The curious case of Benjamin Button

What about a life lived backward? It should be somewhere an impossible love story. Too much predictable and sometimes I get simply angry because of too much passivity from the part of the characters.

Religion and purpose

The last Gallup poll made in 84 countries in 2007 found out that only 2% of all respondents worldwide said they were secular or nonreligious.

"As researchers have long noted, religiosity tends to be highest among poorer, less educated populations -- providing a source of hope where it is most needed. As these data indicate, religion can also provide a much-needed sense of direction for those to whom life might otherwise seem futile".

On-line friends

New meanings of friendship, in the Internet world.

Hope(less)

They are situations where is no chance to change, even you thought you could. Sooner or later you'll find yourself trapped in a small empty room with high walls around, no way to overcome. They are places which cannot offer you anything, whatever powerful or blind your enthusiasm could be; sooner or later everything will have the same no-results outcome. Of course, they are people who are making possible such situations. They are playing very well their roles giving you the impression that you only have to wait - and wait, and wait - in order to get the best of him. But, after longer or shorter periods of time you'll discover that they don't have nothing to share and, in fact, you - and only you - was the one who invested in their chances. A dead horse, in fact.

Hope kills - time, energy, enthusiasm, life, relationships. If any self-esteem and self-awareness rest, the only normal way is to just left. The psychological mechanism of taking a decision - wrong or good, no matter, but the ability to say "yes" and "no", without the intermediate, non-logical, options "maybe", "perhaps" - is quite difficult, because the comfort looks always as the best choice ever, to be preferred to the unknown future. But, ever, if you'll look back you'll see that, in fact, over the years, nothing changed tremendously and, with or without you, the wheel is going on with or without you. So, it could be that your absence is not even noticed.

Middle Ages nostalgia

The Pope talked about salvation of the Planet...What will be next? A new crusade? Thanks to the brilliant minds which made the Internet and the evolution of technique possible, he could call for a mass mobilization easier than in the Middle Ages times.

Madoff - to be continued

"Madoff case" is so different and needs not only special attention, but also a different media approach?

Shortly, how I see the case: Madoff is an American citizen (I hope I'm not wrong) who mismanaged and stolen the money of other fellow citizens and organizations from the States. Some of them are already bankrupt. It is a penal case and they are any other people involved, for sure. The overwhelming part of these organizations are Jewish. Madoff is accountable before the American laws and for sure he will be judged accordingly.

Where is the wrong spin?

In my opinion, in obsessively judging him from a Jewish perspective, trying to find the reasons why he did this to his fellows Jews, offering ammunition to Anti-Semits in "validating" their narrow minded theories for low IQ people.

In fact, I don't worry any single second this Madoff is Jewish and did this. I have nothing to do with this kind of guys. Why don't mention with the same frequency the ethnic affiliation and the religious grounds of Al Capone or of any other famous gangsters?

One of the main treats of Anti-Semitism is the oversimplification of characters and situations in order to fit the no-need-to-be proved assumptions. The mechanism of argumentation is very easy and sells. So, please, don't give up thinking, in any circumstances!

A Highly Evolved Propensity for Deceit

NY Times
by Natalie Angier
December 23

When considering the behavior of putative scam operators like Bernard “Ponzi scheme” Madoff or Rod “Potty Mouth” Blagojevich, feel free to express a sense of outrage, indignation, disgust, despair, amusement, schadenfreude. But surprise? Don’t make me laugh.

Sure, Mr. Madoff may have bilked his clients of $50 billion, and Governor Blagojevich, of Illinois, stands accused of seeking personal gain through the illicit sale of public property — a United States Senate seat. Yet while the scale of their maneuvers may have been exceptional, their apparent willingness to lie, cheat, bluff and deceive most emphatically was not.

Deceitful behavior has a long and storied history in the evolution of social life, and the more sophisticated the animal, it seems, the more commonplace the con games, the more cunning their contours.

In a comparative survey of primate behavior, Richard Byrne and Nadia Corp of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland found a direct relationship between sneakiness and brain size. The larger the average volume of a primate species’ neocortex — the newest, “highest” region of the brain — the greater the chance that the monkey or ape would pull a stunt like this one described in The New Scientist: a young baboon being chased by an enraged mother intent on punishment suddenly stopped in midpursuit, stood up and began scanning the horizon intently, an act that conveniently distracted the entire baboon troop into preparing for nonexistent intruders.

Much evidence suggests that we humans, with our densely corrugated neocortex, lie to one another chronically and with aplomb. Investigating what they called “lying in day-to-day life,” Bella DePaulo, now a visiting professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and her colleagues asked 77 college students and 70 people from the community to keep anonymous diaries for a week and to note the hows and whys of every lie they told.

Tallying the results, the researchers found that the college students told an average of two lies a day, community members one a day, and that most of the lies fell into the minor fib category. “I told him I missed him and thought about him every day when I really don’t think about him at all,” wrote one participant. “Said I sent the check this morning,” wrote another.

In a follow-up study, the researchers asked participants to describe the worst lies they’d ever told, and then out came confessions of adultery, of defrauding an employer, of lying on a witness stand to protect an employer. When asked how they felt about their lies, many described being haunted with guilt, but others confessed that once they realized they’d gotten away with a whopper, why, they did it again, and again.

In truth, it’s all too easy to lie. In more than 100 studies, researchers have asked participants questions like, Is the person on the videotape lying or telling the truth? Subjects guess correctly about 54 percent of the time, which is barely better than they’d do by flipping a coin. Our lie blindness suggests to some researchers a human desire to be deceived, a preference for the stylishly accoutred fable over the naked truth.

“There’s a counterintuitive motivation not to detect lies, or we would have become much better at it,” said Angela Crossman, an assistant professor of psychology at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “But you may not really want to know that the dinner you just cooked stinks, or even that your spouse is cheating on you.”

The natural world is rife with humbug and fish tales, of things not being what they seem. Harmless viceroy butterflies mimic toxic monarch butterflies, parent birds draw predators away from the nest by feigning a broken wing, angler fish lure prey with appendages that wiggle like worms.

Biologists distinguish between such cases of innate or automatic deception, however, and so-called tactical deception, the use of a normal behavior in a novel situation, with the express purpose of misleading an observer. Tactical deception requires considerable behavioral suppleness, which is why it’s most often observed in the brainiest animals.

Great apes, for example, make great fakers. Frans B. M. de Waal, a professor at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center and Emory University, said chimpanzees or orangutans in captivity sometimes tried to lure human strangers over to their enclosure by holding out a piece of straw while putting on their friendliest face.

“People think, Oh, he likes me, and they approach,” Dr. de Waal said. “And before you know it, the ape has grabbed their ankle and is closing in for the bite. It’s a very dangerous situation.”

Apes wouldn’t try this on their own kind. “They know each other too well to get away with it,” Dr. de Waal said. “Holding out a straw with a sweet face is such a cheap trick, only a naïve human would fall for it.”

Apes do try to deceive one another. Chimpanzees grin when they’re nervous, and when rival adult males approach each other, they sometimes take a moment to turn away and close their grins with their hands. Similarly, should a young male be courting a female and spot the alpha male nearby, the subordinate chimpanzee will instantly try to cloak his amorous intentions by dropping his hands over his erection.

Rhesus monkeys are also artful dodgers. “There’s a long set of studies showing that the monkeys are very good at stealing from us,” said Laurie R. Santos, an associate professor of psychology at Yale University.

Reporting recently in Animal Behavior, Dr. Santos and her colleagues also showed that, after watching food being placed in two different boxes, one with merrily jingling bells on the lid and the other with bells from which the clappers had been removed, rhesus monkeys preferentially stole from the box with the silenced bells. “We’ve been hard-pressed to come up with an explanation that’s not mentalistic,” Dr. Santos said. “The monkeys have to make a generalization — I can hear these things, so they, the humans, can, too.”

One safe generalization seems to be that humans are real suckers. After dolphin trainers at the Institute for Marine Mammals Studies in Mississippi had taught the dolphins to clean the pools of trash by rewarding the mammals with a fish for every haul they brought in, one female dolphin figured out how to hide trash under a rock at the bottom of the pool and bring it up to the trainers one small piece at a time.

We’re desperate to believe that what our loved ones say is true. And now we find otherwise. Oh, Flipper, et tu?

Milgram test validated: People 'still willing to torture'

BBC
December 19

Decades after a notorious experiment, scientists have found test subjects are still willing to inflict pain on others - if told to by an authority figure.

US researchers repeated the famous "Milgram test", with volunteers told to deliver electrical shocks to another volunteer - played by an actor. Even after faked screams of pain, 70% were prepared to increase the voltage, the American Psychologist study found. Both may help explain why apparently ordinary people can commit atrocities.

Yale University professor Stanley Milgram's work, published in 1963, recruited volunteers to help carry out a medical experiment, with none aware that they were actually the subject of the test. A "scientist" instructed them to deliver a shock every time the actor answered a question wrongly. When the pretend 150-volt shock was delivered, the actor could be heard screaming in pain, and yet, when asked to, more than eight out of ten volunteers were prepared to give further shocks, even when the "voltage" was gradually increased threefold.

Some volunteers even carried on giving 450-volt shocks even when there was no further response from the actor, suggesting he was either unconscious or dead.

Similar format

Dr Jerry Burger, of Santa Clara University, used a similar format, although he did not allow the volunteers to carry on beyond 150 volts after they had shown their willingness to do so, suggesting that the distress caused to the original volunteers had been too great.

Again, however, the vast majority of the 29 men and 41 women taking part were willing to push the button knowing it would cause pain to another human. Even when another actor entered the room and questioned what was happening, most were still prepared to continue. He told Reuters: "What we found is validation of the same argument - if you put people in certain situations, they will act in surprising and maybe often even disturbing ways. He said that it was not that there was "something wrong" with the volunteers, but that when placed under pressure, people will often do "unsettling" things.

Even though it was difficult to translate laboratory work to the real world, he said, it might partly explain why, in times of conflict, people could take part in genocide.

Complex task

Dr Abigail San, a chartered clinical psychologist, has recently replicated the experiment for a soon-to-be-aired BBC documentary - all the way up to the 450-volt mark, again finding a similar outcome to Professor Milgram. "It's not that these people are simply not good people any more - there is a massive social influence going on." She said that the volunteers were being asked to carry out a complex task in aid of scientific research, and became entirely focused on it, with "little room" left for considering the plight of the person receiving the shock. "They tend to identify massively with the 'experimenter', and become very engaged and distracted by the research.

"There's no opportunity for them to say 'What's my moral stand on this?'"

See also:

Milgram's original study

The Clichés of Our Lives

Forward.com
December 18
By Noam Neusner

At a recent bat mitzvah party, as the Village People’s “YMCA” played, my wife remarked to me that it may be time to retire that unique piece of American kitsch. Give it a rest for a decade. After that, if we think it’s still amusing to spell out letters with our arms, fine, bring it back. But we may discover that there are other ways to express ourselves joyously, and we’ll just move on.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we did the same in American Judaism? So much habit, so much built-up cultural “heritage.” American Jews don’t experience Jewish things — we just submit to the routine of them.

Time for some retirements. Let’s look for the worst of our own built-up and sclerotic habits, and get rid of them for a little while — say, 10 years. After that, we will be free to adopt them anew — or not.

I have a few thoughts of where we could start. I don’t propose doing away with anything required by Halacha — after all, we already do away with too much of that by choice. Rather, let’s focus on what some people call tradition and what I call inertia. Here are my nominations:

Gefilte fish, Manischewitz wine, cholent: Nothing against Jewish soul food in general, but if you were to describe the concept of gefilte fish to someone unfamiliar with it, you’d question eating it as well. Kosher wine has long surpassed the machinery oil quality of Manischewitz, and it is preposterous that our religious ceremonies should be consecrated with such swill. Meanwhile, cholent may have a utilitarian value to those who won’t use an oven on Shabbat, but let’s face it, anything cooked on something called a “blech” is going to retain some of that quality. Let’s eat what Israelis eat — that’s our real soul food.

“Fiddler on the Roof,” especially “Sunrise, Sunset” at weddings: “Fiddler” is now in its post-cliché phase, so perhaps it’s too late to retire it, since it may already be on its way out. But a forced closure would do it some good.

Task forces: Most task forces neither accomplish any task nor have any force. Yet they continue to populate the flow charts of Jewish organizations, usually in an effort to create the impression of consensus in crisis. We are already a community of committees. Better for us to hire a bunch of benign dictators to ram through unpopular but necessary solutions to languishing problems.

The phrase “tikkun olam”: Wiser minds than I have already exploded the misconception that tikkun olam is a commandment from the Torah. Where it exists as a concept in rabbinic Judaism, it does not mean what lefty Jews think it means. Worse yet, tikkun olam has become a cliché of progressive Judaism, a bumper sticker slapped on virtually any social cause that comes along. Progressive Jews need a new motto, and they would find one if they dug deeper into the texts than they do. Here’s a good excuse to do so.

Second Day of yom tov/eighth day of Passover: My friend Tevi Troy points out that we live in an age of atomic clocks. So why live with the fiction that we don’t know exactly when Jewish holidays begin and end? Given the scientific precision brought to all matters of halachic observance — shatnez, kashrut and rabbinic permission for embryonic stem cell research, surrogacy and other biomedical advances — maybe we should also wipe away an onerous and unnecessary weight on Diaspora Jewry.

Shiny satin kippot: Honestly, I would rather wear the flimsy, black, “who wore this last?” giveaway than a preposterously bright and poor-fitting monochrome satin kippah. Most men look ridiculous in them, and toss them after one wearing. If our community agreed to simple black or white cotton kippot — or any variety of suede, velvet or knit — for at least a few years, no one would complain.

New Haggadot: My friend Saul Kelner questions why publishers are always rolling out new versions of the Passover Haggadah. Fair point. Compared with the giveaway versions from Maxwell House, most of the new ones are over-illustrated and over-written. New Haggadot are the equivalent of celebrity-sung Christmas song collections — do we really need yet another version of a classic?

Fundraising dinners/testimonials: If the Bernie Madoff scandal teaches us anything, it is the danger of macher envy — wanting to be toasted as a “leader” in some fundraising dinner often leads to unspeakable acts of stupidity and vanity. Please, spare me — and spare the lives of hundreds of thousands of chickens who give their lives every year to be picked at by bored dinner guests as others give windbag speeches. Jewish philanthropies are now in crisis mode. Cancel the galas, and start raising money by impressing people, not by feeding them dinner.

Publicly uttered prayer for the sick/prayer for the USA/prayer for Israel: This is the section of the Shabbat morning service when everything comes to a grinding halt. At some synagogues, the names of the ill are uttered aloud, as if God must be reminded of those who are sick. (“Oh yeah, I forgot about Bessie’s gallstones.”) The prayers for the United States and Israel are no less tiresome, accompanied often by op-ed commentaries or news summaries by the rabbi. If American Judaism wants a two-hour Shabbat morning service (and judging by sparse attendance when services actually begin, I’m betting it does), here’s the first thing that can get boiled down.

Nine nominations for temporary retirement. I probably could go on longer, but I don’t want to face the same fate.

Noam Neusner served as President Bush’s principal economic and domestic policy speechwriter from 2002 to 2004.

Hurricane "Madoff"

An approximation of the losses provoked by Madoff, via Forward.com. In the case of Elie Wiesel foundation, almost all the assets are lost and any contribution is welcomed. The effects could be feel for years.

Novel delivers Yiddish intellectual world with zest

Chauncey Mabe
Sun Sentinel

Reviewing each new book by Curt Leviant, I open with some variant of the same line: "Curt Leviant is the best unknown novelist in America." His latest gives no cause to change that practice.

Set in New York in the early 1970s, "A Novel of Klass" takes place in the overlapping realms of Manhattan's art scene and the fading Yiddish intellectual world, once centered on The Jewish Daily Forward, which produced such talents as Isaac Bashevis Singer.

Ayzik Klass, Holocaust survivor and self-styled "Yiddish painter," has worked in obscurity for decades, known only to a small coterie of fellow Jewish intellectuals, when by chance he meets a gallery owner named Breslauer at a bookstore.

Breslauer, visiting Klass' small apartment, is impressed to learn the old painter was a friend of Marc Chagall's. Looking at Klass' own pictures - all with Holocaust themes - he's amazed to see they are works of real artistic value.

But Breslauer's efforts to mount a show and gain Klass the attention he deserves (and make some money in the process) are complicated by the artist's wife, Griselda, a homely woman with the figure of a goddess. She's also paranoid, scheming, endlessly argumentative. She takes an instant dislike to Breslauer.

Further barriers arise in the form of Gimpl Englander, a Yiddish poet in a long-running feud with Klass; a gentile Holocaust expert who turns up embarrassing information about Griselda, and Klass' own eccentricities.

Writing with verve and wit, Leviant mines his story for sly comedy. He writes with great affection of his characters and their foibles, yet avoids sentimentality. Here, for example, is the Yiddish speaker Englander struggling with English: "A good thing is worth repeating. Like Emerson said, 'A hobgoblin is the inconsistency of little minds.' "

Leviant's use of Yiddish words and phrases, and the layering of Yiddish rhythms into the English prose, recalls Junot Diaz's use of Spanglish in "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao."

Indeed, if Diaz were a retired Jewish scholar and translator, instead of a young, Latin, English professor, this is the kind of novel he might write.

For all of its comic brio, "A Novel of Klass" is about the Holocaust and the price exacted from its survivors. Leviant shows it can be refreshed by the application of talent, sensibility and energy.

Las Vegas mood, not for all

The state where you could get married easier in the States is Nevada. But, this gambling is having its limits: you need to belong to a religious congregation. Otherwise - if you are an atheist - you can't.

Nothing could weight something

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7787461.stm

Knowledge management

How much you could plan your knowledge? I mean, to plan carefully what do you want to know about a certain topic and look only to enrich your information about this (and not something else). So, you type on Google and you have hundreds of options. Some of them are related, some not. From those related to your subject, you still need more information and you go further, on another bough. And, from there, on another one. Finally, you discover to know a bit more about everything. What we acknowledge very often because of the Internet - but still not everything is on-line; it is only an amplification of our pains - is the unlimited knowledge and the extremely limited capacity of our knowledge.

Blindness

The Brazilian director Ferdnando Meirelles (City of God, The Constant Gardner) adapted recently Saramago's novel. The movie opened this year Cannnes festival.
Cast: Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Alice Braga, Yusuke Iseya, Yoshino Kimura, Danny Glover, Gael Garcia Bernal

The pandemic is simply testing the human limits, which, as it's already certified, aren't too generous. In Canada, the presentation of the movie was accompanied by protests from the part of the Canadian Federation of the Blind, against the way in which blindness is portrayed. Characters are loosing their humanity when they are loosing their sight. Which in real life could happen all the time, in the case of decisions took with the eyes wide open. And not only those who cannot see their immorality act without regret.

Writing in the Dark, By David Grossman

The Independent

Reviewed by Michael Glover

Sunday, 23 November 2008

The Israeli novelist David Grossman has always written from a position of impassioned embattlement. Born in the 1960s, he has matured as man and writer during the very same decades that Israel itself has been coming into being as a self-sufficient state and nation. His books have alternated between fiction and non-fiction, tacking between one and the other.
For Grossman, there is no possibility of creating a body of writing which is not intruded upon by politics. This new book, a slim volume of essays which characteristically shifts from fiction to politics and back again, reflects upon his own maturing as man and writer, and it continues to ask – as his fiction always asks – the most difficult and searching questions of the state to which he belongs.
In this book Grossman analyses his own fictional procedures. What has his writing been good for? How has it helped him to engage with the day to day realities of life in a fragile state surrounded by enemies? Fiction, he argues, has helped him to fight back against the entrenched belief that Israel is a victim. He speaks of claustrophobia, even of a sense of suffocation. How to rid oneself of such feelings? Writing about reality is one way of fighting back, of throwing off the miasma of fear, impotence, paranoia. Why? Because to tell a story is one way of organising the world, and by so doing one changes that world. It is to know yourself, and to know, to get level with, and even to encompass, that ever threatening Other. It is a way of coming to know that Other from within as yet another striving human being such as oneself; even to delve down as far as those parts of him "that deter and threaten".
This is a powerfully humanistic vision for fiction. It gives back to fiction a mighty role for good, if what Grossman says is true. "Literature," he thunders, "reminds us of our duty to demand from ourselves the right to individuality and uniqueness." The message sounds almost touchingly old-fashioned, that literature should be thought to be capable of offering us counsel and even be capable of healing us of our terrible, distorted perceptions of reality. Can literature really be that important?
Yes, says Grossman, to a novelist such as himself who grew up in an atmosphere of silence – the silence of the unspoken horrors of the Holocaust – and fragmented whispers; who grew up in a society haunted by the dread of death; who grew up in a society which has known strife, both internal and external, for the best part of 40 years, and which still longs for the easy sense of everydayness that more settled societies enjoy almost as a matter of course. Literature has its place of honour amid all this terrible fragility. Why? Because literature, at its best, individualises; it plucks the reader out of the anonymous masses. It "redeems for us the tragedy of the one from the statistics of the millions". '
This kind of vision has no time for the nonsense of abstruse theorising about the nature of fictive language. Literature is weaponry in a battle to the death against the forces of destruction and unreason.
Grossman's words have a tremendous, forceful eloquence about them, from first to last. They are a delight to read, and all the more so because his English is slightly fractured, slightly odd. Their power reminds one of the poems Miroslav Holub wrote under Communism. Here are writers witness to injustice, fighting back against the corrosive power of ossified attitudes and partial truths.
Will they still sing quite so impressively, and quite so eloquently, when Israel achieves that state of peaceful normality, that lovely continuum of existence for which Grossman longs with all his heart and soul? What will there be left to write about then? What will it be like to write without the quickening dread of the enemy at the gates?

"Why believe in a god?"

The atheist campaign is in Washington DC, with a inspirer headline than in London: "Why believe in a god? Just be good for goodness' sake". The advertiser is the American Humanist Association, which is putting $40,000 into the holiday campaign. I'm curious where it will be the next stop. It seems it's a huge room for a permanently improving. What a about a campaign running under the logo: "No God! Start living!" or "No God! Enjoy life!"?

Religion, out of public schools!

Religious education should be, in my humble opinion, be kept out of school's gates. If the school is public, of course, because in a private one, parents have the possibility of the "right" choice, according to the vision of theirs children education (even, sometimes, for some kids, it could be useful to be helped to escape an eternal brainwashing).

But, when public education/funding is involved, the children have to receive the basic information in order to make them good, socially integrated citizens, meaning able to make choices while respecting the alterity of the others.

What about morality, I might be asked? You don't need religion to share empathy with the others, to respect the laws and, in general, to do not harm your neighbors. In fact, religions, all of them are stating the exceptional status of their followers. You simply have to be taught about the value of the individuality, the way in which your freedom don't have to harm the freedom of the other, in Rousseau's words. You don't have to be good only because all we are the creatures of a god, but you have to understand the basics of the human behavior, the limits and punishments, the limits and benefits of social co-existence. If your fellow human is suffering, instead of praying for him it's better to move yourself to find out what you can really do for helping him. And the examples could continue.

Not necessary to look after theological arguments, simply look around you and think with your free mind.

Atheist? Oh...Jew????

It's not a basic curiosity. Not too many people, after asking these two consecutive questions - sometimes with a deep anger or an utterly disgust - are going directly, after meeting me, to the first library, or look after helpful information on the Internet (like this one - links for the curious provided: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheist_Jew, helpful for those doubting any cognitive dissonance in my short answers "yes" to both questions).

In fact, me, I don't use to ask people what their religion is. Usually, I can have my own conclusions, but only if it is relevant for the general topics. I can easily discuss about weather or daily life without jumping to religious - more or less theological arguments.

But, I'm often faced with this kind of questions - unfortunately - and when my simple answer is "Atheist Jew", I'm often regarded as a strange person, in the very bad sense of the word.

In fact, from this point on, any other discussion, excepting the analysis/trial of my choice, is dead. I either have to be regarded with deep compassion ("oh, what happened with your life?") or deep aggressiveness ("why do you need to know other fellow Jews, in fact you don't have to call yourself a Jew", it's one of the softest appreciation I can get).

Atheism is a bad brand. I could be considered a communist (impossible!), a person without principles (not corresponding to the reality). Plus, my knowledge about Judaism is scrutinized carefully, mostly by people who know approximatively 10% of what I'm knowing about.

No, I don't feel any inferiority complex and I don't suffer of being excluded; my place is not with narrow minded, intolerant and aggressive people. I don't have any plans to change myself or to reconsider my very personal existential options.

And no, I don't hear voices, I'm not killing people, goats etc., I'm not suffering for any addictions, I wasn't abused in my childhood, I'm not zoophile, pedophile etc. and I'm very monogamous. "Sounds" normal ????

Still surviving

Most part of the tremendous support enjoyed by religion is based on the terrible fear of dead. It's an unequal mix between pure fear and selfishness (of the kind "I want to survive at any expense, now and the illusory, but better than nothing after-life") and it is quite secure to think about a "life", your life precisely, continuing after your physical death.

Humans set-up rituals of remembering the deaths mostly to be constantly assured themselves too, when not alive, will be remembered somehow. It could be psychologically healthy and the concept of social guilt is, in some respect, compulsory for the members of a family to follow the traditions, whatever the religion or their inner beliefs. Shortly, a huge hypocrisy.
Facing the death of people you fully love is terribly painful, but it's nothing you can do about it. It's not about looking to replace to loved one(s), but to try to reorganize your life (this one you are living right now) from a different perspective, being at least happy of having at least the occasion to experience what others are looking for a whole life without necessarily ever finding. You have the taste of an authenticity, maybe impossible to find lately, but still a real life standard, not an imaginary one. This could be terribly painful too.
As an atheist, I took everything as it happened, as facts occurring into my life. Not a single moment felt the need for a prayer, and I don't have/need tombs to put flowers on it, to carefully arrange weekly or to light candles at. A one year Kaddish is nothing and by no way it would alleviate such a loss. But I tried to reorganize the happy memories into a daily life of self-respect, not acceptance of narrow-minded, denial and lies and illusions. I had the chance to know at least one single authentic individual.
Found this morning on richarddawkins.net an interesting account of an Atheist woman who found her own way of living with the grief of loosing the loved one. Without Gods.

Idiots don't have gender, they are simply idiots

Fear of Blogging

Why women shouldn't apologize for being afraid of threats on the Web.

By Dahlia Lithwick
Slate, May 4, 2007

---

This week's entry in the ongoing Kathy Sierra Wars was a benign effort by the Washington Post's Ellen Nakashima, who observed, unsurprisingly, that "Sexual Threats Stifle Some Female Bloggers."

Sierra was a powerhouse blogger who in March shut down her blog, Creating Passionate Users, about the highly gender-charged subject of metacognition and computers. Sierra stopped bloging after anonymous critics posted graphic and sexually threatening material about her, both in the comments section of her Web site and on other blogs. The posters (read them here) somehow confused death threats with debate on the merits of Sierra's views and policies. Some suggested that Sierra deserved to have her throat slit and to be suffocated, sexually violated, and hanged. Among the things Sierra wrote as she folded up her blogging tent: "I have cancelled all speaking engagements. I am afraid to leave my yard. I will never feel the same. I will never be the same."

Nakashima's piece is more interesting for the questions it doesn't raise than those it does. Violent sexual threats against women writers and bloggers have become something of an issue du jour these days, garnering big stories in the Guardian, Salon, and now the Washington Post. But it's a little bit depressing to hear it framed so often in the same tired old discussions of "are women tough enough?" or "are women playing victim?" Of course women are tough enough for the blogosphere, and of course graphic and violent sexual threats against women are serious. What interests me isn't so much why some people choose to behave like livestock toward women in the blogosphere (answer: because they can), or even what can formally or legally be done to regulate it (answer: not much). What interests me is whether the blogosphere is different for women, and if it is, why.

E.J. Graff, writing recently at TPM Cafe, took a crack at this, suggesting that there is actually little difference between the harassment women face on the Internet and in the workplace. The comments made by her readers, and those of Lynn Harris at Salon, are illuminating in that some posters appear to be angrier at frightened women than they are at strong ones. In that spirit, Nick Denton accused Sierra of playing victim, claiming, "A cry of misogynism [sic] pretty much shuts off debate." And Michelle Malkin told women bloggers to stop whining and keep writing (right before submitting her own prizewinning entry from someone threatening to rape her entire family). Joan Walsh, also writing at Salon, tried to slice up this salami, without, well, slicing it right off: Walsh found herself "cringing" at Sierra's over-the-top fearfulness ("I don't think we can be fragile flowers about workplace sexism. Fight it, but don't take to your bed over it.") then concluded that "I've grown a thicker skin. I didn't want skin this thick."

The sniping between the women who insist that men just don't realize how awful this is and the men who feel silenced and attacked by those women is as pointless as it was when we bickered over the numbers of women columnists, the online objectification of female law students, and pretty much every other tired old argument we have about whether women should run with the bulls or get out of Pamplona. Might we try, instead, to think through the question of why Internet threats feel different to some people, perhaps women more so, and at least discuss whether that fear seems reasonable? It's not a gender fight unless we reduce it to one. If we can't ultimately control for the hypersexualized criticism of women on the Web—and I doubt that we can—let's at least try to understand why an otherwise-tough woman might be terrified by it.

With all due respect to Graff, it seems to me that there are important differences between threats received over the Internet and sexual harassment at work. It starts, obviously, with a total lack of context. Women have accumulated at least some skills in figuring out when face-to-face sexual innuendo or threats are serious, joking, or pathological. True, we are sometimes tragically wrong. But for the most part, we can tell whether Jeff from accounting needs a restraining order or just a stern "no." An anonymous sexual threat on a blog could come from anywhere, and it's virtually impossible to determine whether or not the poster is serious. For the recipient, it's a bit like walking blindfolded through what might be a construction site, a retirement home, or a pick-up basketball game between two teams of recovering rapists.

Saying that all women should treat all anonymous violent threats as though they came from an old folks' home is neither smart nor rational. If it's true, as Denton suggests, that treating every threat as legitimate stifles real dialogue, then maybe we need to rethink how we talk to each other. But none of that makes death threats less scary, for men or for women. As Sierra herself later explained, in a "coordinated statement" with one for her detractors: "Are we willing to stake our mother/sister/daughter's life on a sexually and physically threatening photo or comment, simply because it appeared on the internet and therefore must be harmless?" Until there is some metric to sort the truly dangerous threats from the empty ones, women are not wrong to treat both with real caution. The Virginia Tech shootings are only the latest sobering reminder that violent writing can become violent action, and sometimes the difference is only obvious in hindsight.

The Internet simultaneously fosters both false intimacy and false isolation. That intimacy can be a good thing: It's why we feel that we "know" the writers we read frequently on the Web, but it's also why people leave their spouses for the beautiful Russian "supermodel" they met online last month. At the same time, the Web allows you to say things you've only dreamed of and threaten things you might never really dream of doing. It's that combination of factors that can be so fraught when it comes to sexual threats against women. Posters felt both that they knew Kathy Sierra or Jessica Valenti and rejoiced in the freedom to say things they would never have said face-to-face.

There's another aspect of sexualized Web threats that makes them particularly frightening for women: These are not just communications between the poster and the target. They can also serve as calls to action for truly crazy third parties. The threats against Sierra were frightening not just as threats but because, in combination with postings of her Social Security number and home address, they could be seen as incitement. And in a community that reaches the entire world, it's useful to recall that—male or female—you are only as safe as your most deranged critic.

Finally, Web threats are different because they collapse distinctions between the personal and the professional. If I receive a threatening letter at my office in D.C., I can send it through the shredder or forward it along to human resources, if not security. But it's hardly "crying victim" to say that something graphically violent that I can read in my home, with my children asleep upstairs, lands differently. My colleague Michael Agger wrote powerfully this week about the ways in which the line between personal and professional e-mails have become blurred. A violent sexual threat, even if sent to a journalist purely in response to something she wrote in her professional capacity, can become a very personal threat when it enters her home at 3 a.m.

By that same token, we need to recognize that the Internet has blurred the distinction between a new mom's whimsical blog about the new baby and Malkin or Ann Althouse blogging about politics. The intent of these writers is totally different, but on the Internet, that difference evaporates. Not every woman who starts a blog for the grandparents in Montana or poses for a snapshot has chosen to make herself (or her sexual attractiveness) the "issue," any more than the Rutgers women's basketball team did. Readers may certainly choose to treat all women as though they've agreed to be as public as Maureen Dowd, but it's not quite fair to hold every woman who blogs to that bargain. Dowd has some real institutional heft behind her. A law student who blogs from her dorm room didn't sign up for that plan.

No woman should have to choose between writing—either personally or professionally—and being told that her family will be raped. Sadly, that appears to be the current choice. But the important inquiry isn't whether she should drop out or not. Nor is it whether she should stop whining or keep screaming. Those questions are personal and subjective, and the answers will be as different as the writers who consider them. The better questions are: Are these threats serious? Why do they feel so serious? How often do they result in something serious? And what might we do about it? Gender differences are only the beginning of the important discussions—not the end of them.

Dahlia Lithwick is a Slate senior editor.

Closer to reconstructed Neanderthal

Mammoth regeneration on the basis of DNA reconstruction could be done in a short period of time. The experience might be available, from the technical point of view, for the Neanderthals.
US Catholic conference representatives are worried about “ethical aspects” of such a project, but now in comparison with the situation a couple of centuries ago, they could only worry, without endangering the research in itself. They have been already made a couple of experiments about how to reconstruct Neanderthal genome, succeeding, for example, among others, in presenting a voice simulation .

News from the scientific world

The scientific news of the day, step-by-step.

Atheism explained

I am not a strong supporter of organized, militant atheism. Rather, I consider that, starting from the early childhood; children have to be taught to think by themselves and to never stop curiosity regarding the world around. And to be real fighters, never giving up despite the overwhelming amount of mind intolerance and idiotic aggressively individuals.

In the same time, it is a need of public explanation of what a free mind is, but on an individual, permanent basis. Lack of information or certain social contexts could be countered by a coherent discourse of explanation, not necessarily on a bureaucratic, organised basis. But, public awareness is needed, at least at a certain point so, the efforts made recently in US or in London, could be part of a wider effort of public awareness regarding the basic meaning of atheism. Even, as in London case – where the public message was finally diluted (btw, why religious people never would accept a public awareness campaign having as message at leas “probably is a god”, they always utter strong opinions)? – the medium could change the message, the efforts are more than nothing and could encourage people to be boulder in supporting their own identity.

Wise or Indifferent?

The three monkeys don't talk, don't hear and don't see. In China and Japan are representing the main qualities of a wise person. In Western culture, the three attitudes could be equated with the "golden rule" of indifference.

Not easy to live with this

Cicero, in Tusculan Disputations: "Diseases of the soul are both more dangerous and more numerous than those of the body"

Living on-line

Internet is a wonderful thing. Really. I can pay my bills on-line, order food, buy on ebay, reading whatever I want to, writing on a blog for whoever will find me, learning, find new friends and dates too. You stay in the front of a computer connected to Internet and the world is yours. The knowledge you can acquire is amazing. The condition is to have medium Internet skills, a good knowledge of English, and your on-life is waiting for you.

One of the dangers of a life exclusively, or mostly, set on-line is the lack of basic human interaction. Why, you could ask, because you could make your "relationships" made on-line became at a certain respect a reality, through a video-call, for example, when you can effectively see who you are talking to. It's in a way similar to what's happening when seeing a movie, with the difference than you could now be an actor yourself. And, also, not less important, you can close the window if you want to.

You can spend hours and hours messaging on-line people, perhaps telling the same creepy story 100 times to 100 different people. You can call it an intense social life. You can find people with who to share different thoughts and interests, even at different corners of the world, with a low certainty to ever meet them in person. It could be rewarding, again, and you are free to call them "friends". Or to fall in love on-line after seeing one's picture, as the teens who are gathering pictures of favorites actors and hang them near their beds.

Sorry, but real-life relationships are more different. (fortunately) You call friends those you can rely on, that could be any time "on-line" (to be read available, ready) to help you, with whom to share a cup of coffee talking or not, but simply offering you a strong human presence. A conferece call it's very different of a real party or of a friends gathering. A virtual tour of a city - through pictures or short movies - could be the same for every place. You still don't know nothing about the smell of the streets or the sound of the voices.

In Japan, they created recently robots with a human appearance, able to answer with a human voice basic human requests. I'm not sure their system is not down when asked "How are you?", but I can bet they don't make any difference between the people who are addressing them. And they don't need to, because...they are robots.

From my own experience, I can say that the on-line environment, dating sites included, is full of people with a high degree of stupidity and aggressiveness and intolerance, with serious, hard to cure psychological troubles. I'm happy I never had the occasion to meet them in person. I'm already worried they are so many on planet Earth.

Of course, nothing is perfect, and in completely accidental circumstances, once in a century, you can find as well outstanding brainy people.

But still, everything is just an opportunity we still have to tackle with very basic human knowledge skills. Human brains projected extremely sophisticated tools, we are used to work with as they are appendix of our bodies. And without them, we could feel disabled. Every time you feel technically addict, try to close your eyes - a suggestion - and imagine a survival test in a simple world, without mobile phones, Internet, different machines. Are you still able, for example, to find a street only with a simple map? Or to talk with your neighbors? Or to write a letter to your real friends telling in a couple of sentences - not only disparate messaging-like words - how do you really feel (maybe happy, maybe sorry)? If yes, you are still alive.

School lessons

From Istanbul, memories and the city by Orhan Pamuk: "The first thing I learned in school was that some people are idiots; the second thing I learned was that some are even worse".

A life without a god

One of the conclusions of this study is that the more atheistic societies tend to have a healthier social life.

Never ending intolerance

More or less is the same each time an issue is addressed from the religious point of view. At the end of the discussion will all of us be nurtured by the "natural" desire of killing the other. Being sure we are following, of course, the will of a god. November 4 1995, a guy called Yigal Amir killed then Israeli prime-minister Yitzak Rabin, because he thought is the right follower of the religious commandments.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/libby_purves/article2617350.ece

Procrastination

Slate's special issue on procrastination.

Question(s)...

And what about those people who aren't aggressive, but simply look without moving at all- enjoying or not - at the individuals who need help? What do they need in order to react?

Brain Scans Show Bullies Enjoy Others' Pain

Friday, November 7, 2008; 12:00 AM

FRIDAY, Nov. 7 (HealthDay News) -- Bullies may actually enjoy the pain they cause others, a new study using brain scans suggests.

The part of the brain associated with reward lights up when an aggressive teen watches a video of someone hurting another person, but not when a non-aggressive youth watches the same clip, according to the University of Chicago study, published in the currentBiological Psychology.

"Aggressive adolescents showed a specific and very strong activation of the amygdala and ventral striatum (an area that responds to feeling rewarded) when watching pain inflicted on others, which suggested that they enjoyed watching pain," researcher Jean Decety, a professor in psychology and psychiatry at the University of Chicago, said in a university news release. "Unlike the control group, the youth with conduct disorder did not activate the area of the brain involved in self-regulation (the medial prefrontal cortex and the temporoparietal junction)."

The study compared eight 16- to 18-year-old boys with an aggressive conduct disorder to a group that didn't show unusual signs of aggression. All participants underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while watching videos in which people endured pain accidentally, such as when a heavy bowl was dropped on their hands, and intentionally, such as when a person stepped on another's foot.

Denying the present

“Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden”. (…)
Excerpt from T.S. Eliot, “No. 1 of 'Four Quartets'”

I don’t remember exactly when I’ve read this poetry for the first time. I don’t purposely learn verses by heart, since I finished the primary school. But in this case, everything fit automatically into my mind. It sounds so natural, in a way: in fact, both present and past are reorganized and projected permanently into an unknown future, only to diminish this uncertainty. We are present, physically, but in fact we are almost all the time absent. Sometimes, I think we are fully enjoying the present while sleeping, because only then we are out of the normative time. We wake up thinking what we’ll have to do; we finish our day thinking what we’ve done. We start our lives as a plan – of the others, mainly our family; when we grow up we are able ourselves to manage our escape from the present. I haven’t yet fully evaluated the percentage, but mostly we spend our lives in an antechamber: waiting to grow up, to have our “future”, to accomplish our “dreams”, to have a family, to help our children to be themselves, to dye. Some are desperately hoping/believing in an after-life, but as the continuation of the same mechanical waiting lines.

When? Where? Whom? What? Why?

When -Always it is the same problem: Where in this world are hidden and scattered the people who don't give up critical thinking - defined basically as: "The cognitive skills of analysis, interpretation, inference, explanation, evaluation and of monitoring and correcting one's own reasoning " (a helpful lecture could be found here - http://www.insightassessment.com/pdf_files/J_Infrml_Ppr%20_2000%20-%20Disp%20&%20Skls.PDF) ? The complex brains are always putting on trial the world around (and, of course, for these people, is not a matter of never-ending permanent meditation if it is or not a God, because it is NOT; they are spending their time trying to understand the world on the base of reason, a by far more challenging and passionate and demanding approach, trust me) and the individuals inhabiting this world. I had many times the experience, through a dialogue, with different kind of people to be qualified in different ways, because a natural curiosity I would never refrain. Of course, it is my problem - of choosing a certain pattern of life - whose else could it be? As it is my choice to start sharing my thoughts to an unknown and undefined audience. Perhaps this kind of blind, but targeted searches, would get some results. The most important thing it's that people who have something to say, to say it loudly, and to do not give up and shut up, whatever the percentage of stupidity, pressure of ignorance or level of corruption of their minds.