Foot binding.

The side effect of massively mistreating/torturing the majority of parents (who were actually doing parenting) had all kinds of psychological fallout that totally retarded the national psyche's interest in advancement. Something similar happened to Islam with its increasingly brutal treatment of women from the 1400s onward.

Check out the work's of Lloyd DeMause at psychohistory.com: It's decidely not for the squeamish, but it does present much convincing evidence that societal advancement flows from improvements in childrearing and not the other way around. My signature connects to a particularly relevant article.

no hodgepodge....

sigh

well, i always did enjoy portnoy more, but give the rabbit his due...

Merlin Donald's A Mind So Rare. It was the best book on conciousness i've seen in quite a while. Donald weaves together a lot of threads from different sources to make a very plausible scenario. And his author photo is pretty amusing. You know he knows what he's talking about by his amazing eye brows... :)

check it out!

In my childhood and teens, i read the Chronicles of Narnia over a dozen times and loved them. They seemed far mor real to me than any fantasy literature had a right to be. The Christian concepts were always floating at the edges of perception, and given my Catholic upbringing, hard to totally ignore, but i did, even as teenaged atheism kicked in.

In later years, i'd read a fair amount about Lewis's relationship with Christianity, but recently found one of the most persuasive arguments to be one, made by numerous hardcore believers, that Lewis was really cloaking his inherently "Pagan" agenda in a false Christian guise. Folks advancing this theory very much disapprove of the themes and storylines in the Narnia books, and find it greatly greatly disturbing that they have been perceived as very Christian works. Initially, i scoffed at the ideas, but have seen at least a few very good cases made by some that Lewis really was trying to subborn the dominant paradigm (so to speak) in advancing a radically different agenda. I wish i hadn't lost the link to the most well constructed of these arguments, but you can find a lot by googling Narnia and Pagan.

CS Lewis: Crypto-pagan....

Seeing Brendan Hines last night led me to recall his small but juicy roll in a show that got NO mention in ILTW: The Middleman. I had never even heard of it before it was already off the air. After catching up with it via the internet, I was saddened that it wasn't given more of a chance to expand in the directions that were evident over the course of the 10 episodes it did manage to eke out. Heather: did that show accidentally slip under your radar, or did you merely deem it unworthy of mention? Sure, it started out way too self-conciously-attempted-hip, but it really developed nicely in its short time, and BH's Tyler Wolf character had a pretty interesting evolution cut woefully short before really starting to pay off....

But, yeah, it is good to see him get another go on Lie to Me. My 14 year old daughter is wobbly with anticipation. I'm not sure how well the so-called science on display here would hold up when deally with world class socio/psycho-paths, instead of just "normal" people trying (and inevitably failing) to lie convincingly, and it will be interesting to see if they go there.

in the immortal (if slightly inaccurate) words of their like-named song, "Lupus took the life of Flannery O'Connor; she wrote many books before death came upon her."

and no samples cleared or licensed.

I think it's a fair use....

i wish i didn't think a judge could be persuaded otherwise.