How we describe people’s deaths

There was a news item yesterday about the death on a former TV news talk show personality Ed Schultz that said he died at the age of 64 of natural causes. One rarely hears that term used to describe people’s deaths any more. Usually they specify the proximate cause of death (cancer, heart failure, and so on). In the old days, dying from natural causes was the description given for someone who lived to a ripe old age, gradually became more and more infirm as their body started to fail in various ways due to the aging process, and then died more or less peacefully. But what does it mean these days to die of natural causes? After all, Schultz was not particularly old. I became curious as to what the term ‘natural causes’ has come to mean because after all, there has to be some cause.
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A perfect example of the Sam Harris two-step

As a follow-up to my post on how the alt-right hate groups are targeting young skeptics for recruitment, I want to point out how prominent atheists like Sam Harris are enabling this disturbing trend, something that Harvard secular chaplain Greg Epstein has already observed. This is because people like Harris say things that are rife with ambiguity. I and many others have noted before the disingenuous way that Sam Harris argues that enables him to be on both sides of an issue, something that I have labeled the Sam Harris two-step, though he is not the only one to use it. Charles Murray is also a master at it. They both seem to say outrageous things then, when challenged, point to other statements that seem contradict it.
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A metaphor for our times

A man in a suit and tie was caught on a security camera kicking a homeless person in the head in a completely unprovoked attack. You can see him with a briefcase and hat making a point of coming back just to kick the person.


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How far can you see?

As a result of my post on the flat-Earth believers, I was struck by their claim that when you look into the distance, you do not see the Earth’s curvature. This raised in my mind the question of, if you look out over a flat expanse, say a desert or an ocean or from a plane, how far can you see? It may seem as if we can see really far, especially since we can see distant stars, but many factors introduce a great deal of variability.
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“I sent them a good boy, and they made him a murderer”

As promised in my review of Seymour Hersh’s excellent memoir Reporter, here is an excerpt that describes how he found out about Paul Meadlo, one of the people in the platoon that committed the My Lai massacre. Hersh had seen a small news item about a young journalist named Ron Ridenhour who had heard about the massacre and sent reports to the army top brass about what he had heard and been frustrated by the lack of action and feared a cover-up. After talking with Ridenhour, Hersh got the name of Michael Terry, a soldier in that same platoon, and went to see him.
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Female sports reporters are routinely harassed while on camera

Take a look at the video below taken during the soccer World Cup in Moscow. What impressed me is how calmly she continues with her report, without missing a beat. It shows to me that she has experienced this kind of thing many times before.

This reporter also at the World Cup expertly avoided the kiss and used the occasion to angrily lecture the man on proper behavior, saying “Never do this to a woman, ok? Respect!”

Timothy Geithner is a loan shark? Why am I not surprised?

One of the biggest criticisms I had of the Barack Obama administration was that it was completely in the pockets of the big financial sector institutions, such as the major banks on Wall Street. Especially guilty of this were Eric Holder and Lanny Breuer, who were the top two in the Justice Department and never prosecuted the executives of those firms. They both came into government from the law firm Covington and Burling that had those banks as clients, and they then returned to that same law firm after leaving government office, to reap the big rewards of their acts of obeisance to Wall Street. The other major figure in the sell-out to the banks was Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.
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How do you judge when to stop reading a book?

I am one of those people who, once I start to read a book or watch a film, find it hard to stop until I finish it, even if the book and film are becoming tedious. Something really awful has to happen for me to stop. Tedium alone is not sufficient. Librarian Nancy Pearl, who sometimes appears on NPR as an engaging reviewer of books, says that she too used to find it hard to stop reading a book but now she has adopted a ‘rule of 50’.
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The alt-right is appealing to young skeptics

Some time ago, I wrote about how the alt-right coalition of fascists, neo-Nazis, and bigots was luring in young people by appealing to their sense of irony and fun, or ‘lulz’ as some say these days, acting as if the rhetoric of hate was not something to be believed in but was being used just to annoy and irritate those who were derisively labeled as ‘social justice warriors’ (though why that term is seen as an insult baffles me). The claim that they were ‘fighting political correctness’ was another shield used to deflect criticisms of this stance.
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