Hitchensless, and the Threat of a Catbus

Eleven years without Christopher Hitchens. Man, the wisdom he would have given us during that time! It almost seems like he gave it to us preemptively though. "Never be a spectator to unfairness or stupidity. The grave will supply plenty of time for silence."

I saw this picture yesterday and thought of him. He had good taste.

December 15, 2022

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Seems like Trump is adjusting well to his post presidency. From Truth Social:

December 15, 2022

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I don't like to brag, but let me tell you how I got my current job. The director of the co-op took me to meet two of the farmers and they liked me. You know why? They said I was, "not a bragger."

December 15, 2022

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Christopher Hitchens died ten years ago today. 

Fun fact- he was picked by the pope for the official position of Devil's Advocate against the beatification of Mother Teresa. He had written a book critical of her. To the Catholic Church's credit, they did pick someone worthy of representing the devil in their view! 

I don't think a transcript exists of his testimony, but you can be sure that he included this bit from his book: 

"Mother Theresa was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction." 

You can also be sure that he was at least mildly drunk when he testified. 

I'll buy a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black tonight in his honor. It will last me a year but would have lasted him half a night. I'd buy Johnnie Walker Blue, if it were not for two things. 

Number one, it's over $200 a bottle. 

Number two, he said that the proof that it is not superior to Johnnie Walker Black is that Saddam Hussein and Momar Khadafi drank Johnnie Walker Black and money was no barrier for them, they could have had whatever they wanted. 

Hitchensless for 10 years, and what a 10 years! We've been missing a critical voice.

December 15, 2021

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"Could there be a Catbus, in OUR country?" 

I'm in the waiting room at a Monro Muffler, and a solemn guy on a TV commercial just asked that provocative question. 

I might have got that wrong though because it turns out the commercial was for the Wounded Warrior Project.

December 15, 2021

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For years I've been saying not to listen to me, but to consider listening to conservative writers. I wasn't saying anything about Trump that Republicans weren't saying about him. Then came the election and I said to listen to the voters. Then to listen to election officials. Then to listen to Fox News. Then to listen to Republican secretaries of state. Then to listen to Chris Christie. Then to listen to the court. Then to listen to 50 other courts. Then to listen to Barr and Kellyanne Conway. Then to listen to Geraldo and Rush Limbaugh. Then to listen to the Supreme Court. Then I said to listen to the electors in the Electoral College. Then to listen to, wait for it, Putin.

But now look how low I've sunk. Today I'm asking people to listen to Mitch McConnell. I'm asking... people to listen to... Mitch freaking McConnell. I don't know if I can look at myself in the mirror anymore. Soon I'll be telling people to listen to Trump himself.

December 15, 2020

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Ari Melber was just interviewing Salman Rushdie so I told Gretel about him... that religious fanatics wanted him killed because he didn't believe in God. She asked if they are allowed to do that, and I said I didn't think anybody was allowed to kill anybody. She said that Hitler was allowed to kill Hitler. I gave her that point.

December 15, 2020

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Merry Hitchmas... 9 years now without Christopher Hitchens, and when we needed him most. Or maybe we had him all along. Here are some words to live and die by, from Letters to a Young Contrarian:

"Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the 'transcendent' and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don't be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you."

December 15, 2020

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They were just playing Heroin in the liquor store. It was like a mixed metaphor came to life.

December 15, 2020

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Forget the Oscars. TCM is now my go-to In Memoriam.

https://fb.watch/hqSqrYWYGR/?mibextid=NnVzG8

December 15, 2019

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Derren Brown's The Push on Netflix is one of the best things I've seen in a while... four identical experiments in social compliance in which people are manipulated step by step over the course of an hour to the end of pushing a person off a building. So how many of the four will do it?

December 15, 2018

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In honor of the memory of Han Solo, I'm smuggling some candy into this movie. And a Caprison.

December 15, 2017

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The day my daughter was born I tossed some old vegetables on the compost pile. On her first birthday she was old as dirt.

December 15, 2017

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I have tickets to the Trump rally tonight... seriously can't decide if I want to go to it or play racquetball. What should I do?

December 15, 2016

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Cruz's hand is tucked inside his jacket for the national anthem. Prediction- tonight is his Waterloo.

December 15, 2015

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Richard Dawkins Foundation For Science and Reason

Happy Hitchmas again! Even though Christopher Hitchens passed away on this day four years ago his books, articles and speeches will always stay with us. He reminds us to not just stand by but to speak up and act upon important issues and injustice.

Here is a great content resource of 'The Hitch' (videos, articles etc.): http://bit.ly/TheHitch

December 15, 2015

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Lakota leader Sitting Bull was killed on Standing Rock Indian Reservation on this day in 1890, leading to the Wounded Knee Massacre.

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On this day in 1960, Richard Pavlick was arrested for plotting to assassinate U.S. President-Elect John F. Kennedy.

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On this day in 1973, John Paul Getty III, grandson of American billionaire J. Paul Getty, was found alive near Naples, Italy, after being kidnapped by an Italian gang on July 10. It was John Paul Getty's 81st birthday.

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On the same day, the American Psychiatric Association voted 13–0 to remove homosexuality from its official list of psychiatric disorders, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

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Even Dwarfs Started Small was released on this day in 1971. After I saw it I remember thinking distinctly that I was in an "odd state of ecstasy." I remember thinking those words. The world was very different. I later read that Herzog's intent with the film, and all of his films, was to put viewers in an ecstatic state.

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Requiem For a Dream was released on this day in 2000. I saw people coming out of the theater, it was like they had just been hit by a bomb blast.

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Nero was born on this day in AD 37.

"An emperor's an entertainer, an empire a super-show."

How lucky we were to have our own Nero.

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A.P. Carter was born on this day in 1891. Without him, what would music be today?

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Helen Slater was born on this day in 1963. When I was in high school The Legend of Billie Jean was one of my top 10 favorite films. When she cuts her hair, oh my.

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Notable deaths- Charles Laughton (1962), Walt Disney (1966), Chill Wills (1978), Blake Edwards (2010), Bob Feller (2010)

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10 hours of Dominique!

https://youtu.be/lNH7O8P2Y7Y

December 15, 2012

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"If you want to be awe-inspired..."

https://youtu.be/JXEiKPxCSdA

Two years Hitchensless.

December 15, 2013

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http://www.alternet.org/belief/mormon-church-dark-skin-sign-gods-curse-no-longer

What next, admission that Joseph Smith was not in fact visited by an angel named Moroni?

December 15, 2013

The link is broken, but jeez, those morons! I mean Mormons.

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Christopher Hitchens, dead 5 years today. Here he is at his best in a debate with Pastor Douglas Wilson:

If you want to be awe inspired, ladies and gentlemen, and let me say, let me just tell you that those of us who do not believe we are divinely created, let alone divinely supervised, are not immune to the idea of awe and beauty and the transcendent. Let me invite you to look for a moment at the pictures taken by the Hubble telescope. Some of you may have done it. If you haven’t done it now, or yet, do it soon.

The extraordinary revelations of swirling yet somehow beautiful, new galaxies in color and depth and majesty, like nothing, I think, the human eye has ever seen. Turn away from that if you wish, and gaze at a burning bush, in an illiterate desert part of the middle east, and say that that’s where revelation comes from. I don’t believe you’d be able to do it.

Or read a page of Stephen Hawking on the absolute magnificence and consistency and underlying beauty, as Einstein says the great miracle of physics is there are no miracles, it all carries on holding together all the time. There are no interruptions in its order. There are no suspensions of it just to please Joshua, or just to please some sect or tribal group. No. It’s much, much, much more impressive than that.

Hawking has a colleague who looked at the event horizon of the black hole. If you could travel towards a black hole, not yet possible to do, if you could, in theory, the event horizon is the point at which the black hole is pulling everything into itself. So, over into the black hole goes light, itself. It’s so strong it can pull light back into itself. It’s really awe inspiring. A lot more, say, than a crowd of pigs, infested by devils, running down a hill, into the sea, which is a piece of sorcery, and cheap magic of the sort that shouldn’t impress any thinking person. Think about a black hole instead, pulling the light into itself, the event horizon just reorganizing nature, so that if you could get to that lip, the lip of the event horizon and fall in, and go in, you could in theory see the past and the future stretching before and in front of you. You would see time, except you wouldn’t have the time to do it, of course, if you were a mere primate as we are, but Hawking has a colleague who says if he knew he was dying of a terminal illness, that’s how he’d want to go out, is over the lip of the event horizon. That would be majesty, that would be magnificence, that would be awe inspiring, that would be apocalyptic.

So it’s in the natural world, it’s in the world of science and the world of innovation, and discovery, and doubt. We wouldn’t have discovered any of these things if we’d taken the religious story for granted to begin with. We would have said we already know enough. We know. God made this. God wants it this way. What’s the need for inquiry? We already have all the information we need. The big difference between this side of the house, mine, and the other, is this, I am absolutely certain that I do not know, but that it might be possible to find out and that doubt and skepticism and innovation and inquiry are the only means by which wonder and beauty and awe and symmetry will be discovered, and beyond those peaks we can yet see new, more wonderful peaks will arise. Whereas, on the Wilson side of the house it is said we already have the certainty, we know that God created us, and we even claim to know his mind and what he wants of us. And I just invite you to open your minds to the possibility that the skeptical and the inquiring and the doubtful will be better than anything that calls itself faith, because anything that calls itself faith calls itself certainty and for certainty I think there is no place in an institute of intellectual mentation and higher education, and I’m very grateful to you all for giving me the chance to say so.

December 15, 2016

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8 years Hitchensless.

An often re-quoted quote from his mother: "The one unforgivable sin is to be boring."

And how about this nugget from the religion section of his pithy quotes:

"Owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are God. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realise that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are gods."

December 15, 2019

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Woody Allen- Standing in a garage no more makes you a car than standing in a church makes you a Christian.

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Maimonides- "The risk of a wrong decision is preferable to the terror of indecision."

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Sagan- "It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring."

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Vonnegut- "Where do I get my ideas from? You might as well have asked that of Beethoven. He was goofing around in Germany like everybody else, and all of a sudden this stuff came gushing out of him. It was music. I was goofing around like everybody else in Indiana, and all of a sudden stuff came gushing out. It was disgust with civilization."

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Twain- "I've had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened."

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Steven Wright:

A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking.

Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it.

The hardness of the butter is proportional to the softness of the bread.

The problem with the gene pool is that there is no lifeguard.

If at first you don't succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried.

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Hitchens- "Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should stay."