Augury

In the grand tradition of Michael Blowhard’s Elsewhere series…

John Stossel is promoting a new book, which means that he did a new 20/20 segment last Friday. The summary of the segment can be seen here. Some rather fascinating points, particularly the one about how we are unlikely to ever run out of oil. Stossel seems to be pointing a lot of fingers at the news media lately for their scaremongering and inaccurate reporting. Good for him.

In the John Stossel tradition of “News Media gets it Wrong” comes a story from WorldNetDaily via Fark. While some doubts were raised in the comments about World Net Daily’s reliability, and I’m skeptical when educated people type in all capitals, nevertheless it does seem like the objections to the original news story’s reporting are valid. I’ve seen enough spurious reporting of scientific (or political, for that matter) issues to trust the news. Perhaps the AP needs to hire a few respectable people with experience in the sciences for their reporting on scientific matters?

From Fark: A story by Britain’s Times Online claims that there is a racial profiling debacle resulting from license plate scanning cameras. I’m not a big fan of government rolling out cameras in order to keep tabs on citizens, but I’m even less of a fan of histrionics when the world doesn’t break down along predetermined notions of the proper world order. Link here.

Apparently the Da Vinci Code movie is either coming out soon or has already been released. We’re seeing yet more and yet more stories on this travesty of a book. Digg.com links to a story from HowStuffWorks debunking both major and minor parts of the book. Russell Wardlow discusses the Catholic Church’s impotent response to the book. To be honest, the people promoting the religious perspective in the Da Vinci Code seem to me to be so off-base that it’s not even worth discussing. The type of “spirituality” promoted by Da Vinci Code is of the new credo “Spiritual, but not Religious” — or, more elaborately, “I believe God conforms to my beliefs and lifestyle, which gives me convenient footing to cast off restraints that I don’t like and condemn people who don’t believe or act the same as I do.”

The Nag Hammadi texts from which much of Da Vinci Code is drawn are notoriously obtuse and, if anything, they certainly do not promote a sort of feminine, earthy, body-centric spirituality that Brown attempts to project onto them. Though, even worse, Brown is not even original in attempting to do this, he merely copies, as usual, the work of feminist revisionists. Anyone who has even attempted to read any of the Nag Hammadi codices will quickly realize that it isn’t possible to come to pat conclusions like, “Gnostics praised the feminine” or anything else so banal. This news story has even more scholars doing takedowns on Brown’s illiterate historical and religious ideas.

Shamus links on over here again, awesome and much appreciated. Fledgling Otaku leaves a comment about the K2 WordPress theme which I may check out, seems interesting.