Feeding Your Mind

Just as there are a lot of choices to feed your stomach, there are a lot of choices to feed your mind. And just as there is too much junk food to clog your arteries and negatively impact your health, there is too much information junk (you see many of these from magazines at the cashier's station when you are ready to pay for your groceries.)

The internet is full of junk reading. Lies, rumors, slanders and inaccurate information abounds.

Too many people read articles and books that feed their prejudices and not enough materials that may open their minds and improve their judgments.

Hypocrisy of the Thumpers

Trump-ward, Christian Soldiers?

Let me get this straight. If I want the admiration and blessings of the most flamboyant, judgmental Christians in America, I should marry three times, do a queasy-making amount of sexual boasting, verbally degrade women, talk trash about pretty much everyone else while I’m at it, encourage gamblers to hemorrhage their savings in casinos bearing my name and crow incessantly about how much money I’ve amassed?

Seems to work for Donald Trump.

Polls show him to be the preferred candidate among not just all Republican voters but also the party’s vocal evangelical subset.

He’s more beloved than Mike Huckabee, a former evangelical pastor, or Ted Cruz, an evangelical pastor’s son, or Scott Walker, who said during the recent Republican debate: “It’s only by the blood of Jesus Christ that I’ve been redeemed.”

When Trump mentions blood, it’s less biblical, as Megyn Kelly can well attest.

No matter. The holy rollers are smiling upon the high roller. And they’re proving, yet again, how selective and incoherent the religiosity of many in the party’s God squad is.

Usually the disconnect involves stern moralizing, especially on matters sexual, by showily devout public figures who are then exposed as adulterers or (gasp!) closet homosexuals. I’d list all the names, starting with Josh Duggar and working backward, but my column doesn’t sprawl over an entire page of the newspaper.

Frank Bruni NYT 8-26-15

Smartest Thing I Read Today (GOP and Trump)

From  The New York Times article by Paul Krugman "Trump on down, the Republicans can't be serious."

For while it’s true that Mr. Trump is, fundamentally, an absurd figure, so are his rivals. If you pay attention to what any one of them is actually saying, as opposed to how he says it, you discover incoherence and extremism every bit as bad as anything Mr. Trump has to offer. And that’s not an accident: Talking nonsense is what you have to do to get anywhere in today’s Republican Party.

It has long been obvious that the conventions of political reporting and political commentary make it almost impossible to say the obvious — namely, that one of our two major parties has gone off the deep end. Or as the political analysts Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein put it in their book “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks,” the G.O.P. has become an “insurgent outlier … unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science.” It’s a party that has no room for rational positions on many major issues.

Can Mr. Trump actually win the nomination? I have no idea. But even if he is eventually pushed aside, pay no attention to all the analyses you will read declaring a return to normal politics. That’s not going to happen; normal politics left the G.O.P. a long time ago. At most, we’ll see a return to normal hypocrisy, the kind that cloaks radical policies and contempt for evidence in conventional-sounding rhetoric. And that won’t be an improvement.

Philly Strikes Again!

Sad to say, Hitchbot had the same chance that a Cowboy fan wearing a Tony Romo shirt at an Eagles pep rally in getting through Philadelphia unscathed.

Hitchbot traveled safely through Europe and Canada. Shame he tried to go through Philly...

WTF??? Nuttier than Trump

"GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee is open to the idea of using federal troops and the FBI to stop women from having abortions.

"I will not pretend there is nothing we can do to stop this," Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas and an outspoken social conservative, said Thursday at a campaign stop in Jefferson, Iowa. 

Huckabee addressed abortion again at his next stop in Rockwell City, Iowa, where a reporter asked him whether stopping abortion would mean using federal troops or the FBI.

"We'll see if I get to be president," Huckabee said, according to the Topeka Capital-Journal.

"All American citizens should be protected," he added."

Huff Post 

we are all confident idiots by David Dunning

The American author and aphorist William Feather once wrote that being educated means “being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don’t.” As it turns out, this simple ideal is extremely hard to achieve. Although what we know is often perceptible to us, even the broad outlines of what we don’t know are all too often completely invisible. To a great degree, we fail to recognize the frequency and scope of our ignorance.

In many cases, incompetence does not leave people disoriented, perplexed, or cautious. Instead, the incompetent are often blessed with an inappropriate confidence, buoyed by something that feels to them like knowledge.

An ignorant mind is precisely not a spotless, empty vessel, but one that’s filled with the clutter of irrelevant or misleading life experiences, theories, facts, intuitions, strategies, algorithms, heuristics, metaphors, and hunches that regrettably have the look and feel of useful and accurate knowledge. This clutter is an unfortunate by-product of one of our greatest strengths as a species. We are unbridled pattern recognizers and profligate theorizers. Often, our theories are good enough to get us through the day, or at least to an age when we can procreate. But our genius for creative storytelling, combined with our inability to detect our own ignorance, can sometimes lead to situations that are embarrassing, unfortunate, or downright dangerous—especially in a technologically advanced, complex democratic society that occasionally invests mistaken popular beliefs with immense destructive power (See: crisis, financial; war, Iraq). As the humorist Josh Billings once put it, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” (Ironically, one thing many people “know” about this quote is that it was first uttered by Mark Twain or Will Rogers—which just ain’t so.)

Eleven Excellent Basketball Books That I Have Read

I have just finished  Not a Game:  The Incredible Rise and Unthinkable Fall of Allen  Iverson.  Very good book.  Well documented.  As I am from  the Philadelphia area and a basketball fan, there were very few surprises upon reading the book. While Iverson was a star on the court,  he was not nearly as successful off it.  Babb  focuses on dark side of Iverson, his legal issues, marital woes, financial problems and lack of discipline in missing meetings, practices  and dealing with management ( including coaches.)

 I am also including a list of the top books that I have enjoyed about basketball. Off the top of my head and in no particular order:

1. A Sense Of Where You Are by John McPhee
2. A Season on the Brink by John Feinstein
3. A  Season inside: One Year in College Basketball by John Feinstein
4. The Miracle of St. Anthony by Adrian Wojaarowski
5. Dream Team by Jack McCallum
6. Pistol: The Life of Pete Maravich byMark Kriegel
7. The Breaks of the Game by David Halberstam
8. The Jordan Rules by Sam Smith
9. The Hoops Whisperer by Idan Ravin
10. Showtime by Jeff Pearlman
11. Eleven Rings by Phil Jackson