synopsis and reviews-
Publication Date:January 29, 2013
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
From the former vice president and #1 New York Times bestselling author comes An Inconvenient Truth for everything—a frank and clear-eyed assessment of six critical drivers of global change in the decades to come.
Ours is a time of revolutionary change that has no precedent in history. With the same passion he brought to the challenge of climate change, and with his decades of experience on the front lines of global policy, Al Gore surveys our planet’s beclouded horizon and offers a sober, learned, and ultimately hopeful forecast in the visionary tradition of Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock and John Naisbitt’s Megatrends. In The Future, Gore identifies the emerging forces that are reshaping our world:
• Ever-increasing economic globalization has led to the emergence of what he labels “Earth Inc.”—an integrated holistic entity with a new and different relationship to capital, labor, consumer markets, and national governments than in the past.
• The worldwide digital communications, Internet, and computer revolutions have led to the emergence of “the Global Mind,” which links the thoughts and feelings of billions of people and connects intelligent machines, robots, ubiquitous sensors, and databases.
• The balance of global political, economic, and military power is shifting more profoundly than at any time in the last five hundred years—from a U.S.-centered system to one with multiple emerging centers of power, from nation-states to private actors, and from political systems to markets.
• A deeply flawed economic compass is leading us to unsustainable growth in consumption, pollution flows, and depletion of the planet’s strategic resources of topsoil, freshwater, and living species.
• Genomic, biotechnology, neuroscience, and life sciences revolutions are radically transforming the fields of medicine, agriculture, and molecular science—and are putting control of evolution in human hands.
• There has been a radical disruption of the relationship between human beings and the earth’s ecosystems, along with the beginning of a revolutionary transformation of energy systems, agriculture, transportation, and construction worldwide.
From his earliest days in public life, Al Gore has been warning us of the promise and peril of emergent truths—no matter how “inconvenient” they may seem to be. As absorbing as it is visionary, The Future is a map of the world to come, from a man who has looked ahead before and been proven all too right.
Praise for The Future
“Magisterial . . . The passion is unmistakable. So is the knowledge. Practically every page offers an illumination.”—Bloomberg
“In The Future . . . Gore takes on a subject whose scale matches that of his achievements and ambition.”—The New York Times Book Review
“Historically grounded . . . Gore’s strengths lie in his passion for the subject and in his ability to take the long view by putting current events and trends in historical context.”—Publishers Weekly
“Provocative, smart, densely argued . . . a tour de force of Big Picture thinking.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“A luminously intelligent analysis that is packed with arresting ideas and facts.”—The Guardian
We as a nation and world really missed out by not having this man as President for those brutal eight years in the last decade. How things could have been different.
http://oaklandlocal.com/article/oakland-social-masturbation-marathon-health-and-happiness
Some of the hits from the article:
Participants of the current incarnation of the Masturbate-a-Thon can ask friends to sponsor them by the minute or by the orgasm.
. . . a partitioned space for women-identified people only, . . .
In 2009 at the San Francisco Masturbate-a-Thon, Japanese world champion masturbator Masanobu Sato pleasured himself for an eye-watering nine hours and 58 minutes.
“World champion masturbator”?
“I went with my friend a few years ago,” Oakland resident Benjamin Packard, 29, told me. “We walked around and watched for a while and we were like, ‘This is totally crazy and weird.’ ... And then after about five minutes, you just totally get acclimated to it.”
]]>I attended a one-hour Humpday Happy Hour workshop
I was sat in my rocking chair, waiting expectantly for the postman, when he finally appears and ambles haplessly around the fence and across my lawn towards my front door, a small bead of sweat rolled down my temple onto my cheek, making me shiver in anticipation as the familiar click and rattle of my letter box prompted me to rise and rush to the door in excitement… “Will it be today?”, I hoped it would be, I have been waiting eagerly for a week now for my very own copy of that Morley epic “Hats Off To Us All”... and I wasn’t going to be disappointed.
The package was much larger than I had expected…and oddly shaped too, looked like it had been twice around the world, with stickers from various countries plastered all over it and a multitude of rubber stamp marks and hand written scribbles in a variety of languages. This package had been on a journey… probably to.. and back from another dimension….
I tore it open..then unwrapped and unrolled the old piece of parchment, tied with a ribbon and secured with a wax seal, which had added to this package’s queer shape and size, then I read these words, clearly written in black ink and by it’s style, obviously penned with an old quill… “Keep this to yourself… only listen to this in a darkened room.. by candle light…” ...I continued to read this obscure list of instructions, too strange and perverse to share here with all… but… after removing the gilded goat horn from my bottom and applying the stated amount of patchouli to my brow…I was ready to go!!!!
I intend to give this Album, “Hats Off To Us All”, my full attention, so far I am only listening to a few tracks at a time… I will report back on their style, progression, and any changes they make to my physical or mental state… so far I feel a swelling, but it is early and I may need to go to the loo….
Track 1:- Going North
Track 2:- Hats Off
Track 3:- Basket CaseI’m already amazed at the quality of the recording and musicianship, you can tell someone has taken time to get these first few tracks just right, they remind me of a movie soundtrack a journey into an unknown land, or an eery folk rock type ballad you would hear from someone like Jethro Tull or ELP, I could imagine a flute player spinning on his heels… I really like this… wish you guys could hear this too… “Basket Case” is more complex in its chord progression.. it is very well structured, it creates a real atmosphere, a true feeling of someones confusion and angst.
...One worrying development I did notice in the attached post script was a message from Nhoj which said..“If this does not go well for me, then I will consider cutting my hair and moving to Chokpori in the hills of Tibet to live out my days…”
Well…should Nhoj cut his hair or not… it could sap his powers??
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Book Description
Release date: March 19, 2013
This is a timely look at how to foster mutual understanding between believers and non-believers by viewing religion from an outsiders perspective. Depending on how one defines “religion,” there are thousands of religions in the world. Given such religious diversity, how can any one religion claim to know the truth? Nothing proposed so far has helped us settle which of these religions, if any, are true - until now. Former minister-turned-atheist John Loftus thinks we would all be better off if we reviewed any religion - including our own - with the informed skepticism of an outsider. For this reason, he has devised the “outsider test for faith.” He describes it as a variation of the Golden Rule - “Do unto your faith what you do to other faiths.” Essentially this means applying the same skepticism to our own beliefs as we do to others. At a time when the vast diversity of human belief systems is accessible to all, the outsider test of faith offers a rational means for fostering mutual understanding.
Editorial Reviews
Review
“Over the past ten thousand years there have been tens of thousands of religions and thousands of gods. Which one is the right one? To believers in each one they all appear unique. To an anthropologist from Mars they all look the same… . This clever book gives you the intellectual firepower you need when engaging believers, pointing out, for example, that they are religious skeptics, too—of all those other faiths. Some of us go one faith further in our skepticism. You will, too, after reading this testament to the power of reason.”—MICHAEL SHERMER, publisher of Skeptic magazine, monthly columnist for Scientific American, and author of The Believing Brain
“A must-read for believers and any atheists who want to debate them. Superbly argued, airtight, and endlessly useful, this should be everyone’s first stop in the god debate.”—RICHARD CARRIER, author of Proving History
“Loftus makes a convincing case that believers who are willing to honestly apply the outsider test cannot but fail to see the irrationality of their faith.”—VICTOR J. STENGER, author of God and the Atom
“Without doubt one of the best books I’ve ever read on faith. A masterpiece.”—PETER BOGHOSSIAN, author of A Manual for Creating Atheists
“Because one’s religious faith is almost completely an accident of birth, believers should be highly skeptical about whether their own faith is correct. This eminently sensible principle, outlined in Loftus’s admirable book, is rarely followed in practice; but if it were, then the dominance of religion in our world, with all its bad effects, would be severely eroded.”—JERRY A. COYNE, author of Why Evolution Is True
“The Outsider Test for Faith is an ingenious way of helping the religious take a step back so that they can fairly and impartially examine what they believe, which can only be a good thing.”—STEPHEN LAW, author of Believing Bullshit
“John Loftus has done it again! He has produced a lucid and exhaustive explanation of the simple proposition that individuals should examine their own faith with the same skepticism they show toward the claims of other faiths. No significant objection is left unexamined and no major objector escapes unscathed. This is a potent antidote to those who elevate faith above reason, and superstition above science. It is a bravura performance.”—HECTOR AVALOS, author of The End of Biblical Studies
“John W. Loftus will be remembered a century from now for The Outsider Test for Faith.”—DR. FRANK ZINDLER, former president of American Atheists and editor of American Atheist Magazine
“Perhaps the most intractable argument against Loftus’s outsider test for faith is some version of ‘I can’t do it. I can’t get far enough outside of my emotions and beliefs to examine my own religion like I would any other.’ As a psychologist I find that credible. We all have a very imperfect and fragmentary ability to see ourselves as others see us. But this in no way undermines Loftus’s foundational argument that the outsider test should be the gold standard.”—DR. VALERIE TARICO, psychologist and author of Trusting Doubt
“John Loftus has written a bold book based on a simple premise: the unexamined faith is not worth believing… . He demands that believers examine their own faith with all the rigor and skepticism that they direct toward other faiths. To those who condemn the beliefs of others while elevating their own dogmas, Loftus’s message could come straight from the Gospel: remove the beam from your own eye before you seek to remove the speck from another’s.”—DR. KEITH PARSONS, professor of philosophy, University of Houston-Clear Lake, and author of God and the Burden of Proof
About the Author
John W. Loftus earned degrees in theology and philosophy from Lincoln Christian Seminary. He then attended Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and received a degree in philosophy of religion. Before leaving the church, he had ministries in Michigan, Illinois, and Indiana, and taught at several Christian and secular colleges. He is the author of Why I Became an Atheist, and the editor of The Christian Delusion.
Put it on your calendar: http://maythe4th.starwars.com/
]]>Here are the lyrics….
http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/bradpaisley/accidentalracist.html
What do you think? My impression is that it is rather interesting and people are getting upset over the details (some of which are justifiably controversial), rather than the intent, which is a call for tolerance.