Irregular Books

Right now, the United States Senate is preparing to renew the Protect America Act, a law passed in the middle of the night on a Saturday in the middle of the summer of 2007, just when Americans were least likely to be paying attention. The Protect America Act, on a practical level, gives the President the ability to conduct massive electronic spying operations against American citizens without anyone knowing about it and no one able to stop it.

Under the Protect America Act, the Director of National Intelligence and the Attorney General have the power to listen to your telephone calls, read your emails, and follow your activities across the web without any search warrant. The law also prevents any oversight of the spying programs by Congress, and gives the Attorney General the right to order any American to help out with these spying programs - or be thrown into prison.

You can start the project to protect yourself by informing yourself. First, go on over the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and read what they have to say about the Protect America Act. Continue to their Stop the Spying campaign, and take action there.

Then, get yourself some background reading so that you can start to prepare for these spying times. The following books are a place to start:

Odyssey of an Eavesdropper: My Life in Electronic Countermeasures and My Battle Against the FBI - Martin Kaiser III and Robert S. Stokes

Understanding Surveillance Technologies: Spy Devices, Privacy, History & Applications - J. K. Petersen

Illusions of Security: Global Surveillance and Democracy in the Post-9/11 World - Maureen Webb

Electronic Monitoring in the Workplace: Controversies and Solutions - John Weckert

The Hidden Face of Technology: Is Technology Turning Britain into a Fascist State? - Philip N. Thompson

Privacy: Total Information Awareness Programs and Latest Developments - Gina Marie Stevens

Privacy: Wiretapping and Electronic Eavesdropping - Gina Marie Stevens

iSpy: Surveillance and Power in the Interactive Era - Mark Andrejevic

Privacy on the Line: The Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption - Whitfield Diffie and Susan Landau

Spychips: How Major Corporations and Government Plan to Track Your Every Move with RFID - Katherine Albrecht

Techniques in Countersurveillance : The Fine Art of Bug Extermination in the Real World of Intelligence Gathering - Greg Hauser

Surveillance Detection, The Art of Prevention - Laura Clark and William E. Algaier

No Place to Hide: Behind the Scenes of Our Emerging Surveillance Society - Robert O’Harrow

Liberty Under Attack: Reclaiming Our Freedoms in an Age of Terror - Richard C. Leone and Greg, Jr. Anrig

Lovers of Jane Austen’s novels will want to tune in to PBS this year, which is playing an adaptation of every one of Jane Austen’s works, plus a movie of biographical fiction based upon her life, Miss Austen Regrets. Persuasion played a week ago. Northanger Abbey was on last night. Both of these are new adaptations, as will be Sense and Sensibility, the last of the series, to play on March 30 and April 6th. Given the strong changes to the plot of Sense and Sensibility in the Emma Thompson version some years ago, it ought to be interesting to see how this story is brought to screen.

Becoming Jane, a fictionalized biography of Jane Austen, is due to be released on DVD on Feb 12, 2008, so it ought to be a great time for Austen enthusiasts… who then can return to her books when their TV sets have cooled.

My attention was caught yesterday afternoon by an interview of author Sara Paretsky interview by The Progressive. Paretsky discussed her identity as an author of crime fiction, but then talked about her non-fiction interests, which seem focused on the threats to American liberty posed by the american government’s transformation into a nationalist regime of Homeland Security.

Paretsky writes about her ideas about the Homeland Security State in her memoir, Writing In An Age Of Silence, as well as through fiction in the V I Warshawski tale, Blacklist: “The trail leads her back to the McCarthy era blacklists, and forward to the ominous police powers the American government has assumed today. V I finds herself penned into a smaller and smaller space by an array of business and political leaders who can call on the power of the Patriot Act to shut her up.”

It’s an interview worth listening to, and two books worth reading.

…of course, it’s not the books that change.

People pretend that the Bible means the same to them at 50 that it did at all former milestones in their journey. I wonder how they can lie so. It comes of practice, no doubt. They would not say that of Dickens’ or Scott’s books. Nothing remains the same. When a man goes back to look at the house of his childhood, it has always shrunk: there is no instance of such a house being as big as the picture in memory and imagination call for. Shrunk how? Why, to its correct dimensions: the house hasn’t altered; this is the first time it has been in focus.

Well, that’s loss. To have house and Bible shrink so, under the disillusioning corrected angle, is loss–for a moment. But there are compensations. You tilt the tube skyward and bring planets and comets and corona flames a hundred and fifty thousand miles high into the field.

- written in a letter to W. D. Howells in 1887

In this original video production by Irregular Books, Nibbles the Cat introduces himself and begins reading Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. It isn’t the BBC, to be sure, but a cat brings a different kind of understanding to the work of Jane Austen than a human director, and that must be of some interest to fans of Jane Austen.

Post script: Nibbles the Cat likes people to think that he’s got an English accent, when in fact, he’s from Nebraska. Please forgive him this conceit. He is, after all, a cat.

I first read Beating the Devil Out Of Them back in 1997 while doing a literature review for my Master’s Thesis on attitudes about the use of corporal punishment in schools. I had already read stacks of research-based articles on issues related to corporal punishment and considered myself fairly familiar with the subject. Still, I was shocked when I read through what this book has to say about the effects of corporal punishment on children.

The following are just some of the psychological and social problems this book demonstrates are associated with exposure to corporal punishment:
- depression
- suicidal thoughts
- child abuse
- spousal abuse
- violence in schools
- masochism
- violent crime
- theft.

Author Murray Straus even shows the ways in which research indicates that corporal punishment leads to more misbehavior in school - not less. Consider the states where corporal punishment is used on schoolchildren, and you’ll see that there are all kinds of social problems that don’t exist in states where alternatives are used on students instead.

Some smart aleck is sure to respond with a comment that argues that it’s possible to make research say whatever you want it to say. That sounds like an intelligently skeptical thing to say, but the fact is that it’s not true. The fact is that it’s possible for an unscrupulous researcher to mislead readers who are uneducated in the rigorous standards of research methods. Luckily all the research that’s referred to in Beating The Devil Out of Them has been thoroughly reviewed by professionals who are familiar with research methods and the subject area.

The beauty of this book is that it discusses the research behind these correlations without getting lost in the tedium of the academic writing style. None of the many journal articles I’ve read had the smooth, direct manner of Straus’s writing. I recommend it to all teachers and parents, as well as anyone who cares about the way that we’re raising the next generation.

Reason #993 from the upcoming book, 2008 Reasons to Elect a Progressive President, has to do with the 2004 slam of “Massachusetts liberal”:

Remember what the Republicans called John Kerry? They called him a “Massachusetts Liberal” - as if that’s a bad thing. Massachusetts liberals have a great deal to be proud of, actually.

Consider, for example, the status of poverty in Massachusetts. There is poverty in Massachusetts, as there is in every state in the USA. However, in Massachusetts, the poverty rate is lower than the national average. Nationally, the poverty rate is 13.3 percent. In Massachusetts, however, the poverty rate is only 10.3 percent.

The management of child welfare in Massachusetts has been even more of a success. As is the case in every state, child welfare in Massachusetts is higher than the general poverty rate. However, in Massachusetts, the child poverty rate is even further below the national average than the general poverty level - just 13.6 percent. That’s half of the child poverty rate in some Republican-voting red states.

It’s time for America to listen to the wisdom of Massachusetts liberals, instead of following the clumsy bravado of red state economics.”

Right wing Christian organizations are busy sending around an email declaring that good Christians must not go to see the movie The Golden Compass or to read the book upon which it is based. Why? They say that the book promotes atheism

That’s ignorant nonsense. The Golden Compass does not promote atheism. I know. I’ve read the book.

The Golden Compass is not an atheist book because, for all of its trappings of fantasy, it is founded in a Christian perspective.

From that Christian perspective, The Golden Compass plays around with some assumptions of the Christian religion, but in doing so, it only really ever achieves heresy. After all, a Christian idea that’s reconsidered is still at base a Christian idea. It’s not an atheist idea.

Atheism is not just rebellion against orthodox Christian ideas, or rejection of the authority of Christian church organizations. Such rebellion and rejection remains Christian, just as Martin Luther’s followers remained Christian, though they rejected the authority and ideas of the Roman Catholic Church.

The Golden Compass is like a new Protestant Reformation, reworking Christianity, but not truly stepping away from it.

Atheism is simply life without belief in gods. It isn’t rebellion against Christianity. Atheism is completely outside of Christianity, and other religions like it. Atheism leaves religions such as Christianity behind, and doesn’t concern itself with them, except in as much as atheists defend their right to live outside of the ideas of religion.

Maybe Philip Pullman meant to write a book of atheist ideas. Maybe that’s not what he meant to do at all.

However, whatever Philip Pullman meant to do, he did not write a book that promotes atheism. For most of The Golden Compass, there aren’t any religious ideas at all.

In the last few pages, one character engages in semi-coherent ramblings about Adam and Eve and The Garden of Eden, suggesting that the story is in some sense true. That places The Golden Compass within Christianity, not outside of it. The many supernatural beings and magical happenings throughout the book also lend it a spiritual character that is not at all typical of atheism.

Perhaps you’ve been told that The Golden Compass promotes atheism, but if you haven’t read the book, you don’t really know that.

I’ve read The Golden Compass, and I’m telling you that from what I’ve read, the book is not atheist, and doesn’t promote atheism. For anyone to be provoked into becoming atheist by reading The Golden Compass would be extremely unlikely. That’s just not what the book is about.

Don’t believe me? That’s your right - if you’ve read the book yourself, and know what you’re talking about. If you’re just relying on the word of a religious group to tell you what the book is about, then you don’t really know what The Golden Compass is about.

If Lao Tzu had meant to have his poetic classic illustrated by cartoon characters, he would have done so himself. On the other hand, Lao Tzu is just about as much an historical fiction as Jesus, and he certainly isn’t alive today, so who cares? Lao Tzu isn’t here, if he ever really lived at all. We are here.

Translated by Brian Bruya and adapted by Tsai Chi Chung, The Tao Speaks takes the Tao Te Ching, one of the central texts of Taoism, and coverts it into a comic book. Why? Well, for some readers the addition of pictures makes it easier to understand the point of the text as it describes the path to ultimate harmony through short chapters with titles such as The Ideal Leader and Honor’s Disgrace.

Is it sacrilege to make a cartoon out of the Tao Te Ching? I doubt that many real Taoists would care, or even take much notice, although Western Scholars who study Taoism might raise their eyebrows. On the other hand, the creators of this book take care to leave the Chinese version in the margins of each page for the sake of purists who must have the original. The truth is that even the modern Chinese version of the Tao Te Ching has been copied so many times that scholars argue over what it actually says.

Any translation has its flaws, so why worry? If you want to get a quick and easy introduction to the basic ideas of the Tao Te Ching, pick up a copy of The Tao Speaks, read it with a light spirit, and relax about the details. You can always go pick up the latest authoritative translation with one hundred pages of scholarly notes later. Forget about getting it right — it’s all about harmony anyway, right?

If you’ve ever been on a church email list, or know somebody who has been, you’ve probably gotten one of the messages warning you about The Golden Compass - a fantasy book written for young adults that has been made into a movie which will be shown in cinemas starting next week. These emails claim that The Golden Compass has been cleverly designed to seduce children to become “militant” atheists (though the book is not written for children, but teenagers and adults). Some members of Gathers have copied and pasted parts of this forwarded email, and published them as articles here.

Let’s think about what this email claims. If reading The Golden Compass really has the power to transform people into transform teenagers into atheists, then how come there hasn’t been a dramatic increase in the number of young atheists in the time since The Golden Compass has been published?

It’s been ten years since The Golden Compass was published, and in that time, millions of people have read The Golden Compass. Are there that many more atheists on Earth now than there were before?

If not, then it seems to me that the Catholic League and its email campaign about the spiritual dangers of The Golden Compass are nothing but hype.

People who get the email warnings of imminent religious catastrophe as a result of this one book need to stop allowing themselves to be whipped into a frenzy, and think logically about the claims being made in that email for just a second.

Let’s base our concerns in reality, not in propaganda campaigns that depend upon forwarded emails.