william.scherk

Rich Engles fer shure! I do recall that one of my own slovenly rants seemed to hit your funnybone back in those halcyon days at the old SOLO: Phil, Galt love you, I admire your stance and your persistence and the essential wisdom of all your posts (which I read carefully), but a prideful lecturing tone gets in the way sometimes, brother. You can be mistaken for a huffy, angry and arrogant teacher with little human touch on some rare occasions. If I was your student, and was treated that way, I would write "Wonderful, wonderful educator, my favourite lecturer. Would attend his seminar even if held in a Bombay meat market's offal depot during communal rioting. Hat too tight. Needs to get laid. More than once."

Among the points Neil makes in my email exchanges with him is that I misunderstand Objectivism/Rand, which is almost certainly true. My most recent misunderstanding of this type was when I asked him about George: George doesn't accept that god mind-melded with you. So what? Why does that matter to you? No non-believer in a spirit world is going to accept your account as you interpret it without a leap of faith. It's just the way things are in the world. Neil replied that it is the ridicule that annoyed him, not the non-acceptance, and that George was "denying the Objectivist premises we share." That stumped me, of course, so I asked, "Which premises has he denied? A basic Objectivist premise like Atheism?" Which point reveals me as sitting backwards on the horse, since Neil says that atheism is not in any way a premise of the philosophy, and that to so assert is a lie. Some kind soul has put together some excerpts from Rand's TV appearances with Phil Donohue and Tom Snyder -- where she speaks of faith and reason, god and atheism. I am hoping another kind soul with a top-drawer grasp of Objectivism can tell us where atheism actually fits in Objectivism, if not as premise . . .

Imo you have distilled here and put in clear words exactly what Neil is hoping for. Is Starbuckle right in his assessment, Neil? I am having an interesting email exchange offlist with Neil. He rejects the 'leap of faith' idea as applied to him. He does accept that there is something that could be called a leap of faith, and illustrates his notion of leap of faith with the example of scientists at the Large Hadron Collidor "when they decided to see if they could reproduce the Big Bang without being absolutely sure they wouldn't set off a chain reaction that would destroy this planet." He may be hoping folks accept his interpretations, but asserts strongly that faith had nothing to do with it whatsoever, "[m]erely curiosity, such as any scientist might have." So, I wouldn't suggest using the 'leap of faith' argument with him, as this seems to lead to reactions like "go fuck yourself."

Strip away Mrs Grundy's tone and the hectoring he is wont to use, and there is the germ of a reasonable inference that Mrs Grundy has taken from your initial post. I will put it this way . . . how come you don't write in standard English? The question was answered in Mrs Grundy's mind, and the unpleasant conclusion he drew was that you were lazy and slovenly and probably doomed to a low-paying job because you didn't give a shit about putting your best effort forth, that you are three hundred pounds of I-can't-be-bothered in a pizza-stained chenille housecoat, wondering why you cain't make ends meet and nobody will take you to Bingo any more. That is probably not accurate, but it sure looks like you don't care about the impression non-standard orthography can make here. -- forgive Mrs Grundy/Phil his fit of snarks. Nobuddy axes him ta Objekkiviss Binga any mo, and he jest cain't figger out why . . .

I wonder too. To put a sharper point on my wonder, does Neil find it impossible that he could be mistaken in his interpretation of his godfusion experience? Does he regard as impossible that the psychological state he was in at the time could explain the odd experience? In other news, I have experienced a communication from at least a remnant of FusionGawd. The communication came direct to my email inbox and consisted of a riff on 'you fucking lying asshole.' Apparently the most awful lying lower sphincterish nastiness of all comes in saying I think Neil is implicitly asking for a leap of faith.

Let us unpack this jury-rigged mess. Did J Neil Schulman report a 'mind meld'? Yes. Did J Neil Schulman offer both spiritual and non-spiritual explanations for his experience? Yes. Neil offered the explanation that dehydration, sleeplessness, 'ketosis,' and paranoia could be responsible for his experience. He also offered the explanation that the spirit of the universe melded with his personality. Which of these two explanations is plausible -- which makes the most sense, which explanation does not require belief in invisible spirits? Neil, can you get your head around the notion that the first explanation is most likely to reasonable people? The first explanation fits well with what we know about the world. The first explanation fits all the facts. The first does not add entities or postulates or hypothetical assumptions about the world. It is that simple, Neil. To accept the second explanation as most plausible one has to posit an invisible spirit, and accept all the ramifications of that spirit. You are asking folks to choose the least plausible explanation. That is the 'leap of faith' -- to accept the god/spirit hypothesis folks have to reach beyond the reasonable into the World Of Woo. You surely grasp the difficulty . . .

I have found another case of god appearance. From a Texas newspaper's crime blotter (like Neil, I have made a standing Google Search for I Met God). Blotter: Report: Man’s behavior turns strange 07:35 AM CST on Tuesday, December 21, 2010 By Donna Fielder / Staff Writer Paramedics took a man to a hospital for evaluation Sunday after his friend reported to police that he was talking in tongues, declaring himself God, threatening her with a knife and doing other things that were out of character. The woman said her friend asked her to accompany him to a movie, but she suggested they watch a movie at her apartment instead. They were having a conversation about God, she said, when he suddenly declared that he was God. He announced that they were going to have sex. She told him that was disrespectful and he insisted that they were going to have a sexual encounter and picked up a pair of scissors, according to a police report. She ran into the bathroom, and he threw the scissors across the room and ran into the living room. She was fearful for him and followed. She reported that she saw him “levitate” for about 10 feet across the room. She feared he was going to go over the balcony, so she shoved a table across the door. He picked up a knife and she defended herself with a curtain rod, she said. Then she grabbed a baseball bat. He began chanting “Red, green, go” over and over and “flying” around the room, she said. He was flailing his arms and hit her, the report states. She struck him with the bat, she said. He began speaking in a language she didn’t understand. She called 911 at that point. She told police that her friend uses steroids and GHB, called the date rape drug, but that he did not appear to have taken anything when he first arrived. Later she reported that he was texting her from the hospital that he was not sorry for what happened.

This is true. Neil did not describe Joan of Arc's experience as a hallucination. He avoided all of George's questions regarding Joan. The most he did was to compare Joan to a football coach's report of god's special favour. Which is the central problem several of us pointed out to Neil. We class Neil's claim in with the long list of other claims of divine contact. We wondered what made Neil's experience ring true to him, while Joan's experiences were not to be considered as 'real.' Here's as close to answering that question that Neil was able to get: George asked: "Are you skeptical of Joan's claim to have had visions and instructions from God? If so, why?" Neil answered: "I'd say I take it just as seriously as a football coach who attributes his team's victory to God giving him the winning play in a dream the night before." According to Neil he has a standing Google search on "I Met God," and has not yet found any claim worth following up. He apparently spent some time reading Walsch's report of god contact, but ultimately dismissed it as 'horseshit.' There is nothing about a trance that makes communication impossible, nor is it fiendishly dishonest to characterize your state of mind as a trance. Apparently the only thing that made your experience different from your usual state of mind was the belief that you could see in four dimensions and perceive other people's intentions. That would seem to add to human abilities to deal with legal matters, not lessen them . . . Sorry, but you miss the centrepiece of my observation. I equated your faith in your own god experience with the sad faith of the Rapture Lady that 'open-minded' folk would somehow get value out of her nutty insistence that the revelation of the end of the world might be true. You didn't find her special pleading poignant, but I did, and I found it corresponded to your own special pleading. If you don't understand what special pleading actually means, or how to evaluate your own arguments for fallacies, then I feel very sorry for you. I only lump you in with the Rapture Lady because of the poignancy of her appeal. The appeal is beyond reason, as is yours. The only way any atheist could accept your "temporarily abnormal state of consciousness" as a real mind meld with the eternal creator of the universe is to put aside reason and make a leap of faith. It is very sad that you can't see that this stark reality. But Neil, the only reason anyone could accept the mind meld hypothesis is by setting aside reason. Straightforward reasoning suggests you had an abnormal (for you) psychological experience. You concede in several places that the most reasonable explanation for your mind-meld is psychological: My most powerful communication was during a state of shallow breathing due to nasal and broncchial congestion, physical dehydration, and ketosis One can say that I’m going through a psychotic episode at this point. Certainly the physiological conditions for a psychotic episode — ketosis, dehydration, lack of sleep — all of these various things can add up and say that I’m having a break with reality. -- you point to the problem that confounds you: But the problem is that I’m not experiencing it as a break with reality. So, bearing in mind that you concede that the circumstances suggest a psychological explanation, the only thing that convinced you of reality was a leap of faith. What you ultimately are asking for is that those who accept the psychological explanation put it aside in favour of faith in you. We can't do that, brother. We atheists don't accept your faith. And as you say, that is only a problem for you . . . that is the poignant reality. Welcome back to OL.

Here is one paragraph from an English translation of Raspail's opus: To appreciate the scope of Dio’s power, we could look to a hundred examples. One will suffice: the Saint-Favier swimming-pool scandal. Saint-Favier is a dull, sleepy town stuck away in the Jura, that decided one day to indulge its wild fancy and present itself with a gift sure to rouse an industrious populace lulled by the pipemaker’s lathes. Namely, a swimming pool. Olympic, Hiltonesque, covered in the winter, basking in mountain sun in the summer, a billionaire’s pool on a communal scale, a fabulous toy for the people, democratic to a fault, and always jam-packed (God knows how those French love the water!) … Well, it just so happened that, in one of the weekly analyses required by law, a lab technician discovered a troop of bacteria—gonococci, to be precise—living on a corner of the metal plate marked “Saint-Favier Municipal Swimming Pool,” happy as could be with their new surroundings, and, in a word, thriving. So well, in fact, that the hospital, much to the doctors’ disbelief and indignation, found itself treating three youngsters with ophthalmic gonorrhea: two girls and a boy—not even related—and one of whom, it should be noted, was a pupil with the Sisters of Perpetual Help. Now, in France, no schooltot does anything much with her eyes but open them wide, agog at the wonders of the world. There had to be an explanation. And it soon came to light in the files of the hospital, the national health plan, and the factory infirmary, where the records showed that a thousand Arabs—first-rate workers notwithstanding, and socially accepted if not socially absorbed—had been showing up time after time, to the tune of some ten percent, with the aftermaths of a stubborn case of North African clap. To be utterly fair and unbiased, the authorities proceeded to check through the files of all the Jura natives too. A time-consuming task, but one which the West, personified there in Saint-Favier, felt obliged to perform in the worthy effort to subdue its prejudices. The result, unhappily, merely confirmed them. They turned up a total of two rich young brats, both terribly spoiled, who wouldn’t have dreamed of using the public pooi, and one dirty old derelict, who never bathed and didn’t know how to swim. What a blow for the poor town fathers! Such fine folk, too, these laborers, pensioners, railroaders, politicized peasants, placing their leftist ballots in the box, like Eucharists laid on the communion plate, and scratching their chins, deep in thought … One of them, a delegate from the Communist trade-union party, in a highly emotional search through his papers, brought out a mimeographed document proving that the Arabs were essential to the economic well-being of the nation, and that the sudden resurgence of racism had to be nipped in the bud. Of course, they all agreed. The point was well taken. They were all for the worldwide solidarity of the masses. But still! If their kids’ eyes were going to catch the clap, after all—and in their nice new pool, to boot, that they scrimped their pennies together to pay for—and a dose like you wouldn’t pick up from some army-camp whore, well, Arabs or not, they couldn’t just let the thing get out of hand, and besides, doesn’t everyone know it’s an Arab disease? … The fine folk believed it was only common sense to vote as they did, and to reach their unanimous decision: namely, that thereafter the only Arabs to use the municipal swimming pool at Saint-Favier would be those with a medical certificate proving that they had no contagious diseases that might be spread by water. The decree was posted at the entrance to the pool, and in all the Arab cafés and haunts in town. It was, in fact, rather clumsily worded. But that’s hardly a surprise. In times when a spade has ceased to be called a spade, it’s no wonder that thirty-two town fathers—each one a family man, but none with an excess of schooling—should let themselves be trapped by the subtleties of language. … Dio rubbed his hands with glee, and proceeded to use the Saint-Favier edict as his cover of the week, spread over the newsstands in all its glory (by ultracapitalist distributors, no less), with a big title splashed across, proclaiming: “Anti-Arab Racism Alive and Well!” Six hundred thousand copies. Rather hard to miss! … In Paris, His Excellency the Algerian ambassador demanded an audience and got it on the spot. The North African press let loose volleys of hate, and the French press picked up the tune, albeit in a minor key. Somewhere there was even the observation that plenty of Frenchwomen jumped into bed with those poor, slandered Arabs, without once insisting to see their bill of health. … Retaliation took many forms. Oil, for example, was an issue again, as three tankers returned bone dry. And a hundred nice French girls, teaching school in Algeria, were suddenly hauled into the hospital and spread on the stirrups to be plumbed and explored by a squad of medical student commandos, whipped up to a frenzy. Two of them died as a result, but the inquest didn’t last. On his minister’s orders, the prefect of the Jura quickly reversed the Saint-Favier decree, first for certain technical flaws, and also for its breach of human rights. Dio was exultant, crowing his triumph in one of his best editorials. Because, when all was said and done, he was right. And any time that man was right—which he often was, since he chose his pretexts with diabolical skill—the walls of the ancient citadel were sure to crumble. So the Arabs of SaintFavier returned en masse to the pool, victorious. And they had it all to themselves. No townsfolk were seen there again. There wasn’t even talk about building another one, separate from the first. What would be the sense? … And all at once whole sections of New York are deserted, a score of American cities watch the flight to the suburbs—and half the historic Paris pavement too—American tots in their integrated schools fall five years behind, tubercular Gauls flee in droves from our open-air clinics. … Tally-ho! Tally-ho! Just listen to that battering ram smash at the southern gate!

Very good post. The most poignant moments for me in this thread were those where Neil gave in to special pleading with George -- if George granted him to be an honest reporter, then why oh why couldn't George grant that he what he reported could be true? Why not make the leap of faith? Here is something that resonated with me -- the same poignant undercurrent of 'it could be true and unbelief is closeminded,' complete with shonky analogy. These paragraphs are from "End of Days in May? Believers enter final stretch" at MSNBC. I could almost sense the spirit of J Neil "God" Schulman. The MSNBC story covers the latest in a long line of Rapture cranks, who have scratched a new date in May on their calendars, and utter a very Schulman plea . . . "If you still want to say we're crazy, go ahead," she said. "But it doesn't hurt to look into it." Past predictions that failed to come true don't have any bearing on the current calculation, believers maintain. "It would be like telling the Wright Brothers that every other attempt to fly has failed, so you shouldn't even try," said Chris McCann, who works with eBible Fellowship, one of the groups spreading the message. For believers like McCann, theirs is actually a message of hope and compassion: God's compassion for people, and the hope that there's still time to be saved. That, ultimately, is what spurs on Exley, who said her beliefs have alienated her from most of her friends and family. Her hope is that not everyone who hears her message will mock it, and that even people who dismiss her now might still come to believe. "If you still want to say we're crazy, go ahead," she said. "But it doesn't hurt to look into it."

Joel, thanks for that. Rick Mercer is a scream. My faves are when he cajoles federal politicians to appear on his show.

Voting results from the City. Yes to municipal petition process in Alberta, details here. No to primaries. We don't register our party affiliation with the gummint nor does gummint supervise or carry out party leadership elections. Nor are our federal electoral districts apportioned by legislators, thus leading to lesser gerrymandering, or at least less of those strangely-shaped congressional districts you find in Florida and Illinois. In the province of Nova Scotia, a kind of gerrymandering did result in a black majority federal riding, Preston. If you will allow some shameful smugness, your electoral system seems kooky at times compared to ours.

It's not really provocative, Adam, and not particularly profound. The only notable 'blowback' came from Steyn. I did find some criticism in a 2007 story from Al Jazeera's English edition -- but it seems the reaction was from secular Muslims in Canada, rather than from the crazed bunny-breeding Eurabian jihadis of Steyn's nightmares: But not all Muslims see the sitcom as a true representation of their community. Tarek Fatah, founder of the Muslim Canadian Congress (MCC), an organisation of secular Muslims based in Toronto, says: "The vast majority of Muslims in North America don't go to mosques." He said: "I believe there's an attempt by Islamic groups to sanitise what happens in mosques. We know that most mosques give political sermons." Fatah said he believes this series is "a step backward". Farzana Hassan, president of the MCC, says the sitcom portrays Muslims from a narrow narrative and is offended by the way non-Muslims are portrayed. She said: "I would have liked to have seen [the women in Little Mosque] not wear the hijab. "The bigotry of small-town white Canadians has been exaggerated." She would have preferred to see more Muslims appear in mainstream Canadian shows, instead of separately in their own series. Second season Darling says she is aware of criticism from some of Canada's secular Muslims, but says a mosque was chosen as a setting because the sitcom is based on the experiences of its creator, Nawaz, who is a practising Muslim. Darling says other people have criticised the show for using "hokey humour". But, as far as she is concerned, Little Mosque "entertains and informs at the same time ... and will help race relations" in Canada. I suspect that a lot of Canucki Muslims like their Islam 'light' -- even if they are not huge fans of Irshad Manji, they just want to get along without much fuss and bother. What might interest you, Adam, as an indication of the relative weight given to religion, is the recent mayoral election in Calgary, Alberta. The new Mayor is Muslim, Naheed Nenshi.

Steyn won the BC case hands-down, and good for him. I dislike his fundamentalism and his anti-Mooslim rantings, but he is a damn good writer, and an effective polemicist. He is also a bit of a slop-hound as a journalist, but hey. Fact checking his hilarious Little Mosque review reveals that his claim that all the actors are non-Muslim is, well, hooey. Ho hum. Although he is a citizen of Canuckistan, he lives in New England. The Great White Nought is a snarky little notion, unlike the Little Mosque show, which is more a time warped Andy Griffith Show, or as the serie's tag puts it, "Small town Canada with a little Muslim twist." Oddly, or not so oddly, the series is broadcast in Israel and other Middle Eastern nations. Canadian Muslims are pretty much like Canadian Catholics, save that more Catholics wear habits than Muslims wear niqab.** The National Council of Imams is pretty darn boring about their place in the scheme of things, even going so far as to issue a very Canucki seven-point declaration that hit the international news this past August. It's a classic Canuckistani bleat about tolerance and freedom and blah blah blah, and makes the Muslims about as scary as Ukrainians, and slightly more boring and deluded than Anglicans. Not to say that we don't have our own out and out nutcase Islamic leaders like Zijad Delic and Mohamed Elmasry, but they are balanced out by the likes of Hamid Slimi and Tarek Fatah. The many Muslim organizations are generally given to the same kinds of squabbling as any bunch of god-intoxicated people. The university orgs are probably the most demented, but are on a par with the demented neo-Zionists, no more righteous and one-eyed than ARI campus clubs . . . I realize Ted has a necessarily limited view of Canadian reality, and I hope my fellow citizens of the Northern Socialist Hellhole (Carol and Joel) don't take his crabbiness to heart. OL is overwhelmingly American, and the Canadian 'don't give a shit' attitude sometimes gets mixed up with the loathsome Canadian smugness. I say, Ted, some weekend you and your boyfriend should cross the border and whoop it up in Montreal, maybe get married, and see what a seething pit of horror that multicultural burg can be. Adam, here's an example of the Little Mosque show from its third season. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pIgUetvSwg ____________ ** The Socialist Hellhole has 13 million Catholics and about 700,000 Muslims.

Those of us who admire Ayn Rand are surely aware that a short work of art can often convey more than thousands of words of didactic argument. You are definitely right that Neil intended the excerpt from Contact to speak for him. He made that explicit in an email exchange with me subsequent to his departure. For those interested (Ted, you can go lay down behind the stove and scratch for a while), Neil has put a post up at his blog -- I argue God with the Atheists. He won't be back, but invites the readers of his blog to visit here. So the OL gang has now run off all the recent inbound spiritual cranks. I shall join Ted behind the stove.

This is awesome. Neil acknowledges that "nothing I experienced can not be explained by conventional means," which is reasonable and shows he understands why no one here makes the leap of faith to belief in an eternal spirit. Great. Then he posts a Youtube video of a scene from a science fiction movie as an answer to his own question -- if normal non-spirit explanations could account for the phenomena, why does he persist in his faith? So, our George asks the obvious -- what other science fiction movies could be cited? That's a fair question, even if it threatens Neil with personal annihilation. But Neil has a conniption. George might be snide, Neil, and he might be dishonest, and he might be able to auto-fellate, but the question remains in the air: what in heck does a science fiction movie have to do with your resistance to normal explanations? The only thing I can take from this exchange is that science fiction explanations trump real world explanations. Which I think Neil Schulman will understand strikes most folk as completely Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.

This is epistemological progress, and finally answers comments in this thread that suggested the same notion: explanation by conventional means. I think you have answered this elsewhere: self-annihilation. f given the choice between denying one's own perception or accepting the authority of others' denial based on their differing assumptions, denial of one's own perceptions would be self-annihilatory. Fun stuff. Now, I also wonder if you could give us a sketch of the astral-travelling thing. Apparently you left your body and flew down to some place that you hadn't visited before, and then afterwards you visited the same place in the flesh and verified the information received during the flight. For those who need to get up to speed on Astral Travel, here is a quick and easy method:

Dude, I can't make you do anything. Only you can clean up the murky analogies and not quite right comparisons before you post. Why say "it's the same thing" when it's not the same thing? Do you want us to think that you are only capable of sloppy argumentation? Look, the underlying point is that sloppy analogies are a lousy way of making an argument hang together. Don't be sloppy and imprecise if you don't want to be seen as sloppy and imprecise.

Yes; cosmic rays are not composed of photons. Remember, you wrote: "Okay, George, mix colors that represent the color "cosmic ray." Why did you write that, when you know cosmic rays are not even part of the electromagnetic spectrum? It's like asking someone to mix colours that represent the flavour of pixies. It's a strained, stretched, unworkable comparison. It's a defective analogy. It stands in the way of discussion and makes your arguments seem unmoored, all over the map and aimed to defeat common understanding. Neil, George suggested you work harder on your analogies and examples. It's very good advice, brother.

Do you refer to the orbit of Uranus and the (at one time) unseen orbital body Neptune? If so, you have the process of inquiry and scientific history badly garbled. What a shock that is . . . No, I understand it quite well. Perhaps, but what you wrote was rather unclear: "Predicting orbits by positing as yet unseen planets." Observing perturbed orbits led to predictions of as yet unseen planets, which planets were confirmed by observation. Well, no. Exoplanet discovery is different. Astronomers use Doppler spectroscopy, photometric transit or microlensing. Not the same thing, dude. Look it up.

Thanks for making the effort to consider the material in the article, Neil. I appreciate that you have changed your mind from "That's quite a bit of hand-waving." Progress!

Well, young Neil, it so happens that fish schooling has been explained without reference to 'subtle means of communication.' Do you refer to the orbit of Uranus and the (at one time) unseen orbital body Neptune? If so, you have the process of inquiry and scientific history badly garbled. What a shock that is . . . I must now invoke the Law Of Pixies to explain this know-nothing attitude. I illustrate the Law Of Pixies with this chilling video courtesy of your fellow investigator . . . I double-dare you to explain this freaky exhibition.

Okay. How about this . . . 1.) Neil experienced something externally real 2.) Neil did not experience something externally real (he had a psychotic break with reality). 3.) Neil did not experience something externally real (he did not have a psychotic break with reality) I am asking you to consider that the ketosis/paranoia/dehydration/starvation/insomnia may have led to the experience. As far as I can tell, you do not consider this a reasonable possibility.

That's quite a bit of hand-waving in an attempt to explain the cause of a phenomenon when the cause is not immediately apparent. If I was studying this I'd be looking for subtle means of communication either among the fish or in reaction to some as-yet unidentified external trigger. Not hand-waving at all. The behavioral rules were identified to be quite simple and were simulated: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/09/100916121320.htm Very strange line of inquiry from Neil. You asked if he was familiar with fish schooling. He dodges the question and ignores the reference ('hand waving') and then suggests that the best way to proceed is to disregard all previous inquiry and leap immediately into the spirit world. That stance boggles my mind. It appears that Neil is predisposed to a mystical explanation of any intriguing phenomena, without taking the time to even glance over more prosaic explanations. Mike: Are you familiar with the science of crossing the road, which attempts to explain how people get from one side of the road to the other without being mashed like sardines? Much of the work concentrates on vision, sound and 'pedestrian signalling' infrastructure. Basically, the behaviour is an emergent property of Look Both Ways and/or wait for a 'safe crossing' light. Neil: A lot of hand-waving nonsense. I would start with psychic emanations from the eleventh dimension and stir in multiple continua that we aren't able to measure yet. Mike: Um, why would you posit invisible mystical possibilities rather than respond to the empirical work first? Neil: You are a fucking dogmatic asshole.

I'll buy that idea. The remnant crabs and cranks at SOLO remind me of folks left over in the wee wee hours after a big party. Among the platters of dried fish paste and gnawed bones and spilled drinks and melted ice-sculptures are a handful of raddled also-rans without taxi fare. Cathcart has a book "coming soon." The earth trembles in anticipation.