I am continually amazed at the wide variety of shapes of plant and animal life. Today, I ran across this series of photos of sea life, some of it from the deep sea. If I had been asked to design a new underwater life form, my imagination would not possibly have been able to concoct functioning animals like these. It's incredible that each of these life forms continues to live today, the successor to a long series of earlier and simpler life forms.
Over the past few days, I've been publishing sections of an engaging discussion with Mark Tiedemann that I videotaped about a year ago. I only recently got around to cutting the session up into individual videos, but the delay allowed me to enjoy the discussion anew, and it also allowed me to appreciate more than ever that the topics that draw Mark's attention tend to be relatively timeless. As you can probably see, this discussion was spontaneous. I went to Mark's house with a video camera and a few general topics scribbled down, no specific agenda. We both allowed the conversation go where it wanted to go. In these final two videos from last year's discussion, the topics are VI) The importance of knowing history and VII) Church and State. I hope you've enjoyed getting to know Mark as much as I have. If you'd like to know more about Mark's way of viewing and analyzing the world, he has already posted almost 200 articles at DI, all of them readily available.
This Psychology Today article spells out strategies for effectively telling lies. I was interested, as a reader who wants to better understand how to detect lying. But then again, I might be lying.
This is a continuation of my interview of Mark Tiedemann, who is both an established science fiction writer and an author here at Dangerous Intersection. In the first video in this post, Part IV, Mark discusses science, religion and morality. In the second video in this post, Part V, he discusses sex. I had an extensive discussion with Mark, and I will actually have one more post featuring video of our conversation. I expect that those will be published tomorrow night.
Andrew Sullivan sees Mel Gibson as a prototype, not an aberration:
Yes, the man who viewed John Paul II as too liberal is actually a lefty. But what we see in this dialogue is deeply revealing, it seems to me, about Gibson's mindset and the fundamentalist psyche that is undergirding politics and culture the world over. He is a deeply disturbed man whose "spirituality" is wrapped up in extreme violence and fascist imagery. What motivates him is clearly power - heterosexual white male power - imposed on others by raw violence or the threat of violence. He is a fascist in temperament - which is why racism and anti-Semitism and murderous hatred of gay people come naturally to him. And this is how he sees himself as a Christian.