Post by Jim Newman

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I found this delightful video while looking for something else. I hadn’t seen it for years. Even as an old fart he’s delightful and if I were a young chick or gay I’d still find him hot. Ok, Ok, it’s five o-clock somewhere…

The lady interviewing him is wearing pearls and I delight that like my spouse Louise who wears them to class, pearls are still cool, classic. There is something about them that always reveals quiet elegance.

I recently saw High Society, which is like the Philadelphia Story (great movie) of the same script, after seeing Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. I love Katherine Hepburn the most inspiring actress of all time, even above Ingrid Bergman. This doesn’t date me as I’m a boomer and fondly remember Katherine Ross in The Graduate. I will not continue for discretions’s sake but Jessica Alba in Dark Angel has a special place and Paul Newman (not my relative) in HUD makes me pause maybe even more than James Dean.

High Society stars Grace Kelly and Frank Sinatra compared to Philadelphia Story’s Kate Hepburn and Jimmy Stewart (whom I can’t quite forgive for It’s a Wonderful Life and Harvey, though his is a homespun realism). Both are interesting contrasts in these movies. Grace Kelly is awesome and while I may growl at her sexuality, Kate has a gene se quois I find irresistible.

Check out all three after the Bertrand Russell video, which endures time. Seven Brides is its own post but beware of the sobbin women or the Sabine abduction and consider it in relation to the culture in which the movie was made. It was made at the same time as the others for a wholly (holy?) different audience. There are few better dance sequences.

Honestly? Louis Armstrong does it for me. His role in High Society supersedes the rest, but I’m a sucker for a musician, jazz or blues. Otherwise? I’d take Grace to bed, Kate to breakfast, and Louis to dinner. Bertrand? He’s perfect for the front porch, sipping a Bourbon, and watching the sun go down and talking about the world!

Jim Newman, bright and well

www.brightpride.com and www.frontiersofreason.com

Post by Jim Newman

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Golshifteh Farahani the first Iranian to star in a major Hollywood film, Body of Lies, can now no longer return to Iran because she bared, cupped, her breasts in the French fashion Magazine Madame La Figaro.

Wait, doesn’t everyone pose nude in a French magazine? Have it published in Facebook, do a sex tape, become a star, retract the sex tape, and then go on to do more soft porn, uhh, I mean act? I am sorry. Her rights are too important to belittle the sad state of affairs in US female reality show acting these days.

Farahani won fame in her 2006 movie M for Mother and represented Iran when it won Best Foreign Film in 2008.

The Paris based model also starred in the 2007 film Santoori which has yet to be shown in Iran. The ministry of culture and Islamic guide have banned her from returning to Iran forever; declaring to her Iran doesn’t need actors or artists though she won the Best Actress award in Iran’s Fajr Film Festival. She had already been banned from leaving but now she can’t go back.

Lest you think this unAmerican, there are many fundamentalists in the US that detest pornography or even nudity and many more that believe a dour life of work, devoid of frivolous pleasure is the way to heaven, or prove they have been elected to heaven already. I think of the Amish, Mennonites, Quakers, Hasidic Jews, fundamental Muslims and of course fundamental protestants embracing Calvinism (get a job, go to work, die).

Max Weber famously coined the term Protestant Work Ethic to define the Calvinist emphasis on the necessity for hard work as a means to salvation. The Catholic notion of good works transformed into work obligation as a sign of grace.

Luther famously decided duty benefits the individual and society. Because of predestination, you are only saved by grace alone unknown to you. The best ways to avoid lip-service or gain a possible grace of perseverance are frugality and hard work. There is not a lot of joy when you don’t know if you will be saved but maybe if you work your ass off and stay serious you have a chance and that you could was a sign that you were maybe one of the elect.

The US has grown out of this somewhat but not entirely. Let us also see Golshifteh Farahani as a hero not merely because she has a right to her body but also because she has a right to joy in her life.

Jim Newman, bright and well

www.brightpride.com

Thought you would like a little Ricky!

Post by Sarah Moglia

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Tim Minchin, hilarious singer, actor, and comedian, is going to be attending the Reason Rally! If you are unfamiliar with Tim Minchin, his animated story “Storm” is a fantastic introduction that bashes pseudoscience in the funniest possible way.

If you were on the fence about attending before, this should surely help you decide.

Via The Sam Harris blog….

Lawrence M. Krauss is a renowned cosmologist, popularizer of science, and director of the Origins Project at Arizona State University.  He is the author of more than 300 scientific publications and 8 books, including the bestselling The Physics of Star Trek. His interests include the early universe, the nature of dark matter, general relativity and neutrino astrophysics. He is also a friend and an advisor to my nonprofit foundation, Project Reason. Lawrence generously took time to answer a few questions about his new book.

Here is the first question from Sam Harris (bold) and and the answer from Lawrence Krauss.

One of the most common justifications for religious faith is the idea that the universe must have had a creator. You’ve just written a book alleging that a universe can arise from “nothing.” What do you mean by “nothing” and how fully does your thesis contradict a belief in a Creator God?

Indeed, the question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” which forms the subtitle of the book, is often used by the faithful as an unassailable argument that requires the existence of God, because of the famous claim, “out of nothing, nothing comes.”  While the chief point of my book is to describe for the interested layperson the remarkable revolutions that have taken place in our understanding of the universe over the past 50 years—revolutions that should be celebrated as pinnacles of our intellectual experience—the second goal is to point out that this long-held theological claim is spurious. Modern science has made the something-from-nothing debate irrelevant.  It has changed completely our conception of the very words “something” and “nothing”.  Empirical discoveries continue to tell us that the Universe is the way it is, whether we like it or not, and ‘something’ and ‘nothing’ are physical concepts and therefore are properly the domain of science, not theology or philosophy. (Indeed, religion and philosophy have added nothing to our understanding of these ideas in millennia.) I spend a great deal of time in the book detailing precisely how physics has changed our notions of “nothing,” for example.  The old idea that nothing might involve empty space, devoid of mass or energy, or anything material, for example, has now been replaced by a boiling bubbling brew of virtual particles, popping in and out of existence in a time so short that we cannot detect them directly.  I then go on to explain how other versions of “nothing”—beyond merely empty space—including the absence of space itself, and even the absence of physical laws, can morph into “something.”  Indeed, in modern parlance, “nothing” is most often unstable.  Not only can something arise from nothing, but most often the laws of physics require that to occur.

Now, having said this, my point in the book is not to suggest that modern science is incompatible with at least the Deistic notion that perhaps there is some purpose to the Universe (even though no such purpose is manifest on the basis of any of our current knowledge, and moreover there is no logical connection between any possible “creator” and the personal God of the world’s major religions, who cares about humanity’s destiny).  Rather, what I find remarkable is the fact that the discoveries of modern particle physics and cosmology over the past half century allow not only a possibility that the Universe arose from nothing, but in fact make this possibility increasingly plausible.  Everything we have measured about the universe is not only consistent with a universe that came from nothing (and didn’t have to turn out this way!), but in fact, all the new evidence makes this possibility ever more likely.  Darwin demonstrated how the remarkable diversity of life on Earth, and the apparent design of life, which had been claimed as evidence for a caring God, could in fact instead be arrived at by natural causes involving purely physical processes of mutation and natural selection.  I want to show something similar about the Universe.  We may never prove by science that a Creator is impossible, but, as Steven Weinberg has emphasized, science admits (and for many of us, suggests) a universe in which one is not necessary.

I cannot hide my own intellectual bias here.  As I state in the first sentence of the book, I have never been sympathetic to the notion that creation requires a creator.  And like our late friend, Christopher Hitchens, I find the possibility of living in a universe that was not created for my existence, in which my actions and thoughts need not bend to the whims of a creator, far more enriching and meaningful than the other alternative.  In that sense, I view myself as an anti-theist rather than an atheist.

Go check out the rest of the discussion over at Sam’s blog.

tip to Le Cafe Witteveen.

from NPR.

This week on Fresh Air, we’re marking the year’s end by revisiting some of the most memorable conversations we’ve had in 2011. This interview was originally broadcast on December 13, 2011.

In the FX TV series Louie, comic Louis C.K. plays a divorced father of two struggling to balance his comedy career with being a single dad. The show, which has just been picked up for a third season, is often based on events that have happened to C.K. in his own life.

C.K.’s boundary-crossing humor has always appealed to other comedians, but in the past year, the stand-up comic has also racked up a series of honors from more mainstream sources. GQ recently called him the “funniest comic alive” and named him their “Comic Genius of the Year.” Rolling Stone said C.K. is currently the “darkest, funniest comedian in America.” And Time called Louie the top show of the year, shortlisting C.K. on the magazine’s list of the most influential people in 2011.

C.K. writes, directs, edits and produces Louie, which has been nominated for several Emmys. He took a similar hands-on approach for his latest comedy special, Live at the Beacon Theater. The hourlong broadcast, filmed in front of a live crowd over two nights in November, was produced with C.K’s own money, edited entirely by him, and then released independently on his website, bypassing network cable and video.

An Unorthodox Way To Release A Comedy Special

C.K. asked his fans to contribute $5 directly to him via PayPal, in exchange for two streams and two downloads of the unencrypted, high-definition show. He explains that he chose the unorthodox method of sharing his special to see if releasing a video himself could potentially make money.

“I’ve never seen a check from a [TV] comedy special,” he tells Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross. “It never ends up being that. … This time, I just thought this might be interesting to give this a try. Put it on my website, make it $5, make it really, really easy for people to enjoy. To make it as close to a viral video as possible, instead of having it on TV.”

here is the first 4 minutes of the interview…..  (whole interview is here)

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via Reuters.

(Reuters) – Ricky Gervais says he wants to improve on his controversial performance at the 2011 Golden Globe Awards — by being even more outrageous the next time around.

Ohhhh….  I can hardly wait.  I want to watch the Golden Globe Awards this year.

The British comedian said his third time hosting the annual Hollywood awards ceremony in January 2012 would definitely be his last.

But he is aiming to go out with a bang.

“They must be mad. Not sure if I’m flattered that they trust me or insulted that they trust me. Either way…they shouldn’t trust me,” Gervais said in a statement on Thursday.

Mwaaaaa Haaa Haaaaa…….

The caustic creator of TV mockumentary “The Office” last year insulted Golden Globe organizers with jokes about bribes and took shots Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie’s critically-panned movie “The Tourist” that was up for a Golden Globe nomination.

Many of the jokes in the televised broadcast fell flat with the gala audience of A-list stars. The president of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which hosts the event, said afterward that Gervais would not return.

“I don’t think anyone had the right to be offended but they were. This year I’m going to make sure their offense is completely justified,” Gervais said on his blog on Thursday.

He asked fans to pass on their “favorite targets for the monologue.”

After Golden Globe organizers announced he’d be back one day earlier, Gervais wasted little time in tweaking more ribs in Hollywood. He posted a Twitter message saying that he told Oscars host, comedian Billy Crystal: “He’d better not use any of my holocaust or pedophile material” at the Academy Awards ceremony in February 2012.

Gervais also gloated over being invited back again, saying it was a tough decision for him because “I was worried that I couldn’t improve on last year.”

“What actually tipped the balance and made me say yes, was the fact that it would shut up all those…idiots who said that I’d never be invited back,” he wrote on his blog.

His hiring will be either a problem for celebrities and Golden Globe organizers or a stroke of genius for the NBC television network that airs the awards show if more people tune in just to see what Gervais says.

The timing also will be good publicity for the comedian’s new TV venture, “Life’s Too Short” which will make its U.S. debut on HBO in early 2012.

Gervais’ new show is a documentary-style comedy about the life of a showbusiness dwarf, featuring 3 ft 6in (1.07 meter) actor Warwick Davis as a version of himself.

Johnny Depp also appears on the TV show in a cameo role as himself, sparring with Gervais over his money-making career and suggesting that, for at least one Hollywood star, all is forgiven.

Here is the video from last years show….

I don’t like the start of this story.  Reality IS a better story!

Listen to Richard explain how they got it wrong.

Here is the book – The Magic of Reality

It comes out in the states on October 4th.  You can order your copy on Amazon.

Here is a sample review….

“I wanted to write this book but I wasn’t clever enough. Now I’ve read it, I am” —Ricky Gervais

A Freethough Classic! 

I am starting a collection of Freethought Classics.  The best of audio, video and books from years gone by.  This will become a tool and a resource for new and established freethinkers. 

My first entry is “Letting Go Of God” by Julia Sweeney.

The audio for the CD was recorded on November, 19 2005.  So it is time to celebrate the five year anniversary.  You can buy the CD at Amazon for just $9. 

Here is the summary from the Amazon page…

Julia Sweeney says she was a “happy Catholic girl” when, one day, she walked into church and signed up for a Bible-study course. “What an eye opener that was!” she says. “Next thing you know, I was on a quest for something I could really believe in. I traveled to places like Bhutan, Ecuador, and my local Starbucks looking for answers. Would I embrace Buddhism? New Age pseudo-science? Was I a freak for feeling the way I did, or were there other people out there just like me? I was grappling with serious questions. But, somehow, a lot of the things that were happening to me seemed, well, funny.” Equally comedic and insightful, Letting Go of God is Sweeney’s brilliant one-woman show about her struggle with her faith. Grappling with the seeming contradictions in Adam and Eve, Noah, the Ten Commandments, and even the teachings of Jesus – and trying to understand the Bible’s messages about morality, family values, and human suffering while faced with door-knocking Mormons and wise-cracking priests – Sweeney takes listeners on her very personal journey from God to “not-God”. This performance was recorded on November 19, 2005, at the Ars Nova Theatre in New York City.

Below is a videos sample of the monologue recorded at a later date for TED.  You can get your copy of the DVD from Amazon.