Pun Salad

Unexpected news from the Guardian: Komodo dragons have iron-coated teeth, scientists find.

Later on in the article:

Komodo dragons are the largest living lizards…

OK, I knew that, thanks to Bob and Ray:

For some reason, this sketch cracks me up every time I listen. "If we wanted to take the youngsters to see a Komodo dragon…"

Also of note:

• Good thing to add to your bullshit detector. Noah Rothman at NR on how to handle Everything before the ‘But’ . . .

  There’s a rule of thumb that loosely prescribes disregarding everything that precedes the “but” in a compound sentence. The introduction is a throat-clearing concession designed to soften the blow of what’s about to follow, and what follows invariably contradicts the introduction. If we observe that rule, Axios’s latest report on how the Biden White House is reacting to Israel’s targeted assassinations of the leaders of U.S.-designated terrorist groups is a doozy of a “but.”

  Reporter Barak Ravid revealed on Friday that Joe Biden insisted upon holding a “tough” call with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu in which the president conveyed how “deeply frustrated” the administration is by Israel’s actions.

  “U.S. officials don’t mourn the deaths of either Hezbollah’s top military commander Fuad Shukr, who was involved in killing 241 U.S. Marines in Beirut in 1983, or Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh, who celebrated the Oct. 7 massacre,” the report read. Here it comes . . .

  “But,” the subsequent paragraph began, “they feel that Netanyahu kept Biden in the dark over his plans to carry out the assassinations after leaving the impression last week that he was attentive to the president’s request to focus on getting a Gaza deal.”

  Emphasis added. Why, this is just malarkey!

Recently on the book blog:

I'm afraid I didn't get a lot out of this book.

The author, Robert Wright, attempts to marry up "Buddhism" with the latest research on evolutionary psychology. I put "Buddhism" in quotes, because (like just about all popular religions) Buddhism is a large candy store where you can pick and choose the items you like, leave other stuff on the shelf.

Wright doesn't buy into any hint of supernaturalism, so near the end of the book he mentions the candy he left at the store: no karma, no reincarnation, no praying to the Buddha, no bowing to his statue. He goes into great detail on his experiences with meditation, and argues that it makes ones mind work better, in some senses. His spiritual journey is not without interest, and I wish him well, but its general applicability is iffy.

Moreover, Wright admits that a great deal of what we call "Buddhism" is pretty divorced from the Buddha himself: "There's roughly no chance that all the sayings attributed to him in Buddhist texts were uttered by him." Admittedly, kind of like Jesus.

The evolutionary psychology stuff is also kind of a candy store, and Wright picks out the stuff he likes there too. To match up the Buddhist concept of "not-self", he picks out the research that emphasizes our proclivity for self-deception, gullibility, fallacy, bias, … . He argues Buddhism (sorta) indicates this by arguing that your "self" isn't really in charge of your actions.

Fine, but it sometimes is in charge. Since I "believe" in free will (which Wright doesn't go into), I think we have "the capacity for conscious, rational, control of our actions". Take that, Buddha.

Wright's reliance on what "studies show" is kind of a warning flag to me. For example, on page 160, he discourses on "priming". He doesn't mention that a number of studies on priming have failed to replicate.

A brief appendix contains "A List of Buddhist Truths". I wish this had been a chapter up at the front of the book.