Friday Reads: The Devil’s in their Details
Posted: October 25, 2013 Filed under: morning reads 35 Comments
Good Morning!
I totally enjoy this time of year! The weather cools down and the politics heat up! Also, Halloween is my favorite holiday! So, here’s some frightening stories as we head towards the day itself! I also love all the old spooky movies and the new scary ones!
Rick Santorum says that Satan controls the Film Industry! Maybe that explains all these great movies I love to watch this time of year!!!
While speaking on a network where televangelists on a daily basis tell viewers that God will reward them financially if they send in contributions, the former senator and presidential candidate spent most of the time criticizing movies for being too materialistic.
Santorum, who has previously said that Satan has control over mainline Protestantism and universities, thanked viewers in advance for seeing the movie.
“This is a tough business, this is something that we’re stepping out,” Santorum said, “and the Devil for a long, long time has had this, these screens, for his playground and he isn’t going to give it up easily.”
Herman Cain says the Devil was behind all those sexual misconduct/harassment charges that plagued his presidential campaign. Those lying witches!!! Burn them at the stake!!!
Then he speculated as to who may have orchestrated the allegations: the Devil.
“It made me realize that there was a force bigger than right,” Cain said.
But that doesn’t mean Cain has given up. Nowadays, Cain fights against the Evil One from the pulpit. Cain has been a member of the same Baptist church in Atlanta — “a church in the hood” — since he was 10, where he now serves as an associate pastor.
Cain preaches that the Devil is “determined to destroy our culture” and that “the family is at the center of our culture and the center of the family is its religious beliefs.”
A recent sermon of his is entitled: “Don’t Give Up, Get Up!” He told the congregation that there are three ways to battle “give-up-itis. You get down on your knees and pray, you write down your blessings, and you turn down the noise in your life.” The noise in Cain’s life is considerably softer than it was two years ago, but he hasn’t called it in just yet.
The tendency to be outspoken seems to run in the family, because the senator’s father, Rafael Cruz, has also been making headlines over the last few months.
Like his son, Cruz’s father is no stranger to the spotlight. He has spoken at a number of conservative events, including the Heritage Foundation organized “Defund Obamacare Tour,”which took him to cities across the country in August. He’s also becoming a regular on the conservative speaking circuit and on talk radio.
The Cuban immigrant and pastor turned his attention to the media during an interview on Glenn Beck’s radio show last Friday.
“In your previous segment you were talking about imagining America. I’ll tell you what, it almost seemed like I was listening to what was happening in Cuba during Castro,” the Texas senator’s father told Beck. “The very same thing, the ministry of misinformation that you have in all the communist countries. Well, did you know, Glenn, we have a ministry of misinformation in this country? It’s called the liberal media, and they just tell us what they want us to hear. They are rewriting history.”
Beck agreed with Cruz, and pointed out his annoyance with the “liberal media” for “rewriting history.”
“They have an agenda,” the elder Cruz said, “and, unfortunately, the agenda is an evil agenda. It’s an agenda for destroying what this country is all about.”
Here’s a new study for BB to look at! The religious tend to be more likely to lie for financial gain. I’ve already mentioned three that fit this category in this post!
“Everybody lies” was the mantra of Gregory House, the curmudgeonly physician so memorably portrayed by Hugh Laurie. But being a man of science, the brilliant doctor might want to rethink that philosophy in light of new research from Canada.
In an experiment where lying led directly to financial gain, just over 50 percent of the participants told an untruth. That figure is roughly consistent with previous research.
What’s new in this study by University of Regina economist Jason Childs is its breakdown of the personality traits of the liars. Unlike some previous research, he did not find men are more likely to lie than women.
However, he discovered other factors predicted a greater likelihood of telling an untruth—including the assertion that religion plays an important role in your life.
Somewhere (or not), Christopher Hitchens is chuckling.
Of course, I believe there are hells and they are on earth. Here’s one such example: 5 Shocking Revelations About Hellish Private Juvenile Prisons and the Man Who Profits From Them. This is a brief review of the HuffPo investigative piece which is itself worth reading.
For the past 25 years, James F. Slattery, YSI’s owner and former owner other for-profit companies, has focused on the bottom line, while generating a huge record of neglect. From creating “welfare hotels” in the ’80s to halfway houses for federal prisoners in the ’90s, Slattery’s living spaces are known for their poor conditions and low-paid workers. Slattery eventually began contracting with the government to run juvenile detention centers. After a few name changes and a merge, YSI now makes hundreds of millions of dollars in federal contracts. In the past 20 years, more than 40,000 youth have gone through YSI’s facilities, which are wrought with unsanitary environments, physical abuse and sexual assault.
Here’s the one thing I wish I wrote about Fama winning the Noble prize finally for his completely debunked rational expectations hypothesis which so many Republicans love to tout. This basically is one of the reasons our economy went to hell and has stayed there. Markets are not really very efficient at all.
Eugene Fama just received a Nobel Prize for his contributions to the theory of “efficient financial markets,” the dominant theory in financial economics that asserts that markets work ideally if not constrained by government regulation. The fact that economic “science” teaches that unregulated financial markets work effectively helped financial institutions and the rich accomplish their goal of radical financial market deregulation in the 1980s and 1990s. Deregulation, in turn, not only contributed to the rising inequality of the era, it helped cause the global financial market crisis that began in 2007 and the deep recession and austerity fiscal policies that accompanied it.
The theory of efficient financial markets requires the union of two ideas: the “efficient market hypothesis” (or EMH) and optimal (security) pricing theory (OPT). Both the EMH and OPT are built on crudely unrealistic assumptions that would lead anyone not indoctrinated in a mainstream PhD program to conclude that efficient financial market theory is a fairly-tale rather than serious social science.
The EMH is simply an assumption or assertion with no supporting evidence that all information relevant to the correct pricing of securities is known by all market participants. For long-term assets such as stocks and bonds, the relevant information is the cash flows associated with each security in every future time period. Yet it is logically impossible for anyone to know this information because the future is not yet determined in the present; the future is uncertain. Nevertheless, defenders of efficiency adopted the “rational expectations” hypothesis, perhaps the most ludicrous assumption in the history of social science, which asserts that all investors know the correct probability distributions of all future security cash flows and believe that they will not change over time.
So, that’s a little this and that from me this morning. What’s on your reading and blogging list today? Oh, and name the witches, their names–real and characters–and the movie/tv show for for some fun!
Plus, tell us what’s your favorite Halloween movie so we can all rent it this weekend!!!
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
ecocatwoman
mablue2
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Sky Dancing 
Well, for horror…Freaks is my favorite…it goes without saying of course. But for those who want a kick ass scary thriller: Diabolique (1955) – Overview – TCM.com it will be on Sunday at 3am
My favorite Halloween movie is “The Haunting” starring Julie Harris.
I remember jumping out of my skin.
I will never forget the first time I watched that movie. I was a teenager and the only other person home was my younger brother who had gone to bed. I was petrified. Awesome movie based on a Shirley Jackson novel.
I watched it on the Late Night Movie while feeding an infant and I then went around the house putting all the lights on.
My sleeping husband refused to join me and I remember being unsettled for hours because it was so spooky.
Love that one Pat. Did you ever see The Body Snatcher also directed by Robert Wise? so good…
For movies specifically about Halloween, the original “Halloween” is OK. Other horror/scary movies that I like:
Psycho
The Birds
Rosemary’s Baby
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (original or remake)
The Changeling
Fright Night (the original with Roddy McDowell)
The Fog
The Haunting (the original version)
Stir of Echoes
The Ring
Dawn of the Dead (original or remake)
28 Days Later
Mothman Prophecies
The Omen
Here’s one I bet no one else has seen: Session 9. It takes place at an abandoned mental hospital in Danvers, Mass. I had nightmares after seeing it!
I could probably think of more.
That’s a good list.
Some of my favorite scary movies are:
“Bunny Lake is Missing” (1965)
“Don’t Look Now” (1973)
“Haunted” (1995)
“The Uninvited” (1944)
“Wait Unti Dark” (1973)
Correction: “Wait Until Dark” came out in 1967.
Need more coffee!
Wait Until Dark is very scary!! Audrey Hepburn was fantastic in it.
They have been showing that on our PBS station
Those are good BB, but I have never heard of Session 9.
You should see it JJ. It’s really eerie.
“Psycho” or any Hitchcock movie would do it for me.
I remember Rosemary’s Baby…….and
My cousins wanted to take me to that movie but my mother wouldn’t let me go with them.
“The Shining” is still too scary for me to watch!
I saw it in the theater and have not been able to watch it again. It scared me half to death!
OMG…..The Shining was the scariest movie ever, imho. Jack Nicholson gave me the creeps.
I love the Poltergeist movies. “This House is clean”.
Hell yeah, I love that line. And the little person who says it.
Hey ya’ll – don’t forget “The Exorcist” which is my favorite scary movie and one of my favorite movies period.
Also – “Alien”. I showed that to my neighbor’s kids and then had to walk them home!
Finally – if you haven’t seen the new “Cabin in the Woods” it’s very good. Netflix has it.
“The Exorcist”
Yes, Mercedes McCambridge….as the demon.
I have heard that cabin in the woods is good.
What about the original Carrie?
I like Alien too for a good jump out of your seat thriller.
The Exorcist is on AMC tonight at 7PM!
“The Skeleton Key” with Kate Hudson and Gena Rowlands scared the bejebus out of me and it takes place in (pre Katrina) New Orleans.
Hudson hung out at my neighborhood bar while she was filming that movie.
I liked that movie too–very scary.
Another Scary Stupid Republican:
Rand Paul Threatens To Hold Up Janet Yellen Nomination To Fed: Report
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/25/rand-paul-janet-yellen_n_4163766.html
He’s an example of something Obama said today, “If you think education is expensive, wait until you see what ignorance costs”.
That’s a very good quote.
These dummies are shameless, a cost of ignorance 🙂
tp: CNN Anchor Challenges Congresswoman To Substantiate Obamacare Criticism, Hilarity Ensues
Dak, This is close to where you would have been, right next to Watauga, speaking of dodged bullets.
Woman Forced To Strip And Serve Jail Time For Overdue Ticket
Christian activist warns: Obama turning us all into pro-gay, European zombies: In the video embedded below, Jo… http://bit.ly/17jqlxO
🙂
TBogg 🙂
Like everyone else in America, Sarah Palin would rather kill one her own than be on CNN