One of the things I rarely see discussed is the fact that books—fiction and non-fiction—are products of the times in which they were written. Well, that's not completely true. Literary criticism often discusses the milieu in which a book was written if the book is fairly recent. This is true even for books a few hundred years old. Perhaps the reason for this is that we know more about the environment of recent times than we do of ancient times. 'Twas the Night Before Poverty… In a few months, many of us will either be reading Dickens' A Christmas Carol or watching one of its numerous versions being replayed on TV. The focus of the story is rightfully on the rebirth and redemption of

If you've ever seen a "slasher" film, this scenario is going to be familiar to you: The mad, "pure evil" slasher comes after his victim with an axe. There's a loud "thump!" and a scream. The victim looks in horror at his shoulder, now issuing copious spurts of fake red blood. Jason Voorhees character from the Friday the 13th Movies © 2003 New Line Cinema There's no doubt. The mad monster is evil. Pure evil. There's no way he or his actions could be described other than calling him evil. *   *   *   * Let's move to a different film, a Western. It's been a long cattle drive. Curiously, the never-shoot-first hero's clothes are still white while everyone else's are dusty and dirty.

In a recent post on the functioning of magickal energy, I was confronted with comments from a couple of posters who presented the pseudo-skeptical, pseudo-scientific and so-called debunking position. As I have repeatedly pointed out, some of the techniques of this position consist of: 1) Demanding proof but not saying what will happen if you provide such proof. 2) Not giving specific and clear examples of what such proof should entail. This will allow people following the debunking position to change what is acceptable as proof—what is commonly called "moving the goalposts"—so they never have to admit their position was in error. Perhaps most importantly, though, I would

As I mentioned in my previous blog post, I recently assisted at a training for 175 people who wanted to be certified as NLP practitioners. In that post I wrote that "NLP [Neuro-Linguistic Programming] is a set of tools that will allow you to communicate better with yourself (between the conscious and subconscious mind) as well as communicate better with others in order to achieve ecological goals. For the purposes here, ecology means good for me, good for you, good for the community." In fact, I have heard several people use this definition and have also read it many times. The focus, here, is on NLP being a set of tools. And while that's not inaccurate, it's also not exactly right. One