Disney Studios Rooting for the Empire in Future Star Wars Films, says Hollywood insider

Dateline: BURBANK—Disney Studios is rooting for the Empire to defeat the rebels in its upcoming Star Wars films, according to Hollywood insider Wily Hangeron. (Be warned that spoilers for The Last Jedi follow.)

Star Wars: The Last Jedi was almost universally praised by professional film critics, but hardcore Star Wars fans are much more divided. Many thought the writer-director Rian Johnson meant to insult the older Star Wars films, even though those films form the bedrock of the lore celebrated especially by Generation X which grew up watching Star Wars.

“The Last Jedi spits on the characters of Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia and on the fans who take Star Wars seriously, who wanted to know who Snoke was or how Rey got all her Jedi powers with no training,” said Billy Fanboy, a Star Wars fan. “Kylo Ren even says in the movie to stop holding onto the past, to let it all die. That clearly is meant to have a double meaning.

“The reason why The Last Jedi is the way it is, of course, is that Disney wants to attract the new, younger generation, by cutting all ties to George Lucas’s legacy. That’s where the money is, not in the older, more ardent fans, and Disney needs to earn back the billions it spent on buying Lucasfilm.”

Some fans have gone further and speculated that Disney wants to disrupt the Star Wars narrative, because it sees itself in the role of the Empire, in which case Disney is increasingly uncomfortable telling a black and white story about the heroic, underdog rebels who resist and eventually defeat the evil galactic Empire or New Order.

“Let’s be clear,” said another Star Wars fan. “Disney is the friggin’ Empire. Disney owns Marvel Comics, Star Wars, Pixar, and now Fox movies. Disney ain’t no underdog. And Lucas himself turned to the dark side when he started tinkering with his first three Star Wars movies, and when he sold Star Wars to Disney. Now the Star Wars universe is in the hands of a monstrous conglomerate for realsies.

“That’s why the rebels come off as clueless dolts in The Last Jedi: that’s why Vice Admiral Holdo doesn’t tell her crew her secret plan to save them, and that’s why Rose Tico saves the alien horses but not the children tending to them, and why she chastises Finn for trying to sacrifice himself to save the rebels when that’s just what Holdo and then Skywalker do. And that’s why Luke loses his faith in the Jedi and concedes that the New Order is unstoppable. And on and on and on—the movie’s plot is a mess.

“But it’s not just that the writer was lazy. It’s that Disney wants to destroy the Star Wars universe as we’ve known it, to undercut its implicitly anti-Disney message, and create a new Star Wars vision that finds a home for the evil Empire, as a way of ‘providing balance in the Force.’ It’s hackneyed Daoism in the service of greedy, soulless capitalism.”

Wily Hangeron, a longtime Hollywood insider, has reported conversations he’s had with Disney executives who have admitted they have a hard time admiring the Star Wars world that George Lucas created.

“They tell me they can’t help but root for the Empire when they now watch the original Stars Wars movies,” said Mr. Hangeron. “‘Order throughout the galaxy? Sounds like a plan!’ they said. That’s what Disney’s all about. When rebellious artists rival the Order of Disney, Disney squashes them or buys them up. So some Disney executives told me that the Empire should just buy out the rebels; offer them a planet or two if they’ll stop their terrorist attacks.

“Nowadays the elites at Disney don’t even disguise their preference for the Dark Side. I have it on good authority that Bog Iger, the head of Disney, often walks around his offices in the Emperor’s black robe, pretending to strike down his subordinates with lighting flashing out of his fingertips.

“Industry insiders are betting that The Last Jedi is only the beginning of a shift in Star Wars messaging under Disney’s auspices. The ninth Star Wars movie may have the rebels all learning the error of their resistance to the New Order, and Rey turning to the dark side with Kylo Ren.

“Johnson’s new trilogy, then, may depict the Empire in an even kinder light, without any upstart rebels or sanctimonious Jedi. He may also include some subliminal advertising by having the Emperor wear Mickey Mouse ears.” 

Why Evangelical Christians shouldn’t Think too much

Once in a while I rummage through the detritus of the internet to see if I can spark a worthwhile discussion with someone with whom I strongly disagree. Recently, I found a blog called Thinking Christian, written by Tom Gilson who worked for Campus Crusade for Christ for over 30 years and who is senior editor of a Christian news website, The Stream, which says its aim is to champion the causes of “freedom, smaller government, and human dignity.” I read several articles on Thinking Christian and posted some comments, assuming Gilson would take the opportunity discuss the issues I raised. It didn’t go so well, but instead of letting the experience fade entirely from memory, I’ll use it as a launching pad to illustrate a larger point.

Here, first, is some of the back and forth, after which I’ll talk about the very notion of a thinking Christian.

The Problem with Old Testament Tribalism

Gilson wrote an article, Atheists Rejecting the Bible Due to OT Morality: Bound To Be a Bad Tradeoff, which presents a Pascalian wager to the skeptic who dismisses Christianity based on apparently immoral passages in the Old Testament, such as Exodus 21:7-11, which is about how Jews regulated their practice of sex slavery. Gilson argues that there may be an innocent explanation of such a troubling passage, whereas “We can know that the Bible presents the highest example of moral character in all history: Jesus Christ,” “that God revealed himself thoroughly and uniquely as a God of love,” and “that he expressed that love through the highest possible means, self-sacrifice on the Cross,” among other dubious Christian doctrines. So Gilson concludes, “An atheist who rejects all the outrageous good that we do know, based on some questionable, unknown passage about which we can’t know nearly enough, is making a bad tradeoff, rationally, morally, and experientially.”

Here’s the comment I posted beneath that article:

'I don’t think this article gets at the skeptic’s real problem with a biblical passage like the one above that’s meant to regulate slavery. The problem is that a unique book containing revelations from a personal creator of the universe wouldn’t contain any such passage. The book itself would be miraculous; otherwise, Occam’s Razor dictates that a thinking person should opt for the simpler, more familiar interpretation that the Bible is a library produced entirely by fallible people, containing books assembled and edited over some centuries which reflect only the human interests at those times and places. 

'No skeptic would dispute that a harmonizer can conceive of an interpretation that smooths over a problematic biblical passage. Our species is highly imaginative and intelligent. We can see things like the shapes of trains and rabbits in the clouds even though the shapes are accidental concatenations of water vapor. We can find Jesus’s face on a piece of burnt toast. So of course we can imagine possible defenses of a preferred view of the Bible. The interpretation will be more or less plausible depending on the Christian’s and the skeptic’s underlying beliefs, and these they don’t share. 

'So when the thinking Christian author here says we can know that Jesus is the paragon of morality and that God revealed himself in a loving act of sacrifice on the cross, he’s begging the question. We’re supposed to know these things from the Bible, but if the Bible reads more like one of many other human-made, historical records of a particular ancient culture’s beliefs and practices, not like miraculous divine revelation, we know nothing of the kind. You can choose to believe what you want based on faith or a religious experience, but the fact is that the above passage that merely regulates slavery doesn’t read as if it were inspired by a god who hates slavery. Sex slavery was widespread because humans are animals, male humans are stronger and more aggressive than female ones, and so societies tend to be patriarchal. It doesn’t take rocket science to explain the prevalence of sex slavery or sexism in an ancient religion. So this is evidence for the skeptic’s view of the Bible as a mere historical, literary document. 

'As to how a Christian can explain away the ancient Jewish view of slavery, that’s easy. The Jewish view of God evolved from the tribal one that distinguishes itself by its antisocial monotheism (its denial of the existence of other gods), to Christian universalism. That transition was obviously influenced by the fact that the early Christians were Jews living under occupation by the Roman Empire. The drive to evangelize, to spread Christianity around the world derives from Jewish syncretism with Roman imperialism and from Alexander the Great. After all, those pagans likewise wanted to spread their way of life everywhere, the difference being that they left alone the harmless idiosyncrasies of the foreign cultures they conquered, whereas Judaism added the antisocial element, the interest in controlling everyone’s mind and ethics rather than demanding only minimal displays of respect for Rome. 

'So there were two covenants between Jews and their god, and thus we have the two testaments, and the second one is less tribal and more universal in its morality. So a Christian will read the tribal parts of the Old Testament and thank God for finally sending his Son to die on the cross to teach everyone the importance of love. A skeptic will interpret the difference between the two testaments and religions as having arisen without the need of any divine intervention at all. 

'As I said, Jews finally made their peace with their occupiers, by compromising with them, injecting monotheism into their secular empire. The pagans (especially Paul) modified Judaism, in turn, by ditching the stringent concern with elaborate ethics and rituals, and making Judaism universal by putting all that hard stuff on Jesus. Jesus did us the service of perfecting Jewish behaviour and sacrificing himself so no one else would have to live like a perfect Jew. All we have to do is trust in Jesus’s sacrifice to receive those benefits. 

'So it’s a dumbing down of Jews’ absolutist ethics, and we know that dumbing things down does wonders in spreading a message far and wide. Today, the most popular songs, books, movies, and YouTube videos aren’t the ones that are the greatest in quality; on the contrary, they’re almost all dumbed down to reach the widest possible audience. It’s the same with comedy: the stand-up or late night comedy that pleases the most people is the kind that taxes their mental powers the least, that simplifies things the most to reach only the lowest standards. That’s also why Fox News is more popular than its competitors, and why most people watch TV rather than read anything. The majority normally goes with the easier option, because critical thinking and intellectual integrity are hard and rare. 

'Indeed, the above article itself is dumbed down for the sake of SEO optimization. The needless headings and short words, sentences, paragraphs, and article length are all simplifications to cater to the low standards needed to reach the widest possible audience on the internet. That’s what the Roman Empire did for Judaism: it packaged Jewish monotheism and ethics in a more appealing form (Jesus did all the work so you don’t have to) to reach the lower-quality masses. 

'That’s how a skeptic understands these matters, and the above article doesn’t really address the heart of the matter.'

Hollywood’s schlocky Movies are Payback for China’s shoddy Merchandise, says Industry Insider

Dateline: HOLLYWOOD—The American movie industry has been releasing the simplest, dumbest possible movies for overseas markets, especially in China, to pay back the Chinese for flooding the American market with shoddy merchandise, according to Hollywood insider, Wily Hangeron.

“Hollywood no longer cares about making quality films,” said Mr. Hangeron. “North American audiences are cynical about movies now because they’ve already seen anything. So they’re like movie critics: almost impossible to please. It takes a lot of skill and money and time to entertain experienced audiences, so Hollywood has set its sights on foreign viewers that are new to American movies.

“That’s what all the superhero and action movies and remakes and reboots are all about. Instead of telling stories that would appeal specifically, say, to China or India, the American movie industry realized it could appeal to almost everyone by lowering the bar, by telling the broadest and dumbest possible stories. They’re not trying to make art anymore. It’s all seemingly about laziness and greed, because it turns out the Chinese will watch anything.”

When Hollywood ran out of superheroes, it began filming hours and hours of blank footage, and still made millions of dollars overseas.

“Americans hated those blank screen movies, of course,” said Mr. Hangeron. “They were like, ‘What happened to stories and characters and discernable objects and colours instead of just two hours of absolutely nothing? But the newbies in China ate it up, so Hollywood kept churning out these lowest-common-denominator productions.”

Wily Hangeron obtained secret information, however, indicating that Hollywood executives were interested in more than just making easy money by ignoring the sophisticated local expectations and appealing to foreign audiences that would evidently be content to watch paint dry.

“I kept hearing these rumours that it’s all really about revenge. Then I looked into it further, and it’s true! It turns out that China is a really old and experienced civilization—as in 4,000 years old.

“China invented paper, gunpowder, the compass, alcoholic drinks, bells, wooden coffins, cookware, noodles, rowing oars, rice, artillery, banknotes, colour printing, crankshafts, crossbows, dominoes, explosives, firecrackers, fishing reels, flares, folding screens, fragmentation bombs, fuses, gas lighting, goldfish domestication, hand fans, hand grenades, handguns, helicopter rotors, horse collars, incense, India ink, irrigation systems, kites, land mines, merit systems, modular architecture, nail polish, natural gas as a fuel, oil refining, paper cups, parachutes, pig iron, pinhole cameras, playing cards, porcelain, puppet theater, raincoats, restaurant menus, rocket boosters, salt mining, seals, soy sauce, stirrups, sunglasses, tea, toilet paper, umbrellas, wheelbarrows, wheelchairs, woks, wrought iron, and many, many other things. 

“So in its heyday China already did everything. Now Chinese people are as cynical as American movie-goers, except that the Chinese are also cynical about life in general. That’s why the Chinese are hard to please when it comes to merchandise, and that’s why, like Hollywood, China’s taken the easy route of ignoring its domestic market for so long and focusing on selling Americans the lowest-quality goods that the Chinese produce in their sleep, the stuff that falls apart as soon as you take it out of the box or that’s hazardous to your health if you look at it the wrong way.”

According to Mr. Hangeron, Hollywood decided to take revenge against China for its flooding of America with cheaply-made products, by sending the basest, most slapdash American movies China’s way.

“‘You want to give us your schlocky, knockoff goods, because you think Americans are newbies to culture in general and don’t know any better? Okay, we’ll give you our crappiest movies and we’ll see how you like it.’ That’s how Hollywood sees it. In the meantime, Western movie buffs, eager for more challenging fare on the big screen are left out in the cold.

“In the US, you couldn’t get away with two hours of just blank screen footage without even a CG superhero thrown in somewhere—not even in an arthouse cinema. If there’s anything Americans know about, it’s lowbrow entertainment. But even lowbrow movies should have at least a car chase, some course language, maybe a pointless reboot of a mediocre movie made only a decade ago. Something!”

Meanwhile, economists point out that China is beginning to focus on selling to its domestic market.

“It turns out that China has a lot of people in it—as in almost one and a half billion people,” said one economist. “That’s a lot of potential customers, compared to America’s measly 323 million.”

“Maybe China’s finally emerging from its funk of world-weariness,” said Mr. Hangeron, “and is ready to consume again instead of working like a dog all day and night to make a quick buck off of the credit cards of clueless Americans. In that case, it won’t take long for China to outgrow this generation of Hollywood movies. When that happens, Hollywood will have to relearn what it’s like to tell an original, grownup story.” 

Posthuman Religion from the End of Art

We like to think that our distant descendants represent an ideal we should strive to achieve, because collectively we’re bound to progress. But even if this social progress were to make sense and to happen, we should ask: progress for whom? If progress entails an honourable alignment with profound truths, we should strive, as Nietzsche said, to become posthuman, to grow out of the delusions that are normal for mammals with our brain type. So our distant descendants may be cosmically advanced, rather than just technologically more powerful than us, but their way of life might seem hellish from our naïve and vain perspective. I believe we’re provided an inkling of the posthuman outlook by the evolution of Western art that’s led to the end of art’s story in what’s been called a postmodern malaise. What seems like apathy and cynicism in response to art’s apparent descent into meaninglessness and irrelevance may instead be growing pains.

A Non-Design Argument for Pantheism

To catch a hint of how posthumans might think, consider William Paley’s watchmaker analogy. If you saw a watch lying on the beach, you wouldn’t think the watch had always lain there, since the evident contrivance of its parts would indicate that the watch was designed, which would imply the existence of a watchmaker. By contrast, if you found a stone lying on the beach, you would be more inclined to think that for all you know the stone had always been there and needn’t have originated from an intelligent designer. Then again, says Paley, “Every indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design, which existed in the watch, exists in the works of nature.” Therefore, Paley concludes, the universe must have an intelligent designer. As you can tell, the argument is self-contradictory, since Paley both contrasts and equates the watch and the stone. Paley needs the watch to stand out as evidently designed, but he also needs the stone to have the same contrivance of its parts as the watch. So the argument dismisses itself, but it must be dismissed also for various other reasons, both logical and ethical. The notion of a supernatural person is incoherent, so positing God says nothing. Also, the notion of God stems from a vain anthropocentric bias and thus speaks poorly of the theist’s character. If we wish to retain our dignity and our chance of heroically facing the cosmic truth, we must decline to naively anthropomorphize the great unknown. Even if God exists, atheism would establish the skeptic’s ethical superiority to the average theist, given the state of the evidence.

Nevertheless, Paley’s argument can be modified for a less embarrassing purpose than that of promoting theism. Suppose, once again, you come upon both a stone and a watch lying on a beach. You’re struck now not by the naïve, self-serving, and self-contradictory theistic analogy, but by your knowledge that both the stone and the watch are created, and that because theism is absurd for independent reasons, only the watch, not the stone, is designed. Specifically, the stone is created by a vast intergalactic process of forming stars from collapsing nebular dust and gas, planets from the outer parts of the nebular cloud’s disk, and stones from climatic and weather cycles—all over a period of hundreds of millions of years. That’s how you make a stone with no intelligence: the natural universe does it for you. The universe is mindlessly creating every part of itself and it’s doing this out in the open, so there is still a basis for comparing the creators of the stone and the watch. Between the two, only the watch is designed for an intended purpose, but both are produced by elaborate processes. The stone’s creator is just impersonal causality, the watch’s is a person whose existential role is to oppose nature.

Thus, the stone’s maker, which is roughly the universe as a whole, has a different character than that of the watch. Intelligent design makes sense to sentient creatures, since we’re familiar with ourselves and with what we do, but impersonal creation is mysterious, however sophisticated may be our scientific understanding of the causes involved. Intelligent, artificial creation is comforting since it signifies that we’re putting our stamp on the universe to help eclipse precisely the other kind of creation, namely the natural kind which horrifies us enough to drive us to invent gods to feel more at home in the world. Nature creates with no end in view and with no regard for the creatures born and caught up in its arrangements. Nature thus creates wastefully and absurdly, since there’s no deeper reason for the universe’s origin or for its formations other than the calculation of cause and effect. The ultimate purpose of intelligent designs is the same as the epic hero’s, which is to smite the dragon whose very existence is blasphemous. To understand what the proverbial monster is is to drive you mad, and the same is true for the philosopher who realizes that far from being of ultimate significance on the cosmic scale, intelligent design is less than an afterthought, metaphysically speaking.   

Woman sues Women Studies Feminists for preventing her from Sleeping her way to the Top

Dateline: NY CITY—Miss Marylou Ditsy is suing Women Studies departments in colleges across the United States, for creating an atmosphere of political correctness that she alleges has prevented her from sleeping her way to the top.

Since Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein made headlines for allegedly raping, sexually assaulting, or harassing many women over a period of decades, hundreds of other women have made similar charges against powerful men in government, the entertainment industry, and journalism.

No further evidence has been needed other than the women’s having come forward with allegations of the men’s misconduct, for the men to be tried in the court of public opinion and for them to step down or be fired in disgrace.

“Powerful men are afraid now of even being alone with female employees,” said Miss Ditsy. “And you can forget about them hitting on you, since they know the woman might turn around later if things don’t work out, and call his attempt to seduce her ‘harassment.’ So now how am I supposed to use my long legs and big tits to exploit my male boss’s superficiality and horniness and get ahead in business?”

One of Miss Ditsy’s lawyers explains that feminists in Women Studies department have made sluttiness in the workplace unfeasible.

“Much like my client,” said her lawyer, “who has no nonsexual skills to speak of, Women Studies professors have no idea what they’re doing. Their discipline is a sham, their philosophy a joke. But the difference is that the feminists deal with their lack of talent by playing victims on a pseudo-professional basis, whereas my client has taken it upon herself to make the best of unpleasant reality and to use men’s weakness for sex, to succeed in life.”

“Feminists have no right to take away my one advantage,” said Miss Ditsy. “Genetics blessed me with a slamming hot body and that’s all male bosses care about, because their powerful position naturally turns them into monsters.

“Everyone knows there’s a give and take in the real world of business. No one makes it to the top on their own. The powerful men themselves only reached the pinnacle in their fields because they’re white and their rich parents paid for their Ivory League education which awards them with bogus diplomas, since their parents’ donations to the college mean they could never have flunked out even if they were dumb as posts. Just look at George W. Bush and Donald Trump.

“And then when they reach the top, their job is just to be a dick all day. All the real work is done by the lowly employees you never hear about. So if men can skate by on their class privileges and their sociopathic tendencies, why can’t an attractive young woman flirt with the gatekeepers and even sleep with them to further her career?”

One social scientist points to a culture of political correctness which has lost its grip on reality: “It’s politically incorrect now to say that generally speaking, men and women are naturally unequal in various ways. The liberal myth of equality prevents feminists from acknowledging that only monsters want power because power turns you into a monster, and that men are better at being monsters than are women, because men are more aggressive, which is a polite way of saying that men are generally assholes.”

For that reason, said Miss Ditsy, “powerful men are eager to pretend that they’re taking advantage of their female employees’ weakness, by hitting on them in obnoxious ways, whereas often it’s the women who are trying to get ahead in the office by making the best of their absurd situation of having to humour their creepy male boss who can be bribed with something as trivial as sexual favours.”

Strippers usually feel the same way about their customers, according to exotic dancer Candy Boobs. “I hear from feminists trying to shame me for making a spectacle of my naked body on stage,” she said. “‘Have more respect for yourself,’ they tell me. ‘Get a real job.’

“But these feminists live in a fantasy world. Most of them are ugly as sin in the first place, so they’re just jealous that a woman can make so much money with so little effort, whereas they’re the ones making fools of themselves in public, spouting postmodern, overheated PC garbage.

“More than that, though, in the real world, most men are pigs. Period. So why not make money off their piggishness? Why not exploit their sexual weakness and get paid big time just for shaking your ass? You know why there are far more strip clubs for male customers than for female ones, all over the world? Because men and women aren’t equal, never were, and never will be. Men are way worse than women! And the smart women take advantage of that inequality instead of trying to deny it exists and pushing their PC fantasies onto everyone else.” 

As to how Miss Ditsy can afford to pay her team of lawyers in her class action lawsuit, even though by her admission she has no business skills and is being unfairly prevented from sleeping her way to the top, you can see her perform as an exotic dancer with Miss Boobs Tuesdays and Thursdays at the Male Suckers strip club in New York City. 

Reason, Attitude, and Ultimate Reality

Is there an ultimate explanation of everything? Or is the very notion of such an explanation confusing? I’ll show that there can be no perfectly comprehensive mental representation, but that there’s at least a fitting nonrational way of relating to nature, a posthuman attitude towards the great cosmic mystery that dignifies us even as it begins with our humiliation. The world will be enlightened when selfishness and vanity are despised as signs of ignorance, and when the world is perceived as holy in Rudolph Otto’s sense, when those deemed wise ground their decisions in underlying angst, awe, and dread.

The Futility of Ultimate Explanations

The philosopher Immanuel Kant’s great insight was that explanations don’t fall from the sky or grow on trees; instead, they come from the human mind, of course, and it turns out our mind isn’t a blank slate. Even if we had no innate concepts or inborn ways of thinking, inevitable commonalities in human experience would shape our analyses and interpretations, by forming intuitions that ground our reflections, such as archetypal norms. Indeed, physicists are wary of these subjective starting points of inquiry and of natural language itself, since its terms carry the baggage of our formative experiences in the terms’ associative meanings. Still, when scientists reach for a theory of everything, they presuppose some laws or principles to show how the supposed first thing gave rise to the next thing. For example, this was the main criticism of Krauss’ cosmology, in A Universe from Nothing. Krauss’s “nothing” is nothing only in a technical sense, in that it’s a void with no material things in it. But the void always has energy in it which operates according to quantum mechanical laws. The void itself, then, goes unexplained, and so this attempt at an ultimate explanation isn’t so ultimate. It doesn’t explain absolute everything, because a naturalistic explanation is rational, by definition, and so must proceed in a stepwise fashion.

Likewise, Hawking and Mlodinow’s cosmological model in The Grand Design—which explains many features of our universe by appealing to a weak anthropic principle (if we’re here, the universe must contain such and such conditions to have evolved us)—presupposes the multiverse and the laws which give rise to it, such as the laws that rationally lay out the cosmic inflationary interpretation of the Big Bang theory. The first step of this explanation or of Krauss’s won’t follow logically from any step, by definition, and so these explanations will necessarily be incomplete. The first step needn’t be temporally first, but it will have to be at least logically prior to everything else or mereologically most fundamental, and so that step will be presupposed or, at best, self-evident. To say it’s self-evident, though, is to confess that the explanation rests on anthropocentrism, since the first theoretical step would thereby be evident only to creatures with selves like ours. 

It’s hard to see how any rational, naturalistic explanation could be absolutely complete. We understand things by generalizing about types and relations, and we think in terms of logical rules which have proved reliable or self-evident. That’s just how we do our best thinking, and there’s no guarantee that our ideal picture of the world would match up with the world itself or would capture its essence. On the contrary, living things seem fundamentally opposed to nature, assuming the natural universe isn’t alive at its core or in general. We evolved to decide how we should behave and to socialize with others, which requires that we understand ourselves. For those reasons, we’re most comfortable dealing with other living things, which is why science, logic, and math are often counterintuitive. Indeed, reason points us in the direction of naturalistic atheism, which means even our best, finished explanations will likely be embarrassingly human-centered—however far we try to stretch our imagination and to avoid appealing to our intuitions. This is because objectivity is naturally repugnant to us, and so we rebel against the nonliving world by striving to dominate it with mechanistic modeling and technology. We can’t entirely avoid being ourselves, after all. Even to divide events into cause and effect or to analyze matter into deeper and more superficial levels betrays a creaturely bias. The passage of time is an illusion in physics, according to which all events really happen at once, in which case causality too is illusory. Moreover, if there really is a multiverse containing infinite universes, the scientific analysis of our local matter pales into insignificance, and to speak of what’s “foundational” and what’s “merely epiphenomenal” in our universe is madness, if our universe is only like a raindrop in a sky full of other drops.

So even our most abstract and technical thoughts will depend on their societal and biological impetuses, and so science will be instrumental, which means our supreme rational enterprise will be guided by its mission founded in early modern Europe, to advance our species by discovering more and more efficient ways of controlling nature, including human nature. Again, that mission should provide us with more of a self-portrait than with an objective representation of the universe itself. In fact, the notion of a perfectly objective explanation is oxymoronic, because only nonliving objects could produce such an explanation, by having no subjectivity and thus no biases or ulterior motives, and yet such objects—the stars, the void, the atoms—obviously couldn’t directly explain anything. No, objects can explain things only indirectly, by evolving creatures like us who do the explaining from our subjective viewpoints. Scientists leave aside their personal subjectivity, but not the collective subjectivity of our species and thus not the Enlightenment quest of pursuing instrumental rationality to the bitter end. We subjects think, using concepts and other generalizations, playing our cognitive games with our rules and guiding interests. But just because our thoughts and games derive from the nonliving universe, just because, for example, we’re star stuff doesn’t mean our best arguments and theories have anything especially to do with the universe at large. As effects, our works bear informational content pertaining to their source, but there’s a stark absurdity we often miss, which is that a thought of a tree, for example, is utterly unlike trees, just as a theory of the Big Bang is absolutely nothing like that mysterious event. Our thoughts are meaningful only to us, but in the bigger picture which we can glimpse in our moments of sobering, albeit partial objectivity, our thoughts are just more things that happen along with everything else.

Hollywood Reboots itself, giving Creative Class power over Studio Executives and Producers

Dateline: HOLLYWOOD—After having rebooted all of its hit movies from past decades, Hollywood has finally gotten around to rebooting itself.

The schedule for the reboots consists of a long actual list for of movies to be remade for foreign and domestic audiences that have low standards. Somehow the movie industry found itself on that list.

“You have to understand,” said film critic Larry Schneider, “the movie industry consists of two types of people, the creative artists who make the movies, and the executives and producers who run the industry and pay for everything.

“The creators don’t want to keep doing reboots, because as artists they’re inspired to tell stories that resonate with viewers who want to be challenged. The list of reboots came from the executives and producers who are cynical and who care only about making money, not creating art. That list kept getting longer and longer until all Hollywood was doing was cannibalizing its past.”

Mr. Schneider theorizes that an executive slipped up and meant to add “Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers” to the list, but got distracted and left the entry as “Hollywood.”

“Alternatively,” said Mr. Schneider, “an executive may have intended to reboot the movie ‘Brazil,’ but when he instructed his secretary to add that film to the list, the secretary thought of the scene in that movie when due to a mishap with a fly, a dystopian government switches the name ‘Tuttle’ to ‘Buttle’ on its list of wanted terrorists. Thus, the secretary may have written ‘Hollywood’ as a practical joke.

“However it happened, it was then only a matter a time before the bean-counters got around to that entry and were trapped by their one-dimensionality into surrendering power to the creative class.

“They’re like machines, the studio owners and moneymen. They have no talent for judging the aesthetic merit of an idea. So when they saw that Hollywood itself was on their treasured list of things to reboot, they dutifully pitched themselves the idea of rebooting the movie industry by putting the directors, screenwriters, set designers, and animators in charge.”

As a result, the movie industry was the last of Hollywood’s reboots, since as soon as the artists were given the authority to decide which movies to make, they burned the list of reboots, ending the sordid business of producing schlocky versions of older movies to cater to the broadest possible audience, and returned to the long-abandoned art of writing and filming original stories.

For their part, the executives and bankrollers confined themselves to their secondary role of being art patrons or office administrators.

But some industry watchers wonder how long the new golden age of American cinema will last.

“The problem is that most Americans no longer care about art,” said one critic. “When you’ve been fed dog food for so long, you lose your ability to appreciate fine cuisine.”

Reason, Progress, and the Frankfurt School

Is reason progressive? Is the use of reason to understand the world ultimately beneficial? Does it promote peace and happiness? The conviction of early modernists from Descartes to Kant was that it was, that Europeans in the Middle Ages had neglected their potential for cultural and technological advances, because their social structures were oppressive and fatalistic rather than open to new ideas. Let each individual observe and think without having to defer to an authority, and reason would enable us to discover the real, liberating truth. While religious faith makes a society complacent, reason is supposed to be progressive because it empowers us to predict and to control natural processes and because rational autonomy provides the basis for human rights and thus for a more egalitarian society in which the masses don’t have to languish to pay for the luxuries of a few theocrats.

Nietzsche famously challenged these Enlightenment assumptions, charging that so-called rationality is only a cover for power struggles. But in the 1940s, the Frankfurt School of social critics went in a different direction, extending the Marxist criticisms of capitalism to formulate a comprehensive critique of Western society that included a broadside against the Enlightenment covenant that reason is progressive. In 1944, Horkheimer and Adorno published The Dialectic of Enlightenment (DE), which argued, “Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity.” This calamity of 20th century totalitarianism is due to the surprising fact that “Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology.” Instead of progress from an ancient or medieval state of ignorance and superstition to one of liberty and wisdom, so-called modernity is structurally continuous with the past, according to those social critics. Only the styles of delusion and domination have changed.

Adorno and Horkheimer on the Enlightenment

The essence of their criticism of the Enlightenment is Hegelian and it’s that Enlightenment thinkers mistook the ease of applying certain methods, such as the abstractions of formal logic and mathematics, for the discovery of absolute truth, and that by doing so those thinkers mislead us into presuming that knowledge isn’t always humanized, that is, situated in a historical, social or psychological context. The reason secular rationality took this turn was to fulfill “Reason’s old ambition to be purely an instrument of purposes…The exclusivity of logical laws stems from this obdurate adherence to function and ultimately from the compulsive character of self-preservation” (23). In short, the promise of instrumental reason is that calculation, quantification, and abstract categorization are means of efficiently achieving our goals, especially our primary goal of surviving by dominating anything that opposes us, including the whole of the natural environment as well as other people. Horkheimer would go on in Eclipse of Reason to distinguish between subjective and objective reason: the former interprets everything as means to a presupposed end, and so projects onto the world our preoccupation with utility. This pragmatic kind of reasoning is anthropocentric and thus subjective, and the way this occurs in science is through formalization, through the use of mathematical equations and abstract categories which render the world calculable. This conceptual machinery is a tool for picking out the useful aspects of things, namely their causal relations which can be predicted and exploited. By contrast, objective reason deals with ends rather than means, by understanding how things fit into a much larger whole that isn’t necessarily defined by its relation to the ego’s urge to survive.

But in DE, the pair contrasts the Enlightenment’s instrumental reason with quasi-Hegelian “dialectic” and “determinate negation.” Their point is that reason needn’t be mistaken for an absolute source of knowledge, but can be employed more humbly if we attend to how our models “negate” what they’re about by inevitably leaving much out of the referent. In that case, our models can’t so easily be used to delude or to oppress us. As DE says, “dialectic discloses each image as script. [Dialectic] teaches us to read from [the image’s] features the admission of falseness which cancels [the image’s] power and hands [the image] over to truth” (18, my clarifications between the square brackets). This criticism of secular reason is foreshadowed by Kant, since “Philosophical judgment, according to Kant, aims at the new yet recognizes nothing new, since [that judgment] always merely repeats what reason has placed into objects beforehand” (19-20). Kant’s point, too, was that reason allows us to understand only phenomena as they’re conditioned by our categories and cognitive processes, never things in themselves which are inevitably left out of the human attempt to fathom them. (Weird fiction under H.P. Lovecraft would later present the existential significance of this cognitive humility, which is that the self-aware, non-deluded knower typically suffers from bouts of horror or angst.) But Kant pretended that things in themselves are irrelevant and he celebrated our sovereignty over the humanized world of experience that we construct in our attempt to understand things. Kant’s philosophy was thus another step towards secular totalitarianism.

Sexual Battle Lines drawn between Toxically Masculine Trolls and Devious Lesbian Feminists, argues Social Scientist

Dateline: Whynot, NC—Hermann Gunzenhauser, a social scientist at True Dat University, has published a paper extrapolating the long-term effects of the proliferating allegations of sexual harassment and molestation in the entertainment industry and in government, business, and all other social sectors.

The professor distinguishes between sexual abusers and rapists, on the one hand, and three other kinds of heterosexual men, on the other. First, masculine or alpha males are aggressive in their attempts to seduce women, and emphasize the qualities that make men different from women.

Second, emasculated or beta males “go overboard with liberalism,” succumbing to the radical feminist narrative that masculinity is the root of evil and so men should be more like women so that everyone can be equal in all respects.

“Women are internally conflicted,” writes Professor Gunzenhauser. Masculine men fulfill women’s romantic fantasies of how men should behave, whereas emasculated men conform to feminist dogmas about what women need as opposed to what they really want.

According to the professor’s exhaustive search of the records of accusations and prosecutions, the number of men who sexually abuse women—in the sense of genuinely acting against their will, such as by continuing with an attempt at seduction after the woman has demonstrated her disinterest or her opposition—is around five percent of American males.

By contrast, the vast majority of men who have been accused of being sexual abusers after the Weinstein scandal, who total around fifty percent of American males, are just masculine men who exhibit traditional alpha male traits of assertiveness and independence.

Prof. Gunzenhauser predicts that masculine men will have four choices as they learn that masculinity is forbidden in liberal, civilized parts of America. They can become predators and force women to submit to them sexually, whereupon they’ll likely be caught and imprisoned. Alternatively, they can move to the increasingly barbaric conservative states, they can emasculate themselves, or they can become the third type of heterosexual male: the drop-out who contents himself with porn and video games, having given up on women.

“In what’s been called the ‘sexodus,’ the drop out male retains a semblance of masculinity,” writes the professor, “and retreats to a virtual world in which his heroism is honoured and rewarded rather than condemned. Inadvertently, the semi-masculine drop-out punishes civilized women by consigning them to the Sophie’s choice between emasculated men and lesbian feminists.”

According to the professor, the surge of liberal protest against masculinity in America is due to a radical feminist agenda in which lesbians have discovered an insidious means of fulfilling their fantasy of dating and converting straight women. By demonizing masculine men, forcing them to become outlawed predators, conservative trolls, or feminine pseudomen, heterosexual women will come to prefer the homosexual option.

This is for two reasons: female sexuality is more fluid than the male kind, and emasculated men suffer from the uncanny valley problem, as it’s called in robotics. “We’re turned off when something looks and behaves almost exactly like something else but doesn’t quite make it,” write the professor. “When men behave very much like women but are clearly still men, women are disgusted and will have no choice but to seek companionship with the real deal, that is, with other women.”

The battle lines in the war between the sexes are being redrawn. “Trumpism represents a surge of toxic masculinity in the conservative states, but the traditional patriarchal values are being weaponized under the cover of white supremacy and neofascism,” writes the professor. “Blue collar America is being hollowed out by globalization and is reverting to jungle norms. On average, both male and female conservatives survive by giving up on humanity and acting like animals.”

“Meanwhile, the liberal states will be run more and more by women and neutered men.”

According to the analysis, within twenty years a lesbian Amazonian warlord will rule the remains of the big cities in liberal America which will have crumbled because of the dearth of masculine, blue collar men there to repair the infrastructure. Liberal heterosexual women “will serve as sex slaves for the warlord’s bevy of lesbian feminist lieutenants.”

Conservative America will be overrun by “trolls and troglodytes” who will periodically invade the more civilized states and “prey on liberal women by touching their knees a couple of times, calling them pretty, and showing them their penis.”

Confined to their man caves, civilized, semi-masculine drop-out males will await the coming of their messiah who will “solve the mysteries of what women want and of how to give it to them without being ostracized, imprisoned, or forced to sell-out humanity by becoming a Republican.” 

Scientology, Christianity, and the Persistence of Cults

Naïve Christians who believe in the historicity of the gospel narrative of Jesus’ life sometimes argue that a myth about Jesus couldn’t have arisen during or soon after his lifetime, because eyewitnesses or other insiders would still have been alive and could have refuted wild Christian claims about Jesus. For example, if Jesus hadn’t been crucified by the Romans, relatives of Jesus could have testified to that fact while Paul was creating churches in the name of the crucified messiah, thus making it impossible for Paul’s churches to have succeeded. The fact that Christianity names names and that the New Testament record began only a few decades after Jesus is supposed to have lived proves, according to this argument, that at least the elements of the Christian narrative—that Jesus lived, excelled at teaching a revolutionary version of Judaism, reportedly performed healings and miracles, and was seen to have been resurrected after he was crucified—are historical. Had the early Christians fabricated that tale, the descendants at Galilee would have been around to point that out and so Christianity would have flopped as a movement.

This argument for the historicity of Jesus is untenable. This isn’t to say that the skeptic’s disproof consists only of the usual sort of argument which allows for rational counterarguments. No, in this rare instance, the disproof annihilates the Christian counterarguments. There is no intellectually-responsible way of arguing that myths about Jesus couldn’t have arisen so soon after Jesus lived or that Christianity couldn’t have survived as a religion in spite of the foolhardiness of its claims, given this disproof. The disproof consists merely of the counterexample of Scientology. What is the Church of Scientology but a deeply shameful late-modern cult of personality that arose during the lifetime of a quack and a Trump-like madman and that persists despite an overwhelming case against its every word and deed? Scientologists believe that L. Ron Hubbard discovered a science of freeing the mind to be superpowerful, and that Hubbard himself—as naturally an expert in these techniques—became superhuman and immortal. They believe Hubbard, who published Dianetics in 1950, founded the Church of Scientology in 1953, and died in 1986, was a wise man and a miracle worker.

The Overwhelming Case against Scientology

There is, however, no more comprehensive case available against any religion or pseudoreligion than there is against the Church of Scientology. The only way to strengthen the case would be for L. Ron Hubbard himself to admit that the whole thing was a fraud (although he practically did that too by saying on several occasions that the best way to make money is to start a religion). Imagine all the ways a phony religion could be disproven. Now notice that Scientology has whistleblowers galore, who have laid out devastating, detailed, and insider cases against their former religion, Scientology. These include Hubbard’s eldest son, Ronald DeWolf, who was involved in early Scientology but broke from his father in 1959 and gave sworn testimony repudiating his father’s practices. DeWolf said more than ninety percent of what Hubbard wrote about himself is false.

Then there’s Hubbard’s second wife, Sara Hollister, whom Hubbard met in Aleister Crowlely’s occult organization, the OTO. Hollister was involved in the early Dianetics years, was Hubbard’s personal auditor and was one of the first Dianetic “clears,” according to Hubbard. Hollister filed for divorce in 1951, saying about Hubbard,

she had been subjected to “systematic torture, including loss of sleep, beatings, and strangulations and scientific experiments”. Because of his “crazy misconduct” she was in “hourly fear of both the life of herself and of her infant daughter, who she has not seen for two months”. She had consulted doctors who “concluded that said Hubbard was hopelessly insane, and, crazy, and that there was no hope for said Hubbard, or any reason for her to endure further; that competent medical advisers recommended that said Hubbard be committed to a private sanatorium for psychiatric observation and treatment of a mental ailment known as paranoid schizophrenia.”

Then there’s Hana Whitfield who was a Scientologist and a member of the Sea Organization (the fraternal religious order for elite Scientologists) for twenty years, and who “captained two of Hubbard’s ships, ran his organizations, and was Deputy Commodore under Hubbard in the United States for two years.” She broke from the Church and told harrowing stories of what life was like as an early Scientologist with Hubbard. Her account is part of the 2015 documentary against Scientology, “Going Clear,” and can also be found in interviews on YouTube, along with that documentary. The significance of her repudiation of Hubbard is such that it would be like Peter repudiating Jesus, not just by denying him three times in fear of Roman persecution, but by telling chapter and verse about what a fraud Jesus was, and by saying so in a permanent public record for the world to see.  

Mainstream News Anchor proves he understands Trump’s Presidency by repeatedly Punching himself in Face

Dateline: ATLANTA—A newly hired news anchor at CNN, Guy Hoogetsit, has criticized his colleagues at the cable news station for failing to understand the point of Donald Trump’s election, and maintains that the only way for members of the corporate media to properly report on President Trump is to simultaneously hit themselves repeatedly in the face.

Mr. Hoogetsit was hired by CNN because of the millions of followers of his YouTube videos in which he railed against what he called “mainstream, neoliberal media” for failing to understand the significance of Trump’s presidency and the main reason Donald Trump was elected.

“The corporate media elites just don’t get it,” said Mr. Hoogetsit. “They keep merely stating the obvious about Trump’s scandals and unfitness for office. They go on and on about how Trump’s regime is outrageous, how his corruption is unprecedented in American politics, how his psychopathy and narcissism are terrifying and potentially apocalyptic.

“But the mainstream journalists don’t understand that that’s why he was elected, to embarrass and to punish the centrist institutions of the plutocratic American establishment.

“So you’ll hear Don Lemon or Anderson Cooper or most others on CNN or MSNBC or BBC or CBC—any self-described liberal, rational defender of the globalized establishment—these mouthpieces for the upper-middleclass white-collar professionals who’ve skated by for decades while the American blue collar workers have lost their jobs to robots or to impoverished armies of Chinese labourers—all of these serious and sober media personalities are acting like the viewer should naturally be as appalled as they are by President Trump.”

But these media elites “have insulated themselves from the deeper reality,” according to Guy Hoogetsit. The millions of Americans who voted for Trump or who support the idea of “an outsider anarchist blowing up the American establishment” approve of Trump’s “subhumanity” as a means to an end. “The insane clown president Trump is an instrument of their vengeance against the establishment that’s profited from a rigged economy, against the elites who double-crossed the American middleclass with their free trade deals that were full of lawyerly loopholes.”

These millions of radicalized American viewers don’t need to be reminded of the obvious, said Mr. Hoogetsit. “They don’t need to hear about every detail of Trump’s inadequacy as a president, as if their votes weren’t meant to send precisely such a troglodyte into the halls of power, to destroy the office of the presidency and every other American institution, because those white American masses in their opioid-induced stupor mean to take their country down with them.”

Guy Hoogetsit’s technique for reporting on President Trump’s activities is thus to punch himself hard in the face while he relays the horrendous political news of the day.

“That’s how I prove that I get it,” he said. “So I’ll say to the camera, ‘Mr. Trump backed away from his tough talk against North Korea at APEC, because he’s a man-baby who’s in way over his head, and the other world leaders know he’s all talk.’

“But then I’ll smack myself hard in the face. I’ll really lay into myself with lefts and rights. There will be uppercuts or hard bitch slaps, the kind that sting and make you cry and bleed from your nose and give you a black eye and a cut lip. 

News Channel treats Politics as Theater

Dateline: NY CITY—Under the auspices of Europe’s Postmodern Media Group, American entrepreneur Roy Havalaff is launching a cable political news channel that will assume no politician is capable of honesty.

The channel will be called Theater of Political Liars, or TPL, and will differ strikingly from established news organizations in its method of covering political news.

“All other political shows,” said Mr. Havalaff, “whether on BBC, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, or Al Jazeera assume that at least some politicians tell the truth as they see it. Their journalists and newsreaders therefore cover that news by broadcasting the politicians’ messages and then perhaps discussing the ramifications. Alternatively, they’ll assemble a panel of pundits, some of whom disagree with the politician’s point of view, and so the analysts will argue about what the facts are or what the policy’s consequences would be.

“We at TPL believe that that approach to politics—and particularly to democratic politics—is asinine. If you assume that politicians are acting in good faith, that they care about helping the people they represent, then perhaps it would make sense to take what they say at face value. But TPL won’t be so naïve or disingenuous.”

TPL will also differ from the satirical approach to news coverage, popularized by Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show and by other comedians such as Bill Maher.

Said Mr. Havalaff, “Instead of mocking politicians for their hypocrisy, mendacity, and chicanery or pretending that politicians are disposed to being honest with the public, TPL will revolutionize political broadcasting by evaluating politicians’ work purely as theater.”

Instead of reporters or news analysts, TPL will have political theater critics. Instead of treating political speech as ordinary communication between people of good will, the theater critics will assess political events as staged productions meant to uphold a branded franchise. Far from bringing empirical criteria to bear in determining the accuracy of political statements, and far even from evaluating politicians’ behaviour in ethical terms, TPL will weigh only the aesthetic merit of democratic politics.

TPL has produced a prelude of what to expect, by sending some of its theater critics to cover the APEC summit in which world leaders met in Vietnam to lie together about economic issues. The ten-minute TPL video showed leaders from China, Russia, Australia, the United States and other countries meeting, shaking hands, giving press conferences and making speeches.

But the news segment treated these interactions as though the politicians were acting on a stage and reading scripted fictions. The segments mostly ignored the content of the politicians’ remarks, and focused on their acting ability and the quality of the stagecraft.

“Trump’s performance as an actor has grown significantly since his days as a wrestler in the WWE,” said one TPL theater critic. “Xi Jinping excels at countering President Trump’s lies with his own lies. The result is a splendid bit of political theater, a fantasy to be applauded for its casting, costumes, and corporate directors.”  

“There’s really no comparison between the alleged savviness of CNN’s news analysts, such as Dana Bash’s or John King’s, and ours at TPL,” said Mr. Havalaff. “To understand what’s really happening in politics, you have to stand outside the system. CNN can’t do that because it’s owned by Time Warner and is thus part of American corporate culture, which is the source of that country’s political fictions. How can a critic properly assess political theater if the critic is just another actor in the production, just another hack scrambling for access to the A-list political actors (the politicians), and spreading propaganda to increase ratings?”

According to Mr. Havalaff, political theater comes together especially when politicians speak to each other, as opposed to directing their lies to the general public. 

Deaf Inventor of Leaf Blower Unveils new Noisy Devices

Dateline: PITTSBURGH—Manny Hornblower, the deaf inventor of the leaf blower, has unveiled a series of new inventions, including the gas-powered page-turner, the motorized tea bag dipper, and the jet-fuelled food-chewing aid.

The gas-powered leaf blower is popular with landscaping companies and when in operation it can be heard from miles away even when indoors.

“We use it to blow leaves around, to clear lazy people’s lawns,” said professional landscaper Dillon Jerkwad. “Kind of makes you feel like a ghostbuster, since it’s this big old device you wear on your back and you hold this thick hose that comes out the side.

“Noisy AF, that’s for sure. That’s why some of us in landscaping also wear heavy-duty, noise-cancelling earphones. In the business, we call that the Full Asshole. You know, like the Full Monty, except instead of showing your junk on a stage you’re making a god almighty nuisance of yourself in suburbia. I mean, you might as well be going up to strangers and shouting at the top of your lungs in their ears for no reason, all while wearing big earmuffs so you can’t hear a thing and your ears are fully protected.

“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had folks come up to me and give me dirty looks while I’m waking up the dead, blowing leaves off of some guy’s lawn with that gas-powered ghostbuster contraption. One old guy turned his dog loose on me to shut me the hell up or maybe just to knock my earphones off my thick head, to give me a taste of my own medicine, I guess. I aimed the leaf-blower hose at that dog and blew him back to his doghouse.”

Anthropologist Leah Mackelmire explained the appeal of this strange tool.

“The leaf-blower very nearly replaced the rake in suburban areas, in which a pristine lawn is a sign that even though the suburbanite couldn’t last an hour in the wild, and even though all wild places are fast disappearing from the face of the earth, he’s still king of his castle and can take comfort in the greenness of his lawn as a substitute for any connection between him and nature.

“The trick is you can’t leave even a single leaf or twig on your lawn for long in autumn, since that would spoil the effect of the green grass and desecrate the clean-cut lawn as an altar to phony masculinity. So the rake won’t work unless you want to be out there for hours and hours or you haven’t gotten fat and lazy from your desk job.”

Mr. Hornblower demonstrated his new devices at an indoor press conference. Sitting on a Lazy Boy recliner on a stage with a novel in his lap and a glass of brandy by his side, he clipped the page-turning device to the book and pressed a red button on the side of the device. The small but surprisingly-cacophonous page-turner sprang into action, emitting a deafening roar as it turned a single page of the novel, and then it fell still and silent. He pressed the button again, and the device filled the room with howling banshee screeches as it deftly turned the next page.

Mr. Hornblower couldn’t hear the reporters’ questions that were shouted at him while his machine was turning the pages, not just because he’s congenitally deaf but because the device itself was deafening. Instead, he laid the book aside and gave the reporters a self-satisfied grin.

The next invention was a variation of the page-turner, except that instead of turning pages it dunked a bag of tea in the hot water in his mug. Again, the reporters were astonished by the ear-splitting noise generated by the small device.

While it was dunking the tea bag, a reporter shouted at one of Mr. Hornblower’s aids, who were waiting at the side of the stage, “Don’t you expect most people won’t want to make quite so many explosive, buzzing, crashing noises while they’re preparing to have a cup of tea—or to read a book, for that matter?”

The aid only shook his head reproachfully, as though it were politically incorrect to speak about noise in front of Mr. Hornblower.

The inventor attached the final machine to his head and proceeded to eat a sandwich, relying on the jet-fuelled motor to open and close his mouth for him. Like the rest of Mr. Hornblower’s inventions, the chewing aid could be heard from outside the building and from far down the street.

But Mr. Hornblower smiled and proudly gestured towards his three machines, indicating that they’re available for sale and anticipating perhaps that the consumer’s laziness will compel him or her to overlook the products’ foibles.