the tower of babel

Seems to me that if you are going build that tower to the truth you seek, you are going to have to use bricks made of fact or else the damn thing is going to topple.  And speaking of towers, how about that fine old bible story of Babel?  Kind of makes a point, well the one it makes over and over, don't fuck with the Lord.  It also tucks in a little explanation about why people speak different languages.  So I'm fine with it.

But I wouldn't accept a citation of the story as an explanation of why we speak different languages, and I don't believe there was ever an actual tower.  I'm sure some crackpot can be dug up who says well there used to be those ziggurats in Mesopotamia, and maybe there is some ancient local myth, and surely some verses can be found in the bible, so maybe there actually was blah blah blah, but for all we know somewhere among the people the story was passed along there were some guy who didn't like bridges which is what the story was originally about and decided to substitute towers.  It seems like such a waste of time to manufacture explanations for improbable stories when with one swoop of Occam's razor the problem is solved for good.

I suspect that that story about wolves never killing anybody in North
America was dreamed up by some pro wolf people, and they do like you gun nuts do, just keep repeating it whether it is true or not. 

The thing about credible citations is, if it is in a newspaper, than it was written by a guy who is kind of a professional, who could lose his job if he lied too much, and it was probably overlooked by an editor, and it gives a location and some details which you could probably go there and check out.  It's still possible that the newspaper was ill informed or maybe just told a whopper for some reason, but it is a lot more reliable than what some guy you never heard of said.

I'm sure the DNA was from cat poop or hair and not a photograph.

Catch 22 is not the kind of book you would ever read to find out what the army was like, it was more about bureaucracy.  We were talking about suspension of belief a few posts ago, and if you like the story well enough you can tolerate some stuff that doesn't seem realistic.

I'm always skeptical of these movies that are promoted like, this is what the war in Vietnam, or life in the ghetto, or winter in Cheboygan is really like.  Things like those are different things to different people and it's stupid to pretend that this is what it is like for everybody.

Lions want to eat and everybody wants to go to heaven, and the colosseum crowd wants a good show.  It's a win-win for everybody.  Reminds me of those famous blues lines:

Ev'rybody wants to go to heaven
But nobody wants to die

Ev'rybody wanna hear the truth
But yet, ev'rybody wants to tell a lie