Really, I don’t make these things up. But I do shake my head sometimes at what arrives in my in-box.

Human Events Online, who bill themselves as “The National Conservative News Weekly” has presented their list of the “Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries.”

In their own words “Appropriately, The Communist Manifesto, — Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, earned the highest aggregate score and the No. 1 listing. ”

Other noteworthy publications include: The Kinsey Report, The Feminine Mystique, Origin of the Species, Coming of Age in Samoa, Silent Spring and, unbelievably, Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed.

But hey, here’s the whole list, and go to the website to check out the 15 “scholars and public policy leaders” who served as judges in selecting the Ten Most Harmful Books.

1. The Communist Manifesto — Authors: Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels
2. Mein Kampf — Author: Adolf Hitler
3. Quotations from Chairman Mao — Author: Mao Zedong
4. The Kinsey Report — Author: Alfred Kinsey
5. Democracy and Education — Author: John Dewey
6. Das Kapital — Author: Karl Marx
7. The Feminine Mystique — Author: Betty Friedan
8. The Course of Positive Philosophy — Author: Auguste Comte
9. Beyond Good and Evil — Author: Freidrich Nietzsche
10. General Theory of Employment, Interest and Mone — Author: John Maynard Keynes

Honorable Mention

These books won votes from two or more judges:

The Population Bomb — Paul Ehrlich
What Is To Be Done — V.I. Lenin
Authoritarian Personality — Theodor Adorno
On Liberty — John Stuart Mill
Beyond Freedom and Dignity — B.F. Skinner
Reflections on Violence — Georges Sorel
The Promise of American Life — Herbert Croly
Origin of the Species — Charles Darwin
Madness and Civilization — Michel Foucault
Soviet Communism: A New Civilization — Sidney and Beatrice Webb
Coming of Age in Samoa — Margaret Mead
Unsafe at Any Speed — Ralph Nader
Second Sex — Simone de Beauvoir
Prison Notebooks — Antonio Gramsci
Silent Spring — Rachel Carson
Wretched of the Earth — Frantz Fanon
Introduction to Psychoanalysis — Sigmund Freud
The Greening of America — Charles Reich
The Limits to Growth — Club of Rome
Descent of Man — Charles Darwin

Sometimes life is very difficult. Sometimes you find yourself doing things that you never, ever thought would be possible. Things that you know you will hate and despise.

I’m one of those souls that hated phys-ed in school. I was not a jock and didn’t “get” jock culture. I was lousy at basketball, couldn’t hit a baseball to save myself, always wound up standing around while everyone else played soccer, and couldn’t do push ups.

I won’t talk about my experiences with locker rooms.

Consequently once I was free of high school I abandoned all physical activity, and especially that which involved sweat or teamwork.

I was happy with that choice, and every time that I saw some poor suffering jogger run by I felt smug and superior. Or at least that I was in much less pain.

Well, this year all of that changed. I was suckered in by invitations to go for a “walk”. I had suggested lunch, but hey I can get into anything.

Somehow those walks kept getting longer and faster, and then started to include long flights of stairs. The next thing that I knew I was buying $120 running shoes. Even worse, somewhere along the line I began running.

I am so embarrassed.

Now I find myself out for an hour or two at least twice a week, usually more often. Down the rail trail near our house, or through the woods with a friend… anywhere cool and green is fine.

I finally bought a cheap MP3 player so that I could listen to music (currently Prince, Madonna, Eminem, Outkast, and odds and ends from Tom Waits, BTO, and Hazel Dickens). That led to figuring out that there is music that makes you fly, and music that just does not work.

Ursula the Wonder Pup thinks that all of this walking and running is just wonderful, and loves to gallop along beside me down forest trails. She likes it even better when I ignore the leash laws and let her run free.

So what’s the upshot? I feel better than I have in years. I’ve dropped about twenty pounds. I feel fit and can walk across town without thinking about it.

Still, somewhere in the back of my mind I still feel like a fraud, an outsider, and I doubt that I’ll ever entirely feel comfortable with the “jock”label.

Take a minute right now to visit CanadianJournalist.ca.

Members of the Canadian Association of Journalists (CAJ) will know that the organization has been embroiled in a rather ugly battle revolving around the CAJ Board’s decision last year to issue a press release denouncing veteran journalist Stevie Cameron.

At the end of this month’s CAJ Annual General Meeting the organization had seen a bitter proxy fight that resulted in the group not retracting the press release, and in many longtime members cancelling their memberships.

All of this left the formerly excellent CAJ-L mailing list in disarray. When some members continued to challenge the actions of the CAJ Board they found themselves unsubscribed. Now the Board is talking about closing the list to all but fully paid (and presumably obedient) members.

The good news though is a brand new blog and discussion list moderated by former CAJ stalwarts Greg Locke, Bill Doskoch, and Deborah Campbell.

It’s called CanadianJournalist.ca and is nothing short of excellent.

Even better, it’s attracting a decent following after only one week.

In the less than 7 days since we launched this blog we have generated:
2639 page views …or real hits
We have 428 people subscribing via XML/RSS
35 original messages and 34 comments as of today.

Set up an RSS feed and enjoy the stories and ideas that appear there. And stay tuned for lots more content and resources in the weeks to come.

WOW! UPDATE! This in just a day later!

Over 6300 pageviews or visits to the site.
1003 xml/rss subscribers
44 Original articles
41 comments

Honestly, I enjoy a good smoke as much as anyone. Tobacco is one of my favourite drugs.

I do though acknowledge that tobacco kills a lot of people, annoys others, and in general it is a good thing when fewer people smoke in fewer places. I like smoke free bars.

I am always amazed at how the pro-tobacco lobby manages to make themselves look like complete idiots on a regular basis.

Today the NYC Citizens Lobbying Against Smoker Harassment (and how long did it take them to figure out a name that had ?NYC CLASH? as the acronym?) among others are calling for a boycott of donations to major charities, saying their support of smoking bans is a threat to small businesses and civil rights.

Yes, the people who are most likely to get lung and throat cancer are urging us to not support the organizations that fund research that could provide treatment and a cure for these conditions.

?”No more,”? says Audrey Silk, founder of NYC Citizens Lobbying Against Smoker Harassment, which is leading what appears to be the first-ever boycott of the American Cancer Society, American Lung Association and American Heart Association.

?”We will stop contributing to Big Nanny”", she said. “?Why do we want to donate to groups that are out to ruin our businesses and demean us as human beings??”

Read the article here. I think you’?ll agree that Darwin was right.

Peter Hirshberg, the former head of Enterprise Marketing at Apple Computer, has an interesting blog post about the challenges faced by Pope Benedict XVI in developing his “brand”.

Hirshberg opines that the new Pope seems to be aiming to develop the Catholic church as a more exclusive brand (like Apple) rather than trying to attract a mass audience.

“We’re only days into the new papacy, and already Benedict XVI is honing the Church’s positioning and strategy. And have you noticed how similar the Vatican strategy is to the Karl Rove strategy?”

“In religion, when folks get fed up they actually have the option not to go to church, or ignore teachings, or more actively, change sects or religions. Just ask Martin Luther. Ratzinger would prefer to have fewer, but more devout followers. “

“In the world today, you’d think the pope would want more followers, more priests, and an easier to follow religion. That’s what grows. Instead he’s opting for the tougher strategy of going for a more elite, “better” customer base.”

Well worth reading.

From the LA Times:

…detractors and supporters of “Bat Boy: The Musical,” now in rehearsal, packed a meeting of the La Cañada Unified School District board. Worried parents asked officials to cancel the production of the satiric comedy about a creature who is half-human, half-bat. A representative of the conservative group Focus on the Family flew in from Colorado to speak to the board, which met on the campus.

I don’t make these things up….