Secular Sunday

Great speeches, interviews, lectures and readings:

First off, Yonanton Grad hosts from New Books Network::

... In her engaging, informative, and fun book, The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats, Brothels, and the Business of AIDS (Norton, 2008), Elizabeth Pisani draws on her experiences doing field work as an epidemiologist in Indonesia and on staff at UN AIDS, the joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS, during the time when the world was coming to grips with the fact of an exploding global epidemic of HIV. If you want to design effective interventions, you have to understand exactly who and what those interventions should target. But how easy is it to figure out who has sex with whom and when and where and how often? Or who injects drugs and shares needles? Doing so is loaded with pitfalls, and Elizabeth lays them out for us, exploring how preconceptions, ignorance, and technical problems can cloud our ability to see what’s really happening, to interpret what we see, and, most importantly, to figure out effective ways to intervene.

In the second hour, Robert Knight's 17 April "5 O'clock Shadow" from WBAI NYC "

... A conservative republican cohort has now pushed America so far to the right that, for the first time in history, a Democratic party President - Barack Obama - has openly proposed major reductions in Social Security benefits. America's rightwing tailspin is part of a conservative global conspiracy that seeks to impede the development of so-called "social democracy. "That's the thesis of social critic and political scientist MICHAEL PARENTI, author of "God and His Demons." Parenti spoke recently at the Deep Politics Conference about the role of conspiracy in government operations, and the suppression of critical analysis of self-serving right wing social and military conspirators. ..."

Harpsichord music provided by Joyce Lindorff.