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POPSWhat if everything you believe is Wrong? Retrospect and reflection are priceless. It's easy to cherish a belief that we are not prepared to challenge. Like a crab that needs to shed it's shell to grow, for a short time is soft and vulnerable. Soon it is harder, stronger and bigger. (unless it's a Hermit crab, with a new shell ready) One of the keys to the manner in which we challenge our beliefs is through learning and experience. Without the unknown to draw us forward, we would run around in circles. Consider the way a child sees the world. It can be valid, but sometimes beliefs belong in the domain of children. Children can believe a man they barely know gives them gifts for Christmas. There comes a time in their life that they have to admit not so much that this is a fiction, but that the truth has been that their parents have had to work to get the money to get the gifts, with absolutely no credit. (Sorry, I should write Recognition. Credit and Christmas are Mortal enemies)
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POPS15 Hacks To Enhance Google Reader Some useful hacks to enhance Google Reader experience; like being able to read the actual feed within reader (not just excerpt), adding a searchbox to the reader or changing the look and feel. You need Firefox for all and also GreaseMonkey extension for some.
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POPSChildren taken away because of a breastfeeding photo in Texas The excerpt above is taken from "Oxytocin and breastfeeding - does this hormone make breastfeeding a sexual act?" on http://www.007b.com/breastfeeding_sexual.php I'd like to call attention to the central issue, that, as I suppose, is given in this quotation: "My sister couldn't breastfeed because it felt good. She thought, if it felt good with her baby it must be a sin ...." (Loco citato.) In my humble opinion, it is rather a capital sin to plant such a superstitious crap of false, hostile, self-destructive morality in girls and women.
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POPSWhat social media means to me... This is an excerpt from a piece I just wrote (it continues at the source). I was inspired to write it after looking at a series of photos labeled "The Decade in Pictures" that made me feel very sad about this past decade. After looking at them my only thought was that hopefully we are all so fed up with the way things have been that we can rally together to bring about a better decade ahead. The potential impact of social media gives me great hope! Oh, and i didn't realize that written posts didn't make their way into the Amplify Newsfeed of Public Timeline...i ought to rethink that :)
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POPSWhy I Fled George Bush's War Read the whole story, straight from the horse's mouth. It's just unacceptable what's going on in Iraq. This does NOT sound like a one off offense to me either! Neither did Abu Ghraib. I'm not buying it! What's going on with these people! Aren't we supposed to be the good guys?? Good grief, no wonder they all hate us...
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POPS1943 Guide to Hiring Women Obviously, I couldn't clip the whole thing because of the character limit, but check out the rest of the page at http://home.tiac.net/~cri_d/cri/2000/women1943.html.
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POPS How Republics Die ~ Plato's Cautionary Tale and makes war against the wealthy class, seizing their money by force. This politician emerges as a tyrant, and the old republic has died. Republic is a complex and profound morality tale in which we can see, if darkly, the reflection of our own republic. Its story is not exactly ours, but we have a lot in common with this once-beautiful city. We have been blessedly spared from the final stage of the societal destruction portrayed in Republic, wherein a redistribution of wealth proceeds by way of a violent coup to tyranny. The American republic is stable enough that for the foreseeable future we need not fear such madness.
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POPSYour Daily Dose of Moral Outrage: US Army Edition
READ THE WHOLE LINK...there are too many juicy details to clip: Another excerpt: He was given discharge papers, Defense Department form No. 214, that say he served honorably and left at the end of his enlistment. Miller got a place in town and a job, and began planning for his life as a civilian. The 29-year-old enjoyed his four years in the Army and once was named soldier of the month, but he admits he bristled under the authority and knew it was time to shed the uniform. The post says Miller never should have been allowed to leave, because he was awaiting trial. “He was erroneously discharged from the Army,” Fort Carson spokeswoman Dee Mc-Nutt said. When Miller didn’t show for his July 7 court-martial, a legal battle ensued, with the Army proving to a judge that Miller’s discharge was void. Miller went back to Fort Carson where he was convicted in a court-martial Aug. 1, reduced in rank to private first class and given extra duty. WAY MORE AT THE LINK
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POPSIf Convicts Can Serve, Why Not Gay People? There are already gays serving, some "openly, but discreetly". There are far more who are totally forced to live a lie. Many "straight" soldiers know and don't care. With all the problems this country is having hiring recruits to fight the endless war on terror, it's way past time to get rid of the rules that bar openly gay Americans from serving in our Armed Services. When you are having to lift restrictions on weight, criminal and education history in order to increase your ranks, what is wrong with expanding the pool of candidates to homosexuals? Of course, with so many Americans being against the Iraq war, this probably won't make a whole lot of difference if it passes.
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POPSGlobal Warming Exposed as 'Globaloney' via Big Hack Attack .... (presented out of order because of frequent updates at that post): Hackers have broken into the data base of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit - one of the world’s leading alarmist centres - and put the files they stole on the Internet, on the grounds that the science is too important to be kept under wraps. he files suggest, on a very preliminary glance, some other very dubious practices, too, and a lot of collusion - sometimes called “peer review”. Or even conspiracy. (excerpt from a hacked e-mail) From: Phil Jones To: ray bradley ,mann@XXXX, mhughes@XXXX Subject: Diagram for WMO Statement Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 13:31:15 +0000 Cc: k.briffa@XXX.osborn@XXXX Continued below
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POPSFritz Haber 3 of 5 Owe Their Lives To His Discovery! perpetuates life is written in nitrogen ink. But the supply of usable nitrogen on earth is limited. ... Until a German Jewish chemist named Fritz Haber figured out how to turn this trick in 1909, all the usable nitrogen on earth had at one time been fixed by soil bacteria living on the roots of leguminous plants (such as peas or alfalfa or locust trees) or, less commonly, by the shock of electrical lightning, which can break nitrogen bonds in the air, releasing a light rain of fertility. ...
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POPSBaboon Metaphysics Under the right conditions, instinctive behavior would appear automatically, even if the animal had never before had the appropriate experience. When they act by instinct, then, animals are not behaving according to Lockean reason, carefully weighing the information acquired from experience. Instead, they are governed by “hereditary tendencies” acquired over generations.
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POPSCatholic League Overboard in Criticism? The clip is a short excerpt from the interview. It addresses a point that we see over and over again these days from the Religious Right. Their primary focus is to make their form of Christianity a State religion. Luckily, the Constitution as prevented this from happening. To be fair, a majority of these folks probably want this to happen because they are genuinely troubled for what, to them, appears to be a moral collapse in the US. They think that a return to an imagined past is the answer to restore their world back to equilibrium. These simplistic desires are often the fuel that powers many of these unfounded protests. Reasoning and logic have no effect on this close minded thinking.
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