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POPSThe Christian Paradox: How a faithful nation gets Jesus wrong
Just how Christian is America? Aside from what studies show about what we do and do not know about Christianity or how often we go to church, it is how we behave that is most telling. Jesus summed up his message for his disciples when he said the way you could tell the righteous from the damned was by whether they'd fed the hungry, slaked the thirsty, clothed the naked, welcomed the stranger, and visited the prisoner. We are ranked near the bottom among developed countries in government foreign aid. We are the most violent rich nation on earth, with a murder rate 4 or 5 times that of our European peers. Having been told to turn the other cheek, we're the only Western democracy left that executes its citizens, mostly in those states where Christianity is theoretically strongest. Despite Jesus' strong declarations against divorce, our marriages break up at a rate at just over half. Teenage pregnancy? We're at the top of the charts. Just how Christian is America?
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POPSHave You Heard "The Hum"? Various features of modern life have been blamed - gas pipes, power lines, mobile phone masts, wind farms, nuclear waste, even low-frequency submarine communications. The internet is abuzz with rumour and speculation. There are dark mutterings about secret military activity, alien contact and government cover-ups. The hum even featured in an episode of the sci-fi drama "The X-Files". Such conspiracy theories are understandable, but unhelpful, according to Dr David Baguley, who's head of audiology at Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge. He estimates that in about a third of cases there is some environmental source that can be tracked down and dealt with. "It may be a fridge or an industrial fan or a piece of heavy machinery at a nearby factory that is causing the disturbance and can be switched off," he says. Most of the time, however, there is no external noise that can be recorded or identified. You can hear an amplified recording of the hum, at the source.
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POPSEarly life united “We’ve known about the gram-negative bacteria for three scientific generations. We’ve been staring at them for a hundred years, and we never realized how they came about or what made them so different,” said Lake. “Without them, we wouldn’t have eukaryotes as we do today.”According to Lake, the union likely took the form of endosymbiosis, in which one of the prokaryotes literally swallowed the other, and the two grew together. Were mammals derived from a union of insect and amphibian, the story-of-life rearrangement would be comparably profound.
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POPS15 Words you won’t believe they added to the Dictionary #3. Prebuttal #2. Ego-surfing v. Searching the Internet for instances of one's own name or links to one's own website. #1. Meatspace n. The physical world, as opposed to virtual. Doubtlessly coined by a level 80 Druid tank somewhere in the World of Warcraft, it's a sad day for the species when what you may recognize as that in which everything exists, needs a special term to differentiate it from the "real" world of Facebook friends and LOLcats. Soon you'll hear it used in sentences like, "So all of the crops are dying and the air is turning poisonous? Bah, who cares about all that stuff that happens in lame old Meatspace."
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POPSWhat does "Fascism" look like? 14 Characteristics 10. Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology, insofar as it is fundamentally aristocratic, and aristocratic and militaristic elitism cruelly implies contempt for the weak . 11. In such a perspective everybody is educated to become a hero. 12. Since both permanent war and heroism are difficult games to play, the Ur-Fascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters. 13. Ur-Fascism is based upon a selective populism , a qualitative populism, one might say. 14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak.
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