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POPSSanta Claus 'buried in Ireland' It is thought that the man who inspired the tradition of leaving presents under a Christmas tree, came from a wealthy family and he is believed to have given much of his fortune away. Early pilgrims visited the cathedral in Myra to pay their respects to the bishop. The bishop was originally buried at a local church in Myra, in modern day Turkey, when he died. Historians now believe his body was later moved to the abbey in Ireland by early crusaders. “St Nicholas Church is still standing and there is a slab on the ground which marks St Nicholas's grave,” he said. Few locals know of the much-loved figure’s link with Kilkenny. “It is an amazing story and yet very few people in Ireland know about St Nicholas's connection with this country,” he said. “Every year now we get visitors to the site, but still not that many.” i
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POPS'Conspiracy Would Become Manifest' IF ALL Climate Research Emails Unveiled
Gray warns that the likely agreements coming out of Copenhagen, the cap-and-trade bill before Congress and the Environmental Protection Agency's decision announced this week to treat carbon dioxide as a pollutant "represents a grave threat to the industrial world's continued economic development." "We should not allow these proposals to restrict our economic growth," Gray said. "Any United Nations climate bill our country might sign would act as an infringement on our country's sovereignty." He said he probably would have been concerned about the possibility people are causing serious global climate degradation "had I not devoted my entire career of over half-a-century to the study and forecasting of meteorological and climate events." "There has been an unrelenting quarter century of one-sided indoctrination of the Western world by the media and by various scientists and governments concerning a coming carbon dioxide … induced global warming disaster," he said.
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POPSWe Always Give Thanks.
The ocean of fratricidal blood in the war following Lincoln's election would be the worst thing to happen in America's history. For decades after the Civil War, cripples and amputees roamed city streets. The wounds would take a century to heal. Still, in 1859, Americans gave thanks. In 1934, seventy-five years ago, our nation was firmly in the thrall of the Great Depression. The unemployment rate was near the highest level in American history, about twenty-five percent, and the patent medicine of FDR's Neal Deal was making things worse. Our government dropped the gold standard and piled up federal debt at an alarming rate. Hitler was consolidating his wicked power in Germany. Holomodor, the mass extermination by deliberate starvation of perhaps ten million Ukrainian men, women, and children, showed the depths of Stalinist evil and danger. Japan had annexed Manchukuo and was obviously scheming to grab more of China. Sober and caring Americans might well have asked in 1934: How, by
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POPSMcCain Going Down
John McCain was the Republican candidate for President in the last election, running against Barrack Obama. He's up for relection in 2010. Now it looks like he's going to lose his Senate seat, facing a primary challenge in his own party. Point 1. The horses are lining up at the starting gate for the 2010 elections. (one year ahead of voting day, par for the course) McCain is one of my U.S. Senators and I'd love to dance on his political grave. I'm joyful planning on it.... I've remained registered Democrat so I can vote in the Demo primaries. Up to now there hasn't been a good candidate because McCain was previously invincible. Now the cracks are showing -- A big problem is that Democrats always lose this seat because they mouth the national policy on immigration while the vast majority of us in this state --- a state on the border with Mexico -- have a whole different real-world perspective on an out-of-control border. We want the border controlled, like all nations do
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POPSGirl Plots Murder You dig a grave on Friday, and wait a week to kill this other person because you wanted to know what it felt like? You need mental help. Seriously.
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POPSbow-wow, now roll over and beg I agree with Scott Johnson, Steve Gilbert, Andrew Malcom, and many others that the President of the United States should not be bowing before any head of state. But unlike these astute observers, I actually know a little something about the art of the bow in Japan, having lived in Japan four different times on a resident visa, taught East Asian Studies at Harvard, and counseled many hundreds of American, European, Middle Eastern, and Australian executives on how to work and negotiate with the Japanese -- including teaching them the right way to bow. Watch Heads of state greeting the Japanese Emperor below: http://domania.us/Oaccess/OBAMA/BOW-Japan346H.gif
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POPSA Terrible Case of GOOD vs. EVIL To paraphrase one of Dora’s favorite old saying, evil triumphs when good men (and women) do nothing. Will you help to keep all little girls safe and join us in writing the Governor and the Illinois Prisoner Review Board? Please ask that Scott W. Darnell be denied all clemency. Write to: Illinois Prisoner Review Board, 319 E. Madison St., Suite A, Springfield, Ill., 62701. And/or contact Governor Pat Quinn, 207 State House, Springfield, IL 62706.
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POPSScientist: CO2 Not Causing Climate Change the world has experienced three periods of cooling since 1850 and furthermore carbon dioxide was increasing during many of those cooler periods. "If we had only had warming, then there would be a connect between co2 and temperature, there is not," he added. Prof Plimer has come under attack as a "denialist poster boy" whose theories are in danger of stopping the world from tackling the grave dangers of climate change. But he said the scientists "frightening people witless by following the party line" are motivated by politics and research funding. "They are taking advantage of the current situation. That is understandable. In previous times people got wonderful research grants in a war against cancer and they achieved a lot of money for that. Now we have a war on climate change and we have a huge number of people out there who have their career staked on it and are beneficiaries of this process."
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POPSWhat We Can't Accept "A corpse is a stark reminder that human beings are inescapably embodied creatures, and that a life is the sum of what has been performed and spoken by the body — a mixture of promises made and broken, deeds done and undone, joys evoked and pain inflicted. When we lift the heavy weight of the coffin and carry the dead over the tile floor of the crematory or across the muddy cemetery to the open grave, we bear public witness that this was a person with a whole and embodied life, one that, even in its ambiguity and brokenness, mattered and had substance. To carry the dead all the way to the place of farewell also acknowledges the reality that they are leaving us now, that they eventually will depart even from our frail communal memory as they travel on to whatever lies beyond. People who have learned how to care tenderly for the bodies of the dead are almost surely people who also know how to show mercy to the bodies of the living."
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POPSWhat's YOURS is EVERYONES
There are fundamental differences between the philosophies of Republicans and Democrats. There exists certain core beliefs about the role of government and the individual that are as different as night and day. Republicans believe it is the people who should have the freedom to determine their own destiny, free from overdue government intervention, regulation and control. They believe in lower taxes and smaller government. Republicans believe in "home rule," allowing local governments, closest to the people to have the loudest voice. Republicans believe that government exists to serve the people in the ways the private sector cannot. They believe in "the velocity of money," that is to say, they believe that every time a dollar changes hands privately, it helps the overall economy and creates more revenue through taxes to the government. Democrats, and more specifically the current administration, believe that it is the role of government to "care for" the population in every r
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POPSThe Obama-McChrystal Gap He answered, “I’m always worried about using the word “victory” because, you know, it invokes this notion of Emperor Hirohito coming down and signing a surrender to MacArthur.” … Obama either doesn’t understand " or, worse " doesn’t take seriously McChrystal’s report when it says, “While not a war in the conventional sense, the conflict in Afghanistan demands a similar focus and an equal level of effort, and the consequences of failing are just as grave.” Obama is neither smarter nor more politically astute than his generals. He tried to snooker McChrystal by requiring the general to send three options for Afghanistan catalogued as “low”, “moderate” and “high” risk. That way, he thought, he could accept a lower number of troops to be sent and still say that he followed McChrystal’s advice. But the general " seeing through that (according to a senior House member who I spoke to last week) " beat the president at his own game. The “moderate risk plan . . .
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POPSACORN foresaw the foreclosure crisis in 2001
More: Moreover, Oakland's law would have gone much farther than requiring that borrowers could afford loans. In 2001, ACORN officials already recognized that the driving force behind the subprime lending was the ability of brokers to chop up risky mortgages, repackage them with good loans as "securities," and sell them to other banks on a largely unregulated market. When homeowners who couldn't afford their loans later defaulted on them, these securities became widely known as "toxic assets" and were the primary cause of the world financial crisis… But if Oakland's law had been widely adopted, the bailout likely would have been unnecessary and the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression probably averted. Why? Because the city's ordinance not only would have held mortgage brokers liable for making bad loans, but also every other bank that later bought pieces of those bad loans after they were securitized. In short, the market for subprime loans would have dried up.
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POPSIs Communism Dead? From the article: "If the Communist-coordinated terrorists had been squashed or had never existed, Dr. Waller concludes, in all likelihood the world would not be plagued by the present-day terrorism of Hezbollah, Hamas, al-Qaeda, and the other violent organizations that commit mass murder in the name of God." Read the entire article.
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