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POPSWhy is pleasure so suspicious? "The best sort of life, says Epicurus, is one that is free from pain in the body and from disturbance in the mind. That sounds a rather negative credo for a 21st-century devotee of the good life. Were he writing self-help books today, Epicurus would probably acknowledge that you can aim a little higher than that. He might point out in his own defence that health and peace are essential preconditions of happiness, and are easy to belittle if you are lucky enough to have them. But perhaps his most useful observation for the discerning hedonists of today, when such an intoxicating variety of gratifications are dangled before them, is a reminder of caveat emptor: "No pleasure is in itself evil, but the things which produce certain pleasures entail annoyances many times greater than the pleasures themselves."
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POPSWrong Woman; Wrong Message Her down-home, divisive and deceptive speech did nothing to cosmeticize a Republican convention that has more than twice as many male delegates as female, a presidential candidate who is owned and operated by the right wing and a platform that opposes pretty much everything Clinton's candidacy stood for -- and that Barack Obama's still does. I get no pleasure from imagining her in the spotlight on national and foreign policy issues about which she has zero background, with one month to learn to compete with Sen. Joe Biden's 37 years' experience. When asked last month about the vice presidency, she said, "I still can't answer that question until someone answers for me: What is it exactly that the VP does every day?" When asked about Iraq, she said, "I haven't really focused much on the war in Iraq."
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POPSUtopia for a modern age. Our goals include returning healthy biodiversity to the heart of our cities, agriculture to community gardens and the streets, and convenience and pleasure to walking, bicycling and transit. We work to build thriving city and neighborhood centers while reversing sprawl development; to build whole cities based on human needs and “access by proximity” rather than cities built in the current pattern of automobile driven excess, wasteful consumption and the destruction of the biosphere. We visualize a future in which waterways in neighborhood environments and prosperous downtown centers are opened for curious children and native plants and animals.
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POPSA New State Of Mind But that view of the neurotransmitter was vastly oversimplified. What wasn’t yet clear was that dopamine is also a profoundly important source of information. It doesn’t merely let us take pleasure in the world; it allows us to understand the world.
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POPSSF Author: Gregory Frost The Nebula, Hugo, Tiptree, International Horror Guild, and World Fantasy Award finalist takes you on a journey of wonders and nightmares. It's a midnight odyssey to a shadowland where vehicles feast on vagrants . . . where Poe's final days are revealed . . . where factory workers are exploited by an apparition of the Virgin Mary . . . and where Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart pinwheels through the corridors of Time. On this pilgrimage we discover the apocalyptic entity that hides in a Ukranian village. We're taken to a crossroads where the Castle of Otranto bleeds into the Depression-Era South accompanied by the rollicking music of Kid Ory and Bix Beiderbecke. Frost's fourteen excursions include an account of the horror that dwells in Jack the Ripper's pocket watch, and features a brand new novella -- a slam-bang interplanetary "Road" picture peppered with Hope & Crosby japery and more than a dash of Flash Gordon. Attack of the Jazz Giants: And Other Stories
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POPSSecret Diary of a London Call Girl Hustler, prostitute, a hooker... that's just semantics to her. Meet Billie Piper - a lovely and smart young woman who sells her body to strangers because she loves sex and money.
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POPS"Tropic Thunder" Comedy Mocks Hollywood And Movie-Makers
To save the movie, director Damien Cockburn (Steve Coogan) decides to shoot it documentary-style, with his actors improvising in the jungle. But that idea also goes awry, and the gun-toting actors find themselves up against a drug lord and his minions' real guns. The premise is amusing, though the actual plotting doesn't always make sense, especially when the actors have to face the real-life villains. And as it goes along, the pleasure is not so much from character development as a series of set pieces, such as African-American Chino's view of Lazarus' vision of an African-American, or Grossman's attempts at crisis management. Indeed, Cruise may be the funniest thing in the movie, although he gets competition, notably from Downey and from Jay Baruchel as Kevin Sandusky, the non-star in the acting ensemble. And movie buffs will have fun picking up on the allusions to other films, especially Apocalypse Now. http://www.tropicthunder.com/home.html
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POPSLife in these United Police States! "This just isn't very surprising, is it? More and more often, honest, decent and law abiding citizens are finding that the police are at best adversarial, and more often than not, actually seem to take pleasure in agressive, bullying tactics. We are learning, like citizens of police states everywhere, to lie to cops even when we don't have anything to hide. Personally, I would never trust a cop to act decently, honestly or professionally. Punks, thugs and bullies are far too well represented in all branches of police, sheriffs and constable offices today in America." --Falon
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POPSOn Wickedness Conservatives wickedly play to unreason because being unreasonable is part of what human beings are. Indeed, it is part of the pleasure of being human. The recognition of this is part of what makes conservatism conservative. And it's not going away. I'm reading what I wrote above, and still haven't got to the bottom of what I want to convey. So expect more soon. Trust that I am not offering a counsel of despair. Here, in fact, is a fine piece of writing that gets at why, to tide you over until I figure out a better way to explain that the human reality of unreason does not ever have to be an alibi for progressive defeat, and has, indeed, underwritten many of progressivism's most famous victories.
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POPSWhy We Love Our Lawns Falk tested his theory by showing various groups worldwide photos of different landscapes, including their own. All groups said they'd prefer to live in savanna-like surroundings, even jungle-dwellers and city folk who'd never seen a savanna or a lawn.
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POPSThe science of love Studies show that when you first fall in love, serotonin levels plummet and the brain's reward centres are flooded with dopamine. This gives a high similar to an addictive drug,
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POPSStinging Tentacles Offer Hint of Oceans’ Decline The explosion of jellyfish populations, scientists say, reflects a combination of severe overfishing of natural predators, like tuna, sharks and swordfish; rising sea temperatures caused in part by global warming; and pollution that has depleted oxygen levels in coastal shallows. These problems are pronounced in the Mediterranean, a sea bounded by more than a dozen countries that rely on it for business and pleasure. Left unchecked in the Mediterranean and elsewhere, these problems could make the swarms of jellyfish menacing coastlines a grim vision of seas to come. “The problem on the beach is a social problem,” said Dr. Gili, who talks with admiration of the “beauty” of the globular jellyfish. “We need to take care of it for our tourism industry. But the big problem is not on the beach. It’s what’s happening in the seas.”
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POPSWe Are What We Eat part 2 Carlo Petrini, a charismatic Italian who writes about food and wine, started Slow Food with friends who shared his notion that leftist politics and gastronomic pleasure could be happily married. The international organization has grown to 86,000 members and become an industry in Petrini's hometown, Bra, Italy. There are Slow Food restaurants, a university and a hotel. You can buy a cashmere truffle-hunting vest embroidered with the Slow Food snail logo at the main office in Bra. The group's budget is about $39 million, and subsidized by the Italian government. Much of the organization's work involves identifying traditional foods, like Ethiopian white honey or Amalfi sfusato lemons, and designing ways to help the people who produce them. Its philosophy — that food is about much more than cooking and eating — is often hammered home by Petrini on his frequent trips around the world.
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POPSOn CNN 8pm tonight Buddha's Warriors I don't work for CNN. At least not any longer. Once upon a time I did. Even had the pleasure of spying the Ted in his bathrobe as he traversed the film library in search of a cup of coffee. That was in the early '80's. Christiane Amanpour was just starting to report for CNN. And baby look at her now.
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POPSFive People Reality Shows Hurt The Most "And we don't want them to be obsessed with watching Tila Tequila to see if she's ultimately going to choose a guy or a girl to be her partner, either. Boys have plenty of time to learn about bisexuality; they do not need some MySpace whore in a sting bikini and stripper heels encouraging them to think about girls on girls. They'll waste enough time thinking about that when they're good and ready." My sentiments about Tila EXACTLY. Bi's already have enough stigmas to deal with!! Thanks to "The Bachelorette," little girls grow up seeing that if they can't find a husband on their own, they can just go on TV and make out with 25 different hot guys to magically find their Prince Charmings." *sigh* Moral of this story? Children are not small adults but adults can be small children sometimes.
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POPSRuby Tuesday Blows Up An interesting turn for Ruby Tuesday, abandoning both its past and its planned future in an attempt to avoid the same fate as Bennigan’s. Will “simple, fresh American dining” be enough of a differentiator to lure diners into the revamped chain—and can the advertising change perceptions quickly enough to boost sales performance.
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POPSEmotion and Confirmation Bias Where there is no skepticism and clear-thinking, we have the emotional attachment of those worshiping theory and living in a hypothetical world. Theirs is a devotion to an idea, which is actually a faith. Hope and change, anyone? Climate Change?
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POPSFemale Orgasm is Deadly for Men When it comes to the difference between male and female sexuality, scientist Kunio Kitamura discovered that female orgasm is 10 times stronger than man.
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POPSDemocracy Supposedly I live in a representative republic. Maybe our republic is more like a democracy of the upper one percent.
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