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POPSInteresting Critique Of Modern Radical Conservatism The entire article is several pages long and has some thought-provoking observations to make regarding the evolution of the American conservative movement and how it has "morphed" into what we are seeing today. BTW, notice the civil tone of the article.
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POPSIs the Internet melting our brains? I start with Plato's critique of writing where he says that if we depend on writing, we will lose the ability to remember things. Our memory will become weak. And he also criticizes writing because the written text is not interactive in the way spoken communication is. He also says that written words are essentially shadows of the things they represent. They're not the thing itself. Of course we remember all this because Plato wrote it down -- the ultimate irony. We hear a thousand objections of this sort throughout history: Thoreau objecting to the telegraph, because even though it speeds things up, people won't have anything to say to one another. Then we have Samuel Morse, who invents the telegraph, objecting to the telephone because nothing important is ever going to be done over the telephone because there's no way to preserve or record a phone conversation.
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POPS Irving Kristol Irving Kristol, 1920-2009: Godfather of Neoconservatism (Read WP posts from Donald Douglas) | (Read MT posts from Donald Douglas) The Astute Bloggers graciously provides the New York Times link, “Irving Kristol, Godfather of Modern Conservatism, Dies at 89.” Also, my good friend Ken Davenport has written his own thoughtful commemoration, “Irving Kristol, 1920-2009.” Ken focuses on how Kristol’s neoconservatism has become the most important critique of modern statist ideologies (and of especially the consequences of post-1960s Democratic Party social policy).There’s lots of commentary at Memeorandum. See Jules Crittenden, GayPatriot, Power Line, The Other McCain, and Outside The Beltway. See especially John Podoretz’s obituary at Commentary, and Robert Kagan at the Washington Post. And Myron Magnet, at City Journal, shares a personal anecdote about Kristol’s compassion: Read more >>> http://www.memeorandum.com/090918/p115#a090918p115
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POPSMoney spent on war vs cost of health care reforms According to the Center for Defense Information, the total cost of the war in Afghanistan will reach $439.8 billion by the end of 2009. The United States, which spent exactly 10 times more on Afghanistan in 2008 ($140 billion) than it spent in 2002 ($14 billion), increased such efforts by $33 billion in just the last year. Obama's escalation, largely overshadowed by the health reform's incendiary spectacle, has been swift and significant. It's also showing no signs of slowing down. On Thursday, a Senate subcommittee approved 2010's $636.3 billion defense appropriations bill. Of this, $128.2 billion has been set aside for "overseas contingency operations." Simple multiplication tells us that the cost of maintaining this rate of defense spending for the next decade would eventually make Afghanistan $300 billion more expensive than the health care overhaul's projected cost. And that's just dollars and cents...
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POPSMuslims Watch Our Feet, Not Our Lips Muslims are no different than any of us - they have been lied to enough to kknow that it is people's actions that count; not what they say. The General hits ot right when he says that each time we diverge from our central American values - we get in trouble with everyone, not just muslims.
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POPSWhy Israeli Jew Uri Davis joined Fatah to save Palestine
So what does Davis believe, and why? His father was a British Jew who met his mother, a Czech, in British Mandatory Palestine in the mid-1930s, where they married in 1939, four years before his birth. While his mother escaped the transports to the gas chambers at Auschwitz, many in her family did not. It is a familiar story in Israel. But the lesson that Davis learnt from it was different from the vast majority of Jews who concluded that never again could Jews depend on others to guarantee their security from persecution. "An important part of the education that I received from my parents," Davis recalled last week, "was never to generalise. To beware of every sentence that begins with 'all'. It was not 'all' Germans who killed my mother's family. It was some Nazis." Another distinction was emphasised by his mother. "If she heard the suggestion of vengeance, she would be horrified. She sought justice. One of the biggest problems addressing a Zionist audience is that the distinction
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POPSStep it up Hannity Kevin's publicist contacted the Hannity producers for quid pro quo, and she submitted his latest blog regarding the reverse racism that he believes occurred in “Gates Gate.” The response from Hannity’s team was essentially that Kevin was fishing for racial controversy. Really?!
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POPSAloe Vera ~ Awesome Potentials & Safety precautions
from an Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center article: Scientific Name Aloe barbadensis, Aloe capensis Common Name Aloe gel, aloe leaf Clinical Summary Aloe vera is a tropical plant used in traditional medicine throughout the world. It has been studied for its ability to relieve constipation, treat burns, heal wounds, treat psoriasis, frostbite, ulcerative colitis and diabetes. Recent studies suggest that some components of aloe, such as acemannan, aloeride, and di(2-ethylhexyl)phthalate (DEHP) may have immunomodulating and anticancer effects. Emodin, an extract of aloe vera, inhibited cell proliferation and induced apoptosis in human liver cancer cell lines through p53- and p21-dependent pathways. Aloe is also thought to have antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties. Concurrent administration of aloe with chemotherapy was reported to benefit patients with metastatic cancers. More research is needed. Data on external use of aloe products to alleviate radiation-induced s
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POPSWe are Storytelling Apes: let Faith decline A pithy, powerful critique of Armstrong and the apothatic tradition. Fairly clearly (I think) an equally pithy response could be made centred upon the fact that the criticisms partly support Armstrong's position, and do not contradict it. However, the critique of her overarchingness is totally valid: the examples of Hamas and women are indicative of the near universal tendency of a certain class of writers/thinkers to believe they need to pull a definitive view of everything from their glittering theories. The Case for God: What Religion Really Means, Karen Armstrong, The Bodley Head, 2009
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POPSDownload Off Jackson Avenue Movie It’s just five minutes into Off Jackson Avenue, and already you’re skeptical. It’s plain that Olivia is a means to an end, dropped into this stereotypically bad situation in order to set up for a broader critique of American dreaming, the fictions that innocents believe. Olivia passes a room where girls in cheap lingerie loll on sofas.
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POPSScience, Reason & Religion: Eagleton v 'Ditchkins' <<<Eagleton is not anti-science or reason. He merely points out that science has produced Hiroshima as well as penicillin. And liberal rationalism, in addition to its many undoubted triumphs, has provided the intellectual underpinning for exploitative capitalism and the wanton destruction of the environment on an unprecedented scale. Indeed Eagleton is stronger on reason than Ditchkins, for he thinks carefully about what his opponents say whereas Dawkins & Co prefer knockabout rhetoric to serious engagement with mainstream religious thought. This is, then, a demolition job which is both logically devastating and a magnificently whirling philippic. Ditchkins, he says, makes the error of conflating reason and rationality. Yet much of what seems reasonable in real life turns out not to be true. And much that is true, like quantum physics, seems rationally impossible. >>> (from review)
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