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POPSA second chance at life, thanks to strangers on a train
More: Mr. Medaglia and Dr. Tolani rode the subway downtown together… He’d missed the 5:13 train and while he was waiting at Penn Station for the 5:59, a woman came up and said, “You did the CPR on that guy, is he really going to live?” “I said I think so,” recalled Mr. Medaglia. “She blew me a kiss. She said, ‘God bless you — you did a great thing.’ I just sat on the train home, thinking, ‘Holy Jesus.’ ” …This was Lieutenant Kelly’s fourth CPR call in 13 years. The three other aideds all died. “Best thing I ever did in my life,” he said… Having gotten a second chance, Mr. Kiernan, a lifelong bachelor, said he is trying to be a better partner to his longtime girlfriend and is trying to eat more carefully, drink less, and seize each day a little more. “I’m not religious,” he said, “but I keep thinking, ‘Who put that cardiologist on the train?’ Coming home tonight, I looked around the subway car — there wasn’t anybody who looked like a cardiologist.”
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POPSBiking 150 miles for a cause - in a dress and high heels More: It all started when Tsai began to work in a hospital many years ago. A native of Taiwan, she was trained in Japan in the art of shiatsu massage. So while working at the hospital, "I started to put my hands where they hurt," she says. Tsai began regularly giving massages to cancer patients, until one day, about 26 years ago, she massaged a patient with MS. It was then and there that she first heard about the bike ride and decided to participate. "In Taiwan, riding a bike is very common," explains Tsai's grandson, Alan Sim, who also participates in City to Shore -- 2009 was his sixth year. "So she grabbed her little one-speed bike and was doing the ride." And why the nice dress and high heels? Tsai says that's just her normal biking outfit. "I went to church, so I always dressed up and would ride my bicycle," she says. "So that's why I do it that way -- I do it that way naturally. That's the way I ride my bike." :-D
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POPS 'On "The Wealth of Nations"' P. J. O'Rourke Economic progress depends upon a trinity of individual prerogatives: pursuit of self-interest, division of labor, and freedom of trade. There is nothing inherently wrong with the pursuit of self-interest. That was Smith's best insight. To a twenty-first-century reader this hardly sounds like news. Or, rather, it sounds like everything that's in the news. These days, altruism itself is proclaimed at the top of the altruist's lungs. Certainly it's of interest to the self to be a celebrity. Bob Geldof has found a way to remain one. But for most of history, wisdom, beliefs, and mores demanded subjugation of ego, bridling of aspiration, and sacrifice of self (and, per Abraham with Isaac, of family members, if you could catch them). This meekness, like Adam Smith's production, had an end and purpose. Most people enjoyed no control over their material circumstances or even-if they were slaves or serfs-their material persons. In the doghouse of . . .
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POPSWhy "trash the dress" pisses me off I'll be getting in touch with Jireh Women to find out how I can donate my wedding dress to them. I don't intend to ever wear it again, and I'd love to know that a woman who never thought she'd be a bride can look and feel more beautiful on her wedding day.
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POPSReligion is not the primary motivation of suicide bombers
Whether through sloppy thinking, laziness, or outright racism, Imperial powers love to dismiss local resistance to foreign domination as either "drug-crazed" or "religious fanatics", sometimes both. Because then you don't have to take a close look at their motivations and ask "Why are they pissed off enough to do something like this? Why specifically are they targeting us ? What would I have to be put through to feel like a suicide bombing was a reasonable thing to do? "Oh wait, they're just a bunch of religious nutbags? Great, now we can unleash death an destruction on them and their society knowing that they're unreasoning fanatics, and not people with a legitimate beef. "Nice to know we're still the good guys who never start a fight but always finish it. We're kind of attached to that myth, and it would cause a lot of national distress and heartache if we had to question the reality of that. "Good thing they're just religious crazies."
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POPSOn Suicide Bombers have argued the altruistic motivations on this for a long time:::humiliation factor is why the us military always loses the moral aspect of warfare
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POPSA good Samaritan at the Atlanta airport More: The United Methodist minister models his ministry on the parable of the good Samaritan — a stranger who helps a traveler in crisis and practices kindness, often without mentioning religion. Cook says he gets a lot of practice in these days of inflexible airline rules. He often pays a traveler's $150 change fee from his chaplain's budget or his own wallet.… These are the easy fixes, Cook says. The harder ones involve the runaways, the abused women and the people who end up at the airport with nowhere else to go. "It's literally the last stop," he says. "And then they end up in the atrium, which is right out front of our chapel. And they don't really know what to do next. They don't know where to turn."… "Your heart goes out, and sometimes you can't do anything," he says, adding that it's tough leaving people at the end of the day, knowing their problems will still be there tomorrow. "It's not always a quick fix. It's not always a little solution."
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POPSBy modern conservative standards, Winston Churchill was a Bolshevik More: As a lifelong conservative with a strong dedication to enterprise and merit (and a host of less admirable right-wing prejudices), Churchill would have bristled at anyone who dared to describe him as a socialist. Why then did he promote and protect the NHS? Partly out of political expediency, no doubt, but also because he felt an ethical obligation that seems not to trouble the contemporary conservatives who profess to admire him.… Whatever the marvels and defects of the NHS may be – and most experts agree that it does a superb job despite inadequate funding -- its importance for the debate over American health care reform may be moral rather than practical. Imagine what kind of country we would inhabit if those who claim to represent conservatism in America possessed even a small measure of the human compassion and political decency of Churchill at his best. It is a standard that they do not even attempt to achieve these days.
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POPSMaking lives better by recycling durable medical equipment More: A man has come to pick up a cane and commode for his disabled wife. He knows there is no charge for the items, but he pledges to make a future donation as he walks away, as soon as he can, when "things get better some day." A woman arrives and hopes to find a walker for a friend who "can't stand on her own two feet anymore." Meanwhile, an elderly woman approaches with a large floor mat balanced on the handlebars of her own walker. Susan runs up to greet her — she is a friend and regular visitor who routinely searches the neighborhood for items that Home Cares might use. A volunteer named Wayne offers to assist me, and I discover through conversation that he's an expert mechanic available to help with wheelchair problems. A young man in a baseball cap arrives — there, weekly as usual, with his pick-up truck brimming with donated medical equipment and supplies.
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POPSThe evolution of religion "Religion arose out of a hodgepodge of genetically based mental mechanisms designed by natural selection for thoroughly mundane purposes," he writes. Those mechanisms include conformist bias (believing what your peers believe, in order to get along), a tendency to explain events in terms of personal agency (since our mental machinery for thinking about causality evolved in the context of social interaction), and interest in remote control (a bias toward beliefs that promise influence over predators, diseases, and bad weather). Given these biases, we're prone to believe in powerful, jealous, tempestuous personal deities.
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POPSThe 10 mysteries of human behaviour that science can't explain Scientists have split the atom, put men on the moon and discovered the DNA of which we are made, but there are 10 key mysteries of human behaviour which they have failed to fully explain. The New Scientist magazine compiled a list of the everyday aspects of life which continue to confound the world's greatest brains, including the reasons behind kissing, blushing and even picking your nose.
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POPSThis is What Makes America Great In spite of all the blather coming forth from capital hill, this story once again proves the greatness of America. When the American people are FREE to live their lives and make their own decisions, we have proven time and again the USA is an altruistic nation. Although the current crop of political hacks continually speak down our nation and our economy, there are still hope for change. America is still great because her people are great.
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POPSRestaurant manager's "free food if you wash dishes" policy touches hungry students More: Inoue is delighted when a former frequent dishwasher comes back to report that he has passed an exam, thanks to Inoue. Among his former dishwashers, there are even three lawyers. "I hope that former students will go on to do good deeds for others when they remember their dishwashing days," he says. Inoue keeps all the business cards that former dishwashers have given him, and the wall by the cash register is covered with letters sent to him from those who have left Kyoto. "Your restaurant was our home away from home," one says. Another promises, "One day, I will save enough money for you to take a day off." Every time he re-reads these words of gratitude, Inoue says, he is inspired to continue working for as long as he is physically able.
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POPS How altruism evolved over 200,000 years of conflict Biologists have argued for decades about the evolution of altruism and long ago came to the conclusion that Darwinian natural selection cannot explain acts of supreme personal sacrifice except those directly connected with helping the survival of close blood relatives who share similar genes.
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POPSChurch gives new meaning to "offering" plate "We've taken $200,000 and spread it out to organizations -- four local, two missions that are feeding and clothing people in these tough times," Slough said. "We've paid utility bills for members of our church that are unemployed or under-employed." His favorite giveaway came three weeks ago. The church gave 1,400 families $50 each and told them to hand it out to someone else. One of the recipients was Katie Lewis. "I've been alone so long. Just to be thought of and to be remembered, to be welcomed -- it's amazing," she said, crying.
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POPS A True Martyr Like the most worthy saint, Jan Palach lived a simple life. As a boy, his father nurtured in him a keen love of history, which he went on to study at Prague's Charles University. He was known as a quiet student, strong-willed, bookish, rather serious. The turning point in Palach's life was the August 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact forces to suppress the political and cultural liberalization known as the Prague Spring. The invasion had a radicalizing impact on Palach. What he found hardest to bear was not the occupation and attack on freedom itself, but the reaction of his countrymen. In the months following the invasion, the raw passion of opposition and defiance became resignation, accommodation and lethargy. Alexander Dubcek, the Czechoslovak leader who was instrumental in the reform movement's "socialism with a human face," signed the Moscow Protocols, which were ultimately an expression of loyalty to the Soviet Union.
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