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POPSMedia Ignoring Conservatives' Return to Dominance of Political Book Market
In September of that year, the Boston Globe proclaimed liberals "triumphant" against "conservatives' decade long hold on popular culture." Yes, it seemed such wonderful liberal values were finally en vogue. Barnes and Noble, reacting to the outpouring of Bush-bashing literature in August of 2003 announced that it would set up ‘political science/cultural affairs' tables at its stores to feature the newest partisan works. But conservatives have reclaimed their hold on the Times's bestseller page. The closest any of the top 15 hard-cover non-fiction books gets to a defense of liberalism or the Obama Administration is In Fed We Trust by David Wessel "The books from the left strike me as an obvious reaction to Bush," conservative commentator Tucker Carlson told the Associated Press in 2003. "And for people who buy them, it's a way of voting against him in an off-election year." With Bush gone, liberals no longer have a blatant target at whom to direct a coordinated
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POPSRacially Exclusive Suburbs Across U.S. Dubbed the New 'Whitopia' Benjamin is not the first to describe this phenomenon. In his 2008 book The Big Sort, journalist Bill Bishop detailed how Americans have been parceling themselves out into increasingly homogeneous communities in which everyone votes for the same political party, goes to the same church and holds the same values. This situation, Bishop says, has its good and bad points. "The good part is you get this incredible variety from place to place; places zoom off into their own cultural trajectories. But what happens is people lose touch with those who disagree with them. What happens is a nation incapable of compromise; you have this kind of national stalemate."
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POPSThe Next Culture War "During this period, debt exploded. In 1960, Americans’ personal debt amounted to about 55 percent of national income. Our current cultural politics are organized by the obsolete culture war, which has put liberals on one side and conservatives on the other. But the slide in economic morality afflicted Red and Blue America equally. If there is to be a movement to restore economic values, it will have to cut across the current taxonomies. Its goal will be to make the U.S. again a producer economy, not a consumer economy."
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POPSCultural Wisdom Seth always asks some interesting questions and in this post he wonders who, in the organization, communicates the cultural wisdom to their customers. He defines cultural wisdom as a form or "sophistication" about current social norms, values, fashions and design. It is obviously more than just that but it is hard to define and it is harder to utilize in your work with your target customers. The sad part is that your customers will assess their level of trust vs mistrust of you and your company if you don't try. How do you determine what is cuturally wise? How do you communicate it? Who is responsible for the interpretation and delivery of cultural wisdom in your organization? Share your thoughts at http://thirstyfish.info by clicking the comment link or tweet us a reply at http://www.twitter.com/thirstyfishinfo
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POPSEhrenreich: Recession wiping out black middle class And not because of cultural values, which declined far more precipitously among whites. "Wall Street greed" created an unemployment rate among black families rising at four times that among white ones - "greatest loss of wealth for people of color in modern U.S. history." It's a recession among white families, but a full-blown depression among people of color.
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POPSThe destruction of the black middle class More: Yet in the depths of this African American depression, some commentators, black as well as white, are still obsessing about the supposed cultural deficiencies of the black community. In a December op-ed in the Washington Post, Kay Hymowitz blamed black economic woes on the fact that 70 percent of black children are born to single mothers, not noticing that the white two-parent family has actually declined at a faster rate than the black two-parent family. The share of black children living in a single parent home increased by 155 percent between 1960 to 2006, while the share of white children living in single parent homes increased by a staggering 229 percent. Just last month on NPR, commentator Juan Williams dismissed the NAACP…The fact that there is an ongoing recession disproportionately affecting the African American middle class – and brought on by Wall Street greed rather than "ghetto" values – seems to have eluded him.
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POPSStill Second Class Citizens “There’s a perception in Washington that you can throw little bits of partial equality to gay people and that gay people will be satisfied with that. Gay Americans aren’t just another political special interest group. They are Americans who are actively discriminated against by federal laws. If the president is to properly honor the memory of Stonewall, he should get up to speed on what happened there 40 years ago, when courageous kids who had nothing, not even a public acknowledgment of their existence, stood up to make history happen in the least likely of places."
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POPSRiyadh Shows First Movie in Decades (women not permitted) Well that's no fun. Who are you going to throw popcorn at during the movie? And why hasn't Gloria Steinem complained that The Saudi Palace doesn't have a ladies room? And based on what Obama has recently taught us, churches and synagogues are about to open in Saudi Arabia. Since "Islam has a proud tradition of tolerance" and there are "over 1,200 mosques within our borders." Side note: Instead of doing two clips, I included a few photos of the strongest sandstorm to hit the Saudi capital Riyadh in decades (March 2009).
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POPSBack Door Censorship The Frankfurt School was dedicated to the destruction of the West. One of its founders, Willi Munzenberg, stated explicitly that its goal was to: ...organise the intellectuals and use them to make Western civilisation stink . Only then, after they have corrupted all its values and made life impossible, can we impose the dictatorship of the proletariat. According to an article by Timothy Matthews in Catholic Insight, key strategies to achieve this goal were: 1. The creation of racism offences. 2. Continual change to create confusion. 3. The teaching of sex and homosexuality to children. 4. The undermining of schools' and teachers' authority. 5. Huge immigration to destroy identity. 6. The promotion of excessive drinking. 7. Emptying of churches. 8. An unreliable legal system with bias against victims of crime. 9. Dependency on the state or state benefits. 10. Control and dumbing down of media. 11. Encouraging the breakdown of the family. Munzenberg stated
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POPSProvocative Biocultural Bullet Points * Diseases are disease entities. * If you divide truths in half you get half-truths. * If you divide knowledge, your knowledge is divided. * Pain is always in your head because your brain is. * Nothing human is universal or atemporal. * Embodiment is necessarily biological, and knowledge is always embodied. * A fact is a socially produced conclusion. * Bodies are always cultural and biological. * Selves today are embodied, biologized, shaped by medical knowledge. * The body—whose, what, when, where—is always in question. * The boundary between organic and inorganic is no longer clear. * Technology has become human; humans have become technologies. * Patients and experimental subjects are part of the decision-making process. * Science can be postmodern; postmodernisms can be scientific. * Biology, as a science, cannot exist outside culture; culture, as a practice, cannot exist outside biology."
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POPSThe Culture Warriors Get Laid Off "Here, at last, is one piece of good news in our global economic meltdown: Americans have less and less patience for the intrusive and divisive moral scolds who thrived in the bubbles of the Clinton and Bush years. Culture wars are a luxury the country — the G.O.P. included — can no longer afford."
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POPSOn Stewardship As a member of society I am a steward of social and cultural values. -- nice thought
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POPSThe Holistic Kabbalah This is a cool site on the kabbalah-it has that "free site built in the nineties" look, but the information is worth it.
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POPSJust cuz I Wanted to Know I hear the term "Zionist" thrown around all the time, so I decided to look it up. There are plenty of articles out there decrying Zionism just as there are plenty that praise it or it's off shoots. I opted for as near to neutral as I could get. I'm not interested in the insults/finger pointing/stereotypes/or prejudices found in the media. I wanted historical facts. Now I realize that Wikipedia is not the be all/end all source, but it's a good start. I hope everyone will read, research further and better understand. And no, I'm not a Zionist or Jewish, or Israeli. Just a middle class American female trying to understand. Peace.
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POPSDifferent conflicts demand different resolutions The first interesting result was that offering money or material goods in exchange for sacred ones did not make the sacred goods less valuable but more. Expressions of anger and disgust and of the willingness to use violence actually rose among moral absolutists when a deal involving giving up some sacred value was sweetened with material incitements, the second, more optimistic, result was that the absolutists who rejected with contumely the offer of profane money (or peace) for sacred landwould accept deals that involved their enemies giving up things that they considered sacred . The paper cites both Israeli and Hamas leaders saying that they could make peace if only the other side would apologise for 1948, or recognise formally Israel's right to exist. Demanding this kind of wholly intangible mutual surrender of pride makes no sense on a utilitarian calculus, and yet it may be the only thing to unlock the situation.
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POPSCountdown has begun for the first Arabic Online Game
The second Closed Beta Test of Arabic Rappelz will be finished soon at 30 December 2008, and Open Beta Test is going to during the half of January 2009. So finally the Dream will be real for the Arabic gamers who are yearning for playing with completely Arabic Online game. Game Power 7, Arabic online games publisher, promised gamers in the Middle East and North Africa to bring them the most famous and beautiful Massively Multiplayer Online Games(MMOG). Moreover the games would be completely translated, culturalized, serviced and operated within the region. The commercial release of Arabic Rappelz is expected to be launched at the beginning of February 2009. About Game Power 7 Game Power 7 emerged as the first online gaming publisher in the MENA regions, promising to bring gamers in the Arab region the best MMO games. Game Power 7 is a subsidiary of Weiss Investment, which operates a major regional media hub that is sensitive to the region's cultural values. Weiss Investme
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POPS60th anniversary of Universal Declaration of Human Rights
For women around the world, domestic violence and discrimination in employment are a daily reality. Minorities suffer stigma, discrimination, and violence in developed and developing countries. The right to information is denied to millions through censorship and media intimidation. Poverty is our greatest shame. At least one billion very poor people, 20% of humanity, are daily denied basic rights to adequate food and clean water. While gross inequalities between rich and poor persist, we cannot claim to be making adequate progress toward fulfilling the ambitions set down 60 years ago. As we mark this anniversary, the question is how to protect the inherent dignity and equal rights of all people. A key part of the answer lies in more effective systems of accountability, so that rights are recognised and laws enforced. Yet if we take a long, hard look at what has been achieved over the past six decades – and at what remains resistant to all our efforts – then it is also clear
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