When a cold-blooded hitman bursts into a hotel room to execute someone, the intended victim does something unexpected: he asks the hitman for a moment to make his peace with God. The hitman lowers his gun as the victim takes a chain with a crucifix from around his neck, holds it tightly in his hands, kneels down with eyes closed, and begins moving his lips in silent prayer. Now peaceful and resigned to his fate, the victim opens his eyes, looks at the hitman, and says, "I forgive you." The hitman hesitates, looking confused and even regretfully at a peace he's never seen before, but then pulls the trigger anyway.Here is the link to the first episode on Hulu.
That's the incident that propels the story in the new online web series on Hulu.com, and across the DBG network, called The Confession. Shot partially in the Basilica of St. Patrick's Old Cathedral in New York City, the series stars Kiefer Sutherland as the hitman, and John Hurt as the priest to whom he contentiously goes to gain an understanding of what he witnessed.
I’ll come right out and say it: Children repulse me. They frighten me. They make me anxious. Babies all look the same, and they are all ugly. Toddlers are praised for doing ordinary things like speaking and waving. Children have a comment and a question about everything. And adolescents—if YouTube sensation Rebecca Black has taught us anything—are totally self-absorbed and completely lacking in any sense of shame. Each stage of development brings with it new things to annoy me.And:
I don’t understand why children are instantly adorable and appealing. It’s not okay for a strange man to stand next to me and hold my hand. Adults don’t stare at me with fascination on public transportation. And I am certainly not impressed when a fully grown woman colors inside the lines. Why should these things be permitted, even praised, when done by children? I would love to return to the pre-Victorian days, when childhood didn’t exist—children were simply small adults, and they were expected to act like them.
My hatred for children is not crippling. I can make it through life coexisting with these little people under a ceasefire. I assume that they, like many predators, can sense fear, and will therefore leave me in peace. But there are no guarantees in life—not even the success of birth control. Here’s to hoping no little accident ever “blesses” my life.Pity the man who becomes the father of this little "accident."
We’re right there with you Julie! From your lips to God’s ears! Incidentally, Julie’s Facebook page lists her only two Interests and Activities as “Being a Bitch” and “Being a Hypocrite.”
Word.
What’s my point? Oh, just that maybe, First Amendment rights notwithstanding, railing against innocent children from a Jesuit university newspaper is in poor taste. And also to provide one more data point confirming the raging epidemic of female narcissism.
"This confusion is purely the result of Obama's decision to get America into the war and then immediately relinquish American command. Never modest about himself, Obama is supremely modest about his country. America should be merely "one of the partners among many," he said Monday. No primus inter pares for him. Even the Clinton administration spoke of America as the indispensable nation. And it remains so. Yet at a time when the world is hungry for America to lead -- no one has anything near our capabilities, experience and resources -- America is led by a man determined that it should not.This, by the way, contains a great sentence.
A man who dithers over parchment. Who starts a war from which he wants out right away. Good God. If you go to take Vienna, take Vienna. If you're not prepared to do so, better then to stay home and do nothing."
Well, let's see how that paper multilateralism is doing. The Arab League is already reversing itself, criticizing the use of force it had just authorized. Amr Moussa, secretary-general of the Arab League, is shocked -- shocked! -- to find that people are being killed by allied airstrikes. This reaction was dubbed mystifying by one commentator, apparently born yesterday and thus unaware that the Arab League has forever been a collection of cynical, warring, unreliable dictatorships of ever-shifting loyalties. A British soccer mob has more unity and moral purpose. Yet Obama deemed it a great diplomatic success that the League deigned to permit others to fight and die to save fellow Arabs for whom 19 of 21 Arab states have yet to lift a finger.
No word yet on what the cause is. Paramedics swooped in to check him out but it sounds like they found nothing seriously wrong. He’s following up with his doctor but has no news to report yet. Did this ever happen on news broadcasts years ago or are we really seeing lightning strike twice in the span of five weeks? And no, “Dan Rather always sounded like this” isn’t an acceptable answer.
Despite efforts to stem the tide of family flight, the population of children in San Francisco continues to ebb.
Families that remain in The City are bucking the trend that has plagued San Francisco for years as the number of children — defined as people up to 17 years old — has dropped from 181,532 in 1960 to 107,524 today, according to the latest U.S. Census Bureau figures. The 2000 census counted 112,802 youths.
The decrease is disappointing news for city officials, who have attempted to counter the family-flight trend by creating more affordable housing, improving schools and cutting costs, such as a college savings account for kindergarten enrollees.
It is a myth that the ancients only or normally read out loud - a myth we appear to want to believe, since the evidence against it is strong. In Euripides's Hippolytus, the King, Theseus, confronted with the corpse of his wife, Phaedra, finds a letter fastened to her hand. While the Chorus expresses its foreboding, Theseus silently reads the letter (which contains Phaedra's false accusation that Hippolytus has raped her). Then he has an outburst, whose meaning takes force from his silent reading. The letter, he says, "shrieks, it howls horrors insufferable ... a voice from the letter speaks ..."On the other hand, this book - points to the development of "word spacing" and devotional reading as elements of silent reading in 12th Century Scholasticism. (Referring to Paul Saenger, Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).)
Plutarch, in a speech called "On the Fortune of Alexander", tells us that, when Alexander the Great was silently reading a confidential letter from his mother, Hephaestion his friend "quietly put his head beside Alexander's and read the letter with him; Alexander could not bear to stop him, but took off his ring and placed the seal on Hephaestion's lips". Plutarch tells this story four times: the point is that Alexander does not have a fit of temper at his friend's presumption: he behaves "like a philosopher" simply reminding his friend that such letters are highly confidential.
I consulted Alberto Manguel's A History of Reading (Flamingo), which was published in the same year as Gavrilov's and Burnyeat's articles. Manguel believes that the passage in Augustine is "the first definite instance [of silent reading] recorded in western literature". He is well aware of the evidence to the contrary, but he finds it unconvincing. Thus Manguel: "According to Plutarch, Alexander the Great read letter from his mother in silence in the fourth century BC, to the bewilderment of his soldiers." [My italics.] But these bewildered soldiers are Manguel's importation. They have been brought into the story in order to make it seem exceptional. Manguel shamelessly fudges the argument.
In order to read aloud well, especially when a text is written without breaks between words (as was classical practice), it seems important to possess the gift to read ahead simultaneously. Silent reading is a necessary adjunct to the kind of reading aloud for sound and sense Nietzsche admired. What shocked Augustine was that Ambrose read silently in front of visitors and refused to share his reading matter, and his thoughts, with them. But Augustine was perfectly capable of silent reading, and describes a key moment in his conversion as a moment of silent reading with a friend. As Gavrilov concludes: "... the phenomenon of reading itself is fundamentally the same in modern as in ancient culture. Cultural diversity does not exclude an underlying unity."
Saenger argues that the shift from oral to print culture-- or rather from oral to silent reading, with various other attendant changes-- was brought on by the adoption of word spacing from the 1100s to 1400s, not the printing press. If this is so, then word spacing deserves to be regarded as an innovation on par with Gutenberg's invention of the printing press.And:
Roman authors like Plutarch and Cicero praised reading aloud as an aid to memory, and internal evidence suggests that letters and orations were meant to be spoken rather than read. Further, "books of the ancient Romans were highly unsuited to visual reading and study," containing "neither punctuation, distinction between uppercase and lowercase letters, nor word separation." This and other evidence suggests that "silent reading was an uncommon practice in classical antiquity." (370)
Word spacing began as an aid to reading aloud, but it soon gave rise to two new practices: silent copying and (paradoxically) silent reading. Scribes who copied texts were supposed to do their work in silence. Previously they had developed means of copying in silence: most notably, such as breaking texts into lines of 10-15 characters, which they could remember in their entirety. Adding word spacing "increased reading speed and permitted more rapid copying." (378) The enforcement of silence became stricter as word spacing diffused through scriptoria, and scribal iconography shifts from showing scribes receiving dictation from angels, to scribes copying from texts.So, there seems to be something of a debate on the subject.
Reading likewise became a silent activity, we evidenced by changing interpretation of the rule of silence. Before about the 10th century, "oral group reading and composition [were] in practice no more considered a breach of silence than were confession or the recitation of prayers. Cluniac monks were judged to have violated their vows of silence only when a word they spoke was not written in the text." (383) But later, "silence" comes to mean real silence.
Once reading became silent, the design of spaces for reading-- namely libraries-- could also change. Carrels had been developed in the early Middle Ages to let monks read aloud or dictate, and few reference books had been needed in a period in which memorization of Scripture was the central intellectual challenge of a life. In the late 13th century, libraries were relocated to central halls, and "furnished with desks, lecterns, and benches where readers sat next to one another. " (396) Services also changed: lending periods grow, as readers are able to work through books more quickly, and "reference books were chained to the lecterns so that they could always be consulted in the library." (396)
France, in all its feline self-indulgence, was happy to claim for decades its tolerance and vocation for absorption and fraternization with the Arabs, especially while de Gaulle could irritate the Americans by truckling to Arab anti-Semitism, and the French elites could sit in their cafes waving their smoldering Gitane or Gauloise cigarettes and snifters of cognac or absinthe about, extolling the virtues of French trans-Mediterranean Arabophilia (in refreshing contrast to America’s hypocrisy and bigotry vis-à-vis its black population).And this:
Anyone who knows France knew that as soon as the militant Islamists in France provoked the French by seriously disturbing their enjoyment of their magnificently sumptuous country, the best wined and dined nationality in human history, sharing one of the world’s most distinguished cultures in every field with only 20 or 30 million others apart from the 60 million French themselves, the French public, almost in unison, would throw down the pious mask of fraternal egalitarianism and lower the truncheons of their well-practiced police on the ethnically covered heads of the real infidels.Good stuff.
A simple, primal threat.
For me, the final nail in the coffin of the current series was pounded in with one word: phosphorous. Phosphorous. I can't even remember what the point of the phosphorous is now. I think it has something to do with missing DNA and breeding. Or something. Anyway, the show's most recent "dramatic" revelation is that the "V's" not only want to breed with us, they want to harvest the best parts of our DNA in order to further their own genetic evolution.
Wow. That is so boring.
You know what the original Visitors wanted to do to us? TAKE ALL OUR WATER, AND EAT US. That speaks to whatever primal fear human beings have about what might happen were aliens to show up on our doorstep. Let me reiterate: THEY WANTED TO EAT US. Why does the current show make it all so complicated, with weird DNA extraction machines and whirling giant helixes and phosphorous? The original Visitors shipped people off to FOOD PROCESSING PLANTS. Now that's a battle I want humanity to win!
Barack Obama has now been responsible for firing more cruise missiles than all other Nobel Peace prize winners combined.
He’s still in 2nd place for number of Arab deaths caused (and 3rd place for Muslim deaths) behind Yassir Arafat and Mikhail Gorbachev.
On the other hand, the reality of human uniqueness is equally chilling to those who stake their existence on the idea that humans are not unique.Of course, options 2 and 3 don't square with Occam's razor.
The first proposition, that we humans are unique and special, appears quite absurd. It contradicts all that we have discovered during the last five hundred years about the true nature of the universe and our place in it.
We are not special: the Earth is not at the center of our solar system, the solar system is not at the center of our galaxy, and our galaxy is not at any special position in the universe. Our placement in space and time seems to be random and unremarkable.
Moreover, we humans, along with every other form of life, have evolved to our present state in accordance with natural selection. There’s nothing special about us.
Why, then, would it even be conceivable that earthlings are destined to be the very first species to make a noticeable mark on the universe?
If we reject proposition 1, then we must choose between propositions 2 and 3.
There is a crucial distinction between the second and third propositions. The former relies on choice, while the latter implies restriction by some force or law of the universe.
It seems strange to imagine, as suggested by proposition 2, that all extraterrestrial civilizations would, without exception, choose to expand or exist in such a way that they are completely undetectable to us. If proposition 2 is correct, it requires every one of potentially hundreds, thousands, or even millions of advanced worlds to make the exact same decision. We might expect some to do so, perhaps even most, but all? That defies logic.
So we are left with the third answer. Whatever civilizations have come before us have been unable to surpass the cosmic roadblock. They are either destroyed or limited in such a way that absolutely precludes their expansion into the visible universe. If that is indeed the case—and it would seem to be the most logical explanation for Fermi’s Paradox—then there is some immutable law that we too must expect to encounter at some point. We are, effectively, sentenced to death or, at best, life in the prison of a near-space bubble.
Call the national media! A firebombing attack just took place an abortion center in Kalispell, Montana! Tea Party violence strikes again! Call the Department of Homeland Security! These Christian Taliban extremists must be stopped!
Oh wait. Yes, a homemade incendiary device was thrown in the general vicinity of the All Family Health Care abortion center in Kalispell, Montana on Thursday night, March 17. At a pro-life demonstration on a public sidewalk. Specifically, at an elderly woman participating in a 40 Days for Life prayer vigil.
According to the Thomas More Society, the pro-life law center representing 40 Days for Life:
Karen Trierweiler, coordinator of the 40 Days prayer vigils in Kalispell, said that a homemade incendiary device was thrown at one of the vigil participants, an elderly retired woman, by an assailant—as yet unidentified—as she walked on the public sidewalk near the abortion provider’s premises. The victim did not see the bomb-thrower, nor did she see the bomb—akin to a “Molotov cocktail”—before it exploded on the sidewalk behind her, making a loud popping noise like a big firecracker as it burst into flame. Apparently the victim was unhurt.Ah. That’s very different. Never mind.
The Chinese Fleeceflower:The Chinese use this plant in their traditional medicine for kidney health, strong bones and hair restoration, and as a mild laxative, and it's ... Hey, wait a second ...
OK, weird, it's a root that looks like a little dude. But that's a rare, onetime fluke, right? It's not like that's what this species typically looks like or anything.
A New York Times investigation over the past year has found widespread problems in the more than 2,000 state-run homes. In hundreds of cases reviewed by The Times, employees who sexually abused, beat or taunted residents were rarely fired, even after repeated offenses, and in many cases, were simply transferred to other group homes run by the state.
And, despite a state law requiring that incidents in which a crime may have been committed be reported to law enforcement, such referrals are rare: State records show that of some 13,000 allegations of abuse in 2009 within state-operated and licensed homes, fewer than 5 percent were referred to law enforcement. The hundreds of files examined by The Times contained shocking examples of abuse of residents with conditions like Down syndrome, autism and cerebral palsy.
At a home upstate in Hudson Falls, two days before Christmas in 2006, an employee discovered her supervisor, Ricky W. Sousie, in the bedroom of a severely disabled, 54-year-old woman. Mr. Sousie, a stocky man with wispy hair, was standing between the woman’s legs. His pants were around his ankles, his hand was on her knee and her diaper was pulled down.
The police were called, and semen was found on the victim. But the state did not seek to discipline Mr. Sousie. Instead, it transferred him to work at another home.
Roger Macomber, an employee at a group home in western New York, grabbed a woman in his care, threw her against a fence, and then flung her into a wall, according to a 2007 disciplinary report. He was then assigned to work at another group home.
Note that in the United States, 10,667 people made allegations of child sexual abuse between 1950 and 2002 against 4,392 priests. This represented around 4 percent of the 109,694 priests who were ordained and active during that time. Given that there were 13,000 allegations of abuse in one state representing one-fifteenth of the U.S. population in 2009 alone, this indicates that state social workers are 951 times more likely to abuse a disabled person under their supervision than a Catholic priest was to sexually abuse a child.
This doesn't excuse what the pedophile priests did nor does it excuse the diabolical decision of the Vatican to permit homosexuals to join the priesthood in the first place. They eminently deserve whatever punishment they receive, in both this world and the next. But it puts the scale of their evil deeds into the proper statistical perspective. And while one could argue that physical beatings and psychological abuse are not as bad as sexual abuse and should be omitted from the comparison, one also has to keep in mind that none of the crimes committed by the priests rose to the lethal level either.
It also shows the tremendous hypocrisy of those who simultaneously claim that there is no truth to religion and yet attempt to hold religious individuals to a higher standard than they hold anyone else. Social workers and schoolteachers commit far more abuse, sexual and otherwise, than religious leaders, especially if religious leaders who are openly in direct violation of their religious standards are omitted from the equation as logic dictates they must be. (Why should we be surprised that a man who rejects the Church's stand on homosexuality should also reject the Church's stand on the sexual abuse of children or anything else?) But it is quite clear from the reaction of the state agency to the crimes of its agents that the Catholic Church's reaction to the crimes committed by its priests was an entirely normal bureaucratic one. It can, and should, be condemned by Christians who believe in a higher standard for Christian leaders. Secular individuals, who don't believe in any such standards, have no such grounds for similar condemnation, especially when they show so little interest in the far more common crimes committed by secular agents of the state.
In an explicit denial of his public duty, the then attorney general of the state of California (now governor) refused to defend the law of the state in the Perry v. Schwarzenegger case concerning the constitutionality of Proposition 8. His reason? He is personally opposed to it.A couple more:
Irony No. 2: after decades of hearing Catholic legislators (whose job, admittedly, is to make the law, not enforce it) claim that they could not let their personal views on a public issue (in this case, abortion) influence their public role, we now have the chief law enforcer in the state doing exactly that.
Irony No. 4: During the presidential campaign, Obama stated that he favored preserving marriage as the union of one man and one woman. In a change of course, he more recently had said he favors the repeal of DOMA, but asserts it should be done through the legislative process, not the courts. Now, he has taken an action that does exactly that, i.e., repeals DOMA by the decision of a federal court judge.
The affirmation of marriage does not discriminate against anyone and casts no judgments on how people work out their intimate relationships, but rather affirms the most fundamental good in any healthy society. But if we were to admit the argument that it did, it would bring us to irony No. 5: In the court case challenging the constitutionality of the legislation that allowed the revival of cases of sexual abuse of minors by clergy that had expired long in the past, the federal district court judge ruled against the plaintiffs. With regard to the argument that the Church was targeted, he did not deny this claim (the evidence was apparently too overwhelming that we were). Rather, he argued that it is not unconstitutional to target a religious group, as long as their access to worship is not impeded. Why, then, would it be unconstitutional to target a sexual minority (which defining marriage in the law does not do, anyway) as long as their freedom to engage in sexual activity as they choose is not impeded?
In two-thirds of the countries where persecution of Christians is most severe, there are strong indications that the problem has worsened, the report claims. It also goes on to underline the severe threat to the Christian presence in parts of the Middle East, especially Iraq and the Holy Land.Makes sense. Christian countries don't persecute. Non-christian countries do.
Speaking about fears for the future of Christians in Iraq, Archbishop Warda said: “We wonder if we will survive as a people in our own country.
“The Persecuted and Forgotten? report and the work of Aid to Church in Need are critical to us as members of the worldwide Christian community. This information will significantly contribute to building international support and solidarity for Christians around the world where our human rights and our religious freedom have been stripped away.”
Persecuted and Forgotten? also highlights the threat of Islamist extremism, not just in the Middle East but also in north Africa and parts of Asia. And it reveals that authorities in a number of Communist or atheistic countries are reasserting state control over religious activity.
An Astoria woman has been sentenced to 30 days in jail for raping a 14-year-old boy at a party.The line in the Jimmy Buffet song goes "fifteen will get you twenty," but he was talking about years, not days. Apparently, for women in Oregon, 14 will get you 30 (days).
The Daily Astorian reports that 35-year-old Julie Diane Green pleaded no contest last Friday to rape and endangering the welfare of a minor.
Prosecutors said Green held a party for her children and their friends last August, allowed several minors to drink alcohol and then had sex with one of the visiting 14-year-olds.
Green also must serve 36 months on probation for the rape conviction and another 36 months for the second conviction. She also must register as a sex offender.
The victim's mother told a judge her son couldn't face coming to the courtroom for Green's sentencing.
The Patriot Game" is an Irish ballad about an incident during the Border Campaign launched by the Irish Republican Army during the 1950s to bring about the reunification of Northern Ireland with the Republic of Ireland. It was written by Dominic Behan, younger brother of playwright Brendan Behan, to the tune of an earlier folksong, "The Merry Month of May". It tells the story of Fergal O'Hanlon, an IRA Volunteer from Ballybay, County Monaghan who was killed at the age of 20 in an attack on Brookeborough Royal Ulster Constabulary barracks in County Fermanagh on 1 January 1957. The operation was devised and led by Sean Garland, an IRA man from Dublin. Another volunteer, Seán South from Limerick, was also killed during the raid.I drank one night at a faux-Irish pub in San Diego called "The Patriot Game." The pub had pictures of the men executed after the Easter Uprising of 1916 and had anti-British slogans painted on faux-brick walls. That experience made me realize that the great promise of America is getting away from the ancient debts that history places on us and getting a fresh start, free from ancestral grudges.
Addison was hired in Sept. 2007 to teach graduate students under a one-year contract as an assistant professor of psychology. The following July she was awarded a two-year contract which stated that she could be fired only for just cause, according to the complaint. The contract also held that she would be deemed to have her contract extended unless it was formally canceled. It was not canceled as she never received negative performance evaluations, the complaint says.Well, sure, that's transgressive.
At about the same time that she started working at JFK, she started performing under a pseudonym, Professor Shimmy, at the Hubba Hubba Revue, a burlesque show in San Francisco. Addison performed intermittently with the revue, which typically plays to about 400 to 600 people every month, said producer and co-founder Jim Sweeney. Hubba Hubba, like traditional burlesque, intertwines partial striptease (down to pasties and g-strings), dance and comedy with parody and references to popular culture.
Addison also belonged to a group of performers who sought to bring social commentary to their acts. Some of her performances tell stories, including one in which she performs with a classically trained male ballet dancer. He is dressed as a snow fairy and she as the abominable snowman (as can be seen in the YouTube video below). As they remove nearly all of their clothes, their gender identities are revealed to be the opposite of what they first seemed.
I want to slap everybody in a fifty-mile radius of the Event writers' room. There's obviously a buildup of psychic energy all around the producers which is causing them to have narrative arc constipation when it comes to anything other than scenes where people repeat the plot we already knew and then somebody reacts with a "you are totally crazy" face. What I'm saying is that I BLAME SOCIETY for the scene where Michael drops Leila and Sam off with random aliens "for protection" and says "I love you" when Leila asks, "There's something, isn't there?"Also, the character are really boring and should be sucked through that quantum tunnel that is the McGuffin of the show. Apropos of that problem, Twain's 10th Rule of Writing offers:
And then, in the annoying scene I mentioned earlier, Leila overhears the aliens arguing about whether to support Sophia or Thomas. She busts in and says, "Tell me what's going on - I'm one of you!" The guy replies, "It's your father's place to tell you." WHY? Is there an alien knowledge patriarchy that nobody told us about? Nobody can tell her anything even though she's been through kidnappings and murders and is now being hidden somewhere? It makes no sense! Again, I BLAME SOCIETY. The writers don't actually have an explanation, and it's YOUR FAULT. All we'll get is an endless repetition of the scene where Leila expressionlessly asks for information and is told that only daddy can tell her.
Plus, folks, how bad and important can this difference really be? So she'll probably age more slowly than a regular human, and apparently she'll be able to melt her face and store earbuds in her chin the way Thomas' henchman does. Obviously human DNA and alien DNA is similar enough that she can have children with a human. Could it be that this whole "difference" thing is just a sad ploy to keep us interested in the Most Boring Person Ever? I BLAME SOCIETY. Also, I blame hipsters. And Cthulhu. And porn. And videogames! I'm sure they have something to do with this.
10. They require that the author shall make the reader feel a deep interest in the personages of his tale and in their fate; and that he shall make the reader love the good people in the tale and hate the bad ones. But the reader of the "Deerslayer" tale dislikes the good people in it, is indifferent to the others, and wishes they would all get drowned together.
Of course Sean also had to show what a badass he is by randomly going into a bar, trying to hit on some chick, and then getting into a fistfight with her boyfriend. Seriously, why is this scene in the show? Just to make us hate Sean even more? I think maybe the chief of staff isn't the only person who has misjudged his audience.I think that the character of Sophia violates Rule Number 3:
Maybe this was a meta moment for the show, and barroom fight was a metaphor for what it's like to be the audience for this show? So the boyfriend is the audience, the girl is the studio, and Sean is the show. And the show is punching you in the face! Punch! Whoa, this show is badass because it can punch you in the face! I'm just guessing here - could that be the subtle meaning that we're supposed to get out of this episode?
3. They require that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others. But this detail has often been overlooked in the "Deerslayer" tale.
“So you have to wonder: why do we still buy those magazines and watch those television programs when they should just make us more dissatisfied?” said Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick, associate professor of communication at Ohio State University.Somehow you knew that the study would just have to be done by someone with a name like "Sylvia Knobloch-Westerwick."
In the new study, Knobloch-Westerwick found the answer through an ingenious experiment that measured how long people looked at pictures of models in an online magazine.
Results showed that people who are dissatisfied with their appearance will indeed avoid these photos of ideal bodies – unless the photos are surrounded by articles suggesting that they, too, can look like those models.
So basically, the feds wanted to spend $2.6 billion, plus any cost overruns or operating costs, to put in a train for which there was no evident demand. Why? Because they didn't have any better options, and they wanted to build a train. The California High Speed Rail project, following similarly sound reasoning, is going to start out in California's not-very-populous Central Valley, because . . . it's easier to get the right of way. Never mind that there aren't any, like, passengers.Philip Klein at the Spectator has more:
As the Authority was fighting off the "train to nowhere" label, it had some good luck -- incoming Republican governors John Kasich and Scott Walker turned down high-speed rail stimulus funds granted to Ohio and Wisconsin, saying they couldn't afford the rail projects given their states' fiscal problems. The Obama administration acted quickly to divert $624 million of the rejected money to the California project. The new infusion, with matching amounts from California, allowed the Authority nearly to double the proposed first segment, to 123 miles, and make it reach just north of Bakersfield (though short of its downtown).Who cares about the economics of the plan. They've got funding and Central Valley is flatter than where most Californians actually live!
Officially, the Authority gives several explanations for the location of the first section. The cost of building in the Central Valley and of acquiring any land is cheaper, and the terrain is much flatter.
First I did a double take. He said what? I read it again and the shock waves followed.Much more disturbing is the always sober Michael Barone's take:
A beleaguered Presi dent Obama has told aides it would be so much easier to be the president of China, The New York Times reports.
There are two ways to read the remark, which is attributed to anonymous aides. One is that Obama resents the burden of global leadership that comes with the American presidency. The other is that he longs for an authoritarian system, where he need tolerate no dissent.
Under either or both interpretations, his confession carries a dose of self-pity that means Obama has hit a wall.
He is in over his head, and he knows it.
Even before the horror in Japan, the president faced a litany of nightmares. From Libya to Iran to Afghanistan to gas prices, unemployment and rising debt, Obama is surrounded by serious trouble.
His responses range from halfhearted to wrongheaded. Nothing is working. Unhappy voters already repudiated his first two years and might fire him when they get the chance. It is a moment that brings home the truth of the sign on Harry Truman's desk: "The buck stops here."
Yet my suspicion is that it's not the problems per se that have Obama envying a lower rung on the global ladder. It's that he regards them as endless distractions that keep getting in the way of his transformative agenda.
He is a man of the faculty lounge who wants a blank slate so he can remake the nation into a more perfect place, as he sees it. Remember, he greeted his election with the messiah-like claim that future generations would say, "This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal."
But damn it, the country and the world won't cooperate. Because he has no significant experience that would give him a framework for any other response, he is reduced to vaporous platitudes that dispirit allies and embolden adversaries.
But the steps the United States has taken may well have bolstered Gadhafi's determination to crush the rebellion against his regime.And:
On the one hand we supported the United Nations resolution giving the International Criminal Court jurisdiction to prosecute Gadhafi and his minions. That means we have blocked off any escape route to a safe retirement.
On the other hand we have interpreted the Security Council resolution ordering an arms embargo as applying to the Libyan rebels as well as the Gadhafi regime.
Or at least that's the interpretation of State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley. An anonymous White House source said maybe the resolution doesn't apply to the rebels.
The White House has said the United States will send aid to the rebels and that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will meet with their transitional council next week.
Aid, not arms; a meeting, but (unlike France and Portugal) no official recognition. The president seems to be voting "present" once again.
It is understandable perhaps that he has not chosen to impose a no-fly zone, as Senate Foreign Relations Chairman John Kerry has urged; military intervention is an enterprise with serious risks.
But the hesitancy to recognize the rebels as an alternative to a regime the president has said "must go," as urged by former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, is harder to fathom.
Meanwhile, the news is that Gadhafi's forces have captured cities both in eastern and western Libya that were held by the rebels. Military outcomes are hard to predict, but the time when we might have helped turn the tide against Gadhafi may have passed or be rapidly passing. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told a Senate committee he thought Gadhafi would survive.
Obama seems to be voting "present" on the budget as well. His proposed budget for 2012 failed to address the looming problem of entitlements identified as critical by his own bipartisan economic commission.
He designated Vice President Biden as his chief negotiator with congressional leaders on budget issues, at which point Biden embarked on a presumably previously scheduled seven-day trip overseas. Plenty of practical politicians would regard that as an insult meriting a two-word response with a tough letter to follow.
Voting "present" may be a responsible move for a legislator genuinely undecided about which way to go. But an executive voting "present" is choosing a course with consequences whether he likes it or not.
After the palaces had fallen, vase-painters went on for a couple of generations reproducing, without much conviction, imitations of the style to which men were accustomed,” A.R. Burn tells us:
This is the length of time it usually takes for a people, after a far-reaching social change, to get habits which are no longer relevant thoroughly out of their system; for the first generation of survivors are still people brought up under the old order, and the second generation are people brought up by people who were brought up under the old order. This is one reason why a century, a period of about three generations, so often seems to have a distinctive character. In the third generation, vase-painters at Athens and perhaps elsewhere had at last lost the feeling that the decadent sub-Mycenaean was in some way the “right” style, and a fresh start is made with proto-geometric, the folk art of a vigorous and talented people.
Note a few things about this statement. First, unlike the original, incendiary claim, which was repeated by more than 100 people, including Jack Shafer (who has now issued a correction) and Radley Balko, this tweet was repeated by only 8 people. And it’s termed a “clarification” — which is just amazing, given that her original claim was flatly wrong. She needs a “correction” and not a “clarification.” She needs to admit she was wrong. Isn’t it the job of an “ombudsman” to be clear about admitting error? Isn’t it the job of an “ombudsman” to care about facts in the first place, and not make statements with no basis in facts? I summed it up in my last e-mail to Shepard:Well, maybe she thinks that people who are not among the "predominately white, liberal, highly educated, elite" core that makes up NPR's listeners are too stupid to notice that she can't be trusted.
In other words, you never had a basis for saying what you said, and you are not clearly admitting error.
This is NPR’s regard for facts??
Apparently so.
And this brings me to the film's other strength, which is that director Hardwicke has managed to craft a chick flick that is clearly a horror film. Unlike the widely-misunderstood Jennifer's Body - which was mistakenly marketed to men, and failed accordingly - Red Riding Hood knows that women crave blood and bite marks as much as they crave romance and weepies. Sure, there is a bit of romance in Red Riding Hood, and some steamy rolls in the hay with broody woodsman boy, but horror is the point. The werewolf is the point. The romance part is sort of like the romantic bits in an action movie - they're there so the hero can get kissed, and so we know there's a payoff for her when she's done dealing with serious monster business. I think this may be the first horror-action film that openly acknowledges that women buy the vast majority of tickets to horror films, and that they do it not because they want to snuggle with boyfriends but because they love to be completely creeped out.
What happened as a result is that we unwittingly cultivated a core audience that is predominately white, liberal, highly educated, elite. "Super-serve the core" — that was the mantra, for many, many years. This focus has, in large part, brought us to our success today. It was never anyone's intention to exclude anyone.So, amazingly, a system based on public funding managed to use taxpayer money to build an entertainment and propaganda vehicle that (a) catered to exactly the kind of people who don't need a subsidized system and (b) are the kind of people who are in control of government and the levers of public opinion.
But we have to accept — unapologetically — that this is the franchise we've built.
We have to look at this because the criticisms that are coming at us — whether they're couched in other things — do have some legitimacy. We must, as a starting point, take on board some of this criticism. Before we can set a path, we have to own this.
One choice, at this transformational moment, is to say, "We are satisfied with what we are doing. We — in radio — are providing 11 percent of America with an extraordinary service." If this is our choice, we need to carefully consider whether we warrant public funding and, if so, what the rationale would be.
Easter Sunday -- the celebration of the resurrection of Jesus Christ -- is for Christians the culmination of their community life, expressing the heart of their faith. But among Baptists and other evangelicals, an intentional period of preparation for their holiest day is often understated or absent -- in contrast to Christmas, the other great Christian observance, typically the focus of elaborate church festivities for weeks prior to Dec. 25.Some Baptists are apparently rediscovering the benefits of a kind of liturgical calendar:
Many Baptists are seeking to reclaim that pre-Easter focus -- historically called Lent -- which has been an integral part of many Christians’ experience since the earliest years of the church.
“It’s a biblical thing, not a made-up Catholic thing,” says Kyle Henderson, pastor of First Baptist Church in Athens, Texas, acknowledging a robust Baptist suspicion of spiritual practices seen as too closely associated with the Roman Catholic Church or its distant cousins, the Anglicans.
“I’m surprised at how much our folks have embraced [the services],” says Lynn Turner, senior associate pastor at First Baptist, who is staff liaison for the events. “Not just accept -- embrace.”And the reality that we are embodied spiritual beings for whom knowledge of the truth involves more the intellect:
Turner attributes that response in part to the use of prolonged silences.
“It’s simply a time to be quiet,” she said. “Complete silence is a form of prayer we almost never use. We don’t have periods of sustained silence -- of even three to five minutes -- in our traditional worship services. The rhythm of the contemplative service is different.”
First Baptist in Athens does not rigidly adhere to a liturgical Christian calendar, but Henderson estimates he has led some sort of Ash Wednesday observance during his 14 years at the church -- normally during a regularly scheduled Wednesday evening prayer service.
Typically, the service involves members writing their sins on slips of paper, collecting and burning the folded pieces of paper, and having their foreheads marked with the sign of the cross using those ashes.
Zolli was quite clear. In his book Antisemitismo (today, like all of his works, almost impossible to find), he wrote: "World Jewry owes a great debt of gratitude to the holiness of Pius XII for his repeated and pressing appeals for justice on behalf of the Jews and, when these did not prevail, for his strong protests against evil laws and procedures."It seems thought that even 50 years after his death, Zolli is still being made the subject of vicious personal attacks. This is from the Wiki article on "Hitler's Pope":
Miriam, too, believes the image of a pontiff imprisoned by his own fears in the Vatican palaces is a myth.
"When the Nazis asked for 50 kilograms (110 pounds) of gold to spare the lives of the inhabitants of the Portico d'Ottavia (a Jewish quarter of central Rome)," she recalls, "my father, almost in despair, rushed to the Vatican and spoke with the Vatican's treasurer, Monsignor Nogara. Through Nogara, Pius XII made it clear to my father that the Vatican would place at his disposition the 15 kilos (33 pounds) that were lacking. From that moment, my father established a relationship of human sympathy, almost of identification, with Pacelli."
Unfortunately, the gold did not serve to placate the Nazis. Between the 15th and 16th of October, the Germans rounded up the Jews of the ghetto.
"My father," Miriam recalls, "had understood this as well: how things would turn out in the end. He did not trust the SS and previously had suggested to the leaders of the community that they bum the registers and make the people flee the city. They thought his fears exaggerated, that he was a prophet of doom. This was in part because they had received assurances from the chief of Rome's police force, Carmine Senise. In the end, nearly all of them died."
According to Miriam Zolli, the Catholic daughter of Israel Zolli (later Eugenio Maria Zolli after he became a Catholic), World War II Chief Rabbi of Rome, Cornwell does not consider the context of what he calls Pius XII's silence in the face of Nazism and anti-semitism. In a 1998 interview with Inside the Vatican, she stated, "Pacelli and my father were tragic figures in a world where every moral reference point had been lost. An abyss of evil had opened up, but ordinary people did not believe it and the great ones — Roosevelt, Stalin, de Gaulle — were silent. Pius XII had understood that Hitler would not descend to pacts with anyone, that his madness was of the type that could explode in any direction, in the massacre of German Catholics or in the bombing of Rome, and he acted in the light of this knowledge. The Pope was like a person constrained to move in solitude among the lunatics of an insane asylum. He did what he could. His silence must be read in that context, as an act of prudence, not of cowardice." Zolli has stated that his apostasy was motivated by spite based on perceived grievances against the Italian Jewish community.That last sentence is untrue - it is simply a bit of internet defamation against someone who lived through an experience that the coward who wrote the sentence could never comprehend.
After a stroke left her severely brain damaged, Rachel Nyirahabiyambere, a legal immigrant from Rwanda, has been given a court-appointed guardian who has ordered her feeding tube removed against her family’s wishes. From the story (h/t Wesley Smith):This kind of thing is happening all to often, and, notwithstanding popular stereotypes, it is not limited to people in a persistent vegetative state. Catholic hospitals, among other have made it a practice to withhold food and water from elderly patients who are responsive and conscience, but who may be suffering Alzheimer's or in need of medical treatment. That, of course, is nothing less than murder, but since it gets masked under the double-talk of "ethicalese" and respecting a patient's autonomy, although the autonomy is not being exercised by the patient, the professionals who have become habituated to these kinds of murder no longer seem to recognize them as murder.
On Feb. 19, Ms. Nyirahabiyambere’s feeding tube was removed on the order of her court-appointed guardian. Her six adult children — including two United States citizens — vehemently opposed that decision. But they were helpless to block it when Georgetown University Medical Center, frustrated in its efforts to discharge Ms. Nyirahabiyambere after she had spent eight costly months there without insurance, sought a guardian to make decisions that the family would not make.In emails to their mother’s guardian, Nyirahbiyambere’s sons say that they are fine with “do not hospitalize”/”do not resuscitate” orders, but insist that their mother would not want her feeding tube removed. Said one son:
“Now we are powerless spectators, just watching our mother die,” said Mr. Ndayishimiye, 33, who teaches health information management at the State University of New York’s Institute of Technology in Utica. “In our culture, we would never sentence a person to die from hunger.”
“Ending someone’s life by hunger is morally wrong and unrecognized in the culture of the people of Rwanda”to which Mrs. Sloan had the audacity to respond:
“You have asked for understanding about your culture and that is exactly what I am trying to do. Feeding tubes are not part of your culture, are they?”So, the United States should treat every immigrant the same way he or she would be treated in their native country? That’s the standard for healthcare in America? Unbelievable. And this woman calls herself a nurse??
According to the article, Sloan insists that the issue with the feeding tube essentially has nothing to do with insurance and money, but later admits that her client’s life is ultimately just not worth the cost of keeping her alive:
“Hospitals cannot afford to allow families the time to work through their grieving process by allowing the relatives to remain hospitalized until the family reaches the acceptance stage, if that ever happens…Generically speaking, what gives any one family or person the right to control so many scarce health care resources in a situation where the prognosis is poor, and to the detriment of others who may actually benefit from them?”Does anyone else find it tragically ironic that, after escaping genocide and hunger in her native land, this woman is now being starved to death in the country she fled to for freedom? As of late Thursday afternoon last week, Ms. Nyirahabiyambere was still alive – almost two weeks after the feeding tube was removed.
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