Playing with toy weapons helps the development of young boys, according to new Government advice to nurseries and playgroups.Pacifist parents who try to ban weapon-like toys
I am so afraid that without Bhutto's restraining sobriety, that part of the world will begin (or accelerate, depending on your perspective) a terrible downward spiral. What chance do all of the oppressed women in the Islamic nations have now? (I'm sure many of them are getting the message: Take off the chador, babe, and you'll just SEE what happens to you.)Rather than persuade you on "the error of your ways"
I want to go back to yesterday.
"My forecast is that around 2050, the state of Massachusetts will be the first jurisdiction to legalize marriages with robots," artificial intelligence researcher David Levy at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands told LiveScience.Of course, there's already a scary warning video about dating robots. But warning videos are usually worthless, so I figure robot relationships are practically a done deal.
"Even Hitler didn't wake up going, 'let me do the most evil thing I can do today'," said Will. "I think he woke up in the morning and using a twisted, backwards logic, he set out to do what he thought was 'good'. Stuff like that just needs reprogramming.Some of that's true. But I don't believe that Hitler really thought he was doing good.
"It is an awful and disgusting lie. It speaks to the dangerous power of an ignorant person with a pen. I am incensed and infuriated to have to respond to such ludicrous misinterpretation. Adolph Hitler was a vile, heinous, vicious killer responsible for one of the greatest acts of evil committed on this planet."To me it sounds like he's not denying the quotation, just the media interpretation that "Hitler was a good person."
"This is an industry that largely employs women, and this gives them an opportunity to raise funds for a crime that affects women," said state Rep. Ellen Cohen, a Houston Democrat who sponsored the legislation.No, Representative Cohen, you're not GIVING ANYTHING to ANYBODY involved in strip clubs. You're TAKING something from them.
My father didn't have it all, but I believe he was at peace with himself and the life he led. Shouldn't that be enough for any of us?The elevation of "peace with yourself" to a supreme attainment is interesting, recalling Stoicism and Buddhism. It's a bit jarring to find in a business newspaper.
The teens were awakened in the middle of the night and given the shock treatments, at times while their legs and arms were bound. One teen received 77 shocks and the other received 29. One boy was treated for two first-degree burns.Now 7 people are fired for cooperating with the prank caller. It occurs to me that the whole thing is like a repeat of the notorious Milgram Experiment. I've heard that Milgram couldn't run his experiment under current ethical research rules. But pranksters don't worry too much about ethics.
Kipling had a very high reputation, especially as a short story writer, early in his career, but fell out of critical favor later, I think mostly for bad reasons. Certainly he had politically unpopular views--but they weren't the views generally attributed to him.I think that's 100% correct.
"As I remember it, 'Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening' was written in just about that way, after I had been working all night long on 'New Hampshire.' But I must admit, it was written in a few minutes without any strain.Daniel Smythe quotes Frost on complicated interpretations:
Critics think I had that sort of all-night struggle before I could write the little poem I'm talking about. They must have heard me say, sometime or other, years back, that I wrote all night, in connection with 'Stopping by Woods.' But the thing I worked on all night had no struggle in it at all. It's in print, called 'New Hampshire.'. . .Then, having finished 'New Hampshire,' I went outdoors, got out sideways and didn't disturb anybody in the house, and about nine or ten o'clock went back in and wrote the piece about the snowy evening and the little horse as if I'd had an hallucination--little hallucination--the one critics write about occasionally. You can't trust these fellows who write what made a poet write what he wrote. We all of us read our pet theories into a poem." (Quoted in full by Cramer, p 77)
This is the one that gets into the anthologies more than any other. The greatest danger is that your mind will get too busy over a poem. You don't have to get busy at all - just let it alone. On the whole, it's kind of fun. You don't go to the circus to make a lot of discussion - you go to gape. There is nothing hard in that poem, but there is a busy-mindedness that makes people want to know about a little thing like that. What is there to know about it? Somebody wants to know what his name was. Will the woods really fill up? That is the way they treat it. They they write, 'Who was that going home that way at night?' Their teacher puts them up to it. (p 57)Reginald Cooke has a transcription of Frost responding to deathly interpretations:
I believe Ciardi and others have said- some people have said - it's a suicide poem. That's going some. But he thinks it's a death poem. And you can see how you could say: "Life is lovely, dark and deep." See. "But I have promises to keep. I have heaven to go to, you know." Like that. You could do that. That analogy's in it. Many others. You say, just as I could right now: this is a lovely dark and dep situation, but I've got something [else], I ought to teach a class tomorrow, or something like that. Promises to keep. Company of an evening. One o'clock in the morning - two o'clock. An appropriate thing to say - that stanza is lovely, dark and deep, but I've got to be getting along. And it doesn't mean that you're going to do anything bad. Sounds rather good to me. I can see that someone might turn it the other way, like the old saying, "I used to be afraid to go home inthe dark, but now I'm afraid to go home at all." [Laughter] They think it's like that. And all this metaphorical play and all! (p 123)Of course, this just addresses
You are no doubt right that Bush’s stature and power cause him to be hated (or loved) more than we would an ordinary man. And yet, on some level, does our integrity not require that we judge him by the same human considerations that we would judge a relative or neighbor or acquaintance?I think this can be a hard perspective to maintain, especially when one's hopes and fears are tied up in some politician's performance.
And this is how we die. We die in profligate numbers. Just under 15,000 Americans were murdered in 2006. Roughly half of them -- 7,421 -- were black. African-Americans are 12 percent of the nation's population.It's a terrible problem. As Pitts indicates, it's mostly black-on-black crime. He wonders why we haven't had a government task force on the topic. It's a good question.
Newspapers abroad have been filled with headlines bemoaning the plight of Australian Santas ordered not to say “ho, ho, ho” for fear of offending women or scaring children, and British Santas sent to boot camp to lose weight.And our own acting Surgeon General is getting in the act:
“It is really important that the people who kids look up to as role models are in good shape, eating well and getting exercise. It is absolutely critical.”Is it really critical
In Sudan on Friday, thousands of Sudanese, many armed with clubs and swords and beating drums, burned pictures of Gibbons and demanded her execution.
Sudan's top clerics said in a statement Wednesday that the full measure of the law should be applied against Gibbons, calling the incident part of a broader Western "plot" against Islam.Hatred on the streets!
His youthful essay The Necessity of Atheism, which got him expelled from Oxford, was simply an outpouring of ignorance. For instance, it presumed that the First Cause argument is designed to prove that the universe had a temporal beginning, which is just a mistake.I think Donway's wrong about this. You'll note he doesn't actually sketch out the first cause argument, nor does he quote from Shelley's essay.
There Is No God. This negation must be understood solely to affect a creative Deity. The hypothesis of a pervading Spirit co-eternal with the universe remains unshaken.So Shelley attacks a version of The Argument which tries to prove temporal beginning for the Universe.
The mutakallimūm, theologians who used reason and argumentation to support their revealed Islamic beliefs, developed the temporal version of the argument from the impossibility of an infinite regress, known as the kalām argument. For example, al-Ghāzāli (1058-1111) argued that everything that begins to exist requires a cause of its beginning. The world is composed of temporal phenomena preceded by other temporally ordered phenomena. Since such a series of temporal phenomena cannot continue to infinity, the world must have had a beginning and a cause of its existence, namely, God (Craig 1979, part 1). This version of the argument enters the Christian tradition through Bonaventure (1221-74) in his Sentences (II Sent. D.1,p.1,a.1,q.2).Good golly,
Add to this, that in tracing an eternal succession of objects, it seems absurd to enquire for a general cause or first author. How can any thing, that exists from eternity, have a cause, since that relation implies a priority in time, and a beginning of existence?
In such a chain, too, or succession of objects, each part is caused by that which preceded it, and causes that which succeeds it. Where then is the difficulty? But the WHOLE, you say, wants a cause. (Dialogues on Natural Religion Section 190)To those who have followed this far -
It is urged that man knows that whatever is must either have had a beginning, or have existed from all eternity, he also knows that whatever is not eternal must have had a cause. When this reasoning is applied to the universe, it is necessary to prove that it was created: until that is clearly demonstrated we may reasonably suppose that it has endured from all eternity.I conclude that he made no such bonehead mistake.
After allegedly helping Drew Peterson haul a large container that was warm to the touch from a bedroom, a male relative of the former Bolingbrook police sergeant told a friend Oct. 28 that he was afraid he had just helped Peterson dispose of the body of his wife, Stacy Peterson, a source close to the investigation said.But the Sun-Times says:
Prosecutors have not called Morphey to testify before a grand jury examining the 23-year-old woman's disappearance because he has "memory lapses" about loading the barrel into Peterson's GMC Yukon Denali, the source said.This story just won't let up.
"We are extremely concerned about this continuing pattern," Director of Health David R. Gifford said in a written statement.Concerned. Good.
Financial chiefs in London have pointed to the booming public offering business and the omnipresent construction cranes in the financial district, calling their industry “the house that Sarbanes-Oxley built.”Sarbanes and Oxley,
Perle, pleasaunte to prynces payeTolkien rendered it this way:
To clanly clos in golde so clere,
Oute of oryent, I hardyly saye,
Ne proued I neuer her precios pere.
Pearl of delight that a prince doth pleaseAnother transitional poem, probably by the same author, is "Sir Gawain and The Green Knight." Here, the main narrative is head rhyme, but each verse paragraph is ended with a quatrain in end rhyme.
To grace in gold enclosed so clear
I vow that from over orient seas
Never proved I any in price her peer.
Do we think our parents and our grandparents and our great grandparents didn't live in danger and didn't have difficult problems? Do we think the Second World War was less difficult that our struggle with Islamic terrorism? Do we think that the Great Depression was a less difficult economic struggle for people to face than the struggles we're facing now? Have we entirely lost perspective of the great challenges America has faced in the past and has been able to overcome and overcome brilliantly? I think sometimes we have lost that perspective.Amen to that.
However, having a little extra weight actually seemed to help people survive some illnesses — results that baffled several leading health researchers.Pardon me. There's no real conundrum. There are just trade-offs. For some diseases, you're better off a little heavy. For other diseases, you're better off skinny as a rail.
“This is a very puzzling disconnect,” said Dr. JoAnn Manson, chief of preventive medicine at Harvard’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital. “That is a conundrum.”
It seems to many that while there is a clear road to learning music, gardening or watercolours, poetry lies in inaccessible marshland: no pathways, no signposts, just the skeletons of long-dead poets poking through the bog and the unedifying sight of living ones floundering about in apparent confusion and mutual enmity. Behind it all, the dread memory of classrooms swollen into a resentful silence while the English teacher invites us to 'respond' to a poem.The worst thing about the "respond" request, for me, is that it's so vague. Spew something forth from your deepest soul? What if nothing much comes up?
With such aggressive and often misleading drug company marketing, it's too easy for advertising — instead of doctors or proven results — to influence families' health decisions.I like the way it's just "families" he's worried about. No point talking about "individuals' decisions", is there?
The fact is, it's the right of drugmakers to advertise their products using whatever non-fraudulent language they choose, and it's the right of consumers to buy those products if they like, without the control of a nanny state seeking to prevent "overuse" of drugs.Finally, imagine that you have invented a new product that can save lives. Don't you think you have a right to tell people about it? If it's a life-saving product, wouldn't a 2-year ban mean more lost lives?
It is as close to being a total art as the race has invented. It can tell, like science, what is-but more, it can tell what ought to be.Emphasis mine. Miller is usually thought of as a naturalist, but here you can see his idealistic side coming out. Without that idealistic side, I don't think he would have kept all those theater seats filled all those years.
"Gee, I wouldn't want to be in there doing those things when 100 people are coming by with binoculars and looking into the bushes," Lill said. "But it doesn't seem to bother them."If authorities are really serious about eliminating this conflict, they should just license both groups - at exorbitant fees - so neither group can afford to walk in the woods!
Identity thieves aren't necessarily using the internet to perpetrate their crimes — in fact, most are sticking to low-tech methods such as stealing letters from traditional mailboxes, according to a new study.Here in the Windy City, the latest "identity theft" case comes from our local transit agency, the CTA:
The CTA Inspector General investigated after a customer noticed unauthorized activity on a credit card account used for CTA fare. Days later, Chicago Police contacted the CTA regarding a similar complaint and the investigations were combined, the release said.Uh oh. I have a CTA pass that works like that!
"Do we have some (expletive) security in this building," Maher yelled, "or do I have to come down there and kick his (expletive)?"Then, when the guy resisted the guards, Maher personally went into the audience to help push the guy out the door.
W.D. Howarth wrote: "On the whole, Romantic drama often strikes us as lacking the metaphysical dimensions provided by the traditional systems of religious thought, such as had been present in Greek tragedy as well as in Shakespeare's and Racine's."This has me scratching my head. The Romantics were big on metaphysical speculation. The editor comments:
This lack of a "metaphysical dimension", of tragic grandeur, has been a criticism since the first appearance of Hugo's plays, and his use of chance, coincidence and curses is usually compared unfavourably to the imposing gravitas of the classics (Greek, Elizabethan or Racinian).It's true that fans of classic tragedy sometimes attack the Romantics this way. But the editor parries and thrusts:
But what is "fate" in Oedipus? An absurd prediction by an oracle that if a lawfully married couple should conceive a child, then that child would kill his father and marry his mother. Why? No reason is given! How does the prediction come about? By a series of improbable coincidences.Too true.
Some English people have resorted to pulling out their own teeth because they cannot find — or cannot afford — a dentist, a major study has revealed.Well, we knew English dental care was in a precarious state, from looking at photos of their celebrities. Still, how did it come to this?
Six percent of those questioned in a survey of 5,000 patients admitted they had resorted to self-treatment using pliers and glue, the UK's Press Association reported.
...more than three-quarters of those polled said they had been forced to pay for private treatment because they had been unable to find an NHS dentist. Almost a fifth said they had refused dental treatment because of the cost.They tell you that it's free,
Despite all the advances--and expected job growth--in the computer industry, expect the number of programmers to increase by about 2% between 2004-2014. Why? Outsourcing. Americans who want a career in this field should find a specialization, like cybersecurity.2% growth qualifies for worst job prospects?
If some of America’s political leaders were in the military they would have been relieved or court-martialed long ago, Sanchez told a conference of military journalists.He thinks it was a mistake to disband the Iraqi Army, since a lot of them immediately took up arms as guerrillas. I believe we disbanded the police too, with similar results. Granted, the Iraqi army and police had been involved, collectively, in doing some very bad things. But maybe it would have been better to keep them on the payroll - where we could keep more of an eye on them!
Sanchez also railed on the media during his speech, saying that many people covering the war have political agendas and little concern about collateral damage when their stories are wrong. These members of the media are doing "a tremendous disservice to America," he said.He's also unhappy with his own career running aground on the Abu Ghraib scandal:
"Is America happy with destroying the careers and the reputations of everyone in the military chain of command involved in Abu Ghraib?"There's an old analysis of our involvement in Vietnam, by a military man, Harry G. Summers. He argued that our central mistake was assuming that we could not be defeated. From this followed a war fought by half-measures, with too little dedication of resources, lacking full commitment from the American people.
"I very much appreciate his human warmth," Tibet's exiled spiritual leader told CNN's Wolf Blitzer.These statements call out for a deeper explanation.
About 10,000 of the 45,000 registered runners chose to not race in the heat despite more mist stations, cooling buses and water-soaked sponges, while another 10,934 started but didn't finish, officials said.I've done this race many times, but I am glad I wasn't signed up for today.
