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POPSThis American Life Stories of people who believe a book changed their life. It's a romantic notion, and one reason we believe it is because we want to believe our lives can be changed by something so simple as an idea " or a set of ideas contained in a book.
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POPSNelson Mandela Mandela spent 27 years in prison for being a leader in the fight against apartheid, South Africa's oppressive system that dictated where blacks could work or live. As vice-president of the illegal African National Congress, he led a campaign to sabotage the country's economy. He was arrested, and in 1964, sentenced to life in prison. At his trial, Mandela declared, "I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.
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POPSOverpopulation, finally The unpopular truth is that education only works if the educatee has the congenital intelligence to appreciate what’s being taught. We can train anyone to do just about anything, if there’s an immediate reward for it, like on the job training. But we can’t convince them it’s a good idea unless they have the brains for it. Every idea matches an intelligence level and above; if someone is below that level, the idea seems to them like magic, silliness or witchcraft and they ignore it when at home.
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POPSOur Incredible Shrinking Democracy Democracy requires at least three things: (1) Important decisions are made in the open. (2) The public and its representatives have an opportunity to debate them, so the decisions can be revised in light of what the public discovers and wants. And (3) those who make the big decisions are accountable to voters.
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POPSBuild Good Credit Without Credit Cards Borrow from Yourself " This is the easiest method to establish your own credit history without a credit card. Buy a Certificate of Deposit (CD) from a bank. Then take out a secured loan against the CD for the same amount of time. Put the money you borrowed in a high-yield checking account. Then use the money you borrowed to payback the secured loan. You'll be establishing a credit history and earning interest on your checking account and CD. There are some downfalls to this method. You need the starting capital to fund the CD. You could end up paying more interest on the secured loan than earn through your CD and checking account; however, it's probably less than what you'd pay in fees and interest if you used a credit card. Just make sure to weigh the true costs before going down this road.
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POPSShackleton's whisky recovered A team from the New Zealand Antarctic Heritage Trust have managed to extract five cases, three of Chas Mackinlay & Co's whisky and two containing brandy made by the Hunter Valley Distillery Limited, Allandale (Australia), which were abandoned by the expedition in 1909 as encroaching sea ice forced a hasty departure.
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POPSBill O’Reilly Meets Jon Stewart, Not Much Hilarity Ensues
This means that their discussion was quite substantive, with Stewart playing the role of the guy who wants to be a cenrist but can’t find where the center is in a world gone mad, and O’Reilly mostly concerned with defending the honour of his network as a news organization, and trying to argue that Stewart’s “cyclonic perpetual emotional machine” is only driven by a couple of guys on the network. It really does seem that this is the only criticism that stings at Fox News, which has gone out of its way to argue that its news shows are separate from its opinion shows. (I think this doesn’t really wash if you’ve watched most of their news anchors, apart from Shepard Smith. The m.o. of many Fox News anchors is to report the news in such a way as to provide talking points for the “opinion” shows. And in any case, opinion shows on cable news tend to present themselves as news sources.) The fact that Stewart is more respectful of O’Reilly than he was of Crossfire is intere
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POPSLos Angeles May Now Require Rainwater Harvesting Designing water management systems which help to control rainwater runoff at its local source, with a variety of small, cost-effective natural systems, instead of massive expensive and inefficient chemically intensive treatment facilities, is very smart planning. In drought-stricken southern California, this proposed regulation truly demonstrates visionary leadership. Water recycling and more sustainable water management practices are an inevitable part of our future.
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POPSThe west owes Haiti a bailout. And it would be a hand-back, not a handout There is no connection between these two events. But in the public imagination maybe there should be. The world cannot yet find $1bn in debt relief for Haiti, the poorest country in the western hemisphere, a country that spent more in 2008 servicing its debt than it did on health, education and the environment combined and that has now been flattened. But, over a weekend, a single country could rustle up $85bn to keep a single company in business. It is an obscene reminder that, in the world of global capital, distressed assets are still more valued than distressed people.
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POPS"Digital Nation": What has the Internet done to us? ven if you're too distracted by your iPhone to care whether continual distractions will take a toll on our souls, "Digital Nation" should beat a little sense into you. You know the routine: A kid says proudly, "I never read books. I'll be honest. I can't remember the last time I read a book"; an English professor tells the camera, solemnly, "I can't assign a novel that's more than 200 pages"; we learn of a Kaiser Family Foundation study indicating that 8- to 18-year-old kids spend 53 hours a week using media
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POPSA Young Glenn Gould Plays Bach Great find by Robert B., who captions this clip: “the teenage Glenn Gould at his Canadian home.” Gould is playing here J.S.Bach’s Partita #2. Give this a minute to get going. It’s a pretty awesome display of Gould’s talents.
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POPSWomen-only food sites open in Haiti The WFP said the coupons will go to women because they tend to be responsible for the household food supply. The aim is to reach two million people over two weeks.
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POPSDaily Literature I love this site as it gets my brain working before breakfast each day. Although others may question this ;-)
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