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POPSFounding Fathers Planned Religious Openness Jon Meacham commentary that founding fathers wanted no state religion; wanted freedom of religion. They refuted the "Old World" practice of state sponsored and dictated religion which caused so much bloodshed.
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POPSGeorge Washington's Rules of Civility
Insightful precepts of civil social behavior; as applicable now as ever. As a young schoolboy in Virginia, George Washington took his first steps toward greatness by copying out by hand a list of 110 ' Rules of Civility & Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation .' Based on a 16th-century set of precepts compiled for young gentlemen by Jesuit instructors, the Rules of Civility were one of the earliest and most powerful forces to shape America's first president.... Most of the rules are concerned with details of etiquette, offering pointers on such issues as how to dress, walk, eat in public and address one's superiors. But in the introduction to the newly published Rules of Civility: The 110 Precepts That Guided Our First President in War and Peace , Brookhiser warns against dismissing the maxims as "mere" etiquette. "The rules address moral issues, but they address them indirectly," writes. "They seek to form the inner man (or boy) by shaping the outer."
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POPSGunman Kills 32 at Virginia Tech Updated down to: 32 dead via cnn. Updated to: 33 Dead via Wiccan Updated With Timeline: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18138327 via Wiccan. Updated to: 32 Dead via yanksrule. Updated to: 31 Dead via Wiccan, and Skwirl.
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POPSIn Virginia, Palin crowd believes every myth This sounds like The Onion, but it's a New York Times story covering a race-track rally by Sarah Palin. How have we failed, that Americans could be so poorly educated as to be vulnerable to such tripe?
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POPSNotice quiet on ACORN? There's a reason ... Two McCain-paid voter registration firms are embroiled in real voter registration scams - including the destruction of Democratic registrations. One was arrested Saturday. Not Mickey Mouse, this is the real thing.
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POPSOrigin of State Names GEORGIA. Named after King George II of England, who charted the colony in 1732. HAWAII. An English adaptation of the native word owhyhee, which means "homeland." IDAHO. Possibly taken from the Kiowa Apache word for the Comanche Indians. ILLINOIS. The French bastardization of the Algonquin word illini, which means "men." INDIANA. Named by English-speaking settlers because the territory was full of Indians. IOWA. The Sioux word for "beautiful land," or "one who puts to sleep." KANSAS. Taken from the Sioux word for "south wind people," their name for anyone who lived south of Sioux territory. KENTUCKY. Possibly derived from the Indian word kan-tuk-kee, meaning "dark and bloody ground." Or kan-tuc-kec, "land of green reeds", or ken-take, meaning "meadowland." LOUISIANA. Named after French King Louis XIV. MAINE. The Old French word for "province." MARYLAND. Named after Queen Henrietta Maria, wife of English King George I.
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POPSVoting Machines Changing Votes... Votes switch to McCain. http://byrd.senate.gov/byrd_email.html http://rockefeller.senate.gov/contact/email.cfm mailto:CongressmanMollohan@mail.house.gov http://www.house.gov/writerep/ http://www.rahall.house.gov/?sectionid=9§iontree=9
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POPSLiteral Answers to Rhetorical Questions
>>People commonly ask empty rhetorical questions that rarely receive any sort of sensible answer. When you have had your surfeit of poetical whimsy and are ready for some good, hard facts, come here to be set straight.The world would be much improved if those engaging in windy musings were more often brought up short by a nice, sharp definition or a pointed rebuke. Even the fantastical William Shakespeare, asking himself "Shall I compare thee to a Summer's day?" goes on (admittedly at excessive length) to list a number of reasons for answering in the negative.Of course, some questions are so ill-framed as to admit of no sensible answer. Example: Where have you been all my life? It so happens that this question has never been addressed to me; but if it were I should be at a loss to detail the many addresses at which I have resided and worked during the span of existence of some other person, even if I knew that person's precise date of birth. Such idle musings are best ignored.<<
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POPSWhere Is Atheism When Bad Things Happen? Hmm....I had noticed this but never really gave it much thought. Good points. Funny that the protests against religious expression never occur until a couple weeks or so after a tragedy like this. More than that you never see an atheist offering a shoulder to those who are suffering. These folk scatter faster at the outset of tragedy, when man's natural inclination is to turn to God, than do roaches at a the turning of a light switch. Suppose they are seeking similar dark corners?
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POPSConservatives Are Such Jokers "Most conservatives are more careful than Mr. Kristol. They try to preserve the appearance that they really do care about those less fortunate than themselves. But the truth is that they aren’t bothered by the fact that almost nine million children in America lack health insurance. They don’t think it’s a problem."
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POPSIraq Has Two Virginia Techs Every Day I've been thinking this to myself privately but didn't wanna seem insensitive, but now that juan cole is with me I can raise the issue. This is not to say that you can really compare deaths and loss and grief, but its something to think about.
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POPSVirginia Tech Massacre, Viewed From Abroad The conservative London Times writes “But why, we ask, do Americans continue to tolerate gun laws and a culture that seems to condemn thousands of innocents to death every year, when presumably, tougher restrictions, such as those in force in European countries, could at least reduce the number?”
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POPSWe Feel Like The Ghost, Not The Machine
" But it's time to bring experience back. Neuroscience has effectively investigated the sound waves, but it has missed the music. Although reductionism has its uses -- it is, for instance, absolutely crucial for helping us develop new pharmaceutical treatments for mental illnesses -- its limitations are too significant to allow us to answer our biggest questions. As the novelist Richard Powers wrote, "If we knew the world only through synapses, how could we know the synapse? Virginia Woolf, for example, famously declared that the task of the novelist is to "examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day ... the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness." In other words, she wanted to describe the mind from the inside, to distill the details of our psychological experience into prose. That's why her novels have endured: because they feel true. And they feel true because they capture a l
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