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POPS10 legs, 4800 books and 1 passion On a trip this month into the rutted hills, where about 300 people regularly borrow books from him, he reminisced about a visit to the National Library in the capital, Bogotá, where he was stunned by the building’s immense collection and its Art Deco design. “I felt so ordinary in Bogotá,” Mr. Soriano said. “My place is here.” Very nice story....
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POPSVolcanic lightning may have sparked life on Earth In the classic Miller-Urey experiment, a mixture of gases and water that Miller thought were present on early Earth was heated and zapped with electricity to mimic lightning. This created five identifiable amino acids. Yet Miller tested three versions of his spark flask. One of the two lesser-know setups – the volcanic apparatus – created 22 amino acids that could be positively identified. The findings could also give clues to life on other planets. The conditions found in the volcanic spark flask could conceivably have once existed on Mars or Titan, and Bada is developing instruments that could detect tiny amounts of amino acids frozen beneath the surface of the Red Planet.
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POPSBuilding society eats building society I don't know much about financial institutions in Britain, but I found it encouraging that they still apparently have building societies. In South Africa all the major building societies demutualised about 20 years ago, suckering their members with stories of "windfalls", which they have since lost many times over in the bank charges levied by the commercial banks that replaced the building societies. Am I right in surmising that Northern Rock, which recently had a big bail out at the expense of the taxpayers, was also one of these demutualised ex-building societies? And what are these Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac that have had similar bail-outs in the US? The first sounds like an escort agency rather than a financial institution. I realise that "image" is deceptive, but who in their right mind would lend to or borrow from an institution with a name like that?
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POPSCuckoo's Nest' Mental Hospital to Be Torn Down Although "Cuckoo's Nest" was filmed here, neither the movie nor the 1962 Ken Kesey novel on which it was based makes any specific references to Oregon State Hospital. Kesey drew on his experiences working at a veterans hospital in Palo Alto, Calif., and set his satirical story at an unnamed institution in Oregon. Milos Forman, the director, lived at the institution for six weeks and had his actors study patients, according to a 1975 account in Rolling Stone magazine. Jack Nicholson, who played the rebellious Randle Patrick McMurphy, became depressed because of what he saw, including electroshock being administered to a patient.
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POPSNo, wait! The cooling is really global warming! Covering their tooshes, the liberals are now saying that global cooling we are going to experience over the next decade is just a temporary effect. These liberal lunatics still want your money to combat what they fear will be global warming some ten years after the cooling has happened. Next, when the ice caps begin to grow, they will claim the effect of the ocean currents was stronger than they expected and the dreaded globabl warming will occur in the next century. Another example of the fact that liberalism is a mental disorder.
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POPSDemocracy Saves America's Reputation The great thing about America is not that we are a perfect country, but that we are always a redeemable one. We have a certain mercurial charm (not to mention idiosyncratic way of doing things) that somehow manages to bring us back from the brink. The world will never truly hate us, because we can and do change. And somehow, America has a knack for putting its best foot forward at just the right crucial moment. Roger Cohen, also, is a shining example of editorial journalism in an age of glib semi-literate rants. He takes in the whole world, and manages to make sense of it, noticing all the right details.
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POPSExpenses At U.N. Balloon 25 Percent U.S. Demands on Body Help Drive Up Budget The additional funds in the latest request would be used to renovate the landmark U.N. headquarters in New York, fund war-crimes investigators in Lebanon and pay $100 million to build a reinforced, attack-resistant U.N. headquarters building in Baghdad. But they would also be used to pay nearly $7 million for a 2009 anti-racism conference in Durban, South Africa, which Washington believes would serve as a forum to bash Israel. Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, insists that the organization will have to find savings or live without its new programs. On the eve of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Bush spoke before the U.N. General Assembly and challenged the institution to enforce the resolution requiring Saddam Hussein to disarm, suggesting that the institution's reason for being was at stake: "Will the United Nations serve the purpose of its founding, or will it be irrelevant?"
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POPSWas Hillary Clinton Advisor Strobe Talbott Manipulated By Soviet Intelligence?
Talbot was perhaps the perfect target for this type of Russian intrigue, bringing to the State Department his considerably biased opposition to taking a hard line against the Soviets, "In his previous career as a journalist Talbott had been a critic of the Reagan-Bush policies of peace through strength that had precipitated the collapse of the Soviet Union." By way of temperament, not only was the Russophile Talbott personally hostile to militarily resisting Soviet tyranny, he is a long-time disciple of what is known as World Federalism, a philosophy which seeks to diminish national sovereignty and work towards world government, hence his support of the corrupt United Nations Like most key Clinton associates Talbott has not retired from the political game. He has run the liberal Brookings Institution since 2002 and now serves as an adviser to the Hillary Clinton campaign. Should she become president it's hard to imagine that Strobe Talbott will not once again loom.
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POPSSA police arrest 1,500 in church The South African Police now seem to be playing a game of "blame the victim" was we are seeing scenes that we have not seen since aparthneid ended in 1994. The government has watched as Zimbabwe turns into a fascist dictatorship and hundreds of thousands of refugees have poured into South Africa. The SA government has said very little to the government that has driven them out, but instead treasts the refugees almost as badly as they are treated at home. During the South African liberation struggle South African exiles found homes in neighbouring countries, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia and Mocambique, as well as places further away such as Britain, Sweden and other European countries. Yet now when we have our freedom and others flee to us for asylum, we persecute them,
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POPSBrave New World-Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) Aldous Huxleys vision of the Future, where a World State dictates that individuality be sacrificed for the sake of 'stability. The clip contains an introduction to the first chapter, with direct links to other chapters.
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POPSReasons Not To Go To War - #21 The common perception of Walter Reed is of a surgical hospital that shines as the crown jewel of military medicine. But 5 1/2 years of sustained combat have transformed the venerable 113-acre institution into something else entirely -- a holding ground for physically and psychologically damaged outpatients. Almost 700 of them -- the majority soldiers, with some Marines -- have been released from hospital beds but still need treatment or are awaiting bureaucratic decisions before being discharged or returned to active duty.
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POPSTurmoil Grows for Wolfowitz @ World Bank "Her initial supervisor at the State Department was Elizabeth Cheney, whose father, Vice President Dick Cheney, has been a longtime associate of Mr. Wolfowitz." The Bush administration is showing all the signs of a ship that is nearly sunk. This bunch of corrupt incompetents need to be thrown out of office. Impeach Bush and Chaney. They are complete f***-ups.
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POPSIndie Bookstores trying to stay alive in the era of the internet Bookstores trying to stay alive in a world where most order online...this reminds me of that bad Meg Ryan/Tom Hanks movie a couple years back- 'you've got mail'... anyway, seems like some bookstore owners are being really creative in ways to keep their small stores unique enough that shoppers still need to/want to keeping going.
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