Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Minute-by-minute updates on the terrorism in Mumbai
The Indian Express reports: "ATS [Anti-Terrorist Squad] chief Hemant Karkare, two senior police officers and 100 others were killed when terrorists struck..." R. Sridhar reports for the Mumbai Mirror: "Mumbai under seige! Maharashtra under red alert Suspected terrorists attempt to hijack Taj Mahal hotel. Firing and bomb blasts 9 places in Mumbai. 60 killed, 30 injured.. Nigerian terrorist gang suspected to be involved. Attempt has been to capture Taj Mahal hotel" This is followed by a list of...
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Friday, November 14, 2008
To die or not to die?
The Optimum Population Trust has claimed that Britain, with a population of 60 million, can only sustainably support 17 million. Therefore, they wrote in a report, "if it is not possible to constrain affluence and technology, the only parameter left to constrain and reduce is population." In other words, as Tim Worstall paraphrased it for the Register, it seems like this group wants Britons to die. But the burial industry projects that British cemeteries will run out of space within 30 years....
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Sunday, November 9, 2008
Should college students study the meaning of life?
Last year, Yale law professor Anthony Kronman published an article saying that a college education ought to be a time between high school and a career when a young person can engage in directed and organized reflection upon the meaning of life. Such pursuits are hampered by encouraging students to narrowly specialize their studies and by certain ideological developments in the humanities that privilege studies of personal identity and politics over broader philosophical and historical questions....
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Saturday, November 8, 2008
The Evolutionary Purpose of Female Orgasm
Does female orgasm have an evolutionary purpose? Elisabeth A. Lloyd believes that many non-orgasmic women unfortunately feel abnormal due to their belief that orgasm is "natural" and that it serves an evolutionary purpose. Her book The Case of the Female Orgasm: Bias in the Science of Evolution says there is no such purpose. Lloyd agrees with a 1979 theory of Donald Symons, who said orgasms are vestigial in females, just as nipples are vestigial in males. Male and female embryos do not differ in...
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Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Wang and Gold: "Undecided Voters May be Smarter than You Think"
From a trippy-neat op-ed in the New York Times: Recent research in neuroscience and psychology, however, suggests that most undecided voters may be smarter than you think. They're not indifferent or unable to make clear comparisons between the candidates. They may be more willing than others to take their time — or else just unaware that they have essentially already made a choice. Neuroscientists have begun to tease out the brain systems that make decisions. Even when it takes no more than a...
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Thursday, October 16, 2008
Conservatives turn against Christopher Buckley
Christopher Buckley, a writer for the conservative National Review, endorsed Obama in the Daily Beast. Why not in the National Review? Because, two weeks earlier, when Kathleen Parker wrote for the National Review Online that her "cringe reflex is exhausted" from observing the circuitous campaignspeak of the Republican vice presidential candidate, she received 12,000 hate e-mails. So Buckley wrote for the Daily Beast of McCain: A once-first class temperament has become irascible and snarly; his...
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Monday, October 13, 2008
Convert or die
"Embrace Hinduism, and your house will not be demolished. Otherwise, you will be killed, or you will be thrown out of the village." Such was the threat reported last month by Solomon Digal, a lifelong Christian, of Orissa State, India. Digal then paid a monetary fine to his neighbors for talking to reporters. Some Hindus in the area believe that the Aug. 23 fatal grenade attack upon Swami Laxmanananda Saraswati at his ashram was committed by Christians, although the police maintain it was...
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Thursday, October 9, 2008
Kristof: The impoverished and voiceless
Nicholas Kristof's op-ed yesterday accused the Bush administration of unfairly cutting off U.S. AID birth control supplies to women in six African countries who receive supplies distributed through Marie Stopes International. The Bush administration complains that Marie Stopes International collaborates with the U.N. Population Fund in China, a country that requires women to have only one child and sometimes forces abortions; oddly, however, according to Kristof, the U.N. Population Fund "has...
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Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Bailouts!
On Sunday, Sept. 7, the U.S. Treasury placed mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into a conservatorship, essentially bailing them out with $200 billion that is to be partly paid by taxpayers. On Monday, Sept. 15, Lehman Brothers filed for the largest bankruptcy in history (it is $613 billion in debt) while Merrill Lynch averted similar financial trouble by selling itself to Bank of America for $50 billion. At this news, the Dow fell 504 points, the largest point drop in seven years since...
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Saturday, September 6, 2008
Moral Relativism
Does morality need to be justified by being good-in-itself, or is it sufficient to say that something is good because it is instrumental, pragmatic, or customary? here is an interesting excerpt from a discussion. what do you think? In response to three excerpts from the essay you quoted: but I don’t know why D should be considered good in itself, or why I should take it on as a value or duty of my own. These are two different things–indeed, they are nearly opposites! I would say that no actions...
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