Free Capitalist
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As for Giuliani, I'm surmising here, but it isn't much of a stretch. My suburban mayor runs a town twice as large as Palin's town, and from the council minutes, I can tell the big issues in running a small town are the occasional zoning variance or capital expenditure. Palin's the one who made abortion an issue when running for mayor of her town, and the one who wanted to fire a librarian for not banning certain books she didn't like. Whatever you think about Giuliani, it's clear he had lots more important items on his agenda.There's a good Palin quote for that: being a mayor of a small town is a bit like being a community organizer -- except that you actually have responsibilities.
As for the church-going in the inner city, I don't know what city you live in. Maybe it's in Chicago, and maybe it's the South side, right next to Rev. Wright's church. What I have a lot of experience with is New York City and with the fountainheads from which "urban culture" springs into mainstream America (and thence into the world). I have driven through their neighborhoods, lived in them etc: they are not church-goers. The black folk who are church-going are not these urban gangsters as I've appropriately called them. They are instead middle class Americans who hate the poor urban culture, and who join the church to try and escape from its nihilism into normalcy and decent values.
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unlike some on this forum, I also can see through Palin's spell and can recognize her for what she truly is. She's an irrational, freedom-hating evangelical who distorts the truth to feed her insatiable desire for power. At least Chicago politicians are blatant in their desire for power. People like Palin are more insidious, and thus more dangerous. The most dangerous people aren't the ones who come across as smart and power-lusting. The most dangerous people are the ones who come across as "folksy" and "humble."As for Giuliani, he must have been fuming inside at having being forced to defend the "mayoral" experience of someone who ran a town 1/1000th the size of his. Clearly, he relished the fight, but it's equally clear to me he knows he's far more qualified to be VP than Palin.
Permit me to fall under her spell then, and ask how you could possibly know any of this? Were you reading Rudy's mind as he was talking? Is Palin evil "intrinsically", simply because she's evangelical? I mean sheesh.
it is no accident that a lot of people who consider themselves "disadvantaged," from the inner cities to rural areas, cling to religionRight, that's why urban gangsters are pious church-goers, and why 50 Cent is a religious icon.
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Whoops, a misprint
an extremely postan extremely interesting post
The essential fascism of the current Democrat Party and liberal establishment will be plain to see. They are haters and they hate our liberties most of all. The party of Henry "Scoop" Jackson and Joe Lieberman has been stolen by the Michael Moores, the Pelosis, and the Alex Baldwins of the world (forgive the synecdoche, pray do).Yeah it is really surprising to see staunch democracts, I mean people who might've frothed at the mouth at G.H.W. Bush, now finding the McCain/Palin ticket not only tolerable but even exciting. And it deals with more than that she's a woman, because they find this to be a pro-American camp while finding Obama's camp suspicious and corrupt. Who would've thought!
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There's an extremely post by a Hillary supporter there about McCain's VP pick Palin:
these liberals are truely disgusting... and I say that as an FDR/Clinton DemThey will insult the FIRST GOP FEMALE CANDIDATE!
at least the repubs don't eat their own.. if you prove you are a repubs, they will suporrt you, black/white, male/female
I am TRUELY DISGUSTED TO CALL MYSELF EVEN A RECENT EX-DEM.
THIS UNDEMOCRATTIC PARTY HAS NOW TURNED INTO A RADICAL LEFIST FREAK SHOW!
I cannot believe I was a member of this disgusting party for 15 years!
http://www.hillaryclintonforum.net/discuss...5312#post325312
There have been forces unleashed by this election that I don't think anybody could've expected.
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The jury is out on just how her religion plays out in public life. On the one hand she's anti-abortion, on the other hand she vetoed a State bill which would limit legal rights of gay couples.
I guess in the larger scheme of things whom I'm impressed by is McCain: this guy is a tough cookie, and while Obama is softening up and cooling off, McCain seems just getting warmed up.
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Wow that's a sad picture indeed. And what worries me the most is that short little comment in the article, that thus goes one of the last basic physics laboratories in the world. Who will pick up the slack? It's disconcerting.
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No, it's not a sacrifice as such. But if she came back to save him this pain, then it would be, because she would be giving up her own happiness and time with Galt - essentially living her life for someone else and not for herself.Right, in that particular situation it would've been, but in general, it is quite possible to save a dear one's pain, and deny oneself joy with another dear person. I'm not dropping any context, and nothing you particularly said is being disputed here, but I'm just making a clarification that there is no dichotomy between one person's pain, pity for them, and your happiness. One's happiness could quite well be served by relieving that pain; and to always go for the benefits to one's literal self would be an improper, popularly derided, kind of selfishness.
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So, I don't think it's as simple as which man would she choose (Galt knows she chose him, and cannot choose otherwise)- but the core of the treason is based in the urge for self-sacrifice (putting somebody else's pain above her happiness).I don't understand, why is it a sacrifice to regard somebody else's pain? What if they matter that much to you? She didn't regard Rearden merely because he was "some guy in pain".
The real treason was whether she would make a sacrifice out of pity for Rearden.Also what's wrong with making a "sacrifice" (poor choice of words) out of pity for Rearden? Pity is not a moral crime.
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Ok then I wasn't clear enough in what I meant by that one instant when one's courage shows -- it's not so short of an instant that only a reflexive reaction is allowed. It's a couple of seconds, a conceptual moment, when you must volitionally choose between safety and danger, but don't have days and weeks to philosophize and figure out your answer. That's where courage lies, because courage is not reflexive, nor is it deliberate. It's conceptual, but instantaneous.
Anyway, I already pointed out what interested me in that article (despite its obvious materialism): it wasn't the notion that genes determine our courage, but that courageous men in some sense live on, while the cowards who stay in safety are actually the ones who die out.
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Of course, by "cooperative" I refer to the level of conscious control over our bodily functions (which is cooperative, and not master-slave); I obviously don't mean that there's some additional will directing our body in parallel with ourselves.
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which exist in a cooperative master-slave relationshipsshould be:
"which exist in cooperative rather than master-slave relationships"
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The personally chosen values that leads one to join the military and the personally developed traits that one acquires from training rigorously in the military do not change an individual's DNA, so members of the military are not going to leave an evolved genetic fingerprint on the human race that is different from civilians.Joining the military has nothing to do with bravery.
Bravery is that one instant, that split of an eye when you decide to run from danger, or run towards in defiance of all. I'd like to know that I'd be brave when that moment comes but I don't until I'm faced with it, and neither does anybody else who hasn't been in it. Bravery has a lot to do with one's convictions and ones values, it it also has to do with adrenaline and hormones intensely pumping into your body to enable you to do what you think you must. We are not just disjoined minds, we live in bodies which are genetically determined, and which exist in a cooperative master-slave relationships with us.
Obviously there's something materialistic in the above posted article, as is always with these new 'scientists' trying to derive everything from evolution. I'm by no means endorsing every single part of it. I just thought there's something extremely visceral in the notion that the courageous don't die off, but in fact in some evolutionary sense live on, while it's the safe cowards who end up disappearing from history.
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Did you mean "fascinating scientific account" seriously or tongue in cheek?I didn't mean to come off as one of those who attribute every human action to evolution. I just found it interesting that there's a biological foundation for men acting heroically, though whether they choose to do so or not still depends only on their will (and values).
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From the heroic 300 Spartans of Thermopylae to the Charge of the Light Brigade, history is littered with tales of the bravery of men who knew that death was as likely an outcome as glory.Such courage has always been recognised as a supreme asset by military strategists — Carl von Clausewitz, the 19th-century Prussian theorist, described it as “above all things . . . the first quality of a warrior”. For biologists, however, it poses a problem: humans simply should not have evolved to be heroic: the dangers to life and limb are too great.
Now, it appears, the solution to this evolutionary puzzle may lie in sex. New research suggests that braver soldiers may ultimately win more sexual partners as well as more battles, and that the extra chances to spread their genes can outweigh the risk of dying in combat.
Natural selection deals brutally with qualities that hurt organisms’ chances of survival and reproduction, and few ways of harming these prospects are quite as blatant as a heroic charge on enemy lines. American scientists have now shown how such courage could have evolved in the small tribal societies of human prehistory.
The study, by Laurent Lehmann and Marcus Feldman, of Stanford University in California, suggests that great bravery can have evolutionary benefits under certain circumstances, despite its obvious dangers.
If courage makes it significantly more likely that small bands of tribes-men will win military confrontations with their neighbours, its overall advantages can easily outweigh its risks, a mathematical model has shown.
Some men who carry genetic variants that promote bravery might perish because of them, but the ones who survive may win more battles through their greater daring. The resulting opportunities for rape and pillage can create a net evolutionary benefit.
By having sex with their vanquished enemies’ wives and children, and by taking land on which their own womenfolk could grow or gather more food, particularly courageous and successful warriors would have more offspring who share their genes. “This has consequences for our understanding of the evolution of intertribal interactions, as hunter-gatherer societies are well known to have frequently raided neighbouring groups from whom they appropriated territory, goods and women,” the scientists said.
In the research, details of which are published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society, Dr Lehmann and Dr Feldman concentrated on two traits that they imagined might affect societies’ capacity and aptitude for war: bravery and belligerence.
They assumed that tribes with a high proportion of belligerent men would be more likely to attack rival groups, while those with a high proportion of brave men were more likely to win such battles. Both traits, however, also increased the chances of death.
While neither of these qualities is controlled by a single gene, the scientists imagined the emergence of single genetic variants that promoted one trait or the other. The multiple genes that influence bravery or belligerence can be assumed to have evolved in a similar way.
The scientists concentrated on the likely effects among small bands of hunter-gatherers, living in an environment in which rival groups competed intensely for food and shelter.
It is thought that people have lived in such groups for most of our evolutionary history, and that these conditions are thus the main ones that have influenced the development of the human brain and temperament.
The model demonstrated that belligerence or bravery genes could spread quite rapidly, despite the increased risk of death, if the conquest of neighbouring tribes brought a group one of two significant advantages. The first was increased opportunities for men to have sex and father offspring, in this case through capturing the women of a defeated tribe. The second was the capture of extra territory, or other material resources.
While the findings do not explain the emergence of belligerence or bravery, or shed any light on what the genes that might affect these traits might be, they do show a mechanism by which they could have evolved.
“We show that the selective pressure on these two traits can be substantial even in groups of large size, and that they may be driven by two independent, reproduction-enhancing resources: additional mates for males and additional territory (or resources) for females,” the scientists said.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/s...icle4615314.ece
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I'm glad everyone is loving it. I absolutely adored the movie.
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There are major structural impediments that had forbidden the World Trade Center towers to be taller than they were -- first and foremost, wind resistance. The further a building rises from the earth and away from the earth's rotational inertia, the more the air will buffet it. Think of 50 mph winds, perpetually buffeting the tower even at perfectly calm weather. Then add storms to that. Also earthquakes. Such were the physical limitations that have put a very real cap on how tall skyscrapers could be just a decade or two ago. I'm not sure how Burj plans to solve that.
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There's no question that ancient middle eastern civilizations interacted with classical GreeceThey did in other, intellectual things. Not in fitness and physical perfection. Persians and all the rest were frequently flabby and fairly pudgy, not that they ever minded it. There's a story when Spartans defeated a Persian squadron, they stripped them down to search for hidden items, and, chiseled and tanned as they were, faced down the sight of a flabby, pale-skinnned "soldier". The historian actually records that they started laughing.
It's simply inconceivable that Middle Easterners could've fathered physical perfection, as much today as then (since nothing's changed in the last 2000 years).
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Ever since the Western archaeological discovery of the ancient Olympic Games - which were used as the antecedent of the modern Olympic Games - historians and archaelogists have made numerous attempts to trace back the ancient Olympic Games to their historical source in an attempt to better understand their meaning and importance.Finally on August 1st, 2008, on the eve of the modern Beijing Olympic Games, and on the same date used by the ancient Mesopotamians to commemorate the ancient Gilgamesh Games, the Gilgamesh Games thesis has finally been published online. After years of researching archaelogical source data we are able to present to you what may very well be the origins of the ancient Olympic Games.
The main thesis shall show that the Mesopotamian (modern day Iraqi) cultural influence that had for centuries percolated into ancient Greece through contact with the Hittites (modern day Turks) and other peoples appears to have suddenly swamped Greece during the middle of the 8th century BC. This was during the start of the Sargonid dynasty which saw the Assyrian (ancient Iraqi) empire reach its geographical zenith and incorporate colonies such as the Greek island of Crete.
It was during this period that the funerary rituals and the athletic ‘feats of strength,’ depicted in the Death of Bilgames cuneiform tablet, along with other Mesopotamian athletics festivals may have been adopted from the ancient Mesopotamians and gradually incorporated into the ancient Greek Olympic Games.
Based on original Mesopotamian and Greek source material there are a total of eleven major similarities discovered thus far that may show that the ancient Greek Olympic Games have their antecedent in the ancient Gilgamesh Games.
The revelation that the Olympian “jewel in the crown” of Western civilisation may trace back to the Middle East may unsettle many readers, who have been immersed within the framework of Orientalism. It will also sound the final death knell for the artificial concept of “Western civilisation."
http://www.gilgameshgames.org/
Wasn't Rev. Wright right? The chickens are coming home to roost.
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Looks to be an actual photo. It's from the official website and has a date stamp on it. Besides, the top with the cranes would look less real if 3d-generated.
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It's such a shame he left the US to go back to the Soviet Union. The famous filmmaker Eisenstein did the same. I don't know why.
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To avoid starting a new thread, I thought I'd put this here; and it's quite appropriate for this anyway:
Ode to the Olympics
A large painting depicting the Olympics, in China:
"Confucius, Laozi, Quyuan and Socrates are featured watching the Olympics. "
Hillarity, or tragedy, I don't know.
PS. Note, it's not even,
"Confucius, Pythagoras, Aristotle, and Socrates watching the Olympics"
but,
"Confucius, Laozi, Quyuan, and Socrates watching the Olympics"
Like I said, it's either hilarious or very tragic.
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Dueling was banned in the 19th century because all of the cream of the crop of society -- the army officers, the leading intellectuals -- were basically killing each other off. It is true, if we lived in a completely laissez-faire society there would be no grounds to ban such a thing, as bad as it could be.
Sarah Palin selected by McCain for VP slot
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