The Unification Church (AKA: “moonies”) held a ceremony to bless ‘the rod of iron’ – AR-15s. So everyone brought guns to church (unloaded, with the triggers ziptied).
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The Unification Church (AKA: “moonies”) held a ceremony to bless ‘the rod of iron’ – AR-15s. So everyone brought guns to church (unloaded, with the triggers ziptied).
The intelligence state has not been collecting data for its own entertainment; they have to find a use for it. Remember back to when the Bush administration’s secret interception program was disclosed? Probably the most painful bit of news in it was that the NSA wasn’t (yet) capable of doing anything particularly interesting or useful with the data.
David Landes’ The Unbound Prometheus is on my recommended reading list; [amaz] it’s an account of the changes in European societies brought about by the industrial revolution. It’s a book you can pick up, open to a page at random, and learn something fascinating.
… was when he went through the mouth of Hell.”
Recent discussion in some comments brought up the nature/nurture question and Steven Pinker’s book The Blank Slate.
This is a counterpoint to our lesson regarding the parking pastor. [stderr] [Read more…]
Racial segregation has probably done more to shape American cities than any other factor. The Guardian [guard] has a thoughtful and very deep article about the structural effects of inequality on some cities – including Baltimore, Maryland, where I grew up.
Warning: Weird, Sexual, Fetish
This sort of nonsense is the consequence of allowing “but I’m a preacher!” to carry some kind of implied moral status – or as a general-purpose excuse for anything. The reason is simple: by assuming there is something special about a preacher, we may mistakenly think they are better strategists than they are.
The Iraqi army got US-made M-1 Abrams tanks (older generation) from the Americans. [stderr] It’s the world’s premier main battle tank; the gold standard of tankness.
Take for instance the arguments of E. O. Wilson, who is a very distinguished biologist at Harvard University who wrote a book entitled On Human Nature. His expertise is in insects, but he jumps from insects to human beings and he talks about human beings as being “innately aggressive.” I go over his book very carefully and show that even though he says that human beings are innately aggressive at one point in his book, and in another point in his book he indicates that human beings have to be taught to be brutal and to kill. That human beings that behave peacefully in one situation may behave aggressively in another situation. In other words whether we, as human beings, are violent and murderous really depends on the situation we’re in. And, if that is so, then it is not simply an inevitable fact of human nature. It means that aggression is one of our potentialities.