Hey Look! A Post!

Hey, how ya doin'?

So there's this SelectSmart guide to ethical philosophy, and I'd be interested to see how you all score and your thoughts, you know, assuming you see this and take it and whatnot. Here are my results:

1. Aquinas (100%)
2. St. Augustine (86%)
3. Spinoza (80%)
4. Ockham (64%)
5. Aristotle (62%)
6. Stoics (53%)
7. Jean-Paul Sartre (49%)
8. Kant (49%)
9. Cynics (41%)
10. Ayn Rand (39%)
11. John Stuart Mill (39%)
12. Nietzsche (39%)
13. Plato (39%)
14. Jeremy Bentham (34%)
15. Nel Noddings (33%)
16. David Hume (30%)
17. Prescriptivism (28%)
18. Epicureans (22%)
19. Thomas Hobbes (8%)

Hope everyone's doing well.

Test, One Two...

Nothing too deep, but I saw something that reminded me of Collaboratory, though it was before my time here*. Even taking the "easy" route they had troubles with their encounter with Dostoevsky.

*Come to think of it, most everything was before my time here. Not that I've helped in that regard.

Ugly Zoo


ugly, ugly, ugly zoo...

Andrew Carlssin luvs Lynndie England.

To quote a certain fellow " hello . . . lo . . . lo . . . lo . . . "

Oh well... I'm going to blog here regardless of all that mutinous chatter going on in the comments section (actually its not quite enough to call it chatter exactly).

So one question I have for you. What is so darned good about the Caps Lock key that merits giving it a button larger than than the tab key on most keyboards? Personally I've had ENOUGH OF SUDDENLY GOING IN TO CAPS MODE SIMPLY BECAUSE BY A STUPID SLip of the fingers while looking for the shift key.

So after hunting around for an answer (on Google for about five and half seconds) I stumbled over this little sucker.

No need to thank me.

Somehow I managed to blow away Chris' post (don't ask me how I did it, I have no idea), so anyway I'm reposting it from a copy I found in Google's cache. Apologies, Chris.

Christopher Alvarado writes:
In a Washington Post Writers Group op-ed, Neal Peirce explores the topic of regionalism by reporting on the trend towards City-County mergers and other alternative forms of governance.

Comments

Cruel & Unusual

"That really, really is the worst atrocity. It affects the honour and pride of Muslim people. It is better to kill them than sexually abuse them."

--- Abdel-Bari Atwan, editor of Al Quds Al Arabi

I really wonder whether, with the emergence of these photos, the game isn't over for the Americans in Iraq. Is it realistic, after the bloody siege of Fallujah and the Shiite uprising of early April, and in the wake of these revelations, to think that the US can still win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi Arab public?

--- Juan Cole

I saw two naked detainees, one masturbating to another kneeling with its mouth open. I thought I should just get out of there. I didn’t think it was right . . . I saw SSG Frederick walking towards me, and he said, “Look what these animals do when you leave them alone for two seconds.” I heard PFC England shout out, “He’s getting hard.”

--- Specialist Matthew Wisdom

Specialist Charles A. Graner and Private Lynndie England give the thumbs up to the Abu Ghraib facility.

[warning: more hideousness here]

Doing the rounds at the moment

http://karmann.goonsquad.net/img/boudreauxs.jpg

Or is it a hoax? No... but these are.

http://www.imagedump.com/pics/59682.jpg
http://home.comcast.net/~shrapnill/BoudreauxBetter.jpg
http://www.sgtstryker.com/pictures/gluesniff.php
http://www.sgtstryker.com/pictures/clay.php
http://www.glennbeck.com/picoftheday/04-15-04-pod-3.jpg
http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/images/soldier3.jpg
http://photopile.com/photos/dead/auctions/112062.jpg

Morning Edition without Bob Edwards?!

This is....well, it sucks, really -- especially with Edwards saying that it was a case of "management wanting to move in a new direction", which is basically management-speak for, "Hey, here's something we haven't done before, let's do it!"

Ugh.

I always get mad when I hear people cite some scientific study somewhere that has received a chunk of government funding, and then follow it up with something like "Who on Earth needs to know that?!" The reason I get mad is that you never know what bit of scientific knowledge from one field is going to prove useful in another, such as this: findings from astronomy and particle physics could help archaeologists learn if there are secret burial chambers in the Mexican pyramids at Teotihuacan.

Interesting survey of Iraqi attitudes one year on about the occupation and the future. PDF, really worth a read.

Janet Dilbeck clearly remembers the moment the music started. Two years ago she was lying in bed on the California ranch where she and her husband were caretakers. A mild earthquake woke her up. To Californians, a mild earthquake is about as unusual as a hailstorm, so Dilbeck tried to go back to sleep once it ended. But just then she heard a melody playing on an organ, "very loud, but not deafening," as she recalls. Dilbeck recognized the tune, a sad old song called When You and I Were Young, Maggie.

Maggie was her mother's name, and when Dilbeck (now 70) was a girl her father would jokingly play the song on their home organ. Dilbeck is no believer in ghosts, but as she sat up in bed listening to the song, she couldn't help but ask, "Is that you, Daddy?"

She got no answer, but the song went on, clear and loud. It began again from the beginning, and continued to repeat itself for hours. "I thought, this is too strange," Dilbeck says. She tried to get back to sleep, but thanks to the music she could only doze off and on. When she got up at dawn, the song continued. In the months to come, Dilbeck would hear other songs. She heard merry-go-round calliopes and Silent Night. For a few weeks, it was The Star-Spangled Banner.

--- Can't get it out of my head: Brain disorder causes mysterious music hallucinations

The new Iraqi constitution is an exquisitely crafted piece of work and a total balls up.

Two tidbits for those that love the funny pages:
Martijn Reemst has now added a search function to his comprehensive Calvin and Hobbes directory, allowing the visitor to recall the best of Spaceman Spiff.

Worth100.com has entered round 5 of the Far Side Photoshop Contest, where participants flex their image manipulation muscles remaking classic Larson creations as real-life, full color, multi-dimentional representations of the original pen and ink creations.

I'm not at all sure that if I didn't see my daughter from ten days after her birth until six years later, I would recognize her.

But this mother did, and she was calm enough to create a ruse by which she could obtain hair-samples from the child for DNA testing purposes, thus exposing a pretty brazen kidnapping/faked death. Wow.

Yet another author whose works I keep meaning to read has died: historian Daniel Boorstin.

Did Dean give the Dems back their party?

Whether or not you supported him, I'd be interested to hear what you have to say.

I'm inclined to think he was helpful in that regard.

Jon Cusack is cool.

(No, not that Jon Cusack -- this is some other Jon Cusack. But this is still hilarious.)

Kevin Drum on the economy:

The sign of of a healthy economy is not so much that living standards are high for the middle class, but that they are getting higher — that people believe their children will be better off than they are. But as income inequality increases and income mobility decreases that's increasingly not the case, and the question at hand is whether we ever plan on doing anything about it. How long does the middle class have to stagnate in the midst of ever more stratospheric wealth for the rich before even conservatives finally admit that we have a problem?

It's a long post, but a good one, with quite a bit of information, such as this depressing nugget: Every state in the United States, except Nebraska and Nevada, has seen an overall shift of jobs from high-paying industries to lower-paying industries over the last three years.