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Tom

Tom 's Public Library

15 Aug 08

Our Man in Havana - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

  • Rather than admit they were taken in by his invented sketch along with the fear the embarrassing story could not be classified from being published by discharging Wormold, the top officers of the service assign Wormold to headquarters and decorate him with an OBE. Wormold and Beatrice want to marry and Milly agrees.
19 Jul 08

The last word on P.Z. Myers - Crunchy Con

  • The absurd thing about Myers attempt to transmogrify his naked act of aggression, theft, vandalism and incitement into victim status is that he is basically saying that if we all are not going around the world desecrating whatever it is we don't believe in, we are ipso facto respecting and honoring same. So my failure to desecrate a Quran or the Satanic Bible means I am somehow respecting and honoring them.

Op-Ed Contributor - If Israel Attacks Iran’s Nuclear Sites, Iranians Should Hope It Succeeds. - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com

  • ISRAEL will almost surely attack Iran’s nuclear sites in the next four to seven months — and the leaders in Washington and even Tehran should hope that the attack will be successful enough to cause at least a significant delay in the Iranian production schedule, if not complete destruction, of that country’s nuclear program. Because if the attack fails, the Middle East will almost certainly face a nuclear war — either through a subsequent pre-emptive Israeli nuclear strike or a nuclear exchange shortly after Iran gets the bomb.
18 Jul 08

Toddlers who dislike spicy food racist, say report - Telegraph

  • The National Children's Bureau, which receives £12 million a year, mainly from
    Government funded organisations, has issued guidance to play leaders and
    nursery teachers advising them to be alert for racist incidents among
    youngsters in their care.
  • This could include a child of as young as three who says "yuk" in
    response to being served unfamiliar foreign food.
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Religion News (RSS): Muslim clerics annul rape victim's marriage

  • Lucknow: In a chilling reminder of the Imrana case, yet another young woman from Muzaffarnagar who allegedly fell victim to her father-in-law's sexual assault faces a bleak future after mullahs called for the annulment of her marriage.



  • "A woman who has had a sexual liaison with her husband's father cannot be his consort anymore. A divorce is a must," Mufti Maulana Imran, senior cleric from Darul Uloom Deoband, said on Monday after his view was sought. The prescribed punishment in the case, he maintained, was 'sangsar' or public stoning of the victim and the culprit until death.
17 Jul 08

Europe as a giant nursing home - Crunchy Con

  • That's the view Shorto says makes sense from all the data. Ross says he and Reihan believe there should be no necessary antagonism between feminists and social conservatives with regard to the desirability of policies that make for more workforce flexibility -- that is, the state should make it easier for companies to allow women to blend childraising with employment. Agreed.
  • Still, the depth and magnitude of the fertility crisis in Europe (and elsewhere, though Europe's the only place I really care about) suggests that there's something mysterious and, to my mind, malevolent, working in the deepest currents of the postmodern psyche. Despite all the financial hardships having larger families -- and we're not talking five or six kids, but two or three -- brings to modern Europeans, the fact is Europe, as a whole, has never been more prosperous. In times of greater material poverty, Europeans still managed to have more than enough children to replace themselves.
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Rule of law? Screw it, says US president - Crunchy Con

  • Red Cross investigators concluded last year in a secret report that the Central Intelligence Agency's interrogation methods for high-level Qaeda prisoners constituted torture and could make the Bush administration officials who approved them guilty of war crimes."

  • A CIA analyst warned the Bush administration in 2002 that up to a third of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay may have been imprisoned by mistake, but White House officials ignored the finding and insisted that all were 'enemy combatants' subject to indefinite incarceration."
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L'Hôte: I am not you, atheism.

  • And yet Myers has unabashed contempt for every religious person, whatever the explanation. And ironically, he is himself quite ignorant of religion, philosophy of religion, philosophy of science, and epistemology, knowledge of which would enable him to make better arguments. And if he doesn't know he's ignorant, he's self-deceived. I'm sure if he read this, though, he would disparage it as the "courtier's reply". So I invite him to get into a public, taped debate with, say, Alvin Plantinga, Richard Swinburne, Peter van Inwagen, Michael Rea, Dean Zimmerman, Daniel Howard-Snyder, Eleonore Stump, Marilyn McCord Adams, or Robert Adams. I believe it would be quite illuminating.
  • I honestly doubt Myers has given the status of his moral views, or any of his normative views at all, really, much thought. For instance, he would probably claim that moral beliefs are mere preferences for the world being one way rather than another, or expressions of emotions, etc. But when he's actually expressing them, I doubt very much they seem to him like other preferences, such as his preference for vanilla over chocolate ice cream. They probably seem to him to be 'objective'--not just the way he would like things, but the way things really ought to be, such that if you disagree with him you show yourself to be somehow deficient (whereas he wouldn't think that your disagreeing with him about ice cream preference shows you to be deficient).

Atheist rejects neo-atheism - Crunchy Con

  • If someone was a political commentator, and operated the way Meyers, Richard Dawkins, or Christopher Hitchens did, would anyone listen to them? No. As much as the success of the Ann Coulters of the world suggests otherwise, we largely understand that a basic level of decorum, mutual respect, and the assumption of good faith should under gird our national dialogue. Indeed, without these assumptions, the dialogue is not worth having.

  • But then there is atheism, where it is apparently the case that you can always come closer to righteousness by expressing still-greater contempt for those with which you don't agree. Now, this is all very strange; though growing, the atheist minority is stilled dwarfed in this country and in this world by the religious. And how can you possibly change people's minds if you're constantly ridiculing them? Doesn't make much sense.



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The bear cometh. Where be the bullets? - Crunchy Con

  • He puts his finger on something that bothers me about all this "too big to fail" business, and it's namely this: that if investors come to believe that the government won't let something fail, then there's no reason for that something to take risks responsibly. The whole thing ends up being a confidence game. The other morning I was listening to an interview on the (excellent) public radio program Marketplace with Jim Rogers, a Singapore-based US investor, who was ripping the federal quasi-bailout of Fannie and Freddie. Here's an excerpt from the Rogers interview:

Joe Klein’s dual-loyalty assertion for Jews | The God Blog | Jewish Journal

  • The notion that we could just waltz in and inject democracy into an extremely complicated, devout and ancient culture smacked--still smacks--of neocolonialist legerdemain. The fact that a great many Jewish neoconservatives--people like Joe Lieberman and the crowd over at Commentary--plumped for this war, and now for an even more foolish assault on Iran, raised the question of divided loyalties: using U.S. military power, U.S. lives and money, to make the world safe for Israel. And then there is the question--made manifest by the no-bid contracts offered U.S. oil companies by the Iraqis--of two oil executives, Bush and Cheney, securing a new source of business for their Texas buddies.
  • You want evidence of divided loyalties? How about the “benign domino theory” that so many Jewish neoconservatives talked to me about--off the record, of course--in the runup to the Iraq war, the idea that Israel’s security could be won by taking out Saddam, which would set off a cascade of disaster for Israel’s enemies in the region? As my grandmother would say, feh! Do you actually deny that the casus belli that dare not speak its name wasn’t, as I wrote in February 2003, a desire to make the world safe for Israel? Why the rush now to bomb Iran, a country that poses some threat to Israel but none--for the moment--to the United States…
14 Jul 08

Amazon.co.uk: The Lost Literature of Socialism: George Watson: Books

  • The most powerful indictment I've seen of contemporary historiography has got to be the studied ignorance in the West of the evidence brought to light in this slim little bombshell of a book. You will never be able to look at Marx, Hitler, socialism, fascism, National Socialism, or the Holocaust the same way again.
  • Watson, a fellow in English at St. John's College, Cambridge, has been Sandars Reader in Bibliography and is editor of the New Cambridge Bibliography
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Why Germans Supported Hitler, Part 1

  • In fact, there is a remarkable similarity between the economic policies that Hitler implemented and those that Franklin Roosevelt enacted. Keep in mind, first of all, that the German National Socialists were strong believers in Social Security, which Roosevelt introduced to the United States as part of his New Deal. Keep in mind also that the Nazis were strong believers in such other socialist schemes as public (i.e., government) schooling and national health care. In fact, my hunch is that very few Americans realize that Social Security, public schooling, Medicare, and Medicaid have their ideological roots in German socialism.
  • Hitler and Roosevelt also shared a common commitment to such programs as government-business partnerships. In fact, until the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional, Roosevelt’s National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), which cartelized American industry, along with his “Blue Eagle” propaganda campaign, was the type of economic fascism that Hitler himself was embracing in Germany (as fascist ruler Benito Mussolini was also doing in Italy).
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08 Jul 08

The wages of wealth - Crunchy Con

  • To what extent do you think the narcissism of the super-rich can be said to exemplify the narcissism of 21st-century America -- which, compared to the rest of the world, is super-rich?

The American Scholar - The Disadvantages of an Elite Education - By William Deresiewicz

  • They’ve been driven their whole lives by a fear of failure—often, in the first instance, by their parents’ fear of failure.
  • Being an intellectual means, first of all, being passionate about ideas—and not just for the duration of a semester, for the sake of pleasing the teacher, or for getting a good grade. A friend who teaches at the University of Connecticut once complained to me that his students don’t think for themselves. Well, I said, Yale students think for themselves, but only because they know we want them to. I’ve had many wonderful students at Yale and Columbia, bright, thoughtful, creative kids whom it’s been a pleasure to talk with and learn from. But most of them have seemed content to color within the lines that their education had marked out for them. Only a small minority have seen their education as part of a larger intellectual journey, have approached the work of the mind with a pilgrim soul. These few have tended to feel like freaks, not least because they get so little support from the university itself. Places like Yale, as one of them put it to me, are not conducive to searchers.

The miseducation of American elites - Crunchy Con

  • My education taught me to believe that people who didn't go to an Ivy League or equivalent school weren't worth talking to, regardless of their class. I was given the unmistakable message that such people were beneath me. We were "the best and the brightest," as these places love to say, and everyone else was, well, something else: less good, less bright. I learned to give that little nod of understanding, that slightly sympathetic "Oh," when people told me they went to a less prestigious college. (If I'd gone to Harvard, I would have learned to say "in Boston" when I was asked where I went to school--the Cambridge version of noblesse oblige.) I never learned that there are smart people who don't go to elite colleges, often precisely for reasons of class. I never learned that there are smart people who don't go to college at all.

Religion News (RSS): Philanthropist Sir John Templeton dies at 95

  • "Competitive business has reduced costs, has increased variety, has improved quality," he said in 1999, adding that it "has been a blessing to the poor. There has never been a better way to teach ethics than competitive business."



    If a business is not ethical, "it will fail, perhaps not right away, but eventually," he said.

Operational Research | What is Operational Research?

In a nutshell, operational research (O.R.) is the discipline of applying appropriate analytical methods to help make better decisions.

By using techniques such as mathematical modelling to analyse complex situations, operational research gives executives the power to make more effective decisions and build more productive systems based on:

www.theorsociety.com/...index.htm - Preview

operational decision-analysis decision-making decision-theory decisions

  • In a nutshell, operational research (O.R.) is the discipline
    of applying appropriate analytical methods to help make better
    decisions.




    By using techniques such as mathematical modelling to analyse
    complex situations, operational research gives executives the
    power to make more effective decisions and build more productive
    systems based on:

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