Kevin Roose decided that he would transfer over to Jerry Falwell's Liberty University from Brown University, and to write about his experience. His book is called The Unlikely Disciple. Here's an enlightening interview with The Friendly Atheist, and don't miss the introductory video by Bill Maher.
Senator Bernie Sanders understands what's going on. Why is there no outrage from most of us?
"For a Democratic president, Democratic House, Democratic Senate, to be following the Bush economic philosophy of tax breaks for millionaires, billionaires is absolutely wrong public policy, absolutely wrong politically, and I gotta tell you, I will do whatever I can to see that 60 votes are not acquired to pass this legislation," Sanders said on on MSNBC's "The Ed Show," before telling host Ed Schultz that he might go as far as to filibuster the legislation.
"Millionaires and billionaires do not need huge tax deductions, that's the simple truth," Sanders continued.
Think Progress quantifies the insanity:Despite Republican wrangling over the past two years about deficit spending and debt, the New York Times reports that the entire package "would cost about $900 billion over the next two years, to be financed entirely by adding to the national debt."I think we should settle this immediately with a national referendum. Allow the citizens to go to the voting both and check YES or NO: "Should we give big tax cuts to people who don't need the money, where the effect is to plunge this country more deeply into debt?"
In the October 7, 2010 edition of Nature (available online only to subscribers), one can read a short book review touching on "cosmic inflation," as described by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow.
Cosmic inflation is the process by which a small part of the very young universe blows up into a vast geometrically flat and almost-smooth patch large enough to encompass all we can see and more, thereby accounting for the universe around us today. [It] makes a number of predictions that have been verified. Yet because of quantum mechanics, inflation is not a one-time event but occurs continuously. Enormous bubbles of space-time are constantly being spawned, each one causally disconnected from the others and harboring its own laws of physics.
Fascinating, indeed, but is it science? Author of the book review, Michael Turner, writes that "cosmic inflation" gives him a headache. "It is science if we cannot test it? The different patches are incommunicado, so we will never be able to observe them." Turner expresses hope that we will someday understand whether we are part of a multiverse. Then again, he worries that we might be "becoming the philosophers that Feynman warned about [in his 1964 messenger lectures]." When has inquiry ceased being science and started becoming philosophy?[Richard Feynman] warned that we should achieve the Ionian goal of finding all the laws, then"the philosophers who are always on the outside making stupid remarks will be able to close in," trying to explain why those laws hold; and we won't be able to"push them away" by asking for testable predictions of those ideas.
Every so often, I dig into my collection of quotes. I pick them up in a wide variety of places. I hope that some of these are new for you: It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit. —Harry Truman A conclusion is the place where you got tired thinking. —Martin H. Fischer Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else. - James M. Barrie (1860 - 1937) “To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing.” - Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915) Adventure is just bad planning. - Roald Amundsen (1872 - 1928) Efficiency is intelligent laziness. ~David Dunham "You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train." - Howard Zinn Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted. - Albert Einstein Procrastination isn't the problem, it's the solution. So procrastinate now, don't put it off. - Ellen DeGeneres The only man who is really free is the one who can turn down an invitation to dinner without giving an excuse. - Jules Renard (1864 - 1910) [More . . . ]
For years, I’m been a big fan of WordPress. How could you not be? WordPress is amazing versatile open source software; 25 million people rely on it to publish their blogs. If there is one thing that could be a bit easier, though, it is the WordPress post editor. It works well enough, but it’s a bit clunky and the window can be confining. 
Rather than composing on the WordPress editor, then, I often write my posts on MSWord, or I dictate them in Dragon, then paste them into the WordPress post editor. One needs to be careful, though, to first strip out all of the word processing formatting tags. If you don’t, those tags can wreak havoc with the site design—they crawl outside of the post and change the formatting of other posts too, and they can even modify the homepage design. To strip out those formatting tags, I copy the finished text from my original workspace and paste it into Notepad (on Windows) and immediately copy it out and paste it into the WordPress post editor. But that requires two extras steps. And then I find myself tweaking the post once it has gone live.
Where, then, can one get the best of both worlds: A) a spacious writing area with WYSIWYG and B) no worries about formatting tags? This post is my first attempt to use Windows Live Writer, a free utility from Microsoft. I learned about it from the company that provided my magazine theme, Solostream. The screen looks very much like a well-equipped word processor. When you are finished with your post, you choose your blog (you can set up many blogs at once) from a pick list, and you are finished. You can easily format photos and videos too.
It all seems quite painless. This is an excellent product by Microsoft, which allows me to appreciate WordPress all the more. Now I’m going to hit “publish” and we’ll see how it looks.