benny

Japanese, for instance, live surrounded by water rich in fishes and Japanese high I.Q. is explained by their diet rich in fish (Omega3) and by their long school year.

By a public policy on genetic engineering.

What we can say for sure is that genes influence the production of amino acids, which are the building blocks of proteins. From there, therapeutic programs can be devised to improve the development of living organisms including humans, of course.

To benefit everyone, the diversification of genes should be agreed upon, with each individual having an equal say on the agreement.

The Monstrosity of Christ MIT Press, 2009 Slavoj Žižek and John Milbank In this corner, philosopher Slavoj Žižek, who represents the critical-materialist stance against religion's illusions; in the other corner, "radical orthodox" theologian John Milbank, an influential and provocative thinker who argues that theology is the only foundation upon which knowledge, politics, and ethics can stand. In The Monstrosity of Christ, Žižek and Milbank go head to head for three rounds, employing an impressive arsenal of moves to advance their positions and press their respective advantages. By the closing bell, they have proven themselves worthy adversaries--and have also shown that faith and reason are not simply and intractably opposed. Žižek has long been interested in the emancipatory potential offered by Christian theology. And Milbank, seeing global capitalism as the new century's greatest ethical challenge, has pushed his own ontology in more political and materialist directions. Their debate in The Monstrosity of Christ concerns nothing less than the future of religion, secularity, and political hope in light of a monsterful event—God becoming human. For the first time since Žižek's turn toward theology, we have a true debate between an atheist and a theologian about the very meaning of theology, Christ, the Church, the Holy Ghost, universality, and the foundations of logic. The result goes far beyond the popularized atheist/theist point/counterpoint of recent books by Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and others. What matters is not so much that Žižek is endorsing a demythologized, disenchanted Christianity without transcendence, as that he is offering in the end (despite what he sometimes claims) a heterodox version of Christian belief. —John Milbank To put it even more bluntly, my claim is that it is Milbank who is effectively guilty of heterodoxy, ultimately of a regression to paganism: in my atheism, I am more Christian than Milbank. —Slavoj Žižek http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/defau...2&tid=11672

The universe is characterized by a "persistent creativity," operating on all scales and in all contexts, but especially where there is life. (Stuart A. Kauffman)

Before messing with other cultures, Protestants needed to conceive these peoples as composed of lazy persons predestined to hell.

Not much remains of the concept of adaptation after having been confronted to the concept of exaptation, that is preadaption and cooptation.

Since humans have almost all the same genes, it would be better to define a "race" by its mutations, which are random natural occurrences.

I think that legalizing pot can contribute to transforming our society into something more and worst than a totalitarian society, it can transform it into a society that is "too much", into a society for which we have to invent "toomuchness" as a new substantive.

Buffalo Bill was not exactly a sophisticated man.

Some white supremacists like to think that the finding of the Kennewick man in Washington state give them the right to do whatever they want in the New World.

Yes. If scientists would care more about their relatives than about capitalists, inhabiting the Earth today would not require literal reading of religious texts. Never forget that the word "religion" comes from religare which means "read again" and/or "what is linking people together".

And Barry Jennings felt dead bodies in WTC7 : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyKtNHPeKxg...feature=related http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/cons...les/7434230.stm http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=9072062020229593250

A guilty feeling about slave trade legacy I guess.

So, it seems that evolution is at best punctual. Stuart A. Kauffman’s Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion recapitulates many of the ideas about the role of emergence in biology. Kauffman is thus one of the few scientists who challenge the Neo-Darwinist consensus. Alongside Kauffman, one could also list Lynn Margulis (theories about the role of symbiosis in evolution), Stephen Jay Gould (both for punctual evolution, and for his insistence, together with Richard Lewontin, on the importance of exaptation), Susan Oyama and her colleagues (Developmental Systems Theory), Humberto Maturana and Francesco Varela (autopoiesis). http://www.dhalgren.com/Blog/?cat=5

Some critics have found significant one incident written about by DeParle on Charles Murray: "While there is much to admire about the industry and inquisitiveness of Murray's teen-age years, there is at least one adventure that he understandably deletes from the story: the night he helped his friends burn a cross. They had formed a kind of good guys' gang, "the Mallows," whose very name, from marshmallows, was a play on their own softness. In the fall of 1960, during their senior year, they nailed some scrap wood into a cross, adorned it with fireworks and set it ablaze on a hill beside the police station, with marshmallows scattered as a calling card. Rutledge [a social worker and former juvenile delinquent] who was still hanging around the pool hall [and considers some of Murray's other memories to be idealized] recalls his astonishment the next day when the talk turned to racial persecution in a town with two black families. "There wouldn't have been a racist thought in our simple-minded minds," he says. "That's how unaware we were." A long pause follows when Murray is reminded of the event. "Incredibly, incredibly dumb," he says. "But it never crossed our minds that this had any larger significance. And I look back on that and say, 'How on earth could we be so oblivious?' I guess it says something about that day and age that it didn't cross our minds". So, racism can hide itself very deep into our psyche. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Murray_(author)

If pot was not a means to escape heated debates, I would not mind as much to see it legalize.

Michael Hess witnesses the WTC7 explosion with all his five senses.

Garbage in, garbage out.

As much as negative liberty, you have also to consider positive liberty. Negative liberty is the absence of obstacles, barriers or constraints. One has negative liberty to the extent that actions are available to one in this negative sense. Positive liberty is the possibility of acting — or the fact of acting — in such a way as to take control of one's life and realize one's fundamental purposes. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberty-positive-negative/

Because of the powerful and enduring cigarette industry lobbying perhaps.

Hear that now:

Making something illegal is ipso facto making it an object of temptation.

Those who are not hearing explosions everywhere all the time are simply unaware that the Big Bang is still an on going phenomenon.