The Hall of Fire

A nicely written student's perspective on the "celebrations" following the announcement of bin Laden's death. http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2011/05/04/my-take-no-apology-for-celebrating-after-bin-ladens-death/ And this story about the photo of Obama and his security council watching the r...

Reports are that the SEALs went in with orders to kill. That's not true, at least according to Obama's chief counter-terrorism advisor, John Brennan (who should know): Obama aide: We would have taken bin Laden alive Here's an interesting tidbit from the link: - President Obama and aides watched the...

I do think it's strange that they buried his body at sea. I don't think that it is strange at all. They were able to fulfill several things with a burial at sea: 1) The burial at sea was done in a time frame in conformance with Islamic law, which requires that the body be buried within 24 hours of ...

Hopefully, this will weaken Al-qaeda as a group, but there are other leaders out there still, Ayman al-Zawahiri, for example. And we should hope that people in the U.S. and the West don't blame Pakistan or Pakistanis in general for having harbored him (although, obviously, there were specific Pakist...

May I add my cautious optimism? As some of you may know, my younger brother and his wife are Muslim; she is from Pakistan, and she decries the many of the same kinds of things in Pakistan that were problems in Egypt. Both countries (and many others) still have a long road ahead of them. Maybe this w...

I'm glad to see that point change. I don't spend $600 with any one vendor unless I need furniture or a computer, but a whole new set of tax forms to file was not happy news for this very very small business owner. It was $600 per vendor for the year, not per purchase; so it was not just for large-t...

The situation isn't that promising, I have to say. Less than 10% of South Sudanese have access to running water, less than 5% finish primary school, and some 1 in 10 die in infancy. But we'll see. These things are true whether it is a separate state or the part of a larger state. If becoming a sepa...

The riots in Tunisia are on the main page of the NY Times online:

I've linked to the article below:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/14/world ... ia.html?hp

BrianIs AtYou

I believe that Tolkien felt this himself, if (at times) with regret. "Leaf by Niggle" was something that I see as an attempt by Tolkien to express this idea of incompleteness and contradiction in any such attempt at an all-encompassing vision. It is my own belief that if everything were fi...

Yes that is the one thank you. And thanks for the article, I hadn't read that one before. The practice by Monsanto is, if nothing else, unsavory to me. Not allowing people to save seeds due to intellectual property rights seems wrong. I agree. I would think (according to common sense) that the reve...

I have not read the Potter books, except the very beginning (1st chapter) of the first, which I glanced at while at my brother's house. I enjoyed the little I read very much, but I have not had the chance to get back to them. Voronwë's experience is very encouraging, and it reminds me of the first t...

Artist Ksenya Simonova does a sand animation live---a depiction of the Great Patriotic War (or as we in the West know it, the Eastern Front of WWII). The artist is Ukrainian, and of the 30,000,000 or so who died in the struggle, about a third were from the Ukraine. The words at the end, I am told, t...

What movies/works of his have you seen? The first of his films that I saw was Millennium Actress, and it was a stunning film. The following is the trailer for Millennium Actress, which really does not do the movie justice, since the integration of the art, music and storyline is so intricately plann...

News has come out that Satoshi Kon, director of Perfect Blue, Millennium Actress, Tokyo Godfathers, Paprika, and Paranoia Agent and more, has died. A lot of the folks on here may not have heard of him, but he was one of the most interesting and imaginative directors of the 21st century, whether in a...

Di,

Someone on another forum asked the question how the revised version of the Arizona law is really different from the Federal McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, which provides for a similar ability to deport aliens under similar contexts. The explanation that they provided as the rationale for the passage o...

I spent the early evening outdoors in front of Seven Stones Cafe, reviewing my brother's Phd thesis-in-progress over some Tuscan Chicken Soup. The weather was a balmy 80F with word of 90F+ to come this weekend. I ran into Mac, a buddy of mine, and his wife and a friend. Mac is the dean of a local co...

Well, the fair trade approach has been a good idea for a number of reasons. Certainly, the town has benefited from the publicity, and the additional cost of selling fair trade goods is marginal, especially when you are talking about people buying a cup of coffee or tea at a cafe--you could go to Sta...

The town that I live in, Media PA, just outside Philadelphia was the first fair trade town in America, in fact, in the Western Hemisphere. They had heard about it in Europe and thought it would be a good thing to bring here. The following videos are about some of the things that went into this decis...

This is a great tragedy, Rodia, and you and all the people of Poland have my sympathies. My mother's side of the family is all from Poland, and there is a large Polish community in the New York Metro area where I grew up, as well as in other places in the U.S., such as Chicago. I am sure there are m...