I guess this means that house cats, like the horse, we’re not in the New World before European contact.
The wildcat DNA closest to that of house cats came from 15 individuals collected in the deserts of Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, the researchers say. The house cats in the study fell into five lineages, based on analysis of their mitochondrial DNA, a type that is passed down through the female line. Since the oldest archaeological site with a cat burial is about 9,500 years old, the geneticists suggest that the founders of the five lineages lived around this time and were the first cats to be domesticated.
Wheat, rye and barley had been domesticated in the Near East by 10,000 years ago, so it seems likely that the granaries of early Neolithic villages harbored mice and rats, and that the settlers welcomed the cats’ help in controlling them.
Unlike other domestic animals, which were tamed by people, cats probably domesticated themselves, which could account for the haughty independence of their descendants.
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Two car bombs found and defused
They always say that Londoners just take it as it comes, they don’t get nervous. English people are like that anyway, they just sort of mind their own business, they don’t get in a panic.â€Â
That’s the admirable side of stoicism
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I came across Drew Westen’s The Political Brain at Barnes and Noble today. I’m going to request it at my library. This review seems pretty solid, and quotes a point about Democrats that could also apply to Humanists.
They do so, I believe, because of an irrational emotional commitment to rationality–one that renders them, ironically, impervious to both scientific evidence on how the political mind and brain work and to an accurate diagnosis of why their campaigns repeatedly fail.
Westen refers to Damasio’s work about the limits of rationality, and how all of us use emotion to frame the narrow window within which we think rationally.
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Fascinating article in the British Prospect Magazine on recruiting jihadists. It shows that the Al Qaeda threat is not coming from traditional Islam, but is coming precisely from the edge that is colliding with modernization and globalization.
Butt also explained that traditional communities often inadvertently push their young into the arms of the radicals. Attitudes to jobs, dress, schooling and socialising all play their part in driving youngsters away from their parents’ generation. But one of the biggest factors that has helped the growth of British Islamic radicalism is marriage. Islamism’s most important tenet is that Muslims should not be divided by race or nationalismâ€â€that all Muslims are one. It therefore can offer an Islamic route out of having to marry your cousin.
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Cheney stretches common sense in defining it away
In a radio interview last fall, Cheney said, “We don’t torture.” What he did not acknowledge, according to Alberto J. Mora, who served then as the Bush-appointed Navy general counsel, was that the new legal framework was designed specifically to leave room for cruelty. In international law, Mora said, cruelty is defined as “the imposition of severe physical or mental pain or suffering.” He added: “Torture is an extreme version of cruelty.”
How extreme? Yoo was summoned again to the White House in the early spring of 2002. This time the question was urgent. The CIA had captured Abu Zubaida, then believed to be a top al-Qaeda operative, on March 28, 2002. Case officers wanted to know “what the legal limits of interrogation are,” Yoo said.
This previously unreported meeting sheds light on the origins of one of the Bush administration’s most controversial claims. The Justice Department delivered a classified opinion on Aug. 1, 2002, stating that the U.S. law against torture “prohibits only the worst forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment” and therefore permits many others. [Read the opinion] Distributed under the signature of Assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee, the opinion also narrowed the definition of “torture” to mean only suffering “equivalent in intensity” to the pain of “organ failure ….. or even death.”
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Jaume de Marcos of the Hanif blog has comments on my UUWorld article on UU Buddhism, and finds it falls short.
it is not that UUs quietly evolve towards a “vague Buddhism”: it is Buddhism that is revisioned and contorted (something that Buddhism has done very well for centuries and is one key reason for its survival and expansion) in order to fit the UU way of being religious.
I gather Jaume is critical of UUs taking a humanist approach to Buddhism, and discarding notions like samsara, the cycle of rebirths, that are fundamental to Asian Buddhism. UU Buddhism seems more to me like the Buddhism Without Beliefs proposed by Stephen Batchelor rather than traditional Asian Buddhism. I am skeptical not just of rebirth, but of the aspiration for “enlightenment,” so I think that’s the right way to go.
Jaume also criticizes the statement (he attributes it to me, but in the article, it’s a quote from Joel Baehr) that Buddhism is non-theistic, by noting the Pure Land sect which is extremely popular in Asia.
All I can say is that among UU Buddhists, I found interest in Zen, Tibetan and Vipassana forms, but no one who followed Pure Land.
I’m writing an essay that uses this exact same quote, and connects it to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (via Albert Ellis) as this essay in Smithsonian
Johnson prepared to manage his own case, a contemporary noted, by studying medicine “diligently in all its branches,” giving “particular attention to the diseases of the imagination.” His greatest fear was that he might lose his reason, for it was his powerful intellect that allowed him to keep a grip on sanity. “To have the management of the mind is a great art,” he told Boswell, “and it may be attained in a considerable degree by experience and habitual exercise.” Johnson would have agreed wholeheartedly with the sentiment of the Greek philosopher Epictetus, who wrote: “People are not disturbed by things, but by the view they take of them.” This is the idea at the heart of cognitive-behavioral therapy, a pragmatic, short-term form of psychotherapy now widely used to treat a host of psychological problems.
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No evidence that he was a sinner.
With no rain or even clouds to warn him of the danger, death came literally out of the blue Thursday to a self-employed landscaper. The killer was a powerful bolt of lightning that cracked through perfectly clear skies.
David Canales, 41, of West Miami-Dade, was on the job at a Pinecrest home when the bolt hit. It first seared a tree, then traveled and struck Canales, standing nearby.
Experts said Canales was killed by a weather phenomenon fittingly called a ”bolt from the blue” or ”dry lightning” because it falls from clear, blue skies. He was pronounced dead at South Miami Hospital.
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Actually, I’m surprised it’s a surprise, though having recently read it, I don’t think it’s as well organized and coherent as some other books of a similar vein that I’ve read. It’s really better at fencing, making specific attacks on religious embarrassments, than as an overall analysis.
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When I saws that MSNBC has a story busting journalists for giving campaign contributions, I figured it was written by my former professor, Bill Dedman. I was right. Dedman taught computer-aided journalism, and is a wizard with spreadsheets and databases.
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