MetaFilter comments by amberglow

19236 MetaFilter comments by amberglow (displaying 801 through 850)

[Her] prayer group was part of the Fellowship (or "the Family"), a network of sex-segregated cells of political, business, and military leaders dedicated to "spiritual war" on behalf of Christ,... The Fellowship believes that the elite win power by the will of God, who uses them for his purposes. Its mission is to help the powerful understand their role in God's plan.

Whose prayer group? Hillary Clinton's.
comment posted at 11:22 AM on Sep-10-07

Laud Humphreys was studying to be an Episcopal priest in the mid-1950s when he learned, shortly after his father's death, that his father, Oklahoma State Representative Ira D. Humphreys, took trips to New Orleans to have sex with other men. After being dismissed as an Episcopal priest in the 1960s, Laud Humphreys then enrolled as a sociology grad student where he completed a dissertation about men who had sex with other men in public bathrooms in St. Louis, which Humphreys researched by agreeing to serve as a "watch queen", looking out for the police. After writing down the license plate numbers of the men having sex, Humphreys traced the men's addresses and contacted them in disguise, claiming to be collecting data for a public health survey. The research, which was condemned as unethical for its use of covert methods, was published in 1970 as Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places.
comment posted at 11:52 AM on Sep-8-07
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comment posted at 7:34 PM on Sep-8-07
comment posted at 7:35 PM on Sep-8-07
comment posted at 7:50 PM on Sep-9-07
comment posted at 11:26 AM on Sep-10-07

Salvador and Mabel Mangano, the owners of St. Rita’s nursing home in St. Bernard Parish, where 35 patients drowned in Hurricane Katrina’s flood waters, were found not guilty of negligent homicide and cruelty to the infirm charges tonight by a six-member jury. Read their story and decide for yourself if they're guilty.
comment posted at 7:12 PM on Sep-7-07
comment posted at 12:06 PM on Sep-8-07
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comment posted at 7:42 PM on Sep-8-07
comment posted at 8:02 PM on Sep-9-07
comment posted at 8:04 PM on Sep-9-07
comment posted at 6:51 AM on Sep-11-07
comment posted at 1:43 PM on Sep-23-07

§7. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

Ludwig Wittgenstein is such a contradictory figure that there are, in professional philosophical usage, two of him. Wittgenstein I had solved every philosophical problem in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921); having nothing else to do, he went home to Austria and became, unsuccessfully, a schoolteacher. In 1929, Wittgenstein I returned to Cambridge, where he began his transformation into Wittgenstein II. He was no longer confident in the Tractatus, his certainty in any answers less firm. Wittgenstein II's great, posthumous, work was the Philosophical Investigations. But Wittgenstein the living man was one, not two: musician and architect, reader of mysteries and engineer. "If philosophy has anything to do with wisdom," he once wrote, "there's certainly not a grain of that in Mind, and quite often a grain in the detective stories."
comment posted at 4:40 PM on Sep-7-07

D. James Kennedy , father of Christian Dominionism, has died.
comment posted at 4:48 PM on Sep-6-07
comment posted at 4:56 PM on Sep-7-07
comment posted at 4:57 PM on Sep-7-07
comment posted at 2:37 AM on Sep-8-07
comment posted at 3:02 AM on Sep-9-07
comment posted at 8:07 PM on Sep-9-07
comment posted at 8:08 PM on Sep-9-07
comment posted at 8:09 PM on Sep-9-07

Persistence of Myths Could Alter Public Policy Approach. "The conventional response to myths and urban legends is to counter bad information with accurate information. But the new psychological studies (PDFs) show that denials and clarifications, for all their intuitive appeal, can paradoxically contribute to the resiliency of popular myths." [Via Firedoglake, more at MindHacks.]
comment posted at 9:53 AM on Sep-6-07
comment posted at 7:41 AM on Sep-7-07

London prides itself on having the most highly trained cab drivers in the world. Black cab drivers (as opposed to their unlicensed minicab counterparts) must pass a gruelling test of local geography known as The Knowledge. Applicants take several years to master over 300 "runs" through London, and are often seen scouring the streets on mopeds with maps on clipboards as they prepare. Knowledge Boys (and Girls), as trainees are known, practise calling over the runs with "callover" partners (Forward, Orchard Street. Right Oxford Street. Comply Marble Arch...). Passing The Knowledge requires appearing before the Public Carriage Office multiple times before obtaining a license, and has been scientifically proven to grow the cabbies' brains, findings which could help those whose memories have been damaged by stroke or trauma. The Knowledge even forms the basis of a dystopian future religion in Will Self's The Book of Dave. Naturally, London's cabbies were incensed when the Immigration Minister recently referred to them as "low-skilled".
comment posted at 8:57 PM on Sep-5-07
comment posted at 8:57 AM on Sep-6-07
comment posted at 9:01 AM on Sep-6-07

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