SerPolUS_IDES

The pope's friend and former student stirs up the Vatican by questioning celibacy, current attitudes towards gay relationships, and church conduct in the sex abuse scandal.

Franklin Graham attacks Islam (& Hinduism) & asserts US is only Judeo-Christian in its roots. "Muslims do not worship the same God I do."

Rowland on the Quirinale exhibit in Rome (Feb-June 2010), and on the lonely, violent, ill-starred and powefully innovative painter who so connects with people of the 21st century.

Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini's book What Darwin Got Wrong - says reviewer Richard C. Lewontin - considers an immense amount of biology missing from our modern formulation of evolution by natural selection. Why, when vertebrates evolved wings, did they have to give up their front legs to do it? Why don't birds that live in trees make a living by eating the leaves instead of spending so much of their energy looking for seeds or worms?

News, commentary and archival information about the Tea Party movement from NYTimes.

More than populism, the movement is about a transformation from political indifference to bracing for tyranny.

Karl Rabeder, an Austrian Horation Alger, decided he'd be freer if he gave away his fortune to a micro-credit philanthropy he set up in South America. He does not pass judgment on other rich people who don't follow his example

Matt Beynon Rees (former Jerusalem bureau chief for Time mag) writesprovocative mysteries set in today's Palestinian territories - adopting a humanist perspective focused on ordinary people. A modest protagonist, an aging schoolteacher Omar Yussef, is no one's idea of a hero. But he proves his courage by daring to keep an open mind in a closed society.

W.B.Wilcox (Yale research fellow) on C.Smith's "Christian America? What Evangelicals Really Want" - a book which denies evangelical views are monolithic, or a threat to political moderation & tolerance.

Discussion about Tea Party movement, & article about it on 2/1/2010

FINANCIAL PAGE about the contradictions of economic populism…

Visit to a Tea Party group in Kentucky gives keys to Tea Party's origins & concerns

Wheatcroft lauds Orwell's clear vision about tyrannical tendencies (whereever he saw them, on left or right) & his influence on our language. Though his novels aren't in the world's top literary tier, Evelyn Waugh (with whom Orwell shared an unlikely mutual admiration) described Orwell's greatness in terms of his "unusually high moral sense and respect for justice and truth." Orwell's epitaph could be his own praise for Anatole France's "passion for liberty and intellectual honesty."

Lee Siegel recapitulates an indictment of American life that displeased both right and left - pervasive narcissism resulting from "a decadent definace of nature and kinship." "Long-term social changes," Lasch wrote, have "created a scarcity of jobs, devalued the wisdom of the ages and brought all forms of authority (including the authority of experience) into disrepute."

Argument that the scientific frame of mind played a leading role in the emergence of democratic governance and individual rights.

In 2010: $50-75 bucks.day very easily from close to home (to avoid flying - yr-round from New York, seasonally from Boston) - go on older ship, shoulder/off-season,Carib or Eur(hi compet'n) inside cabin (Norwegian has window to hall), Avoid alcohol,spa,boat shore excursion,on-board Internet. No tips in Europe.

The author discusses the current timeliness of the 1914 book, "Other People's Money," by Louis Brandeis (future Supreme Court Justice). Melvin A. Urofsky is a Brandeis scholar and professor at Virginia Commonwealth University.

In China, 42 high-speed rail lines have opened or are set to open by 2012; the U.S. hopes to build its first high-speed line by 2014. The Chinese bullet train, which has the world's fastest average speed, travels 664 miles from Guangzhouon the coast to Wuhan, deep in the interior. In a little more than three hours. Travelling the same distance from Boston to southern Virginia, the train takes less time than Amtrak's fastest train, the Acela, takes to go from Boston to New York. By comparison, the United States hopes to build its first high-speed rail line by 2014 - linking only the 84 miles between Tampa and Orlando, Fla.

China has nothing comparable to the research, industrial and economic resources of the United States. Yet the Chinese are blowing us away in the technology race to the future

Q're to help answer question (9/18/09)