Bonhoeffer the Brave: Interview

from National Review:

LOPEZ: What are the most prevalent myths about him?

METAXAS: One of the big ones is that he was a pacifist, which he wasn’t. But the Sixties anti-war movement appropriated Bonhoeffer for their purposes nonetheless. They seemed to be under the impression that, had he lived, he would have been the third person in bed with John and Yoko. Another myth about him is that he was an advocate of income-redistributionist “social justice.” There’s just no actual evidence for that.

But the main myth about him is that while imprisoned by the Gestapo he drifted away from orthodox Christianity toward some kind of “post-Christian humanism,” that he became some kind of atheist. This one is based off of a single infamous phrase — “religionless Christianity” — that he wrote in a letter to his best friend Eberhard Bethge. It turns out that Bonhoeffer meant precisely the opposite of what the atheists and agnostics said he meant. This is a classic case of the lie traveling around the world four times before the truth gets a chance to put its shoes on. There was no rebuttal to this misinterpretation for so long that it just got out there as a fact and stayed out there — basically until now, over 50 years later.

Facebook Vet Launches Jumo, a Social Hub for Do-Gooders

from FastCompany:

Hughes has entered a crowded field of do-good sites wanting to tug your heartstrings and separate you from your cash. He walks through a list. “There’s Causecast, Causes, Razoo,” he says, pulling up sites to compare and contrast. “There’s Firstgiving and Justgiving, and they’re all doing great things.”

Harry Houdini always stressed that his miraculous tricks were the product of art, not the supernatural.

from CityJournal:

Throughout his professional life, Houdini had no illusions about his talent. He always assured onlookers that no matter how miraculous his tricks appeared to be, they were actually earthbound, consisting of muscular contortions, lock-picking skills, inventive gimmicks, and misdirection. He did his best to expose charlatans who claimed that their magic came from occult sources. One of his colorful posters is succinct:DO SPIRITS RETURN? HOUDINI SAYS NO—AND PROVES IT.

'Wandering minds' make people unhappy: study

from YahooNews:

A US study out Thursday suggests that people spend about half of their time thinking about being somewhere else, or doing something other than what they are doing, and this perpetual act of mind-wandering makes them unhappy.

Check out Trackyourhappiness.org:
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Track Your Happiness.org is a new scientific research project that investigates what makes life worth living.

UFO Conspiracy Theories has Holes

from Discovery.com:
Keeping state secrets is difficult enough, but a conspiracy of this magnitude would involve thousands, or perhaps tens of thousands, of people in a dozen or more countries. There are plenty of (often contradictory) stories from both known and anonymous "former officials," yet not a single person has come forth with hard evidence of extraterrestrials.

Peckman and other UFO conspiracy theorists have a difficult time explaining why, exactly, all the governments of the world are so concerned about the public being aware of aliens, what the purpose of a cover-up would be.

The crimes of the Khmer Rouge are inextricable from Marxist/Leninist ideology.

from CityJournal:
All Communist regimes follow strangely similar trajectories, barely colored by local traditions. In every case, these regimes seek to make a blank slate of the past and to forge a new humanity.

The Airbag for Cyclists: New inflatable collar protects riders who refuse to wear a helmet

from DailyMail:
It is the perfect invention for those of us too vain to bother wearing a helmet while riding our bikes.
The 'Hvvding' helmet is an airbag 'collar' that springs into action within 0.1 seconds, covering the skull and neck of a rider in the event of an impact.

Eat Pray Love Me Generation

from Standpoint Magazine:

Maybe what was once seen as a little girl's fairy-story is now seen by baby-boomer women as an inalienable right. A little self-knowledge would go a long way here. But this movie is not about self-knowledge. The audience will come out of Eat Pray Love none the wiser on how to put their stuff in order. Rather, it's all about looking beautiful and having hunks lust after you in beautiful settings, with some faded old Sixties mantras thrown in to add to that feel of quality. And there is something distasteful about the kind of pick-and-mix, magpie-like attitude to different cultures that this film shamelessly displays.

In any case travel — the modern variety anyway — increasingly narrows the mind, I find. It's become a fetish, a manifestation of personal disquiet rather than a genuine desire to explore. Gilbert was wrong and Dorothy was right — you don't need to go any further than your own backyard. Or try therapy, if you must.

It is, after all, very rare to come across anybody who has genuinely been changed by a stint living here or there, whatever they might claim to the contrary. Travel, in and of itself, never makes a person more interesting. A boring person's take on their experiences will be the same whether they're in Bali or Boston — even if they do look like Julia Roberts.

Mike Hukabee says folks with pre-existing conditions are unisurable, just like burnt out house

from Not Dead Yet:
Where I - and other disability activists - part with politically Right-leaning opponents of assisted suicide is that we see cause for alarm on the Right as well. A lot of radical conservative rhetoric right now - like from the Tea Party - sounds pretty pro-death if you're a person with a disability, chronic condition, etc.

If that sounds extreme and alarmist (as opposed to the "death panel" cries), please watch the video embedded below. It's good old "Compassionate Conservative Christian Mike Huckabee" speaking at the "Values Voter Summit" - the site for the summit says the "values" they want to further are to: protect marriage, champion life, strengthen the military, limit government, control spending and defend our freedoms. Guess which one of those "values" Huckabee throws under the bus?

National Reports Show Increase In Poverty And Charity

from Everyday Christian:
This report was in response to the U.S. Census Bureau’s Report on Poverty released earlier this month, which showed the income gap between the richest and poorest Americans widened last year to its greatest disparity on record. Those making more than $100,000 annually earned 49.4 percent of all income generated in the U.S., while those below the poverty line generated only 3.4 percent.

How to ask awkward questions and annoy people

from Spiked:
Socrates’ relentless questioning of received moral wisdom and authority, his struggle to apprehend real existence in consciousness, would make him many enemies.

This argument, that all that mattered was care for one’s soul, is, she points out, possibly the one thing that the young democracy could not rightly accept. It was, in effect, a rejection of the people in the name of the individual and conscience. Only Socrates was wise - he tells us in Plato’s Apology (an account of his defence during the trial) - because he knew he was ignorant. Everyone else was simply ignorant.

'The Lonely Crowd,' at 60, Is Still Timely

from Chronicles of Higher Education:
It was the first book to stress a change in modern society from a culture of production and scarcity to one of consumption as a social act—from making things to relating to people, from "the hardness of the material," as the authors put it, to the softer touch of consumer-focused sales and services.

The other big trend discussed by The Lonely Crowd was the rise of the "peer group," the importance of schoolfellows and contemporaries, along with the mass media, in socializing a young person...It was a picture of teenagers listening together to pop records or radio music...Though he thought the sociability it promoted was superficial, he differed from earlier writers on mass media, advertising, and consumption—especially Frankfurt School sociologists—who stressed the atomizing of people into self-centered buyers.

Malaria death toll grows while Greens vilify solution

from CFACT:

The Centers For Disease Control (CDC) was formed in 1946 specifically to fight malaria. Its primary weapon was DDT, which it sprayed on over 4.5 million American homes. It worked, and by 1951 malaria had been eradicated from the United States. Since then, a variety of green groups have waged a campaign to ban this valuable weapon, and have succeeded to a large degree. Ineffective bed nets are in. DDT spraying is out. CFACT's experts explain in the following articles why reinstating DDT as a tool in the fight against global malaria is a matter of life and death.

Clinton to unveil US funds for clean cookstove push

from Reuters:
Some 1.9 million premature deaths, mostly among women and young children, occur every year due to smoke inhalation from rudimentary stoves, which in many cases consist of a few stones and an open fire inside or outside a shelter, officials said.

Smoke from such cooking methods can lead to childhood pneumonia, lung cancer, bronchitis and cardiovascular disease...

The Art of the YouTube Video

from Boston.com:

Are YouTube videos art? The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum thinks they might be. A team from the museum has selected 125 YouTube videos to appear in an exhibit called "YouTube Play: A Biennial of Creative Video."

Andy Stanley...Marriage and Expectations

Salvo Blips...King Corn and others...

from Salvo:

This is an eye-opening film about modern American agriculture and its impact on American food. Picture this: Cows are fed genetically modified corn that makes them sick (a corn-heavy diet is toxic to cattle). The cows are pumped full of antibiotics, slaughtered, and then sold to us as meat. We ultimately ingest the corn and the antibiotics. And that’s just one of the problems.

The Gospel of Wealth

from NYT:

Platt grew uneasy with the role he had fallen into and wrote about it in a recent book called “Radical: Taking Back Your Faith From the American Dream.” It encapsulates many of the themes that have been floating around 20-something evangelical circles the past several years.

The material world is too soul-destroying. “The American dream radically differs from the call of Jesus and the essence of the Gospel,” he argues. The American dream emphasizes self-development and personal growth. Our own abilities are our greatest assets.

But the Gospel rejects the focus on self: “God actually delights in exalting our inability.” The American dream emphasizes upward mobility, but “success in the kingdom of God involves moving down, not up.”

Whatever happened to quicksand in the movies

from Slate:

Access to sand and water may have given kids like me something that has since disappeared—a venue for a certain kind of wilderness fantasy, or "a peril over which the child's imagination has complete control," as Jesse, the quicksand fan, describes it. The ubiquity of sandboxes once nurtured the playful idea of being swallowed whole, while the kids who dreamed of quicksand sustained the movie myth. But in the late 1980s, nervous parents started to take our sand away. When they looked at the sandbox, they saw danger, too.

Why Nondrinkers May Be More Depressed

from Time:

But if alcohol can lead to depression, does that mean abstaining from alcohol will make you happier? A new study suggests that the opposite actually tends to be true. In fact, those who never drink are at significantly higher risk for not only depression but also anxiety disorders, compared with those who consume alcohol regularly. Read more: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1928187,00.html#ixzz0yDqZfaB8