Moral dilemmas

Good and Evil. Sometimes which side is which is obvious, but sometimes decisions involve more thought. What is good? What is evil? Here are some examples and mind-twisting moral issues.

Be fair with yourself, and tell the truth!^^

San Francisco Supervisors call for Arizona boycott

CBS News - Opponents of Arizona's new immigration law protest in San Francisco.

S.F. supes want economic boycott of Arizona

John Wildermuth,John Coté, Chronicle Staff Writers

Tuesday, April 27, 2010

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San Francisco’s supervisors are calling for a sweeping boycott of Arizona in the wake of that state’s harsh new law aimed at illegal immigrants, but they haven’t convinced Mayor Gavin Newsom.

A resolution that will go before the board today calls for San Francisco to end any and all contracts with Arizona-based companies and to stop doing business with the state.

“We want to send a message,” Supervisor David Campos told a rally on the steps of City Hall Monday morning. “There are consequences when you target a whole people.”

Immigration should be treated “not as a police enforcement issue, but as a human rights issue, as a social issue,” Supervisor John Avalos added. “We want to make sure the voice of San Francisco is well heard.”

Stephen Hawking on Aliens (the E.T kind, that is…)

From The Sunday Times

April 25, 2010

Don’t talk to aliens, warns Stephen Hawking

THE aliens are out there and Earth had better watch out, at least according to Stephen Hawking. He has suggested that extraterrestrials are almost certain to exist — but that instead of seeking them out, humanity should be doing all it that can to avoid any contact.

The suggestions come in a new documentary series in which Hawking, one of the world’s leading scientists, will set out his latest thinking on some of the universe’s greatest mysteries.

Alien life, he will suggest, is almost certain to exist in many other parts of the universe: not just in planets, but perhaps in the centre of stars or even floating in interplanetary space.

Hawking’s logic on aliens is, for him, unusually simple. The universe, he points out, has 100 billion galaxies, each containing hundreds of millions of stars. In such a big place, Earth is unlikely to be the only planet where life has evolved.

“To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational,” he said. “The real challenge is to work out what aliens might actually be like.”

Poll Finds President Obama Is World’s Most Respected Leader – AOL News

Poll Finds President Obama Is World’s Most Respected Leader – AOL News.

(April 23) — President Barack Obama is still the world’s most respected leader, according to a new six-country poll.

Released today by France 24 and Radio France Internationale, the Harris Interactive Poll asked 6,135 adults between the ages of 16 and 64 who live in the United States, Britain, France, Italy, Germany or Spain to name their favorite world leaders.

Seventy-seven percent of those surveyed chose Obama, which is one percentage point higher than when Harris Interactive asked the same question in November.

Getty Images

President Obama and the Dalai Lama rank at the top of a new poll measuring the world’s most popular leaders.

Close on his heels is the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s spiritual leader, who was mentioned by 75 percent of those polled. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton came in third at 62 percent, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel was mentioned by 54 percent of respondents, good enough for fourth place.

Taken between March 31 and April 12, the poll found that Pope Benedict XVI still ranked as the seventh most popular leader, despite the ongoing revelations about sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.

On the flip side of the coin, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi and Chinese President Hu Jintao earned a collective thumbs-down as the world’s least popular leaders.

Filed under: Nation, Politics, Crime

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The ongoing revelations this article talked about must be Liberal Propaganda. Because sexual abuse does not happen in the Catholic Church, according to Kay. All of those molested children are lieing its all Liberal propaganda. (I had to take a break because Kay was saying just that.) But, seriously to the Republicans that is trying to bring down the Democratic President because he wants to protect the CITIZEN and not the Corporations. The Big Corporations is a cancer in this nation, they dont deserve the bailouts the last president started. It would have been more detrimental as well. I am going to do something on how legalization of Marijuana could help this nations economy.

It’s not liberals trying to bring down conservatives like the idiots that are political entertainment shows. (Its all scripted to show the networks views.) Anyway Obama is doing a good job and everyone except for the most Radical Fundamentalist Republicans (does not mean they are religious. Even though any Fundamentalist in my mind is a Radical Fundamentalist and uses the same tactics for terror that the Islamic Fundamentalists do. Psychological Terrorism is far worse than a plane killing tens of thousands of people.)

Artist of the Day – Henri Matisse

How about some color – from the master of color himself , Henri Matisse ← click for more bio

Henri Émile Benoît Matisse was a French artist, leader of the Fauve group, regarded as one of the great formative figures in 20th-century art, a master of the use of color and form to convey emotional expression. Henri Matisse was born in December of 1869 in Le Cateau, France. He began painting during a convalescence from an operation, and in 1891 moved to Paris to study art. Matisse became an accomplished painter, sculptor and graphic designer, and one of the most influential artists of the 1900s. bio source:henry-matisse.com

Music. 1939. Oil in canvas. Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY, USA.

We survived Bush. You’ll survive Obama.

And now a few words from the spunkiest straight-shootin’ grandma ever, Mrs. Helen Philpot !

Margaret, please tell Howard that I love him because he loves you.  But that is about all the reaching across the aisle that I can handle.  A few years back, millions of people across this nation and across the globe marched for peace.  George Bush ignored us and we had to endure his lazy ass being in the White House for eight years.

So now a black man named Barack Obama, elected by the will of the people, has decided to fight for the poor, and work for world peace… and a bunch of white guys who think Fox really is News just can’t stand it.

Well, they can kiss my ass because I am tired of their belly aching.

This is exactly how our political system works.  Sometimes your party is in and sometimes it is out.  Your party is currently out.  So shut the hell up and deal with it.

Learning while you sleep and a case for more Zzzzzs

April 22, 2010 | ScientificAmerican.com

Sounds Make Memories Stick During Sleep

Hearing certain sounds during slumber can spur learning, according to research detailed at the Cognitive Neuroscience Society’s annual meeting in Montreal

By Ingrid Wickelgren

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MONTREAL—A good night’s sleep, or even just a nap, can be an aid to memory. Psychologists have known for years that sleep solidifies what we’ve learned during the day, transforming tenuous associations into stable ones. Learning while you snooze seems supremely efficient, and so people have long dreamed of co-opting this process so that their dozing brain shores up what matters to them—say, material they’ve studied for a test or a talk, or verbiage in a foreign language they want to master. But until now there has been little support for the notion that studying in your sleep is useful. Psychology graduate student John Rudoy at Northwestern University in Illinois reported findings here on Monday at the Cognitive Neuroscience Society 2010 annual meeting that hint at a way to do that.

News or sensationalism?

I’m not a journalist, nor did I ever have much interest in it save for lack of other ideas during career days in junior high. Still, I did go to university (Sociology degree, btw) and can be something of a critical thinker when I feel like it, so sometimes I like to pick on news sources and look at how they deliver information to the public.

I’m comparing a couple articles about a court case in Brisbane, Australia. I’ll start with The Brisbane Times whose headline was noticeable enough: ‘Satanic’ charges dismissed.

The article concerns itself entirely with the result of court proceedings where four people were accused of desecrating 82 graves at an historic cemetery.

The court heard one of the group bragged about inverting crucifixes at the cemetery because it “had meaning to Satanists”.

But following evidence from several witnesses at a committal hearing yesterday, lawyers for the four accused today argued their clients had no case to answer.

Lawyers Jann Taylor, for Ms Wilson and Mr Bell, and Debra Wardle, for Mr Smallbon, told the court the element of unlawfulness could not be proved by the Crown.

Laughably, their defense appears to center around the fact that police never contacted the owners of those plots to find out if the group had permission to tear the place up. (Another Brisbane article I found also points to police and investigators who couldn’t say precisely when the damage might have occurred. Some of all of it could have happened up to two weeks before this group was there.)

Ms Nisbett said Ms Wilson had been “quite animated” as she recounted what she had done.

“I said I hoped she hadn’t gone near my family’s graves. My grandmother and my uncle and aunt are buried at the Toowong Cemetery,” she said.

Ms. Nisbett’s testimony is what drives the second article, where she explains what else Wilson, her work colleague, said happened. I definitely like the wording of One India’s headline:

‘Vandal pinned down by Jesus Tombstone Down Under.’

The federal public servant said Ms Wilson had told her of a bizarre incident involving a tombstone.

“(Wilson said) ‘Jesus smashed Shane’. (She said) the tombstone moved a significant distance, hit Shane and pinned him on the legs,” Nisbett said.

Bell screamed and passed out from the pain, and the three others had to move the tombstone off his legs, the court heard.

Now, if you just read Brisbane’s version, you can gripe about how dumb the court system is since it has let this group get away with destruction of property. The Brisbane article only glosses over this tombstone story, because it’s more intent on providing a decent rundown of what all led up to the case against these people. Reading One India’s coverage, we’re led to think that God may have exacted some very specific revenge on one of the vandals. Is that true? Pretty damned unlikely. I’d believe Wilson’s ghost did it first.

The only value of the Jesus tombstone story is to explain how Bell’s leg got injured, which is what helped police pick him as a suspect. Well, that and the gravestone chunk he took home with him. He wound up pleading guilty to possessing “tainted property” because of it.

To sum up, I think the need to generate clicks on a story means writers or editors or whoever’s in charge of that stuff have to take the sensational angle more often than not. But you don’t get well rounded stories that way. And maybe they don’t care; they just want the clicks. Why worry about what a gullible audience will take from it? Caveat emtor and all that. Are journalists like this at all liable for leading their readers to goofy conclusions? Judging by what else I’ve read in the past, I guess not.

(cross-posted)