Big Bosoms And The Big Bang: Did The Human Condition Really Emerge In Europe?? | The New Republic

Big Bosoms And The Big Bang: Did The Human Condition Really Emerge In Europe?? | The New Republic
John McWhorter

There they go again.

This week in Nature we learn of the discovery of a 35,000 year old erotic figurine in Germany, 5000 years older than previously known such work by early humans.

We are to take from this that evidence for an artistic mindset - i.e. modern, abstract thought - mysteriously "exploded" into the human endowment at this time. "The Big Bang," some call it, an apparent Great Leap Forward in toolmaking, burial rituals and art among European peoples at this time. Scholars of human evolution have taken a cue from this and supposed that the Big Bang was the result of some genetic mutation that led to humanity of a modern cognitive level.

John Noble Wilford at the Times notes the fascination over the "inspiration and symbolism behind the rather sudden flowering" that figurines of this period...

The Great Grocery Smackdown - Magazine - The Atlantic

The Great Grocery Smackdown - Magazine - The Atlantic
I started looking into how and why Walmart could be plausibly competing with Whole Foods, and found that its produce-buying had evolved beyond organics, to a virtually unknown program—one that could do more to encourage small and medium-size American farms than any number of well-meaning nonprofits, or the U.S. Department of Agriculture, with its new Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food campaign. Not even Fishman, who has been closely tracking Walmart’s sustainability efforts, had heard of it. “They do a lot of good things they don’t talk about,” he offered.
The program, which Walmart calls Heritage Agriculture, will encourage farms within a day’s drive of one of its warehouses to grow crops that now take days to arrive in trucks from states like Florida and California. In many cases the crops once flourished in the places where Walmart is encouraging their revival, but vanished because of Big Agriculture competition.

the sun rises every morning

“The sun rises every morning. I do not rise every morning; but the variation is due not to my activity, but to my inaction. Now, to put the matter in a popular phrase, it might be true that the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising. His routine might be due, not to a lifelessness, but to a rush of life. The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, ‘Do it again’; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, ‘Do it again’ to the sun; and every evening, ‘Do it again’ to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.”

— G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

70 MIllion by Hold Your Horses!

70 Million by Hold Your Horses ! from L'Ogre on Vimeo.

Common Semantic

mission accomplished protesters. Never thought that would conjure such a strong parallel.

The Wisdom of Mistakes

The Wisdom of Mistakes

Romoeroticism

InsideCatholic.com - Romoeroticism

"This year, just like last year, Gay Pride weekend coincided with the feast of Corpus Christi.

Washington, D.C.'s Pride parade was fairly restrained: It featured a cornucopia of Episcopalians, and all the marchers went out of their way to sweetly drape beads over the little elementary-school girls standing in front of me. There were Affirming Baptists; as the parade passed by me, a knot of gay men to my right joked -- in that gay way that is never really joking all the way down -- that maybe they could be Baptists again now. There were strollers, lots of strollers . . . at least five floats' lengths away from the guys in the padded leather thongs..."

check it out.

Yesterday turned into one long discussion on homosexuality, gay rights, how do I interact with my gay friends at my conservative christian college etc. This morning I woke up and found this recommended by an Anglican man I very much respect.

For a more personal and indepth discussion on the positions on homosexuality in the church check out: http://slaggetyslagg.blogspot.com/