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Rabu, 26 Mei 2010

“2010 Kentucky Book Fair - Examiner” plus 3 more

“2010 Kentucky Book Fair - Examiner” plus 3 more

2010 Kentucky Book Fair - Examiner

Posted: 26 May 2010 05:46 PM PDT

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The 2010 Kentucky Book Fair is scheduled for Saturday, November 13th at the Frankfort Convention Center in Frankfort, Ky. The event is free and is from 9:00am - 4:30pm.

Each year there are approximately 150 authors who showcase and sell their books. This has been credited for being the largest literary event in the state. It is sponsored by the The State Journal, Frankfort's daily newspaper, and co-sponsored by the Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives and the University Press of Kentucky.

There have been over 5,000 patrons each year that has frequented the 28 annual events. The donations of the profits have been a huge help to the local schools and libraries throughout Kentucky. The average donation is $120,000 per year, a huge amount for the schools in the area.

The Book Fair is looking for the following to help make this year's book fair a success:

  1. Author submissions from all genres- fictions, non fiction, graphic novels, cookbooks- anything of interest to the public
  2. Volunteers to help set up, clean up, and greeters
  3. Volunteer Committee members
  4. Sponsorships

For more information please visit the following

Five Filters featured article: The Art of Looking Prime Ministerial - The 2010 UK General Election. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

Noah and the Flood; why it is nothing more than a fable. - Gather.com

Posted: 26 May 2010 06:43 PM PDT

From The Portable Atheist, from the essay of Ibn Warraq.

Logic and reason versus fairytales and  the improbability of anything like this ever happening.

The building of the ark, by Noah, the saving of all the animals, the universal deluge are all taken over into the Koran from Genesis. As the manifest absurdities of the tale were pointed out, Christians were no longer prone to take the fable literally; except, of course, the literal minded fundamentalists, many of whom still set out every year to look for the remnants of the lost ark. Muslims, on the other hand, seem immune to rational thought, and refuse to look the evidence in the face. Here, therefore, are the arguments to show the absurdities in the legend, even though it may seem to be belabouring the obvious. Sometimes it is a good thing to belabour the obvious and a few still don't get it!

OK, so Noah was asked to take into the ark a pair from every species. Some zoologists estimate that there are perhaps ten million living species of insects; would they all fit into the ark? True, they don't take up much room, but they do feed on each other....so let us concentrate on the larger animals: reptiles, 5,000 species; birds, 9,000 species; and 4,500 species of class Mammalia. In all, in the phylum Chordata, there are 45,000 species. What sized ark would hold nearly 45,000 species of animals? Remember TWO of each. A pair from each species makes  nearly 90,000 individual animals, from snakes to elephants, from birds to horses, from hippopotamuses to rhinoceroses. How did Noah get them all together so quickly? How long did he wait for the sloth to make its slothful way from the Amazon? How did the kangaroo get out of Australia, which is an island? How did the polar bear know where to find Noah? As Robert Ingersoll asks, "Can absurdities go farther than this?" Either we conclude that this fantastic tale is not to be taken literally, or we have recourse to some rather feeble answer, such as, for God all is possible! Why, in that case, did God go through all this rather complicated, time-consuming (at least for Noah) procedure?  Why not save Noah and other righteous people with a rapid miracle rather than a protracted one?

The other inconvenient fact (inconvenient to 'the faithful"anyway) is that there is NO geological evidence indicating a universal flood. There is indeed evidence of local floods but not one that covered the entire world, not even the entire Middle East. We now know that the biblical accounts of the Flood, on which the Koranic account is based, are derived from Mesopotamian legnds: "There is no reason to trace the Mesopotamia and Hebrew stories back to any one flood in particular; the Hebrew fiction is most likely to have developed from the Mesopotamians' legends. the stories are fictions, not history."

And on and on it goes. Take most any 'story' found in the Bible or the Koran and it can- not just be disproved, it has no validity at all.

Five Filters featured article: The Art of Looking Prime Ministerial - The 2010 UK General Election. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

'24' Ends and It's the Story of Jack and Chloe - Popmatters.com

Posted: 26 May 2010 05:28 AM PDT

Final Acts

The eighth and final season of 24 ended on a threnody to selfless friendship and irrational loyalty. As she has done since she first joined 24 in 2003 as a surly comms whizz, Chloe O'Brian (Mary Lynn Rajskub) lied, stole secrets, expedited information, and defied co-workers, superiors and a President, all for Jack Bauer (Keifer Sutherland). There were few gripping moments in the series' two-hour finale, but the closing scenes between Jack and Chloe resurrected the emotional intensity characteristic of the earlier series.


Such intensity occurred far too rarely in the preceding 22 episodes. Although more tightly plotted than the seventh series, Bauer's final outing lacked the driving complexity of earlier seasons. Despite a surfeit of violence and death, nothing of much significance actually happened until near the end. Katee Sackhoff's Dana Walsh, for instance, wasn't quite an amoral counterpoint to Jack's brutal good guy, but the lack of attention CTU paid to her increasingly ridiculous behavior and constant absences simply made the nation's supposed front line against terrorism look grossly inefficient. As Dana's unimportance was revealed, the charade of her secret life as a wanted criminal and spy-for-hire seemed so much wasted air time.


The series did pick up after the re-emergence of former President Charles Logan (Gregory Itzin) as Mephistophelian éminence grise to the struggling President Taylor (Cherry Jones). This reintroduced what the series always did best, the push and pull of psychological, not physical, pressure between two well-matched adversaries. As Taylor struggled to save her dream of an international peace treaty over the Middle East, her moral uncertainty and stealthy corruption of her honorable presidency was a joy to watch. And as Logan transfixed Taylor at the point where she realized she could no longer turn back without destroying herself, Jones' performance matched Itzin's own, her face alternating between presidential façade and human ruin. Unlike other villains in 24, who came to resemble the megalomaniac fictions of the James Bond franchise, Logan was menacing because he was so human: weak, ambitious far beyond his talents, and capable of justifying to himself any thought or action through a sometimes stunning pragmatism.


At the same time, the core of Sutherland's performance rarely wavered. Even in this most extreme of Bauer's incarnations, where killing moved beyond operational necessity into personal odyssey, Sutherland communicated the tragedy of long-term psychological destruction courted by professional death-dealers. He took full advantage of a physiognomy that can slip from an adolescent horror at the world to a snarling, ageless hatred within seconds. And so Bauer appealed even when behaving at his worst, reminding viewers that while he is fictional, he has counterparts who are real.


Sutherland even managed to bring a whisper of dignity to the Bourne-like ending, when Jack limps into a Chloe-enabled information blackout. (Chloe's final line, "Close it down," had more than a hint of Treadstone about it.) The mechanism of the closing was clever, no doubt, with Jack gazing up at a surveillance drone and Chloe and Cole (Freddie Prinze Jr.) seeing him eye-to-eye on a screen in CTU. But the farewell scene was smeared with a kind of weepy schmaltz that even Disney might abjure, predicated more on profit from a future movie than on the logic of Jack's final acts. 


And yet, in its death throes, 24 still raised discomfiting questions. Logan showed again that the men who lead the world's only super-power retire now with potentially decades of active life ahead of them. And Jack and Chloe's relationship—especially his excessive demands on her allegiance and her instinctive support of his decisions—parallels that between a civil society and those it trains and pays to protect it. How does a democracy control those it trains to kill and who is responsible for their actions? Is it with those who decide policies or execute them—or with those individuals who enable the actions taken in their name? 


However uneven the plotting of the last two seasons of 24, and however predictable its variations on deception, duplicity, and greed, primetime TV will miss the seriousness of the show's themes, especially in exposing the confrontations between morality and exigency that government entails. North Americans are quick to claim the rights of citizens. 24 reminded them that citizenship also imposes obligations.

Five Filters featured article: The Art of Looking Prime Ministerial - The 2010 UK General Election. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

Justification for American Revolution about to disappear - DAILY KOS

Posted: 21 May 2010 04:11 PM PDT

It is very possible that the wholesale gutting of many of Britain's most malignant intrusions on civil liberties which is now being promised by Nick Clegg will fail. The very fact that such a program has been proposed by the de facto number two man of a major government is among the greatest actual causes for celebration in a lifetime. We have seen great increases in liberty both on the occasion of 1989-1993 and more gradually in nations such as China, but these have tended to involve cruel and incompetent elites letting go at least partially by their own inclination. It would be hard to point to a better example than this of a representative government actually being prompted to give up a great array of its own powers through the functioning of the electoral process itself. Likewise, it would be hard to imagine anything of the sort happening in the U.S.

As relayed by The Independent, Clegg's proposals include the following specific actions, some of which would have a wholesome effect on the activities of our own government but has to be implemented by our elected leaders:

* scrapping the identity card scheme and second generation biometric passports; * removing limits on the rights to peaceful protest; * a bonfire of unnecessary laws; * a block on pointless new criminal offences; * internet and email records not to be held without reason; * closed-circuit television to be properly regulated; * new controls over the DNA database, such as on the storage of innocent people's DNA; * axeing the ContactPoint children's database; * schools will not take children's fingerprints without asking for parental consent; * reviewing the libel laws to protect freedom of speech.

Of course, the Brits have more to work with than we do in terms of things that need to be revoked, but we have recently been gaining on them - and now, by way of this probable reversal in Britain, we are thus on track to reaching the point at which the U.S. will be on the whole less free than the United Kingdom, which, of course, was the entity from which we declared independence for the purpose of establishing a government that is more free than the United Kingdom.

All of this is to say that the U.S. is about to fail.

Five Filters featured article: The Art of Looking Prime Ministerial - The 2010 UK General Election. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.
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