Telling Is Listening: Ursula K. Le Guin on the Magic of Real Human Conversation Every act of communication is an act of tremendous courage in which we give ourselves over to two parallel possibilities: the possibility of planting into another mind a seed sprouted in ours and watching it blossom into a breathtaking flower of mutual understanding; and the possibility of being wholly misunderstood, reduced to a withering weed. Candor and clarity go a long way in fertilizing the soil, but in the end there is always a degree of unpredictability in the climate of communication — even the warmest intention can be met with frost. Yet something impels us to hold these possibilities in both hands and go on surrendering to the beauty and terror of conversation, that ancient and abiding human gift. And the most magical thing, the most sacred thing, is that whichever the outcome, we end up having transformed one another in this vulnerable-making process of speaking and listening. Why and how we do that is what Ursula K. She explains: Box A and box B are connected by a tube.
Daddy’s boy: New York Times investigation exposes the breadth of Trump’s lies and corruption On his way out of town on Tuesday afternoon, President Trump took some questions from the press corps and defended embattled Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh's youthful drinking habits. Trump said that while he has never had a beer himself he knows lots of people who have and he doesn't consider it a problem. This isn't the story we've heard in the past, at least as it concerns his son Donald Jr.' “Donald put Freddy down quite a bit,” said Annamaria Schifano, then the girlfriend of Freddy’s best friend, who was at the dinner and recalled Donald’s tendency to pick fights and storm out. Since he's been president, Trump has pretended that he isn't as judgmental about his big brother's drinking as he used to be. Caption Settings Dialog Beginning of dialog window. Ad • Video will play after ad After Trump's comments on Tuesday, I was reminded of a famous illustration of his vengeful nature. That too is BS. Trump has always said he got "peanuts” from his father.
Saudis Bankroll Taliban, Even as King Officially Supports Afghan Government In interviews with The New York Times, a former Taliban finance minister described how he traveled to Saudi Arabia for years raising cash while ostensibly on pilgrimage. The Taliban have also been allowed to raise millions more by extorting “taxes” by pressing hundreds of thousands of Pashtun guest workers in the kingdom and menacing their families back home, said Vali Nasr, a former State Department adviser. Yet even as private Saudi money backed the Taliban, Saudi intelligence once covertly mediated a peace effort that Taliban officials and others involved described in full to The Times for the first time. Playing multiple sides of the same geopolitical equation is one way the Saudis further their own strategic interests, analysts and officials say. But it also threatens to undermine the fragile democratic advances made by the United States in the past 15 years, and perhaps undo efforts to liberalize the country. Others say the verdict is still out. That may be easier said than done.
Google’s Leading Futurist Predicts Humans Will Start Living Forever by 2029 Google’s chief futurist, Ray Kurzweil, is known for his wildly-accurate predictions — back in the 1980s, when all of our current technological advancements seemed like sci-fi fantasies, he predicted self-driving cars, prosthetic legs for paraplegics, and wirelessly accessing information via the internet, among many other spot-on forecasts. Now, his latest prediction is that humans are going to live forever, and he thinks it’s going to happen as soon as 2029. “Many think author, inventor and data scientist Ray Kurzweil is a prophet for our digital age,” writes Playboy’s David Hochman. “A few say he’s completely nuts.” SEE ALSO: Soon We May Live Longer Than 120 Years, Scientists Say According to Kurzweil’s calculations, Singularity — the merging of human intelligence with nonbiological intelligence, or technology — will happen in 2045. This is where his predictions for 2029 come in. "By the 2020s we’ll start using nanobots to complete the job of the immune system," he said.
Radical right (United States) The lily-white movement was an all-white faction of the Republican Party in the Southern United States which opposed civil rights and African-American involvement in the party, and was active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In 1948, the Dixiecrats, a breakaway segregationist faction of the Democratic Party, contested the 1948 presidential election with then-Governor of South Carolina Strom Thurmond as their candidate, winning 4 states. In Louisiana, Ned Touchstone, a Wallace supporter, edited a conservative newsletter, The Councilor, through which means he attacked liberals in both major parties. The Councilor was the publication of the White Citizens' Council. In 1967, Touchstone ran unsuccessfully as a Democrat against Louisiana Education Superintendent Bill Dodd, who carried the support of party moderates, liberals, and African Americans. Jim Gilchrist, a conservative Republican, founded the Minuteman Project in April 2005. Jump up ^ David Brion Davis, ed.
untitled The New York Times published an amazing story last night on the U.S. and Iraqi troops who discovered and were wounded by old and inoperable chemical weapons over the course of the Iraq war. In some cases, shoddy disposal tactics resulted in soldiers suffering injuries after being exposed to active chemical agents still inside the corroding munitions. The Pentagon withheld information about the weapons from soldiers on the front line, kept military doctors in the dark, and generally did everything it could to “suppress knowledge” about the injuries to U.S. personnel. It’s a remarkable piece of journalism. But for many conservatives, the real news broken by the Times is that BUSH WAS RIGHT ABOUT IRAQ. . It’s incredible that I have to write this sentence in October 2014, but here it goes. Before we get into the actual reasons for why this doesn’t vindicate Bush, let’s think about this logically for moment. The discovery of old, degraded chemical munitions in Iraq is not news.
After the Election: ‘What a Pathetic Thing Is Decadence’ Today is finally Election Day, mercifully. Our tireless politics team is live-blogging events throughout the day and into the night. Over the past several weeks, scores and scores of your emails have poured in, covering a wide array of campaign topics, so here’s one final roundup of your smart opinions and analyses as the polls open this morning. (They’re already closed in Dixville Notch, New Hampshire, the first vote in the nation, and in that tiny hamlet Clinton beat Trump in a landslide, 4-2—a harbinger, we hope.) Most recently we had a roundup of reader reaction to the Comey aftermath, and a new reader makes an interesting point here: FBI agents ran to the nearest reporter to leak about potentially damaging material about Clinton. Another reader similarly wonders: Why is there no MSM coverage of Trump having to face Judge Curiel on November 28 over fraud and racketeering charges for Trump University? This next reader quotes Fallows in “2016: The Year Latinos Saved America?
The Screenwriting Mystic Who Wanted to Be the American Führer When Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany in January 1933, an American named William Dudley Pelley believed the Führer’s rise was the fulfillment of a prophecy revealed to him by the spirit world in 1929. It was a sign, he thought, ushering in his own ascent to power, and he announced the creation of the Silver Legion, a Christian militia dedicated to the spiritual and political renewal of the United States. Jesus, Pelley reported, even dropped a line to say he approved of the plan. That was the beginning of the group that a Congressional committee would later characterize as “probably the largest, best financed and best publicized” Nazi-copycats in the United States (Nazi Germany chose to keep Pelley and his spirits at arm’s length). While his ideas, steeped in spiritualism and racial theory, were never that popular—historians estimate the Silver Shirts maxed out at a membership of 15,000—Pelley wasn’t alone in admiring Hitler or the economic turnaround of 1930s Germany.
Wolfowitz wrongly says Germany, France thought Iraq had WMD Fifteen years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the debate continues over the events that led to the Iraq War. Appearing on NBC’s Meet the Press on the anniversary of the attacks, Paul Wolfowitz took questions from host Chuck Todd on the causes and outcomes of the war. Todd asked Wolfowitz, a former deputy secretary of defense, about the war’s stated rationale, which was that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Todd: "Let me ask you this, then, who lied? Wolfowitz: "I think the original liar is Saddam Hussein, who lied about what he had and we discovered he had more. The charge that President George W. Our fact-check asks a different question. We found much evidence that Germany and France were skeptical. A brief recap While weapons of mass destruction weren’t the only argument for going to war, they were pivotal in the debate. "There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction," Cheney said. President George W. Our ruling