Friday, November 27, 2009

“Steve Jreige - Bleacherreport.com” plus 4 more

“Steve Jreige - Bleacherreport.com” plus 4 more

Steve Jreige - Bleacherreport.com

Posted: 27 Nov 2009 02:28 PM PST

A life long sports fanatic that spends way too much time watching, listening, and reading about sports, and not enough time actually playing sports (as evidence by my substantial beer gut). Once upon a time I did play sports, and like some many of us sports junkies, my glory days were back at Annandale High School (Annandale VA) where I was a two-way started on the 1993 State Champion football squad. When I'm not focused on sports, I enjoy spending time with friends and family, especially my son Giacomo, and reading the philosophy of the great Khalil Gibran.

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Joel Kraemer's Maimonides Biography: Impressive Scholarship ... - Huffingtonpost.com

Posted: 25 Nov 2009 11:49 PM PST

Joel Kraemer's Maimonides: The Life and World of One of Civilization's Greatest Minds is, like its protagonist, the great 12th-century rabbi and scholar, impressively erudite and maddeningly elusive. Kraemer is a medievalist with a knowledge of Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, and Maimonides' native Judeo-Arabic, and he also has an impressive command both of traditional Jewish sources and traditional Islamic sources. His greatest source for contemporary documents is the Cairo Geniza, a repository of hundreds of thousands of documents kept by Cairo's Jewish community from the 9th through 19th centuries. But even with all the necessary ingredients at his disposal, the story never feels fully finished: both the man and his philosophy remain maddeningly out of reach.

Moses Maimonides, commonly called RaMBaM (an acronym for Rabbi Moses Ben Maimon), or Musa ibn Maymun in Arabic, was a towering figure of his day across religious communities. Born in Cordoba, the greatest city in Islamic Andalusia, he was forced to flee with his family to North Africa when fundamentalist Almohad Berbers overthrew the tolerant dynasty that had previously reigned. Both he and his father wrote tracts about Jews who were forced to convert to Islam, and there is much speculation -- which Kraemer finds credible -- that Maimonides himself outwardly converted to Islam, perhaps while he was doing his medical training in Fez, Morocco, while continuing to practice Judaism in secret. After more than a decade of travel, Maimonides finally arrived in Egypt, like his namesake, where he soon became court physician to Saladin, the ruler of Egypt and Syria who defeated the Crusaders in Palestine; simultaneously, Maimonides became the most prominent Jewish leader in Egypt, coordinating community affairs, judging disputes, writing responses to legal questions, and writing major philosophical works, when he wasn't seeing patients.

Kraemer is burdened by the weight of his subtitle. Maimonides' prose is dense and rich, both allusive and elusive, as he admits quite openly that he has no wish to make his meaning clear on the surface, but to write in layers so that only the most learned will penetrate his deepest meanings. While Kraemer does a good job writing his life and world, he doesn't do a good job of explaining why Maimonides is one of civilization's greatest minds -- which is, in fairness, a truly difficult task. He would have had both to explain Maimonides' philosophy, and then to explain the importance of Maimonides' philosophy in the context of the history of civilization. And Maimonides' ambitions were extraordinary. His Mishneh Torah was designed to condense the Jewish Oral Law, the Mishnah and Jerusalem and Babylonian Talmuds, from a discursive record of legal argumentation into a coherent, understandable legal code. His Guide of the Perplexed attempted to harmonize Jewish religious tradition with Aristotelian philosophy, to resolve the ancient dispute over whether there were contradictions between science and faith in God.

His prose tended to be intentionally obtuse, however, partly because some of his views were far from the mainstream of Jewish thought, and partly because he was a Jew living in a Muslim land, where anything outwardly contradicting Islamic thought would have been punished harshly. As a result, he's hard to summarize simply, and he's hard to sketch in broad strokes. Rather than roughly outline Maimonides' major works, Kraemer opts instead to dip in and paraphrase representative samples, showing where Maimonides borrowed from Aristotle, and where he borrowed from Islamic legal tradition and Muslim philosophers, especially al-Farabi. It's undoubtedly easier to understand than a college textbook on Maimonidean philosophy, but ultimately an unsatisfying choice, and it doesn't allow Kraemer to pursue his argument about Maimonides' importance.

As a primer on Maimonides, this is a worthy effort, worth a read despite its shortcomings. In choosing Maimonides for his subject, Kraemer was hardly less ambitious than the Master himself. He wanted to write the definitive biography of the man, and instead wound up writing the definitive biography of his life and world -- Maimonides the doctor and community leader, but not Maimonides the philosopher. That book, perhaps, is yet to be written.

Rating: 73

Crossposted on Remingtonstein.

Follow Alex Remington on Twitter: www.twitter.com/alexremington

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iphone - who to go with? - BikeRadar.com

Posted: 27 Nov 2009 02:36 PM PST

I've stayed with Orange for mine, having been with them for a decade and operating under a "better the devil you know" philosophy. I think the 750MB "fair use" limit for 3G data was a bit over-hyped, though it raised my eyebrows to begin with. They have announced somewhere – I'll try to find the link – that this limit is porous, and may be reviewed. I think (hope!) they're playing it safe, and will relent if general data demands prove to be higher.

In any case, iPhone much prefers Wi-fi, and will connect to Wi-fi networks invisibly if it can find them. BT Openzone and the Cloud are included, for free (though with their own limit, I believe). As a result of this, I've found myself nowhere near 750MB of 3G data in my first month even with heavy use.

One downside I didn't expect: Visual Voicemail is not yet supported on with Orange. With Vodaphone joining in soon and Tesco doing an O2 franchise deal, some are predicting a price war. I think that's optimistic, because the operator profit margins are apparently very slim already.

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End addiction to hand-outs - Asbury Park Press

Posted: 27 Nov 2009 02:28 PM PST

Ask anyone who is addicted to anything — alcohol, drugs, food, gambling — and they will tell you their worst enemy, besides themselves, are their "enablers."

These enablers do more harm than good, and most likely were not even aware of it.

This describes the liberal/socialist philosophy and to a degree many politicians, but it is endemic to the liberals. They honestly, or maybe not so honestly, believe that giving handouts will help people.

Wrong. It just makes them "addicts" of a sort — dependent and reliant on the politicians and the government.

Parents of old understood this all too well. "Spare the rod, spoil the child" comes to mind. These parents ended up with a responsible, unspoiled, independent teenager or young adult.

The liberal politicians end up with power and control over the "addicts" and, most importantly, their votes and continued support. The liberals seemingly become addicted to their own largesse — especially when the government, (i.e. the taxpayer) seems like a bottomless money pit. This is a two-way street, which becomes a vicious cycle and nobody can get off.

The addicts have to confront the enablers first and say "enough is enough."

Unfortunately our public sector unions don't seem to understand just how deeply their "addiction" is entrenched. They seem incapable of seeing the forest for the trees or the greater good for their own "addiction." As long as the enablers remain in power, the addicts will be at the feeding trough, asking for more and more largesse.

Charles Boud

BEACHWOOD

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Problem with Sun City 'philosophy' - AZCentral.com

Posted: 26 Nov 2009 06:19 PM PST

On Monday, you published a letter from a reader in Sun City ("Sun City populated with caring people"). In referring to that community's "philosophy," the writer observed that their residents are here "to give, rather than to take."

The letter concludes with, "Del Webb was a much better community organizer than Barack Obama could ever dream to be."

Does that mean Sun City will now start contributing to school taxes, making them givers and not takers?

And, quite frankly, I doubt if Mr. Obama would throw anyone out of the country who is not yet 55 years old. - John F. McIlray,Scottsdale

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