Family disagreements over same-sex marriage

Over the weekend I attended a wedding in Toronto and while there took the opportunity to visit a cousin of mine, his wife, and their adult son. It was an enjoyable visit and we discussed various topics, especially around the elections that are being held on October 19 in Canada and the permanent elections that are the feature of the US. They of course wanted to discuss the Donald Trump phenomenon.
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The next hurdle for the LGBT equality movement

Many people are not aware that in most states, members of the LGBT community, even though they can now marry, lack any legal protection from being fired or otherwise discriminated against. John Oliver on his show Last Week Tonight discussed the need to pass federal legislation to prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity.

In a question that he posed to all the people running for president, only Democrats Bernie Sanders, Martin O’Malley, and Lincoln Chafee said they would support such legislation. The others did not respond.
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A plan to end police abuse

The issue of police brutality in the US has become a major issue and I too have been hitting on the issue hard and calling for reforms. But what reforms exactly? Now comes along something called Campaign Zero that has articulated 10 steps that can be taken towards the goal of ending police violence. The graphic giving the names of the 10 steps is below but if you go to the above website, each box is a hyperlink that takes you to a page that gives detailed policy recommendations.
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The strange Ashes series

England and Australia have the longest running rivalry in Test cricket and they just completed one of the strangest series in living memory. England won the five-match series 3-2 and thus won back the symbolic Ashes that they lost due to a 5-0 drubbing in Australia just 18 months ago. Given that, Australia were favored to retain the Ashes so the result was undoubtedly a surprise.
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The subtle snobbery of elite education

William Deresiewicz has written a book titled Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and The Way to a Meaningful Life, critiquing the education that elite universities provide, and followed up with an article in the New Republic titled Don’t Send Your Kid to the Ivy League: The nation’s top colleges are turning our kids into zombies.
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Religious implications of finding life on other planets

There have been an increasing number of discoveries of planets orbiting other stars that are in the habitable or ‘Goldilocks’ zone, not too close or too far from the star and thus having the kinds of temperature and size that might be able to support life. The possibility of intelligent life existing on other planets is tantalizing no doubt and opinion is split as to whether it exists or not. I for one think that it does. From our own existence, we know that the probability of intelligent life emerging is non-zero. Given the huge number of stars and planets out there in the universe, it seems possible, if not likely, that it could have emerged elsewhere too. But at the same time this same vastness of space makes it highly unlikely that we will ever find out about other life so it will likely remain a theoretical speculation.
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David Cay Johnston on Donald Trump’s shady activities

Economics writer David Cay Johnson is a long-time Donald Trump watcher and in an interview on Democracy Now! says that there are a whole lot of unsavory elements in the way that he has done business, using undocumented labor, kickbacks, union-busting, tax-avoidance, corporate welfare, and others. Johnson lists 21 questions that should be asked of him.
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Unnecessary vitamins

America is prone to all manner of food fads. New diets come and go with eye-popping rapidity and this or that food becomes the new magic food that everyone latches on to, before it is replaced by something else. Kale is now the latest miracle food to be dethroned. The problem is that people go overboard with the big new fad and overdo it, rather than taking everything in moderation
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