There is no reason to think that the level of unbelief among elected officials in the US is much less than it is in the general public so it is really quite embarrassing that there are no openly atheist members of the US Congress. Compare that with the UK where they actually have a state religion of which the Queen is the head but where their All Party Parliamentary Humanist Group has 150 members, most of them elected atheists.
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Via reader Marcus Ranum I read about this extraordinary case where a medical examiner arrives at a cause of death of a person in police custody that seems to go directly counter to the facts of the case.
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We have all felt it. The return trip from some place seems to be quicker that the outward trip, especially if you were going to a new place. I used to think that this was due to the fact that on the return trip we were now familiar with the route, which meant that we did not have to pay close attention to where we were going and that this somehow translated into the journey seeming to be shorter
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Whenever I go to the dentist, it seems like the Dr. Oz show is on their TV in the waiting room. It is an absolutely nauseating show where the host uses his impressive medical credentials to plug various products with wildly exaggerated claims. And yet apparently people take him seriously, making the dietary supplement industry highly profitable.
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Self-driving cars are already here and even legal on some public roads. It is likely that they will be better drivers than many of the humans that drive cars since they have faster reaction times and do not suffer from the impairments and distractions of people, such as talking on cell phones or even texting. They could be a boon for older and disabled people who will no longer be limited in their ability to go places.
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The Pearls Before Swine comic strip is my favorite among the ones currently running. It has a wildly unpredictable absurdist humor that often breaks the fourth wall by inserting the cartoonist Stephan Pastis into the strip to interact with his characters, and uses puns and other plays on words (like this one).
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Part of the aversion to thinking about death may not be the actual fact of dying but unease about the way we might die. In many ways we are fortunate that we live in a time when medical advances have enabled us to have much greater life expectancies than our ancestors. While much of this improvement has arisen because of reduced infant mortality, some has been because of our ability to combat many illnesses that once used to be quickly fatal. Because of the possibility of rapid response and treatment, many of the quick ways of dying such as due to heart attacks and strokes have been eliminated. But that improvement is not without its costs. We now see many more people having long and lingering deaths, the body and mind gradually losing functionality in ways that cannot be fixed, like an old car in which one part after another starts breaking down and one starts to wonder how much more one should invest in keeping it going.
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This dog reacts to the alarm clock going off in much the same way that many people do, hoping for it to stop so that he can go back to sleep.
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Nonbelievers in the US are only too aware of the ubiquity of religion. Churches and religious billboards are everywhere, Christian broadcasters fill the radio and TV, and public prayer and other forms of pandering to religion by politicians and other public figures is commonplace and even required if they are to be elected to office. So it is a little disconcerting to discover that some Christian conservatives see themselves as a persecuted minority.
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