I want to point you to a very interesting post by Greta Christina on a recent Gallup poll that finds that members of the LGBT community are less religious than others. A lot less. Almost half of them describe themselves as ‘not religious’.
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Three years ago, I wrote about the danger of the creeping paramilitarization of local police departments, with them acquiring military style clothing, weaponry, vehicles, and other hardware. The trouble in Ferguson, MO following the killing of an unarmed black man by police, shows just what can happen when you do that. It looks like the local police went full metal jacket on a civilian population as they protested the initial shooting, with snipers, armored vehicles, and all the other goodies that the Pentagon and Department of Homeland Security has been showering on police departments with. These photos show snipers, police in riot gear, and the like.
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Michael and Laura McIntyre decided in 2004 to homeschool their nine children, using as a classroom some space in a motorcycle dealership that he co-owned. But his twin brother Tracy noticed that the children never seemed to be doing any actual work, instead singing and playing. He also overheard one of the children tell a cousin that they did not need to do any work because they were going to be raptured.
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Amanda Marcotte has some interesting speculations on the fear of death and lays the blame on human ego. She points out that many people cannot quite come to terms with the fact that after they die, they will cease to exist. More than that, they fear that their lives will not have even mattered and will not be remembered, and this can be a shattering blow to their egos.
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By all accounts, Ebola is a deadly disease, now ravaging parts of west Africa and taking a dreadful toll on people there. But for the US media, there is no scare in any part of the world that cannot be made into a scare here. We have seen one media-fuelled panic after another over the past few years, with bird flu, swine flu, SARS, and I forget what else. If ever a real epidemic hits, we have more to fear from being crushed by mobs of people running around wildly in panic than from the disease itself.
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When president Obama talks about torture practiced by the US, and excuses the actions of the torturers, he gives the impression that they occurred under the Bush-Cheney regime. But a new Amnesty International report says that torture continued well into the Obama presidency even as recently as a year ago. Nico Hines and Sami Yousafzai describe some of its contents.
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There has been increased attention to the abuse of civil forfeiture laws. These are laws that enable authorities to seize the property of individuals even if they are never even charged with a crime and putting the burden on them to go through the complex and expensive legal process to get back their property. Mark Frauenfelder describes what happens in Philadelphia.
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A magician does a trick where there seems to be a wiener floating in front of dogs’ faces. What surprises me is the reaction of two of the dogs. While most try to eat it, as I would expect them to, these two shy away from it in seeming fear. It is as if they realize that the laws of nature are being violated in some way and that hence something is seriously wrong and alarming.
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The MIT linguist and political analyst does a quick recent history of the situation in the region and what Israel hopes to achieve by its successive military assaults on Gaza that are causing outrage and protests in the rest of the world, as this report of a recent rally and demonstration in London demonstrates.
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