A recent study is being used by some to “prove” that children raised by same gender couples have more problems. It would seem obvious that any group facing prejudice would have more problems, but that’s the way prejudice works. First, you make people miserable, and then use their misery to show your own superiority. In the following response to the study, Andrew Sullivan breaks down what is wrong with using unstable same-gender relationships to discredit stable faithful ones.
To read, click here.
“By measuring reflected sunlight from Titan’s surface and atmosphere, the international Cassini spacecraft detected a dark region near the landing site of Huygens, a companion probe that parachuted to Titan’s equator in 2005.
Scientists said further analysis of the dark feature suggests the presence of a 927-square-mile hydrocarbon lake – twice as big as Lake Champlain, a freshwater lake that borders upstate New York and Vermont. Near the tropical lake were hints of four shallow ponds similar in size and depth to marshes on Earth.”
To read, click here.
“What Has Massive Breasts, a Weak Heart, and a Lifespan of 42 Days?” So Tom Philpott begins his article on poultry farms. The answer, of course, is the chicken that goes into your chicken nugget. Here are a few “nuggets” from the article:
“The number of chickens produced annually in the United States has increased by more than 1,400 percent since 1950 while the number of farms producing those birds has dropped by 98 percent.”
“Concentrating so much waste, laced as it is with arsenic and antibiotic-resistant pathogens along with algae-feeding nitrogen and phosphorpus, is bound to cause problems..”
Each bird lives in constant light to trick them into over eating and lives in space the size of a standard sheet of paper.
“A broiler can now go from hatchling to raw material for chicken nuggets in as little as 42 days—representing a growth rate four times as fast as those that prevailed just 50 years ago.”
To read story, wait til you have an empty stomach, and click here.
To stand up for a cause is not the same thing as standing against people. In history, we get locked in important struggles about what is right and wrong, but we should never believe that we are good people fighting bad ones. Paul noted that we do not struggle against other people, but against “principles and powers.” Anyone who deeply studies humankind knows that we are very similar to one another. We often do harm with good reasons, and do good for secretly naughty motives.
The poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, was fascinated by the use of dragons in fairy tales, particularly ones that became beautiful when confronted with love. “Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princes and princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us. (Slight paraphrase)
It is exhausting to picture oneself as a lonely crusader against a brutish world. Instead of seeing ourselves fighting terrible ogres it is nice to realize that we are really just waking each other up. We are like an acting troupe that is so good that we loose ourselves in our roles. The actress playing the dragon this week will be a lovely princess soon, but she cannot remember that now. She is protecting the cave for reasons she cannot quite recall. The handsome prince and princess are also ordinary people. Today they are hiding on their pedestals afraid that someone will see that they are really just like the rest of us.
The remedy to “crusaders exhaustion” is to remember your opponents humanity, and your own. They are not dragons and we are not dragon slayers. We all just people trying to get by. The world is better served if we can all step outside such roles and ask what is the highest good which includes everyone, princes, princesses, and dragons.
You are probably aware of the horrifying deeds of Blackwater during the Iraq War. When Blackwater was caught bullying and murdering civilians, they had to change their name to Xe so they could continue making huge amounts of money off the misery of the Iraqi people. When that “beard” didn’t work they waited a bit only to come back as ACADEMI. Under that name they bought another security firm, and the 10 billion contract the firm had with our government. If you wonder why Bush and Obama would not arrest these criminals, stop and think. If you were leader of a vast empire that thinks of itself as a peaceful democracy, your job would depend on doing the secret dirty work our economy demands, but that the people do not want to see. In a land of such high rhetoric and such low character, extrajudicial assassins are a President’s best friend.
To read an article about the new contract, click here
.To see Harper’s article with video of Blackwater attrocities, click here.
To visit the ACADEMI Watch website, click here.
Legalizing pot isn’t one of my causes, but emptying our prisons of people who committed victimless crimes does seem like the sane thing to do. It is estimated that 800,000 Americans are arrested every year for marijuana use. Surely there is a better way to deal with our nation’s drug problems than prison. According to the United Nations World Drug Report last year, the Netherlands, where pot is legal, had a user rate of 5.4 percent compared to a 13.4 percent user rate in the U.S. where it is not. Furthermore, people in the Netherlands use fewer hard drugs per person. Their cocaine usage is 0.6% compared to our 2.4%. Their opiate usage is 0.31 compared to our 5.9%.) This trend relates directly to the fact that the Netherlands has a rate of 87 people in prison per 100,000 compared to our 730. It’s something we should think about in the “land of the free.” As someone who sees the devastation of drug usage, I am not defending addictive substances, but I also think its time to admit that the “war on drugs” has been a failure and that a less violent approach should be considered.
Every civilized mind realizes at some point that a just God would not torture people eternally for any crime committed during our relatively brief life span on earth. The effort to frighten people with hell at some point becomes pathetic. Tales of horned demons with pitchforks eventually becomes a charade that even children find transparently absurd. It might be helpful to think what the symbol of hell might mean to those who seek a religion of love.
The images of scripture are not false, they are symbolic. They give us a vocabulary to speak about all aspects of our human journey. We need a vocabulary that speaks of our fears as well as our hopes. Here are few unorthodox musings on the infernal realm by one has spent a little time in nether regions:
Because “God” is a symbol of something that is everywhere, “hell” cannot be a place. Instead, “hell” would symbolize the experience of a heart closed to the sacred. The doors of hell are always unlocked, but we ourselves are imprisoned in the incurable pain of self-concern like a flower bulb refusing to open to the sun’s light.
Hell would not be so much a place of pain, but of numbness. Hell is that place where you can touch everything and feel nothing. Here you are unencumbered by any commitments. Hell is the unraveling of meaning itself. Hell is that crowded hall where no one has a face. Hell is that sickness of stomach when a person cries in the night for help, and every neighbor closes the shade. The “torture” of hell is the torque of ten thousand contradictory desires with no higher principle to organize them. The “smoke” in hell is the incessant noise and talk without any effort to communicate.
And the way out? Even in the deepest recesses of hell, if we love any single being however faintly, he or she will be our door to remembering the sacredness in which we live and breathe and have our being. “Hell” is the symbol of our deepest despair, and “heaven” a reminder that love is always our true home.
Amnesty International has called on Canadian authorities to arrest and prosecute George W Bush, saying the former US president authorised torture in the course of the United States’ “war on terror”.
Bush is expected to attend an economic summit in Surrey in Canada’s westernmost British Columbia province on October 20.
The human rights organisation said in a statement released on Wednesday that the Canadian government has “international obligations … given [Bush’s] responsibility for crimes under international law including torture”.
The London-based group also released a 27-page memorandum that it had submitted in September to Canada’s attorney general laying out its legal case.
To read article, click here.
It would be a very good thing for our leaders to stop voting party line on every issue. Civil disagreement is a very healthy sign in a political party. In this interview Jeb Bush says that Republicans have become so partisan that Reagan would have trouble winning the nomination. I’m no fan of Jeb Bush, but here is a man who was considered a possible running mate for Romney publically confronting his own party.
“Don’t just talk about Hispanics and say immediately we must have controlled borders,” he said. “It’s kind of insulting when you think about it. Change the tone would be the first thing. Second, on immigration, I think we need to have a broader approach.”
To read, click here.
Getting rid of the death penalty in Texas will be the last thing that happens before the second coming, but it is important that we never give up on this issue. No nation can be called civilized that murders anyone unnecessarily. So even though it sits as an icecube about to go into a furnace, we should celebrate that the Texas Democratic Party has adopted a platform that calls for repealing the death penalty in Texas. Today such platforms look like Bambi about to face Godzilla, but someday, this nation will learn that violence cannot cast out violence. It may seem futile today, but every step we take in the right direction is a gift to the future.
To read article, click here.