Category: Asides

Huh. Neat obser­va­tion.

Jesus did what he taught his dis­ci­ples to do.

Here is a great post by Steve Addi­sion, the author of a great new book “What Jesus Start­ed”. Check out his blog, It is awe­some! Find­ing “per­sons of peace” is an impor­tant ele­ment in most dis­ci­ple m.…..

Truer than col­lege stu­dents imag­ine.

Jaana Nys­tröm orig­i­nal­ly shared this post:

This. 🙂

I am not sure how to blurb this arti­cle. I will sim­ply say this: I thought this was com­mon knowl­edge, but appar­ent­ly it is not.

What You Should Know About ‘Monogamish’ Rela­tion­ships

What you should know about the rede­f­i­n­i­tion of monogamy and same-sex relationships.What you should know about the rede­f­i­n­i­tion of monogamy and same-sex rela­tion­ships.

I some­times feel I could lis­ten to Penn all day. In this clip he makes a great point: many Amer­i­can Catholics are actu­al­ly Protes­tants unwill­ing to act on their con­vic­tions.

Watch this: Out­spo­ken athe­ist Penn Jil­lette (Penn & Teller) defends Catholic ortho­doxy on CNN’s Piers Mor­gan Tonight

“I think I may be some­body who believes in the Pope’s posi­tion more than most Catholics. I real­ly take peo­ple at their word. And it seems like all of the cyn­i­cism and all of the — who are we going to…

This is an inter­est­ing argu­ment. I need to think about it more.

Words of wis­dom

Aus­ter­i­ty is the result of coun­tries’ demo­c­ra­t­ic deci­sions to wait until the last minute before act­ing, under the pres­sure of the mar­kets, main­ly by rais­ing tax­es rather than imple­ment­ing long-wait­ed …

This is a fas­ci­nat­ing inter­view. Sev­er­al bits stood out to me. I men­tion two here:
“Joe Nocera at the Times runs a dai­ly tal­ly of gun killings. He’s not run­ning a dai­ly tal­ly of how many peo­ple defend them­selves with guns. For one thing we don’t know about it most of the time. David Hemen­way at Har­vard is very pro gun-con­trol and he thinks it hap­pens about 80,000 times a year. If that’s true, that means that guns are sav­ing 10 times as many peo­ple as they’re killing.”

“We have this impulse in the U.S. to do some­thing. We have no nation­al church, so the only way we can express our pub­lic moral­i­ty is to say there ought to be a law. It’s anti­thet­i­cal to the Amer­i­can can-do char­ac­ter to say there are cer­tain things we just can’t do much about.”

For the record, I am not a “gun guy.”

What Lib­er­als Need to Under­stand About ‘Gun Guys’

The author of a new book tries to rec­on­cile his per­son­al pol­i­tics with his fond­ness for firearms.

Fas­ci­nat­ing. 3.5 per­cent of adult Amer­i­cans iden­ti­fy at LGBT of one stripe or anoth­er, but the den­si­ty is three times greater in the Dis­trict of Colum­bia. In fact, D.C. has a den­si­ty twice as great as the next entry on the list. I bet there’s an engross­ing back­sto­ry which explains this dis­tri­b­u­tion.

Ground­break­ing Study Ranks States by LGBT Pop­u­la­tion

It isn’t even close. Ten per­cent of adult res­i­dents in Wash­ing­ton, D.C. iden­ti­fy as les­bian, gay, bisex­u­al, or trans­gen­der, accord­ing to a ground­break­ing new Gallup study that for the first time has e…

Sweet!

Opti­cal Illu­sions orig­i­nal­ly shared this post:

This is not a gif

This is a well-done visu­al of the dis­tri­b­u­tion of reli­gious beliefs.

nationalpostnews.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/fo0324_religion1200.jpg

Inter­est­ing arti­cle about the neg­a­tive con­se­quences of mar­i­jua­na use by teens by a pro-pot author. Best line: “I dis­agree with the recre­ation­al use with­out the aware­ness that it is med­i­cine and that you are self med­icat­ing, and from the stand­point of media glo­ri­fy­ing it to teens in music, movies the inter­net, and tele­vi­sion, with­out them hav­ing prop­er under­stand­ing of what it does.”

Staying_On_Topic com­ments on TIL that US teens smoke more Mar­i­jua­na than Cig­a­rettes

If you want to be edu­cat­ed on why drugs are ille­gal read this [The His­to­ry of the Non-Med­ical Use of Drugs in the Unit­ed States by Charles White­bread,…