Concerns regarding brutality by the Henderson Police Department have been raised before on this website. Now a resident says his Third Amendment rights were violated. (link)
Listening to a snippet on the radio of General Hayden going on about the terrible blow to intelligence gathering that was dealt by Snowden’s interview with the Guardian, I began to wonder if the whole point of the official response has been to drive terrorist plotters away from simpler communication systems. Not being able to use phones and e-mail like a normal person would be a huge hassle. (more…)
“Due to an aging population, non-Hispanic whites last year recorded more deaths than births.” (link)
Driving down a narrow, rural highway seventy miles west of Washington, D.C., I slow for the tiny Virginia town I’m passing through. A banner on the side of a commercial building proclaims “WE’RE FASTING TODAY.” How interesting. I will be fasting with my LDS Ward the next day. Is there a special need this community is rallying around. Is a town fast a recurring thing?
The seconds it takes to think about all that brings the car closer to the banner, and I glance at it again. The F is actually a T, and WE’RE is actually WINE. WINE TASTING TODAY. Oh. That makes more sense. Too bad.
“We seem to be moving inexorably from a society where organized religion dominates issues of morality—and mortality—but not to the secular promised land of reason. Rather, we are orienting ourselves to a more personal spirituality, at once vague and autonomous. Ordinary sinners increasingly don’t believe that they deserve judgment, let alone hell. Theists and atheists alike dispute any earthly authority’s right to judge, and both feel NDEs give them reason to hope for something beyond the grave. And many believers confidently expect that God isn’t judgmental either.”—closing of a Maclean’s piece by by Brian Bethune
According to the Sacramento Bee, “Nevada health officials no longer will send psychiatric patients alone on buses to cities across the county.”
“The Bee’s investigation found that Rawson-Neal [a psychiatric hospital] purchased Greyhound tickets for more than 1,500 patients since July 2008, dispatching people to every state in the continental United States. About a third of those patients were sent to California.
“One of those patients, James Flavy Coy Brown, who suffers from schizophrenia, was discharged in February to a Greyhound bus bound for Sacramento, a place he had never visited and where he knew no one. He said a doctor at Rawson-Neal told him to call 911 when he got to Sacramento.”
Perhaps I should disclose that I rode Greyhound from Las Vegas to California a few times, but in all cases I paid for the ticket myself.
“Libertarians think they can get a Victorian-sized state without Victorian attitudes, but they’re deluded. If you really want a small state that doesn’t tell you what to do and gobble up half your income then start going to church, get involved in voluntary activities, tell the vicar or priest to stop droning on about the cuts and climate change and tell him to start shouting about sin and fornication. Repress yourself, you’ll find it’s good for your wallet.”—Ed West in the Telegraph
“White House press secretary Jay Carney said Friday that President Obama called California Attorney General Kamala Harris (D) late Thursday to apologize for his remark that she was the ‘best-looking attorney general in the country.'” Ah, this may explain things: “The daughter of an Indian mother and a Jamaican-American father, she has been described as ‘the female Barack Obama.'” Was our President just affirming that he, too, is reminded of himself when looking at Miss Harris?
Reading complaints a few weeks back that too many Latter-day Saints marry before completing courses of higher education, I felt concerned that a natural corollary of that is that people who don’t complete a college education shouldn’t marry at all. Perhaps the unfolding 21st Century for many will be less like the 20th Century abounding in middle-class families and more like earlier ages when bunk houses, barracks, brothels, servants’ quarters, convents, and monasteries absorbed many whose economic limitations put marriage and children out of reach, and those who want a different future will have to choose paths of their own bucking prevailing trends.
The National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia has put out “Knot Yet: The Benefits and Costs of Delayed Marriage in America” There is such discussion of the Great Crossover (mean age at first marriage passing age at first child), and a running theme is that delayed marriage plays out differently for the two-thirds of the nation that doesn’t complete a college degree.
A summary can be found at Washington Post: link. Coming at the topic from another angle, perhaps you’ll enjoy “Settle Down” by Kimbra. Or perhaps you won’t, if your tastes in song and dance don’t run that way.
I am my father’s oldest child, born when he was 40. He died at 83, so while he lived he was even in memory always older than me. I’m now 46, and I remember having a 46-year-old father. I also have a child who is forty years younger than me, and thinking of him, I am glad for my father that I was born to him.
A 31-year-old woman died from heart failure due to drinking Coca-Cola says a coroner in New Zealand. However it took six to ten liters a day to do her in. Ten liters of Coke provides 970 mg of caffeine, twice the level of daily consumption that is considered toxic. Also 1 kg of sugar, though the deceased was of normal weight, apparently due to not eating or drinking anything other than Coke. So Coke will kill you if you drink two gallons a day and use it as your only form of nourishment. (more…)
I spent most of Saturday in a high school gym taking in an end-of-season JV county wrestling tournament, and I wondered if there will be such a tournament in twenty years. Dozens of colleges have dropped wrestling programs, and though only a fraction of the couple hundred boys I watched would be expected to go on to compete with a college team, even if all the programs from twenty years ago still existed, cutting down the prospects for the best has a way of percolating down to diminish the possibilities for everyone.
This morning we learn that wrestling will no longer be an Olympic sport, which is a bit dumbfounding. Can you really borrow the word “Olympic” for a sports festival and not have wrestling? (more…)
The LDS Church has announced the closing of another school, this one the 49-year-old Benemerito of the Americas in Mexico City. (link) This is said to be done as the only feasible option for providing training facilities for a surge of new missionaries, but it had probably been desired for some time to close the school. A drastic, permanent loss like that isn’t allowed merely to smooth over some facilities crowding issue elsewhere.
There’s a nice little AP article marking the nine years since Opportunity landed on Mars. In the years since, the rover has traversed 22 miles. Coincidentally, the astronauts of Apollo 17 also drove their rover 22 miles during their three days on the lunar surface forty years ago. Fender repairs using map pages, duct tape, and (very importantly) gloved hands were part of those three days. Remote probes’ computers are reprogrammed frequently to compensate for degrading systems, but it’s not quite the same thing. (more…)
Consider first Stan Ridgway’s “The Drowning Man”.
Is there anybody out there
That can save a drowning man?
He’s been out there past forever,
Left his footprints in the sand.
If you made it to 1:32 in that song video, and you’re a Latter-day Saint, the next nine seconds borrowed from Richard L. Evans greatest hit, “Man’s Search for Happiness” (3:21), may have amused you.
This is the way to peace and happiness and the fulness of everlasting life. It is your Heavenly Father’s way.
