Saturday, December 22nd, 2012
MICHELLE COTTLE, - The Daily Beast
Stephan: This was the most nakedly awful public speech I have heard since George Wallace's, 'Segregation now..' speech. It's almost deranged: Arm everyone, arm them now... there are monsters walking our streets.
For a long time I thought nothing would happen about guns. What would it take? Little bodies on a lineoleum floor I think has done it. The spell is broken.
Click through to actually see the video. It is quite extraordinary to hear LaPierre actually say it.
Following the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary last week, the pro-gun lobbying behemoth signaled that it, too, felt-as so many people have suggested-that ‘this time was different.
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Saturday, December 22nd, 2012
ROSE EVELETH, - BBC News (U.K.)
Stephan: The manipulation of imagery is a huge problem. It is getting harder and harder to determine what is authentic. This is a good discussion of the problem.
Doctored images can affect what we eat, how we vote and even our childhood recollections. The question scientists are asking is why there’s nothing we can do to stop it.
The year was a memorable one – looking back at the unforgettable images over the past 12 months, you might think of apocalyptic-looking clouds over Manhattan during Hurricane Sandy, or Mitt Romney’s children mistakenly standing in a line spelling out the word ‘MONEY
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Friday, December 21st, 2012
, - The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life
Stephan: This is a really useful look at the place of religion throughout the world. It contains a wealth of information, some of which you may find quite surprising. Click through to see the very well designed charts and graphs.
Worldwide, more than eight-in-ten people identify with a religious group. A comprehensive demographic study of more than 230 countries and territories conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life estimates that there are 5.8 billion religiously affiliated adults and children around the globe, representing 84% of the 2010 world population of 6.9 billion.
The demographic study – based on analysis of more than 2,500 censuses, surveys and population registers – finds 2.2 billion Christians (32% of the world’s population), 1.6 billion Muslims (23%), 1 billion Hindus (15%), nearly 500 million Buddhists (7%) and 14 million Jews (0.2%) around the world as of 2010. In addition, more than 400 million people (6%) practice various folk or traditional religions, including African traditional religions, Chinese folk religions, Native American religions and Australian aboriginal religions. An estimated 58 million people – slightly less than 1% of the global population – belong to other religions, including the Baha’i faith, Jainism, Sikhism, Shintoism, Taoism, Tenrikyo, Wicca and Zoroastrianism, to mention just a few.1
At the same time, the new study by the Pew Forum also finds that roughly one-in-six people around the globe (1.1 billion, or 16%) have no religious affiliation. This makes […]
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Friday, December 21st, 2012
AARON GLANTZ, - Center for Investigative Reporting
Stephan: I have always thought that one of the hallmarks of the neo-cons like Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Pipes, etc. is the avidness with which they engage in war, and their supreme indifference to the broken bodies of the men and women they commit to their follies. They themselves, of course, never, ever, are in a place or situation of personal physical risk.
This report is utterly shameful. Please write your Representative and Senators and tell them to give these people succor. Only focused and intense citizen pressure is going to change this dreadful situation.
After seven months of delay, the Department of Veterans Affairs finally approved World War II veteran James Alderson’s pension benefits last week.
The day after Veterans Day, U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Luke Parrott walks through the rows of headstones in Section 60 where several of his friends and soldiers he served with are buried at Arlington National Cemetery Nov. 12 in Arlington, Virginia. A veteran of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Parrott was injured in an IED blast in Baghdad in 2005. Parrott spent time sitting and talking to the graves of the soldiers he knew. ‘It’s as close as we can get to talking anymore,’ he said. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty)
But it was not a cause for celebration or relief for Alderson, whose life’s work was the farm-supply store he founded near Chico, Calif., after returning home from the Battle of the Bulge.
The 89-year-old veteran had died three months earlier in a Yuba City nursing home.
‘My father was a very proud person,
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Friday, December 21st, 2012
SARAH BANET-WEISER, - New York Press/AlterNet (U.S.)
Stephan: One of the notable things, to me, about Evangelical and Pentacostal Christian Fundamentalism is how much it resembles an indoctrination into a marketing get rich program. Here is an excellent essay on the subject.
The following is an excerpt from Sarah Banet-Weiser’s book Authentic published by NYU Press.
Prosperity Christianity, or what some call ‘health and wealth
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