Stephan: If you ever wondered what Neo-medivalism and high technology might look like, here's your answer.
According to Catholic Church doctrine, specific good works and prayers can get you a reduced sentence in purgatory, which is pretty much a waiting room to the afterlife.
And while corrupt church baddies used to sell so-called indulgences back in the Middle Ages, today there are plenty of ways to get a reprieve from the temporal punishment of your sins free of charge – like, say, following the pope on Twitter.
Mindful of the faithful who cannot afford to fly to Brazil, the Vatican’s sacred apostolic penitentiary, a court which handles the forgiveness of sins, has also extended the privilege to those following the ‘rites and pious exercises
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JESSICA STUTZMAN and ELIZABETH MENDES, - The Gallup Organization
Stephan: I find the food trend in the U.S. utterly shameful. It says something really sad about us as a culture.
Click through to see the charts which are very helpful.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — In the U.S., 31% of single-parent households report times in the past 12 months when they struggled to afford food, much more than the 19% of two-parent households who say the same, according to an analysis of adults aged 18 to 50. Single-parent households also report greater difficulty affording food than do unmarried and single adults who do not have children. But, in households with two adults, the percentage who struggled at times to afford food is the same — 19% — regardless of the presence of children in the home.
Percentage Who STruggled to Afford Food, by Marital Status and Children in the Home
These data are based on more than 36,000 interviews conducted as part of the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index with adults aged 18 to 50 from Jan. 1-June 27, 2013. Over this time period, 23% of all Americans aged 18 to 50 reported struggling to afford food. However, the large majority of all Americans do not report struggling to afford food.
Having a child present in the home does not, by itself, make a household more likely to report struggling to afford food. Rather, having a child compounds the difficulty single-adult households already face.
Food Insecurity Increases With […]
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ANNE FLAHERTY, - The Associated Press
Stephan: Here is the latest on the rise of the American police state. The level of surveillance in this country is truly astonishing.
Chances are, your local or state police departments have photographs of your car in their files, noting where you were driving on a particular day, even if you never did anything wrong.
Using automated scanners, law enforcement agencies across the country have amassed millions of digital records on the location and movement of every vehicle with a license plate, according to a study published Wednesday by the American Civil Liberties Union. Affixed to police cars, bridges or buildings, the scanners capture images of passing or parked vehicles and note their location, uploading that information into police databases. Departments keep the records for weeks or years, sometimes indefinitely.
As the technology becomes cheaper and more ubiquitous, and federal grants focus on aiding local terrorist detection, even small police agencies are able to deploy more sophisticated surveillance systems. While the Supreme Court ruled in 2012 that a judge’s approval is needed to track a car with GPS, networks of plate scanners allow police effectively to track a driver’s location, sometimes several times every day, with few legal restrictions. The ACLU says the scanners assemble what it calls a ‘single, high-resolution image of our lives.’
‘There’s just a fundamental question of whether we’re going to live […]
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DAVID EDWARDS, - The Raw Story
Stephan: There are so many of these stories. There is something about the Theocratic Right that makes them at once weird and dangerous. They live in a world that seems entirely impervious to facts. This guy is a Republican of course and he, and people like him, have become a serious impediment to creating a healthy society in America.
A Republican lawmaker in Utah is calling on his state to put an end to the requirement that children go to school.
On Tuesday, Deseret News flagged a Friday article posted to state Sen. Aaron Osmond’s blog where he says that Utah ‘should take a close look at repealing compulsory education.
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EMMA INNES, - The Mail (U.K.)
Stephan: This is the latest in the Homo Supreriorus Trend.
American scientists believe they have found a way to ‘switch off’ the extra chromosome that causes Down’s syndrome.
Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Medical School have managed to prevent the condition in human cells in a laboratory.
They believe that this breakthrough could eventually lead to treatments for the syndrome.
Down’s Syndrome is a genetic condition that causes learning disabilities and a characteristic range of physical features. It occurs as a result of an extra chromosome called chromosome 21
Down’s Syndrome is a genetic condition that causes learning disabilities and a characteristic range of physical features. It occurs as a result of an extra chromosome called chromosome 21
Gene therapy has already been used to treat medical problems that result from the presence of one defective gene, but this is the first time that silencing the impact of a whole chromosome has become a possibility.
The BBC reports that the breakthrough means that this could now be possible. However, it will require many more years of research.
A team of scientists at the university added a gene called XIST to lab-grown stem cells with Down’s syndrome.
This gene is important in natural cell development as it turns off one of the two X chromosomes that are […]
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