Monday, October 15, 2012

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Sometimes people ask if religion and science are not opposed to one another. They are: in the sense that the thumb and fingers of my hand ar...
Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Thomas Szasz RIP

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Some good quotes from the good doctor: *People dream of making the virtuous powerful, so they can depend on them. Since they cannot do that...
Thursday, May 24, 2012

can't have no scissorhands around here

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The high-school Mitt Romney who, it is alleged, helped to forcibly restrain and cut the hair of a classmate must be distinguished from the m...
Monday, May 14, 2012

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Friday, May 4, 2012

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For some years I have been haunted by a story of [writer William Dean]Howells and that most civilized of all our presidents, James A. Garfi...

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Economist Joan Robinson (1903–1983) wrote, “The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of readymade answers to economic quest...

sins of the mothers

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Anecdote about Tennessee Williams, courtesy of Gore Vidal Of a dinner with Williams and his magnificently termagant mother: Tennessee c...
Monday, April 30, 2012

You cannot know a politician's heart

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[Let us not forget] that deceit is the basis of all politics. I remember before the Gulf War, I was talking to a Baptist seminarian who coul...

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One of the most famous social science experiments is Stanley Milgram's Obedience to Authority studies at Yale. Subjects were asked to ad...
Monday, February 20, 2012

academy award time!--two nominees

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Tuesday, February 7, 2012

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For many years I worked in palliative care. My patients were those who had gone home to die. Some incredibly special times were shared. I wa...
Friday, February 3, 2012

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To field a ground ball must be considered a generous act and an act of comprehension. One moves not against the ball but with it. Bad fielde...
Tuesday, January 24, 2012

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I am trying to restrain my contempt for people claiming to be religious who are perfectly prepared to turn the country over to another warmo...
Friday, January 13, 2012

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We recently saw the impressive movie, Of Gods and Men, about a small group of monks in Algeria during the civil war. The movies closes with ...
Friday, December 30, 2011

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Would you sacrifice your firstborn son to establish a democracy in country that had a dictatorship? How about giving up your son to effect a...
Friday, December 23, 2011

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I have explored other religious and philosophical paths, in part to discover what God is doing outside Mormonism and to give me context for ...

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It is said that we cannot choose three things: our parents, our birth, and, because they are thrust upon us in tender years, our attitudes t...
Saturday, December 17, 2011

summation

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In March 2003, the United States of America launched an entirely unprovoked act of military aggression against a nation which had not attack...
Friday, November 11, 2011

newest WMD

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Plastic Bottle Prompts Airport Evacuation CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa -- An evacuation of the lobby at the Eastern Iowa Airport in Cedar Rapids is o...
Sunday, November 6, 2011

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The British medical journal, The Lancet, estimates the total death toll from the Iraq war at nearly 700,000. When the war began, Pentagon ex...
Tuesday, November 1, 2011

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Monday, October 31, 2011

Joe Bageant's(RIP) letter to John Ashcroft

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"John, goddammit, we are going to have to thrash this thing out! Thanks to you, my librarian wife, who is pretty much the stereotypical...
Friday, October 28, 2011

Refuge

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Terry Tempest Williams can also remind us powerfully of our special connections to God as his chosen people. She tells of when her mother fi...
Thursday, October 27, 2011

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From the journal of Joseph Millett, who tells of his name being read out as a missionary in the Salt Lake Tabernacle in 1852, of making his ...
Thursday, October 20, 2011

the world has no use for a drone...

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Drone technology is advancing faster than the public or the legal system has time to catch up to their now ubiquitous use in America’s many ...
Thursday, October 13, 2011

resolution

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The first of the rescued reached Salt Lake on November 9th, a day of tears and thanksgiving. For many days afterwards the others were stragg...
Tuesday, September 27, 2011

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An article at AlterNet asks: "Mental Illness Rates Are Up. Could Climate Change Be to Blame?," by Julianne Escobedo Shepherd. For ...
Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Some Lessons of 9/11

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1. Killing one or many innocents, regardless of one's grievances, is monstrous. This elementary principle would seem to apply to George ...

keeping my yuan in the U.S.

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The evil dragon used to be Japan. Now it's China. India will get its turn soon enough. Americans are supposedly out of work because of C...
Wednesday, September 7, 2011

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Sigrid Undset as a young girl
Tuesday, September 6, 2011

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Artist Alexa Meade paints real people to look like paintings.

Contract With Atrocity

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Amazing news story: The Guardian reports on a remarkable case of private contractors who flew American Terror War captives to various sites...
Tuesday, August 23, 2011

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The dove descending breaks the air With flame of incandescent terror Of which the tongues declare The one discharge from sin and error....

reflections on the rioting

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Only the wilfully blind could have been surprised by the scale or ferocity of the riots that have engulfed Britain in the past week. Unfor...

FBI: Nation's largest terrorist organization

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A recent report put together by Mother Jones and the Investigative Reporting Program at the University of California-Berkley analyses some...

Intelligence and Affection by Parley P. Pratt

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Man, (and woman) know thyself, -study thine own nature, -learn thy powers of body, -thy capacity of mind. Learn thine origin, thy purpose ...
Saturday, August 20, 2011

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A few years after Henry Bennion Eyring became president of Ricks College (now Brigham Young University–Idaho), he was offered a high-payin...

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The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be either good or evil. - Hannah Arendt

called to serve

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I have had [many] experiences feeling of the Holy Ghost…But I’ve never felt what I have felt as I have…participated in the assigning of miss...

Rules for Radicals

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In 1971, Saul Alinsky wrote an entertaining classic on grassroots organizing titled Rules for Radicals. Those who prefer cooperative tacti...
Friday, July 8, 2011

The great Sheldon Richman

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About that Debt Limit Maxing out the credit card panics the politicians. What’s the point of a debt ceiling if raising it is a mere formalit...
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Thursday, July 7, 2011

First Muscle Lady speaks

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“But I think that the last four years have shown us the truth of what Barack has always said: That if any child in this country is left behi...
Thursday, June 23, 2011

this is your brain on leeches

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Maggot therapy is an example of a medical approach called biotherapy--the use of living animals to aid in medical diagnosis or treatment. Le...
Wednesday, June 22, 2011

disappearing species

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A hat tip to our peripatetic animal rights reporter, Thelonius Royal, for calling our attention to this latest outrage: our animal friends t...
Tuesday, June 21, 2011

lest we forget

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Stephen Glass perpetrated one of the great journalistic frauds in modern American history. In 1998 Glass, a 25-year-old rising star at the N...
Monday, June 20, 2011

the besetting sin

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Moral theology classifies the sins or faults of man in various ways. It is a discipline with its own taxonomy. One kind of fault that pastor...
Saturday, June 18, 2011

cool news story

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Reporting from Washington— After the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, the George W. Bush administration flooded the conquered countr...
Tuesday, June 7, 2011

a prayer

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Heart weeps. Head tries to help heart. Head tells heart how it is, again: You will lose the ones you love. They will all go. But even the ea...