"Some stories from recent months: A religion instructor at a midwestern state university explains in an e-mail to students the rational basis for Catholic teaching on homosexuality. He is denounced by a student for 'hate speech' and is dismissed from his position. (He is later reinstated - for now.) At another midwestern state university, a department chairman demurs from a student organizer's request that his department promote an upcoming 'LGBTQ' film festival on campus; he is denounced to his university's chancellor, who indicates that his e-mail to the student warrants inquiry by a 'Hate and Bias Incident Response Team.'"
"Americans may reject romance, but love will endure, because Americans can no more harm marriage than they can loot Heaven. We can damn ourselves, but future humanity likely will shake their heads at our folly and use us as a moral lesson." - seems to be another iteration of the argument that marriage and "marriage" should be distinguished.
Delicious? Other than the way in which he mentions that everyone eats insects, I can't say that I've gone out of my way to try to find some of these to eat.
"Even at times of high unemployment in the past, wages have been very slow to fall; economists describe them as 'sticky.' To an extent rarely seen in recessions since the Great Depression, wages for a swath of the labor force this time have taken a sharp and swift fall."
Would we be better off spending our resources elsewhere? "seat belts, at about $25 a pop, are one of the most cost-effective lifesaving devices ever invented... a rough estimate of $30,000 for every life saved. ... air bags cost about $1.8 million per life saved."
I wonder how this will impact the use of tracking devices to determine what's happening to various critters - "The survival rate of King penguins with metal bands on their flippers was 44 percent lower than those without bands and banded birds produced far fewer chicks." The article does note that this hasn't been observed in all studies with all trackers, but I wonder if it will still cause some second guessing of this sort of thing.
"Virtually every human rights group and Western government agency that monitors the plight of Christians worldwide arrives at more or less the same conclusion: Between 200 million and 230 million of them face daily threats of murder, beating, imprisonment and torture, and a further 350 to 400 million encounter discrimination in areas such as jobs and housing. A conservative estimate of the number of Christians killed for their faith each year is somewhere around 150,000. ... the U.S. Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life put it this way: ... 'Altogether, Christians faced some form of harassment in two-thirds of all countries' ... Muslims also face 'substantial' harassment, the Pew report found, but in fewer countries.
