While most women giving birth are doing it within the context of marriage, researchers said a record 41 percent of births were to unmarried women in 2008. That's up from 28 percent in 1990, according to the study, "The New Demography of American Motherhood." The trend crossed major racial and ethnic groups.
For fans of Morpurgo, it is also good news that the screen adaptation is being written by Richard Curtis and Lee Hall, both past masters at bringing a tear to the eye.Richard Curtis! I hate all his post-Blackadder work.
The equivalent of $1 is enough to buy four glasses of illegally brewed chang’aa—and oblivion. Some drink the local special, jet-five, so called because the fermentation of maize and sorghum is sped up with pilfered jet fuel. It can damage the brain. Elsewhere in Nairobi, chang’aa is spiked with embalming fluid from mortuaries. The name, meaning literally “kill me quick”, is well chosen.And Uganda may have this distinction:
The UN’s World Health Organisation reckons that half of all alcohol drunk in Africa is illegal. Neighbouring Uganda may consume more alcohol per person than any country in the world. Much of this is waragi, a banana gin. Some 100 Ugandans died from toxic waragi in April alone.
So I guess some mornings he still can't find his car keys, but at least he can recite line 8,576 of a poem while he's looking for them.Although not formally tested, JB's everyday memory is apparently normal for his age, with his exceptional memory for Milton's poem apparently arising from his relentless practice and dedication.
This is a common pattern in mental practice or 'brain training' style scenarios where we get better at the tasks we repeat but that improvement doesn't seem to carry over very effectively into other areas of mental life.
Professor Richmond and her team studied 188 Australians who had made it to 100, and found that maintaining social networks, keeping physically and mentally active, and being open to change were common traits.
Sounds a little dubious to me, but what do I know?“About 20 to 30 per cent of the likelihood of living to 100 is because of your genes. But that leaves 70 to 80 per cent up to environmental factors,” Professor Richmond said.
“The major finding of this study is the impact of personality.”
The chemicals used in methamphetamine production are highly toxic and can include not only pseudoephenadrine—the main ingredient in meth and active ingredient in decongestants—but also 32 other precursor chemicals. These include acetone, the active ingredient in nail polish remover, and phosphine, a widely used insecticide.There are specialist meth lab clean up businesses in America:
Home-cooking meth spreads toxins to every inch of the room where the meth was cooked and beyond. Nothing escapes contamination—the carpet, walls, furniture, drapes, air ducts, even the air itself becomes toxic. "Ingesting some of these chemicals, even a tiny drop, can cause immediate death," said Smith.
In dealing with toxic chemicals, most meth lab clean-up crews follow general guidelines. In the room where the meth was made, they scrub all surfaces, repaint the walls, replace the carpets and air filters, and air out the property. However, there are no national standards for meth lab cleanups—regulations differ from state to state. And in some states, getting a license to decontaminate a house is as easy as taking a few hours of class and a written test. "There are some bad certification methods out there. You could be a pizza delivery guy, study for a month, pay $250 and be certified," said Joe Mazzuca, a methamphetamine contamination expert and CEO of Meth Lab Cleanup, a nationwide meth-lab-specific cleanup company based in Boise, Idaho.Finally, guess the State which is the meth lab capital of the world:
And although meth houses are more concentrated in certain states—Missouri is the meth capitol of the world, with 1,471 labs discovered in 2008 alone—there are meth houses in all fifty states, and they can be found in posh towns.What a distinction. And why Missouri?
Overall, I have yet to see anyone rebut the simple calculations of Vaclav Smil, the resource and risk polymath at the University of Manitoba, who has shown how capturing and processing just a small percentage of today’s CO2 from coal combustion would require as much pipeline and other infrastructure as is now used globally to get oil — a costly commodity — out of the ground. Imagine the price required on carbon to make that doable beyond boutique scale.
Prosecutors have abandoned a legal attempt to make a young man pull his trousers up, it emerged today.Somewhere last week, I think it was in New Zealand, I did spot the lowest worn pants by a stupid teenager ever. I mean, the top of the back of his jeans sat at the base of his backside, so that his entire buttocks would be exposed if it weren't for his underpants. It looked very strange.Ellis Drummond, 18, was facing an asbo preventing him from "wearing trousers so low beneath the waistline that members of the public are able to see your underwear". He would have been banned from displaying his underpants anywhere in public in the borough of Bedford, and wearing a hood up in any public place in the area.
In 1900 the first attempt was made to ship Sockeye ova (eggs) to New Zealand from Canada which had been gathered from Weaver Creek , British Columbia in 1898. This shipment turned bad en route. A second shipment of 500,000 ova was supplied free of charge by the Canadian Fisheries Department, collected from the tributaries of Shuswap Lake in the Kamloops district of British Columbia. This time 160,000 survived and were hatched at the Hakataramea Hatchery near the Waitaki River .I remember when visiting the Salmon Ponds in Tasmania many years ago (it's a historic trout hatchery, actually), it told the story of how some early fish pioneer tried to introduce salmon to Tasmanian rivers by importing fertilised salmon eggs (not an easy feat when they had to be shipped from England), then releasing them in the rivers and hoping that they would head out to sea and back to the rivers to spawn. They did leave the rivers, but never returned.
The bulk were carefully liberated into streams feeding into beautiful Lake Ohau . However, instead of running to the sea, and returning to fresh water to spawn (as is the normal life cycle) the Sockeye developed into a non-migratory population.
This is the only self-sustaining population in the Southern Hemisphere and forms the basis for the fish farmed today by Mt Cook Salmon. Chinook salmon introduced around the same time established normal migratory patterns and can be caught in the major South Island east coast river systems today.
Our salmon live in fast flowing cold water and develop firmer flesh with less inter-muscular fat. This makes for a tastier firmer textured fish.Well, another reason to visit New Zealand again.
In a report issued on the eve of Children's Day, a national holiday, the Internal AffairsI wonder what the equivalent figure (for under 15 year olds) is in Australia.and Communications Ministry said kids comprised 13.3 percent of the population as of April 1.
"The differential mortality that we witnessed suggests that the relationship between certain populations of Pocillopora and the species of algae they associate with is quite stable," said Warner. "And this stability, ultimately, is an Achilles heel for Pocillopora. The inability of the corals to shuffle their symbionts or to establish symbioses with different species of algae means that we may see a significant loss of coral populations in the future, especially if extreme temperature disturbances, such as the cold anomaly we documented in 2008 or the hot anomaly that took place in 1997, become more frequent or severe."
Pope Benedict this spring put forward the Vatican model priest at the end of his letter to the Irish church. Jean Marie Vianney, a 19th century French priest who overcame a lack of education to serve his flock 16 hours a day or more and was known for his radical piety, is the model. Mr. Vianney’s talent for reading thought and tales of his levitation have also brought a cult of mysticism and secrecy around him; he is venerated by hardcore groups like the Society of St. Pius X, whose namesake pope beatified Vianney in 1904.Well, more levitating priests would give a certain supernatural zing to going to Mass that's been missing for a while!
"Vianney is thought to be a useful model for many new Catholic priests in rural or developing nations," says Andreas Batlogg, editor of the Jesuit-based Catholic intellectual journal Stimmen der Zeit in Munich, Germany.
Yet Benedict’s choice of Vianney caused loud and palpable groans in many parts of US and Europe. Modern-oriented Catholics and theologians see the choice as a political model of a priest closed off from society, overly idealized, hard for young Catholics to relate to, and one whose effect will be to increase a sense of distance between priests and ordinary people, and promote a view of priests more spiritually gifted than regular Catholics.
“We need an example, but this is a pastor of 230 people in a small French village in the 19th century,” says Mr. Batlogg.
The Independent covers the frankly mind-bending news that David Cronenberg is to make a film on the relationship between Freud and Jung with Keira Knightley playing Jung's lover. I would have gone for Bruckheimer for director myself.
I was vaguely aware of Australian based director Phillipe Mora, who seems to have made a remarkable number of barely noticed films in his day, but I hadn’t recalled that he directed the alien abduction movie “Communion”. (Not that I ever saw that one either.) In any event, for some reason, Mora is talking in the Sydney Morning Herald today about how it came to be made, giving us this amusing anecdote:
Of course, this anecdote may not be entirely true, but I like it anyway. It’s certainly less cringe-worthy than a certain other anecdote about Australian film maker circles.In 1986 I dined with Dr Andrija Puharich, famed para- psychologist, Tesla expert, UFO proponent and magic-mushroom maven was was reportedly funded by the CIA in the 1950s to undertake mind-control research. He introduced me and my wife to a little person, a woman he described as his "psychic bodyguard". Our hostess was a movie executive and we were to discuss my forthcoming film, Communion. Halfway through, Puharich excused himself, saying he had to telephone the aliens to get their OK on me. I said to the psychic bodyguard, "I didn't know the aliens had a phone number?" She replied, "Oh yes, they do." Puharich returned and declared, "Everything is fine; they approve you!" I was hoping he'd say they would also finance the movie or guarantee distribution.
Richard Glover writes today about the European travel disruptions:
One woman from Birmingham told the Herald midweek that she was staggered when informed she might have to wait a fortnight before she could travel home: “I passed out, just fainted, from the sheer shock,” she said.
Really? The news was so unexpected she was rendered unconscious? Is Sydney Airport now like the scene of a Jim Jones massacre — scores of people flat on their back mumbling, “the horror, the horror”?
Personally, I feel like fainting when told that flying is possible: me and 400 people inserted into a metal tube and then hurled into the sky in the expectation we will be served very small packets of peanuts and then land, some hours later, in a different country.
I like that last paragraph in particular. I think I may have said this before here, but like Richard, I have never gotten over the technological wonder that is flying. Yet I don’t think that I would like a job that involved flying so often that it did become routine and I no longer reflected on how improbable it is that I am having a drink while hurtling higher than Everest through thin, instantly asphyxiating air of Antarctic temperature from which I am separated by bits of not-so-thick perspex and aluminium skin, all while watching some crappy movie. (Well, mostly crappy. The only exception I’ve experienced to the normal rule that an inflight movie can never be absorbing was Shakespeare in Love. Yes, I felt a bit teary by the end, but then maybe that was partly the effects of jet lag too. This was especially remarkable given that I was viewing it on one of those old blurry projector systems.)
I imagine that too much flying is probably like living beside a beautiful Australian beach, which I did for a couple of years some time ago. At one level you can still appreciate the beauty, but there’s no doubt it does become less of a wonder over time. I certainly remember that the longer I lived there, the inclination to go for a swim got more and more put off until the most perfect of weather conditions. No, it’s better to have the enjoyment of going there with just enough frequency that it never completely loses novelty.
So this is one of Opinion Dominion’s secrets of life: know enough to be impressed by flight, but if you start doing it so much that you no longer get at least a bit excited by the prospect, start doing it less.
Saving endangered baleen whales could boost the carbon storage capacity of the Southern Ocean, suggests a new study of whale faeces. Whale faeces once provided huge quantities of iron to a now anaemic Southern Ocean, boosting the growth of carbon-sequestering phytoplankton.
So says Stephen Nicol of the Australian Antarctic Division, based in Kingston, Tasmania, who has found "huge amounts of iron in whale poo". He believes that before commercial whaling, baleen whale faeces may have accounted for some 12 per cent of the iron on the surface of the Southern Ocean.
Japan has proposed catching up to 440 southern minke whales each year for what it calls research purposes in the Antarctic Ocean, down from 935 at present, sources familiar with the matter said Tuesday. Japan hopes to resume full-fledged whaling in its coastal waters in return for the proposed quota reduction in the Antarctic Sea, the sources said.How many (and what type of) whales do they expect to catch in their coastal waters?
Six of the attendees confirmed yesterday that Mr Abbott had raisedMaybe Tony is getting kickbacks from the ALP's advertising agency. They come up with their fantasy quotes for the next campaign; Tony then makes them real.
the idea of banning welfare payments for young people to encourage them
to fill the thousands of jobs emerging in states such as Western
Australia and Queensland."He said he was thinking more and more about it, with a view to formulating something on it," said one of the participants, who asked not to be named.
Another recalled: "He definitely said it was something he was considering as a policy."
I find it hard to believe that South Korea does not know the truth of how this happened yet.South Korea says it now appears that an external explosion possibly
caused by a torpedo ripped the warship in two.Seoul is warning that if North Korea is found to have been involved
it will take the issue to the United Nations Security Council for
possible sanctions.
Just over half (51%) of the people who reported feeling drunk at interview said they intended to drink more alcohol that night. The researchers also found that when individuals were informed about their blood alcohol level, it was more likely to encourage them to drink (nearly 1 in 4) than to reduce their alcohol consumption that night (less than 1 in 25). Bellis said, "Commercial use of breathalyzers to encourage individuals to drink more has already been attempted in some bars in the UK. As such technologies become more easily accessible there is a real danger it will further increase alcohol consumption."Oh well. I can always thank a stomach that is more than ready to throw up after its allocated share of alcohol for ensuring I am in absolutely no danger of ever going out to attempt 40 units of alcohol in a night. On the assumption a bottle of wine is about 7 standard drinks, I'm not sure I've even reached 10 or 12 in an evening without vomiting. ( Just thought I would share that with you.)
Camera manufacturers are joining the trend. Nikon, Olympus and Sony sell cameras that offer "cuisine" or "food" settings, which adjust to enhance colors and textures on close-ups.How come they haven't come up with a "shower/bedroom flesh tone" setting for men, then? Would be used more often, I bet.
A major study has revealed that women who take a daily multi-vitaminGiven the bad publicity that many vitamin supplements have been accruing over the last 5 years or so, I wonder if sales have been significantly affected.
pill are nearly 20 per cent more likely to develop breast cancer.
They say Houston behaved oddly, chatting about nothing in particular for minutes on end, took a 15-minute break only half a dozen songs in, and had trouble reaching some of her high notes.She does indeed appear to be regularly (see the comments below about the next concert) making a spectacular hash of the famous climax of "I will always love you", as you can see here. It's doubly excruciating because of the long, long break she takes before attempting it, and the whoops and encouragement given by her (not very British sounding) fans.
However, Houston's rendition of the ultimate schmaltz anthem "I Will Always Love You" must have tested even her most loyal followers. It's a challenging ballad, not least if you've been doing extraordinarily damaging things to your upper body for several years. Her voice wheezes and grates through the high notes. There are attempts to plaster over the cracks with octave changes and smiles, but mid-song she stops, sighs and turns around to compose herself. She does finish the number, in a way, but it isn't spectacular and Houston, frozen, knows it. A momentary silence is pierced by the sound of a child crying in the stalls. Quite why left this song to the end is bewildering.But the on-stage behaviour is perhaps worth seeing on its own:
The songs include moments of genuine bonkersness. During "Saving All My Love for You" she stoops to moisturise her ankles and on several occasions appears to be singing to her shoes.All a bit sad, in its way.
Pedophilia, say experts, is more a question of a stunted (or arrested) sexuality, more a question of power, and more a question of proximity (among many other complicated psychological factors). Simply put, being gay does not make one a pedophile.Um, doesn't celibacy for men who have (presumably, in many cases) entered into celibacy as virgins (or at least with little in the way of long lasting sexual relationships) just about guarantee a "stunted or arrested sexuality"?
Volcanologists say the fireworks exploding from the Eyjafjallajökull volcano on Iceland, which is responsible for the ash cloud that is grounding all commercial flights across northern Europe, may become a familiar sight. Increased rumblings under Iceland over the past decade suggest that the area is entering a more active phase, with more eruptions and the potential for some very large bangs.As for the question of whether the current eruption could cause significant cooling: apparently, it's not thought big enough yet to do that."Volcanic activity on Iceland appears to follow a periodicity of around 50 to 80 years. The increase in activity over the past 10 years suggests we might be entering a more active phase with more eruptions," says Thorvaldur Thordarson, an expert on Icelandic volcanoes at the University of Edinburgh, UK. By contrast, the latter half of the 20th century was unusually quiet.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the last ten years – aside from the fact that a man who can write a self-refuting line like “Only a Sith believes in absolutes” and be paid a billion dollars – it’s this: web communities create in-breeding. It’s less the planet-holding-hands-and-singing-the-Coke-song than Cities in Flight, domed off, heading on different trajectories. If you doubt this, subscribe to a few Twitter feeds from people who believe different things than you do, and you will find dross passed off as insight, biscuit-crumbs strewn as if they were pearls on silk, all because the writer believes he or she is speaking to an audience that need not be persuaded. The worst part of the internet is its ability to let the pre-persuaded accrete, and declare the sun moves around them.Oh, and from the same column:
I suppose I could assume everyone who’s sensible and/or hip to the new “cyber” tools for interpersonal avoidance masquerading as immediate communication is already hooked up with the RSS and the Twitter and the Tumblr...
King has been married to seven different women, but this is his eighth divorce, because he remarried one of his former spouses and then divorced her again.I remember, years ago, that David Letterman had a funny video segment that was a "guide" to being a new wife for Larry King. I wonder if it is around on the net somewhere.
Japan's budget, announced last week o kick off the fiscal year, promises to spend a record trillion dollars, and the government must issue a record ¥44.3-trillion of new bonds this year.
The heavy spending and financing are raising worries in Japan about the country's long-term fiscal health, amid concern that Japanese government
bonds are turning into an asset bubble fuelling a public debt that is the highest among advanced economies.Japan's debt, mostly owed to creditors within the country, is more than 200 per cent of annual gross domestic product, compared with 113 per cent in Greece, 50 per cent in Spain, and 69 per cent in the United States, according to the New York-based ISI Group.
This is the part that really caught my eye:
“I'm actually envious of the Greek situation,” said Masaaki Kanno, chief economist at J.P. Morgan in Tokyo, and a former senior official of the Bank ofJapan . “They have market pressure forcing them to take action sooner than later. In Japan, even if the government tries to cut spending, social security costs will likely grow ¥1-trillion every year. The government deficit is likely to grow forever, in a sense.”
"So, we'll start by sending astronauts to an asteroid for the first time in history. By the mid-2030s, I believe we can send humans to orbit Mars and return them safely to earth, and a landing on Mars will follow."
A new species of leech, discovered by an international team of scientists, has a preference for living up noses.
Researchers say the leech can enter the body orifices of people and animals to attach itself to mucous membranes.
They have called the new blood-sucking species Tyrannobdella rex which means tyrant leech king.
The creature was first discovered in 2007 in Peru when a specimen was plucked from the nose of a girl who had been bathing in a river.
The creature lives in the remote parts of the Upper Amazon and has a "particularly unpleasant habit of infesting humans", the scientists say.
Studies also revealed that it had "a preference for living up noses". The research published their findings in the online scientific journal PLoS One.
| The Colbert Report | Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Thought for Food - Mentally Ill Advertisers & German Cupcakes | ||||
| ||||
They don't actually explain what bugs can give you the disease, apart from having a photo of some unnamed blood sucker. Wikipedia explains that it is usually via a bug with particularly unpleasant habits:Some 18m people worldwide have Chagas disease, caused by an infection with the parasite Trypanosoma cruzi.
Recently, researchers discovered having this disease puts the individual at increased risk of stroke due to heart complications and blood clots.
Chagas disease is endemic in Latin America. But emigration of millions of people to Europe, North America, Japan and Australia over the past 20 years has also made Chagas disease an emerging health problem in these countries with the potential to cause a substantial disease burden, say the investigators.
In Chagas-endemic areas, the main mode of transmission is through an insect vector called a triatomine bug.[1] A triatomine becomes infected with T. cruzi by feeding on the blood of an infected person or animal. During the day, triatomines hide in crevices in the walls and roofs. The bugs emerge at night, when the inhabitants are sleeping. Because they tend to feed on people’s faces, triatomine bugs are also known as “kissing bugs.” After they bite and ingest blood, they defecate on the person. Triatomines pass T. cruzi parasites (called trypomastigotes) in feces left near the site of the bite wound. Scratching the site of the bite causes the trypomastigotes to enter the host through the wound, or through intact mucous membranes, such as the conjunctiva.Yuck.
Since Obama announced his changes to NASA, which include abandoning the current return to the moon rocket development, some have argued that this may work out better in the long run. I don't really know enough to know, but I can certainly see the argument that NASA needed shaking up in some major way.The main problem with NASA is not lack of money. Its current budget is about the same size, when adjusted for inflation, as the average during the 1960s and early 1970s. But space exploration has become so costly that this level of financing won’t even pay for a return to the Moon anytime soon, which is what prompted the White House to cancel the Bush administration’s lunar mission.
Normally, once a pioneer makes the first trip somewhere, the cost goes down as others follow and technology improves. That’s why so many colonists could follow Columbus to the New World, and why the masses today can afford to fly in Lindbergh’s path back to Europe. The real costs of shipping freight by rail and air have declined by an order of magnitude since locomotives and airplanes were invented.
In space transportation, though, many costs have actually risen since the days of Apollo.
....Sheikh Ahmed al-Ghamdi recently declared that nothing in Islam bans men and women from mixing in public places like schools and offices.The article goes on to give some examples of Saudi segregation which shows how extreme it is:Supporters of the status quo responded harshly. Anyone who permits men and women to work or study together is an apostate and should be put to death unless he repents, said Sheikh Abdulrahman al-Barrak.
Men and women enter government offices and banks through different doors. Male professors teach female university students from separate rooms using closed-circuit television. Companies must create all-female rooms or floors if they hire women. And the Jeddah Chamber of Commerce just announced different work hours for male and female employees so the two don't mix on arrival and departure.I wonder what outdoor events women attend there. 'Cos I am thinking, if ever there is a brave man in Saudi Arabia, it would be the first male streaker at a women's only sporting fixture.
An unemployed man in Osaka City was sentenced to one year in prison suspended for three years on Tuesday for stealing electricity worth 2.5 yen from a shared electric outlet at his apartment building.
Speaking clinically, 75+ percent of abuse cases are not paedophilia but crimes of a homosexual nature involving clerics and boys in upper adolescence.[UPDATE: I see a Cardinal is copping a lot of criticism for making the homosexual link too.]
The aforementioned solution, of the dark energy problem, not only solves a cosmological problem, it casts a completely new light, on the nature of the gravitational force. Since the expansion of the universe, including the acceleration thereof, can only be a gravitational phenomenon, I arrive at the viewpoint, that gravity is a classical result, of the second law of thermodynamics. This means that gravity cannot be regarded as, on a footing with, the electroweak and strong interactions. Although this can be the most radical change, in gravity theory, for over three centuries, it is worth emphasizing, that general relativity remains unscathed.
My result calls into question, almost all of the work done on quantum gravity, since the discovery of quantum mechanics. For gravity, there is no longer necessity for a graviton. In the case of string theory, the principal motivation17,18 for the profound, and historical, suggestion, by Scherk and Schwarz, that string theory be reinterpreted, not as a theory of the strong interaction, but instead as a theory of the gravitational interaction, came from the natural appearance, of a massless graviton, in the closed string sector. I am not saying that string theory is dead. What I am saying is, that string theory cannot be a theory of the fundamental gravitational interaction, since there is no fundamental gravitational interaction.
There was an indescribable feeling of personal fulfillment, that the 66 years and 98 days, so far, of my life, had a significance. This was/is a totally individual experience which, unlike money or fame, involves no other person, and is therefore different. Because the visible universe is much bigger than the Solar System b, I had vindicated my claim, as a four-year-old, to be cleverer than Newton. Because, in my opinion, time travel into the past will forever be impossible, I cannot return to Isaac Newton in 1686 and forewarn him that a cleverer person will be born on October 31, 1943; nor can I return to 1948 and tell the four-year-old on a tricycle that he is right to say he is cleverer than Newton. The first reaction is to want to achieve the personal fulfillment again, and again.Hmm. Paul Frampton looks quite normal, and appears to have had a long career in physics. He sure doesn't seem to write about himself a very "normal" way, though.
A comprehensive drive to get staff to decontaminate hands before and after touching patients or contaminated surfaces is useless if they then sit on consecutive beds on a ward.You can't be too careful.
“While replication in independent samples is warranted, the data from our sample suggest that up to approximately 30 percent of schizophrenia cases could be prevented in the offspring of the pregnant population [in the review appearing in AJP in Advance] if we were to completely eliminate three of the infections we studied—influenza, elevated Toxoplasma antibody, and peri-conceptional genital-reproductive infections,” Brown told Psychiatric News.
Belief in hell began to decline in the eighteenth century. Boswell relates that when Dr Johnson dined with Dr Adams, head of Pembroke College, Oxford, in 1784, Johnson said, 'looking dismally', that he was afraid he would be damned. Dr Adams: 'What do you mean by damned?' Johnson, 'passionately and loudly': 'Sent to Hell, Sir, and punished everlastingly.' Dr Adams: 'I don't believe that doctrine.' A discussion followed, in which Johnson appeared to be in a minority of one, until he said, 'in gloomy agitation', 'I'll have no more on't.' The decline of hell was the reason why the Redemptorists were founded, and in Britain, why Parliament replaced fear of damnation by a huge increase in capital punishment.Interesting. But was Dr Adam's problem with Hell the idea that it is permanent? The idea that purgatory is just Hell that any soul can leave (at least until the Final Judgement) is one that has more appeal to the modern mind, and if the idea of a permanent, immediate judgement leading to Hell leads people to disbelieve in it entirely, I would rather the Catholic church did go back to talking about other possible understandings of Hell, rather than just ignoring it.
...a disembodied soul attaching itself to God in heaven offers no more comfort or inspiration than an escaped balloon. Consolation was not the goal of Plato's afterlife. Without sight or hearing, taste or touch, a soul in heaven can no more enjoy the "green, green pastures" of the Muslim paradise, or the God light of Dante's cantos, than it can play a Bach cello suite or hit a home run. Rationalistic visions of heaven fail to satisfy.The post at First Things about Millar's book agrees.
A leading IVF specialist is calling for men to start donating sperm because of growing demand from single women and lesbian couples.I am slightly pleased if this shows a slightly conservative view towards the importance of fathers actually being present for their kids. But in fact, it's probably just men worried that somehow they'll be made financially liable in future.
