Stephen Colbert describes how a device called Vapshot works. It is aimed at people who feel that the normal way of drinking alcohol takes too long to get them high. So this device vaporizes the alcohol so that it gets into the lungs and bloodstream almost immediately.
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One thing that you have to give credit to Christianity is that it gave us some great organ music and some wonderful organs were built to play them. But via a reader, I learned of a historic church organ in our region that was destroyed by fire. The reader has a personal connection to the organ that increases his sense of loss, because his father was one of the people who was instrumental in getting the organ installed. He adds:
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I enjoy satirical websites like the The Onion that take current political events and trends and then twist them around and manufacture a ‘story’ to illustrate some point about it or to highlight some absurdity. It is not uncommon for people who are not aware that these are satirical sites to take them at face value, even though it should be fairly clear that they are meant as humor.
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Israel has once more made clear its intentions to slowly and steadily annex as much Palestinian land as it can.
Israel announced on Sunday a land appropriation in the occupied West Bank that an anti-settlement group termed the biggest in 30 years and a Palestinian official said would cause only more friction after the Gaza war.
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Last weekend’s conference in Pittsburgh of the PA atheists and humanists was a lot of fun. I have mentioned before that I am somewhat asocial but whenever I do get out to events like this, I have a good time. I met several readers of this blog who introduced themselves to me and I enjoyed talking with them during the breaks and over meals. I knew they were regular readers of my blog because as my talk slides were being readied for projection on the screen, my computer wallpaper that consists of a picture of my dog appeared briefly and they could identify him as Baxter the Wonder Dog!
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Lee Zion is an editor of the Manchester (CT) Journal Inquirer and in his final memo to his reporter colleagues before taking up a new job, he gives them this useful bit of advice: Keep your sentences to less than thirty words.
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As many commentators have noted, the pace at which equal rights for gays has been advancing in the US has been nothing short of remarkable. Within a decade we have moved from a time in which one state after another passed laws and constitutional amendments to ban same-sex marriages to one in which public opinion has shifted so far that likely none of them would pass now, not to mention an almost unanimous string of judicial rulings overturning such bans.
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John Oliver describes how some US evangelicals, likely frustrated by steadily losing ground in the battle for equal rights for the LGBT community here, have shifted their hate campaign to other countries and have found fertile ground in Uganda which, although it has anti-gay laws dating back to the British colonial period, had not intensified the bigotry until the recent push by people like Scott Lively.
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I am sure that almost everyone in the US has heard about the bizarre case where a nine-year old child at a shooting range was allowed to fire a Uzi submachine gun in the fully automatic mode (where a single pull on the trigger will allow the gun to fire repeatedly until the trigger is released) and ended up killing the instructor who was supervising her.
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I have previously written about the US Attorney in our region Steven Dettelbach being an overzealous prosecutor. One example of this is his use of civil asset forfeiture laws to deprive people of their possessions without having to first convict them of any wrongdoing. Another is his use of terrorism charges against hapless individuals who were lured into plotting to blow up a local bridge. The third was his use of federal hate crime laws against 16 members of an Amish group that cut off the beards of other Amish people in an internal dispute because one sect’s leader thought that the other Amish were not sufficiently observant and pious. By stretching federal hate crime and conspiracy laws to an extreme level, Dettelbach obtained convictions and harsh sentences against the defendants in each case.
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