My local newspaper The Plain Dealer today had this statement in place of the normal Non Sequitur comic strip, one of my favorites.
Editor’s note: Today’s “Non Sequitur” strip was withheld because it was deemed objectionable by Plain Dealer editors. A replacement strip was unavailable at press time.
I naturally went on the web to see what was so shocking and am frankly baffled. Can anyone tell me why this strip should have been withheld?
A report just released says that it has been one year since there was a case of polio in India. This result was obtained after India carried out a massive program to deliver vaccines, involving 2.3 million vaccinators delivering 900 million doses in the past year. India used to have more than half of the world’s cases of this disease so this is a huge achievement. (Thanks to Ian over at The Crommunist Manifesto for the tip.)
This could mean that India could soon be removed from the list of countries where polio is still endemic, leaving just Afghanistan, Nigeria, and Pakistan on the list. It will take another two years of being disease-free for it to be declared that India has eradicated the disease. It is hoped that soon polio will join smallpox as the second global disease to be completely eradicated.
On a personal note, as a person who contracted polio at the age of six, this news is particularly gratifying.
Such a question had never occurred to me but if asked, my initial response would have been “A lot”. But I would have been wrong. It turns out that the number is surprisingly small and that I had (once again) been misled by the deceptive power of geometric progression.
I’ll let readers have the fun of guessing for themselves (assume that you can have a piece of paper of any size to start with) and then they can read this New Scientist report about a group of students who worked on this question for seven years before breaking the previous record.
It turns out that there is some fascinating physics involved in crumpling paper.
Jessica Ahlquist, a Rhode Island high school student who happens to be an atheist, challenged her local school board, requesting that a ‘prayer mural’ that had been hanging in the school auditorium since 1963 be removed.
The 8ftx4ft mural in the auditorium read:
SCHOOL PRAYER
OUR HEAVENLY FATHER, GRANT US EACH DAY THE DESIRE TO DO OUR BEST, TO GROW MENTALLY AND MORALLY AS WELL AS PHYSICALLY, TO BE KIND AND HELPFUL TO OUR CLASSMATES AND TEACHERS, TO BE HONEST WITH OURSELVES AS WELL AS WITH OTHERS, HELP US TO BE GOOD SPORTS AND SMILE WHEN WE LOSE AS WELL AS WHEN WE WIN, TEACH US THE VALUE OF TRUE FRIENDSHIP, HELP US ALWAYS TO CONDUCT OURSELVES SO AS TO BRING CREDIT TO CRANSTON HIGH SCHOOL WEST.
AMEN
That Mitchell and Webb Look examines the sad plight of those who are w-a-a-a-y ahead of their time.
It is not easy for a Mormon to publicly renounce his or her faith. This article shares the story of four young Mormons who realized that they did not believe during or soon after they finished their obligatory missionary work. The author of the article Greg Wilcox says that this disenchantment with religion is part of a more general trend.
A 2010 article in Christianity Today, citing various studies, says that the percentage of Americans claiming “no religion” doubled in about two decades, up from 8.1 percent in 1990 to 15 percent in 2008. A substantial 22 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds claimed no religion, up from 11 percent in 1990. Also, 73 percent of these younger people came from religious homes.
The same article makes reference to the research of Robert Putnam and David E. Campbell, authors of a 2010 study called “American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us,” which shows that the younger generation is dropping out of religion at five to six times the historic rate. [My emphasis-MS]
This adds to the evidence supporting my (admittedly minority) view that, despite appearances, religion is in serious danger of collapse. It is not that it will completely disappear but that it will become like astrology, largely irrelevant, viewed with amusement by most, but still believed in by an increasingly small minority.
Although the story is about loss of Mormon faith, I suspect that the experiences recounted are more generally applicable. The stories are quite poignant in describing the initial feelings of loss and loneliness before they found that they were not alone and joined with others in their same situation.
(Via Machines Like Us.)
Yesterday was the tenth anniversary of the arrival of the first prisoners at Guantanamo, brought there on military transport planes, shackled hand-to-waist, waist-to-ankles, their ankles bolted on the airplane floor, their ears and eyes goggled and their heads hooded. Glenn Greenwald describes how over that period, the principles of justice have been steadily subverted, first by Bush/Cheney and now by Obama, resulting in nightmarish treatment of people becoming routine.
It is worth reading the accounts of two of the people who were detained for long periods in Guantanamo.
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Last week Stephen Colbert had a good segment that dealt with the National Defense Authorization Act that Congress and the White House rushed through during the holiday season with little or no discussion of its dangerous features. I wrote before about how it authorizes the military to detain anyone to be held indefinitely without trial.
The Colbert Report
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The New York Times an interesting profile of Colbert and a look behind the scenes of his show.
Iranian nuclear scientists are getting murdered, the latest case being reported today. Glenn Greenwald asks the right question: Why is this not denounced here as terrorism?
Does anyone doubt that some combination of the two nations completely obsessed with Iran’s nuclear program — Israel and the U.S. — are responsible? (U.S. officials deny involvement while pointing the finger at Israel, whose officials will not comment but “smile” when asked; the CIA has “targeted” Iran’s scientists in the past, several of whom have disappeared only to end up in U.S. custody, including one who “resurfaced in the United States after defecting to the CIA in return for a large sum of money”). At the very least, there has been no denunciation from any Obama officials of whoever it might be carrying out such acts.