Phonewalking addiction

Ever since the federal government started requiring universities to make publicly available knowledge about any incidents of crime that take place on or near their campuses, we get email notification of any incidents that occur. Initially it was somewhat jarring to get them, since they shattered the illusion that we lived in a crime-free bubble but it is a good thing if it encourages people to be more aware of their surroundings and take precautions to avoid becoming the victims of crime.
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Great moments in understatements

The Vatican admits that it doesn’t fully understand youth culture. Really? I am so surprised. Who would have thought that adopting reactionary views towards women and the LGBT community would alienate young people? In order to combat this failure, the “Pontifical Council for Culture invited sociologists, Web experts and theologians to a three-day, closed-door event Feb. 6-9 [2013] aimed at studying “emerging youth cultures.””
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Justice-American style

Major Jason Wright, one of the military’s judge advocate generals assigned to the team to defend Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, one of the prisoners at Guantanamo, has quit the military saying that those tribunals have become heavily stacked against the defendants and now are little more than show trials and that the government has gone to extraordinary lengths to keep its torture practices secret and to deny the prisoners the basic legal rights to a fair trial, such as secretly recording the conversations between attorney and client..
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Payday loans

It is true that these companies extort money from the needy and get them trapped in a cycle of debt. The problem is that they also serve a need. Many people live paycheck-to-paycheck, just barely getting by, and any sudden emergency (car repair, medical bill, broken furnace) can throw their delicately balanced finances out of whack and they often feel they have nowhere else to turn to at short notice.
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The western allergy epidemic

In the US people have allergies to many things, the most common ones being pollen, dust mites, mold, wasps and bees, cats and dogs, industrial and household chemicals, and foods such as milk, nuts, and eggs. Growing up in Sri Lanka, I cannot remember anyone in my family or friends who had allergies, apart from a very few people who had asthma and thus had occasional breathing problems. No one seemed to have the need to avoid foods and plants, apart from varying degrees of lactose intolerance.
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Facing death-8: Being remembered forever

I have discussed that some have a strong desire to want to live on in some capacity forever, and thus yield to the temptation to believe in an immortal soul that exists in an afterlife in heaven or is reincarnated in some way. But others who may not believe that may still seek to find ways to make their names live on even after they have died, to be at least remembered forever.
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Valuable church organ burned in fire

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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