Politician’s preemptive apology
This preemptive apology is brought to you by Onion News Network . . . Congressman Offers Preemptive Apology For Extramarital Affair
All that talk about life after death . . .
Highly religious people should be more willing to say goodbye to the material world, right? It turns out that devout believers cling ferociously to Earthly life. That's the finding of a new study reported by the Center for Inquiry:
[T]erminal cancer patients who reported drawing comfort from religion were significantly more likely to demand heroic care during their final week of life than those less attached to faith. Strong believers were also significantly less likely to engage in advance-care planning activities like making a living will, signing a do-not-resuscitate order, or naming a health-care proxy.
The difference between religious and non-religious was not trivial:Only 3.6 percent of the least religious received mechanical ventilation during the final week of life, compared to 11.3 percent of the most religious.
Running in your sleep
Did you ever wake up suddenly because while you were having a dream because your body actually moved a bit? This poor dog was apparently having a running dream when his body kicked in . . . such a rude awakening! What protects us from physically acting out our dreams and hurting ourselves? The body functions to paralyze itself during REM sleep to protect us from self-damage that would occur if we acted out scenes from our dreams. [Via hahahaimontheinternet]
Where the non-believers tend to live
Where do American non-believers live? On the West Coast, of course. Based on new data, however, even greater percentages of them live in New England. Here's the interactive American map. Here's an excerpt from the article by the LAT:
Since 1990, the percentage of Americans claiming no religion has nearly doubled, growing to 15% last year. That was the overall conclusion. But tucked inside the report are figures offering portraits of various regions.
Nonbelievers, skeptics and the unaffiliated are clustered in New England and along the Pacific, even as all 48 states surveyed have become less religious, the American Religious Identification Survey found.Herr Ratzinger continues the massacre
HIV/AIDS is possibly the worst health crisis to hit this planet. It's also arguably the worst thing to happen to the African continent since white people were regularly kidnapping its inhabitants and trading them like farm machinery. But the one hopeful thing about the whole situation is this: while there's no cure yet, AIDS is easily preventable. Ridiculously easily preventable. Avoiding the sharing of needles & using contraception are the two most effective ways to avoid the long, tortuous, wasting death we've all come to associate with this horrendous epidemic. And if you're not an intravenous drug user (or you studiously avoid sticking sharp, blood-stained things in your body), there's 50% of your prevention pretty much sorted already. So ... how the hell are you supposed to react when the gold-robed, paedophile-protecting dictator-for-life of the Catholic Church continues to threaten people with eternal torment for using contraception during sex (based on a very, very, um, interpretive interpretation the Bible) and instead tells people "just say no" to sex? In this story (BBC) Pope Oberstumbannfuhrer Herr Kaiser Ratzinger (I refuse to use his picked-out stagename, he's not Axl Rose for crying out loud) once again proves to the world that not only is his outlook anachronistic, unrealistic & laughable, it's also flat-out fatal. To millions upon millions of people.