From Lily Allen, who I never heard of until 3 minutes ago:
“I thought that being a popstar meant going out getting trashed with famous people and sleeping in all day,” the young singer jokes. “The fact that this is not true has come as a huge disappointment to me.”
I’ve heard a fair share of second-guessing about how the police and the administration in Blacksburg handled yesterday’s terrible events, particularly how slow they were to notify the campus about what was going on. I don’t pretend to know whether and to what to degree they were wrong, but it seems pretty obvious to me that every school in the country should have a Twitter channel and require every student and faculty member to sign up for it.
Yeah, a lot of people would turn off their phones in class, but plenty of them wouldn’t, and the people outside of class may have been able to identify the shooter before he got to second crime scene.
Surely this means the times they are a changin’.
The invitation extended to Vice President Dick Cheney to be the commencement speaker at Brigham Young University has set off a rare, continuing protest at the Mormon university, one of the nation’s most conservative.
Interesting thought about religion from Jonah Goldberg, in which he writes candidly and dispassionately about his (relative lack of) faith.
And then there are some of those discomfiting facts about human groups. Taking the population of these United States, for example, the least religious major group, by ancestry, is Americans of East Asian stock. The most religious is African Americans. All the indices of dysfunction and misbehavior, however, go the other way, with Asian Americans getting into least trouble and African Americans most. What’s that all about?
I have no idea if this assertion is borne out by the facts, but it’s consistent with the well-document phenomenon of relatively little violent crime in Europe and Canada even as religiosity is much lower there as well.
Every now and then some misinformed clown writes a letter to the editor about how problems in society would be solved if (among other things) we had prayer in school. I always want to ask those people why, except for that commited by Islamists angry about cartoons, violence is so low in <a href=”http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=library&page=norris_27_2″>Denmark</a> (scroll to chart at bottom).
Over the last couple years I’ve written (I think) four letters to the editors of the Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News. Most recently I wrote one last week in response to this letter. Today they printed it. That makes three out of the four that have made it to publication. Woo hoo!
As an aside, I noticed that they recently started allowing people to post responses to the letters. An excellent idea since letters are so often edited for brevity.