Religion can be fairly divided into two parts: what you believe, and how you tell other people what you believe.
Some people believe that Tuesday’s Republican victory in Massachusetts, which may have cut the throat of health care reform, was big news. I beg to differ. The big news came out of a large room holding nine small people and a few witnesses on Thursday afternoon. It was doomsday for the individual in American politics. The Supreme Court decided on Thursday that corporations and unions are no longer beholden to the rules that had limited their spending on federal elections. Remember that date. Because the gargantuan coffers of those corporations and unions are now open very, very wide, and the words “shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech” have led to some very murky consequences. Justice John Paul Stevens read a long, lonely dissent from the bench. He called the decision “a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have ... fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the time of Theodore Roosevelt.”
30,364 vs. 210. Obviously, 30,364 is a much greater number than 210. Sadly, the former amount represents the number of gun-related deaths, including homicides, suicides and accidental deaths, in the United States in 2005. According to a blog post from the New England Coalition to Prevent Gun Violence, 210 is an extrapolated figure that represents the number of gun-related deaths in the United Kingdom if its population was equal to the United States. In reality, there are only 42 gun-related deaths per year in the U.K., according to the blog.
Read as a straightforward attack on capitalism in a blue-green hue, many conservatives have angrily vented across all media platforms belittling “Avatar” as yet another Hollywood-leftist-socialist-homosexual-pantheistic-anthrophobic diatribe.
About two weeks ago, Haisong Jiang, a graduate student from China studying biosciences at Rutgers, saw his girlfriend off at the Newark Liberty International Airport.
No offense to my parents, but I was raised by television.
It is perhaps no accident that the nuclear power industry chose a French word, “renaissance,” to promote its alleged comeback. Attached to this misapplied moniker are a series of fallacious suggestions that nuclear energy is “clean,” “safe” and even “renewable.” And, in keeping with its French flavor, a key argument in the industry’s propaganda arsenal is that the U.S. should follow the “successful” example of the French nuclear program.
After my father lost his job in November 2008, my family’s health insurance coverage lapsed. Although he found work — and, consequently, coverage for himself — in April, the rest of the family can’t join until March 2010. So, for the only year my mother and I have ever been without insurance, we have tiptoed through our lives, avoiding what health risks we could.
If you listen to geologists, they will tell you the reason the massive earthquake occurred in Haiti last week had to do with seismic activity, fault lines and tectonic plates. At first glance, it’s a believable explanation. But the Rev. Pat Robertson proposes another answer that deserves consideration. Not consideration of its validity but rather consideration as to why in the world he would say such a thing.
My colleagues at the Alligator, Amelia Harnish and Jared Misner, wrote a defense — or at least a justification — of infidelity in their Jan. 14 Avenue column at www.bit.ly/secretscrewing.
People of UF: In my first official column as the Friday columnist for the largest student-run newspaper in the country, I want to touch on a very important issue on campus — the provoking and condemning preachers. This isn’t a blanket statement for all preachers on campus, but only those who are hatefully insulting for the purpose of garnering attention.
The 7.0-magnitude earthquake that hit Haiti on Tuesday is the worst to shake the country in 200 years, claiming the lives of up to 50,000 people and affecting more than 3 million people world wide, according to the American Red Cross. The disaster has left a country already stricken with political instability, poverty and humanitarian conflict in an even more devastating state. So, in the wake of the tragedy, it’s important for us to ask ourselves: What can we do to help?
Much has been made of the fall of the Roman Empire in the media over the last few years, especially as our own American empire has come under deservedly intense scrutiny.
There are a good number of people who believe in the hypothetical situation that torture is justified in the ticking time bomb scenario. That is, a nuclear or biological weapon is about to detonate and kill thousands, maybe millions of people.
When I saw a link for the spanking new “race and ethnicity” guidelines from the U.S. Census Bureau plastered across the ISIS homepage, I had to check it out.
When Time Magazine declared the age of irony dead following the Sept. 11 attacks, its conclusion was right, even if it was working from faulty premises.
As the song from the musical “Avenue Q” states, “Everyone’s a little bit racist sometimes. Doesn’t mean we go around committing hate crimes...Maybe it’s a fact we all should face: everyone makes judgments based on race.” I don’t care whether you’re black, white, Hispanic, Asian, biracial or multiracial. At some point in your life, I’m sure you’ve had racist thoughts. If you’ve read this far, you probably agree (though wish you didn’t) or shaking you’re head in outrage because you’re a P.C., apologist liberal who’s a closeted racist. For a while now, we’ve allowed liberal Democrats to define racism. When it benefits them politically, they’ll throw the label at someone, but what happens when it’s one of their own? They quickly excuse to save the squeaky-clean facade they perpetuate.
I’m starting to cringe whenever I hear “carpe diem.”
I found a chart online recently consisting of two pictures. The top picture had a map of the United States with states highlighted where gay marriage was legal: Massachusetts, Connecticut, Iowa, Vermont and New Hampshire. Pretty simple picture — five states. The picture below it was the same map but with a lot of states colored. That one? States where it’s legal to marry your first cousin.
It was a banner week for bipartisan tomfoolery, culminating on Friday and coming from both Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele and Democratic strategist James Carville.
Solutions by The State News
