Random stuff worth reading on the internet thread

[Jeff Lebowski]

This guy attended 52 churches on 52 Sundays in a single year, and blogged about it. Here is his LDS experience:

http://churchexperiment.blogspot.com...ormon-lds.html

Children. Cute little buggers. Cute, but loud. Especially in this particular Mormon Church. It was interesting how much emphasis the Mormon Church seems to place on the family. In fact, this Sunday was called “Family Sunday.” (Not sure what it means. Maybe they don’t do their version of Sunday school, and instead, invite the children into the adult service?) Either way, there were lots of kids, and they were so incredibly loud that it became comical.

It seemed like there was a competition to see which child could make the most noise. And there was a fifty-way tie for first place. More on that later.

[Art Vandelay]

I've never been a Glenn Beck fan, and his denouncement of Trump seems a little Jason Chafetz-like (the prophet HFN said: kickers are a**holes and should never be trusted). With that said, Brother Beck has had some pretty significant change of directions in his life. Regardless, a quick, easy and interesting read.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...mbid=synd_digg

He left convinced that Trump was nuts. “This guy is dangerously unhinged,” he said. “And, for all the things people have said about me over the years, I should be able to spot Dangerously Unhinged.”

[HuskyFreeNorthwest]

I've never been a Glenn Beck fan, and his denouncement of Trump seems a little Jason Chafetz-like (the prophet HFN said: kickers are a**holes and should never be trusted). With that said, Brother Beck has had some pretty significant change of directions in his life. Regardless, a quick, easy and interesting read.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...mbid=synd_digg

Glenn Beck'a family lives in Toronto?

He was speedwalking up Eighth Avenue with his wife, son, and daughter, all in from Toronto.

Lol what a great patriot!

[Maximus]

Who are these people

http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2...y_harmful.html

"In reality, this treatment is performed almost universally without even asking for the parents' consent, making this practice all the more insidious. It's called infant gender assignment: When the doctor holds your child up to the harsh light of the delivery room, looks between its legs, and declares his opinion: It's a boy or a girl, based on nothing more than a cursory assessment of your offspring's genitals."

"With infant gender assignment, in a single moment your baby's life is instantly and brutally reduced from such infinite potentials down to one concrete set of expectations and stereotypes, and any behavioral deviation from that will be severely punished—both intentionally through bigotry, and unintentionally through ignorance. That doctor (and the power structure behind him) plays a pivotal role in imposing those limits on helpless infants, without their consent, and without your informed consent as a parent. This issue deserves serious consideration by every parent, because no matter what gender identity your child ultimately adopts, infant gender assignment has effects that will last through their whole life."



"Infant gender assignment is a wilful decision, and as a maturing society we need to judge whether it might be a wrong action. Why must we force this on kids at birth? What is achieved, besides reinforcing tradition? What could be the harm in letting a child wait to declare for themself who they are, once they're old enough (which is generally believed to happen around age 2 or 3)?"

[falafel]

I disagree that that article is worth reading.

[Art Vandelay]

This article is interesting from an outsiders perspective for us 99%ers. If Uncle Ted, PAC, or cr33kster decide to get divorced, they may be able to learn something. I don't know if anyone on here is a divorce attorney. I found all the legal maneuvering intriguing.

How to hide $400,000,000

[Clark Addison]

I am far from an expert on The Philippines and and Duterte's war on drug users and dealers, other than everything I have read and seen about it seems very bad.

The NY Times published a photo piece documenting some of the violence yesterday. It is full of beautiful and terrible and disturbing photos.

Very few sites do as good a job at weaving together maps, graphics, and other media into their stories as the NYT. I really dig a lot of what they do, maybe because I am an old guy.

Warning, lots of dead bodies.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2...=tw-share&_r=1

[Art Vandelay]

I am far from an expert on The Philippines and and Duterte's war on drug users and dealers, other than everything I have read and seen about it seems very bad.

The NY Times published a photo piece documenting some of the violence yesterday. It is full of beautiful and terrible and disturbing photos.

Very few sites do as good a job at weaving together maps, graphics, and other media into their stories as the NYT. I really dig a lot of what they do, maybe because I am an old guy.

Warning, lots of dead bodies.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2...=tw-share&_r=1

I read that a couple days ago. It was shocking to see a country like the Phillippines (which often seems closer to a poor American state than a 3rd world country) have this happening. The photos are amazing, and as you said disturbing.

[falafel]

Dad takes kid's drawings and turns them into fully drawn characters.



http://imgur.com/gallery/l25T7?campa...design_engaged

[Pelado]

"Confessions of a Catholic convert to capitalism"

http://www.americamagazine.org/polit...ert-capitalism

[BigFatMeanie]

Not an article, but a book:

The Plutonium Files: America's Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War

http://http://media.wix.com/ugd/0ad54b_02bd35303a0338ab8bb7526fd5b60c98.pdf

Absolutely riveting.

[Northwestcoug]

~20,000 drug convictions in Massachusetts look like they will be dismissed, because they are all tied to a single fraudulent chemist:

https://news.vice.com/story/massachu...ence-for-years

Crazy. And, this isn't the first time in recent history that Massachusetts forensics has been in trouble.

[Armenag]

Heartbreaking story about the theology of homeless children in Miami:

The secret stories say the angel army hides in a child's version of an ethereal Everglades: A clear river of cold, drinkable water winds among emerald palms and grass as soft as a bed. Gigantic alligators guard the compound, promptly eating the uninvited. Says Phatt: "But they take care of a dead child's spirit while he learns to fight. I never seen it, but yes! I know it's out there" -- he sweeps his hand past the collapsing row of seedy motels lining the street on which the shelter is located -- "and when I do good, it makes their fighting easier. I know it! I know!"

All the Miami shelter children who participated in this story were passionate in defending this myth. It is the most necessary fiction of the hopelessly abandoned -- that somewhere a distant, honorable troop is risking everything to come to the rescue, and that somehow your bravery counts.

. . .

Research by Harvard's Robert Coles indicates that children in crisis -- with a deathly ill parent or living in poverty -- often view God as a kind, empyrean doctor too swamped with emergencies to help. But homeless children are in straits so dire they see God as having simply disappeared. Christianity, Judaism, and Islam embrace the premise that good will triumph over evil in the end; in that respect, shelter tales are more bleakly sophisticated. "One thing I don't believe," says a seven-year-old who attends shelter chapels regularly, "is Judgment Day." Not one child could imagine a God with the strength to force evildoers to face some final reckoning. Yet even though they feel that wickedness may prevail, they want to be on the side of the angels.

http://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/my...-miami-6393117

[wuapinmon]

Heartbreaking story about the theology of homeless children in Miami:



http://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/my...-miami-6393117

That article is fascinating. I only noticed at the end that it's 20 years old.

[wuapinmon]

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...really-big-one This article won a Pulitzer.

The first sign that the Cascadia earthquake has begun will be a compressional wave, radiating outward from the fault line. Compressional waves are fast-moving, high-frequency waves, audible to dogs and certain other animals but experienced by humans only as a sudden jolt. They are not very harmful, but they are potentially very useful, since they travel fast enough to be detected by sensors thirty to ninety seconds ahead of other seismic waves. That is enough time for earthquake early-warning systems, such as those in use throughout Japan, to automatically perform a variety of lifesaving functions: shutting down railways and power plants, opening elevators and firehouse doors, alerting hospitals to halt surgeries, and triggering alarms so that the general public can take cover. The Pacific Northwest has no early-warning system. When the Cascadia earthquake begins, there will be, instead, a cacophony of barking dogs and a long, suspended, what-was-that moment before the surface waves arrive. Surface waves are slower, lower-frequency waves that move the ground both up and down and side to side: the shaking, starting in earnest.