Strange, the media tells us that white people are never called terrorists
Elderly Chinese woman rescued three days after being ‘buried alive by son’ - "A man in northwest China has been detained after his 79-year-old mother was buried alive.The woman, who was partially paralysed, was rescued after three days and is in a stable condition in a hospital in Shaanxi province, police said.Prosecutors in Jingbian county said the woman’s son, a 58-year-old identified only by his surname Ma, had been charged with attempted murder."
BBC Radio Ulster - Everyday Ethics, Love and Polygamy - "‘Tom in Lurgan [sp?] says: I was once told by a young man in my role as a social worker that he could never love a Heavenly Father, because he never knew his earthly father. And Alan in Armar [sp?] wants to know, he says, we weren't made in the image of any God, we evolved. And with this in mind, can atheists find love? What do you say to that?’
‘Well atheists are finding love every day. But I think that's because they are human beings.’...
[On a Canadian Mormon Winston Blackmore] ‘He has subsequently renounced the practice of taking underage brides, he’s said that he would only marry someone who's 18. But at this point, he says he's not marrying anybody. He's just, he's calling all of his, all of his ladies, just friends.’"
BBC Radio Ulster - Sunday Sequence, Broken Society; Suicide Prevention; North Korea - "‘The rich today don't earn income, they, they earn rent. And they do that by effortless activities, by owning an asset which, whether it could be a property or a bond or, or stock on the stock market and sitting back and relaxing and just allowing the rent to come in. And it's the rent income or the income from rent, which actually determins. Those of us who don't own assets, who don't own property, who don't own stocks… which is the majority, we are be, well left behind. And the one percent are looking down on us and laughing. Look at those people working hard, going to work every month, hoping that at the end of the month, there'll be a salary. Hoping that at the end of the month their little business will make a profit, where actually what they are doing is owning works of art, owning assets and owning government bonds and earning rent off their collateral’...
‘Do you get any sense there that people in South Korea wants the island to be reunited?’
‘Not really. Financially, it would be, like we were all for it until we saw the German and how much it cost West Germany when they were reunited. And we began to figure here they couldn't afford it. And we'd say trade unions here wouldn't want a cheap labor force suddenly descending on the market, it'd destroy theirs’"
BBC Radio Ulster - Everyday Ethics, Assisted Dying; Loyalist Culture; Al-Anon - "‘If we look at the the situation in Oregon, and I've looked at, in 2014, four out of 10 assisted suicide deaths in Oregon, that people were either put down as a reason [on the form] wholly or partly because they were afraid of being a burden to the health service, to their family, to caregivers. In the state of Washington, it was six in 10 deaths… in a society where we've got my, where we’re constrained by financial things and people are worried about problems of well, how will the budgets go?... in Oregon, where several patients were told, they had Medicaid and so they were terminal. And their state said, well, I'm sorry, we can’t fund your chemotherapy. But I tell you what, we will fund the drugs for your assisted suicide’...
‘Countries which have, we look at Holland, for example, where they have assisted suicide and euthanasia. Their whole system of palliative care is much more rudimentary in there, and I think we need to pump services, we need to pump money into how we look after people and help them to live and help them to have a good death. It's not to put at risk the lives of those who would be vulnerable with the change in the law by saying for the very few, the very vocal who the media jumps upon the cases and saying, for them, we change the law. The law is a blunt instrument and it cannot work that way and Holland has proved that. One of the doctors who was instrumental in bringing in the changes in Holland has said, during the year and indeed last year, as well, said don't do it as a warning to us. Don't do it. Don't change the law. You can’t safeguard’...
‘Holland as I said before, about a third of the deaths there are recorded as non voluntary or involuntary, that's when the person did not actually make a request for this in the first place. But also there are statistics available to say that, and there are doctors have gone on record and say actually, we're not recording all of the deaths, or we're doing other things like using persistent sedation, deep sedation, deep continuous sedation, as a way round it, as a way of saying we not have to list it as euthanasia for what it is’"
On euthanasia and the 'myth' of the slippery slope
BBC Radio Ulster - Everyday Ethics, Registration of Faith Leaders, Socialism & God, & Aritificial Intelligence - "‘I don't think I can say, you know, it's impossible for a Christian to belong to a particular political party. But I do think that at a broader level, one can say that Christianity points in certain definite political directions, to such an extent that sometimes the Christians in different political parties find quite a lot in common with each other. And I would say, roughly speaking, that Christianity thinks that politics is about trying to produce virtuous people. It is about trying to produce good human relationships. In that sense, you might say, in the real sense, Christianity favors a kind of Republicanism, not in the sense of monarchy, but in the sense of a good Commonwealth. On the other hand, I think that Christianity also says that politics has to yield to some kind of vision of a divine order if you like, of what is objectively good. So it can't be on the side of a politics that says it’s just about making people freer or just about making people happier. Most secular politics is now about that. It's not compatible with a religious understanding.’...
‘I think it's quite instructive to look at the actual figures here, because there are an awful lot of Christians out there who vote. And the thing that is absolutely clear is that Christianity is political. And an awful lot of Christians do exercise that in deciding that they want to follow one party or another. So for instance, if you look at the UK election results, I think Christians were voting 41% conservative and 28% labour in the general election in England and Wales. But then if you look at the vote in Scotland, in terms of SNP vote, half of the Catholics in Scotland are voting SNP which is traditionally considered more left wing and right wing. So I don't think Christians are giving clear messages about whether they're all left or all right... I think capitalism is flawed and needs redemption. But redemption is a key motif in Christianity. It's not just about giving up on things that seem to be a bit broken. The thing that I worry about around too thick a socialist solution, politically, is that it privileges an idea about original sin that can allow people of a sort of Christian mindset to try and control the rest of the state. By essentially mandating moral behavior, and by making visible The Invisible Hand in order to create that. As we've seen, that is as susceptible to corruption as sort of unbridled capitalism.’...
‘What Stephen Hawking has said that artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race’...
‘Anybody actually working in artificial intelligence or robotics or this field just laughs at that. And some of them are quite rude about Stphen Hawking saying, you know, they wouldn't pontificate on black holes. So why is he talking about artificial intelligence, which he isn't directly involved in’"
BBC Radio Ulster - Everyday Ethics, Death, Forgiveness and Dawn Chorus - "‘A good death to me is a rapid, final illness after a long, active and fulfilling life, surrounded by your family, in your own home, with your privacy and dignity maintained, with a, if required, a medical person available to ensure that you are pain free, and that you are not subjected to unnecessary and prolonged treatment.’...
‘Overwhelmingly people say that they would like to stay at home or in a hospice, if at all possible’...
‘I think a good death is also where all of the voices are saying the same thing... not trying to have a patient survive at the last minute when all that would be directly inflicted upon them, in doing so will tend to a bad death rather than a good death.’...
‘Very often, the temptation is for the patient to think that the have to fight it somehow, that you have to accept all offers of treatment that they're given. Where in retrospect, looking back on it, the person was clearly dying, it'd been far more humane to explore that with the patient and say, look, where do you think we are just now? What do you think the future is holding? What do you think the benefits of this treatment might be? And there's really good studies that show that very often we overestimate the effects of benefit from treatment. And we underestimate, it's hard. And we know that we do kind of, you know, invasive treatments towards the end of life, we tend to die in intensive care, for example, more often’…
‘Maybe the language sometimes doesn't help when people talk about battling or something. And then they’re a failure I suppose if-’
‘Absolutely, and I feel passionately about this. And there's, advice from cancer charities, saying you must fight this, you must stand, fight the battle of cancer, the battle of my life. And we know that fighting styles or coping styles of cancer make no difference to outcome. And instead we have a group of patients who feel under pressure to kind of almost perform and fulfill their so called duty with taking all these treatments. On the other hand they feel so desperately upset when perhaps a cancer has spread, feeling that perhaps they were to blame because they didn't fight enough, it's absolutely appalling, and much of that has been driven by cancer charities, which I find absolutely dreadful.’"
Everyday Ethics: New pilgrims, a captive & a king in a carpark - "[On being captured by terrorists] ‘When I was in captivity, the food became very bad. And other hostages, not me, other hostages complained, I was in solitary so I had no dealing, I heard this afterwards. The headman came eventually and said, what are you getting, they told him. And he said, that's clearly wrong, I'll look into it. So he looked into it. And he discovered that the guard practiced the old trick. He'd been given money to buy food, he’d pocketed half and spent the other half on food. So what did they do? They took the guard out, and they shot him. Because they said, if you'll cheat us in small matters like that, you'll give the whole organization away if someone comes along with a bribe… A couple of years back, I went back to meet my captors. And I said, we put the past in the past, let's put the past in the past and build a new future together"
What Happens When Everyone Stays Home to Eat? (Ep. 412) - Freakonomics Freakonomics - "even if you’re used to eating at home a fair amount, you probably eat out more than you think. The economist Jayson Lusk:
LUSK: Depending on the data set you look at, more than half of food expenditures occur away from home these days.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the top three places where we buy food away from home are: full-service restaurants and limited-service, fast-food style restaurants, each taking in roughly $340 billion a year. And then school and college cafeterias, at around $70 billion a year. But there are a lot of other places we’ve gotten used to eating out: hotels and bars and sports stadiums and wedding halls...
before the pandemic, Jayson Lusk said we’d been spending more than 50 percent of our food dollars at restaurants and elsewhere outside the home.
LUSK: In terms of just pounds of food, it’s certainly lower than that.
Lower than 50 percent because food is more expensive, per pound, in restaurants.
LUSK: My guess is you’re probably talking in the 30 to 40 percent range of pounds of food.
And so, suddenly, that 30 to 40 percent of food missing from restaurants? Americans are buying it from grocery stores. In fact, many people seem to be buying more than their missing 30 to 40 percent. Why? You can think of at least three reasons. Number one: inexperience. If you’re not used to shopping in a grocery store, in a time like this you may buy a lot more food than you need. Number two: fear. Covid-19 is scary; food is comforting. Fighting the fear with food seems like a good idea. And number three: human beings, for all our enviable individuality, also succumb to the herd mentality."
'"I know what you're thinking, but let me offer a competing narrative." - New Yorker Cartoon - "Wife to husband who has just caught her in bed with another man"
Post-modernism!
Rob on Twitter - "Remember when Barack Obama bombed a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Afghanistan? It was the first time a U.S. president and Nobel Peace Prize winner has ever bombed another Nobel Peace Prize winner."