According to McClatchy, the Veterans Administration withheld inconvenient information regarding the number of veterans who have attempted suicide: The Veterans Administration has lied about the number of veterans who've attempted suicide, a senator charged Wednesday, citing internal e-mails that put the number at 12,000 a year when the department was…
FirstFreedomFirst.org was co-founded by two Believers, Barry Lynn and Dr. Welton Gaddy. On behalf of First Freedom First, they have produced an hour-long video to inform others of the importance of maintaining a political wall of separation between church and state. The Separation Clause appears in an abstract form in…
Arianna Huffington recently wrote a post that summarizes enough hypocrisy to throw the happiest concerned citizen into a long-term funk. The deep theme that all of these recent events have in common is that prominent American sources of information are demonstrably untrustworthy. How else can you explain the Administration's military…
Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi assumed the role of a true Believer in order to see what it's like to be one. In Taibbi's entertaining and well-written article, "Jesus Made Me Puke: And other Tales from the Evangelical Front Lines," he describes that he almost got too caught up in…
I previously wrote that I bought a little camera that I try to take everywhere. Having that camera nearby forces me to look more carefully at the startling sights that are everywhere. Many of those sights are the postures and expressions of people, but privacy concerns keep me from freely photographing or sharing the photos of strangers (I haven’t given up somehow accomplishing this!). To this point, I’ve focused on taking photos of nature and architecture. This morning, my wife Anne and I took a walk in Forest Park (in St. Louis, Missouri). In the morning light, we came upon some startling bursts of color, causing me to take out my little camera.
When I look at biological wonders, I sometimes imagine standing with Charles Darwin and learning from him. That’s how I felt a few weeks ago at an orchid show at the Missouri Botanical Garden. Even before Darwin published his findings there were various levels at which one could appreciate nature (it’s beautiful, it’s functional, it inspires poetry). Darwin added an explosive new level, however. Such was his impressive legacy. Before I appreciated Darwin’s contributions, my attention to plants was limited. But now I see functionality embedded in the beauty–there is now so much more to behold [I was also inspired last year when I viewed David Attenborough’s Private Life of Plants and Life in the Undergrowth (focuses on bugs). These are both spell-binding must-watch collections].
There are life and death wars going on out there …
