National Geographic photography contest winners

I subscribe to National Geographic in part for the great photography. In additional to publishing photos taken by their professional photographers, NG also sponsors various photography contests in which readers send in their inspiring, idyllic and oftentimes stunning images. Here are two of the NG contest sites (here and here), with lots of incredible sights to be seen. I can't say enough about all of the terrific written content of National Geographic either. It is a must-read every month for me. What a bargain! For only $15 per year (a fraction of the cost of a ticket to many spectator events), you'll be transported to the four corners of the Earth (and beyond) every month.

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Held Hostage by Health Care

A physician friend of mine sent me a link to a piece written by Dr. Marcia Angell about why Congress should consider a single-payer system and suggestions as to how it could be implemented. Dr. Angell is a senior lecturer in social medicine at Harvard Medical School and a former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine. I can only hope that, even though she was not invited to speak in front of Congress, Pres. Obama and the Congress see her words and incorporate this into their discussion.

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McClatchy calls out Cheney on his lies

Good for McClatchy, publishing an article detailing Dick Cheney's recent lies regarding torture conducted by the United States.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney's defense Thursday of the Bush administration's policies for interrogating suspected terrorists contained omissions, exaggerations and misstatements.

If Cheney really wants to claim that the U.S. mistreatment of prisoners produced information that "prevented the violent death of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of innocent people." OK, Cheney. If that really were true (it isn't) tell us what information was obtained and how it saved thousands of people. Just give us one example of how that information saved any lives at all. It's hard to believe that this clown was theVP of the United States. He could never gotten his way invading Iraq in the first place if all the media had been as diligent as McClatchy has been over the years. Note that the article doesn't limit itself to Cheney's speech, but reviews many of the lies and distortions of the Bush Administration.

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The correlation between religiosity and intelligence.

Gad Saad of Psychology Today reports that really smart people tend to not be religous. I know that this topic is going to stir up a lot of emotion, but it is quite clear that our smartest scientists tend to not follow religions. Not that there aren't lots of blisteringly smart believers out there, some of them first-rate scientists. The trend says that Nobel Prizes mostly go non-believers.

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God and Greed

In "Why Do Christians Worship Greed?" Peter Laarman puts his finger on yet another ugly-Americanism:

Only in America can one find significant numbers of serious Christian theologians who will still argue that unfettered capitalism represents God's Plan for human thriving.

Contemporary Republicans have worked extra hard concoct their stunted Money-God. Laarman quotes David Brooks:

The Republicans talk more about the market than about society, more about income than quality of life. They celebrate capitalism, which is a means, and are inarticulate about the good life, which is the end. They take things like tax cuts, which are tactics that are good in some circumstances, and elevate them to holy principle, to be pursued in all circumstances.

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