INTERESTING TIMES

http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/04/30/religion.torture/index.html
--analysis released Wednesday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life
--60%+ of white evangelical Protestants say torture is often or sometimes justified
--54% of people who attend services at least once a week agree
--42% of people who seldom or never go to services agree
--40% of people unaffiliated with any religious organization support the use of torture

Excellent talk here, suggesting that our death rate at the hands of fellow humans is lower now than it ever has been, and consideration of a few possible causes. Mind-broadening viewpoints.

This is the chess master on Real Time with Bill Mayer, and he is....a genius. Not just about chess. I laughed hard, too, because he says things that are totally unPC in the US media, and gets away with it because....he's RIGHT.

(link disappeared, not sure where to find this now)

Some of the people who have been held and interrogated as suspected terrorists by the US in detainment centers have been released. I have heard interviews and read about some of these people. In the ACLU newsletter there was a story about a German Muslim who was held so long that his family moved, thinking he had desserted them. He was an innocent man. We detained and tormented him when he tried to go on a vacation to the Middle East. Other innocents have been held and tortured by US. According to one man interviewed on This American Life we have offered a bounty to people turning in terror suspects, and a great number of the people who were turned in for a bounty were innocent. Too many people have died on our watch, and we will never know their real stories.
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