openpolitics.com

Penn: Anyway, so I spent today church-hunting. I called a bunch of places. Pastors can say some whacky things. Listen to what some of the pastors said.

Here's what one guy said:

"We are no longer affiliated with Mennonite Church USA. We felt they were too concerned with helping people, and not enough concerned with following God." Huh? In whose version of Christianity does God not lead you to help people? I think this is code for "We're more concerned with policing what our members should and shouldn't do."

Former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray is defying a gag-order and publishing torture memos on his blog relating to the coordination between the Uzbek, British, and American governments:

Last year the US gave half a billion dollars in aid to Uzbekistan, about a quarter of it military aid. Bush and Powell repeatedly hail Karimov as a friend and ally. Yet this regime has at least seven thousand prisoners of conscience; it is a one party state without freedom of speech, without freedom of media, without freedom of movement, without freedom of assembly, without freedom of religion. It practices, systematically, the most hideous tortures on thousands. Most of the population live in conditions precisely analogous with medieval serfdom.

Nobody can believe this level of aid – more than US aid to all of West Africa – is related to comparative developmental need as opposed to political support for Karimov. While the US makes token and low-level references to human rights to appease domestic opinion, they view Karimov’s vicious regime as a bastion against fundamentalism. He – and they – are in fact creating fundamentalism. When the US gives this much support to a regime that tortures people to death for having a beard or praying five times a day, is it any surprise that Muslims come to hate the West?

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Not sure how you feel about a special person in your life? Analyzing the pluses and minuses of the relationship might not be the answer.

In a study I conducted with Dolores Kraft, a clinical psychologist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, and Dana Dunn, a social psychologist at Moravian College in Pennsylvania, people in one group were asked to list the reasons their relationship with a romantic partner was going the way it was, and then rate how satisfied they were with the relationship. People in another group were asked to rate their satisfaction without any analysis; they just gave their gut reactions.

It might seem that the people who thought about the specifics would be best at figuring out how they really felt, and that their satisfaction ratings would thus do the best job of predicting the outcome of their relationships.

The Lancaster Ice Rink is one of the few not-for-profit ice skating facilities in Pennsylvania that is owned and operated by a youth hockey organization. The Lancaster County Youth Amateur Hockey League (LCYAHL) has been in existence since 1971. Our organization began skating at the ice rink in the Park City Mall

Then, in 1994, our dream of having our own rink became a reality. The LCYAHL had saved enough money from years of fundraising to build our own ice rink in the Granite Run Corporate Center . Hundreds of volunteers helped build the Lancaster Ice Rink. Now, the LCYAHL has over 750 youth participants (25 youth hockey teams, our own figure skating club, learn to skate clinics, learn to play hockey clinics).