Response to "N.H. pastor houses child killer, riles town"

Is it not true that people form lynch mobs to take the focus off of their own legal and moral insufficiencies? Well, among other reasons, but that's always a hidden motive for it.

Also, not to say that the crime was ok or anything, but it seems to me that it's being a bit overblown. The boy was killed by the guy...and in the same moment some other kid across town died of an unknown heart defect, and 6 women had abortions, and two people committed suicides, and one guy got hit by a bus... Death happens, people, and it happens sooner or later to everyone. The crime of killing is not in ending a life, but in determining when to end it. If someone is old enough, we call it assisted suicide. If they are young enough, we call it abortion. Yes, hypocracy is a central theme to this discussion, in more ways than one.

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I'm reminded of the Old Testament system involving "cities of refuge" to hold criminals...to keep them away from "decent" and "innocent" society while allowing them to remain human. Of course, that seems too logical and easy to be implemented in a modern context.

response to: "Recession F-bombs: Why swearing feels great"

You are teaching anger to your children when you do this. They don't care what word it happens to be. They just care that they've seen you being angry so that means that they can be angry too. If I recall correctly, when I was young, younger than 5, my dad still swore. I picked this up until they told me not to do it. I did the typical monkey see, monkey do: My dad got angry fixing the car. I heard him say something, and it sounded impressive: Gaaaahdammit! So I started saying it whenever I was frustrated for a short time until I was suppressively corrected. Now, at that age I knew about God. However, I made absolutely no connection whatsoever between that strange new phrase I had learned and the name of God. What my dad had said sounded like one distinct word. But I did understand that the strange new phrase was to be used against something when I was frustrated with it. So, don't ask the shrinks how swearing affects children, ask those who can actually remember what it was like being a child.

Really, it isn't about what word is being used. It's about the emotion behind the word. And chances are that you don't know what emotion really is. Emotion is our true language. It is what we process directly from inputting stimuli before we translate it automatically into our artificial learned language (e.g., English.) Since information tends to get lost in translation, deliberately or otherwise, your emotional state will always be a truer assesment of your stance on an issue, your values, your hangups, your frustrations, your misgivings, your beliefs, and so on than what you tell yourself in your learned language. The benefit of a learned language is that it can solidify the knowledge held in emotional language so that it can be more easily studied, understood, and, especially, discussed with others.

An interesting side note to this: do animals think in a form of this "emotional" language? I find it apparent that they do. You may draw your own conclusions from this revelation.

But back to the anger thing, since that's what a lot of this swearing is about. We see more swearing than in the past because we have become a different people than we were in the past. What, may I ask, has become of the dignity of being a unique person? Who of us loves others not because they can do stuff for us, but because they need love? We are all empty, and feel worthless, because all we can do to attain satisfactory worth in this age is be perfect. And that is something no one can do. Our families are spread out and separated and everyone works in an emotionally isolated bubble, with business relationships that are focused on ignoring and working around emotional needs rather than meeting them, because they interfere with the task on hand. What we lack in self-worth from acceptance we try to make up for with financial security. Now that that has been removed from us, our frustration is becoming more pronounced.

News article title: "Study: 1 in 31 U.S. adults in prison system"

The title says all...absolutely incredible. And completely unacceptable. The newsvine comments included many, many murmurings of "police state," "prison nation," and "because of the failed war on drugs." Fortunately there is hope for all this. Someone suggested googling "restorative justice." Really, that seems to be what we need instead of lock-ups in most situations. And it looks like there's quite a few places taking that approach--(google it yourself)

Also someone provided a link to this interesting site:
www.leap.cc/