Supply-Side Jesus!

Back when Sen. Al Franken was still making jokes, he could make some pretty good ones.

And thanks, AlterNet, for the reminder.

Second coming! Second coming!

That, or a very cool cloud formation, one, over Moscow.

Junior ROTC in middle school?

Says here the Army’s considering it.

I am an Army brat, though my mother opted out of the military life (and her marriage) when I was quite small, and so I didn’t experience the multiple moves of so many other military brats. While I may be hard-wired to appreciate soldiers, I have a real problem with starting military training this young — which is already happening  in places like Wichita:

The Wichita school district in south-central Kansas is one of a few nationwide offering middle school programs based on the Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps curriculum. Top Army officials are studying its programs to see if they could be a model for others nationwide.

No regrets

God bless Internet Monk, and here’s why.

You? Do you regret anything? If I regret anything, it’s that I let other people dictate what I thought about the world for too long. I probably still do that — a little — but I wish I’d wised up years earlier and stopped gauging others’ reactions before I had my own.

The End. By Me.

So I’m looking at these petroglyphs yesterday…

And though I’m walking the trail by myself, I end up behind an older couple with some serious-looking cameras and notebooks. I figured they had to know more than I did about these carvings, so I cut in close to listen.

No one knows how old these are, really. Archeologists say maybe 700 years, the natives say 3,000. Each carving took a long time to make, and no one knows the meaning of the oldest ones — though some Europeans came through in the 1800s and added their crosses and sheep brands and such.

The couple was looking for a carving of the legendary flute-playing, baby-bearing Kokopelli and I helped them look, but we never found it. Too bad. I am in need of neither flute music nor babies, but it would have been cool to see a real Kokopelli, as opposed to the garden version of it.

It’s hard to pick a favorite…

at BuzzFeed’s 20 best signs at the National Equality March.

Oh, awesome.

A cleaning trolley, just for lil’ girls.

Define “natural family.”

A new quarterly journal is lauded for its tracking the breakdown of the “natural family,” and I can’t for the life of me figure out what that means.

Is that two parents, a man and a woman? Two kids? A dog or a cat? What? And I’m not trying to be snotty about this, but these statistics would lend one to understand that “family” can mean a whole lot of things. The same goes for “pro-family,” as well.

Words fail me

But thanks, Geekologie, for the link.

Why do more women than men believe in God?

Especially, says Lauren Sandler at Double XX, considering the way God treats women.

Here’s a clue:

Researchers have offered many theories about why women are religious in greater numbers than men. Most are inconclusive; all are fascinating. Some investigators locate the engine of belief in our very brain chemistry, and find the female brain far more apt to sense the divine. Canadian cognitive neuroscientist Michael Persinger, the reigning cleric of the neurology of belief, has asserted that the “experience” of God, or feeling the presence of the divine, is literally built into the brain, specifically in the limbic system or the temporal lobe. When Persinger applied magnetic fields over the temporal lobe to mimic the reaction he found in electromagnetic studies, the gender difference was “quite impressive”—that women sensed the presence of a “sentient being” in greater numbers than men.