planaheaMental illness… or demonic possession?

Yes.

Holy freakin’ crap, what a mess. Given the nature of the error, it seems to me that this is something that should be written off.

Minor League baseball players are barely paid in the five digits, and congress may allow them to be paid less. Minor league sports and their athletes, it turns out, are not very valuable (unless associated with a university).

This strikes me as about right. Yes means yes doesn’t just mean changing the threshold for rape, but changing the way young people have sex. It’s not just for college campuses, though. It looks like it’s going to be up to the courts, in the end.

Well this is a lovely story. So is this. Good job, Dixie. Good work.

I don’t mind this, but I’m not going to pretend the fact that it moves the ball in the direction it does isn’t significant. The concept of legislative momentum is right there in the story: We should do this because of that previous thing we did.

Lee Drutman argues that we have too many lawyers in politics. It’s something conservatives complain about, but maybe it ought to be liberals doing the complaining.

donedieavirginBrookings Institute has discovered the concept of NAM.

A neuroscientist writes of all we don’t know about the brain.

If we’re looking for habitable words, we should look for orange planets, because that’s what Earth used to be.

I’ve linkied some bad news regarding the adoption of EMR, but here is some good news.

NPR looks at whether it’s cost-effective to pay teachers $100,000 a year.

Dennis Perkins writes of his experiences working in the video store industry for 25 years, and watching it die.


Category: Newsroom

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8 Responses to Linkluster Abandoned New Mexican Uranium Mines

  1. Michael Cain says:

    EHR, not EMR?

  2. Oscar Gordon says:

    Demonic possession goes to climate change?

  3. The pro-brutalism piece seems focused as much on celebrating what brutalism represented and what it made possible as it does on the merits of brutalism itself. On those merits, I can speak only for myself and say that working in a location whose architecture was designed along brutalist lines (although significant steps have been taken to de-brutalize it), I can say that it feels very depressing and imprisoning. Maybe that’s an appropriate comment on my field, and therefore maybe the “just world” hypothesis is valid.

    On a more practical note, the two brutalist buildings I have the most personal familiarity with lack a lot of functionality. Temperature and humidity controls are very difficult to maintain it’s very hard to move something very large from one end of the building to another because of the way the floors are laid out. (It’s hard to describe without doxxing myself.)

    Those features, however, might be more attributable to the architect and not necessarily to brutalism itself, and for all I know, there are good reasons for the seeming lack of functionality in the buildings that have nothing to do with the choice of architectural style.

    • That said, I’ll add that the effect brutalism has had on me personally–an effect I resent even though it is also an effect I probably exaggerate and blame for too much–has reminded me how important architecture is.

    • fillyjonk says:

      Agree on the temperature and humidity control thing. I’ve worked in buildings like that in the past.

      Also, I know I’m too sensitive to such things, but they’re just freaking depressing.

  4. About demonic possession, I’m of very different minds.

    As someone who criticizes what I find to be the hyper-materialism of some approaches to science and the “We Shall Be All” mentality of some people who claim to be “pro-science,” I think it’s worthwhile to explore phenomena that don’t seem to have a materialist basis.

    But…if a phenomena is attested, then why not explain it as somehow grounded in materialism, but just as something unexplained by current knowledge?

    And…it’s hard to discern the theological implications of demonic possession. It doesn’t fit as well with notions of sin and responsibility for sin–and exorcism doesn’t seem to mesh well with doctrines of grace. That may not be a problem for some belief systems, but Christians need to grapple with that lack of fit.

    But…a health-care professional ought to focus on the patient’s/client’s health. If framing any given instance as “demonic possession” leads to improving health, then the health-care professional should seriously consider that framing. I do realize such a professional may have other, potentially opposed, obligations (e.g., to stick with that which is verifiable, first do no harm, etc.), but ensuring health enters into the mix. (I realize the author of that piece is not talking only about framing, but about what he claims are actually attested phenomena.)

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