Scrolling around...July 2, 2013

Medieval Pet Names
...They include Troy, Nosewise, Amiable, Nameles, Clenche, Bragge, Ringwood and Holdfast... image

In sickness and in health? That’s too religious for a civil wedding
It is a phrase used for centuries by couples pledging to be faithful to each other...

Study: Electric Cars No Greener Than Gasoline Vehicles, One Of The “Environmentally Dirtiest Transportation Options
“Upon closer consideration, moving from petroleum-fueled vehicles to electric cars starts to appear tantamount to shifting from one brand of cigarettes to another,”

University Tells Student to Remove Cross Necklace
A Sonoma State University student was ordered to remove a cross necklace by a supervisor who thought other students might find it offensive, in a case that prompted even one campus official to speculate that “political correctness got out of hand.”

Audrey Jarvis, 19, a liberal arts major at the northern California university, said she had no choice but to seek a “religious accommodation” in order to wear the cross. Her lawyer said she deserves an apology, and the school seems ready to oblige...

Obamacare Regulation Effectively Bars Catholics from Owning Health Insurance Companies
The final version of Obamacare’s “preventive services” regulation that the Department of Health and Human Services published on Friday discriminates against faithful members of the Roman Catholic Church by effectively barring them from owning and operating health-insurance companies.

This is because the regulation orders health insurance companies to provide sterilizations, contraceptives and abortion-inducing drugs to all female beneficiaries except those insured by “religious employers”--which, according to the regulation, includes only actual “houses of worship” (n.b. parish churches), their immediate auxiliaries, associations of houses of worship and the “exclusively religious activities of any religious order.”...

The Demise of Legitimate Political Authority
...The social, cultural, and political leaders of forty years ago have departed—only Mick Jagger still struts and sweats his weary hours upon the stage. Yet the trends Nisbet descried have marched on, swaggering and swollen, flattening everything in their path.

Without the moral and metaphysical limits of legitimate authority, the cancer of illegitimate power festers and grows, attacking and oppressing any resistance, both within government and without.

Especially striking is the willingness of not only the demos, but their formal and informal institutions, to acquiesce in the willful destruction of their autonomy and, yes, their authority. Among the elites, however, the embrace of egalitarianism for others seems designed to guarantee superiority for themselves. Thus they merit exemption from the promised equality of result that they advocate for everyone else. But the Leviathan’s price is high, as the elite’s permissible terrain shrinks to a tiny fashionable island crowded with Thought Police and narcissists...


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