Cinemas ban Church of England Lord's Prayer ad; Obamacare Endures the Death of a Thousand Facts...more

Cinemas ban Church of England Lord's Prayer ad
Three of the UK's leading cinema chains are refusing to screen a Church of England advert which features the Lord’s Prayer.

The Digital Cinema Media agency, which handles adverts for Odeon, Cineworld and Vue cinemas, has decided that the ad could offend people.

Hollywood star Liam Neeson provides the “voice of God” in the minute-long ad, which received clearance from the British Board of Film Classification and the Cinema Advertising Authority...

Seven reasons to ban the Lord's Prayer  ...There are only 63 words in the Lord’s Prayer.

 It takes less than a minute to say them. Yet these words shape our identity, give purpose to our lives, check our greed, remind us of our imperfections, offer a way of reconciliation, build resilience in our spirits and call us to live to the glory of our creator.

No wonder they have been banned in the boardrooms of consumer culture.

Anne Kennedy: Line by Line the Preacher Preaches

Obamacare Endures the Death of a Thousand Facts ... problem is that “reform” distorts the market by burying both insurers and the insured beneath a mountain of mandates. Probably the worst is Obamacare’s benefit mandate. Most health plans must now include 10 “minimum essential” benefits—whether customers want them or not. This mandate has inevitably caused the cost of providing coverage to skyrocket. The only way a company like UnitedHealth can keep premiums under some modicum of control is to offer plans with very high deductibles. Meanwhile, the law’s individual mandate has utterly failed as an incentive for healthy individuals to purchase insurance.

This has led to a “lose-lose” situation for insurers and for patients. In an article titled, “Many Say High Deductibles Make Their Health Law Insurance All but Useless,” the New York Times reports, “In many states, more than half the plans offered for sale through HealthCare.gov, the federal online marketplace, have a deductible of $3,000 or more.” In 2016, the penalty for failing to buy insurance is $695 or 2.5 percent of one’s household income. This means that for most individuals, particularly the young and healthy, the penalty will be considerably less than the out-of-pocket cost required by most health insurance plans...

 ObamaCare's imploding even without repeal “We can’t really subsidize a marketplace that doesn’t appear at the moment to be sustaining itself.”

Half Of People Who Went To College In The Recession Haven’t Graduated  ...The low graduation rate shouldn’t come as a big surprise. The recession drove people to attend college who wouldn’t have gone otherwise and who were likely less prepared than other students. Many of them ended up in worse shape than if they hadn’t gone to college in the first place: burdened with thousands of dollars in student debt, but without a degree to show for it...

Australian Bishops Face Lawsuit for Distributing Traditional Marriage Booklet ...This is what “Don’t Mess with Marriage” said about traditional marriages: “Their physical, spiritual, psychological and sexual differences show they are meant for each other, their union makes them whole, and through their union ‘in one flesh,’ they together beget children who are ‘flesh of their flesh.’”

 

The distribution of “Don’t Mess with Marriage” outraged Rodney Croome, the leader of Australia’s gay marriage political movement. Croome claimed that the bishops had turned the children into “couriers of prejudice” by giving them copies of the booklet...

Why Fractals Are So Beautiful

The world is full of beautiful geometry.

 

It’s something we start teaching our youngest children. This daisy is a circle. This dandelion is a sphere. And we repeat it all the way through high school: Honeybees build their hives in hexagons. Solutions to quadratic equations can be graphed as parabolas. Rates of change are found in the slope of lines tangent to a curve.

 

“God has established nothing without geometrical beauty,” astronomer Johannes Kepler wrote. Before him, planetary orbits were thought to be perfect circles. He discovered that they weren’t—but that they were in fact ellipses, still part of the same wonderful family known as Euclidean geometry, named for the Greek mathematician who wrote Elements around the year 300 B.C.

 

Kepler, Newton, Leibniz, Descartes, and others looked at the world and found time and time again that the Euclidean model accurately describes all kinds of shapes and events in nature...
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