A Few Good Links (vol. 6)

It's been a busy week at work, so I haven't had the chance to do much in the way of writing.  The reading I do during lunch and dinner breaks (I'm here from morning until midnight most days when I get laser time):

1. Two links on Millenials: we're adrift in the cosmos and don't really know what we want from churches, or really from anyone. A lot of this has to do with the general wrecking job the 'Boomers generation did on the culture. "What one finds among Xers and millennials alike is a second-order decay of American idealism: the Boomers tore up the world of June Cleaver, but what the Boomers built wasn’t a liveable replacement."
2. Fear of the Lord (and readiness, and anticipation--most of all hope) has a tendency of driving out other fears and anxieties. On a related note, we will be meeting the Lord in the hereafter, which is the one thing for which we need to be prepared.
3. The following two things may or may not be related: the (unfortunate) popularity of the childfree life on the one hand, and the development of robots which emulate human emotions to the point of mimicking falling in love (in some sense of the word) with people. Also, please tell me that second link is a hoax:
   

   "The trouble all started when a young female intern began to spend several hours each day with Kenji, testing his systems and loading new software routines. When it came time to leave one evening, however, Kenji refused to let her out of his lab enclosure and used his bulky mechanical body to block her exit and hug her repeatedly. The intern was only able to escape after she had frantically phoned two senior staff members to come and temporarily de-activate Kenji."

   Ugh. It seems to me that there is some deeply disordered potential market for "pleasure bots", but it seems like we're well on the way to developing the first robotic rapist.
4. MSNBC fails at geography. That's par for the course with them.
5. You might be a bad parent if...
6. I'm not keen on the death penalty in many circumstances, but there are two (technical) ways that we can go wrong in avoiding it: the first is in deliberately prolonging a prisoner's life to inflict the maximum amount of misery possible, and the second is sparing no expenses for prison inmates.
   

   "Instead of paying the $816 in fines with money, Pappas said Feeley could instead pay with jail time, at a rate of $50 a day. But the math is fuzzy: it costs taxpayers $179 a day to house an inmate at the jail, Sheriff Shaun Golden has said."

   To put things into perspective, the $179/day which it costs the Monmouth prison to house an inmate works out to more than $65,000/year. A lot of people (most, in fact) get by on far less. What is so hard about putting a person in a small solitary cell with three meager meals per day that it costs this much money? Prison should be bad enough that the prisoners don't have any desire to return once released.
7. We need only listen to the homosexualists speak to understand exactly what their position is regarding us. Tolerance is not enough, silence is not sufficient. And these are the kinds of people who get put on "human rights" councils. It's not going to end with the legalization of "gay marriage," and it has nothing to do with rights: this is ultimately going to be about crushing consciences and restricting religious rights.

Sadly, I have to work Saturday and will still by busy with other stuff Sunday. Sigh. I guess it's on my co-blogger this week.