Don't take me too seriously. I don't.
Maybe a little about current events
I consider myself a conservative in spite of all the surveys I’ve taken that call me a centrist.
Maybe I am. The news now reports that President Bush is following the conservative wing of the Republican party by endorsing the constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. Read more
Local 6 News in Orlando, FL, reports that STDs are running rampant in my retirement community, The Villages. As my brother, Dan, says, “There must be a joke in here somewhere.”
As a youth leader in our church, we find that the biggest fear of teenagers in relation to sex is pregnancy. Their fear is mis-focused. Their greatest physical fear should be STDs. Pregnancy is not permanent and it’s fixable. Birth usually cures pregnancy, and I’ve know several teens who have made the pregnancy mistake and are now doing nicely, thank you.
Some STDs, however, are more permanent. In the 50’s there were three known STDs, today there are 30 and 30% of those are incurable. Some forms of STDs can make the STD sufferer sterile.
People who have multiple sexual partners (or those who have sex with someone who’s had multiple sex partners) are four times more likely to contract an STD than get pregnant. 1They’re 10 times more likely if they’re on birth control
Obviously, retired folk have the same mis-conception (pun intended) that teens do.
Footnotes
| ↑1 | They’re 10 times more likely if they’re on birth control |
|---|
On Monday, all of the news agencies, inclucing Fox News reported that 26.5 million veterans’ social security numbers and dates of birth were stolen. While I haven’t received a letter, yet, my records are in the range of those stolen.
The VA says they’ve “set up a call center at 1-800-FED-INFO and Web site, http://firstgov.gov, if veterans believe their information has been misused.” Well, the first piece of advice they give you there in their “Deter, Detect, Defend” tactic is, “Deter identity thieves by safeguarding your information.”
Well, dah, what are we supposed to do when the federal government can’t even protect our information?
The Time cover story from March 27, features an article on how media saturated and incessantly multi-tasking most of today’s teenagers have become. Researchers studied 32 families in LA for four years looking at how today’s families interact. One of their findings shows that electronic media consume considerable amounts of a family’s time, greatly affecting regular interactions in ways unheard of 20 years ago. In addition, children, especially teens are fitting more media into the same amount of time as their predecessors of a decade ago. Watching TV, talking on a cell phone, and chatting online simultaneously, they cram 8.5 hours of media use into 6.5 hours of real time. Researchers point to studies that show that output and depth of thought deteriorate as a person attempts to attend to multiple tasks. Teachers and professors also believe students are becoming dependent on their media stimuli, with many unable to walk from one class to the next without pulling out their phones or iPods to absorb the 4 minute passing time. While the current generation has become very good at manipulating information, using visual and audio clips in multi-media presentations in class, many college professors feel writing and critical thinking skills are suffering in the media saturation.
(Time.com March 27, 2006)
Quoted from The Ivy Jungle Network Campus Ministry Update May 2006.
Apparently commitment isn’t all a man is avoiding by living with a girlfriend outside of marriage. Among cohabitating pairs, women contribute more than 70% of the couple’s income. Both formal and informal surveys indicate that in such situations, most women expect the relationship to lead to marriage, while most men do not. (Touchstone April 2006 p. 48)
Quoted from The Ivy Jungle Network Campus Ministry Update May 2006.