A News Round Up - 28 September 2014

• As part of his Illinois Jobs Now! campaign, Governor Pat Quinn (D-Chicago) announced a gift of $1.5 million to Quincy University, my alma mater. I'm sure the university will put this money to good use, but the Governor will still not receive my vote in the November election.

• New records were made in Hawaii last week for the hottest temperatures ever recorded in the island chain, with the hottest temperature at 93ºF at Kahului Aiport. It wasn't that long ago that a new record was set for the coldest temperature in the island chain when the temperature in Honolulu fell to 64ºF on November 14, 2013.

• The German Ethics Council recently declared incest to be a "fundamental right." Just a few weeks, a judge in Australia suggested incest may no longer be taboo (as if the logic of taboos is the best logic with which to establish laws); perhaps he was right. And they told us this wouldn't happen.

• Rush Limbaugh tipped a waitress $1,000 on two separate occasions. You'd think the waitress would be extremely grateful for such a generous tip, but she saw the money as "blood money." Knowing she couldn't keep blood money, she donated a 'sizable chunk' of it to an abortion clinic. Apparently she doesn't know what an abortion actually is.

• From the "You Can't Make This Up" file comes this bizarre story of an atheist giving the invocation at a city council meeting in Huntsville, Alabama. This simply shows the utter anti-logic of many atheists. The word "invocation" means to call upon a deity and the atheist concluding what he claims was not a prayer with "let it be so," which is the meaning of the word "Amen." For what wasn't a prayer, it certainly resembles one.

• A recent poll conducted by the Pew Research Center found that public support in the United States of America has now fallen to 49%, down from 54% found by the PRC in February.

• A new study published by Harvard University suggests that, "from a climatological point of view, in many ways the climate then [the first millennium] may have been more closely comparable to the twentieth century than the intervening period." The study suggests that the warmest temperatures in the western hemisphere over the past 2,000 years occurred between the years 800 and 900 (with the sole exception of the last few recent decades, which are now cooling).

• Another story from the "You Can't Make This Up" file concerns a man who was found crossing the the Canadian border from Detroit with 51 turtles in his pants.