(Roughly) Daily

The Pew Research Center’s 2013 Global Attitudes survey asked 40,117 respondents in 40 countries what they thought about eight topics often discussed as moral issues: extramarital affairs, gambling, homosexuality, abortion, premarital sex, alcohol consumption, divorce, and the use of contraceptives.  For each issue, respondents were asked whether the behavior is morally acceptable, morally unacceptable, or not a moral issue.

Explore the results (and see larger versions of charts like the one above) here.

* David Hume

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As we struggle to take the high ground, we might that it was on this date in 1881 that Clara Barton and Adolphus Solomons founded the American National Red Cross, to provide humanitarian aid to victims of wars and natural disasters.  Barton, who’d famously done medical relief work during the American Civil War, had later gone to Europe to provide aid during the Franco-Prussian War, and had encountered the European Red Cross.  On returning, and with the help of Solomons, she started the American branch of the organization. The group was quickly called into action, first in response to the Great Fire of 1881 in the Thumb region of Michigan, which occurred 1n September of 1881, as a result of which over 5,000 people were left homeless. The second major call on te Red Cross was the Johnstown Flood which occurred at the end of May, 1889. Over 2,209 people died and thousands more were injured in or near Johnstown, Pennsylvania in one of the worst disasters in U.S. history.

The Red Cross set up in a community hard hit by tornadoes, Florida, 2007

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