Joe Nocera, business correspondent for the New York Times, has been on a tear recently, blasting the National Collegiate Athletic Association for being petty and tyrannical in ways that harm individual students, even as major colleges have used sports and their athletes as money makers. He says that the people who tend
Monthly Archive: January 2012
Jan 31 2012
Those subversive Muppets
I saw the latest Muppets film over the holidays and it was fun, though not great. But because the villain was an evil oil executive named Tex Richman (played with relish by Chris Cooper), Fox News seemed to think that the film was a brazen
Jan 31 2012
Mohammed on the US Supreme Court?
There exists a marble frieze in the US Supreme Court building that overlooks the bench that contains carvings depicting 18 secular and religious lawgivers of the past. Guess who is included in the pantheon? Yes, it is the prophet Mohammed himself. We know that Muslims are highly touchy about depictions of their prophet, some of …
Jan 31 2012
How some traffic jams happen
We’ve all been in situations where the traffic is moving along smoothly and suddenly there is a backup for no apparent reason. Computer simulations suggest that this can be caused simply by one driver slightly braking, causing the driver behind to brake and
Jan 31 2012
What the Occupy movement has achieved
A quite extraordinary thing has happened in American, and even world, politics. It used to be the case that great wealth and income inequality were topics that were not mentioned in mainstream discourse and to suggest that this was not healthy for a democracy was to be accused of being envious or creating class warfare …
Jan 30 2012
Leon Panetta lies to justify murder
Glenn Greenwald shows a clip of Defense Secretary Leon Panetta being asked about the Obama administration’s murder of Anwar al-Awlaki and
Jan 30 2012
Religious liberties
The Catholic Church is in a snit, again. This time it is because of the ruling by the Obama administration that they, like any other employer, must provide health insurance that offers free contraceptives to employees. I think Kevin Drum has the right response, saying,
Jan 30 2012
The last word on traditional marriage
In the comments on my post yesterday about a senior Anglican cleric who defended ‘traditional marriage’ and said that it excluded same sex ones, people offered variants of what that phrase implied. Since there seems to be some confusion on what constitutes ‘traditional marriage’, I thought that I would set everyone straight by reposting the …
Jan 30 2012
A note on the comments policy
In order to reduce spam, I have a policy that the very first comment that is submitted must be approved by me. Once approved, that commenter is free to comment without prior approval. This means, however, that I must judge if the first comment is genuine or not. So people who are commenting for the …
Jan 30 2012
Mitt Romney, early front-runner for president of heaven
It turns out that Mitt Romney and his father George successfully converted Mitt’s wife’s entire family to Mormonism, with the mother doing so practically on her deathbed. The one holdout was her father who was a committed atheist and went to his grave asserting that all religion was “drudgery and hogwash” and that he considered …
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