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 [Read more…]
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 [Read more…]
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 them being willing to even kill those who do so. Hence it must have been quite awkward for all concerned to discover this. After the various controversies involving this issue, the Supreme Court included [Read more…]
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 [Read more…]
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 or attacking capitalism itself.
But how things have changed. Now the vast disparity in income and wealth between the top 1% and the remaining 99% is front and center. The gulf between the former and the latter is a major topic of discussion in [Read more…]
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, [Read more…]
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 definitive ruling on what constitutes Bible based marriage from the ultimate authority on this topic: Betty Bowers, America’s Best Christian™.
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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 people who were religious to be “weak in the knees.”
But Mormons don’t let a little thing like death prevent them from [Read more…]