There are a lot of people on the internet whose main goal seems to be to say silly and outrageous things just so that the public will pay attention to them. Ann Coulter in one such media hustler. Sarah Palin is another. The logical thing to do is to ignore them and deny them the visibility they so clearly crave and usually I do just that. But sometimes the things they say are so funnily mockable that I bend the rules.
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When Apple unveiled Siri, its intelligent digital assistant, people were wowed by what it could do. You could ask ‘her’ to set the alarm or call someone or tell you where to go and was able to deflect metaphysical questions with humor.
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A federal judge ruled on August 7, 2014 that a privately-funded Ten Commandments monument that on July 4, 2011 was placed on the lawn in front of the city hall of the town of Bloomfield in New Mexico must be removed by September 10, 2014 as a result of suit filed by the ACLU on behalf of two people, one of whom Jane Felix is a Wiccan, a high priestess with the Order of the Cauldron of the Sage.
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Last week a federal judge struck another blow against the bogus amateurism shield that the NCAA uses to prevent having to share its enormous revenues with the students who make all that money for them.
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Ryan Devereaux reports that five people have now sued the government for infringing on their civil liberties by placing them on no-fly lists and otherwise harassing them using its massive database to put them on watch lists and used it to pressure them.
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The world of mathematics was agog last week with the announcement of the first woman to win the Fields medal, the most prestigious prize in that field, awarded every four years to two to four people. What was additionally noteworthy is that Maryam Mirzakhani, a professor from Stanford University is originally from Iran.
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The latest gambit by American corporations to lower their taxes even more is to take advantage of what is known as ‘corporate inversion’. The way it works is for a big US company to buy a small company in a country that has favorable tax laws, Ireland being the current favored nation. They then ‘invert’ the relationship, claiming that the foreign company is the parent one while the US one is the subsidiary, even though nothing else has changed. This enables them to pay the lower taxes of the other nation while enjoying all the benefits of being in the US.
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Alex Kane writes that mounting evidence is making it increasingly hard to deny that war crimes were committed by Israel in its most recent assault on Gaza. The United Nations Human Rights Commission has sent in a three member team to investigate human rights violations in the most recent conflict.
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Jimmy Carter had his faults as president, the main one being his decision to implement what they must have thought was a clever plan to destabilize Afghanistan so as to covertly draw the Soviet Union, its Cold War adversary, into that country and get bogged down so as to create for them their own Vietnam. That set in motion a train of horrific conflict under which the Afghan people still suffer. [IPDATE: See the interview that Zbigniew Bzerzinski, Carter’s National Security Advisor, gave in 1998.]
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There is an strong extremist Buddhist faction in Sri Lanka that believes that non-Buddhists are second class citizens and this group is powerful enough that it can influence the government, yet another example of the terrible consequences when religions can influence the use of state power.
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