With all the drama taking place within the Republican party from their presidential primary to the chaos surrounding the search for a new speaker, we should not ignore that things are moving along within the Democratic party.
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With all the drama taking place within the Republican party from their presidential primary to the chaos surrounding the search for a new speaker, we should not ignore that things are moving along within the Democratic party.
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Food writer Michael Pollan says that when you look at time-lapse photography of plants as they grow so that you can see them move as they grow, it looks eerily like they are acting with a sense of volition, although of course they do not have a central nervous system.
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Yesterday I wrote about how Ben Carson, when questioned about his boast that he would not have let the Oregon gunman shoot people so easily, came up with anecdote from his own history, presumably to dispel criticisms that he has no idea how he would actually act in such a situation.
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When a couple were denied a marriage license because the justice of the peace said that their proposed marriage would be harmful to children and also violated his personal beliefs, the state’s governor was outraged and thundered, “This is a clear violation of Constitutional rights and federal and state law. Mr. Bardwell’s actions should be fully reviewed by the Judiciary Commission and disciplinary action should be taken immediately, including the revoking of his license” and when Bardwell finally resigned his position, the governor said that it was “long overdue”.
Give up?
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I recently came across an item where the author claimed that Sam Harris had advocated that some beliefs are so pernicious that they merited the person holding them being killed. The critic was using this quote supposedly made by Harris that “Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them.” Although Harris has advocated ideas that are terrible (such as bombing campaigns against Islamic countries), racial profiling, and concocting elaborate scenarios to justify the use of torture, I thought that advocating killing people for thought crimes was a bit much and that he must have been taken out of context.
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It looks like Ben Carson has become the new target of comedians because of the crazy things he is saying. Donald Trump will have to up his game to even higher levels of nuttiness to regain the lead.
First off, Trevor Noah of The Daily Show examined some of the weird things that Carson has been saying and has a plausible theory about what makes him do so.
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Some of the people who are determined to believe that there is a link between childhood vaccinations and autism have rejected all the scientific findings so far that have shown no link, suggesting that there is a collusion between scientists and the pharmaceutical industry to hide the truth. In order to bolster their case, some of them who belong to a group known as SafeMinds commissioned a study to find just such a link. The researchers have come back with their conclusion that they could not find any such connection.
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The media are reporting that president Obama personally called the leaders of Doctors Without Borders (MSF) to apologize for the bombing of their hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan. But MSF is saying that his apology is not enough and they are calling for an independent investigation into what they strongly feel is a war crime. The article looks into all the factors that make plausible the case that this was a war crime, because no warning was given of an impending attack and a hospital is considered a protected facility that warrants such an action.
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[UPDATE: Carson has now come out with an anecdote about how he once had a gun put in his ribs, presumably to demonstrate his coolness under threat. Not only does the story not reflect well on him (he told the gunman to aim at someone else), frankly it sounds bogus to me. I wonder if any reporter will try and track down the actual event.]
In an interview that Carson gave with Kai Ryssdal of the radio program Marketplace (you can read the transcript or listen to the full interview here) Carson revealed that he is an even bigger nonsense spouter than Donald Trump. He made grandiose claims for what he would do while speaking in only the vaguest generalities about how he would actually do them. He wants a balanced budget amendment. He says that you can get a balanced budget by having across the board cuts of 3% in government to ‘get rid of the fat’ (though if that is also applied to Social Security payments and Medicare that would be political dynamite, while if not, the cuts elsewhere would have to be much larger), lowering taxes to a flat value of about 15% (which everyone agrees would reduce revenues by at least 25%), while vastly increasing spending on the military (so that the US can achieve space and military domination).
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The producers of the popular TV series starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman have placed the special episode of the story back in its original Victorian time period of the 19th century. I must say that I actually prefer the older, original time period for the stories and am looking forward to this release. The exact date has not been set.
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