Bernie Sanders appeared on Stephen Colbert’s show last night to a rousing reception from a clearly supportive studio audience and Colbert spent quite a bit of time talking about and with him about politics. Here is Colbert in his opening monologue talking about the presidential race in general and Sanders in particular.
[Read more…]
The Alabama State Board of Education has created a one-page insert for its biology textbooks that regurgitates the same old arguments that creationists have been trying to use for a long time to discredit evolution. The insert says the following:
[Read more…]
The curse of the American media is that the major ones refrain from calling out stupid statements by major politicians for the nonsense they are but instead treat them as one side of a debate to be counter-balanced by an opposing view, leaving the impression that the truth lies somewhere in between. But we have entered a stage in politics where Republicans are making flat-out wrong statements that are simply not even debatable.
[Read more…]
We should note that the UK indulges in the same kind of idiotic patriot games that the US does. The new leader of the Labour Party Jeremy Corbyn has been criticized for simply standing but not singing along with the national anthem at an event.
[Read more…]
In fear-driven US, there seems to be a pathetic need to see the president as some kind of god-like figure who will keep watch over us and keep us from coming to harm. The Republican debate on Wednesday was, as expected, largely fact-free and full of hyperbole and distortions but the one jaw-dropping moment for me was when Jeb! Bush! defended his brother’s record by saying that whatever else he might be accused of, “he kept us safe”. This line got applause from the audience. It was incredible that not a single person on the stage or the moderator pointed out that 9/11 happened when GW was president.
[Read more…]
Via reader Norm, I heard about this website that shows photos of houses that have been built using bamboo. What I had not expected was how spectacular they are. The accompanying article says that the houses are sustainable but what impressed me was that bamboo, something that I always thought of as a flexible plant, seems to be strong enough to support such large structures with plumbing, etc.
[Read more…]
Bernie Sanders spoke recently at Liberty University. This institution was founded by the late Jerry Falwell in 1971 and is an evangelical Christian college. You can get a good sense of how religion is threaded into every discipline by its statement about its Arts and Sciences curriculum.
[Read more…]
On The Nightly Show Larry Wilmore discusses with his panel the above topic, sparked by the fiasco in Kentucky. What is interesting is not the answer but the fact that these kinds of discussions are becoming common on TV and other forms of popular media. The grandstanding by Kim Davis and her allies may have been a warning sign to many people that religious extremism and a sense of entitlement, that is manifesting itself as a persecution complex if they cannot do whatever they want, is getting out of hand.
[Read more…]
With all the attention focused on the Republican debate, a major event that been largely obscured is that today marked the end of the 60-day deadline to block the nuclear deal the P5+1 nations made with Iran. A final attempt in the US Senate to add amendments to the deal that would have effectively killed it failed today to get enough votes to overcome a filibuster and so the deal goes through.
[Read more…]