Some time ago, I discussed the question of how dominant cats were compared to dogs and the consensus seemed to be that it depended on the cat and the dog. But now I read of a case where a 22 lb Himalayan cat in Oregon is so dominant that not only is the family dog intimidated but so is the entire family. They had to lock themselves and their dog in a room and call 911 to recue them from the cat.
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Kevin Drum recounts the case of a cancer patient Julie Boonstra who was featured in an anti-Obamacare ad “claiming that her new insurance plan under Obamacare was far more expensive than her old plan and didn’t cover all her medications.” When informed that this was not true and that if she had only bothered to go to the healthcare website and checked she would have found better coverage than what she had that was actually cheaper, she refused to believe it because it went against what she had been repeatedly told by Obamacare opponents, like the Koch brothers funded Americans for Prosperity (AFP) that featured her in the ad.
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I have been worried recently about televangelist Pat Robertson. He has been saying some sensible things about how Christians should give up on things that flatly contradict science, like a 6,000 year old Earth. It seemed like he was not his usual nutty self and I was wondering whether he was suffering from some form of illness that actually increased his rationality.
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One of the recurrent themes of politics that would be amusing if it were not infuriating is how politicians are quite complacent about the rights of ordinary citizens being violated by the government but get enraged when they discover that they themselves are targets of those same abuses.
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I am not sure how many people are familiar with this online show on the comedy website Funny or Die, where Zach Galifianakis plays a boorish and ignorant host who interviews celebrities and both host and guest are mutually passive-aggressive and backhanded in their insults, and the cringe-worthy exchanges are interspersed with awkward moments of silence.
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Blood borne tropical diseases like malaria, African sleeping sickness, schistosomiasis, and Chagas seriously harm millions of people. Early detection would help in treating them but traditional microscopes are expensive and scarce and not easily stored and maintained in remote areas.
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In a single cartoon, Tom Tomorrow skewers US hypocrisy on Ukraine, the eternal bloodlust and warmongering among certain sectors of our political-media class especially the neoconservatives, the pusillanimity of so-called liberals, and the vapidity of the media. (Click on comic image to make bigger.)
With help from readers, I managed to solve the problem of spam flooding my mailbox that started happening at the same time I switched to the Mavericks operating system on my Mac.
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Edward Snowden was interviewed live yesterday at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas before a crowd of over three thousand. The moderator was his ACLU attorney Ben Wizner and Chris Soghoian who is the principal technologist for the ACLU was also part of the panel. The event lasted an hour. You can read a live blog of the session or watch it below.
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