For reasons that I cannot comprehend, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman is seen as a sage observer of the world whose insights are worth paying attention to, by people whom you would think should know better. [Read more…]
Conservationists in Kenya got a report that a baby elephant had fallen into a well. The problem was how to get it out with just a rope and an off-road vehicle. [Read more…]
Fellow Freethought blogger Greta Christina has been having a run of unfortunate setbacks in her life recently. Her father just died after a long illness and then almost immediately afterwards she was diagnosed with endometrial cancer that requires surgery and will cause her to curtail much of her writing and speaking (which is the source of her income) during the period of surgery and recovery.
Greta is, typically, hanging tough and being upbeat about her situation but she is also realistic that at this time she needs help so she is reluctantly holding a fundraiser to help tide her over just during the period of her treatment, until she can get back to writing and speaking full time again.
Any help that you can give her will be greatly appreciated.
I wrote in an earlier post today on national gerrymandering of electoral districts and how the redistricting process that occurs following each census results in the winners of the most recent election controlling the process and gerrymandering the electoral boundaries to entrench a bias in their favor for future elections. [Read more…]
While most of the attention focuses on the presidential race, over at the Princeton Election Consortium Sam Wang has an interesting analysis of the data on the relationship of the national vote for the two major parties in each biennial election to the number of seats that they ended up holding in the House of Representatives. [Read more…]
Chrystia Freeland is an excellent reporter who has been chronicling the rise of the global oligarchy and whose articles I have linked to several times in my posts on the workings of the oligarchy. (See here, here, here, and here.) [Read more…]
Monday was the earliest opportunity they got to comment on last Thursday’s debate and they did a good job of combining humor with political analysis. [Read more…]
Because I honestly never know which is which when talking to Christians.
(Thanks, as always, to Jesus and Mo.)
Jimmy Kimmel’s team took to the streets of Los Angeles four hours before yesterday’s debate to ask people what their impressions of it were. The responses were quite remarkable in how they could have been fitted to any news coverage taken after the debate. [Read more…]
The media consensus seems to be that Barack Obama had a good night and Mitt Romney not so much, roughly in line with my own impressions.
But as often happens, things that I gave only a passing attention to in the debate turn out to grab a lot of attention in the media world. In this case it was Mitt Romney’s claim, in making the case that he was sensitive to women’s issues, that when he was elected governor of Massachusetts, he was given “binders full of women” that he could use to select women for high posts. [Read more…]