This is the season when cities light up their public spaces to make them more festive. But the person who was paid to put up these holiday lights had either a wicked sense of humor or was really ticked off with his employer. [Read more…]
This is the season when cities light up their public spaces to make them more festive. But the person who was paid to put up these holiday lights had either a wicked sense of humor or was really ticked off with his employer. [Read more…]
Glenn Greenwald points out that the soft-glove treatment given by the government to mega-bank HSBC for its crimes illustrates how the US has now gone to a system where a small class of individuals and corporations have been openly given immunity from prosecution for even major crimes, while at the same time ordinary people are cracked down hard for even minor ones. [Read more…]
Reports have emerged that the head of the Fox News network Roger Aisles sent an emissary K. T. McFarland, a Fox News analyst, to Afghanistan in 2011 to try and persuade David Petraeus to run for president on the Republican ticket in 2012, promising that he and Rupert Murdoch would bankroll his candidacy and throw the support of the news network behind him. [Read more…]
In a post yesterday, I said that science is clearly incompatible with religion. In the comments, Beth questioned that assertion, saying that some religions might be compatible. [Read more…]
The members of the US senate love to describe their institution reverentially as the ‘world’s greatest deliberative body’ but that description gets more laughable by the day as its use of arcane processes to avoid doing anything become more and more ludicrous. [Read more…]
The UK has released the results of its most recent census of England and Wales and it shows a sharp drop in the number of people who call themselves religious (from 72% in 2001 to 59% in 2011) and a corresponding rise in those who ticked the ‘no religion’ box, from 14% to 25%. [Read more…]
There is never any shortage of people telling atheists how sensitive the feelings of religious people are and that we need to be careful about what we say to them. The reasoning behind these pleas is based on the belief that if we tell such people directly that science contradicts religion, they will retreat to religion and reject science. [Read more…]
An excellent animation that tells, in a remarkably accurate and understandable way, the story of how we got where we are today and what we should do about it. (Thanks to reader Tim.) [Read more…]
Sunday was the first day that people in the state of Washington could get married following the successful passage of the same-sex ballot measure. Matt Stopera spent the day at Seattle city hall taking photographs of the long line of people who had turned up, accompanied by their friends and families, to get married. [Read more…]