Via Maggie Koerth-Baker, I obtained this video of astronaut Sunita Williams giving us a quite detailed tour of the International Space Station. Although the ISS has been around for a while, it was only while watching it that I realized that I really did not know much about it. The video is pretty interesting, especially for its details of daily life there. [Read more…]
Barack Obama was privately officially sworn in yesterday, January 20th, as required by the constitution, but another public symbolic swearing in will take place today followed by the usual parade and other festivities. [Read more…]
I was worried for a while about Pat Robertson. As far as I knew he had not uttered a statement on the Newtown shootings, and that was so unlike him. He had also recently been expressing some strangely sensible sentiments on subjects like marijuana and science, and I wondered whether he had seen the light of reason or whether those were momentary brain lapses and that he had since gone back to his old ways of seeing a smiting god everywhere, similar to what he said about the events of 9/11 and hurricane Katrina. [Read more…]
Today January 20th is on average the coldest day in Cleveland and so I look on it as mid-winter. From now on, the days get warmer as we approach spring, and so this is a day which puts a song on my lips and joy in my heart, even though it is actually very cold and windy outside today. [Read more…]
A news report says that the Catholic Church in Germany seems to be guilty of the same kinds of crimes that it has committed in the US and Ireland and elsewhere. [Read more…]
On Thursday’s show, Stephen Colbert discussed the meaning of the second amendment of the US constitution, raising many of the issues that were discussed on this blog earlier that day. [Read more…]
I have lived in Cleveland for over twenty years. I like the place even though in many ways it is a typical mid-western city and somewhat conservative in its outlook. In fact, Ohio was one of those states that passed a constitutional amendment effectively banning same-sex marriages in 2004. I would not have thought any city in Ohio to be at the forefront of liberal social values and so I was pleasantly surprised to learn that the cities of Cleveland and neighboring Akron had jointly bid for and won the right to hold the next Gay Games in 2014. [Read more…]
The comments to the previous post on the current gun control debate generated an excellent discussion with a lot of useful information both about the history of the second amendment and the characteristics of the various types of guns that are out there and the appropriate terminology to refer to them, a lot of which was new to me since guns are peripheral to my life and I haven’t paid much attention to the topic. [Read more…]
I have been highlighting the unequal treatment meted out by the Obama administration’s justice department, where extremely harsh treatment is given to low-level criminals and whistleblowers and hackers while those who commit massive damage to the financial system that cause immense hardship t many, and even acknowledge major wrongdoing, are given slaps on the wrist. It is telling that as yet, not a single high-level official in the financial sector has gone to jail, or even faced the threat of jail, for their actions. [Read more…]
The Wall Street Journal had a story on the impact of the recently concluded ‘fiscal cliff deal’ on people’s taxes that was passed by Congress and signed by president Obama. It was accompanied by this infographic.
