It was initially announced that Bradley Manning would be one of the honorary Grand Marshalls at San Francisco’s annual LGBT Pride parade on June 29-30, with Daniel Ellsberg standing in for him since Manning is still in jail. But there were protests and The Guardian has an article that says that the parade leadership summarily reversed course. [Read more…]
This past week saw the opening of the George W. Bush library in Texas, with great pomp and ceremony. This business of presidential libraries baffles me. What is it with presidents having their own libraries after they leave office? Who goes to visit such things? Does any other country in the world do this? [Read more…]
Today is when the annual White House Correspondents Association dinner is held, when the cozy and incestuous relationship between the political and media class is on public display. The curtain that normally hides this and enables the media to portray itself as watchdogs of politicians is stripped away and we see that they are actually lap dogs, eager to be on good terms with those whom they are supposedly antagonistic towards. [Read more…]
Many religious practices are harmless. If people want to waste their time going to their church or mosque or synagogue or temple, praying, reading their holy books, or otherwise indulging in individual and group observances like dancing and singing and speaking in tongues, I say knock yourselves out. It keeps them off the streets and out of trouble. [Read more…]
It looks like I was premature in giving the Justice Department credit for reading Dzhokhar Tsarnaev his Miranda rights. It appears that they questioned him for a long time before a judge insisted on reading him his rights on Monday. So once again, we are dependent on the judiciary to intervene to make sure the government does not violate the rights of people. (In a separate case, a federal judge is challenging the government’s claim to broad secrecy powers.) [Read more…]
I gave an example earlier about how the so-called gridlocked Congress can move with lightning speed when it wants to, which is when it affects either them or those close to them. We see another example of this in the way that they tweaked the sequestration rules when elites are affected. When flights started getting delayed, Congress quickly passed legislation that allowed the FAA more flexibility with regard to air traffic controllers. [Read more…]
It is well known that the Catholic church has a problem with its young people, many of whom see it as out of step with current views on sexuality. The church has locked itself into its dogma and that is unlikely to change anytime soon but you would think that it would realize that it needs to tread delicately in this area so as to avoid needlessly alienating people with high-handed actions. [Read more…]
So now that the Higgs has supposedly been discovered and an important prediction of the Standard Model confirmed, what’s next? Is it of any use or is it just going to sit on the particle physics shelf as a trophy to the success of big science? This is hard to answer now and may become easier as the properties of the Higgs are studied in more detail. (For previous posts in this series, click on the Higgs folder just below the blog post title.) [Read more…]
The Daily Show has yet more fun at the expense of CNN for its coverage of the Boston bombings, showing how they seemed to have thrown editorial judgment out the window in their effort to portray a sense of immediacy and urgency, even when they had no idea what was going on and were simply making wild guesses based on the flimsiest of evidence. [Read more…]
1. Homeopathy petition
Readers may recall Deepak Gupta in India who asked for help in producing a documentary debunking homeopathy, a practice that has quite a following in India. He said that he received a good bit of support thanks to that appeal and has been able to complete the project. It is in post-production and should be released soon. [Read more…]