In the wake of the Boston bombing, there has been the usual speculations of motivation. What could drive young people to willfully harm innocent people? I have been harshly critical of media personalities and pundits who often fail to see the bigger picture and plaintively wail about how the US is attacked because of irrational hatred of our values, our freedom, or our lifestyle. [Read more…]
I was not in the US during the time of the hippie movement and my knowledge of the Christian hippies, sometimes referred to as the Jesus People, is almost entirely shaped by the dopey 1973 musical film Godspell, not the most reliable source. It transported Jesus and his followers into New York City and portrayed them as hippies dancing and singing all over the place. It had one good song Day by Day and nothing much else going for it. [Read more…]
As regular readers of this blog know, I am a huge fan of Orly Taitz, that devoted seeker of truth who has made it her life’s work to expose the fact that Barack Obama is not a natural-born citizen of the US because he was born in Kenya and his father was not a US citizen. The former is disputed but Orly says that that is not necessary since the latter fact alone is sufficient to make him ineligible to be president. Constitutional lawyers dispute this but whom are you going to trust as a better judge of the constitution, some smarty-pants scholars or someone who is a triple threat, not merely a lawyer but also a dentist and a real estate agent? [Read more…]
There are some interesting developments in China. Andrew Stokols says that China’s LGBT community has made great strides in recent decades.
China decriminalized homosexuality in 1997, even before the U.S. removed all anti-sodomy laws in certain states. But today, there are no formal laws to prevent discrimination against LGBT Chinese, especially in the workplace. Since China’s ministry removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders in 2001, government policy and public opinion has also gradually shifted. Public health ministries have been targeting gay bars with public awareness campaigns advocating safe-sex and HIV-testing. But generally, LGBT Chinese now fall into an uncomfortably grey area: no longer directly harassed, but also ignored.
After writing yesterday about the reluctance of some to adopt the label of feminist even though they share the goals of the feminist movement for gender equality, I realized that I never call myself a feminist either and that this perhaps requires an explanation. [Read more…]
I recently read Bailout: How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street by Neil Barofsky and it was a gripping read. His book is an insider’s account of how the financial crisis of 2008 was handled in Washington DC and it is not a pretty sight. [Read more…]
It seems laughable now but we should recall that when the Large Hadron Collider was being constructed, there were fears that the high-energy collisions it would enable would destroy the world by creating black holes or some such thing. Even I got questions about this possibility from people who are not normally paranoid. [Read more…]
The US hated Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez with a passion and supported an attempted coup against him in 2002 that was foiled. When he died recently, the US was openly cheering for the opposition leader in the election to replace him. When Chavez’s successor Nicolas Maduro won the April 15 election with a surprisingly narrow margin of just 1.6%, hopes were raised in the US that the result might be overturned and the US-backed candidate Henrique Capriles become leader. The US media repeatedly dwelt on supposed irregularities in the elections even though former US president Jimmy Carter has said in September 2012 that of the 92 elections he has monitored, the “election process in Venezuela is the best in the world”. [Read more…]
During much of the 20th century, many people bore the label of feminism proudly, as the movement for gender equality became seen as an important struggle that we should all support. But for some reason, the label seems to have fallen into some disfavor recently, with even people who strongly believe in the goals of the feminist movement shying away from calling themselves that. [Read more…]
It is time to wrap up what turned out to be a much longer series of posts on the Higgs than I anticipated when I started it, probably with a lot more information than readers wanted to know! (For previous posts in this series, click on the Higgs folder just below the blog post title.)
The story of the detection of the Higgs is a prime example of what Thomas Kuhn described as ‘normal science’ in his classic work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). He said that most of the time, scientists are not seeking novelty but instead are carefully looking for things in which almost everything is known and anticipated, except for a few minor details. In the case of the Higgs, experimenters knew almost everything about it except its mass, and even then we had some idea of the possible range of values. It should not be surprising that the final confirmation comes as somewhat of an anti-climax. [Read more…]