Those climate change deniers who gleefully seize on any cold spell in the US as evidence that global warming is a hoax conveniently ignore the fact that there is a part of the globe called the ‘southern hemisphere’ and winter here means summer there. It turns out that Australia is currently going through a blistering heat wave with elevated risks for forest fires and heat strokes. [Read more…]
Like many observers, I was puzzled by the decision of the US Supreme Court to accept the case in which in 2008 two citizens of the town of Greece in upstate New York (Susan Galloway who is Jewish and Linda Stephens who is an atheist) sued the town council for beginning its monthly meetings with a prayer. As I said in the first post in this series, there was nothing in this case that seemed to exceed the boundaries established by the precedent 1983 case of Marsh v. Chambers and since those prayers were ruled constitutional, then one would have expected these to be too. The District Court ruled in 2010 in just such a manner but in May 2012 the Second Circuit Court of Appeals surprised everyone by unanimously overruling the District Court verdict, and the US Supreme Court took up the case, hearing oral arguments in November 2013. [Read more…]
While equal rights for gays have been gaining increasing support in the US, this not so elsewhere. Russia and India have taken steps backward recently. But the harshest measures have been in Africa and in its most populous country. Despite considerable pressure from the global community, Nigerian president Goodluck Jonathan signed into law a ban on same-sex marriage. [Read more…]
Bicycle helmets undoubtedly protect users from brain injuries. But is it possible, as some studies have suggested, that the helmets make you hot and sweaty and distracted and thus increase the chances of an accident? This idea has been picked up by some who oppose mandatory helmet laws. [Read more…]
New reports have emerged today about the NSA’s practices of inserting tiny circuit boards and USB cards surreptitiously into computers that then send out radio-frequency signals that can be picked up by listeners even if the computer is not hooked up to the internet. [Read more…]
US District Court judge Terence C. Kern ruled yesterday that Oklahoma’s constitutional amendment passed in 2004 limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Judge Kern relied heavily on this year’s US Supreme Court ruling in the DOMA case United States v. Windsor to strike down the Oklahoma law. [Read more…]
The Greece v Galloway case dealing with whether what kind of prayer, or any kind of prayer at all, is allowable at official government functions, such as at the beginning of the sessions of legislatures and other governmental bodies, brings to the fore the thorny problem of how to interpret the Establishment Clause of the US constitution in this particular context. I have been asked to be on a panel at the Law School of my university later this month that will deal with this case (and at which one of the plaintiffs challenging the practice will also appear) and so I decided that it might be helpful to write up the issues that the Supreme Court will be grappling with before it issues its opinion later this spring. [Read more…]
The company Virgin Galactic is working to be a space tourism company and has already people signed up to go into space. A few days ago it reached a milestone of sorts when it sent its plane on a 10-minute ride to an altitude to 21km. As a comparison, the International Space Station is at an orbital height of about 420km and the Hubble Space Telescope is at 559km, so it has a long way to go. [Read more…]
Heather Linebaugh is someone who operated killer drones in Afghanistan and she writes about what it was like.
Whenever I read comments by politicians defending the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Predator and Reaper program – aka drones – I wish I could ask them a few questions. I’d start with: “How many women and children have you seen incinerated by a Hellfire missile?” And: “How many men have you seen crawl across a field, trying to make it to the nearest compound for help while bleeding out from severed legs?” Or even more pointedly: “How many soldiers have you seen die on the side of a road in Afghanistan because our ever-so-accurate UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] were unable to detect an IED [improvised explosive device] that awaited their convoy?” [Read more…]
By every tangible measure, Pope Francis is no different from his predecessors. He opposes abortion, contraception, same-sex marriage, adoptions by gay couples, and has not called off the inquiry into the social activism of American nuns. And yet simply by saying a few things about gays and atheists that were not outright hateful and that many other Christians had long ago said, and by expressing some gentle criticisms of the current scandalous state of wealth inequality, he has driven the right and the Republican party in in this country into a tizzy. It just shows how much they have assumed that successive popes were Tea Party members in all but name. [Read more…]