Anti-vaxxers suffer legal defeat in NYC

The anti-vaccination movement has resulted in a serious health hazard being created for everyone. One simple way to make sure that people vaccinate their children is to require vaccinations for all children attending school. But it turns out that all you have to do is claim that you object to vaccinations for religious reasons and you are exempt from that requirement, another example of the ridiculous ‘respect for religion’ trope that plagues the US.
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There’s always money for wars and killing

Here we go again.

President Obama has asked Congress for half a billion dollars to support the rebels fighting the Syrian government. But, you are thinking, isn’t that group ISIS (sometimes referred to as ISIL), that consists of a ruthless group of Islamists that seeks to create a new state by combining Iraq and Syria, and whose ideology is so extreme that even al Qaeda washed its hands of them?
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The Aereo case and Obamacare

Readers may recall the interesting case involving a company called Aereo that was marketing a small antenna that can be connected to your mobile device. That antenna was linked to an transmitter at Aereo that picked up programming that is being broadcast over the air by the TV networks. In other words, you can watch broadcast TV anywhere without a TV and can even record and save the programs for later viewing. TV stations sued, saying that these retransmissions were violating their copyright.
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Cashing in, big time

It appears that former NSA director Keith Alexander is now consulting on cybersecurity and getting paid $600,000 per month and this is naturally raising questions about the nature of the information he might be willing to give that is worth so much, given that he worked in a top-security agency. It also shows that there’s big money to be made by hyperinflating threats.
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Appeals Court overturns Utah’s same sex marriage ban

Today is the first anniversary of the landmark ruling United States v. Windsor that struck down the Defense of Marriage Act as unconstitutional and opened the floodgates to a large number of court cases that have ruled in favor of same-sex marriage. So far 14 District Courts have ruled in favor of same-sex marriage (with Indiana joining them yesterday) and other courts have ruled favorably on related aspects of same-sex marriage, such as whether states that do not allow it must respect the marriages of those who were legally married in other states. There has not been a single defeat.
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Sports ethics

Today in the final day of preliminary round group matches at the World Cup. After today’s games, only the top two teams in each group of four will advance to the next round of knockout games. (In the US where we tend to use more violent metaphors, it is called ‘sudden death’.) In Group G, Germany plays the United States while Portugal plays Ghana. From the prior matches Germany and the US each have four points while the other two have one point each.
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