When people try to be heroes

Last Friday, Ricky Jackson and Wiley Bridgeman were released from prison after serving 39 years for a crime they did not commit, convicted purely on the testimony of a then 12-year old boy Eddie Vernon who now admits that he did not see them commit the crime. There was no physical evidence connecting the men to the crime. The boy says that after he initially told police that he had witnessed the crime, they later coached him on what to say at trial. A third person Ronnie Bridgman, Wiley’s brother, was released in 2003 after serving 27 years.
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Glenn Greenwald takes apart Sam Harris

While Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Richard Dawkins are seen as leading lights of the New Atheist movement of which I consider myself a member, I have come to detest their views on a large number of political and social positions, seeing them as lackeys of the neo-imperialism that is driving the western assault on the rest of the world and responsible for immense amounts of suffering. There is an overweening smugness about their sense of their own, and their tribe’s, superiority over those dastardly Muslims that I find unseemly.
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College rape culture out of control [Updated]

[See update below.]

Rolling Stone has an explosive story about rape at the University of Virginia, where the culture of drinking and rape and sexual assault centered around fraternities seems to be out of control. The report has rocked the campus and the university’s president has suspended the fraternities until the beginning of the next semester. The story by Sabrina Rubin Erdely is both shocking and disgusting in describing what female students went through.
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A spectacular demonstration of the Equivalence Principle

The Equivalence Principle enunciated by Albert Einstein says that any two objects in a uniform gravity field will fall at the same rate if dropped from a height. Of course, if we drop a feather and a bowling ball, that is not what we see and we explain that by saying it is because the air resistance slows down the feather much more than it does the bowling ball. But if you could drop the two items in a vacuum, they should fall at the same rate.
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Was Obama’s move brilliant?

In the face of furious hyperbolic opposition from the Republican party who warned him that he was threatening to undermine the very foundations of democracy in the US, president Obama has gone ahead with his plan to use his executive powers to temporarily spare anywhere from three to five million undocumented immigrants from the threat of deportation for three years by offering them temporary legal status.
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Not his strength

The video below is of some kind of competition to see which dog can race down a track fastest. The catch is that on both sides of the track are placed distractions in the forms of treats and toys and it takes a certain single-minded focus to ignore those and proceed straight ahead. Not all are successful.
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The unraveling of Bill Cosby’s reputation continues

More and more stories are emerging that are contradicting Bill Cosby’s reputation as a genial and avuncular person. It has been hard for most people to swallow, given the overwhelmingly positive public image he has had. I had never watched his hit TV shows or seen his comedy routines so perhaps had not fallen under his spell as much as others and so the allegations did not seem as unbelievable to me.
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