After broaching the topic of whether something that we all tend to agree is wrong (blackmail) should be illegal, I came across a comment on Pharyngula that, in the wake of the Avicenna plagiarism case, challenges another a popular belief, this time that plagiarism is wrong. Here is what commenter chimera said:
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The Pew Research Center has surveyed the new Congress about the religious beliefs of its members and we find that nothing much has changed from the previous one.
More than nine-in-ten members of the House and Senate (92%) are Christian, and about 57% are Protestant, roughly the same as in the 113th Congress (90% and 56%, respectively).1 About three-in-ten members (31%) are Catholic, the same as in the previous Congress.
British newspapers are awash with the type of scandal that they revel in, a sex scandal involving the royal family. At issue is whether Prince Andrew, one of the many unemployed leeches in that corrupt and useless monarchy, and others had sex with underage girls that were provided for them by American billionaire Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein himself seems to be a real creep who had an obsession with underage girls, threw lavish parties where he supplied them to his friends, and served some time in prison for it.
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It turns out that there is a personality quiz consisting of 40 questions that can be answered in about five minutes that supposedly gives you a score that measures this characteristic in you. The test compilers say that a score between 12 and 15 is average, that celebrities often score closer to 18, and narcissists score over 20.
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Ken Silverstein has a series of articles where he notes how people associated with the national security state are benefiting from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the never-ending war on terror that we are engaged in. In the first, he looks at what former head of the CIA George Tenet and former head of the FBI Louis Freeh have been up to.
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I have written many times before about how the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) has become a menace and is being used by religious people to gain exemptions from following all manner of laws, the Hobby Lobby contraception case being one of the more egregious examples.
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As I have got older, I have become increasingly aware of how much luck plays in one’s life, both for good and bad. Looking back, I realize the many, many occasions when it was due to luck that things turned out well or badly for me and I have no reason to think that luck does not play a similar important role for other people.
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I have been bemoaning the poor sportsmanship that is everywhere visible and how it has also encroached the once-genteel world of cricket where ‘sledging’ and generally churlish behavior have become increasingly common. So it is a pleasure for me to report on an incident of good sportsmanship that I observed yesterday.
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The Sony hack has again raised interest in the question of internet security. The Sony attack comes on the heels of other attacks on big corporations and they stem from a variety of motives, with many of them seeking to get credit card information and other data that enable fraud. The motives of the people behind the Sony attack seem less clear though the damage done to the privacy of large numbers of people is extensive. For most of us, the main concern is whether such attacks can be prevented so that we avoid having the private data we share with corporations compromised.
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When you live in a single area long enough, you notice changes in the environment and one significant one in my area is the shifting of retail centers. When we moved here in 1989, it was the era of the large indoor shopping mall. The Randall Park mall nearby was, when it opened in 1976, the largest in the country, and its opening was graced by the presence of many celebrities. We used to go there regularly and the holiday season would see it packed with attractions for children like little trains.
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