The danger posed by Bernie Sanders

The biggest issue that the US faces is the attempt by the oligarchy to take over complete control of all aspects of the country. What is clear is that they want to go all the way and remove anything that stands between them and unbridled profits. This means dismantling regulations that protect the public interest, underfunding regulatory agencies so that they cannot even enforce what regulations are left, removing any oversight under the guise of cutting down the bureaucracy, changing the tax structure to benefit the wealthy even more, and divert to themselves all the funding that goes to the mass of people in the form of public education, public services, and social welfare programs, under the guise of making government more efficient or preventing ‘moochers and looters from exploiting the system.
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Due process protections should cut both ways

It has been amusing to see how police unions have reacted to the recent actions by prosecutors to charge police officers with crimes. They whine that the prosecutors are rushing to judgment because of public protests, that police are not being given the benefit of the doubt or the presumption of innocence, and that accused officers are not getting their due process rights.
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The Daily Show on the same-sex marriage hearings

Jon Stewart had a lot of fun pointing out the absurdity of the hypotheticals that some justices raised as possible objections to allowing marriage to include same-sex couples. As Jon Stewart pointed out, these objections reeked of desperation since they could be easily countered. He seemed to think that this signified that June would bring in a verdict in favor of same-sex marriage. I hope he is right though I am not as hopeful that it will be a clear-cut one.
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The new HoloLens from Microsoft

Mark Griswold, a friend and colleague at my university who is a professor of radiology, gave a talk at the Microsoft builders’ event this week that highlighted the features of a new device called the HoloLens headset that overlays virtual 3D objects onto the physical environment around us and promises to revolutionize many fields of education by providing students with the ability to see complete systems that are hidden within an outer shell, like the skeletal structure or the cardiovascular system of a human body. See for yourself
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How will the Supreme Court rule on same-sex marriage?

Trying to predict how the US Supreme Court will rule on the highly contentious issue of same-sex marriage is a mug’s game but I will indulge in it anyway. The court will be deciding two questions:

  1. Does the Fourteenth Amendment require a state to license a marriage between two people of the same sex?
  2. Does the Fourteenth Amendment require a state to recognize a marriage between two people of the same sex when their marriage was lawfully licensed and performed out-of-state?

What follows are my speculations on how all this will eventually play out based on the hearings and the past opinions and statements of the justices. The hearings can be tricky to evaluate because often the justices may seem to be pushing a point of view when what they are really doing is not advocating for that view but seeing what are the best reasons for it.
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