In a startling display of good sense, the ban on Chinese scientists attending a conference on the Kepler space telescope program at a NASA site has been reversed, after many non-Chinese scientists started talking about boycotting the event altogether, since even Chinese graduate students and post docs working in the US with US scientists would be barred. [Read more…]
Ohio governor John Kasich managed to get the Medicaid expansion policy passed in Ohio yesterday by doing an end run around the Republican-dominated state legislature that had opposed the move because they oppose anything to do with the Affordable Care Act even if it benefits those who are too poor to benefit from the new health care exchange and even if the federal government fully funds it for the first three years and at 90% thereafter. [Read more…]
Yesterday, as a result of a court ruling, same-sex couples were able to get married in New Jersey, making it the 14th state to do so, along with the District of Columbia. This is of course an important step forward for equality but I thought it a telling sign of how same-sex marriage has become normalized, at least in the major media, that the story they seemed to focus on was governor Chris Christie’s decision to not appeal the lower court decision to the New Jersey Supreme Court and what impact that move would have on his chances to win the 2016 Republican nomination for president, assuming that he decides to run. [Read more…]
The book came out earlier this year and a documentary film with the same name was released in June and is available on demand on Netflix. Both cover the same ground but in different ways and are invaluable for anyone who wants to understand how the war of terror has evolved and where it is heading. In short, it is headed in the direction in which ‘the world is a battlefield’ (the subtitle of the book) and the US is now engaged in fighting eruptions of what it sees as terrorism in over 70 countries around the globe. [Read more…]
I tend to like much of the new technology, though some of it is quite gimmicky and appeals only to those who like technology for its own sake. I am usually slow to adopt them waiting until I am sure that I really need it. What really bothers me is when people think that technology will solve a problem that the lack of technology did not create. [Read more…]
The practice of snake handling as a test of faith is popular in certain rural Pentecostal churches in the US. There is even a TV series called Snake Salvation about this practice on the National Geographic channel. It is highly dangerous to handle poisonous snakes and this has resulted in some of the people being fatally bitten. [Read more…]
When it comes to war, we tend to count only those who are directly killed by weaponry. But wars kill many more than that because there are the deaths that occur indirectly as well, because of the destruction of the infrastructure, hospitals, water and electricity supplies, transportation, etc. A group of academics from University of Washington, Johns Hopkins University, Simon Fraser University, and Mustansiriya University joined to try and estimate the total number and they come up with the appalling total of 504,000. [Read more…]
Now that the US government has re-opened and the debt ceiling raised leaving untouched the Affordable Care Act, the ostensible trigger for the crisis, the nature of the settlement has prompted speculation as to whether we are going to have a repeat of this in a few months. The deal involves three deadlines: December 13 is when a bipartisan group of legislators from both the House of Representative and the Senate are supposed to come up with a new budget plan; January 15 is when the most recent continuing resolution ends; and February 7 is when the debt ceiling will need to be raised again. [Read more…]