Last Saturday’s Northeast Ohio Center for Inquiry conference was excellent. It is impressive how the volunteers who organize these events manage to put it together. The key people were Mark Tiborsky and Brian Harrington who are in charge of programming for the Cleveland and Akron areas and Monette Richards who is the president of the Cleveland chapter, and they and the other volunteers deserve congratulations.
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Many countries adopt the policy of stunning cattle before killing them as it is supposedly more humane. But Muslims and Jews have religious prohibitions against consuming the blood of animals and so they oppose stunning and instead require that in order for the food to be certified as kosher or halal, that the animals must not be stunned and their blood must run freely when killed, presumable to drain the meat of all blood.
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When a mainstream media organization describes someone as their ‘national security reporter’, I immediately pigeonhole them as basically public relations flacks for the agencies they cover because often their main method of ‘news gathering’ is to cultivate sources at high levels within the agencies who will feed them self-serving leaks that these reporters then pass on to us. There are some good reporters on this beat, one being Jane Meyer for the New Yorker magazine and James Bamford who writes for a number of publications, but they tend to be the exception.
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There is something deeply hypnotic about listening to Ravel’s Bolero. It is like getting engrossed in a mystery novel and not wanting to stop until you know how it ends. In this performance by the London Symphony Orchestra, we get to see close up the increasing intensity of the musicians at the climax approaches. I wonder how hard it is for the percussionists to keep that steady tempo for 15 minutes, because that is crucial.
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The nature vs. nurture argument has been around a long time and one area that has been much contested is about what it takes to achieve expertise at something, say at music or games or science or the professions. Is it innate ability or practice? The likely answer is ‘a bit of both’. But how much of each? In 1869, Francis Dalton argued, based on observations that certain kinds of expertise ran in families, that it must be due to something innate and genetic in origin. But others argued that it was due more to practice.
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The incident of the intruder who recently managed to enter the White House before being captured was obvious fodder for the eternally panic-stricken to call for even more stringent security measures and the use of lethal force because that seems to be the only solution to any problem for those people. But it also provided a field day for humor and one has to merely scan through the collection of editorial cartoons around the nation to see that many cartoonists exploited this event for material. (See here and here for just two of the many cartoons I saw.)
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Fox News bloviator Bill O’Reilly did the rounds of various shows on his network promoting his idea that that US needed troops to fight in Syria but that the task should be given to mercenaries rather than members of the US armed forces. He was widely ridiculed even by the people of Fox
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On John Oliver’s show Last Week Tonight, he had a hilarious clip (sorry, embedding was disallowed so you will have to follow the link to see it) about Ayn Rand titled Why is Ayn Rand still a thing?, because she is still a big influence on Republicans with presidential ambitions people like Paul Ryan, Rand Paul, and Ted Cruz, who all proudly state that they are fans of her despite her support for abortion rights and her atheism.
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Passenger pigeons are fascinating. They used to exist in the billions in the US, so numerous that they sometimes blackened the sky. But like so many species, they went extinct. What is remarkable, though, is that we think we know the exact date that this unfortunate event happened.
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The US government has the power to issue people with what are known as ‘national security letters’ that require recipients to not only give the government any data it requests even if it is about their clients, but they are forbidden to tell anyone, even their lawyers, that they received such a letter. So for example, they can ask your librarian to tell them what items you check out or your internet provider to hand over any information they have on you. It is an astounding assertion of government power and shows the reach of the national security state.
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