Stephen Colbert has more on the Tony Robbins fire-walking fiasco in which many people got burned while trying to show the power of mind over body. I had no idea that people pay thousands of dollars to attend his programs. These things seem to be quasi-religious in nature and it is curious the kinds of things that people put their faith in. [Read more…]
I said in the previous post that I suspected that Mitt Romney may do something splashy to give his campaign a badly needed boost and break out of being stuck behind Barack Obama in the polls. One action that he has at his disposal is his choice of running mate. [Read more…]
Update: It looks like I was premature. There are apparently more dressage rounds to go so Rafalca is still in there though unlikely to medal.]
You have to hand it to Mitt Romney. Thanks to his candidacy, people like me, who had never even heard that there was an Olympic event called dressage, now know more about it than we could have ever imagined, even to the extent of pronouncing it correctly. [Read more…]
The Olympics turns out to be mixed blessing for Mitt Romney’s candidacy. On the one hand, he touts his role in running the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City as if that were a major accomplishment and, for reasons that escape me, the media seem to take it at face value though it is not clear what running the Olympic games has got to do with one’s ability to be a good president. [Read more…]
Samantha Bee interviews the head of the organization of American Catholic nuns that has earned the ire of Papa Ratzi for their emphasis on helping the poor instead of focusing their efforts on the things the Vatican considers far more important, like upholding the church’s doctrine against contraception and abortion and same sex marriage. [Read more…]
Readers of this blog know that I have a fondness for The Daily Show and The Colbert Report (as well as other satires) and frequently link to them if I happen to think them funny and informative. But each of them has his faults. Colbert seems to idolize the military while Stewart is terrible when directly interviewing powerful political figures or news media bigwigs like Brian Williams or Fareed Zakaria, so much so that I don’t even bother to watch those segments anymore. Stewart is best when he has on writers and artists and academics who are experts in some field. In fact, a rule of thumb that I have developed is that the less familiar I am with the name of the guest, the better the interview is likely to be. [Read more…]
Herman Cain continues his “Look at me! I’m an idiot who is willing to be made a fool of by comedians just for the attention!” tour by talking with John Oliver of The Daily Show about how he would lower the price of gas by allowing drilling over most of the national parks, thus effectively destroying the jewels of the American landscape. Because that is part of god’s grand plan. Besides, how many picnic tables do people really need? And do you really need more than one giant redwood tree to appreciate their grandeur? [Read more…]
The Nobel prize-winning economist talks about how the US economy, if not already broken, is on its way to becoming so because of the rapidly rising inequality that is becoming entrenched and hereditary as the rich put in place laws that preserve their privileges. He dates the beginning of decline to 1980 when the divergence between the very rich and the rest of us began. [Read more…]
Luckily for me, I almost never watch TV otherwise the political commercials that Black castigates would drive me insane, especially since Ohio is a so-called ‘swing state’ and we get much more than our fair share of this nonsense. Yes, we are all swingers here. To think that TV viewers have to put up with this for another three months makes me worry whether come November, people will be wandering around with glazed eyes. [Read more…]
Thanks, as always, to Jesus and Mo for capturing in a few panels a point that it took me an entire extended blog post to make, about how religious people’s rationality only extends so far as it conforms to what their religious texts say.