Sometimes I despair at how people can seem to lack the kind of normal human instinct that should kick in when asked to do something that seems so obviously wrong. Take what happened at an elementary school in Utah. [Read more…]
The website Politico is a mixture of news and gossip based on anonymous sources that seems to have access to well-connected members of the oligarchy and to the government-media establishment, so its most useful function is to serve as a window into the thinking of that group of people. Hence it was with some interest that I read the piece titled Why the rich are freaking out that says that some of the very rich see writing on the wall that disturbs them. [Read more…]
To understand the oral arguments presented at the Supreme Court in the Greece case that I will discuss in the next post in this series, one needs to look at the reasoning of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that overturned the practice. Recall that they decided that the ‘history and tradition’ reasoning used to justify the prayers in the 1983 Marsh v. Chambers case was not appropriate for the Greece v. Galloway case and that the court should have used the Lemon test instead, as well as the endorsement test that looks at whether the practice would be seen by a reasonable informed observer to be an endorsement of religion. They proceeded to do so and found that it failed all three prongs of the Lemon test as well as the endorsement test. [Read more…]
Samantha Bee of The Daily Show interviews various people about raising the minimum wage. The rich person she speaks to displays the arrogance, callousness, and cluelessness that have come to typify that class. These people seem to have no sense of the growing anger against them. They seem to feel secure that the power of the state can protect them. They don’t seem to realize that all societies, even the US, have a breaking point. [Read more…]
The Pew Research Center has released the results of a new survey that finds that fewer Americans self-identify as middle class. This is disturbing but not for the obvious reasons.
There has been a long running saga in Ohio concerning a science teacher named John Freshwater who was teaching creationism and propagating Christianity in other ways in his eighth grade science classes in a semi-rural community in central Ohio named Mount Vernon. He kept Bibles on his desk and posters of the Ten Commandments and other Christian messages hung on the walls. [Read more…]
I reported earlier about a federal judge who had slapped down the government over the way they abused their no-fly lists to harass people who had little or no recourse, because they were not told they were on the list or how they could get off it. [Read more…]
Life is complex. This is true not just in a rhetorical sense but also biologically in that living things are complicated arrangements of multicellular life. So how did this complexity arise? The most common explanation given is that it is a natural outgrowth of natural selection and that once a self-replicating molecule formed, the selection pressures would be such that given sufficient time multicellular life would be an almost inevitable consequence, though the exact form it would take would depend on many contingencies. [Read more…]
In the talk given on Monday by Robert McChesney, a professor of communications at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign about his new book (co-authored with John Nicholls) titled Dollarocracy: How the Money-and-Media Election Complex is Destroying America, he spoke about the race against the clock that is driving recent political developments. [Read more…]
Fox News blowhard Sean Hannity took umbrage with some remarks made by New York state governor Andrew Cuomo that Hannity interpreted to mean that the governor wanted extreme conservatives to leave the state. We have seen a spate of rich people recently whining about how people are being mean to them and they think it is all very unfair. Tom Perkins is one of the most extreme of the lot, saying that criticisms of the wealthy are similar to Nazi Germany but he is by no means alone. [Read more…]
