It is appalling to see president Obama once again offer cuts in Social Security and Medicare in order to get a budget deal. He seems to be really eager to give the Republicans not only something that is opposed by his supporters, but also something that will be used as a cudgel against the Democrats in future elections, when the Republicans can run on the platform that it was the Democrats who wanted to cut these prized programs. [Read more…]
Kevin Drum discusses the issue of Twitter addiction and the anxiety that some people have about trying to keep abreast of all the feeds and worrying about what they might be missing otherwise, and the withdrawal pains they suffer when for one reason or another they fail to keep up or try to quit. [Read more…]
In order to understand the Higgs mechanism, we need to first understand how it came to be that the Higgs field, unlike all the other fields corresponding to the other 18 elementary particles, came to have a non-zero average value in the vacuum. As I said in the previous post in this series, this is the key fact about the Higgs field that leads to it giving mass to the other particles. So how did that come about? [Read more…]
For a while I was getting worried. Pat Robertson had started saying sensible things, such as that religious people should not be saying things like the age of the Earth is just 6,000 years old that oppose well established scientific facts, and that marijuana should be legalized. I was afraid that these were signs that we had entered some strange alternate universe. [Read more…]
Some freethinking law students at the Case Western Reserve University School of Law have organized the Secular Legal Society, one of the many new similar student groups that are springing up all over the country. I will be giving a talk the group (and to any other interested people who wish to attend) on the topic God, Darwin, and the Constitution: The Essential Tension. [Read more…]
Nicholas Coppola was a very active member of his local Catholic parish, carrying out a variety of services such as being a religious education teacher, lector (a person who reads aloud scriptural passages as part of church service), altar server, and visitation minister for shut-ins, i.e., people who are unable to attend mass in church. [Read more…]
Jon Stewart of The Daily Show comments amusingly on something that has struck me too, and that is why is it that the thought of same-sex marriage seems to drive opponents so crazy that they immediately start making the most outlandish arguments. [Read more…]
I hate corporal punishment. I was fortunate to have parents who did not believe in it and have never used it on my own children. I did go to a private boys school in Sri Lanka that allowed its principal and vice-principal to cane students and there were some teachers who also hit students with rulers or slapped them even though they were not authorized to do so. [Read more…]
When wars and famines and floods and earthquakes strike a region and threaten large numbers of people with starvation, food is often the most urgent need of the affected people. While the amount of food aid promised is often impressive, the reality is somewhat different. [Read more…]
Philosopher A. C. Grayling has a new book out titled The God Argument: The Case Against Religion and for Humanism that I have not read yet but looks interesting. He appeared on The Colbert Report and it was pretty interesting. Despite the brevity of these interviews, he made some cogent points and provided a succinct definition of humanism, which he says is “an attitude about how we live the moral life… We human beings are responsible for thinking about our ethical outlook, not a set of laws or a code which comes from outside us but we have to take responsibility for ourselves, not just about how we are going to live good and flourishing lives but how we are going to relate well to other people.” [Read more…]