This video shows why, if you want to own a gun, you really need to have serious training in gun usage and safety if you are to avoid harming yourself and others. The video is designed to evoke laughter but the consequences of unskilled usage can be tragic. [Read more…]
A Los Angeles archbishop has now apologized for actively plotting with other church officials to keep secret from law enforcement priests in his diocese who had sexually molested children, continuing the dreary and disgusting trend of high Catholic officials expressing remorse for the abuse that they covered up only after they get caught. [Read more…]
Scientology has been in the news recently and not in ways that it likes. There is a new book on the organization by Lawrence Wright called Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief that is reviewed here. [Read more…]
The speech delivered by president at his second inauguration said many good things. He emphasized the value of collective action, of seeing ourselves as needing to work together and not separately to achieve important goals. In fact, his repeated invocation of the phrase ‘we, the people’ was a pointed rebuke to those who want us to see ourselves as individuals, looking out for just ourselves. [Read more…]
I was surprised to see this clip from The Colbert Report in which media personalities casually spoke about their ‘porn names’ as if it was the most commonplace thing in the world to have one. [Read more…]
Marcia Fudge is the member of the House of Representatives from my district. In a recent forum she spoke her mind about her colleagues in congress with a frankness that one rarely sees on public display. [Read more…]
Via Maggie Koerth-Baker, I obtained this video of astronaut Sunita Williams giving us a quite detailed tour of the International Space Station. Although the ISS has been around for a while, it was only while watching it that I realized that I really did not know much about it. The video is pretty interesting, especially for its details of daily life there. [Read more…]
Barack Obama was privately officially sworn in yesterday, January 20th, as required by the constitution, but another public symbolic swearing in will take place today followed by the usual parade and other festivities. [Read more…]
I was worried for a while about Pat Robertson. As far as I knew he had not uttered a statement on the Newtown shootings, and that was so unlike him. He had also recently been expressing some strangely sensible sentiments on subjects like marijuana and science, and I wondered whether he had seen the light of reason or whether those were momentary brain lapses and that he had since gone back to his old ways of seeing a smiting god everywhere, similar to what he said about the events of 9/11 and hurricane Katrina. [Read more…]
Today January 20th is on average the coldest day in Cleveland and so I look on it as mid-winter. From now on, the days get warmer as we approach spring, and so this is a day which puts a song on my lips and joy in my heart, even though it is actually very cold and windy outside today. [Read more…]