Mano Singham
Just another Freethought Blogs site
After multiple tornados ripped through Oklahoma and other states over the weekend, one of the survivors Paul Lord predictably said, “We are truly blessed. God saved us, and that’s what it’s about.”
No, its not. What it’s about is that god did not save five other people, three of them children. [Read more…]
The deadline for filing taxes is April 17 and so I mailed in my tax returns over the weekend. Yes, I still send in paper returns via snail mail. It is not that I am a Luddite, not entirely anyway. In fact, I wrote my own spreadsheet for taxes many years ago that I update each year to accommodate any changes. All I have to do is input the data and it calculates my federal, state, and local taxes in exactly the same format as the tax forms. I then download the fillable pdf forms from the various government websites and copy the figures from my spreadsheet onto the forms. [Read more…]
Mike Huckabee has launched a new national radio talk show that is aimed at the same conservative audience as Rush Limbaugh, except that he promises that it will be more civil. He may be sensing an opening to attract those who are getting tired of Limbaugh’s ugly bombast. [Read more…]
Remember Snackman, the guy who calmed down a fight in the New York City subway by simply standing between the combatants and calmly eating some potato chips? Well, the New York Times tracked him down and has a profile of him and how the whole episode unfolded. He now has adoring fans and is even receiving marriage proposals.
Catholic seniors in a Catholic high school directly challenged Catholic bigwigs from the archdiocese who convened a special assembly just for seniors to try to persuade them to vote against gay marriage in Minnesota on a constitutional amendment next fall. [Read more…]
Gervais and Jon Stewart seem to have a lot of fun with the things Gervais says.
(This clip appeared on April 11, 2012. To get suggestions on how to view clips of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report outside the US, please see this earlier post.)
The last will of a person is usually considered binding on the executors and people sometimes try to ‘rule from the grave’ by laying down stiff conditions that heirs must meet in order to get their inheritance. Putting such conditions always struck me as a bad idea except in the case where the heirs were small children or otherwise incompetent to handle their own affairs, but such requests are almost always obligatory. [Read more…]
Robert Caro is the famed biographer of legendary New York planner Robert Moses and is currently working his way through a multi-volume epic biography of Lyndon Johnson. What connects the two is that both Moses and Johnson were skillful accumulators and wielders of power and this topic fascinates Caro. [Read more…]