Liliana Segura writes about the botched attempt last week by the state of Alabama at executing Doyle Lee Hamm, who had been on death row since 1987. What resulted was nothing less than torture as the state rushed to execute him before the midnight deadline for the execution warrant expired, all the while trying to hide what happened from his lawyer, his brother, and an outside anesthetist.
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British imperialism is usually portrayed in the English media by English-speakers who are broadly sympathetic to Britain and thus see its colonial practices through rose-tinted glasses. It is portrayed as a somewhat benevolent empire, at least when compared to how the Belgians treated their colonies. The British built roads, railways, schools, and created administrative structures. All these were to enable more efficient looting of the colonies’ resources but they did constitute a legacy of sorts that they left behind. While they did commit acts of brutality, these tend to be downplayed.
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There was a brief flurry of excitement when it looked like Donald Trump was going against the NRA and the gun lobby and proposing restrictions limiting the easy availability of guns. I did not share that excitement because I felt it was only a matter of time before Trump reversed himself and went back into the arms of the lobby and his gun nut supporters. And sure enough, that reversal happened the very next day, after a meeting with a top NRA official.
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After posting earlier today about the detection of when the cosmic dawn (i.e., the appearance of the first stars) occurred, I started thinking about how religious people would react to news like this, especially those religions that have anthropocentric views of the universe, like the Abrahamic religions that have the Genesis story as their foundational myths
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Perhaps the easiest step we can take to encourage more humane agricultural practices is to buy eggs that are produced by farms where the hens are ‘free-range’, i.e., not confined to tiny spaces but free to roam on pastures. And indeed more and more people seem to be buying such eggs. In my local supermarket, the brands that sold them used to have a small space in the egg section but now it has expanded considerably as people become more aware of what exactly goes on in egg farms.
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The winter in Cleveland has been relatively mild so far, and the last two weeks in particular saw warm temperatures and no snow at all. The forecasts seemed to indicate that this would continue but just yesterday the forecast changed suddenly because of the emergence of a storm in the northeast and we had a major snowstorm last night that dumped a large amount of snow on the ground as we slept.
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Last October, I had a post that looked at the units known as the Planck length, Planck time, and Planck mass and discussed the question of whether these were just a universal set of standards that replaced the traditional ones of meter, second, and kilogram or foot, second, and pound, or whether they had a more fundamental significance. I pointed to a paper that suggested that the Planck length might represent a fundamental limit to the continuity of space, that at that level space ceased to be continuously divisible and became like a foam.
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That was my first thought when I saw this BBC news headline today: “Vultures avoid Portugal because of carrion ban”.
I really am thinking too much about puns these days.
It is bad enough to have Donald Trump wallowing in military grandiosity, talking about his ‘big button’ and military parades, now Russian president Vladimir Putin is making grandiose claims about having an ‘invincible nuclear weapon’.
Mr Putin made the claims as he laid out his key policies for a fourth presidential term, ahead of an election he is expected to win in 17 days’ time.
The weapons he boasted of included a cruise missile that he said could “reach anywhere in the world”.
He said of the West: “They need to take account of a new reality and understand … [this]… is not a bluff.”
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The Shaolin order of monks in China is noted for its rigorous training that enables them to perform quite incredible feats of strength and endurance. They are also known for being fierce kung fu warriors, strange for Buddhist monks who are supposed to be pacifist. So how did that happen? Kallie Szczepanski provides a brief summary of the turbulent 1,500 year old history of the order that mixes legend with facts.
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