Mano Singham
Just another Freethought Blogs site
Yes, we have now reached the stage where this is now a question for serious public discussion. It follows a report that this past summer, secretary of state Rex Tillerson had referred to Donald Trump as a moron and had said that he wanted to resign his position. In a press conference that he called today, Tillerson denied that he had even thought of resigning or had to be talked out of it but did not deny that ‘moron’ quote.
[Read more…]
It is said that you can tell a lot about a person by the company that they keep. Going by that standard, the US’s reputation is in tatters. Take for example the issue of governments executing LGBTQ people simply for being who they are. You would think that if the UN came up with a resolution condemning such a practice and calling for its end, that would be a really easy call and the US would sign on. But no. According to Alex Emmons:
[Read more…]
The shooter in Las Vegas 64-year old Stephen Paddock is said to be a well-to-do retired accountant who liked to gamble for high stakes. But his motives remain obscure. Had he lost his money due to gambling and was lashing out at the world? Paddock’s live-in girl friend who is currently in Japan at the time is likely the person who can shed most light on the motives. The reports emerging about him have some surprising twists.
[Read more…]
To no one’s surprise, this year’s Nobel prize in physics has been awarded for the detection of gravity waves in September 2015. This was a huge project involving large numbers of experimentalists and theorists because the waves have such a weak signal. It is not unlike the earlier discovery of the Higgs boson in that the final detection was received with relief rather than surprise because both were firmly believed to exist. In the case of the Higgs, the prediction had been made fifty years earlier and with the gravitational waves, it had been made 100 years earlier, as a consequence of Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. The challenge in both cases was to overcome the immense technical hurdles involved in detecting them.
[Read more…]
There is this odd fantasy that some religious people indulge in that they think that atheists secretly feel some void in their lives and that they try to suppress but that emerges into the open when they approach death, and manifests itself in deathbed remorse and conversions. We saw how religious people looked eagerly for such signs in David Hume and were infuriated when he showed none.
[Read more…]
As a result of science’s great achievements in giving us reliable and accurate knowledge, it has tremendous credibility. Unfortunately, that increase in credibility has not been matched by a corresponding increase in the public’s awareness of how science acquires that knowledge and the limitations on it. This makes it possible to dazzle people with ‘science’.
[Read more…]
Once again, a person with access to high-powered weapons has killed a large number of people, this time in Las Vegas. What struck me was that this person fired from the 32nd floor of a hotel at a crowd on a plaza below who were attending a country music festival. The fact that there seemed to be only one shooter and yet over fifty people died and scores more were injured despite the shooter being about 400 feet away from them suggests a highly dense crowd and powerful, rapid-fire weaponry.
[Read more…]
The protests during the playing of the national anthem before professional sports events has caused some controversy with Donald Trump, as usual, inflaming the situation. In an earlier post, I asked why this practice even existed since it seemed to me to be so silly. Many people have criticized the protesting players for injecting politics into sports but as Justin Levin, the author of a “history thesis on sports as instruments of domestic mobilization during the Vietnam War”, writes, it was the introduction of the national anthem into these events that was an overtly political act to serve an overtly political purpose, to stifle dissent that was erupting during the Vietnam war.
[Read more…]
As the humanitarian situation in Puerto Rico continues to worse, Donald Trump has as usual tried to have it multiple ways, blaming the lack of quick response on Puerto Rico being an island, then saying that his administration has done a wonderful job in relief efforts, and when it is pointed out that it has not done so, blaming lazy Hispanic people and their shiftless leaders, because he knows that attacking people of color plays well with his supporters.
[Read more…]