By a curious coincidence, just as Republican candidates seem to be doing everything in their power to alienate minority voters, Republican controlled states are taking steps to make it harder for minorities to vote by creating hurdles to voter registration. Of course they claim they are taking these steps because of the problem of voter fraud that repeated studies have shown to be almost non-existent.
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The Ten Commandments monument that used to be on the state capital grounds of Oklahoma and was the subject of numerous legal battles has gone. Under cover of night, workers removed the monument and took it to its new home outside the offices of a conservative public policy analysis group known as the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs. The deadline given by the judge for removal was October 12.
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Somehow or other, I have got on the mailing list for WebMD, the medical information site that is often the first one that is returned by search engines when you look for information on anything health related. I get emails from them regularly and on the surface, it has all the signs of being a reliable objective source of authoritative health-related information.
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This year’s Nobel prize for physics was awarded today to two experimentalists Takaaki Kajita of the University of Tokyo and Arthur B. McDonald of Queen’s University in Canada for their independent work that showed that neutrinos have mass. You can read the official announcement form the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences here.
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I wrote earlier about the large crowd that attended a Bernie Sanders rally in Boston. But now it appears that there was an incident there that highlights the fact that Sanders is a PEP (Progressive Except for Palestine) politician, like a lot of Democrats. His team threatened to have people arrested for merely holding a sign that asked “Will Ya Feel The Bern For Palestine?”, an act reminiscent of what the Bush-Cheney campaign used to do at their events. Here’s the video.
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What would you do if you encountered in a public space a statue of a head that was enclosed by a glass case that had a sign warning you to not to look into its eyes? Would you look anyway? Some people were intrigued enough to do just that and this video shows what happens.
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Like clockwork, following an atrocity like the bombing by the US of the Doctors Without Borders (MSF) hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, we see the five stages of public relations manipulation by the US government, aided by its media allies. The first is: We didn’t do it, it must have been someone else. Next we have: Well, let’s not jump to conclusions but wait and see for a full and thorough investigation that may take months or even years. The third is: We may have done it but we’ll have to look into what might have gone wrong. The fourth is: It looks like we did it but if we did it was justified because those devious enemies tricked us into doing it. The fifth is: Yes we did it but we didn’t mean to, it was an accident due to the ‘fog-of-war’ etc. and we will pay compensation to the victims (ignoring the fact that there was absolutely no fog involved).
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Religious people have been warning us for some time that accepting same-sex marriage will bring down the wrath of god upon us. And we know from biblical history that when god gets good and mad and in a smiting mood, he tends to lash out with little discrimination, hitting the godly and the godless alike.
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In a recent post, I said that I felt that the attention being given to an allegation involving British prime minister David Cameron engaging in a sex act with a dead pig while a student at Oxford University was excessive, given that he was a young man at the time and young people do stupid things. I suggested that we give people a pass for the things they did before the age of 25 and not hold it against them later in life.
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I have linked before to flash mobs where musicians appear to spontaneously arrive at a location and perform in public spaces to the delight of people who just happened to be passing by. Here is another case of a flash mob, but this involved dancers in a New York City pedestrian crossing.
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