The rumors that Stephen Colbert would replace David Letterman as host of the latter’s Late Show late-night talk show on CBS when Letterman retires in 2015 turn out to be true. Clearly CBS is hoping that Colbert will bring along with him the younger demographic that he attracts to compensate for the older viewers such shows have.
[Read more…]
The American Bible Society does regular State of the Bible survey and it finds that there is increasing skepticism about it, with younger people as usual leading the way. The ‘Millennials’ they describe are those in the age cohort 18-29.
[Read more…]
I have written about the unbelievable cruelty shown by those states that refused to expand Medicaid so that those people who are too poor to be covered by the subsidies offered by the Affordable Care Act could obtain health insurance anyway. As a result, we have the predicable result that some people are now dying because they have no health insurance.
Bill Manes has written an excellent article about such cases, focusing on Charlene Dill, a 32-year old working mother of three small children. In the process, he also describes the complexities of life when one is poor.
[Read more…]
It has long been true that the rich and well-connected got better treatment from law enforcement and the justice system than the poor and powerless. But that brutal fact was usually hidden behind a façade that claimed that the system was impartial and fair. The image of the statue of a blindfolded Lady Justice holding evenly balanced scales (like the one on the right) is part of the architecture of the US Supreme Court building and is used to personify this idea that justice is dispensed without favor.
[Read more…]
Although Monty Python and the Holy Grail is one of my favorite films, I had not really thought about where the idea of the Holy Grail originated or what it represented. To me it was just another bit of medieval folklore whose origins were lost in the mists of time. In this clip, he explains some things about it.
[Read more…]
After I posted that video about how dogs react to magic, I received an email from professional magician Rick Lax with a link to a video where he tried doing similar tricks with cats. The results were quite different, as you can see.
[Read more…]
I will be speaking today to the Center For Inquiry of Northeast Ohio on the Greece v. Galloway prayer case.
The event begins at 7:00 pm in the Mayfield Branch Library on 500 SOM Center Road in Mayfield Village.
The event is free and open to the public.
Frances Chan is a history major at Yale University who has been involved in a struggle with that university’s health services because they kept telling her that at 92 lbs, she was too thin and that her Body Mass Index was too low. Her height is 5’2″, which gives her a BMI score of 16.8 while the ‘normal’ is in the range 18.5-25.
[Read more…]
Last year, I wrote about an article that examined how some of the Jesus People, as they came to be called, evolved from being part of the hippie movement in the 1970s to become evangelical conservatives and Tea Partiers now.
[Read more…]
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about a news story in which it was reported that the NSA had “built a surveillance system capable of recording “100 percent” of a foreign country’s telephone calls, enabling the agency to rewind and review conversations as long as a month after they take place.”
[Read more…]