Bill Maher discusses the recent trend of people having all the power acting like they are the oppressed ones. And as the oligarchy and their lackeys fight furiously against raising the minimum wage at all, let alone to anything even remotely resembling a living wage, he raises the reasonable question of why we are not considering a cap on incomes.
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It was great to hear that Afghanistan beat Bangladesh in a one-day international game at the Asia Cup tournament currently being played. It marks the first time Afghanistan had beaten a Test playing nation since the national team was formed in 2001. For a weary war-torn country, achievements in seemingly frivolous pastimes can be quite a morale booster.
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So now that Russia is sending its troops into the Crimean region of Ukraine, it is time for the US to once again conveniently forget the past and its own actions and discover international law and express outrage at the very idea of a big power sending its forces into another country. And the western media will follow its lead and the public will be none the wiser, except for those who do not suffer from long-term political memory loss syndrome, a serious affliction that is endemic among the western government and media elite.
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I watched the debate Sean Carroll and William Lane Craig held on Friday, February 21, 2014 on the topic of god and cosmology. I thought it was a good one and I will spend a few posts exploring some of the issues for the benefit of those people without a physics background who may have been a little fogged by some of the technical issues that came up.
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Since today is Oscar day, here is another post about films, albeit a downbeat one about the little noticed but important category of Visual Effects or VFX. I have written several times about the way that the special effects film industry in the US is being steadily destroyed. The reasons are fairly complicated but reader Gordon has sent me an excellent article by David Sirota that provides the clearest explanation for what’s going on.
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Tonight is the big night for films when the 2014 Academy Awards are given out. While I love films, I hate awards shows in general and find them incredibly boring and so will not watch. I have only seen Gravity from among the nine nominees for Best Picture and I reviewed it here. I thought it was good but not great.
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I wrote earlier about journalist Kevin Roose’s infiltration of a party thrown by Wall Street bigwigs belonging to a secretive group known as Kappa Beta Phi, where they had a bizarre initiation rite for new inductees where they schmoozed and spent most of their time making fun of all the people who have been adversely affected by their excesses.
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I was reading an article about Lyndon Johnson the other day and was surprised to learn that he was only 60 when he left office in 1969 and 64 when he died, four years later. I had always thought of Johnson as a really old guy, like Ronald Reagan.
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A US District Judge in Kentucky has become the latest to rule in favor of same sex marriage. But this ruling is of a different kind from those in other states that ruled that the state bans on same-sex marriage are unconstitutional, although the impact is the same.
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