I have left instructions that when I die I am to be cremated in the cheapest container allowed by law, a cardboard box if possible. Wasting money on a fancy coffin seems ridiculous. But there is a opposite trend in which people spend enormous amounts of money on the dead, which seems pointless since they are, after all, dead and won’t appreciate the gesture by their relatives. [Read more…]
Anyone paying any attention knows that news reporting on TV is being steadily replaced by groups of talking heads discussing events. It costs a lot less to invite a few people to a studio to shoot the breeze about current events than to have actual reporters going deep into stories. [Read more…]
To be eligible to be president of the US, one must meet the ‘natural born citizen’ constitutional requirement of Article II, Section 1. It is accepted that if one is born in the US, then this status is automatically conferred on you. This is why the birthers are so desperate to show that Obama’s birth occurred elsewhere. [Read more…]
I wrote recently about religious people getting freaked out the introduction of yoga in the elementary schools of a California school district because of its associations with non-Christian religions such as Hinduism. [Read more…]
The ability of rich people to convince ordinary people to go against their own interests to benefit the wealthy is quite extraordinary. It seems like all you have to do is appeal to dark conspiracies and xenophobia and significant numbers of people, even above the 27% crazification factor, will sign up for your cause. In this episode of the The Daily Show, Al Madrigal examines the strange case of the proposed new bridge to be built between Detroit and Windsor, Canada. [Read more…]
