Yesterday President Francois Hollande of France signed the same-sex marriage and same-sex adoption legislation into law making it the 14th country to do so, after the Constitutional Court rejected attempts by opponents to stop it. The court ruled, reasonably enough, that it “did not run contrary to any constitutional principles”, nor did it infringe upon “basic rights or liberties or national sovereignty”. [Read more…]
The late great George Carlin tells it like it is. (Language advisory)
The Jason Richwine dissertation, like its predecessor The Bell Curve in 1994, argued that IQ scores are a good proxy for intelligence, that intelligence has a substantial hereditary component and is thus largely immutable to change by external measures, and that high IQ levels are significant predictors of economic and social success in life while low levels predict a life of crime, unemployment, and general failure. According to Richwine, American Hispanics have average IQs around 89 (the overall average is fixed to be 100) and thus Hispanic immigrants will be a drain on society. (See here and here for earlier posts on this.) [Read more…]
He provides a pretty good summary and commentary of the issue that I have been writing about (see here and here).
The Colbert Report
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(This clip was aired on May 14, 2013. To get suggestions on how to view clips of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report outside the US, please see this earlier post.)
Mohamedou Ould Slahi is one of the Gunatanmo detainees condemned to indefinite detention. In 2005 he started writing his memoirs in English. His draft of 466 handwritten pages was completed a year later but the authorities suppressed it for six years. A redacted version has finally been published. Selected excerpts from the memoir can be here, prefaced by an introduction by Larry Siems who explains how Slahi ended up at Guantanamo. [Read more…]
There is nothing intrinsically wrong with partisanship. We often have to decide one way or the other on some issue and in the absence of any significant information that dictates how to choose, it is not unreasonable for people to align themselves with ‘their’ side, with those with whom they feel generally close to on most issues. [Read more…]
Minnesota is now the 12th state, following Delaware and Rhode Island, to legalize same-sex marriage, with its senate voting 37-30 in favor of it. The lower house had already passed it 75-59 and the governor signed it yesterday. It will take effect on August 1. [Read more…]
On Sunday, one or more gunmen started shooting into a crowd of people at a Mother’s Day parade in New Orleans. They have not yet been captured though video footage exists of one of them firing into the crowd and later police identified one person they are looking for. [Read more…]
When the Heritage Foundation published its report on the huge cost of the proposed immigration reform package, there was criticism of its methodology. (See here for the background on this story.) One was that the report’s estimated net cost to the economy of $6.3 trillion was arrived at by projecting over the next fifty years and no one takes seriously such long-term projections. Even numbers ten years out are highly iffy. The suspicion was that fifty years was chosen to get a large dollar number that was scary and/or because in the short run there would actually be net plus to the economy due to younger immigrant workers contributing more, while the costs would increase when they became older and reached retirement [Read more…]
Anna L. Pierre is running for mayor of the city of North Miami. Her campaign poster says that she has been endorsed by Jesus Christ. [Read more…]