There has been a lot of angst in the US, generated by those who want to discredit anything that president Obama does, about whether exchanging US serviceman Bowe Bergdahl for five prisoners being held in Guantanamo was a good trade for the US. Cartoonist Ted Rall suggests that we should not ignore the possibility that a similar debate may be going on amongst the people in Afghanistan as to whether they were the ones who got a raw deal.
New research suggests domesticated camels arrived in the region now known as Israel between 930 and 900 BCE. What interested me about this result were two things: how the researchers narrowed the range of dates to just 30 years and the implications of this finding for people who treat the Bible as history book.
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If I had to choose one person from the world of film to spend an evening talking to, it would be no contest. Director John Waters would win by a mile. I can easily see myself spending hours talking to him. This is despite the fact that I had seen only one of his films before (Pecker (1998)) and didn’t think much of it. I had tended to steer clear of his films because I had heard that they sometimes devolved into gross-out humor which I avoid.
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In a post yesterday, I listed some of the people who have been so wrong about the decision to invade Iraq in 2003 that they should be completely shunned, even if they were not tried for crimes. But of course, I was dreaming. They are back all over the media, shifting blame away from their own culpability. Back in 2008, the Center for Public Integrity put out a report listing at least 935 false statements about the national security threat that members of the Bush administration made about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in the two years following September 11, 2001.
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Thanks to Edward Snowden, we now know that the NSA and the US government have used every linguistic contortion, legal loophole and, when those failed to meet their needs, outright breaking of laws in order to achieve its ultimate goal of sweeping up all the communications on the planet, and then lying about it.
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In the last year, ever since the US Supreme Court decision in United States v. Windsor last summer, advocates for the legalization of same-sex marriage have won one victory after another in federal and state courts. But the real test will come when the Appeals Courts around the country rule on the appeals against the lower court verdicts.
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Thanks to reader Marcus Ranum, I learned that the Washington football team has lost trademark protection for the name ‘Redskins’ because the term is disparaging to American Indians. The decision was handed down by the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board.
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First the bad news about the upcoming debate with Joe Puckett where I will be affirming the proposition ‘God Does Not Exist’: Plans for livestreaming the event fell through. So if you want to see it live, you will have to come to Northwest Church of Christ, 3904 38th Street NW, Canton, OH on Saturday, June 21, 2104 at 6:00 pm. The good news is that the entire debate will be posted later on YouTube.
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Jon Oliver had a great bit on why the Washington football team should change its racist name. The clip is well worth watching and includes a powerful commercial that was made to illustrate why the name is so offensive. Oliver also made his own commercial for the cause.
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I found this news report interesting. It says that in a study done with having purported students send out resumes for jobs, those who mentioned having been involved in some sort of religious activities resulted in them being less likely to receive a response.
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