On Thursday, May 15, fast food workers in 150 US cities and in 33 countries are going on strike. In the US, they are calling for a minimum wage of $15 per hour and to be able to form unions without retaliation.
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According to a report of the Inter-Parliamentary Union, the nation that has the largest percentage of women in the lower or single house of the legislative system is Rwanda, where women account for 64% of the members of parliament, followed by Andorra (50%) and Cuba (49%).
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Investigative journalist Gareth Porter has come out with a new book titled Manufactured Crisis, The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare and he was interviewed about it by Andrew Cockburn for Harper’s magazine.
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Remember what happened after the Oklahoma state legislature allowed the erection of a monument to the Ten Commandments on the grounds of the state capital? Both Hindu and Satanic groups said they wanted their monuments on the grounds too.
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Because my friends and family know that I enjoy good ones and make bad ones, they periodically send me collections of them. Here is one set I received recently:
How does Moses make his tea? Hebrews it….
Venison for dinner again? Oh deer!
A cartoonist was found dead in his home. Details are sketchy.
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Scientists have created a computer simulation that produces a realistic picture of the evolution of the universe, starting from just after the Big Bang to the present, compressing the 13.7 billion years into just over two minutes.
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As anyone could have predicted, the decision by the US Supreme Court that ceremonial prayers at the beginning of meetings of the Greece Town Board were constitutional will not settle things. Rather than forbidding such prayers altogether (my preferred option and one that I think is not only constitutional but also practical in that it removes any ambiguity), the majority’s reasoning and verdict was based on the detailed facts of that case and only further muddied the waters. It will inevitably result in other cases with slightly different facts being the subject of future litigation.
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The thought of death is frightening to many. Our sense of our own existence is so strong that the idea of non-existence can have an unsettling effect, although we know in our rational minds that we have to die sometime and that we were non-existent before we were born so it would not be a new experience (or more appropriately non-experience) for us. When we go to sleep too we are to some extent non-existent in that we become oblivious to the world around us but that does not seem to bother us.
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The Daily Show sends out Jordan Klepper to see how far Republican politicians can go to the right before they fall off the edge.
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The Hispanic population is often perceived as overwhelmingly Catholic but a new Pew survey finds that to be an increasingly false perception, with only about 55% of them identifying themselves as such, down from 67% in 2010, a remarkable drop of 12% in just four years. “About 22% are Protestant (including 16% who describe themselves as born-again or evangelical) and 18% are religiously unaffiliated.”
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