Owners of dogs don’t need much convincing to believe that their pets can sense their moods and respond accordingly. But now scientists have done something quite remarkable and that is to train dogs to lie so still that their brains can be studied in an MRI machine and their response to emotionally loaded sounds analyzed and compared to those of human subjects.
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Glenn Greenwald has a new book No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the US Surveillance State that will be out tomorrow about his involvement with the Edward Snowden revelations. In one chapter that has been excerpted in the Guardian, he describes the hectic day that Snowden’s identity was revealed and the cat-and-mouse game they had to play to keep his location in Hong Kong secret, and the few days immediately before and after. Although I have been following this story closely, this still was a gripping read.
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The bishop of the Cleveland diocese has issued a letter outlining the terms of the contract that all elementary teachers at more than 100 elementary schools must sign. The letter explicitly spells out its “morality clause” in detail, giving a long list of activities teachers must agree to avoid, even outside of school, or they will lose their jobs. The church is essentially telling teachers that they have jurisdiction over their entire lives.
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Some of the best segments on The Daily Show are when host Jon Stewart talks to ‘Senior Black Correspondent’ Larry Wilmore about current issues involving race. Those chats are both funny and provide pretty good insight into how America deals with race.
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Federal courts had already declined to rule that the inclusion of the phrase ‘under God’ in the Pledge of Allegiance is unconstitutional largely on the basis that they had earlier ruled that no one could be forced to say the Pledge and thus saying it was voluntary. A new strategy had sought to eliminate it by appealing to state constitutions, with cases in Massachusetts and New Jersey already underway and others pending in other states.
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In a comment, Bryan informs me that yet another child of Shirley Phelps-Roper, the daughter of the late Fred Phelps, has defected from the Westboro Baptist Church that Phelps founded, joining three of his siblings in exile. Six siblings still remain in the WBC.
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The legal overturning of bans against same-sex marriage is penetrating even the deep South as a Circuit Court judge in Arkansas, in a brief but moving opinion yesterday ruled that the state’s ban passed in 2004 is unconstitutional under both the federal and state constitutions.
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Even those of us who recognize that cyclists are doing the Earth a service by not driving cars, are more vulnerable than people in cars, and try to be considerate of them on the road, cannot help but feel a pang of irritation when they don’t obey the rules of the road such as stopping at stop signs or stop lights and then even if they do, sometimes going through an intersection even when the light is still red.
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People may recall in the 2008 presidential election the huge fuss that occurred when in a casual conversation with a voter, candidate Barack Obama made a vague statement to the effect we need to share the wealth. That voter was the infamous ‘Joe the Plumber’ who then had his fifteen minutes of fame as he became a right wing hero, a so-called common man who opposed socialistic policies, although Obama is far from being a socialist as any rational person would concede.
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We know that religious people worry about getting into heaven when they die. But what does one do when there are so many different religions, each with its own prescription for how to get there? Edward Current is worried about this.
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