Sean Hannity is the next sacrificial lamb to be slaughtered for ignoring my advice to avoid taking on Jon Stewart. These people never seem to learn that standup comedians with their own TV show and writers can always get the last devastating word.
[Read more…]
The latest media furor is that over Donald Sterling, the owner of the Los Angeles Clippers basketball team, who had been recorded scolding his girlfriend for consorting publicly with black people and bringing them to the games. Today the NBA commissioner Adam Silver banned him for life from basketball and fined him $2.5 million.
[Read more…]
We have seen many examples recently of religious people claiming that their religious freedoms are being violated because they cannot practice discrimination or they wish to avoid complying with laws that they object to. But now comes a curious reversal in which religious people are suing because they are being prevented from being inclusive and accepting
[Read more…]
Animal intelligence is a fascinating topic and there have been many attempts at studying it. Many of the individual studies look at one or other specific trait that we associate with intelligence in one species and the traits studied can differ from species to species, making general conclusions hard to arrive at. Ed Yong reports on a massive multinational study that looked across many species at one aspect of intelligence (self control) as demonstrated by two specific tasks. (You can read the paper on which his article is based here.)
[Read more…]
In order to try and build up buzz for the new show, HBO has out the entire first episode of Jon Olver’s new show Last Week Tonight on YouTube that you can see here. It seems to be similar to The Daily Show in style. To his credit, Oliver covered the Indian election currently going on, something ignored by much American media, and he excoriated them for it. He also covered the POM Wonderful v. Coca-Cola Supreme Court case in which there are no good guys.
[Read more…]
The state of religion in Britain is pretty confused. The country has an established state-supported church and funds parochial schools out of taxpayer funds while at the same time has very low levels of religiosity as measured by attendance in churches.
[Read more…]
As long-time readers know, I am a sucker for parodies and if there was one set of films that were just begging to be mocked in that way, it has to be the Matrix series. I saw only the first one and while the special effects were fun, the story made little sense and its earnest attempts at philosophizing were so risible that I decided not to see anymore. I tend to avoid sequels anyway.
[Read more…]
There is always some rationing involved in providing any service and health care is no exception. In the US, rationing is largely determined by the ability to pay because the limitations are largely set by the for-profit health insurance companies. If you are rich and/or have good employer based health insurance coverage, you get more and better services than if you are poor and do not have an employer who provides it. The Affordable Care Act tried to close that gap by increasing the affordability of health insurance for those with lower incomes.
[Read more…]