Can the Noah story be made even worse?

When I wrote about the major Hollywood film Noah starring Russell Crowe as the arkmeister that is being released next month, I suggested that the filmmakers would have a tough time making Yahweh acceptable to the many religious people whom they need to buy tickets because there is no question that the story reveals him to be a monster. I said that I would be curious to see to what extent the filmmaker would go to sanitize Yahweh.
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Evangelicals try to escape responsibility for Uganda

The Ugandan president recently signed into law a bill passed by parliament that criminalizes homosexuality and imposes harsh penalties on homosexuals. This action was strongly urged by some American evangelicals who have taken their anti-gay hate message global, looking for countries that might be open to their message given that the people back home are increasingly rejecting it.
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Fake Obamacare victims

It is no secret that the Republican party and their Tea Party base hate the Affordable Care Act with a passion. The House of Republicans is soon expected to pass for the 50th time the repeal of the Act. In trying to drum up opposition, they have resorted to spreading stories about ordinary people who have been harmed by Obamacare by finding that they have to pay higher premiums and so forth, and running ads purportedly featuring such victims.
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Reflections on the Carroll-Craig debate-3: The back-and-forth

To follow up my earlier posts on the debate (see here and here), after the two main talks, we had two further talks by each that allowed for some back and forth, beginning at around the 1:04 mark (with an intermission between 1:27 and 1:35) and where the speakers repeated and reinforced their arguments and tried to rebut the other. There was some repetition, especially on the part of Craig. I will not go through it in order but summarize the main points.
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The Medicaid expansion horror show

There are lots of things to dislike about the Affordable Care Act. The one thing that is undoubtedly good is the expansion in the eligibility criteria for Medicaid (that along with Medicare is the closest thing the US has to a single-payer system) so that people who earned a little too much to qualify for it earlier but earn too little to get the subsidies could not get access to affordable health care.
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Crazy rumors about the Obamas

Brian Resnick has a roundup of all the crazy rumors that are eagerly and widely propagated in conservative circles. I suspect two causes for this absurdity. I think that the internet has enabled these crazy rumors to gain much wider currency than before. And the fact that Barack Obama is not white means that there is a solid core of racists who would like nothing better than to believe bad things about him.
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The Indian headshake

When I came to the US for graduate school, the teacher in my electromagnetism course in the first semester (who later became by thesis advisor and friend) was an excellent teacher who wanted us to understand a difficult subject and looked at us for cues as to whether we were following along as he proved various things on the board.
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