Kevin Drum describes what happened in the US Senate two days ago. The Republican party leadership clearly wanted to avoid another knock down, drag out, fight over raising the debt ceiling that so hurt them the previous times they have tried it. But the Tea Party wing has decided that raising the debt ceiling is the Greatest Evil Ever and was demanding that the party oppose it.
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I think the anonymous NFL people who were interviewed by Sports Illustrated and said that they thought that Michael Sam coming out as gay would make him less desirable for teams in the NFL draft because of the ‘controversy’ he would generate, must be regretting their words because they have been getting a beating over those remarks, by critics saying they showed how backward are the views of the NFL administrators, while players seem to be more accepting. [Read more…]
Via Machines Like Us, I came across this video of a crow (named 007) solving an extremely difficult puzzle. According to this article: [Read more…]
In the clip from the film Questioning Darwin, we saw how a creationist pastor said that if the Bible said that 2+2=5, he would believe that and work everything around that ‘truth’. He was speaking in hypothetical terms but he has a chance to prove his commitment because the Bible actually does say that the number pi is exactly 3. It would be interesting to see how he deals with that. [Read more…]
Someone I know said that a friend of his had spoken of penguins as being frightening creatures. He was puzzled by this and upon questioning him realized that he thought that penguins were large animals, roughly the size of an adult human. [Read more…]
We know that Charles Darwin slowly changed from being religious to agnostic as a result of his research into how species originated. In an interview, Antony Thomas, the 73-year old British filmmaker who produced the documentary Questioning Darwin that looked at the worldview of creationists, says that during the making of the film, he too changed his views from believer to agnostic. [Read more…]
The Establishment Clause requires the government to be neutral in matters of religion. But is the government required to be neutral on other issues? Clearly not, since the government can and should be able to advocate on behalf on one side of some issues, say the evils of drug use. This principle was established in the 1977 case Wooley v. Maynard (in which a New Hampshire resident objected to being forced to display the state motto “Live Free or Die” on his license plate) in which the court ruled that the state may advance an ideological message but this freedom of government speech is not without restrictions because the government cannot force others to be couriers or disseminators of its message. [Read more…]
Michael Sam is a highly-regarded college football player who was expected to be picked early in the NFL draft in April. Last week he announced that he was gay. He has received many supportive messages from teammates and fans but apparently there are fears that his prospects for the draft have dimmed because some teams are worried about the ‘controversy’ involved in having him on their team. [Read more…]
The organization Reporters Without Borders has released its 2014 World Press Freedom Index, its rankings of press freedoms around the globe and the US has plummeted 13 spots and is now at #46 out of 180 nations, sandwiched between Romania at #45 and just above Haiti at #47. Here is what the report says about why the US declined. [Read more…]