Samantha Bee of The Daily Show interviews various people about raising the minimum wage. The rich person she speaks to displays the arrogance, callousness, and cluelessness that have come to typify that class. These people seem to have no sense of the growing anger against them. They seem to feel secure that the power of the state can protect them. They don’t seem to realize that all societies, even the US, have a breaking point. [Read more…]
The Pew Research Center has released the results of a new survey that finds that fewer Americans self-identify as middle class. This is disturbing but not for the obvious reasons.
There has been a long running saga in Ohio concerning a science teacher named John Freshwater who was teaching creationism and propagating Christianity in other ways in his eighth grade science classes in a semi-rural community in central Ohio named Mount Vernon. He kept Bibles on his desk and posters of the Ten Commandments and other Christian messages hung on the walls. [Read more…]
I reported earlier about a federal judge who had slapped down the government over the way they abused their no-fly lists to harass people who had little or no recourse, because they were not told they were on the list or how they could get off it. [Read more…]
Life is complex. This is true not just in a rhetorical sense but also biologically in that living things are complicated arrangements of multicellular life. So how did this complexity arise? The most common explanation given is that it is a natural outgrowth of natural selection and that once a self-replicating molecule formed, the selection pressures would be such that given sufficient time multicellular life would be an almost inevitable consequence, though the exact form it would take would depend on many contingencies. [Read more…]
In the talk given on Monday by Robert McChesney, a professor of communications at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign about his new book (co-authored with John Nicholls) titled Dollarocracy: How the Money-and-Media Election Complex is Destroying America, he spoke about the race against the clock that is driving recent political developments. [Read more…]
Fox News blowhard Sean Hannity took umbrage with some remarks made by New York state governor Andrew Cuomo that Hannity interpreted to mean that the governor wanted extreme conservatives to leave the state. We have seen a spate of rich people recently whining about how people are being mean to them and they think it is all very unfair. Tom Perkins is one of the most extreme of the lot, saying that criticisms of the wealthy are similar to Nazi Germany but he is by no means alone. [Read more…]
I have written about the Religious Freedom and Restoration Act (RFRA) of 1993 which has been increasingly used by religious groups to avoid conforming to government requirements and mandates. [Read more…]
Via David Pescovitz I came across this video of Zach King seems to be a master of video trickery. The Independent newspaper has a profile of King. [Read more…]
In reading about Pete Seeger on the web yesterday, I came across his testimony when he was hauled up before the House Un-American Affairs Committee in August 1955. This was the infamous Congressional committee that would order people to appear before them and quiz them about their political affiliations. If the people were willing to ‘prove their loyalty’ by renouncing their prior beliefs and associations and naming other people as being either Communists or fellow travellers or sympathizers, they would get lenient treatment. But if they did not, they would be accused of being pro-Communist. The committee targeted members of the entertainment industry, seeing them as being influential in shaping public opinion. Pete Seeger and his group The Weavers were blacklisted in the early 1950s. [Read more…]
