Prayer at government functions-4: The role of history and tradition

Justice Hugo Black’s majority opinion in Everson v. Board of Education laying out the neutrality requirement that governments needed to comply with when it came to religion (that I summarized in part 3) basically said that the government had to be strictly neutral between religious sects and also between religion and non-religion. That latter requirement has been particularly difficult to implement without requiring the government to not have anything to do with religion at all and over time we have seen a steady weakening of the resolve to implement it. [Read more…]

New wild and baseless allegations about Snowden

I mentioned before how Republican Mike Rogers and Democrat Diane Feinstein, heads of the intelligence committees in the House of Representatives and the Senate respectively, are two of the most ardent supporters of the national security state and its coercive apparatus. When it comes to supporting authoritarianism, there is no partisan gridlock because both of them work as a single team. As I predicted yesterday, both are already indicating reluctance about even president Obama’s limited reforms of the NSA. [Read more…]

The ethics of blog advertising

You will have noticed that there are ads on this blog. The people who run the FreethoughtBlogs site have contracts with various agencies to place the ads and when people click on the ads, it generates a small amount of money for the network that is then distributed to the various bloggers. The ads that appear are based on some sort of algorithm that looks at the content of the page as well as the browsing and search engine queries history of the person viewing the page. So two people viewing the same page at the same time may well see different ads. [Read more…]

Health care costs and the ACA

Steven Brill has an article in Time describing how some of the very people who would benefit most from the Affordable Care Act have been misled by the virulent anti-Obamacare campaign to think that it is a terrible program and would do nothing for them. He also highlights the way that hospital monopolies and the reluctance of people to change providers prevent a truly competitive system from being created that would lower costs. [Read more…]

Obama’s speech on government spying

President Obama gave an eagerly anticipated speech yesterday outlining his plans for the reform of the NSA. You can see the speech and read the transcript here. While the initial quick reactions amongst the punditry were mixed, more careful reading of his words reveal (as usual) that there is less than meets the eye. It is once again vintage Obama, using his skill with words to make the unacceptable palatable. [Read more…]

Extraterrestrial life may be more likely than we thought

The only planet on which we know for sure that life exists is Earth. Even though this gives us just a sample of one, it is tempting to think that conditions here must be close to the ideal for life to emerge and that if there are other planets on which life exists, they must be Earth-like in terms of size and occupying the so-called ‘stellar habitable zone’ (SHZ) from its star so that the temperature range is similar to ours. [Read more…]

Mixed news out of Uganda

The president of Uganda Yoweri Museveni has decided not to sign a controversial bill that the parliament passed that called for life imprisonment for gays. There had been worldwide protests against the bill (earlier versions of it had called for the death penalty for homosexual acts) and although he claimed that this had not influenced him, he had warned legislators of serious damage to the country’s international relations if the law passed. [Read more…]