We have lived on the same street for nearly 25 years. When we moved in our children were in pre-school and kindergarten. As time went by, they and the other children on the street grew up and moved on as we became the old-timers, and new younger families moved in with their own little children. [Read more…]
Apparently fearful that NSA employees might face critical comments and displeasure over the work they do from the families and friends when they got together over the Thanksgiving holidays, some higher ups at the NSA thoughtfully provided them with a set of talking points on how to defend working for an organization that has received such a black eye. [Read more…]
I have been writing about the travails experienced by wait staff. Here Rowan Atkinson takes on the role of a server at an Indian restaurant in the UK having to deal with a bunch of drunken football fans. [Read more…]
Bloomberg news has been having a conflict with the Chinese government after it ran a series of stories about the wealth of senior Chinese government officials. In seeming retaliation for this, a British reporter for Bloomberg was not allowed to attend a press conference with British prime minister David Cameron and his Chinese counterpart in Beijing yesterday. [Read more…]
One of the perennial problems that men face is that of back splash when using urinals. A group of physicists have tackled this problem and studied how to do it so that there is minimal splashing. Using high-speed cameras and nozzles to mimic various angles and speeds, they have found the optimum method. They have now presented their results. [Read more…]
When it comes to Christian heresies, right wing Christians think that they are blameless and it is only those permissive left-wingers who support progressive causes who are deviating from orthodoxy. But Chris Hedges, a progressive journalist who is also a Christian and studied for three years at Harvard Divinity school early in life, argues that the opposite is true, and that is the Christian right who are the true heretics. [Read more…]
Ralph Nader has come up with a list of 21 reasons why the Canadian health care system is better than the one that the US has. It is pretty good. Here are just two items. [Read more…]
There is a very good reason why political parties should keep their distance from religious institutions. The former need to be able to adapt to changing social values and new political realities while the latter, locked in as they are to doctrines that are supposedly god given and unchanging, tend to be unable to evolve so easily. So if by a fortuitous set of circumstances, the values of major organized religions and a political party coincide, that may result in short term electoral success for the party but it would be mistake for the party to identify itself too strongly with the values of the religions because at some point the paths will inevitably diverge because social realities change faster than religious doctrines. [Read more…]
British comedians John Bird and John Fortune discuss the new media landscape that seems to be passing them by and wonder what they should do about it. And in the process, deliver their usual insightful critiques about the nature of current society. [Read more…]
Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York is perhaps the most prominent Catholic cleric in the US, a favorite of the media, even buddies with Stephen Colbert. In a recent interview, he tries to explain why the Catholic church is not anti-gay and suggests that this is largely a problem of marketing, that advocates of same-sex marriage have managed to pull the public relations wool over the eyes of the public to make them seem like they are the ones on the side of history and painting the church in a bad light. [Read more…]