Another interesting RFRA case

This looks like Religious Freedom Restoration Act day on this blog because the US Supreme Court acted today in another case involving RFRA.

Last year’s major case involving the Affordable Care Act resulted in the US Supreme Court upholding the individual mandate that requires every individual to purchase health insurance. But there is another mandate in the law called the employer mandate that requires companies that have more than 50 employees to provide affordable health care to their employees. That was not part of last year’s case. [Read more…]

RFRA and religious freedom

In the US, legal challenges on the role of religion in public life are governed by the section of the First Amendment to the US Constitution that says “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”. It is the first part, known as the Establishment Clause, that has been in the news recently and comes into play whenever the government takes any action that leads to suspicions that it is endorsing any or all religions. The second Free Exercise clause basically guarantees that people should be free to practice their religion as they see fit. [Read more…]

Are airplanes germ warehouses?

I hate traveling by plane for many reasons, mainly because of the cramped seats, the security theater one has to go through, and so on, though the convenience of getting to one’s destination so much more quickly usually outweighs the negative elements. I have a rule of thumb that says that if traveling by car to a destination takes six hours or less, or if there is no time constraint for even longer journeys, I prefer to drive. [Read more…]

How physics helps me identify and ignore woo

I feel that I have obtained a huge benefit from having studied physics, especially quantum physics. On the one hand, it has given me a sense of wonder and awe at how the laws of nature work to produce the universe we occupy. The theories are really quite beautiful, the experimental methods used to study them incredibly ingenious, and the implications quite profound. [Read more…]

COINTELPRO all over again

It is becoming increasingly apparent that the massive NSA spying program has less to do with combating terrorism and is instead just a modern and highly sophisticated version of COINTELPRO (COounter INTELligence PROgram), the secret spying network the FBI set up in 1956 to supposedly combat the threat of Communism but expanded to infiltrate, monitor, subvert, and destroy those organizations whose activists were simply engaged in actions that the US government did not like. Rising public protests against the Vietnam war and social and economic injustice was something that the government was determined to suppress. [Read more…]