Retired Rear Admiral Barry C. Black is the 62nd Chaplain of the United States Senate, serving in that capacity since 2003. In his opening prayer last Friday, he delivered a blistering attack on the current state of affairs. [Read more…]
Thanks to this interminable and absurd government shut down and the possible debt ceiling breach, I have learned more about the functioning of government finances that I ever thought I would.
One of the interesting bits of trivia is that although I have been reporting that the current debt ceiling set on May 19, 2013 is $16.7 trillion, it turns out that the figure is more precise than that. The actual figure, believe it or not, is specified down to the last cent: $16,699,421,095,673.60 (Table III-C). [Read more…]
We can sometimes forget how much courage it takes for people in some other countries to be openly atheist and fight superstition. The murder of Narendra Dabholkar in India last month is a case in point. A physician by training, he was a simple man who tried to free Indians from the clutches of charlatans and god-men that plague that part of the world. He was gunned down by people on motorbikes as he walked along the road. [Read more…]
President Obama has been saying quite firmly that while he is not willing to negotiate over a clean continuing resolution to fund the government or over a clean resolution to raise the debt ceiling, that once those are passed, he is willing to negotiate over everything else. [Read more…]
The PBS Frontline program League of Denial says that traumatic brain injury can occur even from the normal give and take of playing football, even without any concussions. You can watch the program here. [Read more…]
Many people seem to be quite complacent about having the US’s NSA, the UK’s GCHQ, and other government agencies spy on people’s communications and compile dossiers on their lives and associates because they have been convinced that they are under serious threat and that such measures are necessary to keep them safe. [Read more…]
I have long felt that what people really want to believe in is an afterlife, not in a god so much. Belief in a god serves as a gateway to belief in an afterlife but if you asked people which they would prefer (a god but no afterlife or an afterlife and no god) I suspect that they would choose the latter by a landslide. (I explained my reasoning back in 2010.) [Read more…]
You may recall that during the run up to the 2012 election I referred to Sam Wang’s Princeton Election Consortium website a lot because I liked (even more than I did Nate Silver’s work) his statistical approach to dealing with all the polls and the way he translated all that data into easily understandable likelihoods for outcomes. [Read more…]
Stephen M. Walt says that the rhetoric being used against allowing Iran to have any nuclear capability is similar to what was said about China back in the 1960s when that nation was developing nuclear technology, right down to impugning its leaders as irrational crazy people who might go berserk and blow up the world if they were able to make a bomb. [Read more…]
As expected, this year’s Nobel prize in physics, announced today, was awarded for the discovery of the Higgs boson. The prize was awarded to two people, Francois Englert and Peter Higgs. As I said in one of my series of posts on the Higgs boson, the award of the prize was bound to raise hackles because five theorists had some claim to the discovery (there were six but Robert Brout died in 2011), as well the experimental groups that found the particle last year, not to mention CERN, the laboratory where the experiment was done. [Read more…]