The practice of snake handling as a test of faith is popular in certain rural Pentecostal churches in the US. There is even a TV series called Snake Salvation about this practice on the National Geographic channel. It is highly dangerous to handle poisonous snakes and this has resulted in some of the people being fatally bitten. [Read more…]
When it comes to war, we tend to count only those who are directly killed by weaponry. But wars kill many more than that because there are the deaths that occur indirectly as well, because of the destruction of the infrastructure, hospitals, water and electricity supplies, transportation, etc. A group of academics from University of Washington, Johns Hopkins University, Simon Fraser University, and Mustansiriya University joined to try and estimate the total number and they come up with the appalling total of 504,000. [Read more…]
Now that the US government has re-opened and the debt ceiling raised leaving untouched the Affordable Care Act, the ostensible trigger for the crisis, the nature of the settlement has prompted speculation as to whether we are going to have a repeat of this in a few months. The deal involves three deadlines: December 13 is when a bipartisan group of legislators from both the House of Representative and the Senate are supposed to come up with a new budget plan; January 15 is when the most recent continuing resolution ends; and February 7 is when the debt ceiling will need to be raised again. [Read more…]
I recently watched the film X-Men (2000) about a team of mutants each of whom have specialized superpowers, such as the ability to create turbulent weather or magnetic fields or shift into other shapes, and so on. This was one of the films recommended to me by readers as one of the better examples of Hugh Jackman’s acting skills, whom I had never seen act in a film before. [Read more…]
The mega-investment bank JP Morgan Chase has been at the end of repeated bad news. It just reported its first quarterly loss in ten years. What was interesting is that this was largely due to the bank having to set aside $9.2 billion in lawyers’ fees, which gives you some idea of the extent of the charges of wrongdoing that it has to defend itself against. [Read more…]
Halloween is coming up on October 31. It is not an occasion that I particularly care for and I did not encourage my own children to take part in it for many reasons. I don’t get the fascination with zombies and ghosts and the supernatural in general, and this holiday’s activities give them a patina of credibility that is unwarranted. I also don’t like the emphasis on gorging on candy. I especially don’t like the ‘trick or treat’ aspect, the underlying principle essentially consisting of going door to door, accosting strangers, and extorting candy from them, even if it is done in fun. [Read more…]
I have been writing regularly about the abusive behavior of TSA agents at US airports. But other countries are not exempt from this kind of behavior. This account is by a young woman who was subjected to humiliating and degrading treatment by the Israeli equivalent of the TSA at Ben Gurion airport, to the extent of having her breast and genital areas swabbed and having to give them her underwear because her bra was a ‘security threat’, all in the vicinity of a male security guard who smirked at her whenever he came into her direct presence. [Read more…]
Remember the stenographer Dianne Reidy who went off on a rant about the Freemasons and Jesus during the vote in the House of Representatives to end the shut down and raise the debt ceiling? I suggested that she had become unglued as a result of being forced to listen day after day to all the inane things that legislators were saying. [Read more…]