Let’s not forget the other war within the US

With all the focus on foreign wars, let’s not forget another vicious war that is being waged in the US and that is the war on the poor. The Republicans in the US Congress are proposing to cut funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) program (the one that used to be called ‘food stamps’) by $40 billion. These disgusting people, who think that raising the taxes of the immensely wealthy by even the slightest amount is a travesty of justice, think that we need to reduce aid to those people who are already struggling mightily to just survive. [Read more…]

Political activity at CWRU

On my way across the campus earlier today for a meeting, I saw that a big (roughly 4ft x 16ft) yellow board had been set up in front of the library asking people to write what they thought about a US war with Syria. There were a mix of comments, with those opposed slightly outnumbering those who were either ambivalent or in favor of direct US intervention. I noticed that the board had been put up by the student group Young Americans for Liberty (YAL), a libertarian counterweight to the more establishment conservative Republican Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) which seems to be dormant. (Warning: Audio may begin upon clicking. I hate it when they do that.) [Read more…]

What are the reasons for the push for attacking Syria?

The US government says that its goal is to not to overthrow the Syrian government militarily, something it could do easily if it were not for overwhelming public opinion against such a move. It also says that it is not allied with the Syrian rebels, an understandable public distancing since some reports indicate that about half of that motley group consists of extremely undesirable elements, including violently anti-US groups. [Read more…]

Another way how life may have begun

Religion thrives on mysteries, those things that seem so inexplicable that we do not know how to even begin investigating them, what questions to ask, and what tools to use to study them. We are tempted to just throw up our hands. Puzzles, on the other hand, are those things for which we do not as yet have answers but do know what questions to ask, have hypotheses about what might be going on, and can investigate systematically. [Read more…]