It used to be that Protestants and Catholics were at loggerheads over various doctrinal issues. It is hard to imagine that in the early days of the American republic there was deep hostility towards and prejudice against Catholics, with some even arguing against them receiving full citizenship because their allegiance to the pope made their loyalty to the new nation suspect. [Read more…]
Nancy Pelosi is the Democratic politician that conservatives love to hate. She is painted as the San Francisco liberal who stands for everything they despise. And she is also the darling of ‘Democratic liberals’, that group of people who support liberal issues as long as their party supports it. But in reality she is just another political apparatchik in the service of power. [Read more…]
Xeni Jardin reports that the press covering the final arguments yesterday at the ‘trial’ (i.e., which is the name that the Obama administration gives to the farcical proceedings presided over by a military judge who has been clearly hostile to Bradley Manning) are being intimidated by heavily-armed military police looking over their shoulders as they type, forbidding the use of Twitter, shutting down internet service, forbidding the use of the internet when it is up, etc. [Read more…]
The plight of many young girls in parts of the world is horrendous, ranging all the way from being denied equal access to education to suffering genital mutilation and being forced to marry older men. In a report, Human Rights Watch says that Yemen is a country in which child marraige is common because here is no legal minimum age and girls as young as eight are married off, denying them the right to a childhood and education, and often suffering serious abuse. [Read more…]
I am not a big fan of Obamacare, seeing it as needlessly complicated and unwieldy and a boon to the rapacious and parasitic health insurance industries. I would have much preferred a government-administered single payer system, such as expanding Medicare to cover everyone, not just the elderly. But Obamacare is better than what we have now if for no other reason than many more people, especially the poor, will get some health care coverage. But in the latest example of the right-wingers going nuts, they have started a campaign to urge people without health insurance to not to buy even the subsidized coverage that the Obamacare plan’s individual mandate offers. [Read more…]
A US District Court judge has ordered a North Carolina county government to stop having an opening prayer at its official meetings.
These prayers were not the usual generic appeals to a higher power. They were pretty much over the top in terms of its overt Christianity, referring to the virgin birth, the resurrection, and that salvation was only through Jesus.
Recall that the US Supreme court has already agreed to hear a case during its 2013-2014 term about the constitutionality of opening prayers at the Greece, NY city council meetings. I discussed the history of such opening prayers, the defining 1983 case Marsh v. Chambers, and the case of Greece here.
The coverage of the efforts by Edward Snowden to get asylum in the four Latin American countries (Bolivia, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Nicaragua) has been accompanied by much snickering among the chattering classes about the ‘irony’ that a whistleblower championing transparency would seek asylum in countries that supposedly do not themselves have much press freedom. This ignores the obvious fact, of course, that now that he has largely achieved his goal of blowing the lid off the US government’s actions, his primary task is to find a country that will not let him fall into the hands of the repressive Obama regime. [Read more…]
Given that over the past decade the US has refused to hand over to Russia about 20 people they have wanted for alleged crimes, I was wondering how long it would be before the Russians were pushed over the edge by being sanctimoniously told that they had an obligation to hand Edward Snowden to the US. It looks like that moment has arrived. [Read more…]
The amendment to the Defense Authorization bill that that I wrote about yesterday that sought to defund just one NSA program, its ability to collect bulk records of American’s telephone records, lost by a close vote of 217 to 205 with 12 not voting, despite massive White House lobbying to defeat it. [Read more…]
The Prisoner’s Dilemma problem provides endless fascination for students of human psychology and has served as the foundation for many studies using game theory. There are endless variations of the basic idea and here is one version of it.
The basic version goes like this. Two criminals are arrested, but police can’t convict either on the primary charge, so they plan to sentence them to a year in jail on a lesser charge. Each of the prisoners, who can’t communicate with each other, are given the option of testifying against their partner. If they testify, and their partner remains silent, the partner gets 3 years and they go free. If they both testify, both get two. If both remain silent, they each get one.