There is this curious belief by people who want to defend president Obama’s right to kill even US citizens abroad that US citizens no longer have the same rights under the US constitution once they leave the country. Charles Krauthammer is the latest person to make this claim, saying in a recent column that “Outside American soil, the Constitution does not rule”. [Read more…]
The late Irish comedian Dave Allen often had a very funny take on religion, delivered with nice timing and facial expressions. I posted this clip a long time ago but came across it again and enjoyed it so much that I decided to repost it for the benefit of those who have not seen it before. In just five minutes, he captures some of the major points of Christian doctrine, with its absurdities and contradictions. [Read more…]
Islam, like all religions, is full of contradictions. For example, some of its adherents are very sensitive to slights and in those countries like Myanmar and Sri Lanka, there have been clashes between the majority Buddhists and minority Muslims sometimes resulting in mosques being damaged or destroyed, provoking great anger.
But then we find that in Saudi Arabia, the government is destroying some of the oldest sections of the most important mosque in Mecca and other shrines in that city. [Read more…]
Naw Kham is the leader of a drug trafficking group suspected of a massacre of Chinese citizens who had been eluding Chinese authorities for a long time. Working with Laotian authorities, the Chinese authorities captured him when he went to that country, took him back to China, and he is now standing trial. What is interesting is that the Chinese government refrained from using drones to pursue him into the jungles of Myanmar and Laos and kill him even though they had intelligence pinpointing his location. They say that this was because they wanted to capture him alive and bring him to trial and also because of concerns that such an action would violate international law. [Read more…]
The reputation of Harvard University, especially the John F. Kennedy School of Public Policy, has been getting a severe hammering in the last month. We first had the Reinhart-Rogoff affair (see here and here) and now we have the Heritage-Richwine affair. [Read more…]
As an immigrant, I figured that probably a good way to understand to nature of my adopted country was to familiarize myself with its literature, especially the ones that are asserted to be classics, since the books that a society values are the ones that reveal its sense of identity. So naturally as part of that exploration I read The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, often referred to as the great American novel. [Read more…]
So Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s body has been finally buried in a small private cemetery in Virginia, which I hope brings to an end a ridiculous chapter in the Boston bombing tragedy.
Martha Mullen, a woman in Virginia, hearing about the difficulty the family and funeral director were having in finding a cemetery willing to accept it, felt it was her Christian duty to help and so quickly organized a local interfaith group in her area to have him interred in a small burial ground. Her action has resulted in the predictable vituperation from local officials, neighbors, and the online community, as if she had committed a heinous crime. [Read more…]
My knowledge of TV talking heads is somewhat scattershot, largely dependent on the video clips that come my way when I am surfing the web, usually in relation to news stories. I was vaguely familiar with the name Nancy Grace as a former lawyer as a legal analyst on cable news, but that was about it. So when in response to a post commenter Crudely Wrott said of her that she “seems to thrive on, no, display an actual need for, human suffering and callous, horrific crime. Like a vampire’s dependence on blood”, I thought it was perhaps a tad harsh. [Read more…]
Two years ago, I wrote about research that found that those people who tried to multitask (i.e., switch rapidly between different cognitive tasks) were highly inefficient in procession information when compared to those who did the same work sequentially. They suffered in all three major areas that would be necessary to multitask: the ability to filter (i.e., to detect irrelevancy so as to be able to quickly distinguish between those things that are important and those that are not), the rapidity with which they could switch from one task to the next, and the ability to sort and organize the information in the brain so as to keep track of the results of their different tasks. [Read more…]
The Democratic and Republican political parties are quite similar in that they carefully shape their message to appeal to blocs of voters, trying to encompass as many segments as they can to cobble together a majority, while both remain staunchly pro-oligarchy. This strategy required them to pay at least lip-service to the needs of the non-oligarchic population. [Read more…]