A new mission for Orly Taitz

As regular readers of this blog know, I am a huge fan of Orly Taitz, that devoted seeker of truth who has made it her life’s work to expose the fact that Barack Obama is not a natural-born citizen of the US because he was born in Kenya and his father was not a US citizen. The former is disputed but Orly says that that is not necessary since the latter fact alone is sufficient to make him ineligible to be president. Constitutional lawyers dispute this but whom are you going to trust as a better judge of the constitution, some smarty-pants scholars or someone who is a triple threat, not merely a lawyer but also a dentist and a real estate agent? [Read more…]

Some positive developments in China

There are some interesting developments in China. Andrew Stokols says that China’s LGBT community has made great strides in recent decades.

China decriminalized homosexuality in 1997, even before the U.S. removed all anti-sodomy laws in certain states. But today, there are no formal laws to prevent discrimination against LGBT Chinese, especially in the workplace. Since China’s ministry removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders in 2001, government policy and public opinion has also gradually shifted. Public health ministries have been targeting gay bars with public awareness campaigns advocating safe-sex and HIV-testing. But generally, LGBT Chinese now fall into an uncomfortably grey area: no longer directly harassed, but also ignored.

[Read more…]

Latin America tells US “Hands off Venezuela”

The US hated Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez with a passion and supported an attempted coup against him in 2002 that was foiled. When he died recently, the US was openly cheering for the opposition leader in the election to replace him. When Chavez’s successor Nicolas Maduro won the April 15 election with a surprisingly narrow margin of just 1.6%, hopes were raised in the US that the result might be overturned and the US-backed candidate Henrique Capriles become leader. The US media repeatedly dwelt on supposed irregularities in the elections even though former US president Jimmy Carter has said in September 2012 that of the 92 elections he has monitored, the “election process in Venezuela is the best in the world”. [Read more…]

Fear of feminism

During much of the 20th century, many people bore the label of feminism proudly, as the movement for gender equality became seen as an important struggle that we should all support. But for some reason, the label seems to have fallen into some disfavor recently, with even people who strongly believe in the goals of the feminist movement shying away from calling themselves that. [Read more…]

The Higgs Story-Part 20: Concluding thoughts (and bibliography)

It is time to wrap up what turned out to be a much longer series of posts on the Higgs than I anticipated when I started it, probably with a lot more information than readers wanted to know! (For previous posts in this series, click on the Higgs folder just below the blog post title.)

The story of the detection of the Higgs is a prime example of what Thomas Kuhn described as ‘normal science’ in his classic work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). He said that most of the time, scientists are not seeking novelty but instead are carefully looking for things in which almost everything is known and anticipated, except for a few minor details. In the case of the Higgs, experimenters knew almost everything about it except its mass, and even then we had some idea of the possible range of values. It should not be surprising that the final confirmation comes as somewhat of an anti-climax. [Read more…]

What our ancestors may have looked like

The so-called ‘Cambrian explosion’ that occurred 500-600 million years ago saw the appearance in the fossil record of an extraordinarily wide diversity of life forms. Whether there was a sudden flurry of evolutionary advances at the time or whether that time marked the beginning of animal bodies that were fossilizable and so gave the illusion of an explosion of life forms is not clear. The suspicions are that it was the latter. [Read more…]