Dwight Bashir, who is Deputy Director for Policy and Research at the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) discusses the 2013 annual report released by his office that looks at the state of religious freedom across the world. [Read more…]
As police release more and more information on the decade-long captivity of the three women in Cleveland, the story has, as was feared, got uglier and uglier. I cannot bear to read the stories beyond the headlines, except to wonder yet again what it says about us that such a thing could happen for so long under our very noses. I am a believer of minding one’s own business but have we gone too far in that direction, and as a consequence now tend to ignore signs of trouble for fear of being seen as nosy and interfering in the lives of our neighbors? [Read more…]
The problem of the big banks is becoming acute, as was made clear by Neil Barofsky in his excellent book Bailout: How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street that I reviewed here. While having banks that are too big to jail makes a mockery of the legal system by inviting corruption, there is another reason that they are bad and that is because when some banks are perceived as too big to fail/jail, then they are being implicitly guaranteed by the US government, that it will step in and rescue them if they get in trouble. That means that people feel as safe lending money to them as they feel with buying US Treasury bonds and this carries with it real costs. [Read more…]
Via Mark Frauenfelder, here is civil rights and criminal defense attorney Harvey Silverglate explaining why you should never talk to the FBI without a lawyer present AND a tape recorder running.
For those of you in the Cleveland area who are doing nothing important this evening, I will be giving a talk at 7:00 pm today May 8, 2013 to the Northeast Ohio Center for Inquiry on the topic The ‘God’ Particle:The reality behind the hype over the search for the Higgs boson.
It will be at the Mayfield Library, 500 S.O.M. Center Rd., Mayfield Village.
Economist Jeffrey Sachs is professor of Health Policy and Management and Director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University. He used to be one of your standard establishment types. As recently as 2006, he wrote a book The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time that I read in which he promoted the neoliberal ideology of the policies that developing countries should adopt. He was a major player on the international scene, a widely sought-after and quoted advisor to governments, the World Bank, the IMF, and the like. [Read more…]
So that is not the set up for a joke but just a way of introducing the idea that in 2010, current pope Francis (then cardinal Mario Bergoglio) co-authored with rabbi Abraham Skorka, an Argentine biophysicist and rector of the Latin American Rabbinical Seminary in Buenos Aires, a book titled On Heaven and Earth. In the absence of a significant public record, this book has become a valuable source of information for people trying to figure out the pope’s views on the major issues confronting the Catholic church and the world. This book will become available in English in the US on April 30. [Read more…]
The HBO comedy series Veep is pretty funny. The first season of eight episodes is out on Netflix and I watched it over two weekends. The backstory is that Selina Meyer is a US senator who tried and failed to get her party’s nomination for the presidency, then accepted the role of running mate and became vice-president. She finds that in the world of Washington politics, she now has far less clout than when she was a senator, reduced to making human interest appearances at kindergartens and yoghurt stores and the like. She has all the trappings of power (massive security detail and six limousine motorcades wherever she goes) but not the reality and the show deals with her frustration and insecurity at being deliberately excluded from the really important decision-making processes. [Read more…]
Although everything I know about it is based on information that I read in the media and have no special insight, I feel obliged to comment on the latest bizarre case that has emerged in Cleveland, since I live here.
Three unrelated women separately disappeared in 2002, 2003, and 2004 when they were aged 19, 16, and 14 respectively. (You can read profiles of the three women here.) There were intense searches for the two younger women, less so for the oldest who some thought had run away on her own. When the searches failed, hope that they were alive also faded. [Read more…]
The discussion in the comments following my post about the difficulty of finding a place to bury Tamarlan Tsarnaev raised some interesting issues. In that case, cremation was not considered an option since the family wanted to have a Muslim burial for him and the question was raised as to why they should have the final say. [Read more…]