The Higgs Story-Part 19: Nobel dilemmas

As soon as the discovery of the Higgs was announced in July 2012, there was immediate talk of who would get the seemingly inevitable Nobel prize for it, with some anticipating that it would be awarded even as soon as the same year. This did not happen and I personally did not expect it. For one thing, the Nobel committee is cautious and usually wants to wait until a discovery is totally nailed down before they honor it. Since the LHC has been shut down for a couple of years for upgrades, the corroborating evidence could take some time in coming, although further analysis of the data already taken indicates that the spin of the particle matches that expected of the Higgs. (For previous posts in this series, click on the Higgs folder just below the blog post title.) [Read more…]

Crashing the party

There is an interesting development in China where economic inequality has also exploded in recent years, making a mockery of the country’s official egalitarian philosophy. Ordinary people, fed up with this hypocrisy and the high-life being lived especially by Communist party officials, have taken to crashing lavish private parties hosted by officials and taking photographs and videos of the expensive food and drink and posting them online, enraging the public. [Read more…]

San Francisco’s Gay Pride organizers disinvite Bradley Manning

It was initially announced that Bradley Manning would be one of the honorary Grand Marshalls at San Francisco’s annual LGBT Pride parade on June 29-30, with Daniel Ellsberg standing in for him since Manning is still in jail. But there were protests and The Guardian has an article that says that the parade leadership summarily reversed course. [Read more…]

New book on Washington insider behaviors

Today is when the annual White House Correspondents Association dinner is held, when the cozy and incestuous relationship between the political and media class is on public display. The curtain that normally hides this and enables the media to portray itself as watchdogs of politicians is stripped away and we see that they are actually lap dogs, eager to be on good terms with those whom they are supposedly antagonistic towards. [Read more…]

We love the constitution except when it’s inconvenient

It looks like I was premature in giving the Justice Department credit for reading Dzhokhar Tsarnaev his Miranda rights. It appears that they questioned him for a long time before a judge insisted on reading him his rights on Monday. So once again, we are dependent on the judiciary to intervene to make sure the government does not violate the rights of people. (In a separate case, a federal judge is challenging the government’s claim to broad secrecy powers.) [Read more…]

For whom the government works

I gave an example earlier about how the so-called gridlocked Congress can move with lightning speed when it wants to, which is when it affects either them or those close to them. We see another example of this in the way that they tweaked the sequestration rules when elites are affected. When flights started getting delayed, Congress quickly passed legislation that allowed the FAA more flexibility with regard to air traffic controllers. [Read more…]

Catholic church determined to become irrelevant

It is well known that the Catholic church has a problem with its young people, many of whom see it as out of step with current views on sexuality. The church has locked itself into its dogma and that is unlikely to change anytime soon but you would think that it would realize that it needs to tread delicately in this area so as to avoid needlessly alienating people with high-handed actions. [Read more…]