The Indian subcontinent is going through turbulent times as religious extremists try to demand that religious dogma drive each country’s legal system and social mores. Pakistan has been subjected to vicioius blasphemy laws. India has seen the rise of Hindu nationalists and Hindu-Muslim clashes, Sri Lanka has seen militant Buddhists, led by monks, attack ethnic and religious minorities, most recently the Muslims. [Read more…]
US presidents love to look tough. But why don’t they ever realize that it is always a mistake to publicly draw lines in the sand? It makes you look strong at that moment but boxes you in later, because political reality is always more complicated and requires flexibility and nuance in dealing with it. In the case of Syria, president Obama made the mistake nine months ago in a press conference of declaring that if the Syrian government used chemical weapons, they would be crossing a ‘red line’, leaving unsaid what he would do in response. [Read more…]
[UPDATE on May 9, 2013: He has finally been buried in an undisclosed location, bringing this shameful chapter to a close.]
In an odd sequel to the Boston bombing, the family of Tamerlan Tsarnaev wants him to be buried according to Muslim custom but it turns out that cemeteries are refusing to allow the body to be buried in their plots. The funeral director Peter Stefan has tried four cemeteries in three different states and has been rejected by all of them. His family wants him to be buried in Massachusetts, where he lived the last decade. [Read more…]
When I wrote about the surprising level of opposition to the legalization of same-sex marriage in France, I mentioned that much of the antagonism there was due to the simultaneous legalization of adoptions by same-sex couples, and that this issue was causing more concern than marriage. [Read more…]
A few days ago I watched an excellent hour-long Peabody-winning documentary with the above title that tells the story of the lawsuit brought by Vashti McCollum. The daughter of freethinkers, she and her husband, who taught at the University of Illinois, were not religious and the family did not belong to any church or send their children to Sunday school, which made them anomalies in the conservative religious community of Champaign, Illinois that they lived in in 1945. [Read more…]
Evolution by natural selection says that those characteristics that enable organisms to survive and reproduce more than others will tend to end up dominating the population. In that model, organisms seek to propagate their genes as much as possible. Suicide as a biological instinct is clearly not advantageous and should be selected against and disappear over time. So what are we to make of some mice that seem to commit suicide by actually running towards cats and being killed and eaten by them? [Read more…]
A few days ago I wrote about the surprising discovery that Tea Party darling and Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz, now strongly hinting at a presidential run in 2016, was born in Canada to an American mother but a Cuban immigrant father who was not a US citizen. [Read more…]
The Daily Show turns its attention to how the US Congress can act fast when it wants to benefit itself. In this series of three short clips, the show looks at how quickly it moved to exempt the Federal Aviation Administration from the rules of the sequester so that they could recall air traffic controllers from their furloughs so that flight delays were eliminated just in time to let members of Congress go on their vacations. Meanwhile, much worthier programs where sequester cuts had harmed many people were left unchanged. [Read more…]
It used to be, at least beginning around the second half of the twentieth century, that people ran for president after having paid their dues by spending some time in major elected office, such as governor or member of the US House and Senate. There were just two exceptions. Dwight Eisenhower was one but he was a special case. Jimmy Carter was the other, becoming president after serving just one term as governor of Georgia. [Read more…]