Once in a while I mosey over to the website The Thinking Housewife, to savor once more that old-time world where women stayed at home in order to better meet their husbands’ needs, with god looking benevolently over that tranquil scene. [Read more…]
I was stunned this morning to read that the government of Cyprus was going to immediately impose a one-time levy of 6.75 percent on deposits of less than 100,000 euros and 9.9 percent of more than that on the savings deposits of all Cypriots in order to receive $13 billion in bailout money from the European Central Bank to rescue the banks in Cyprus that were threatened by default. In other words, the money that the people of Cyprus had saved in their bank accounts was going to be used to bail out … the banks. [Read more…]
Some time ago I wrote about the tragic situation in which a school nurse would not let a student use his asthma inhaler, even though he had collapsed in front of her, because the school did not have a medical release form on file. I later discussed a study about how these kinds of situations arise when people see their roles as primarily that of rule enforcers, fearful of repercussions if they use their judgment to defy the rules. [Read more…]
I watched this film last evening and it was good fun. It stars Will Ferrell as the incumbent congressman of a North Carolina district who is expecting to run unopposed until a misstep by him suggests weakness and prompts two wealthy brothers (thinly disguised versions of the real life Koch brothers) to back someone who will be beholden to them and allow them to transfer their sweatshops in China back to the US so that they can save shipping costs and thus increase their profits. [Read more…]
The way the big banks have been getting away with their crimes is truly a scandal, with the white House, the Justice Department, and other federal agencies responsible for monitoring them either unwilling or unable to do anything about it. This leaves Congress as the only possible entity that can do something and senator Carl Levin (D-Michigan) has been almost single-handedly trying to bring some accountability. As we saw in the 2013 Frontline investigation The Untouchables and in the 2010 Academy Award winning documentary Inside Job, he used his powers as chair of the senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations to drag out of the top executives in the big banks information about how they manipulated the housing market and investor’s money in ways that impoverished the country while enriching themselves. [Read more…]
Some of you may have heard about the acrimonious exchange that occurred last year between David Albert and Lawrence Krauss. I did not write about it at that time but now there is an even more unfortunate sequel to that story. What follows is a brief summary of what happened earlier so that you can understand the recent development that I address at the end. [Read more…]
The transitive property says that if A beats B and B beats C, then one would expect A to beat C. This seems quite obviously true and we use it in some form all the time. It is true for the real numbers where we think of ‘beats’ as ‘is greater than’ but is this transitive property true for all meanings of ‘beats’? Via Cory Doctorow, I came across this video of something called ‘Grime Dice’ that not only violate the transitive property (which is surprising in itself) but do so in very interesting ways. [Read more…]
Ohio’s Republican senator Rob Portman has written an op-ed in today’s papers announcing that he is reversing his long-standing opposition to same-sex marriage (he also opposed gay people adopting children, was a co-sponsor of DOMA, and even supported a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage) and now supports it. The reason for his surprising move? The fact that his own son told him in February 2011 that he was gay. [Read more…]
In his appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Attorney General Eric Holder confessed publicly what has long been suspected, that the government has no intention of prosecuting the big banks and putting their top executives in jail even for egregious crimes because they think they are too big to fail. [Read more…]
In yesterday’s Part 1 of this three-part series, I wrote about how in debating sophisticated religious people, atheists have the disadvantage in that science impacts religion in many ways and that atheists, even if they are scientists, cannot know about all developments everywhere and so can be blindsided by arguments based on science that they have little knowledge about. I have labeled this the ‘Craig Con’, in contrast to the older and cruder ‘Gish Gallop’, because some theologians are now more sophisticated than the ones who came before and use information from cutting-edge science to give the same old and tired arguments for god a patina of freshness and credibility. William Lane Craig is the smoothest practitioner of this debating tactic, though by no means the only one. [Read more…]