3D printing is the hot new thing. I have not used one myself but a colleague of mine says that the cost of such things is dropping rapidly (you can now get one for less than $1000) and he has several in his lab because the cost of repairing the older, more expensive ones is now often greater than the cost of buying a newer and better one. He says that they come in extremely useful for creating customized items for his research. [Read more…]
Much of the stated opposition to raising the marginal tax rates on the top two percent of income-earners was that it would hurt ‘small businesses’, the presumed engine of economic growth. But the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities says that this gives a seriously distorted picture of who belongs in that category. [Read more…]
If you want a good source of news, check out The Real News Network, which, in order to maintain their independence, does not accept advertising, government, or corporate funding. They rely on donations. One of the people the network regularly features is Michael Ratner, the former head of the Center for Constitutional Rights and Julian Assange’s lawyer in America. He attended the Bradley Manning hearing at Fort Mead where the latter read his statement explaining what drove him to download the documents and give it over to WikiLeaks, and spoke about what he drew from it. [Read more…]
While not deep or demanding, this comedy touches on some serious issues and makes for enjoyable watching. It tells the story of seven aging English people each of whom is in the twilight of their lives and trying to come to terms with that brute fact. One has unresolved issues from his boyhood in India that he wants to settle before he dies, two are lonely and seek companionship, another feels useless and discarded after a lifetime spent working hard, a couple in a long loveless marriage sense that tensions are reaching breaking point, and a recent widow whose husband had made all the decisions in their lives now suddenly finds herself left to fend for herself in a modern technological world for which she is totally unprepared. [Read more…]
… a letter to the editor in the Plain Dealer yesterday complained about the disrespect shown to Catholics by the Non Sequitur cartoon strip by Wiley that had appeared the previous Wednesday. The letter began:
I thought the mass media were in agreement that insults based on race, nationality, ethnicity, sexual orientation or creed have no place in civil discourse. Apparently, the creator of the comic strip “Non Sequitur” believes the world’s 1.2 billion Roman Catholics don’t deserve such consideration.
An imposter dressed as a bishop tried to get into the meetings being held at the Vatican prior to the papal conclave. Using easily obtainable clothing such as a fedora hat and a purple winter scarf, he managed to look enough like a bishop to fool at least some people.
The role of religion in modern political life is a puzzle. God as an idea worth taking seriously is clearly on life support, at least as far as serious analysis goes. As Andrew Levine says, for a long time in the world of political analysts “the idea that the Creator of all there is would care about the political affairs of particular Homo sapiens, that He (always a He!) would favor some members of our paltry species over others, seemed too preposterous to take seriously” and that “it is hard to see how any part of the Sturm und Drang of modern politics could really be about God, no matter what some political actors do, say, or believe. If their self-representations belie what is plainly the case, they must be deceiving themselves.” [Read more…]
The so-called ‘Arab spring’ posed a bit of a dilemma for people around the world who value both nominal democracy (the right of people to elect their own governments) and as well as true democracy (where fundamental human rights and the rights of minorities and marginalized groups are also protected). [Read more…]
The Daily Show‘s Jason Jones blows the lid off the crime spree that is going on just north of us. [Read more…]
Kimberly Winston recounts the moving story of ‘Samya’, a young woman aged 20 in the US, who left her parents and her five siblings and fears that if her true identity were revealed, she might be killed by her family. Her crimes? “She rejected a marriage arranged by her father, who came to the U.S. from the Middle East when Samya was an infant. And perhaps more serious to her parents: She has become an atheist.” [Read more…]
