Senate votes unanimously against switching to chained CPI

In his search for a ‘grand bargain’ on the budget, president Obama has repeatedly signaled his willingness to cut earned benefits such as Social Security, a long-standing goal of the oligarchy. The way it is proposed is to replace the current Consumer Price Index or CPI, the current way of measuring the rate of inflation, with something called the ‘chained CPI‘, which would have the effect of lowering the reported rate of inflation. This is important because Social Security payments (as well as disabled veterans benefits and food stamps) are tied to the rate of inflation so lowering the ‘official’ rate would result in reduced payments to all those groups. [Read more…]

Mormon church holding fast against same-sex marriage

The Church of the Latter Day Saints has very similar views to the Catholic Church on homosexuality and along with it seems to be determined to try and hold back the tide of approval of same sex marriage that is sweeping the country. You may recall that it was one of the strongest backers of California’s Proposition 8 initiative, pouring money and personnel into getting that measure passed. [Read more…]

The Higgs Story-Part 7: How fields behave

Perhaps it would be good at this point to take a breath and summarize up the state of play so far. (For previous posts in this series, click on the Higgs folder just below the blog post title.)

In quantum mechanics we have the unifying idea that everything in the universe is made up of relativistic quantum fields that correspond to elementary particles and which I will refer to in the future as simply fields. These fields are wavy-like vibrations and differ from classical waves in that they are not vibrations of a medium (like water for ocean waves or air for sound waves) but vibrations of space itself, if you can imagine it. The word quantum in its name comes from the fact that the energy of vibrations of these fields can only change by small discrete amounts (or ‘quanta’) and not continuously, the way that classical vibrating fields can. [Read more…]

The “war is hell” justification for murder

Once again I had the experience of talking with a steadfast ‘liberal’ Obama supporter and we got into the issue of whether the president had the right to order the deaths of people without any due process. It was extraordinary the lengths he went to to say that Obama must have set up this extremely careful system to make sure that only guilty people are targeted, even though he had no evidence whatsoever to make such an assertion. He said that we had to give Obama the benefit of the doubt and that if there was the occasional mistake and an innocent person died, it must be due to faulty information that he received from others. [Read more…]

Sri Lanka’s touchy Buddhists

Sri Lanka has apparently decided that it needs to become the Buddhist equivalent of Saudi Arabia and other Islamic countries where any form of disparagement to their favored religion, however trivial, is not allowed. We had the situation of tourists who were arrested for taking a gag photo at a Buddhist temple and R&B singer Akon who was denied entry because one his videos had scantily-clad dancing women with a Buddha statue in the background. [Read more…]

The torturable class

In Sri Lanka, a poor person who gets arrested on suspicion of a crime can expect to be beaten up by the police in an effort to extract a confession. But better off people or those who might have connections to politically powerful people suffer no such assaults because the police are adept at recognizing such people. This is pretty well known and is seen as unexceptional. [Read more…]