I have been reading about the dreadful shootings in an elementary school that has resulted in so many deaths.
I really don’t know what to say that will not be said by many other people. But I wonder about what goes on in the dark recesses of someone’s mind that can cause them to prepare so carefully and methodically to kill so many little children.
I have not seen (and will not see) this film that deals with the killing of Osama bin Laden but have been following the controversy over it. Glenn Greenwald has a powerful essay about the film that touches on a whole range of important issues. [Read more…]
There was recently a big fuss about how the Hostess company was going out of business, because many people seemed to have a sentimental childhood attachment to its products though I personally had never eaten any, perhaps because I had not grown up in the US. Much of the media spread the message that the cause was that the workers were not willing to grant huge concessions in salary and benefits for the company to stay in business. [Read more…]
When I assert that modernity will undermine religion over time, I often get pushback from people who, while sharing my views about religion, think that I am hopelessly naïve and optimistic and that some religions are so deeply entrenched that they will never budge. [Read more…]
This is the season when cities light up their public spaces to make them more festive. But the person who was paid to put up these holiday lights had either a wicked sense of humor or was really ticked off with his employer. [Read more…]
Glenn Greenwald points out that the soft-glove treatment given by the government to mega-bank HSBC for its crimes illustrates how the US has now gone to a system where a small class of individuals and corporations have been openly given immunity from prosecution for even major crimes, while at the same time ordinary people are cracked down hard for even minor ones. [Read more…]
Reports have emerged that the head of the Fox News network Roger Aisles sent an emissary K. T. McFarland, a Fox News analyst, to Afghanistan in 2011 to try and persuade David Petraeus to run for president on the Republican ticket in 2012, promising that he and Rupert Murdoch would bankroll his candidacy and throw the support of the news network behind him. [Read more…]
In a post yesterday, I said that science is clearly incompatible with religion. In the comments, Beth questioned that assertion, saying that some religions might be compatible. [Read more…]
The members of the US senate love to describe their institution reverentially as the ‘world’s greatest deliberative body’ but that description gets more laughable by the day as its use of arcane processes to avoid doing anything become more and more ludicrous. [Read more…]