Dan Barker, a former preacher turned atheist and now co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, will be speaking on the topic of the separation of church and state on Thursday, Oct 25th, 7:00-9:00pm in the 1914 Lounge in the Thwing Center on the CWRU campus. Thwing Center is at 11111 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland just east of Severance Hall.
The event is organized by the CWRU chapter of the Center for Inquiry and is free and open to the public.
Ed Brayton has already covered the details of the fall from grace of Dinesh D’Souza, who has resigned from the presidency of The King’s College, an evangelical school whose mission seems to be to produce Christian warriors who will shape public policy. [Read more…]
Please do not expect a review tomorrow morning of tonight’s third and last debate between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, the way I did for the other three debates. I will likely not watch it. Even if I start watching I am fairly certain that I will not stay until the finish, and even if sheer inertia causes me to stick it through to the end, I will be too annoyed to care to comment even about the debating tactics that each person uses. [Read more…]
I watched this film a couple of days ago. I am frankly not a big fan of action films in general and the super-hero genre in particular and this film has both in abundance. Furthermore, growing up in Sri Lanka we had limited access to American comic books and I don’t recall any other than Superman and Batman. The entire stable of Marvel comics superheroes that appear in this film (Captain America, Iron Man, Hawkeye, Black Widow, Incredible Hulk, Thor) were almost all foreign to me, so there was no nostalgic tug either. The only Hawkeye I had heard of previously was Chingachgook’s buddy and this was clearly not him. [Read more…]
Evan Osnos of the New Yorker watched the last debate in China and filed this report on the reactions of the Chinese media to the China-bashing that has become a feature of the campaign. [Read more…]
Given all the talk that takes place in the fevered swamps of right-wing American paranoia about president Obama secretly being a Kenyan/Indonesian Muslim or godless Commie, coupled with the major war waged by the Catholic hierarchy against Obama on the issues of contraception and abortion (which has conveniently pushed aside all discussion about its abusive and pedophilic priests), one would expect that there might be a big gap in support among religious people for the two candidates. [Read more…]
After the vice-presidential debate, I posed the question whether some media commentators were right when they claimed that that women dislike it when candidates mix it up in debates and vigorously challenge each other. [Read more…]
[UPDATE: It looks like George Osborna has a habit of sitting in first class while paying only for standard class.]
Over in the UK, the conservative government has been pushing ‘austerity measures’, by which it means of course not austerity for their oligarchs but for ordinary people. The contempt that the global ruling classes feel for the public is usually discreetly hidden but, just as in the US, on occasion the mask drops, revealing the real face. [Read more…]
One of the extraordinary but little remarked comments that Mitt Romney made during the second debate was when, asked specifically what deductions he would eliminate in order to pay for his tax cuts (that would cost $5 trillion over ten years), he again avoided being specific but said: [Read more…]