NYPD spying on Muslims turns up nothing

Some time ago, I wrote about this program by the New York Police Department to infiltrate Muslim organizations including “student organizations on college campuses outside their jurisdiction and even outside their state. The names of students taking part in such things as white water rafting are deemed worthy of entering in their files if they pray several times a day or discuss Islam, though you would expect that a Muslim student group would do just these things.” Merely speaking Urdu or frequenting a Lebanese café could trigger suspicions and your conversations recorded. [Read more…]

Atheist films

Sometimes I feel that my local newspaper The Plain Dealer‘s motto must be “All Catholic News All the Time”. It has devoted an endless number of news stories to the decision by the local bishop to shut down a number of churches and consolidate those parishes with others. We had stories about the anguish of the parishioners, their defiance, their appeals to the Vatican to overturn the rulings, their elation when many of the appeals were successful, and their work in reconstituting the parishes. Many of these stories got front page, above the fold coverage. [Read more…]

The tolerance levels of big animals

A long time ago, before I began blogging, I read an article or book by an evolutionary biologist that said that dogs and wolves had evolved to have rules in their packs that gave the smallest members a great amount of latitude and that the bigger members of the pack would not be rough with them. This results in what appears to be the smaller animals ‘bullying’ the larger ones with impunity. [Read more…]

Fundamentals models for presidential elections

Academic political scientists tend to discount the value of opinion polls as predictors of presidential elections and tend to look at the so-called ‘fundamentals’. They construct models that correlate vote percentages with data that can be quantified. The ‘Bread and Peace’ model of Douglass Hibbs that I have written about recently is one such model that uses disposable income and wartime casualties as the independent variables. Of course, there exist a whole range of independent variables that one can choose to use in one’s regression calculations and they each predict different outcomes. [Read more…]

The three Abrahamic faiths

Here’s an oldie but goodie for those who haven’t heard it before, a great rant from Marcus Brigstocke about the three Abrahamic faiths. I particularly like the bit that begins at the 6:00 mark, where he nails the problem with trying to distinguish between ‘good’ religion (that we should seek to retain) and ‘bad’ religion (that we should try and eliminate). [Read more…]