What is it with gun owners accidentally shooting themselves in the buttocks? We had the earlier story of someone accidentally shooting himself this way with his concealed gun while reaching for his wallet. [Read more…]
In the September 2012 issue of Harper’s Magazine, David Sirota had an excellent article (subscription required for the full article though you can see a shortened version here) that examined how the fact that almost all the major cities have become one newspaper towns lacking any competition has resulted in in an unhealthy collusion between the papers and local institutions and business leaders, with the papers often suppressing stories that might harm the interests and images of powerful people. [Read more…]
I wrote earlier about the puzzling feature of some atheists going out of their way to praise religion, sometimes even denigrating science in the process in order to make their point. Reader Baga sent me a link to this article in Nature that has yet another atheist (this time a scientist) trying to do the same thing. [Read more…]
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…]
The New York Times recently ran a long profile of a Bible-belt pastor Jerry DeWitt who abandoned his faith after 25 years in the ministry. This follows another high-profile defection that NPR recently featured involving Theresa MacBain, a Methodist minister who realized that she too was an atheist. These are just two cases of an increasingly common phenomenon. [Read more…]
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…]
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…]
It’s back to school time and Stephen Walt has some suggestions for what any student aspiring to a career in foreign policy or international relations should learn about while in college. I thought that it was a good list for people going into any field of study and so pass it along.
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…]