How could Romney have blown his foreign trip?

On the surface, Romney’s recent foreign trip must have seemed a no-lose proposition. Go to England, pander to the English and bask in the aura of the Olympics which has played a big part in his resume, then go to Israel and pander to the Israelis, and then go to Poland. The Poland leg of the trip puzzles me, frankly. Why Poland? What was to be gained by going there? It has been suggested that the Poland leg was meant to enhance his appeal to white working class voters but Lech Walensa has been out of the limelight for ages. Given the level of political amnesia here, how many people in the US now would know anything about him or of Poland’s history? [Read more…]

An atheist bishop?

Caspar Melville, the editor of The New Humanist, has a fascinating interview in the May/June 2012 issue with Richard Holloway, the retired Bishop of Edinburgh, which reinforces the point that I have been plugging away at for years, that there is good reason to suppose that there is a great deal of nonbelief among clergy, with the level of skepticism and disbelief rising with rank. [Read more…]

Mitt Romney’s dressage problem

The Olympics turns out to be mixed blessing for Mitt Romney’s candidacy. On the one hand, he touts his role in running the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City as if that were a major accomplishment and, for reasons that escape me, the media seem to take it at face value though it is not clear what running the Olympic games has got to do with one’s ability to be a good president. [Read more…]

Gore Vidal, 1925-2012

Gore Vidal, a class traitor of the best kind, died yesterday.

Born into a well-connected and politically influential family that could have opened doors to a patrician life, he became instead a populist outsider and a scathing critic of the politics of the US. He had wide-ranging interests, writing novels, essays, and screenplays and also acting in films, such as Gattacca where he was pretty good. [Read more…]

Should teams be allowed to lose for tactical reasons?

Eight badminton players (four doubles teams) in the Olympics have been booted out because of charges that they deliberately lost their games. Why might they have wanted to lose? Because these were pool games in qualifying rounds and whom one played in the subsequent round depends upon your ranking in your qualifying group. Being second in your group may sometimes provide a better path to getting to the finals than being first, depending on how teams in the other groups fare. This kind of tactical maneuvering for group ranking is a common problem in any sport that has round-robin qualifying group matches before going into the sudden-death final rounds. [Read more…]

Religious dietary laws

Israeli president Shimon Peres had to cancel his trip to the Olympics to attend the opening ceremony. Why? Because according to the rules of Orthodox Judaism, one is not allowed to travel by car on the Sabbath. He could only attend only if he could stay at the Olympic Village so that he could walk to the ceremony and back but the authorities would not allow it. What is interesting is that Peres himself is supposedly not Orthodox or even particularly observant but seems to feel obliged to show deference to the religious. [Read more…]