Terrorist acts that indiscriminately kill civilians are vile but an even more despicable strategy is the one known as the ‘double tap’. This is where in the immediate aftermath of the first attack, a second attack is launched on those who rush to aid the injured, wreaking even greater death and destruction. [Read more…]
Remember the infamous Nigerian 419 scam? I wrote three years ago about how annoying it was to get these bogus offers practically every other day and expressed surprise that anyone would still fall for it now that it was well known. Thankfully I seem to have been dropped from the mailing lists and have not received any such offers for well over a year now, but it turns out that a variation of the scam using cashier’s checks has been used to defraud even fancy law firms for hundreds of thousands of dollars. [Read more…]
I wasn’t so long ago that ‘death squads’, shadowy groups that murdered enemies of a government, used to be the prerogative of despised authoritarian governments, usually in developing countries. But that has changed. [Read more…]
Sharon Broussard is a black columnist for the Cleveland Plain Dealer who on June 6 wrote on why blacks should support same sex marriage, pointing out that influential voices in the black community (which along with Catholics, evangelicals, and Mormons are the most opposed to it) had come around to the idea that this was an important civil rights issue. [Read more…]
I do not own an iPhone or a smart phone of any kind. When I first tried Siri on a friend’s iPhone when it came out, Siri had a tough time understanding me due to my accent (even though I am told I am relatively easy for people in the US to understand) and the experience was quite frustrating. [Read more…]
Via Jerry Coyne, I came across an excellent 2006 essay titled My God Problem by science journalist Natalie Angier in which she tackles something that also bothers me, which is the way that so many scientists seem to be so concerned about surveys that show low levels of acceptance of the theory of evolution while ignoring, let alone trying to counter, evidence of much worse anti-scientific thinking. [Read more…]
I am quite ignorant of the equestrian events that take place at the Olympics. The only ones I’ve seen involved horses going round a circuit and jumping over various fences with the scoring depending on how cleanly the horses did the jumps and the time taken. [Read more…]
The US media loves to commemorate anniversaries. But I have not heard of any plans to address the fact that this year marks the 50th anniversary of one of the worst atrocities of modern times: when John F. Kennedy began the bombing of Vietnam. [Read more…]
I finally got around to seeing Julia Sweeney’s 2007 monologue performance Letting Go of God, where she describes her journey from being a good Catholic girl to an atheist in adulthood. It was funny, informative, and moving, as she describes the kinds of questions that occurred to her and the answers she sought from her parents, her priest, other religions, and her readings, before she finally accepted that she was, in effect, an atheist. [Read more…]