It looks like the Catholic church has decided to go all in on the issue of birth control.
Chicago’s Cardinal Francis George says that the church is willing to close its hospitals if their insurance companies are required to provide contraceptive services to all employees. [Read more…]
One of the mysteries of governmental responses to the current financial crises in the US and Europe has been the call for more austerity and belt tightening, even at the risk of social turmoil. One would think that the natural tendency for policy makers fighting a depressed economy is for increased government spending to stimulate employment and growth. And yet we hear endless blathering about the importance of balancing budgets and closing deficits, by which is meant cutting social programs that benefit the majority rather than cutting spending on defense or raising taxes on the wealthy. [Read more…]
The excellent news program Democracy Now! had a discussion with three people about the increasingly police state nature of the US. One guest was William Binney, a whistleblower who used to work for the National Security Agency for nearly 40 years and revealed their covert and illegal invasion of American’s communications. He was unsuccessfully prosecuted by president Obama’s administration for whistleblowing. The second was Laura Poitras, an Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker who made films about Iraq and Yemen and is currently working on one about increasing domestic surveillance and the attacks on whistleblowers. The third was internet security expert and hacker Jacob Appelbaum who has been a spokesperson for WikiLeaks and has tried to create portals of anonymity for web users. Listen to them describe their experiences. [Read more…]
Vanderbilt University has stripped a Christian student group of official recognition because it had a clause that says “Criteria for officer selection will include level and quality of past involvement, personal commitment to Jesus Christ, commitment to the organization, and demonstrated leadership ability.” It was the phrase “personal commitment to Jesus Christ’ that resulted in the plug being pulled. [Read more…]
Cosmologist Mark Trodden has an excellent post where he disentangles three questions that most people are interested in knowing about the universe: What is its shape? Is it finite or infinite? Will it expand forever or eventually collapse back into itself? [Read more…]
Was there an actual historical figure that corresponds to the biblical Jesus? The debate on this question has been going on for some time in academic circles but has seen a resurgence with the recent publication of Bart Ehrman’s new book Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth. [Read more…]
Here are two kinds of unusual music.
The first is music played on an unusual instrument.
The second is music played unusually on a familiar instrument.
Music has always been a medium where innovation and creativity thrive and where even amateurs can produce wonderful new things by breaking the rules. It is nice to see fresh examples of that.
The US education system comes in for a lot of trash talk in the media and by politicians and business people. This has seeped into the public consciousness and it is now taken as a given that the US educational system is in dire straits and needs radical changes in order to be rescued from disaster. The 2011 book Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa is another such book that pointed the finger at US college education as failing its students. Using a single measure of achievement, it compared a cohort of students from the first semester to the fourth semester and claimed to find negligible gains in learning, hence the title of their book. [Read more…]
You may have heard about the infamous question on New York State’s test for all eighth graders that gave them a fable about a hare and a pineapple and then asked them two questions. (You can read the fable and the questions here.) This caused a lot of head scratching by students, parents, and educators alike because the story and the questions seemed to make no sense. [Read more…]
No one on The Daily Show is as convincing in caricaturing clueless sexism as Jason Jones.
(This clip appeared on April 17, 2012. To get suggestions on how to view clips of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report outside the US, please see this earlier post.)