Glenn Greenwald links to an interview given by Vali Nasr who argues that we are seeing a failure of diplomacy by the US with respect to Iran, with president Obama’s sanctions policy likely to lead to war.
This is truly insane.
My daughter just sent me the link to this ad for a new line of LEGOs being marketed to girls. She saw it as a retrograde step in attitudes towards women. I have to agree, mainly because of what the new LEGO figurines are portrayed as interested in doing.
It seems like there are many parents who [Read more…]
One of the reasons why Mitt Romney has always been the favorite to win the Republican nomination is because he is the oligarchy’s choice, with close ties to all the major banks. He has obtained [Read more…]
Look at this image and ask yourself which vertical red line would be longer if measured with a ruler on the photograph.
Phil Plait uses this image to give an explanation of the ‘moon illusion’, that refers to the phenomenon that a full moon that lies low on the horizon appears to be much larger than [Read more…]
Joe Nocera, business correspondent for the New York Times, has been on a tear recently, blasting the National Collegiate Athletic Association for being petty and tyrannical in ways that harm individual students, even as major colleges have used sports and their athletes as money makers.
He says that the people who tend [Read more…]
I saw the latest Muppets film over the holidays and it was fun, though not great. But because the villain was an evil oil executive named Tex Richman (played with relish by Chris Cooper), Fox News seemed to think that the film was a brazen [Read more…]
There exists a marble frieze in the US Supreme Court building that overlooks the bench that contains carvings depicting 18 secular and religious lawgivers of the past. Guess who is included in the pantheon? Yes, it is the prophet Mohammed himself.
We know that Muslims are highly touchy about depictions of their prophet, some of them being willing to even kill those who do so. Hence it must have been quite awkward for all concerned to discover this. After the various controversies involving this issue, the Supreme Court included [Read more…]
We’ve all been in situations where the traffic is moving along smoothly and suddenly there is a backup for no apparent reason. Computer simulations suggest that this can be caused simply by one driver slightly braking, causing the driver behind to brake and [Read more…]
A quite extraordinary thing has happened in American, and even world, politics. It used to be the case that great wealth and income inequality were topics that were not mentioned in mainstream discourse and to suggest that this was not healthy for a democracy was to be accused of being envious or creating class warfare or attacking capitalism itself.
But how things have changed. Now the vast disparity in income and wealth between the top 1% and the remaining 99% is front and center. The gulf between the former and the latter is a major topic of discussion in [Read more…]
Glenn Greenwald shows a clip of Defense Secretary Leon Panetta being asked about the Obama administration’s murder of Anwar al-Awlaki and [Read more…]