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…]
The Catholic Church is in a snit, again. This time it is because of the ruling by the Obama administration that they, like any other employer, must provide health insurance that offers free contraceptives to employees.
I think Kevin Drum has the right response, saying, [Read more…]
In the comments on my post yesterday about a senior Anglican cleric who defended ‘traditional marriage’ and said that it excluded same sex ones, people offered variants of what that phrase implied.
Since there seems to be some confusion on what constitutes ‘traditional marriage’, I thought that I would set everyone straight by reposting the definitive ruling on what constitutes Bible based marriage from the ultimate authority on this topic: Betty Bowers, America’s Best Christian™.
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It turns out that Mitt Romney and his father George successfully converted Mitt’s wife’s entire family to Mormonism, with the mother doing so practically on her deathbed. The one holdout was her father who was a committed atheist and went to his grave asserting that all religion was “drudgery and hogwash” and that he considered people who were religious to be “weak in the knees.”
But Mormons don’t let a little thing like death prevent them from [Read more…]
After Newt Gingrich’s unexpected big win in the South Carolina primaries, I said that we could expect the Republican party establishment and the oligarchy to freak out and make every attempt to drive a stake through his campaign’s heart.
And lo, as the prophets spake, so it has come to pass, with the attacks on Gingrich coming so thick and fast from every direction that he must be thinking that he is living in the Book of Revelation.
The conservative media chattering class has [Read more…]
A court in Kingston, Ontario has convicted an Afghan immigrant, his wife, and son of first degree murder for the deaths of his first wife (it was a polygamous marriage) and his three daughters (aged 19, 17, and 13), apparently because they disapproved of the behavior of the daughters and [Read more…]
The second most senior cleric in the Church of England says that marriage must remain between a man and a woman and society should not attempt to change it because “I don’t think it is the role of the state to define what marriage is. It is set in tradition and history and you can’t just (change it) overnight, no matter how powerful you are.”
History and traditions can be powerful and even good things but if they are your only arguments against a practice then it is pretty clear that you have a very weak case.