After a break, he has returned with a new episode and it was a hard-hitting one.
Mano Singham
Just another Freethought Blogs site
After a break, he has returned with a new episode and it was a hard-hitting one.
You should not become bankrupt just because you get sick. That seems to me to be an obvious requirement for any civilized society. But that is not the case in the US. As a new study of bankruptcy court filings reveal, medical expenses are the most common cause of bankruptcies in the US. This has been true for some time and it is significant that the Affordable Care Act (known popularly as Obamacare) has not changed the numbers.
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We are having an epidemic of politicians, corporations, and celebrities from all spheres of activity having information revealed about their bad behavior. When the evidence is incontrovertible, there arises the question of what kind of apology is required and what amends should be made. Lisa Leopold suggests some guidelines and says that in order to be effective, the apology should consist of three elements.
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Saturday Night Live had a good recap of the week’s news.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has garnered many kudos for his decision to not knuckle under to the blackmail attempts by the sleazy tabloid National Enquirer. But Glenn Greenwald writes that while ths action was commendable, it should not blind us to the fact that Amazon’s business practices are truly horrendous and that that company is one of the biggest violators of other people’ privacy and works hand in glove with the NSA, FBI, CIA, and other government spy agencies to develop ever more comprehensive surveillance tools.
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It has been frustrating to see how climate change denialists cling desperately to their alternative narratives to explain away the scientific data that has led to the consensus that the Earth is warming, that human activity is a major cause, and that we need to take action soon to halt and even reverse the trend if the planet is going to be in decent shape for future generations. But just as creationists are finding it increasingly difficult to discredit evolution despite having support from politicians in the US, there are encouraging signs that the climate science consensus is slowly winning over public support from across the political spectrum. Matthew Nesbitt goes further and argues that the battle for hearts and minds on this issue is in fact over.
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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes has become a lightning rod for criticism. The Republicans and right-wingers in general are freaking out about the rising appeal of he socialist polices she is advocating and have decide to throw everything including the kitchen sink at her with comically contradictory results. She is no shrinking violet and has responded accordingly.
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The value of the Hubble constant plays a crucial role in cosmology in calculating the age of the universe. The most direct way to obtain it is to measure the distances to stars and galaxies and galaxy clusters and map them against their speeds. The Hubble-Lemaitre law of cosmic expansion predicts that the resulting data should lie on a straight line and from the slope of that line one gets the value of the constant. But while obtaining the speeds of each stellar object is relatively easy using the red shift of light, measuring distances is a very tedious and painstaking business in which one has to use a ‘ladder method’ involving different techniques, starting with finding the distances to the objects closest to you and using those results to find the distances to the next distance set, often using a different method, and so on. This technique is highly prone to systematic errors because any error at any stage gets magnified as you go to more distant elements. The people who do this kind of work have to pay extremely close attention to detail and I salute them for their diligence.
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The failed attempt by the tabloid to blackmail Jeff Bezos has put a bright light on the way that they do business. It was a fairly open secret that they would threaten to report dirt on celebrities unless the celebrities gave them exclusive access for other stories but now the details of such stories are coming out, with former employees of the parent company AMI, including those who did the investigations for them, willing to speak out.
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