Matt Taibbi has a blistering expose of the massive boondoggle that is the US military budget. He says that it is deliberately designed to be obscure and prevent any proper auditing so that no one really knows how much money is being spent on what. They thumb their noses at any requests for accountability. There is not proper inventory of what they have and what they spend, allowing for massive amounts of fraud and waste.
[Read more…]
According to the results of the most recent General Social Survey data, the number of people who described themselves as not affiliated with any religion keeps rising steadily.
According to newly released General Social Survey data analyzed by Ryan P. Burge of Eastern Illinois University, Americans claiming “no religion” — sometimes referred to as “nones” because of how they answer the question “what is your religious tradition?” — now represent about 23.1 percent of the population, up from 21.6 percent in 2016. People claiming evangelicalism, by contrast, now represent 22.5 percent of Americans, a slight dip from 23.9 percent in 2016.
That makes the two groups statistically tied with Catholics (23 percent) as the largest religious — or nonreligious — groupings in the country.
Just when you thought that Theresa May had fouled things up so much that she had reached rock bottom, she managed to sink even lower. Yesterday she gave a televised address to the nation where she said that she was not at fault for the current mess and put it all on the members of parliament. (You can see her four-minute speech here, though for some reason the video starts with 44 minutes of showing just the podium.) It is true that parliament has voted down her proposed deal twice but it was hardly a profile in courage to pass the buck like this. MPs were understandably furious, saying that they were already worried about their safety because of threats against them and for May to throw them under the bus was unconscionable.
[Read more…]
If you met someone who introduced himself as Bob Shabanowitz and tried to guess his ethnicity, the chances are that you would conclude that he is Jewish. But there is such a person and he is in fact a Muslim, descended from the Lipka Tatars in the Baltics, one of the Europe’s oldest Muslim communities, and that it is a common Muslim name in his native town as he discovered when he made a visit back there.
[Read more…]
(My review of the above book just appeared in the March 2019 issue of the American Journal of Physics (vol. 87, issue 4, p.319). You can access it here but I give the review below.)
A major problem with quantum mechanics is that the dominant Copenhagen interpretation is not conducive to providing visual images of what is going on. With special and general relativity, the initially unsettling ideas that time and distance are not invariants but depend upon the state of motion of the observer and that space can be warped by the presence of mass and energy have gone mainstream. Not so with quantum mechanics. Although of the same vintage as relativity, quantum mechanics has continued to greatly perplex people because it undermines the realist position that other theories, including relativity, take for granted, of a world existing independent of the observer, whose features we can discover by making observations. The denial of this made even Einstein uneasy.
[Read more…]
Mayor of South Bend, Indiana Pete Buttigieg is one of the Democratic candidates for president with lower name recognition. He was interviewed on the show Morning Joe about his candidacy and he was clear and articulate, despite facing vapid interviewers who asked the same old clichéd questions framed in trite ways. His responses were in general sharp, except for the one on North Korea that parroted the conventional wisdom of the foreign policy establishment.
The interview is worth watching and he is worth watching because he is very young (just 37) and even if he does not win this time, is likely to be a significant factor in future elections. It is interesting that the fact that he is gay and married to another man is mentioned in passing and seen as just a trivial curiosity, except of course by the nutters who would never vote for a Democrat anyway. It shows how far we have come.
The shocking murder of Muslims in two mosques in New Zealand by an Australian enabled the country’s prime minister Jacinda Ardern to make a claim that is familiar to us in the US whenever some ghastly act occurs, that ‘this is not us’. It is undoubtedly true that the gracious and warm and inclusive way that she responded to this tragedy reflects very creditably on her and on a country where the leader can say such things, especially when compared to the crass way that the US president responds to similar events
[Read more…]
British prime minister Theresa May has requested from the EU an extension of the current deadline of March 29 until June 30 to negotiate a Brexit agreement. This seems like far too short an extension. If the framework for a deal had been agreed upon and all that remained was to tie up loose ends, then three months may have been adequate. But the situation surrounding the current negotiations is nothing like that. Given that even after two years, they have failed to arrive at even the outlines of a deal that parliament can support, expecting it to happen in three more months seems wildly unrealistic.
[Read more…]
Given the massive size of the country and the voting pool, Indian elections present formidable logistical challenges.
General elections in India will begin on April 11, officials announced on Sunday, with some 900 million voters eligible to cast ballots to fill parliamentary seats and choose the next prime minister in the world’s largest democracy.
…The chief election commissioner, Sunil Arora, said voting would be held in seven stages, staggered across the country, before polls closed on May 19. Ballot counting will begin on May 23 and is expected to be completed in a day.
Got that? Voting results are available the very next day whereas in the US some results take months.
[Read more…]
Jen Sorensen compares the response of New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern to the racist president that the US currently has.
