Jordan Smith writes about how an unlikely alliance of a man and the lawyer who defended wife’s killer is working to expose prosecutorial misconduct in Orange County, California. Paul Wilson was initially very antagonistic towards the public defender for his dogged defense of Scott Dekraai, the man who murdered his wife Christy in the deadliest mass shooting in the county.
[Read more…]
I use the word ‘elite’ often to describe people and groups. What I mean by the word is quite straightforward: It means the people at the very top of any given category. So one can have elite musicians, athletes, actors, and so on. In the political context, it means those who are at the top of the socio-economic spectrum. As someone who follows the evolution of words, I have been interested in how the term is now being transformed into a pejorative description of knowledgeable people who have certain progressive political views. So scientists who raise the alarm about the climate are now dismissed as part of the ‘elite’.
[Read more…]
Tom Tomorrow outlines the possibilities.
She had a good show yesterday that had this ringing, no-holds-barred endorsement of abortion rights. This is why we need more women political comedy talk show hosts like Wolf and Samantha Bee. They address topics and take stands that men may find uncomfortable addressing, however progressive they may be.
John Fea, an evangelical and professor of American History and chairman of the Department of History at Messiah College in Mechanicsburg, PA, has written an essay where he tries to understand why his fellow evangelicals have such a deep devotion to Donald Trump that they are willing to overlook and even celebrate actions that should revolt them because they contradict the basic values they claim to profess.
[Read more…]
‘Evidence-based medicine’ is a term that is now very much in vogue. It suggests that medical practitioners move away from basing their practice on traditions and folklore and instead look to the results of carefully controlled clinical studies for guidance. This is of course good advice. But the problem is determining what makes something ‘evidence-based’. After all, even anecdotes and single events can be considered as evidence since they do provide empirical data. The key question is how to determine when there is a preponderance of evidence that gives confidence that the practice being adopted is the best among all the alternatives. The gold standard consists of carefully controlled, double-blind, reproducible tests with large sample sizes but that is not always feasible and demanding that this be the measure for determining whether a conclusion is evidence-based can be used to delay the adoption of some beneficial measure. It was demands for such unreasonably high standards of evidence that enabled tobacco companies to fight for so long the medical consensus that smoking was highly harmful to human health.
[Read more…]
We used to have a circular dining table that was expandable in that you could separate the two halves and insert an extra leaf in the middle. The extra leaf was rectangular shaped which meant that the expanded table was no longer circular.
Seamus Bellamy points me to this expandable circular table that remains circular. Pretty cool and clever. It would have helped King Arthur as the number of his knights fluctuated.
Today comes news about how the US has attempted to thwart moves to encourage breastfeeding of children around the world. The benefits of breastfeeding are so obvious and well established that pretty much everyone expected this to be a no-brainer that would pass easily. But they did not anticipate that the US does not behave like a civilized nation.
A resolution to encourage breast-feeding was expected to be approved quickly and easily by the hundreds of government delegates who gathered this spring in Geneva for the United Nations-affiliated World Health Assembly.
Based on decades of research, the resolution says that mother’s milk is healthiest for children and countries should strive to limit the inaccurate or misleading marketing of breast milk substitutes.
Then the United States delegation, embracing the interests of infant formula manufacturers, upended the deliberations.
I have written before about the punitive prosecutions launched in Washington, DC against 234 people who were arrested during the anti-Trump demonstrations at his inauguration last year and charged with ‘felony rioting’. After a trial, a jury cleared six protestors of all charges. Then prosecutors were forced to drop charges against six others after the judge found that they had behaved unethically.
[Read more…]
Some readers may recall my post making fun of the press release of a new book by a theologian Edward Feser where he claims to provide five proofs for the existence of his god. My point was that people had been trying for eons to logically prove the existence of any god without success, and there was no reason to think that Feser would be any more successful. Trying to prove the existence of an entity without the use of any evidence is futile.
[Read more…]