The excellent radio program This American Life on their show today tried to understand how it is that the voters who identify as Republicans seem, in this election, to have ditched all their traditional concerns about small government, less regulations, and lower taxes and replaced it with an overwhelming concern about stopping the immigration of Mexicans and Muslims and how this change is threatening to split the party apart.
[Read more…]
The Catholic church seems intent ion creating rules based on convoluted doctrinal reasoning that its followers are likely to ignore. The latest involves cremation, a practice allowed by the church in 1963 and that is increasingly favored by people over burial. The issue is what to do with the ashes. Up to now, people have had the freedom to choose, according to the wishes of the deceased or of the relatives of the deceased. This has led to some unusual methods of disposal.
[Read more…]
When I was in Boston over the last few days, I was in a waiting room for about two hours and, as usual, they had a TV set on. I noticed that no one, neither the staff nor the visitors, was watching the TV and so I asked the person at the desk whether it could be turned off or the volume at least lowered so that I could read my book. I was seated as far from the TV as possible but it still distracted me. When the person tried to comply, it turned out that the volume setting was fixed.
[Read more…]
The boasts of sexual assault by Donald Trump has triggered a wave of many women who have said that it was not mere ‘locker room talk’ but that he actually carried out those actions. Trump’s defenders have suggested that the women are not credible because they did not make these charges public at the time the assaults occurred, though many did confide in friends and relatives.
[Read more…]
I just returned from a trip to Boston. While waiting for my return flight, I had breakfast at an Au Bon Pain cafe at Logan airport and noticed that the people working there consisted of a black woman, a white man, a Latino, an east Asian woman, and a South Asian man, all working together in seeming harmony.
[Read more…]
This is a touching video taken in an animal sanctuary in Thailand in which it looks like (to the extent that one can read an animal’s intentions) a baby elephant thought that the trainer who had rescued her just a year earlier and to whom she had grown close was drowning in a river and so swam out to rescue him
Lost in the hoopla surrounding Donald Trump’s recordings boasting of sexual assault were the vile remarks he made about the Central Park Five. For those who don’t recall the case, Wikipedia describes what happened. On April 19, 1989, a female jogger was brutally raped and beaten almost to death. That same night, five teenagers were arrested as part of a sweep in response to a large number of young people who had been randomly attacking people. They were wrongfully convicted of the rape and assault but later the actual guilty person was found. The convictions of the five were vacated in 2002 after all had served their sentences and the city settled a lawsuit against it for $41 million.
[Read more…]
Catholic hospitals often provide health care in areas where there is no other facility. But Samantha Bee gives a powerful message about the danger posed by Catholic hospitals becoming such a large part of the health care network, because of the way they reject any medical procedures that go against their medieval beliefs, even if the end result of their decisions is death.
[Read more…]
Donald Trump boasts about himself incessantly, talking in superlatives about his achievements, many of which cannot be substantiated and for which he refuses to reveal supporting information. We already know that he has refused to release his tax returns, something that every major party candidate has done for the last few decades and which would reveal, among other things, his annual income, the amount of tax he pays, and his charitable contributions.
[Read more…]