Serving on an interfaith panel

have been invited to take part in an ‘interfaith’ panel to be held at the Cuyahoga Community College’s Western Campus, as part of their Diversity Day Program. The program is open to the public and is titled Voices – A Spiritual Mosaic of Humanity. It will be held on Thursday, April 14, 2016 at noon in the Galleria (Student Services building—center of campus). 11000 Pleasant Valley Road in Parma, OH.
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Michael Hayden’s blatant double standards

The former head of the CIA is making the rounds plugging his book. He was interviewed by Mehdi Hasan of Al Jazeera news and it was a refreshingly hard-hitting interview where Hasan pressed him on the issue of whether waterboarding was torture. The whole 15-minute interview is good but the key point to listen to is the part beginning at around 5:00 minute mark where Hayden tries to defend the abominable practice of ‘rectal feeding’ of the prisoners at Guantanamo. Then at about the 6:00 mark, Hayden suggests that waterboarding when done by the US is not torture but if done by (say) Syria it would be.
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The absurdity and cruelty of the anti-transgender legislation

One of the interesting things about the increased acceptance of gays and lesbians has been the fact that as more of them have come out, people have been startled to discover that many of the people around them, their friends and relatives and co-workers, are gays and lesbians. Having known them for so long with no problems, it becomes harder to maintain their prejudices that they are different in any way other than in their sexual orientation, which has no impact on anyone else.
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Pirates to take over Iceland?

The Panama Papers has led to the resignation of the country’s prime minister but the government itself has refused to dissolve parliament and call for new elections, choosing instead to name a new prime minister from among their ranks. This is because the most popular party right now is the Pirate Party that has the support of 43% of the public, although it only has three seats in the current parliament. The two parties that make up the current government only get 29.5%.
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Adding a cross to Los Angeles county seal is unconstitutional

Back in 2014, I wrote about an interesting legal case out of Los Angeles where a new county seal was being proposed that would put a cross on the roof of an image of a church on the existing county seal. The case was interesting because of the role that history played in it and I discussed the legal aspects of it in that earlier post and will not repeat them here.
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There is a lot at stake in the Panama Papers

The fallout from the Panama Papers continues as people start looking closely at what the documents reveal about the function and purpose of the shell companies that people can set up that can be used to hide assets and thus avoid taxes and launder money. These companies often offer no more information than an address, a phone number, and the name of a contact person who frequently cannot be contacted at the address or phone number.
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Deliberately making it harder to vote

The efforts to make voting harder in the US tends to disproportionately affect poorer people who have less discretionary time and money to enable them to overcome the hurdles being placed on showing eligibility to vote. Although Republicans claim that this is to prevent voter fraud (something that is a negligible or even non-extent problem), that the real purpose of these efforts is to make voting harder for certain groups is pretty much beyond dispute.
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