If you go to the state capital rotunda in Florida during the holiday season, you will find a Gay Pride aluminum Festivus pole, a nine-foot menorah, and possibly something that commemorates the Flying Spaghetti Monster. What you will not see is a nativity scene with the infant Jesus or any other scene symbolizing Christianity.
[Read more…]
With all the attention going to the Republican primary race, we should not forget that there is a Democratic contest too. The media may not have as much interest in it because there is less drama and because of the belief that Hillary Clinton is the inevitable choice. While it is true that she does have a commanding lead in the polls, her neo-liberal policies of being a Wall Street-friendly warmonger who takes Republican-lite positions on economic issues and is only liberal on the GRAGGS (guns, race, abortion, god, gays, sex) issues, though even there on some of them she is a latecomer and less than enthusiastic.
[Read more…]
The Daily Show looks at the obsession the US has with guns and the perpetual fear that the seem to have that their right to buy guns freely will be taken away from them which leads them to rush to buy even more following a mass shooting.
[Read more…]
We have had interesting discussions in the past on this blog about the use of language. This New Yorker article by Adrienne Raphel titled A History of Punctuation for the Internet Age discusses the evolution of punctuation over time and the strong feelings that it generates between purists and those who are more tolerant of contemporary modifications.
[Read more…]
Every four years the media salivates at the possibility of a political party’s nominee not being decided by the primary process, with a multiplicity of candidates going to the convention with sufficient delegates to have a shot at winning the nomination. The media drools at the possibility of public and backroom wheeling and dealing until one of the candidates or, even better, a rank outsider becomes the nominee.
[Read more…]
One of the features of science is that most of the time the community of scientists in any particular sub-specialty will agree on the basic paradigms that govern that field. While there will always be some scientists who refuse to accept the paradigm, most work within the consensus. This changes when the paradigm begins breaks down due to the fact that anomalies start to proliferate and no progress is made on major problems. Then more and more scientists start to look for new paradigms that promise to radically change the way they view the world. Those periods of scientific revolutions are exciting but rare.
[Read more…]
I wrote a few days ago about the parade of Republican presidential hopefuls auditioning for Sheldon Adelson’s money by appearing before his group called the Republican Jewish Coalition. The Daily Show‘s newest correspondent Adam Lowitt had a pretty funny segment dissecting their appearance.
[Read more…]
Encryption has been in the news ever since Edward Snowden revealed to the world the massive spying operation that the US and its allies in English speaking countries (UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) perpetrates on the communications of people all over the world. The backlash has resulted in some curbs to the US government’s spying powers but the greater impact has been on the increased use of end-to-end encryption on the internet.
[Read more…]
In his latest attempts to try and derail the Donald Trump juggernaut that is trampling all over his own candidacy, Jeb Bush accuses Trump of using “dog whistle politics” to gain popularity with his call to ban all Muslims from entering the country, saying:
[Read more…]
It is always interesting when conventional wisdom is challenged. A new study provides a classic example of the danger of inferring causation from correlation. There have been studies that show that people who are unhappy have higher mortality rates and thus shorter life spans. It has become conventional to think that being unhappy is bad for you. But a new large ten-year study says that rather than unhappiness leading to increased mortality, it is poor health that leads people to be unhappy and that is the reason for the correlation.
[Read more…]