Steve Buscemi

Steve Buscemi is a fine actor, often cast in quirky roles, whom I first saw in Fargo. He often makes cameo appearances in films and has such a distinctive face that when he does, you never think “Where I have I seen that actor before?” (as so often happen with other actors) but immediately say “Hey, there’s Steve Buscemi!” This is actually a good thing for me because often my mind gets distracted by trying to place who an actor is and where I have seen them before and I miss some of the film that I am watching.
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What is the Thinking Housewife thinking these days?

I periodically check in on the website known The Thinking Housewife to see what issues are concerning her and her readers. The site espouses quite appalling views but in the most genteel and proper language. That site has a strange fascination for me, like entering a time warp where I find myself in a world that never really existed except in the imaginations of those who think that we have become a decadent, hedonistic society that has abandoned all moral standards largely because we have lost contact with our religious, especially Roman Catholic, roots. They see warning signs of the decline everywhere.
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The coming Supreme Court vote on Obamacare

Sometime this month, the US Supreme Court will issue their opinion on whether the subsidies offered by the health exchanges set up by the federal government are consistent with the wording of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (the official name of what has come to be better known as Obamacare). If they rule that they are not and invalidate the subsidies, this will result in tens of millions of people who now have affordable health insurance abruptly losing them. The elimination of the federal subsidies would be a serious, and some argue fatal, blow to Obamacare and thus on the surface Republicans should welcome an adverse Supreme Court opinion.
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The Fox News echo chamber

It is hard to imagine that Fox News only began operations in 1996, such has been its impact in shaping the political climate in the US, and not in a good way. There has been a lot of buzz recently about a paper published by Bruce Bartlett where he argues that Fox News has created a separate world for its viewers that is increasingly disconnected from the actual world and as a result is hurting the Republican party that has become joined at the hip to it.
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The ‘Free-Range Kids’ movement

We live in an era of fear of all manner of dangers, many of them highly exaggerated. This extends to many parents not allowing their children out of their sight. I have been interested in the so-called ‘Free-Range Kids’ movement, where parents are encouraged to give their children more freedom to roam the neighborhood and not have adults hovering over them all the time.
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The Los Angeles Times shames itself

On the second anniversary of the Snowden leaks, the Los Angeles Times has published an extraordinary editorial trying to have it both ways: acknowledging that it was thanks to Edward Snowden that there have been any reforms at all in the way that the government has been sweeping up the private information of people all over the world, and then objecting to him being given a pardon and calling for him to return to the US and ‘accept the consequences’.
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Why don’t our brains explode when we watch films?

Suppose you are sitting in your living room and suddenly everything in front of you changed to something else, say a view of the ocean. Wouldn’t you be startled? And yet, when we watch films, a cut from one scene to another changes also the entire field of view instantaneously and yet it causes us no problems. And reports about the public viewing of the very first films suggest that this new thing did not cause viewers any problems at all. I wrote a few months ago about the research by Jeffrey M. Zacks, a professor of psychology and radiology at Washington University in St. Louis, and others about why our brains are not disoriented when we watch films with even very rapid cuts that change the entire field of view instantaneously.
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