The Daily Show had fun with Benjamin Netanyahu’s claim that he speaks for all Jews and the rapturous reception he got from the US Congress, saying “It was the State of the Union speech the Republicans wanted delivered by the leader they wished they had.” He also highlighted all the previous times that Netanyahu has cried wolf about Iran’s nuclear threat.
[Read more…]
The film Best in Show took a humorous look at the obsessive personalities of the people who enter their dogs in dog shows. The world of show dogs can be as fiercely competitive as any other beauty contest but it is hard for me to imagine that anyone would stoop to such a thing as poisoning a champion dog.
[Read more…]
Scientists and atheists are among groups of people who value rational thinking, the former because being rational and logical in one’s thinking is essential if one is to be able to navigate one’s way through the complexities of trying to understand the workings of nature, the latter because taking a rational approach to life would make the absurdities of religious beliefs and the behaviors they generate more manifest. But of course, none of us can be purely rational beings in every aspect of our lives. The emotional centers of our brains respond to stimuli in ways that can overpower the centers that govern rational and logical thinking, as all of us can testify from personal experience when we have done soothing impulsive and stupid.
[Read more…]
There was a time not so long ago when there were three rigid dogmas in elite US government and media circles: 1. The interests of the US and Israel were identical. 2. Anything that the government of Israel did must be given unquestioned support. 3. One must never mention even the existence of the Israel lobby, let alone its role in enforcing the first two dogmas. To violate any of these dogmas was to be prima facie guilty of anti-Semitism.
[Read more…]
To follow up on the discussion on this blog two days ago on the need to end the practice of clock shifting twice a year and stick with one time setting, John Oliver on his show Last Week Tonight uses his regular segment How is this still a thing? to look at the history of this practice and argue that it is high time we got rid of it.
[Read more…]
The tournament is rapidly approaching the quarterfinal knockout stage and the rankings in each group are firming up enabling fairly specific speculations about the likely match ups in the knockout rounds. (Brackets are from this Wikipedia article.)
[Read more…]
One of the benefits of religion, if you want to think of it that way, is that it enables one to shift responsibility to god if things go wrong. A new study by my friend and colleague Julie Exline and her graduate student Joshua Grubbs, who are in the department of religious studies at my university, finds that “people are likelier to blame God for their bad moral behavior when they believe they were born to act that way.”
[Read more…]
If there was ever an example of the psychological state known as projection (where one attributes to another one’s own state of mind) applied to nations, it is how the US describes Venezuela. Just yesterday, president Obama declared that Venezuela poses an “extraordinary threat” to US national security and used that to impose further sanctions on that country.
[Read more…]
Via Jonathan Turley I came across this video of a crazy driver of a car speeding through Los Angeles recently, where a news helicopter followed the car as it wove through busy streets and intersections, going the wrong way, with the driver not seeming to care in the least that he was damaging other vehicles and putting people’s lives at risk, even taking over a new car when his was involved in an accident.
[Read more…]
Has there ever been an occasion when members of Congress have written to the leaders of a foreign nation not to strike a deal with the US president? Because this is quite amazing to me:
[Read more…]