When one thinks of religious people objecting to scientific views of the world, fundamentalist Christians and Muslims immediately come to mind. Jews are less often pictured because they seem to be less committed to fixed ideas about how the world works. But there is a sector of Jews who are as bad as other religions when it comes to rejecting accepted scientific views.
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There is an old joke that defines an ambassador as someone who lies abroad for his country. A country’s diplomats are usually the overseas implementers of a government’s policies however corrupt and venal, and are expected to cover them up but once in a while someone comes along who transcends that role and tries to uphold the truth. Robert White, who died on January 13, 2015, is an example of that. He was a whistleblower who, as US ambassador to El Salvador, exposed the truth about that country’s regime in the face of US complicity.
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Yesterday was the first episode of the new Larry Wilmore show that fills the time slot vacated by Stephen Colbert. It was promising, though a little rough in parts, but so were the The Daily Show and The Colbert Report at the beginning and it takes some time for shows like these to find their rhythm and figure out what works best for them.
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The cricket World Cup tournament begins on Saturday, February 14 and will last until the finals on Sunday, March 29, ensuring that the cricket loving parts of the world will see a marked decline in productivity during that period. Australia and New Zealand are hosting the tournament. In the lead up to it, increasing attention is being paid to the issue of poor sportsmanship on the field, mainly in the form of ‘sledging’ where players on the field exchange barbs with the goal of unsettling opponents and waging psychological warfare.
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Scientists at both NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have announced that 2014 has been determined to be the warmest year since 1880, when instrumental records started being kept. In addition, they say that the “10 warmest years in the instrumental record, with the exception of 1998, have now occurred since 2000”.
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The political world was caught flat-footed by the sudden interest expressed by Mitt Romney in running again for the presidency. The surprise was generated by two things. One is that Romney had already made two attempts and lost, once losing the nomination to John McCain in 2008 and then the presidency in 2012 and it was felt that a two-time loser should gracefully bow out. The other is that Romney and his wife had repeatedly said that they had had enough and that it was time to move on.
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In 2003, comedian Dave Chappelle began a sketch comedy show on Comedy Central that was highly acclaimed because it took head-on all the major hot button issues of the day. But after just two seasons he abruptly quit, saying he was fed up with show business and fame. Here is one of the best known sketches from the show, the story of a KKK leader named Clayton Bigsby, told in the style of a Frontline documentary. (Language advisory)
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In January 1965,Playboy magazine published a lengthy interview (the longest he had ever given) that Alex Haley had with the civil rights leader soon after he won the Nobel Peace Prize. In it he expressed his views on a wide range of issues and provides a window into the mind of a remarkable man, revealing a self-assurance and lack of ego in his willingness to admit to all manner of tactical mistakes that he had made.
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A new report says that for the first time in 50 years, a majority of public school students come from families who are eligible for free and reduced-price lunches. As Kevin Drum points out, those who quality for free lunch (44%) have family incomes of less than $31,000, while for the 7% who get reduced-price lunches the cut-off is $44,000.
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Today is the day that the US commemorates Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a man whom I admire greatly and have written about before many times so will not repeat those views. But I will likely not be going to see the new film Selma, that deals with the civil rights struggle of which he was such a big part and uses a key event of that struggle to tell the story, even though the film has been praised.
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