Vaccination suddenly becomes a major political issue

The recent outbreak in measles cases has become a politically hot topic and brought to the forefront the problematic issue of balancing various rights. Politicians, especially in the Republican party, are having to dance around the issue to avoid stepping on the toes of their various bases of support and in the process have sometimes fallen flat on their faces. So as usual, they are trying to muddy the issue by blurring the lines between some fairly clear positions.
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Huckabee’s smarminess

The odious Mike Huckabee is continuing to make the rounds of interviews and trying to have it both ways on homosexuality. He seems to think that by smiling a lot and acting all folksy and telling people that he has gay friends, he can hide the fact that he is a hateful religious bigot who strenuously opposes giving equal rights (such as marriage) to the LGBT community.
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A pathetic response to Stephen Fry’s castigation of god

Stephen Fry’s recent lambasting in a widely-viewed televised interview of god as an “evil, capricious, monstrous, maniac” because of the fact that the world he supposedly created has all manner of evils (as one example he mentioned an insect that makes children blind by burrowing in their eyes) was bound to elicit responses from god-apologists.
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Latin America now leads the world in opposing torture

A few decades ago, when one thought of nations that practiced torture, those in Latin America immediately came to mind. That continent was notorious for being ruled by brutal dictators who would overthrow, often with help from the US, democratically elected governments and thought nothing of torturing and murdering their opponents. So-called ‘death squads’ consisting of paramilitary forces supported by the government and acting under its auspices would seize people in the middle of the night and they would ‘disappear’, sometimes never to be seen again, sometimes their mutilated bodies would be found later.
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Why do zebras have stripes?

The zebra, which is believed to have evolved from horses more than 2 million years ago, has such an unusual look that it just cries out for explanations and there have been no shortage of attempts to supply them. The one that has stuck in my mind is that the stripes provide camouflage in the long grass. Now another team of researchers have taken a shot at coming up with a different explanation.
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Hyper-patriot games

Some years ago, when my children were in high school, I went to a local 4th of July open-air concert in my town. It featured the high school band playing the usual tunes that bands play. In between, the band-leader spoke about the meaning of Independence Day and what struck me was how over-the-top his praise of the US was. In his words, it was the greatest, freest, most noble, most [insert any good quality here] in the world and always had been. What was striking was that he was an immigrant and still spoke with the strong accent from his native nation.
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Handicapping the teams in the Cricket World cup

I have to apologize to regular readers of this blog who are not fans of cricket and are understandably mystified by the appeal of the game and wonder if I am going to talk about nothing else up to and during the cricket World Cup that runs from February 14 through March 29. This is going to be my last substantive post on it, at least until the tournament begins and I provide some brief comments on the games as they happen.
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What Stephen Fry would say if he faced god

This video of Stephen Fry has been making the rounds. He was being interviewed by Gay Byrne as part of an ongoing series for an Irish TV program called The Meaning of Life, with this episode to be aired on Sunday 1st February at 10.30 pm. Fry is asked that old chestnut about what he would say to god if, upon his death, he discovered that god existed and he was in his presence.
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