I have been warming up for the cricket World Cup to be held from February 14 to March 29 by watching more games, so as to get up to speed on what the teams are like and what changes have occurred in the game since my youthful days of addiction to the game, and one thing that struck me was the increased use of technology, much of it for the better.
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I came across this article about the inability of the Republican party leadership to pass a piece of legislation further restricting abortion rights on the occasion of the annual rally in Washington on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade. When there was some dissension within their ranks, especially from women members of their caucus, they pulled the bill from the floor before the vote. As you can imagine, this abrupt change did not go down well with those who felt that they had been betrayed and one abortion foe was so furious that she complained angrily, saying, “What in the h-e-double-hockey-sticks just happened?”
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The US government lets torturers, people who lie to get the public to support illegal wars, and the top executives of big banks whose greed, deception, and recklessness led to a global recession that hurt so many people go scot free. What the government really cares about and prosecutes vigorously are those who expose its wrongdoings by leaking information.
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In an earlier post that had a clip from The Daily Show that made fun of Sarah Palin’s incoherent speech at the Iowa audition of possible presidential candidate, a parody of an advertisement for the Lincoln Continental car that featured actor Matthew McConaughey was shown. Curious, I went online to see the ad and it is truly weird.
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The story of Rapa Nui (better known as Easter Island), consisting of 63 square miles located 2,300 miles west of Chile, is one of enduring interest. How a lush island became a wasteland denuded of its trees, bereft of most of its population, and finally ended up primarily as a home for gigantic stone statues, is a mystery that has intrigued scientists for years.
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At the risk of sounding like broken record, I want to return to a topic that I feel very strongly about, and that is this issue of people not vaccinating their children. In the US at least, the opposition to vaccinations of children seems to be something affecting the affluent. These are the people who seem to have latched onto scary tales on the internet and the media that are warning about the dangers of the vaccines, though those claims have been thoroughly debunked.
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The Daily Show had a field day making fun of the Iowa ‘summit’ hosted by congressman Steve King (R-Crazy) and the Koch brothers, finding much that was eminently mockable in those proceedings. Jon Stewart also alluded obliquely to something that I have been wondering about but hesitated to say out loud, and that is whether Sarah Palin’s greater than usual incoherence (a high bar that she easily surpassed on this occasion) was due possibly to her having been drinking before her speech.
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Recently a friend and colleague of mine, while he and a female colleague were seated at a table in a lounge area discussing a paper, was accosted in the very building where he works by a campus police officer who was looking for someone who was reported to be a trespasser,.
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As someone who was a very religious (but not fundamentalist) Christian before becoming an atheist, I am drawn to other similar conversion stories. Daniel C. Maguire, a professor of theology at the Jesuit Marquette University has written a book Christianity without God: Moving beyond the Dogmas and Retrieving the Epic Moral Narrative describing his own similar journey.
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