Some time ago, I linked to a video of an utterly inept driver trying to get out of a tight parking spot. It was excruciating to watch. But that driver was an expert compared to the person in the video below.
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On NPR’s Weekend Edition on Sunday, December 7, 2014, host Rachel Martin interviewed three veteran police officers (two white, one black) from Columbus, Ohio, a city in which the department had been accused in the past of police officers routinely conducting illegal searches and using excessive force. She also spoke with Malik Aziz who is chairman of the National Black Police Association.
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I have long been a contributor to Partners in Health, the group founded by Paul Farmer that takes high quality health care to areas of great need around the world. It began when I read the book Mountains Beyond Mountains: The quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a man who would cure the world by Tracy Kidder that I wrote about here back in 2005, and listened to a talk by Farmer around the same time when he visited my university.
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People love to rank things, which explains why listsicles are so popular as clickbait. All such rankings are dependent on the measures used to score them and so tend to be quite idiosyncratic. I try to avoid them in general but being in education I was intrigued by an article that claimed that Shimer College was the worst college in America. I had never heard of this college at all and so was curious as to what it was and why it earned this dubious title.
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As part of my Gregory Peck retrospective, I watched over the weekend this 1965 film where he plays a man who seems to have suddenly lost his memory of the recent past. His attempts to find the traumatic event that caused the loss and recover the events of the lost period result in the people trying to help him out ending up dead.
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[A reader reminded me of an old post that I had written back in 2008 on my old blog site and I thought I would reprint it except for very minor editing. So here it is.]
In the course of writing many posts on science and religion and atheism, it struck me that I was tangentially making many statements about what I, as an atheist, believe. I decided to summarize those scattered thoughts into one coherent statement. Of course, I am not presuming to claim that all atheists subscribe to this statement. The creed is purely a personal one.
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The Daily Show looks at the extraordinary effort by those on the right to find something, anything, other than excessive and unreasonable use of force by the police to blame for the recent deaths of black people.
Incidentally, some are arguing that the fact that despite the clear video of the Garner killing no indictments were brought suggests that having police wear body cams will not help. I disagree. The existence of the video has created much greater consensus on the appalling nature of the killing which is why the excuses proffered on behalf of the police in this case are so absurd.
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In films, the star is often replaced by a double in many situations, either because the task involved is too dangerous to risk injury or the star simply cannot or will not do what the role requires. We in the audience almost never notice the switching back and forth. One might think that this is solely due to the care that the film makers take to make sure the double has the same build as the star and is made up to have the same exterior appearance in terms of clothes and hair, and by avoiding close ups of the face.
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It appears that the Chinese government has declared war on puns. Since I am extremely fond of this form of humor, I guess this rules out that nation as a possible future home for me.
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The Satanic Temple, seems to be expanding its sights yet again as they seek to counter every Christian encroachment in the public sphere by demanding that their own religious symbols be given the same privileges.
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