Noted documentary maker Alex Gibney has a new film coming out on the Scientology movement. It is based on the book Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief (2013) by Lawrence Wright that I reviewed favorably here. The film is being produced by HBO and will be released early next year.
[Read more…]
Last Friday, Ricky Jackson and Wiley Bridgeman were released from prison after serving 39 years for a crime they did not commit, convicted purely on the testimony of a then 12-year old boy Eddie Vernon who now admits that he did not see them commit the crime. There was no physical evidence connecting the men to the crime. The boy says that after he initially told police that he had witnessed the crime, they later coached him on what to say at trial. A third person Ronnie Bridgman, Wiley’s brother, was released in 2003 after serving 27 years.
[Read more…]
While Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Richard Dawkins are seen as leading lights of the New Atheist movement of which I consider myself a member, I have come to detest their views on a large number of political and social positions, seeing them as lackeys of the neo-imperialism that is driving the western assault on the rest of the world and responsible for immense amounts of suffering. There is an overweening smugness about their sense of their own, and their tribe’s, superiority over those dastardly Muslims that I find unseemly.
[Read more…]
There was a time when the US condemned China’s use of prison labor because it undercut the labor market and gave them an unfair advantage since the wages of prisoners were so low as to effectively constitute free labor. I was under the impression that in the US it was illegal to use prison labor for that same reason.
[Read more…]
[See update below.]
Rolling Stone has an explosive story about rape at the University of Virginia, where the culture of drinking and rape and sexual assault centered around fraternities seems to be out of control. The report has rocked the campus and the university’s president has suspended the fraternities until the beginning of the next semester. The story by Sabrina Rubin Erdely is both shocking and disgusting in describing what female students went through.
[Read more…]
The Equivalence Principle enunciated by Albert Einstein says that any two objects in a uniform gravity field will fall at the same rate if dropped from a height. Of course, if we drop a feather and a bowling ball, that is not what we see and we explain that by saying it is because the air resistance slows down the feather much more than it does the bowling ball. But if you could drop the two items in a vacuum, they should fall at the same rate.
[Read more…]
The comments following my earlier post about Bill Cosby have been interesting. Some have argued that since he has not been convicted in a court of law of giving women drugs and then raping them, he should be given the presumption of innocence as is his right under our legal system.
[Read more…]
In the face of furious hyperbolic opposition from the Republican party who warned him that he was threatening to undermine the very foundations of democracy in the US, president Obama has gone ahead with his plan to use his executive powers to temporarily spare anywhere from three to five million undocumented immigrants from the threat of deportation for three years by offering them temporary legal status.
[Read more…]
The video below is of some kind of competition to see which dog can race down a track fastest. The catch is that on both sides of the track are placed distractions in the forms of treats and toys and it takes a certain single-minded focus to ignore those and proceed straight ahead. Not all are successful.
[Read more…]