Roger Hoeppner, a 75-year old resident of a rural Wisconsin county, has had a long-standing dispute with local authorities. He was challenging the zoning rules that they said required him to move some wooden pallets in his front yard. As he continued to defy them, the local authorities did what any small community when confronted with an elderly resident who was being difficult.
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There has been a scandal recently in the orthodox Jewish community when a prominent rabbi of a big temple was arrested when it was discovered that he had secretly installed hidden cameras to film women taking a ritual bath known as a ‘mikvah’. I was curious about what a mikvah was and its purpose and this article by Lauren Markoe addresses most of the questions. It turns out that it relates to the obsession that all religions have about women’s purity and how to make them ‘clean’ so that they become worthy to be in the presence of men and have sex with them.
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Ed Brayton, who is the administrator of this network, says that there is a major issue about the ads (not just on FtB but all over the internet) that is being worked on behind the scenes to try and resolve.
He explains what is happening and what steps are being taken on his own blog here.
I apologize for the inconvenience and hope it will get settled soon.
Stephen Colbert makes the case for congressman Louie Gohmert who wins it even in the face of stiff competition from the likes of Michele Bachmann. I sometimes wonder whether he could be as stupid as he really seems to be and whether he is really quite savvy and has figured out that by saying deliberately stupid things, he gets a lot of media attention. But that would require him to be a really good actor, worthy of an award.
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First Look Media, the media venture started by billionaire Pierre Omidyar, was the corporate entity that would publish different online magazines in which the journalists would have much freer reign to investigate and report on stories than they would have with the mainstream media. It hired a whole slew of highly respected independent-minded journalists, not your usual subservient stenographers dutifully transmitting the talking points of their confidential sources.
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Robert Parry marvels at how the US media quickly picks up and follows the official narrative of the US government when it comes to geopolitics. The latest is how Russia’s actions in the world are described when compared with US actions, and how Russian president Vladimir Putin is portrayed as a lunatic. He uses a recent New York Times article as an example.
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I have had mild lactose intolerance since childhood. This means that I have no problems with butter or ice cream or milk in my coffee and tea and cereal and in other foods but cannot drink a full glass of milk with getting an upset stomach. It turns out that what I thought of as a limitation and even a minor health hazard (milk is good for you, right?) may actually be a positive thing. While butter and eggs got the green light some years ago, switching from being bad for you to being either good or neutral, a new study suggests that milk may go the other way, switching from being an unalloyed good to health hazard.
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There are two things I have learned about creationists and intelligent designers. One is that many of them will never give up their beliefs whatever the facts. The other is that they crave acceptance by the scientific community and will try any means to give their ideas even the slightest veneer of scientific credibility. In pursuance of these goals, they managed to stealthily secure a venue at Michigan State University to hold one of their meetings this coming Saturday.
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Jon Stewart looks at how easily Americans are made fearful about everything and asks wonderingly, “What’s wrong with us? I thought we were the home of the brave.” While that sentiment may provide a rousing end to the national anthem, it is just another case of pandering to the self-image of people that they and their nation are possessed of some virtue not held by others. Such self-aggrandizing conceits are hard to erase. The hardest thing for people to accept is that they (as individuals and collectively as nations or ethnic groups) are pretty much just like everyone else in their basic human qualities.
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Although I like science, or maybe because of it, I tend to get irritated with films that casually break the laws of science merely to achieve a cheap solution to a plot problem. I don’t expect perfect fidelity but gratuitous violations of laws (such noisy explosions in space or the presence of Earth-like gravity on spaceships) are annoying. This is why I liked 2001: A Space Odyssey and to a lesser extent Gravity, because they tried to stick as closely as possible to what may be actually possible.
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