Stranger than Fiction
Wow, you can’t make this kind of stuff up. A UCF student took a wafer at a Catholic Mass, upsetting the clergy who believe that it is the actual Body of Christ and hence must be consumed immediately. An atheist …
Author: Phil Mayes
The Path to Torture
Interesting post by Glenn Greenwald on Jane Mayer’s book The Dark Side where he points out that on torture, a reason that Congress has been reluctant to act is that many of its members were themselves compromised. I imagine them …
The Flag
Independence day is a great time to (re)start a blog on independent thinking, and what better subject than the flag. If you see an American flag outside a house, odds are the owners are Republican. In Britain, the ultra-right National …
Does Christian Morality Benefit Society?
The average Christian in the US believes that society’s social problems are due to poor application of Christian morals. A paper published by the Journal of Religion and Society finds just the opposite; it measures homicide, youth suicide, STDs, teen …
Selective reporting
Intersting Salon article on the absence of media reports of public opinion polls on Terry Schiavo: When public opinion doesn’t matter “in the past week, an overwhelming majority — 87 percent — of Americans polled by ABC News and the …
Microsoft makes good patent recommendations
I’m not usually a fan of Microsoft, but they presented some very sensible proposals in a lecture to the American Enterprise Institute.
When Socialism works
In Slate, The Triumph of Socialized Medicine comments on a Washington Monthly report that VA hospitals provided better quality of care than fee-for-service Medicare. Such news must be anathema to free-market ideologues, but the reasons given make sense; for instance, …
How true is the news?
Media everywhere ran the story about Harvard rejecting 119 aplicants because they tried to learn their admissions status early by “hacking into a Web site“, but the initial stories gave no details of the “hack”. Now we learn that it …
Drug costs and medical research
The pharmaceutical industry claims that the high cost of drugs in America is necessary to support the costs of research, but a more likely cause of those costs is in the NYTimes article which says “[t]he drug industry has long …
The Gannon affair
MediaBistro is not finding it as easy to get a press pass as James Guckert, the amateur correspondent who covered White House press conferences for several years.