Sailing the Last Voyage with Newton and Pascal
He fields the usual trick question: Florida Sen. Marco Rubio declined to firmly answer a question of existential importance in an interview released Monday. An interviewer for GQ magazine asked the Republican, a Catholic and potential 2016 presidential candidate, how old planet Earth is. Rubio didn’t give a direct answer, but suggested children should be …
Continue reading "Rubio's Not a Scientist, but They're Not Either"
And not whine about it when people point out the obvious: So he (Mitt Romney) casts about, looking for some other explanation, and he lands on one: “gifts” that, to sway voters, the Obama Administration handed out to the President’s key demographic groups—“especially the African-American community, the Hispanic community, and young people.” “With regards to …
Continue reading "A Patronage Driven Political System Should be Called for What It Is"
For all the hoopla these days about being "scientific", the history of science still gets the short shrift. We are happier discussing the philosophical advances engendered by the Enlightenment and not the people on the STEM (science, technology, math and engineering) end who actually made those advances a reality. We're also happier lionising those who …
Continue reading "The Men Who Saved the Computer From the Hippie Radicals"
Well, we're here again. Four years ago after the 2008 debacle I wrote my piece The Party’s Over: A Post-Election Reflection, and that's as good of a point as any to start from. It’s fair to say that the Republican Party is history as a national party in the U.S. Oh, it’s true that it …
Continue reading "The Party's Over, Once Again: Another Election, Another Reflection"
For students of Latin American history, the serious question: President Obama’s response to the Great Recession and then a pallid recovery has been guided more by “fairness,” a thinly veiled code for redistribution, than by free-market principles. As it stands now, the top 1 percent of Americans generate 16 percent of the nation’s income but …
Continue reading "Do We Really Want to Go the Way of Argentina?"
When they're a)Mormon and b)in American politics: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has a response to Mitt Romney’s claim that he will “reach across the aisle” to work with Democrats in Congress, if he becomes president: Don’t bet on it. “Mitt Romney’s fantasy that Senate Democrats will work with him to pass his 'severely conservative' …
Continue reading "Harry Reid and Mitt Romney: When the Aspiring Gods Fall Out"
And Vladimir, too: Recently journalists from The Guardian newspaper reported an important change during stays in Pyongyang: two large portraits of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin - long a prominent feature of Pyongyang's central Kim Il-sung square - were nowhere to be seen. Instead, the images have been replaced by a more dominating portrait of …
Continue reading "North Korea Calls It Quits on Karl and Fred"
Under the guise of "democracy", we're setting ourselves up for trouble: Americans have fought at home and on many a distant shore with resolve in truths that they hold to be self-evident, "that all men are created equal". Under the Barack Obama administration, America appears to have abandoned this principle through its recent engagement policy …
It's the home stretch for our election season. This is a "make or break" election in many ways. It will both define and set the course for the kind of country we are and kind of people we are. And it's been competitive. As I discussed in the last post but one, it's also been …
Our hopelessly biased media brings up the subject of Mitt Romney's Mormonism on a regular basis. One way they can do this while not attracting attention to themselves is to go out and interview Evangelicals on why they're struggling with voting for a Mormon. This is a clever diversion that, while bringing up an interesting …
Continue reading "Ever Wonder Why the Republicans are Running a Mormon and a Roman Catholic?"
