Daily Archives: March 23, 2010

Choir Me Virtual

First, people audition: Then Eric Whitacre puts them all together: Does geography matter anymore?

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Rush Limbaugh and a Disturbing New Authoritarian Phenomenon: The Brick Throwing “Patriot”

Talk about pushing the Overton Window to the right. Yesterday Rush Limbaugh (who calls himself a “Christian”) equated Barack Obama with Hitler and put up this rather uncharitable battle cry against Democrats: We need to defeat these bastards. We need to wipe … Continue reading

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Sam Harris cuts through the fog of Nietzsche’s fact-value distinction

In a powerful attack on Nietzsche’s fact-value distinction and the oft-repeated canard that it is dangerous to derive an “ought” from an “is,” in the video below Sam Harris argues that, in fact, we know perfectly well what things make for human flourishing, … Continue reading

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Reality Check: Gallup Poll finds public approval of Barack Obama’s health care victory

No wonder the president has been smiling all day. As you might expect, now that the health care reform bill has actually passed, the public’s approval of it has markedly improved. This is what the Democrats were banking on all along, … Continue reading

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Is the Universe a Quantum Computer?

A new book by Vlatko Vedral, Decoding Reality (2010), makes the case for this, and according to the reviewer of the book at New Scientist Vedral also gives a bit of intellectual support to some ideas that circulate among Hindu yogis: Vedral holds out … Continue reading

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A New Harris Poll asks “What do Republicans believe about Barack Obama?”

The answers that the Harris poll yielded are alarming. Here are four of the findings: 24% of Republicans think that Obama “may be the Antichrist” 38% think Obama is “doing many of the things that Hitler did” 57% think that … Continue reading

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Atheism and the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California

The Winchester Mystery House in San Jose has a staircase that famously ends at a ceiling. A friend and I were talking about the Winchester Mystery House and then abruptly shifted to a different subject: an acquaintance engaged in an ambitious and … Continue reading

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