Gene Edward Veith Jr.'s Blog, page 139

The Zika mystery & Zika abortions

Some women who get Zika have babies with severe birth defects, but some don’t.  In Brazil, some regions plagued with Zika have a huge percentage of babies with microencephaly.  But adjoining regions also plagued with Zika don’t.  Also, young, black, and poor women are being hit especially hard. So researchers are now investigating whether Zika does its [Read More...]

“Chariots of Fire” and the vocation of athletics

A rabbi writing in the Wall Street Journal offers reflections on Chariots of Fire, the 1981 movie about Olympic runners Eric Liddell and Harold Abrahams.  The movie, of course, is about athletics as VOCATION. Read an excerpt from the column after the jump, whereupon I offer some reflections about it, including the difference between Liddell’s Calvinist understanding [Read More...]

The problems with Evan McMullin, but he has one chance to win

NeverTrump conservatives thought they might have a candidate they could vote for when ex-CIA agent and ex-Republican Congressional staffer Evan McMullin threw his hat into the ring. But inconsistencies and questions have arisen about his resume (HT: Carl Vehse).  Also, Maggie Gallagher has pointed out his weakness on issues important to social conservatives.  (For example, he is OK with [Read More...]

Riots in Milwaukee

A police officer shot and killed an armed black man in Milwaukee, sparking a riot in which police were stoned with bricks,  journalists were assaulted, several businesses were set on fire, and white drivers were pulled out of their cars and beaten. It turns out, the officer who fired the shots is black. From Violence erupts [Read More...]

What Clinton thinks religious liberty is

In a play to capitalize on Mormon’s dissatisfaction with Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton wrote an op-ed piece in the LDS-owned Deseret News in which she emphasizes her commitment to religious liberty.  But notice what she thinks religious liberty is. Read what she says and my analysis after the jump. From Exclusive: Hillary Clinton: What I have in [Read More...]

Who’ll win the Irish vote?

We keep getting told that demographics favor the Democrats and look bad for the Republicans, as America becomes more ethnically diverse, a phenomenon particularly evident in the growing Hispanic vote.  But Josh Gelertner gives us a history lesson putting all of this into context. He points out that ever since the machine politics of Boss [Read More...]

A shark that was 512 years old?

It turns out that Greenland sharks routinely live to be 272 years old.  One was caught recently that may have been 512 years old.  That is to say, she would have been born in 1504. She had been swimming in the northern sea, starting only 12 years after Columbus discovered America.  She would have been 13 [Read More...]

Conservative Swedish theologian made bishop in Latvia

The Baltic republics, geographically and culturally, are almost Scandinavian.  Now that a national Lutheran church–that of Latvia–has gone confessional, that affects its theologically liberal neighbors. A Swedish theologians whom the state church refused to ordain because he doesn’t believe that women should be made pastors, has been made a bishop in the Evangelical Lutheran Church of [Read More...]

The politics of refusing power

Usually, politics is a competition between individuals and factions each of which wants to be, as we say, “in power.”  In Japan, though, there is a political struggle between a faction that wants to put a man in power and that man who does not want the power. As we blogged about, the party of Japanese [Read More...]

The new “Star Trek” captain will be “diverse,” but what “level of diversity”?

CBS is coming out with a new Star Trek series, starting on its main broadcasting network, but then moving over to its new pay-for-access channel.  An Entertainment Weekly article on the show, based on an interview with the producer, tortures the term “diverse” in ways I hadn’t heard before. We are told that the commander of the [Read More...]