Weekend Reads 9/8/18

Three men unfit to eulogize John McCain

Consider Pence for a moment. He began with a ludicrous declaration that broke all records for disingenuousness: “The president asked me to be here on behalf of a grateful nation, to pay a debt of honor and respect to a man who served our country throughout his life, in uniform and in public office. It’s my great honor to be here.” President Trump despised McCain and routinely mocked him. Suggesting that Pence was there to represent Trump would require him to insult and mock McCain.

New group pushes Simple Plan as way forward

“The Traditionalist Plan expands enforcement of oppression; the Connectional Church Plan resurrects the racist logic of the Central Jurisdiction; and the One Church Plan sanctions segregation regionally,” the statement says of the commission’s proposals.

In contrast, the statement contends, the Simple Plan is grounded in “our experience of God’s blessings in the lives and loves of LGBTQIA+ persons, along with our first General Rule to ‘do no harm.’”

Elusive Elementary Particle Finally Caught Decaying

The LHC smashes pairs of protons together near the speed of light, creating huge showers of particles that splatter the insides of massive detectors. This debris contains lots of different particles at once, and many of them look like the Higgs-bottom decay.

Physicists have to reconstruct precisely how a given collision unfolded using the decay particles they detected—a bit like figuring out how a massive car accident happened by examining the wrecks and tire tracks in the aftermath.

Federal Court: First Amendment Protects Sharing Food With Homeless People

With that as precedent, the 11th Circuit ruled that to determine if an activity is expressive or not, “we ask whether the reasonable person would interpret it as some sort of message, not whether an observer would necessarily infer a specific message.” So for the Fort Lauderdale Food Not Bombs case, “the circumstances surrounding an event often help set the dividing line between activity that is sufficiently expressive and similar activity that is not.”