1. Lt. William Calley - the saga of his conviction and US inability to process it
This blog posting explains some of the background to events that unfolded after Lt. Calley's conviction on 22 (yes, 22) counts of murder. It is not difficult to see that a lot of people in the USA remained in denial about Calley's guilt and became apologists for his actions.

2. The continuing saga of the GOP War on Voter Fraud
One of the pervasive features of western political systems is the extent to which electors fall for The Fear Card when it is played by politicians. Students of history and literature will know that this tactic, as well as being identified by George Orwell in "1984" was one of the prime ones in the Nazi playbook, as admitted by Herman Goering during his Nuremburg trial and interrogation. I have seen it used so many times by politicians in my lifetime that I have lost count. The sad thing is that politicians use it because it works. Humans are terribly bad at assessing perceived threats in an unemotional fashion, and are also bad at assessing risk. This makes us individually and collectively vulnerable to these kinds of fear-based scares.
One of the fears that has been successfully exploited by the GOP in the last 5 years is "voter fraud". The claim is that many people are voting who are not allowed to vote, either because of defective IDs and paperwork, or impersonation.
The reality is that the claims have no empirical foundation. All recent attempts to find evidence of significant voter fraud have failed. Given that legislative time is scarce, I think it is time for elected representatives to stop doubling down on legislation to address a non-existent problem, and, you know, actually work on important stuff. The current legal initiatives in states to combat voter fraud are nothing more than partisan political masturbation, playing on primitive fears and pandering to the "something must be done" mindset.
However, amusingly and ironically, two recent instances of voter fraud have come to light, and both of them were proved or alleged to have been performed by GOP members. The Indiana Secretary of State was convicted of voter fraud in 2011. Currently, another GOP politician in Arizona has also been accused of voting fraud. One would think that if you are a party who is campaigning to stamp out voter fraud, you would at least try to ensure that your own members aren't engaging in it, but then logic and ethics do not seem to be particularly high on the list of requirements for many political arenas in the USA...

3. NLP and interpreting people's eye movements
One of the cornerstones of NLP is that you can supposedly determine whether a person is lying by their eye movement response to questions. Certain types of eye movements are supposed to be associated with attempts to deceive or lie during responses. This is potentially very important, in a culture that places a high premium on eye contact as a means of assessing trustworthiness.
We already know that certain types of people, known as kinesthetics, do not hold eye contact when asked questions. They tend to look sideways and down. This article explains the tendency, and points out that no less a person than Albert Einstein was a kinesthetic. It also discusses the 1984 Vice-Presidential debate between George H W Bush and Geraldine Ferraro, where Bush broke eye contact by looking through the camera, while Ferraro, a kinesthetic, broke eye contact by looking sideways and down. Immediate post-debate analyses scored Bush more highly than Ferraro in terms of perceived trustworthiness, but this was almost certainly based on the audience's primitive reactions to the different ways in which the candidates used eye contact when processing and answering questions.
I too am a kinesthetic, and, like many people in the UK, I find that sustained eye contact from people makes me uncomfortable. It convinces me that the person engaging in eye contact is actually engaging in artifice, not authenticity. I also tend to be a lot more interested in the words of an answer than body language. Body language is more open to interpretation than words are.
The NLP interpretation has always been that looking sideways and down is an indicator that the person is being deceiving or is lying in their response. Well, it seems that this conclusion is not supported by experimental evidence.

4. Butthurt Roman Catholic leader wants a return to the (not so good) old days
In which a German Roman Catholic bishop, infuriated by criticism of his church and the Pope, has the brilliant idea of resurrecting the old days when blasphemy was a felony.
I've got news for him. They tried that for several hundred years in Europe. It is known in history as The Dark Ages, and we were smart enough to move past it, and stop the Church from defining the boundaries of free speech. The bishop may also want to confer with his CEO in future before he opens his mouth, since the Pope complained last year about Pakistan's blasphemy laws. It is always awkward when the CEO and a director are not on the same page.
It is interesting to see this attack of special pleading by the Church. It is in line with other recent dumbass interpretations of the First Amendment in the USA by other butthurt individuals, including John Rocker, whose idea of free speech not only includes their right to say anything they like, but apparently includes an additional right that they should not be criticized or ridiculed for saying anything they like. The logical conclusion that preventing them from being ridiculed is actually a violation of the free speech rights of others is a conclusion that they either cannot reach or that they have chosen to ignore, because their butthurt is more important than others' free speech.