Search for "cheap airline tickets to santa barbara phone number 1-800-299-7264"

Arguments That Caste Protections ‘Unjustly Target’ South Asians Don’t Stand Up to Scrutiny

By Pranay Somayajula and Nikhil Mandalaparthy

…petrators.” In 2021, when a similar resolution was being considered by the Santa Clara County Human Rights Commission, Shukla warned in her testimony that the proposal would “uniquely target South Asians, Indians, and Hindus for ethno-religious profiling, monitoring, and policing.” Time and time again, the Hindu right has issued these same warnings about the discriminatory menace of caste protections—and yet, not a single one of them has come to f…

Pelosi Attacker’s New Age Spirituality and Belief in QAnon is no Contradiction

By Susannah Crockford

…then deleted an article making this allegation from the fake news site the Santa Monica Observer. The conspiracy theory transmuted accusations of increasing right-wing political violence into a tawdry story of a domestic dispute between two men, coupled with an attempt to associate addiction and homosexuality with degeneracy. On social media, this conspiracy theory spread, along with frequent use of the images of the Berkeley house with the Pride/…

Contrary to Popular Narrative the Supreme Court’s ‘303’ Decision Gutting Civil Rights Laws is not About an Individual Standing Up For Her Beliefs

By Andrew L. Seidel

…in Justice Alito’s comments, from his demeaning hypothetical about a Black Santa and a child in a KKK sheet in response to Justice Jackson’s plausible hypothetical about anti-Black discrimination; to his insulting exchange with Justice Kagan about JDate, “a dating service, I gather, for Jewish people;” to his loathsome attempt at humor, “Maybe Justice Kagan will also be familiar with the next website I’m going to mention, AshleyMadison.com”—a webs…

Eid ul-Isa Mubarak. Happy Hanukah. Merry Christmas. Khushiali Mubarak. Eid Mubarak. Happy Kwanzaa

By Hussein Rashid

…menorah seemed to be a nice background to make the menorah stand out. The Santa figure was a shamash to keep the menorah safe, and he sometimes had an assistant in the snowman. I played dreidel with my friends, although I never understood the song. My dreidels were always made of plastic, and I saw metal ones, but never clay. I got my gelt for the holidays, and waited all year to get my latkes. Of course, once I learned of Christmas, it was a ver…

Could a Real Life Jurassic Park Help with Climate Change?

By Michael Schulson

…gible, and, perhaps, edible. Is the magic of lost beasts what motivates UC-Santa Cruz biologist Beth Shapiro to dedicate her life to bringing back extinct species? Shapiro is a MacArthur “genius grant” recipient, a former Rhodes Scholar, and a geneticist. You feel like she might just as well be off trying to cure cancer or engineer superbacteria. Instead, Shapiro studies ancient DNA, and she’s an expert on the genome of the passenger pigeon, which…

How Thanksgiving Became All Dinner, No Worship

By Bruce David Forbes

…joint Thanksgiving services in order to draw decent-sized crowds. Today a number of Christian churches provide no worship service at all on Thanksgiving Eve or Day. Honoring it as a special time for families to get together, the churches are content to raise Thanksgiving themes on the Sunday before or after the holiday. It may seem surprising that there is not more outcry from some Christian groups about the diminished role of church services on…

Wrestling and Religion: We Know It’s Fake and We Don’t Care

By Jess Peacock

…stlemania 31, where 70,000 fans will gather this Sunday at Levi Stadium in Santa Clara, CA. Professional wrestling, much like organized religion, operates within its own system of internal logic and rules. To the uninitiated outsider, the inability of a wrestler to prevent himself from bouncing off of the ropes (perhaps gravity operates differently within the squared circle) or a suplex inflicting damage only on an opponent despite both bodies sla…

Does the Inquisition Explain the Modern World?

By Gordon Haber

…century, inquisitors carried out their grim business in Manila, Cartagena, Santa Fe, and Mexico City. A third, overlapping phase, the Roman Inquisition, began in the 16th century. Under the direct authority of the Holy See, its biggest target was Protestantism. But it also went after Jews, witches, and homosexuals (all the interesting people, apparently). And it went after ideas, inventing the Index of Forbidden Books, roasting Giordano Bruno for…

Favorite Places, Favorite Prayers

By Amina Wadud

…omewhere on the road to home I intentionally took a detour. I was south of Santa Cruz heading north towards San Francisco and I just had a craving for that ride along the coast, the famous Highway One. Earlier this year when I spent a month in Australia, including a stint at University of Melbourne, I took a day tour along the Great Ocean Road. I learned that its architect of it had been inspired by our own Highway One. Both are stunning testament…

MRI Jesus, Bush’s Reading List, Ahmadinejad & the Pope…

By Michael J. Altman

…Jersey school district. In Germany, a group of Catholics want to take the Santa out of Christmas. They want to replace the consumerist Claus with the selfless St. Nicholas. Druidry is now recognized as a religion by Great Britain. That only took a few thousand years. A priest at St. Vincent College in Pennsylvania was fired when pornography was discovered on his computer. The story takes an interesting turn, however. It turns out a former student…