The Mother’s Day charade

In another excellent piece on Last Week Tonight, John Oliver makes the point that the public veneration of motherhood in the US is really a sham because we and Papua New Guinea are the only countries that do not offer paid time off for having a child, and he describes the kinds of extraordinary measures that women have to do to cobble together the necessary time off after giving birth. The email that Tesla founder Elon Musk sent to an employee who merely missed one event in order to witness the birth of his child shows how little we actually value parenting.
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Liberal Zionists on the gloomy future for Israel

These have not been easy times for the group known as liberal Zionists, those who support a two-state solution and envisaged an Israel that upheld democratic values and human rights and co-existed peacefully with a Palestinian state and its Arab neighbors. There was always a latent contradiction in the fact that any state that has an official religion and makes laws accommodating it necessarily undermines democracy but liberal Zionists felt that the influence of religion could be minimized and Israel could be Jewish state the same way that England has an official chirch.
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Conservative America’s new favorite mother

Today is Mother’s Day that, along with Father’s Day and Valentine’s Day and Sweetest Day and Secretary’s Day and who knows what else, are heavily promoted by businesses in order to get people to buy stuff out of guilt that if they don’t spend heavily on their mothers, that means they are not dutiful and caring children. It also enables some people to think that remembering their mothers on this day and sending her a gift or a card means that they can pretty much ignore her the rest of the year.
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Psychologists try to salvage the reputation of their profession

When governments engage in atrocities like torture, they invariably need the assistance of people in health care professions, such as doctors and nurses, to collaborate in these practices since they have the necessary expertise to both monitor them and develop even more methods of torture. Unfortunately they usually have enough of such people to help them, either because those medical professionals are willing to overlook the appalling ethics of what they are doing or because their jobs depend upon them going along or they actually profit from it.
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The return of the Demon Sheep?

Last week Carly Fiorina announced her candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination. I did not follow the ousted chair of Hewlett-Packard’s effort to unseat Barbara Boxer for the US senate in 2010, a race that she lost handily. So I missed the fact that in her primary race against fellow Republican Tom Campbell, she ran an unintentionally hilarious attack ad against him, the one that has come to be called the Demon Sheep ad. It truly deserves a spot on any list of memorable campaign ads.
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Appeals Court rules against NSA’s bulk collections of metadata

The Second Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled unanimously in the case of ACLU et. al, vs. Clapper et. al. that one aspect of the NSA’s bulk collection of metadata (one of the secret programs revealed by Edward Snowden) “exceeds the scope of what Congress has authorized” under section 215 of the USA Patriot Act. (You can read the opinion here.) The issue was whether the NSA’s collection of metadata was legal. A lower court had dismissed the ACLU’s claim but the Appeals Court overturned it and sent it back to the district court to be dealt with accordingly. Because they found it illegal under the law, they did not venture to decide on its constitutionality.
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A parade of clowns

The only interesting thing about the Republican primary process will be to see how extreme the candidates’ rhetoric will get before they get eliminated one by one and to predict who will be next to get the hook and be yanked off the stage. But of course, many of them will not see this as a humiliation. They are likely in this just to feed their egos, increase their public profile, and enhance their speaking fees. They probably see this a no-lose proposition.
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