The Advocate published a list of the 50 most influential LGBT people in the media, limiting themselves only to those who have been open about their sexual orientation. These lists are brazen attempts at getting hits but I clicked anyway.
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So the people of Scotland vote on independence today. Voting ends at 10:00 pm with final results expected around 7:00 am Friday morning, but results will start trickling in at about 1:00 am, all local times. Last-minute polls predict that the ‘no’ vote against independence having a 52-48% lead, if the 8% of undecided voters are excluded.
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From George Monbiot, I learn that all but one (Sunday) newspaper in the UK opposed separation by Scotland, so the fact that the vote is so close at the moment is quite remarkable since my sense is that newspaper reading is much more widespread in the UK than in the US and thus likely to be more influential in swaying public opinion.
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The Daily Show examines president Obama’s ISIS speech on Wednesday and concludes that he has thrown away his reluctance to get involved in yet another front on the never-ending war and has gone all in with the warmongers.
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While the militarization of police departments has been getting some scrutiny, what has not received much media attention is that some school districts are also purchasing heavy weaponry under the same program in which the government gives away its military hardware.
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While there has definitely been progress in acceptance of the idea that the LGBT community has the right to full and equal participation in society, we should not be too complacent either, because there are still pockets of vicious anti-gay sentiment out there, even in supposedly sophisticated urban cities of the northeast like Philadelphia (which translates as ‘brotherly love’), where just last week a gay couple on a street in the city center was viciously attacked by a group of men and women.
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With a great deal of nervousness, Ton Siedsma agreed to an experiment. He would load an app on his smartphone that would send all its activity metadata for one week to Dimitri Tokmetzis who works on datajournalism projects and who would in turn forward it to the iMinds research team of Ghent University and Mike Moolenaar, owner of Risk and Security Experts. All three would analyze the metadata to see what they could learn about Siedsma.
The amount they learned was shocking.
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The US government and the CIA have long used front groups to covertly pursue its agenda. These groups have high-minded names that include words like ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’ and ‘development’ and ‘aid’ but their goal is subversion of other countries. Using these fronts enables the government to deny any involvement and instead say that the things they instigate and finance secretly with puppet leaders are actually ‘popular’ or ‘grass roots’ or ‘local’ movements.
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During the 2008 election, when Sarah Palin burst on the scene and people wondered who the hell she was and what her background was, the site to visit was The Mudflats, an Alaska-based blog that provided the most informed coverage of her and her world. In the wake of the now infamous Palin family brawl, people have begged the founder of the site Jeanne Devon to dig up the details and she has finally, but reluctantly, obliged.
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The Republican party’s determination to repeal, or at least undermine, the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) by throwing roadblocks in its path was obviously predicated on their fear, not that it would fail, but that it would succeed. They rightly guessed that despite its clunky structure and its pro-health care industry tilt, if it succeeded in providing health care access to large numbers of people at a reasonable cost, then it would become harder to get rid of the program. So it had to be stopped early.
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