In an interesting development, seven big internet companies (AOL, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Twitter, and Yahoo) have jointly set up a website listing five principles by which government surveillance can be reformed to protect the general privacy of people while satisfying the government’s genuine need for security information. The five principles are: [Read more…]

Members of the transgender community face severe discrimination at almost every level, leading to them having extremely high levels of poverty and homelessness. They are also the targets of extreme violence. Cleveland has been the scene of fatal attacks on members of the transgender community, two of them in the last few days. Another person was killed back in January. The good thing is that the local leadership has been quick to speak out against these attacks. [Read more…]

The rich have been waging a brutal class war on the rest of us but the media and the allies of the oligarchy refuse to call it as such. The tragedy is that for so long, the poor and working class, the very segments of the population that have been most devastated by this class war, have been taught to shy away from the very phrase ‘class war’ as if it were something unseemly, when it is the most accurate way to describe current conditions, and forms the foundation for understanding their own situation. The real and lasting legacy of the Occupy Wall Street movement was that it brought the issue of the class war front and center by highlighting the divide between the 1% ruling class and the 99% of the rest. [Read more…]

A few mornings ago I dropped into my neighborhood bank. I rarely go in anymore, now that online banking and ATMs are available and was courteously and pleasantly treated as always by the tellers. I was shocked later in the day to see this report (via Pharyngula) that about a third of bank tellers now depend on some form of public assistance to make ends meet. It is yet another example of the galloping divergence between the few haves and the many have-nots in the US. [Read more…]

Coming from the world of science, I tend to look at questions empirically, asking what data exists that sheds light on the problem and whether we can find causal relationships. But when it comes to political questions, while they may still be empirical questions, very often we have at most correlations and as a result there may be only political answers. [Read more…]

Now everyone (almost) sings the praises of Nelson Mandela. Sagar Jethani takes a walk down memory lane to see what some of them were saying back in the 1980’s when he was denounced as a Communist and terrorist and when the Republican party was split, with some opposing his release from prison or putting any pressure on South Africa. [Read more…]

The Chinese president on a visit to the United States told a group of people that he met on the street that they needed to challenge their government and change the status quo, and that people’s privacy must be respected if they are to breathe free. [Read more…]

Nelson Mandela died today. There is not much that I can add to all the words that will be written about him. But I thought that this old TV interview from 1961, when he was in hiding and before he was captured by the apartheid South African government and put in prison for 27 years before being released in 1990, was interesting. [Read more…]