Introducing iRS from Apple, its new corporate tax evasion product, with all the sleek simplicity and hip commercials that you have come to expect from this company.
Mano Singham
Just another Freethought Blogs site
Introducing iRS from Apple, its new corporate tax evasion product, with all the sleek simplicity and hip commercials that you have come to expect from this company.
Canada does not have the reputation that the US has for breeding crazy politicians. So it came as something of a surprise that the people of Toronto, the largest city in that country, elected as their mayor in 2010 Rob Ford who seems to be almost a caricature of a scandal-plagued politician, embroiled in one embarrassing episode after another, sometimes involving alcohol and drugs, at other times racial and sexual insensitivity. Here is an article chronicling his past weird behavior. [Read more…]
‘Terrorism’ has now become a word without much meaning except to be brandished as a political weapon. Witness the absurd fuss in the US over the fact that president Obama initially referred to the Benghazi attacks as an ‘act of terror’ as opposed to ‘terrorism’. In the wake of the recent ghastly murder of British soldier, Glenn Greenwald revisits the question of the selective use of the word, and of what causes some acts to be labeled as terrorism and others not. [Read more…]
Did you know that May is National Masturbation Month? I had no idea until today and wondered why this is not better known. Hugo Schwyzer partially answers this question in an article in which he says that this because of a remarkable prudishness about one of the most common sex acts, one that is central to the culture wars. [Read more…]
Recall my earlier post about an upcoming US Supreme Court case concerning the constitutionality of opening government meetings with a prayer, thus seeming to re-open an issue that it had addressed in 1983 in Marsh v. Chambers and which had served as the precedent for all subsequent cases. [Read more…]
The investigative journalistic body ProPublic has an informative article explaining its own role in the IRS ‘scandal’ and what the fuss is all about, saying that “it reinforces the point that much of the heat generated last week on this subject is just the latest expression of Washington cynicism and its consequences—that the talk show hosts and their fellow travelers, and the representatives and senators and officials in the executive branch, aren’t really looking for answers here. They’re just putting on a show.” [Read more…]
Via Jonathan Turley I learned about an Arizona state representative Juan Mendez who, when it was his turn to open the session with a prayer, chose instead to use the occasion to reveal that he was a secular humanist. [Read more…]
Political scientist Robert Dahl said in 1971 that “a key characteristic of a democracy is the continued responsiveness of the government to the preferences of its citizens, considered as political equals.” The part I italicized emphasizes the key point, that a democracy involves more than enabling all citizens to vote freely in fair elections. While that is a minimal requirement, democracy also requires that political influence be distributed equally. [Read more…]
For a long time, Apple successfully built up an image as the good guys, cool and hip compared to the stodgy and evil Microsoft IBM, beginning with its classic ‘1984’ ad that aired during the Super Bowl of that year