Jon Oliver has had a spectacularly good three-part series comparing gun control efforts in Australia and the US, putting the lie to the claims in the US that gun control does not work to curb gun-related violence and that implementing it is hard and takes a long time. [Read more…]
There is an interesting development in China where economic inequality has also exploded in recent years, making a mockery of the country’s official egalitarian philosophy. Ordinary people, fed up with this hypocrisy and the high-life being lived especially by Communist party officials, have taken to crashing lavish private parties hosted by officials and taking photographs and videos of the expensive food and drink and posting them online, enraging the public. [Read more…]
It was initially announced that Bradley Manning would be one of the honorary Grand Marshalls at San Francisco’s annual LGBT Pride parade on June 29-30, with Daniel Ellsberg standing in for him since Manning is still in jail. But there were protests and The Guardian has an article that says that the parade leadership summarily reversed course. [Read more…]
This past week saw the opening of the George W. Bush library in Texas, with great pomp and ceremony. This business of presidential libraries baffles me. What is it with presidents having their own libraries after they leave office? Who goes to visit such things? Does any other country in the world do this? [Read more…]
It looks like I was premature in giving the Justice Department credit for reading Dzhokhar Tsarnaev his Miranda rights. It appears that they questioned him for a long time before a judge insisted on reading him his rights on Monday. So once again, we are dependent on the judiciary to intervene to make sure the government does not violate the rights of people. (In a separate case, a federal judge is challenging the government’s claim to broad secrecy powers.) [Read more…]
I gave an example earlier about how the so-called gridlocked Congress can move with lightning speed when it wants to, which is when it affects either them or those close to them. We see another example of this in the way that they tweaked the sequestration rules when elites are affected. When flights started getting delayed, Congress quickly passed legislation that allowed the FAA more flexibility with regard to air traffic controllers. [Read more…]
The Daily Show has yet more fun at the expense of CNN for its coverage of the Boston bombings, showing how they seemed to have thrown editorial judgment out the window in their effort to portray a sense of immediacy and urgency, even when they had no idea what was going on and were simply making wild guesses based on the flimsiest of evidence. [Read more…]
Some people are fearful that Sharia law (i.e., laws that are based on Islamic religious beliefs) will be introduced in the US and are taking steps to pre-emptively pass legislation that would prevent this from happening. As one might expect, I am opposed to any laws or legal system that depends upon religion for their justification. We have a secular constitution and the Establishment Clause should effectively bar any government action that seeks to advance or hinder any particular religion or advance or hinder religion in general. [Read more…]
I wrote before about the faulty analysis by two Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff that asserted that when the debt-to-GDP ratio reached a critical point of 90% in a country, the rate of economic growth took a nose-dive and went into negative territory. This analysis was used to spook policymakers, especially in the US and Europe, that bringing deficits under control was the most urgent priority, and that taking measures to stimulate growth and create jobs was the wrong approach. Governments went on an austerity spree, resulting in many people being thrown out of work and social services cut, casuing immense hardship. [Read more…]
Last Friday morning when I heard news that Tamalan Tsarnaev, the elder of the two brothers thought to be responsible for the Boston bombing, had been killed and that his 19-year old younger brother Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was being looked for, I thought that the story was pretty much over, bar the predictable ending. [Read more…]