I have lived in Cleveland for over twenty years. I like the place even though in many ways it is a typical mid-western city and somewhat conservative in its outlook. In fact, Ohio was one of those states that passed a constitutional amendment effectively banning same-sex marriages in 2004. I would not have thought any city in Ohio to be at the forefront of liberal social values and so I was pleasantly surprised to learn that the cities of Cleveland and neighboring Akron had jointly bid for and won the right to hold the next Gay Games in 2014. [Read more…]

The comments to the previous post on the current gun control debate generated an excellent discussion with a lot of useful information both about the history of the second amendment and the characteristics of the various types of guns that are out there and the appropriate terminology to refer to them, a lot of which was new to me since guns are peripheral to my life and I haven’t paid much attention to the topic. [Read more…]

You can expect the gun control debate to shift into high gear following president Obama’s recently announced proposals for gun control. I do not own a gun, have no intention of ever buying one, and have never even fired one (apart from an air rifle as a child). But I am not one who offers unqualified support for a total ban on gun ownership. I think a case can be made for the private ownership of some guns by some people who have a reasonable need of them and I have written on this topic earlier (see here and here). But what types of guns could be owned depends on what one means by ‘reasonable need’ and it is clear that there is a wide divergence of views on this. [Read more…]

Washington is a town of euphemisms. When I read that Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar had announced that he is leaving his cabinet post in March to “spend time with his family”, my first reaction was that he had been asked to leave for some reason or other, essentially fired from his post, and that he was being allowed to do so gracefully. [Read more…]

Glenn Greenwald has a must-read piece that reveals what is actually going on in the investigations and prosecutions of people like Aaron Swartz. He says that Aaron Swartz was a pawn in the US government’s war against one antagonist that challenges their power and that they feel they have insufficient control over – hackers. [Read more…]