We don’t know when and if the Senate intelligence report on torture will be released. But while it remains secret, some of its contents may come out in dribs and drabs. But we should not underestimate the ability of the government to keep unpleasant things hidden.
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There is an interesting case that is being heard today before the US Supreme Court in which technology and copyright laws come into conflict. It concerns a firm named Aereo that is marketing a small antenna that can be connected to your mobile device that can then pick up programming that is being broadcast over the air by the TV networks. In other words, you are no longer tethered to your TV but can watch anywhere and even record and save for later viewing.
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Fairleigh Dickinson University conducted a survey in relation to the of the upcoming ruling by the US Supreme Court on the Greece prayer case that I have written extensively about. It asked 833 people two questions.
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In the comments to my post on a local physician Syed J. Akhtar-Zaidi whose bank accounts and other assets had been seized by the overzealous US attorney Steven Dettelbach for this area because they claim he was prescribing pain killers indiscriminately to make money, reader jimmyfromchicago gave me a link to a long article in the New Yorker magazine by Sarah Stillman about these civil forfeiture laws. What she describes is shocking, a terrible violation of any kind of due process protections, where law enforcement is able to confiscate people’s belongings without even charging them with any crime.
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Over the weekend I watched this film that was nominated for four Academy Awards including best picture, actress (Judy Dench), adapted screenplay, and music score, although it did not win any. It is an excellent film, one of the best that I have seen in recent years, and one that I can strongly recommend to readers.
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The success of the ACA in enrolling people has pretty much unhinged the GOP who had clearly thought that the botched rollout meant that the numbers would be way below the original target. This cartoon pretty much captures their reaction.
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Once again we have a situation in which the city of Portland, Oregon dumped all the water in its reservoir, all 38 million gallons of it, because cameras seemed to show that someone has urinated into it. After observing the group of five young men near the reservoir, police went out there and arrested three of the men and charged one of them.
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The newly-released film Heaven is for Real is based on the preposterous story of a young boy who supposedly died for a short while, came back to life, and told his family about what he had seen in heaven and the people he met.
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I am a huge fan of author P.G. Wodehouse and have read and re-read a large fraction of his oeuvre, a not insignificant feat considering how prolific he was. I am particularly partial to his Blandings Castle series and his Jeeves and Wooster series. While the books are self-contained, they do contain recurring characters so the author provides enough explanatory details from other books to fill in the reader of the state of affairs so that one does not necessarily need to read them in order to follow the plots.
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If the endless “Will she? Won’t she?” speculations about Hillary Clinton running for the presidency in 2016 were not bad enough, we now have the ‘big news’ that her daughter Chelsea Clinton is pregnant. I saw it on news headlines of practically all the news sites that I visit and it received some comment on many blogs as well.
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