How language evolves

Like many older people, I tend to find some new ways of speaking grating. I still wince at the increasingly common use of the response “I am doing good” when someone is asked how they are. The same with “I could care less”. And the word ‘nucular’ drives me up the wall. I am not enough of a rude pedant to actually correct people when they speak like that, taking such liberties only with my own children when they pick up these ways of speaking from their friends.
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Female leaders of Muslim majority countries

Islam is not one of the religions that come to mind when one thinks of providing equal status for women. Its rules about their dress and behavior in public are notorious for their restrictiveness. But at the same time, as Juan Cole points out, there is the curious phenomenon that many Muslim-majority countries have had women as their leaders, almost all of them elected to office. Here’s his list.
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Was the NSA spying on me?

During Jacob Appelbaum’s talk about how he suspected that Apple might be colluding with the NSA to enable the agency to spy on people, he spoke about how they could take control of your cell phones, saying “They would be able to break into this phone, almost certainly, and turn on the microphone” and that the NSA builds fake cell phone towers to grab and store data. One of the things that Edward Snowden revealed was that the NSA had the capability to remotely turn on the cameras in people’s computers so that they could spy on them.
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Christie and the Adelson audition

The Daily Show has some commentary on Chris Christie, starting with the investigation that he commissioned that (surprise!) cleared him of any involvement with the closing of the lanes on the George Washington Bridge and then moving on to join the parade of Republican presidential hopefuls who groveled before Sheldon Adelson in what has been dubbed ‘the Adelson primary’.
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Obamacare enrollment seem to exceed expectations

Despite a major effort at deception that involved outright lying by opponents of the Affordable Care Act that actively sought to dissuade people from getting health insurance that would save them from some catastrophic expenses due to illness, and despite the disastrous rollout that seemed to confirm people’s worst fears, it looks like the enrollment figures will meet their original target of seven million. The final tallies will take some time to be sorted but initial signs are good.
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Stop the nuclear bomb fear mongering

Younger people today are fortunate that they grew up in a post-Cold War era, where the fear of a nuclear war has been lifted. So it is despicable when politicians try to re-create the fears of that era by using one of the worst fear mongering tactics, and that is to scare people about the possible use of a nuclear device in a populated area. Cynical politicians use that to justify any and all abuses of the violation of people’s civil rights and privacy, by arguing that if they are not allowed to do what they want, this awful scenario may well be the consequence.
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