Today is the deadline to begin signing up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act. Not unexpectedly, there has been a surge in enrollments in the days leading up to it and it seems possible that the enrollment target of 7 million, that had been seen as unreachable after the disastrous rollout, may actually be within sight.
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This tournament is currently taking place in Bangladesh and there have been some surprising outcomes. The tournament is structured with eight teams (Bangladesh, Nepal, Afghanistan, Hong Kong, Netherlands, Zimbabwe, Ireland, and the United Arab Emirates) playing in a preliminary tournament in which the top two teams would join the eight top-ranked teams (South Africa, India, Australia, Pakistan, New Zealand, West Indies, England, and Sri Lanka).
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It is clear that there are rumblings of great discontent around the world about how the internet is being hijacked by government spying agencies and I suggested that it may lead to some kind of organized revolt. As usual, I am behind the times because reader John Horstman informs me that there is already a project in the works known as Reset the Net that calls upon everyone to do their bit to reclaim the promise of the internet as a free and open space
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You may recall Sam Wang, the Princeton neuroscientist whose statistical analyses I referred to frequently during the 2012 election. He now has an article in the New York Times where he analyzes the actual risks for causing autism versus the frequency of news coverage. As he says, “by far the largest risk is genetic. In comparison, the measured impact of environmental risks ranges from nonexistent to small, unless you work directly with chemicals in a factory.”
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In the US there have been two inexorable trends that have long threatened to doom even the pretense of being a democracy. One is the fact that election days are cemented into the calendar, which means that politicians can plan and execute their campaigns well in advance, though a thin façade of decorum requires them to demur from having such ambitions until somewhat closer to the date. This long gestation period necessarily results in campaigns becoming more expensive. This is true for all elections but most pronounced in contests for the presidency. In the 2012 election, both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney spent on the order of one billion dollars each, an obscene amount.
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Since I don’t have cable, I do not watch the 24/7 cable news networks and from the clips that I do see on the internet, I know I am not missing much. While I do own a TV and can get the broadcast channels, I stopped watching those news shows a long time ago. The morning news shows especially were a wasteland, with inane chatter and frequent commercial breaks.
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The ACLU is suing the US Conference of Catholic Bishops on behalf of a pregnant woman who suffered because of their rules they enforce on all Catholic hospitals that prevent physicians from giving patients all the information and options they need to make a decision.
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I have been railing at the way that the US has used the war on terror to undermine basic civil liberties. In its efforts to hide its misdeeds, the war it has waged on whistleblowers and the reporters who convey their revelations has been nothing short of disgraceful.
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The Daily Show weighed in on the big court case of the week, that of Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby, with a couple of good segments.
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Laura Poitras has a new story out in Der Spiegel today about how the NSA and GCHQ targeted 122 world leaders for spying, in addition to leading German telecommunications companies and particularly their engineers, using a hitherto secret court order to do so.
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