As I wrote recently, last Sunday the German television station ARD broadcast an interview with Edward Snowden in Moscow in which he revealed a few more details about NSA spying such as that they were also targeting big German corporations such as Siemens. I based my comments on a print report of the TV interview that appeared in the Guardian and in the comments reader Jorg was kind enough to provide a link to the actual broadcast. [Read more…]
I did not watch president Obama’s State of the Union speech. These ritualized events are almost entirely political theater with very little substance. The routine is familiar. Obama will give a speech outlining some of his extremely modest goals and the Republicans will bemoan what they claim is his pursuit of a radical agenda and his lack of willingness to engage in dialogue with them and compromise. [Read more…]
Today’s issue of The Guardian has a long and fascinating article by Luke Harding that gives a biography of Edward Snowden, tracing his life story and how his views changed over time from being a loyal CIA operative to the point where he felt that he had to leak all the NSA and GCHQ documents. [Read more…]
Tomorrow (Sunday) is the much-hyped Super Bowl. I will not be watching it, just as I have skipped it in the past decade. In my earlier post about how little time is actually involved in play during a normal football game, some of the comments accused those critical of the game of being ‘haters’. It is true that I have come to dislike the game but it was not always so. If I am a hater, it is a fairly recent development. [Read more…]
Stephen Colbert has been having some fun at the expense of football and American’s obsession with things like the Super Bowl. One two successive days, he had clips where he tries out to be quarterback and pokes fun at the mentality that goes along with it. [Read more…]
A crucial step in the evolution of complex organisms is the appearance of multicellularity. Key questions are “how did multicellularity evolve? Did it evolve once or multiple times? How did cells make the transition from life as a solo cell to associating and cooperating with other cells such that they work as a single, cohesive unit?” [Read more…]
Sometimes I despair at how people can seem to lack the kind of normal human instinct that should kick in when asked to do something that seems so obviously wrong. Take what happened at an elementary school in Utah. [Read more…]
The website Politico is a mixture of news and gossip based on anonymous sources that seems to have access to well-connected members of the oligarchy and to the government-media establishment, so its most useful function is to serve as a window into the thinking of that group of people. Hence it was with some interest that I read the piece titled Why the rich are freaking out that says that some of the very rich see writing on the wall that disturbs them. [Read more…]
To understand the oral arguments presented at the Supreme Court in the Greece case that I will discuss in the next post in this series, one needs to look at the reasoning of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that overturned the practice. Recall that they decided that the ‘history and tradition’ reasoning used to justify the prayers in the 1983 Marsh v. Chambers case was not appropriate for the Greece v. Galloway case and that the court should have used the Lemon test instead, as well as the endorsement test that looks at whether the practice would be seen by a reasonable informed observer to be an endorsement of religion. They proceeded to do so and found that it failed all three prongs of the Lemon test as well as the endorsement test. [Read more…]