Edward Snowden tops the list of Foreign Policy journal’s list of Global Thinkers for 2013. The top ten people were all associated with the NSA scandal, almost all of them critical of it, except for one (NSA director Keith Alexander) who came second and was immediately followed by Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras. [Read more…]
Remember when you were a child and were having a silly fight with your siblings or friends and the best part was when the other person became so sensitive to the smallest slight that all that it took to get them riled up about something was to make the slightest gesture (like a look) without even having to actually do anything substantial? [Read more…]
There are some news headlines that are irresistible and that one simply has to follow up on. I do not as a rule track the activities of the parasitic British royal family but when I saw the BBC news headline Police ‘told to leave Queen’s nuts alone’, I had to read more. [Read more…]
All of us are so immersed in religious nonsense that even skeptics like me take these religious rules at face value and do not probe them enough to show how unsustainable they are in modern society. These rules were invented by people living in much more primitive times and they simply cannot be sustained today. A little thought will soon uncover ways to expose how ridiculous they are. [Read more…]
Congressional districts are required to be redrawn after every census that occurs every decade. They have to be contiguous and to represent a limited range of numbers of people but beyond that the process is pretty much up for grabs. Whoever has the power to draw the lines can do so to achieve their own goals, such as to create safe seats for one party or to unite (or disperse) a particular ethnic or racial group, and so on. [Read more…]
We have all experienced the convenience of the auto-complete feature of many software items that save you some typing. But the prompts can often be the wrong ones. For me, the most common error due to autocorrect is to send emails to the wrong people who happen to share the first names or first letters of their names with others, because I hit send before double-checking. So far, that has not caused any problems, except delays. [Read more…]
… that ain’t necessarily so.
Here is a list of 76 things that the book of Leviticus bans, many of which are punishable by death. It is nice to have all in one place to use as rejoinders to those who obsess about just one on the list (#39) and ignore all the others. [Read more…]
Yesterday saw two setbacks for gay rights, in India and Australia.
In 2009, the Indian supreme court overturned a 153-year old British law that forbid gay sex and imposed punishments of up to ten years. That decision was seen as a major step forward in a part of the world where attitudes towards the LGBT community can only be described as appalling. [Read more…]
On Tuesday morning, the news headlines on the radio that I listen to while having breakfast mentioned that president Obama had shaken hands with Cuban president Raul Castro at Nelson Mandela’s funeral. I immediately said to myself that this would be treated as a huge story in our shallow media and I was not disappointed. [Read more…]