This year’s Super Bowl is coming up and for the first time it is going to be held in an open-air stadium in a region of the country (New Jersey) where the winter weather can get pretty bad. But what interested me was this news report describing the restrictions on how people can actually get to the stadium. [Read more…]
NPR had an interesting story yesterday on the move by internet companies to limit government snooping on everyone while retaining a legitimate interest in getting information to thwart terrorist attacks. In particular, they wanted an end to the practice of getting blanket information on everybody and everything and get back to targeted data collection. I wrote about this issue yesterday and NPR says that Apple has joined the other seven companies in writing the open letter to the government, though the website still does not include it. [Read more…]
Universities UK, the umbrella organization of universities in the United Kingdom, has published a report saying that it is acceptable for universities to segregate audiences by gender in order to accommodate the sensibilities of external speakers who have ‘genuinely held’ religious beliefs that prevent them speaking to mixed gender groups. [Read more…]
USA Today had an interesting story.
The Republican-controlled Legislature in this state known as the buckle of the Bible Belt authorized the privately funded Ten Commandments monument in 2009, and it was placed on the Capitol grounds last year despite criticism from legal experts who questioned its constitutionality. The Oklahoma chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union has filed a lawsuit seeking its removal.
But the New York-based Satanic Temple saw an opportunity. It notified the state’s Capitol Preservation Commission that it wants to donate a monument and plans to submit one of several possible designs this month, said Lucien Greaves, a spokesman for the temple. [Read more…]
In an interesting development, seven big internet companies (AOL, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Twitter, and Yahoo) have jointly set up a website listing five principles by which government surveillance can be reformed to protect the general privacy of people while satisfying the government’s genuine need for security information. The five principles are: [Read more…]
When I was younger, the thought that a person might change their gender never crossed my mind. But now I personally know five people who have done so and they remain the same in most respects before and after the gender change. You realize that while gender is an important aspect of a person’s self-identity, it matters relatively little in the everyday interactions between people. Being transgender now seems like just another slice of the diversity of the human condition. [Read more…]
I came across these cartoons that seemed relevant to the recent post on the class warfare currently being waged by the one-percenters against everyone else. [Read more…]
Members of the transgender community face severe discrimination at almost every level, leading to them having extremely high levels of poverty and homelessness. They are also the targets of extreme violence. Cleveland has been the scene of fatal attacks on members of the transgender community, two of them in the last few days. Another person was killed back in January. The good thing is that the local leadership has been quick to speak out against these attacks. [Read more…]
The rich have been waging a brutal class war on the rest of us but the media and the allies of the oligarchy refuse to call it as such. The tragedy is that for so long, the poor and working class, the very segments of the population that have been most devastated by this class war, have been taught to shy away from the very phrase ‘class war’ as if it were something unseemly, when it is the most accurate way to describe current conditions, and forms the foundation for understanding their own situation. The real and lasting legacy of the Occupy Wall Street movement was that it brought the issue of the class war front and center by highlighting the divide between the 1% ruling class and the 99% of the rest. [Read more…]
Sesame Street parodies are fun to watch and I liked this James Bond one. Note how the music is evocative of the originals without infringing on the copyright, though I doubt anyone would be so crass as to sue Sesame Street
Interestingly, this parody featured a woman as the villain and it got me to wondering if any of the villains in the Bond films had been women. I have seen many but not all of the films, and all the evildoers have been men. [Read more…]