Power tipping

I have previously railed against the practice of tipping, seeing it as something that encourages servile behavior and is demeaning. It seems to me to be a relic of the feudal system in which the nobility acted patronizingly towards the peasantry by giving them gifts in exchange for acting obsequiously towards them. So I was pleased to see that some restaurants are adopting a no-tipping policy and paying their employees a living wage, by either raising their menu prices and/or adding a service charge automatically. [Read more…]

A Republican traitor

Scott Rigell, a Republican congressman, seems to have decided to not follow the party line on how to vote on the shut down and is now calling for a vote on a ‘clean’ continuing resolution. He was the only Republican to vote against a continuing resolution that defunded the Affordable Care Act, though his reason for doing so was because it didn’t replace the sequester. [Read more…]

Scientists call for boycott of NASA conference

It turns out that in March this year, congressman Frank Wolf, chair of the House of Representatives Appropriations Committee initiated a bill that incredibly was allowed to become a law that prohibited Chinese nationals, even those who are already in the US and working at US universities and other institutions, from even setting foot in a NASA building. The reason given was the risk of espionage. [Read more…]

Vo Nguyen Giap (1911-2013)

Old timers will remember the name Vo Nguyen Giap. He was the legendary leader of the North Vietnamese army who is credited with leading the Vietnamese to victory over much more powerful armies, first famously defeating the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and later successfully resisting the US invasion of his country and forcing them out, leading to the reunification of Vietnam in 1975. [Read more…]

Netanyahu strikes out?

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is clearly alarmed at the way that Iran’s new president Hassan Rouhani has made inroads in the west and the thaw that seems to be occurring between Iran and the US. The goal of Israel has been to have the US go to war with Iran and so you could expect him to use his annual speech to the UN to whip up alarm about the extreme danger posed by Iran’s nuclear program and urge that everything be done to completely dismantle it. But it would be hard to top the comedic effect produced by last year’s speech with the ridiculous cartoon of a bomb that spawned numerous parodies inspired by the similarities to the Road Runner and Bugs Bunny. [Read more…]

Why is the oligarchy not pushing for reopening the government?

It is no secret that the leadership of the Republican party would like to re-open the government by passing a clean continuing resolution without any other provisions and also to raise the debt-ceiling limit. It is also clear that there are more than enough Republican votes in the House of Representatives to join up with the Democrats to do so. The number of Republicans who refuse to do is lies anywhere from 30 to 80, not small but nowhere near enough to stop this from happening, if the Republican leadership were to bring it to the floor. [Read more…]

How can 54=2? Because if you are willing to lie, anything is possible

We have been repeatedly told by the NSA and its supporters inside and outside the government about how valuable the massive privacy invasions were because they stopped a large number of terrorist plots, possibly 54 of them. Marcy Wheeler says that under close questioning from senator Patrick Leahy, NSA director Keith Alexander admitted that it actually may have been at most two plots. [Read more…]

How to deal with an establishment journalist

People often have the illusion that the BBC is an impartial news source. But in reality its journalists are as much establishment supporters of their government as the major news sources in the US. In this interview with Glenn Greenwald on the BBC program Newsnight, Kristy Ward demonstrates all the characteristics of an establishment journalist, such as taking government statements at face value and truthful (which is quite extraordinary given the high level of mendacity that they have displayed) and treating with high skepticism the statements of those who challenge the government’s version of events instead of treating both with the same high degree of skepticism. [Read more…]

Politics as tests of purity

Politics, as Otto von Bismarck famously said back in 1867, is the art of the possible.

This means that a good politician knows that what is needed is the ability to craft a policy that enough people can be persuaded to sign on to so that it can be implemented. But one of the things that can prevent this is when the issue being fought over shifts subtly from the original one that can be bridged by political compromise to a new, and more difficult, one that is based on intangibles that are hard to negotiate over. [Read more…]