The ghastly events unfolding in a shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya unfortunately did not come as a complete surprise to me. Ever since I completed reading Jeremy Scahill’s book Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield (2013), where he traces to evolution of the global war on terror, I felt that it was only a matter of time before some atrocity occurred either in that country or Ethiopia or both. [Read more…]
The House of Representatives voted late last week to cut the budget for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (popularly referred to ‘food stamps’) by $40 billion over ten years. The vote was close (217-210) and the bill now goes to the senate. The Des Moines Register has come out with a scathing editorial against the cutting of SNAP benefits, comparing the meager allowance with how lavishly the state’s members of Congress spend on their own food on trips at taxpayer expense. [Read more…]
My children are now adults and live on their own and own smart phones. But we did not buy them cell phones when they were in high school. Why? For no deep reason other than a general family philosophy of not buying stuff unless you really have a need for it. [Read more…]
In a long profile in Foreign Policy, Shane Harris describes Keith Alexander, the head of NSA, as a cowboy who disdained the law and felt that he could do what he needed to do to get the results he wanted. [Read more…]
The actor Hugh Jackman was interviewed on The Daily Show about his new film Prisoners. I have seen him being interviewed before and he seems to have a very good-natured and engaging personality but I have never actually seen any film of his. Since I am not a big fan of the superhero genre, I have not gone out of my way to see his Wolverine films, which seem to constitute a big part of his oeuvre. [Read more…]
The only local media I consume is the Cleveland Plain Dealer newspaper and the NPR affiliate WCPN.
The newspaper has shifted to a strange model. It used to publish seven days a week and provide home delivery. Beginning in August, it still publishes a print newspaper seven days a week but has home delivery only on Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. On the other three days one has to buy the print edition at a store or from a vending machine. The newspapers on the three days on which there is no home delivery are slimmer in size and the other four days are supposedly bigger to compensate for that. [Read more…]
It was less that a year ago that General David Petraeus was the golden boy of US military strategy, the supposed genius who had turned around US fortunes in Iraq prior to the withdrawal. Members of Congress treated him as some kind of oracle whose words must be followed by even the president and competed to see who could praise him the most. Criticisms of him were treated as if they were blasphemy, as could be seen from the howls of outrage when the group MoveOn.org put out an ad in 2007 against the Iraq war that made a bad pun on his name. [Read more…]
Via reader Mark I heard about Timothy Blaise, a graduate student at McGill University, who has created an incredibly good cover of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody that not only sounds good musically but actually hits some of the main points of string theory. [Read more…]
The world of religion is agog over the extensive interview given by pope Francis to various news outlets. In the interview, he did not announce any changes in policy on the core social issues of ordaining women, celibate clergy, abortion, and contraception, but he definitely signaled that he wants to see a change in focus of the church, away from these divisive issues, saying: [Read more…]
It was little more than a week ago that the US seemed on the verge of bombing Syria, an action that threatened to spread to Iran and thus open yet another front in the perpetual war against Muslim countries. This was something that was hoped for by the neoconservatives, the liberal war hawks, Israel and its US lobby, and al Qaeda and other terrorist groups that thrive on instability and chaos. [Read more…]