Now that the shut down has ended with nothing gained by it but plenty lost by people all over the country, we have the inevitable post-mortems that seek to pin the blame on some and rescue the reputations of others, all done by means of anonymous leaks to the media by those allied with the various Republican factions that ended up losing. [Read more…]
Jonathan Turley has an interesting story of someone who was caught urinating into an open reservoir that served as the source for a city’s drinking water supply. While authorities are looking into whether the man should be prosecuted, the more interesting fact is that the city decided to dump all the stored water, nearly 8 million gallons of it, as a result. [Read more…]
When the history of the Snowden revelations are written, Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras will of course figure prominently. But we have to give The Guardian newspaper and its editor Alan Rusbridger a lot of credit for being willing to publish the original revelations. There is no question that having a mainstream media outlet with a wide readership take the lead had a huge effect on the impact the story had. It is not surprising that the British government plans to retaliate against them, over and above ordering the extraordinary destruction of its computers. Rusbridger himself says that the scope of the NSA surveillance goes beyond George Orwell’s imagination. [Read more…]
For those keeping score, the US government yesterday officially went past the old debt ceiling limit of $16,699,421,095,673.60. As of last night it had borrowed a total of $17,027,544,000,000 or about $328 billion more than it had the previous night. [Read more…]
The Freedom of the Press Foundation has launched a new system for accepting documents from whistleblowers called SecureDrop.
SecureDrop is an open-source whistleblower submission system managed by Freedom of the Press Foundation that media organizations use to securely accept documents from anonymous sources. It was originally coded by the late Aaron Swartz. [Read more…]
The way in which a bill becomes a law was, in theory, supposed to be along the lines of this much-loved animation from the collection known as Schoolhouse Rock, educational clips set to music and aimed at children. [Read more…]
More information has emerged on why Ladar Levison, the owner of the encrypted mail service Lavabit, chose to shut down his service entirely rather than comply with government demands to provide a back door for them to secretly access all his clients’ communications. [Read more…]
In reports on the death of legendary Vietnamese general Vo Nguyen Giap, while his strategic and tactical prowess were noted, much was made of the fact that his leadership resulted in the loss of life of large numbers of Vietnamese soldiers in their struggle to rid their country of invaders, first the French and then the US. [Read more…]
Via PZ Myers, I learned that ABC TV is going to show a special program about the ‘Manosphere’ on Friday at 10:00 pm Eastern Time.
My first reaction was “Wait, really? They named a whole sphere after me?” It is not as big a deal as having a comet or minor planet named after me, but surely it must be an honor, right? At first I was gratified by the recognition but on reading the article, things got dark very quickly. [Read more…]