President Obama’s claim that he welcomes the debate over the NSA’s activities and planned to have one but that he objects to the fact that Edward Snowden revealed the things that he supposedly wants to discuss was obviously a lie. Does anyone seriously think that in the absence of Snowden, Obama would have one day voluntarily told the public what has been going on? [Read more…]
(Thanks to reader Marcus Ranum)
I wrote recently about Stephen Pinker’s efforts to defend scientism, where he argued that although the use of the word is not consistent and is often used as an epithet, it deserves to be defended because there is a positive meaning that can be salvaged.
There are some problems with his essay. One is that he starts out with a partial straw man. [Read more…]
It is fine for reporters to give anonymity to those who fear retribution if their identity is revealed. But it is wrong to do so just so that the government can advance a message or an agenda without taking responsibility for it. One of the things that I have railed against is the practice of journalists granting anonymity to sources who are speaking with the approval of the government. This allows the sources to say things that can be denied later. [Read more…]
Like others who strongly support a single-payer health care system, I have been highly critical of the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare), seeing it as a bureaucratic monstrosity that was designed to keep the useless and parasitic health insurance industry in business while also allowing the hospital and drug industries to keep making exorbitant amounts of money. I also felt that while it would help some people, it would not do enough and would not reduce costs much. [Read more…]
I found this article that contains comments from Russian president Vladimir Putin that shed an interesting light on the sequence of events that led to Edward Snowden ending up in Russia and his relationship with Putin. The report also says that even though he has little money, Snowden is settling in and learning the language. [Read more…]
There is a new web comedy series Ask A Slave where actress Azie Mira Dungey, who used to work as a ‘living history’ character at George Washington’s plantation in Mount Vernon, re-enacts some of the questions she was asked by tourists.
You know how people say that there are no stupid questions? We might want to rethink that. [Read more…]
In an interview he said this: “You know, Senator Chuck Hagel, when he was senator, Senator Chuck Hagel, now secretary of Defense, and when I was a senator, we opposed the president’s decision to go into Iraq, but we know full well how that evidence was used to persuade all of us that authority ought to be given.” [Read more…]
When it comes to probabilities, our intuitions are not reliable, as I have written about before (see here and here). On so many occasions, I have thought that the result to a problem was so obvious as to not be worth thinking about more deeply, only to find myself proven wrong. And the new solution seems also so obvious that you wonder why you ever believed the earlier wrong answer. [Read more…]
Poor David Cameron. Apparently Britain’s prime minister is smarting from the fact that parliament’s refusal to give him authority to wage war on Syria has resulted in him being at the receiving end of petty indignities at the G20 summit, being treated like just another person there, rather than reflecting in the aura of being president Obama’s BFF. Nobody seems to care anymore about what he thinks about anything. [Read more…]