Stephen M. Walt says that the rhetoric being used against allowing Iran to have any nuclear capability is similar to what was said about China back in the 1960s when that nation was developing nuclear technology, right down to impugning its leaders as irrational crazy people who might go berserk and blow up the world if they were able to make a bomb. [Read more…]
As expected, this year’s Nobel prize in physics, announced today, was awarded for the discovery of the Higgs boson. The prize was awarded to two people, Francois Englert and Peter Higgs. As I said in one of my series of posts on the Higgs boson, the award of the prize was bound to raise hackles because five theorists had some claim to the discovery (there were six but Robert Brout died in 2011), as well the experimental groups that found the particle last year, not to mention CERN, the laboratory where the experiment was done. [Read more…]
I have been trying to understand some of the arcane issues surrounding the way the US government is run and what follows is what I have been able to learn. Take it with a grain of salt since I am neither an economist nor an accountant.
The current debt limit, the maximum amount that the government is allowed to borrow, was raised on May 19, 2013 to $16.70 trillion, which is projected to be reached on October 17, 2013. When the government’s expenditures exceed the amount it has in its checking account, the government is authorized to sell US Treasury notes to raise cash make up the difference provided the total amount does not exceed that limit. [Read more…]
The Onion had a point-counterpoint exchange with John Boehner debating himself over the shutdown and his role in it. In the first part, Boehner recites the official line, saying the same things he has been saying at his public appearances. [Read more…]
The so-called millennial generation in the US is the focus of much media attention, much of it negative, decrying them as whiny, praise-seeking, self-absorbed, slaves to social network technology, and having a sense of entitlement. But a new survey finds that as they progress towards adulthood, they display many of the same characteristics as the generations that came before. [Read more…]
Via reader EJ, I learned of this congressional testimony by the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and head of the NSA Keith Alexander that the government shut down is hurting their intelligence gathering programs. Since many of their people are not being paid and may thus be hurting financially, Clapper says that they will become easy targets for subversion. [Read more…]
In the widely publicized interview with New York magazine’s Jennifer Senior, Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia talks, among other things, about his religious beliefs and they turn out to be pretty orthodox. [Read more…]
So we have come to the end of week one of the government shut down with no end in sight. I do not usually concern myself with following the details of political maneuvering since much of it is posturing and lacking any substantive content. It is usually Kabuki theater designed to distract the public while secret deals are made behind the scenes. But this conflict seems genuine and I have been curious about what will bring the shut down to an end because of course it must at some point. [Read more…]
In all the focus on the NSA, we should not forget that the FBI is also part of the massive government intrusion into people’s privacy and in the violation their rights. The ACLU in a new report titled Unleashed and Unaccountable: The FBI’s Unchecked Abuse of Authority describes the many ways that the relaxation of rules governing how the FBI can operate (justified as always by the ‘war on terror’) has resulted in an explosion of abuses. [Read more…]
The country has qualified for the 2015 Cricket World Cup to be played in Australia and New Zealand. Given the fact that this country has been in pretty much a permanent state of major war for the past three decades, that turmoil in the country has seemed to be continual fact of life, and the fact that cricket is relatively new to that country, this is a remarkable achievement. [Read more…]