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…]
Although Libya has vanished from the US news front pages, it may be good to revisit that country to see what has happened since the US last attacked another country. (At least I think it was the last, it is hard to keep track of all the US military campaigns.) Patrick Cockburn writes that two years after that attack, Libya has descended into lawlessness and ruin, a country that now resembles Somalia, where militias fight for control of land, with a weak government unable to do much about it. [Read more…]
The Guardian, ProPublica and the New York Times yesterday simultaneously published articles on the latest revelation to come out of the Edward Snowden documents and they are doozies. The articles reveal that the government has been very successful in trying to break the encryption codes that are used to protect all our data, like our medical records and bank accounts and everything else. And it reveals that US tech companies (both hardware and software) have colluded with the government to provide backdoor access to the government in order to gain that access. The result is a system where little or nothing in our lives is safe from the prying eyes of the government. [Read more…]
In principle, there should be no difference between what one eats at the three canonical meals of breakfast, lunch, and dinner. You should be able to easily switch the menus. But in actual practice, the interchangeability only applies to lunch and dinner, with the food eaten at breakfast being distinctively different from the other two meals. [Read more…]
President Obama seems to be trying to wriggle out of his ‘red line’ comment, perhaps realizing that if the Syria attack goes badly awry, then people will use that statement to suggest that it was he who was solely responsible for getting the US into the mess even if Congress authorized him to act, since it was that statement that people are repeatedly using to suggest that US ‘credibility’ is on the line. [Read more…]
Diana Nyad successfully completed, on her fifth attempt, her 103-mile swim from Cuba to the US. News reports emphasized that she was the first person to do so without a shark cage. David Shiffman, who studies sharks, says that the repeated mentioning of that statement may have given the impression that sharks pose a particularly acute danger when they do not. Jellyfish were more likely to have derailed her, as The Onion notes. [Read more…]
In this report by Philip Weiss, he says that members of congress are getting an earful from their constituents who oppose any US war against Syria. The Washington Post has a breakdown of the current views of members. [Read more…]