The proliferation of chat and banter in news programs

I am old-fashioned. Very old fashioned. And one of my pet peeves is with news that has ceased to be news but is now mixed with inane chat. At one time, the news came on at a certain time of day for a limited time, say 30 minutes. That was it. The upside was that because of the limited time available, it had to be used judiciously and not wasted with trivia. The downside of this was that some newsworthy stories either did not make the cut or could not be covered in the depth necessary. Furthermore, if you missed the news broadcast for whatever reason, you had to wait until the next day, like with the newspaper. [Read more…]

The new US government defense against legal challenges

The Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution is short and to the point.

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

The phrases I italicized state quite clearly that you can only search a person’s private possessions if you get a warrant from a judge and that warrant must have as its basis a sworn oath that there is probable cause to suspect that there is evidence to be found, and that what is to be searched has to be clearly specified in advance. It is meant to prevent the government from simply invading people’s privacy at random, hoping to find something incriminating. [UPDATE: See the comment by dmclean for a more sophisticated analysis of what is allowed and not allowed by the Fourth Amendment.] [Read more…]

A new kind of bicameral legislature

As another byproduct of the Edward Snowden revelations, it has become clear that the real legislative division in the US is not between the House of Representatives and the Senate but between an Insider Congress and an Outsider Congress.

The defense of the Obama administration to the revelations about widespread NSA surveillance is that they have ‘fully informed’ members of Congress, and since these members are supposed to be representatives of the people, then everything is fine. But as this article from Glenn Greenwald points out, there seems to be two Congresses. There is an inner coterie of people who are in the leadership and who get secret briefings and support the government’s programs and its secrecy, and there are the rest who are stonewalled when they ask for information, and yet are expected to vote on issues without knowing what is going on. [Read more…]

Interesting food development

Scientists have been exploring creating meat tissue in the lab for a long time and it was only a matter of time before they were successful on a large enough scale.

The world’s first lab-grown burger has been cooked and eaten at a news conference in London.
Scientists took cells from a cow and, at an institute in the Netherlands, turned them into strips of muscle that they combined to make a patty.

One food expert said it was “close to meat, but not that juicy” and another said it tasted like a real burger. [Read more…]

Faith-based dorm in a public university

Troy University, a public university in Alabama, has just opened a new dorm that will accommodate students who are seeking a “faith-based collegiate experience”.

The new facility gives preference to students who maintain an active spiritual lifestyle and are actively engaged in a campus faith-based organization.

Residents are required to engage at least semi-annually in a community-service or service-learning project that is tied to a church, such as food or clothing drive. [Read more…]

The surveillance data is not being used just for terrorism

It turns out (what a surprise) that the massive collection of data by the NSA is not being used just for detecting terrorist threats.

A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans. [Read more…]

The evolution from dinosaurs to birds

Carl Zimmer has a nice summary of the increasing amount of fossil evidence for the evolution from dinosaurs to birds, surely one of the most fascinating facts of evolution. Interestingly, as the evidence mounts, the importance of Archaeopteryx, that classic fossil that caused such excitement when it was first discovered because it was the first direct evidence of the transition, has become diminished. [Read more…]

The Daily Show on the minimum wage battle

Jon Oliver was on fire in this series of three clips dealing with the strikes by fast-food workers who are trying to get the minimum wages raised from the current $7.25 an hour (which works out to about $15,000 per year for a 40 hour week) to a more realistic $15. Of course this is generating huge amounts of protests by the very same people who think that raising taxes on the rich, even the top 1%, would create enormous hardship on the wealthy. I don’t know if it was ever truly the case that minimum wage fast food jobs were exclusively for adolescents to earn some pocket money but it is clearly no longer true. These jobs have become primary ones for adults and they deserve to have a living wage. [Read more…]

More evidence why we need ‘Medicare for all’

That excellent organization Physicians for a National Health Program has highlighted a new study by Gerald Friedman, a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst that shows that by simply upgrading and expanding the current Medicare system to cover everyone, the country would save billions of dollars in costs as well. There would even be money left over to help pay down the national debt. [Read more…]