There is an important vote taking place today in Congress. An amendment that seeks to cut funding for the NSA’s bulk collection of people’s communication records under the Patriot Act has been proposed to the big Defense Authorization bill by a bipartisan coalition of libertarian Republicans and liberal Democrats. [Read more…]
It looks like the paperwork for temporary asylum has been finally approved that allows Edward Snowden to leave the confines of the Moscow airport. [Update: Or maybe not.] [Read more…]
Matt Bors has an outstanding cartoon where he takes to task those who dump on today’s younger generation as whiny, needy, lazy, self-absorbed, narcissistic and tech-immersed, who demand instant and constant gratification. Very often this is blamed on indulgent parents who refuse to let their children grow up but hover them protectively for far too long. Here is the first panel of his cartoon where he takes to task this lazy and shallow form of journalism that manufactures trends and stereotypes out of nothing, [Read more…]
I dislike flying because of the sheer unpleasant of the whole experience but I am not scared of flying. It is one of the safest modes of transportation. But we sometimes forget, in this age of autopilots where human pilots seem almost superfluous, how necessary they are and how skilled the pilots must be in order to deal with unexpected situations. [Read more…]
… that the news networks are covering 24/7.
The military has broadened its views quite a bit when it comes to accommodating a wide variety of religions, including the choice of what religious symbols are allowed to be put on tombstones in their cemeteries. Yet when it comes to chaplains, the catch is that atheists, humanists, and other non-believers are not yet fully included because of the requirement that chaplains be endorsed by at least one of about 200 recognized groups, and non-believers (and Wiccans) are not among them. An army chaplain who wanted to change from Pentecostal to Wiccan (his would an interesting story to hear!) lost his position and some other chaplains who have become humanists are fearful of revealing their change for fear of meeting the same fate. [Read more…]
I forgot to mention one thing in my post about how I gauge the effectiveness of the Obama propaganda system by the way that his supporters in my social circle now say things in support of Obama’s actions in almost identical terms to the way that Bush/Cheney supporters defended them. [Read more…]
[UPDATE: You can read the full text of the judge’s ruling here. It is pretty strong stuff. This was not a full trial but a request for a restraining order against the state and thus applies only to this case, but the wording of the reasoning suggests that the judge thinks it should hold widely.]
A federal judge in Cincinnati has ruled that even state officials in Ohio must recognize the rights of same-sex couples that were legally married in other states. This is a significant expansion of the US Supreme Court ruling in the DOMA case where the federal government was told that it had to recognize those rights. The judge’s ruling is a major development because Ohio still has on its books the constitutional amendment passed in 2004 that says that marriage is between a man and a woman only, and steps are currently underway to repeal that provision. [Read more…]
Anyone who writes anything critical of Israel in a public forum can expect pushback from members of what has come to be known as ‘the Israel lobby’, those individuals and groups that seek to silence any honest discussion of the Middle East. [Read more…]
Clare Daly calls him a war criminal and a hypocrite in parliament and accuses the Irish government of ‘pimping’ and ‘prostituting’ their country in service to the Americans. [Read more…]