I hardly ever text people and very rarely do I receive any text messages myself so I am not aware of the conventions of that world. But I am aware that texting can be very convenient in certain situations, while at the same time sometimes requires decoding to get at what the sender is actually saying. [Read more…]
Malala Yousafzai, the young Pakistani girl who was shot by the Taliban for the crime of speaking out for the rights of girls to get a good education in her country, addressed the United Nations yesterday on her 16th birthday. She gave a stirring speech, which many may have already seen and part of which can be seen here. [Read more…]
Now that the US Supreme Court has ruled on the Proposition 8 and DOMA cases in ways that were favorable to same-sex marriage but left unresolved the question of whether bans on such marriages were unconstitutional, as expected new cases are being filed at the state level that go to the heart of the matter. About 14 such cases are already in the works with more expected and at least one of these cases are expected to reach the Supreme Court fairly soon. [Read more…]
Once again we are witnessing a debate in the US Senate as to whether the filibuster should be dispensed with. To be quite honest, I cannot get too excited about this kind of rule change, though I can see why abandoning it could have significant consequences. But it is a symptom of a far more serious problem. I think that the US political system has deep problems that extend far beyond arcane senate rules. [Read more…]
Cory Doctorow tells us more about this prize-winning effort.
I just love it when religions create all these hoops for their followers to jump through and then, whenever one of those rules become inconvenient for whatever reason, struggle to find ways to break the rules while trying to maintain façade of coherence. Jews are clearly the winners in providing the most source of fun because their kosher and Sabbath rules are unbelievably complex while their Talmudic scholars are ingenious about finding loopholes for them, as was the case with telephones, ovens, elevators, and escalators. [Read more…]
[UPDATE: Please see comment #7 by Holly Wesley, daughter of the late Mary Hamilton.]
There are some film scenes that are not only indelibly etched in one’s personal memory but become part of the collective memory of an entire generation. One such scene is this one with Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger from the 1967 film In the Heat of the Night, with Poitier as a police detective from Philadelphia who gets involved, alongside Steiger as the local sheriff, in a murder investigation in a small town in Mississippi and has to deal with the racism he encounters.
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It looks like Edward Snowden has decided to create international pressure against the US government’s attempts to block his travel. Although he has offers of political asylum from three Latin American countries (Venezuela, Bolivia, and Nicaragua), the determination of the US government to get its hands on him, and the willingness of its client states in western Europe to assist it in doing so, present major difficulties for him to get there. This article by the McClatchy news service discusses the hurdles in his path. [Read more…]
The Los Angeles Times published a grim tale of someone who got trapped in the Kafkaesque world occupied by those on the infamous ‘no fly list’.
For two weeks, Rehan Motiwala, a 29-year-old medical student from Pomona, sat stranded at the Bangkok airport, sleeping for 10 nights on a roach-infested mattress in a dank, windowless detention room reserved for deportees. [Read more…]