Update: Here’s the link for those who cannot see the embedded video.
Mano Singham
Just another Freethought Blogs site
I have lived all my life working in universities, except for two years in a national laboratory which was pretty similar to a university physics department except that there was no teaching involved. It has been a good life for me. [Read more…]
The Obama administration can be characterized by at least three features: vast over-reaching in its claim to executive power, egregiously violating people’s liberties, and indulging in excessive secrecy.
Whistleblowers have provided a valuable service in letting us know what is going on and exposing wrongdoing and the administration has been a vigorous prosecutor of leakers and whistleblowers, demanding access to all manner of private communications from reporters and employees in their efforts to identify and harshly punish anyone who crosses them. [Read more…]
I am sick to death of hearing about the Facebook IPO. Although I was one of the earliest people to create a Facebook account (and it still exists) I abandoned it a long time ago and do not even respond to friend requests anymore. I have thought seriously about closing it altogether but refrained from doing so because on occasion it has enabled long-lost friends to find me. [Read more…]
TED talks are well known to policy wonks and geeks. I find many of them quite interesting and have linked to them. But while many people know of them, not so many know that the audience at TED conferences tend to be the well-heeled because it is for members only and the cost of attending can be quite high. [Read more…]
I read the works of psychologist Erich Fromm (1900-1980) voraciously when I was younger. His wrote about how humans suffered from a sense of alienation due to their estrangement with nature and with other people, and that this was a source of many mental problems and destructive behavior because they sought to fill that need by various means that did not address the fundamental problem of alienation. In his writings he suggested alternative ways of achieving fulfillment by connecting people with one another in deep and meaningful ways. [Read more…]
I do not directly trade in stocks although like anyone with a retirement account, someone is trading on the stock market with my savings. My lack of interest may be related to my lack of interest in gambling generally and to my lack of a desire to make more money. I have a job that pays me enough for my needs and that is enough. My main interest in the financial world is more on the macro side, to understand how it impacts the political and social worlds. But the recent global financial turmoil has resulted in me learning more about the world of high finance than I ever wanted. [Read more…]
Contrary to the popular American belief that it was Columbus who discovered that the Earth was round, that fact was not only known a long time before, the circumference of the Earth had actually been calculated to high accuracy 2,200 years ago. [Read more…]
According to the Washington Post, he has signed an Executive Order that subjects anyone (Americans or foreigners) to penalties if they obstruct the administration’s preferred policies in Yemen. [Read more…]
In following up the recent revelations of sexual abuse and cover up in the Orthodox Jewish community, I came across Shmarya Rosenberg, a blogger at Failed Messiah, who has been shining a bright and unflattering light on what goes on in that world. His website reveals a religious community whose leaders and members seems to be as zealous as the Catholic Church in protecting sexual predators and abusers and rapists. [Read more…]