John Oliver issues another call to action to ensure net neutrality

He does a brilliant job of explaining why the fight for new neutrality is important for everyone to get involved in and how that neutrality is being threatened by the new FCC chairperson Ajit Pai. His show has set up a website gofccyourself.com to make it easy to go straight to the relevant FCC page. Once there, click on ‘express’ link at the upper right, and leave your comment telling thee FCC that you back strong net neutrality backed by Title II oversight of ISPs. I already did so.

They suspected their actions were illegal – but did them anyway

Alex Emmons writes about a lawsuit filed by the ACLU against two psychologists James Mitchell and John “Bruce” Jessen who received lucrative government contracts to devise the most abusive torture methods used by the government. Their work was supervised by Gina Haspel who has been appointed by Donald Trump as deputy director of the CIA.
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One spelling bee mystery solved

I have expressed my puzzlement with several aspects of the national spelling bee competition, especially the fact that the words have become increasingly obscure over time. (For example, in 1932, the winning word was ‘knack’!) One question in my mind is why such a pointless activity as spelling highly esoteric words has become so attractive that young children spend countless hours learning to do so and then subject themselves to sweating it out in front of cameras and large prime time TV audiences in a format that seems to revel in their agony. To win this contest requires knowing the spelling of 150,000 to 200,000 words. This is astonishing when one considers that Shakespeare used only about 33,000 words in his plays and this is considered to be close to the upper limit of most people’s vocabularies, even those who have high levels of formal education. So these competitors are learning to spell a lot of words they will never, ever use.
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Film review: Risk (2017)

On Friday I saw the new film Risk produced and directed by award-winning documentarian Laura Poitras, who won the Academy Award for Citizenfour, the film about Edward Snowden and his leaks. The focus this time is Julian Assange and WikiLeaks and unlike the earlier one, the narrative structure of this film is, to say the least, a bit confused. But that is not due to the lack of skill of Poitras but due to the fact that after she started filming it, the story went off in many directions and she too became part of it.
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Stephen Fry investigated under Ireland’s blasphemy law

When we think of people being targeted for blasphemy, Muslim-majority countries like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia immediately come to mind. But it turns out that atheist Stephen Fry is being investigated for this offense in Ireland for comments he made on a television show when he was asked what he would say to god if it so happened that after he died he was confronted by god.
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Republicans move towards their goal of depriving people of health care

So the Republicans in the House of Representatives managed to squeeze through their repeal of Obamacare by the thinnest of margins of 217-213 even though it did not undergo any of the normal scrutiny that a major bill should receive. But we do know that it seeks to deprive many people of basic health care protections and is a huge siphoning of money from the poor to the rich.
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Ads, adblockers, and ‘family friendly content’

Some of you use ad blocker software and that may prevent you from seeing some of the content on this page. Part of the problem may be, as Trickster Goddess said in a comment, that the FtB content is not encrypted (as you see since our URL begins with ‘http’ and not ‘https’) and if you are using browsers and settings that allow only encrypted content to get through, it may strip out some content, like images. I suggested a long time ago that FtB join the wave and use encryption for all its content but it did not go anywhere. Part of the problem is that this site is run on a shoestring budget and anything that is not critical to just keep the site running tends to get deferred.
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Money does buy politicians

There is a persistent paradox in discussions about politics, especially in academia. Businesses, interest groups, and their lobbyists give vast amounts of money to politicians and this naturally leads to the impression that many of our politicians can be bought and sold like commodities. After all, why throw money away on some thing that produces little or no returns? And yet, I have found that academic studies by political scientists and economists tend to argue that money is not a decisive factor in how legislators vote on issues. I have been to many seminars and political scientists almost always dismiss as ignorant those who suggest that money buys votes or can change the way people vote. They suggest other reasons why money flows to politicians, such as that people give money to those politicians who already agree with them. In other words, it is a reward for past practices rather than a bribe to change future behavior, to keep people who are already on your side from defecting rather than trying to win over opponents.
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