Two activists in Quito, Ecuador were offended by the poor grammar and punctuation that they saw in the city’s graffiti, seeing them as showing a lack of respect for the language and people. So they decided to do something about it, by becoming grammar vigilantes who prowl the streets at night, anonymously correcting errors wherever they saw them.
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While I have resigned myself to being treated to a blizzard of trivial issues during the Trump presidency that will sideline coverage of his actual actions, even I was surprised that the focus in his first weekend was on the absurd fuss over the sparse crowd at his inauguration compared to that of president Obama’s in 2009 and the Women’s March on Saturday.
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A federal judge has ruled that the US government must release photographs of the abuse that took place at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq that the Bush and Obama administrations have fought vigorously to suppress. The ACLU has been seeking the release of the photos under FOIA since 2004. While some of the infamous photos had leaked earlier, there are an estimated 2,000 still being kept under wraps. The US government had argued that their release would endanger its troops but the judge ruled that with only about 5,000 US troops still in Iraq and serving as advisors rather than in active combat, that danger had not been proven by the outgoing defense secretary.
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Via Mark Frauenfelder I came across this nice card trick. I like it because it is very simple and does not require any manual dexterity. It enables you to look as if you can predict the outcome of a sequence of cards from a shuffled deck better than your opponent. It is not even a trick in the usual sense of the word but an exercise in logic that someone could work out. But thinking of it at all is what is clever.
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Maggie Rowe has written a memoir Sin Bravely: My Great Escape From Evangelical Hell that describes how she managed to break free of the shackles that bound her to the evangelical movement. In this interview, she discusses her obsessive worrying about going to hell and her search, while still a believer, for a therapist who could soothe her fears within the framework in which hell remained a reality. She search took her to a place called Grace Point Evangelical Psychiatric Institute
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The current heating up of the rhetoric in US-Russia relations was triggered in the US by the events in the Ukraine that Cold War warriors in the US say is a sign that Russia and its leader Vladimir Putin are trying to expand the country’s borders and resurrect the Soviet empire, and it shows that they cannot be trusted.
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I didn’t watch the inauguration yesterday because displays of pomp and pageantry coupled with speechifying bores me to tears and having to listen to Donald Trump would just compound the irritation. So I was grateful to Stephen Colbert for providing the highlights.
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I was struck by the way the Washington establishment is responding to the way that Donald Trump is dismissing the leaks from the CIA that the Russian government has been manipulating US elections. Take these comments from Chuck Schumer, the leader of the Democratic party in the US senate.
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Followers of the NSA spying stories will remember Lavabit, the encrypted email service created by Ladar Levison. Its claim to fame is two-fold. One is that it was the service used by Edward Snowden. The other is that in 2013 Levinson chose to shut down the service entirely rather than hand over the encryption keys of the emails of his clients to the US government. I have written about this story before, as have many others.
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One of the biggest myths that has had a negative effect on American politics is that the US is a society with a lot of economic and social mobility and that simply by dint of hard work and other worthy qualities one can achieve success and become wealthy. It should not be surprising, then, that a full one-third of Americans think that they will be rich some day. More than half in the age group 18-29 think so, with the percentage declining with age as people begin to realize that time is running out on achieving that dream
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