We live in an era of fear of all manner of dangers, many of them highly exaggerated. This extends to many parents not allowing their children out of their sight. I have been interested in the so-called ‘Free-Range Kids’ movement, where parents are encouraged to give their children more freedom to roam the neighborhood and not have adults hovering over them all the time.
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On the second anniversary of the Snowden leaks, the Los Angeles Times has published an extraordinary editorial trying to have it both ways: acknowledging that it was thanks to Edward Snowden that there have been any reforms at all in the way that the government has been sweeping up the private information of people all over the world, and then objecting to him being given a pardon and calling for him to return to the US and ‘accept the consequences’.
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Suppose you are sitting in your living room and suddenly everything in front of you changed to something else, say a view of the ocean. Wouldn’t you be startled? And yet, when we watch films, a cut from one scene to another changes also the entire field of view instantaneously and yet it causes us no problems. And reports about the public viewing of the very first films suggest that this new thing did not cause viewers any problems at all. I wrote a few months ago about the research by Jeffrey M. Zacks, a professor of psychology and radiology at Washington University in St. Louis, and others about why our brains are not disoriented when we watch films with even very rapid cuts that change the entire field of view instantaneously.
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There is a national exam taken by all students in British high schools known as the GCSE exam and apparently one recent problem has caused an uproar because it stumped most students. Here it is:
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The New York Times published an opinion piece by Edward Snowden on yesterday’s second anniversary of his revelations, where he justifiably expressed satisfaction at some of the changes his actions have wrought.
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Stephen Colbert has been out of the news while he plans his return to TV as the replacement for David Letterman on CBS’s The Late Show that begins on September 8. But he has been busy growing a beard and has put out a short video promotion for his show that suggests that even without the conservative mask he has been wearing for so long, he is still funny.
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On June 5, 2013, the first of the stories based on Edward Snowden’s documents were published, creating a firestorm of attention around what had been a vast secret data-gathering operation conducted y the NSA under the maxim of ‘collect it all’, where they sought to gather up everyone’s communications. I went back to my own archives to see what I had written then on June 6, June 6, June 7, and June 8 and it was clear from the very beginning that this was a major scandal. Snowden revealed his identity on June 9, surprising everyone by being a young, soft-spoken person with deep principles..
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Social and religious conservatives are worried that the US Supreme Court is going to announce soon that it is unconstitutional to ban same-sex marriages, and fear that this will lead to the end of the world. They have been issuing vague warnings that they will defy the decision, though it is not clear what form those actions could take.
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A few days ago, I excerpted some of former president Eisenhower’s criticisms of the cost of war. What follows is an excerpt from a speech delivered in 1933, by Major General Smedley Butler of the United States Marine Corps, that goes even further.
War is just a racket.
…A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many.
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