(This clip aired on July 24, 2014. To get suggestions on how to view clips of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report outside the US, please see this earlier post. If the videos autoplay, please see here for a diagnosis and possible solutions.)
In an extremely important and positive development triggered by Edward Snowden, Yahoo announces that like Google they will begin to encrypt email. It was clear that the only way that government spying could be thwarted is if the big companies started including sophisticated encryption methods into their software and made it easy to use, because ordinary people would be too intimidated by what is required to do so on their own. We cannot depend upon Congress to rein the NSA in.
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Last evening saw the opening ceremony of Gay Games 2014 in my hometown of Cleveland. The games have been held every four years starting in 1982. In 2018 it will be in Paris. I must say that I am proud of the city for offering to host the games and working hard to put out the welcome mat. The institution where I work (Case Western Reserve University) is hosting some events at its athletic facilities. And from all reports, the opening night festivities seemed to have gone well.
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I have heard the phrase “get your ducks in a row” but I have never seen it done literally with live ducks. This is pretty impressive. If he could do the same thing with cats, he might make obsolete the ‘herding cats’ metaphor for something that is impossible to do.
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There seem to be more and more leakers willing to spill the dirt on what their governments are doing and it looks like The Intercept is their vehicle of choice for revealing information, which must be causing the major media outlets considerable chagrin at not getting the scoops. Of course, they have only themselves to blame because they have shown themselves to be not good custodians of the public trust, being more eager to ingratiate themselves with governments than informing the public.
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I used to get terribly car sick as a boy but fortunately it went away by itself in my mid-teens. But I know adults who never get over it and this makes life quite difficult for them. But one thing that has been noted is that of you are the driver of the vehicle, you are less likely to feel sick and people have tried to understand why.
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As the US population ages, there will be many people who are retired and in nursing homes. Such people may lack mobility and risk feeling lonely and useless, not a good thing for people who have such a wealth of life experience and so much to contribute. Stephen Colbert describes a nice program where older people teach English to foreign students by talking to them over the internet.
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An op-ed in the Washington Post makes a good case as to why the use by the US government of drone strikes is so problematic
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There is a negative correlation between religious beliefs and education in that the more formal education one has, the less likely one is to be religious. But a new study suggests that that familiar pattern may be undergoing a shift, especially in the age cohort labeled as Generation X.
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