I know enough about American Idol to find interesting the above headline, which is from the Chicago Sun-Times. It would be easy enough to ascribe this little outcry to the ire of a vocal minority, but I think there’s more to it than that. I’m not psychologist — and I’m certainly no Nate Silver — [...]
“400 obscenely rich people, most of whom benefited in some way from the multi-trillion dollar taxpayer ‘bailout’ of 2008, now have more loot, stock and property than the assets of 155 million Americans combined. If you can’t bring yourself to call that a financial coup d’état, then you are simply not being honest about what [...]
Security expert Bruce Schneier says he experienced the TSA’s enhanced security measures first hand (so to speak): I experienced the enhanced patdown myself, at DCA, on Tuesday. It was invasive, but not as bad as these stories. Here’s the thing: I have a zero-tolerance policy for physical violation — hell, shaking hands can be an [...]
WaPo columnist David Broder writes: I am not suggesting, of course, that the president incite a war to get reelected. But the nation will rally around Obama because Iran is the greatest threat to the world in the young century. If he can confront this threat and contain Iran’s nuclear ambitions, he will have made [...]
Just look at the individual words which we have recently co-opted from the US military. When we westerners find that ‘our’ enemies — al-Qaeda, for example, or the Taliban — have set off more bombs and staged more attacks than usual, we call it ‘a spike in violence’. Ah yes, a ‘spike’! A ‘spike’ in [...]
Just in time for November’s congressional elections, the Supreme Court today handed down a 5-4 ruling (Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission [PDF]) that decrees that the Government may not restrict corporations from spending as much money as they want to influence political campaigns, particularly with the production and airing of ads. The decision reversed [...]
The more we undermine our own laws, the more we convert our buildings into fortresses, the more we reduce the freedoms and liberties at the foundation of our societies, the more we’re doing the terrorists’ job for them. (via Bruce Schneier) » Share on Facebook
Passengers aboard a December 25th Northwest Airlines flight subdued a Nigerian man who had ignited a device taped to his leg. Ever the reactionaries, the fine people at the Transportation Security Administration (as directed by the US Department of Homeland Security) have hatched some wide-ranging measures in order to alleviate the rest of us from [...]
Further evidence that many Americans are emotional, intellectual infants. Transportation Security Administration officials said passengers aboard U.S. Airways Flight 192 from Orlando, Fla., on Saturday night reported that two men, described as Middle Eastern, were acting strangely and talking loudly to each other in a foreign language. A nearby passenger also observed one of men [...]
“We are an agricultural company,” begins Monsanto’s marketing spiel. And wouldn’t you trust the company who invented aspartame and bovine growth hormone to invent food for you? How about if that company also helped develop Agent Orange? The fact is that you’ve probably eaten food genetically enhanced by Monsanto in the past day alone, and [...]
Klaus Ek doesn’t like things that are bad, to put it succinctly. Read more about him here.