One sign of how this whole Snowden business has got under president Obama’s skin is that he seems to be losing his celebrated cool and becoming more peevish, as demonstrated in the way he spoke about Russian president Vladimir Putin at yesterday’s press conference. [Read more…]
While there has been a general decline in religiosity in the US especially among young people, it has not been uniformly so across the board. The Pentecostal denomination known as the Assemblies of God are reporting quite brisk growth.
The Assemblies of God, a denomination rooted in rural and small town America, appears to have leaped into the 21st century with dramatic results.
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The denomination reported a 1.8 percent increase in U.S. membership to 3 million adherents. Globally, the gain was 1.5 percent, to 66 million, making it the largest Pentecostal group in the world.
Pentecostals are those who claim to ‘speak in tongues’ and their religious services are something to see as people writhe on the floor and yell out and sway and dance as if in a trance. (The documentary Marjoe is available online and well worth seeing.) [Read more…]
As regular readers know, I was a huge cricket fan in my youth, losing touch with the game after I came to the US. But with the advent of the internet, I have rekindled my interest and started following it again. One of the big surprises for me was to discover that women’s cricket is now being played at the international level. Back when I was a boy, girls did not play at all at any level, not being included even when boys formed pick up games. [Read more…]
Phil Zimmerman, who is the creator of the PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) encryption algorithm and the head of Silent Circle, the other encrypted global communication company that shut down along with Lavabit, has explained in an open letter why he took this action. He says that unlike the other services that his company provides for phone, video, and text services, where his company retains no data that it can be forced to provide to third parties and is thus secure from end-to-end, the nature of email is such that he could not provide that level of guarantee. [Read more…]
Two email companies that used encrypted systems, one of which was used by Edward Snowden, have decided to shut down because they were clearly asked to do things by the government that compromised their clients’ confidentiality and they refused to do so.
The bizarre nature of the country we now live in demonstrated by the short letter that the head of one agency (Lavabit) released, of which I will highlight a small bit. [Read more…]
Stephanie Banister, a parliamentary candidate in next month’s Australian federal elections from the right wing nationalist One Nation party, is being described as their Sarah Palin. And it is not a compliment as this clip from a news report indicates. She thinks that Islam is a country and uses the Arabic word ‘haram’ (which roughly translates as sinful or forbidden or disapproved by god) as a umbrella term to cover anything Islamic. [Read more…]
On Monday, there was left on our doorstep a small package in a white envelope. There was no address but on the top right there was a printed image of a cancelled stamp with the Star of David and Hebrew lettering on it, below which was written “Hand delivered by IRM”. On the top right where the return address would be was the same Hebrew word in larger lettering, below which was a logo of a menorah and “ISRAEL RESTORATION MINISTRIES: Hope and Gladness for the Jewish People”. [Read more…]
Of the ‘Big Five’ dimensions that psychologists use to classify people’s personality traits (Openness v. Closed mindedness; Conscientiousness v. Disorganized; Extroversion v. Introversion; Agreeableness v. Disagreeableness; Neuroticism v. Calmness), the extrovert/introvert dimension probably draws the most attention and interest, perhaps because we think it is the easiest to identify in others and identify with ourselves. [Read more…]
As one could have predicted, news is slowly emerging that the sweeping statements provided by the government about the limits of the information it was collecting are turning out to be false. They said that they only collect metadata and not the contents of the messages themselves. But a new report says that they do search through the data looking for certain keywords and if those are found, those emails are saved for later close analysis by humans. [Read more…]
I had not heard of Leah Remini before but she is apparently quite a well-known actress. But more interestingly, she is a former member of the Church of Scientology. She apparently left after being interrogated for questioning leader David Miscavige’s authoritarian rule and is supposedly planning to write a memoir detailing her experiences. [Read more…]