Late night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel sent his crew out to interview people who attended the Fashion Week activities in New York. The crew threw out names of people who were NOT designers and asked the attendees what they thought of their creations. The people reacted as if they were familiar with the names and their designs and the show played those clips. [Read more…]
The children of Sam Walton, founder of the Walmart empire, are among the richest people in the world. Walmart is notorious for paying its workers poorly and treating them badly. As this article from Bloomberg shows, they use every trick in the book to prevent paying taxes so that they keep as much of their money as possible. What seems like generous gifts to charity are in fact tax dodges. [Read more…]
It looks like Edward Snowden is settling in to life in Russia, learning the language and the culture. He may well decide to stay on there if the Russian government lets him. Although he apparently travels freely and is unrecognized by people, he is living incognito at a secret location with security, presumably just in case the US government gets an insane idea to kidnap or even kill him. They are less likely to do that in Russia than in some smaller country like Venezuela or Ecuador because the US government, like all bullies, only picks on people that cannot fight back. [Read more…]
Now that the chances for an imminent bombing campaign against Syria have receded, the bloodthirsty warmongers that infest the top levels of the US political and media worlds are sad, even though US support for the rebels continues. They were so looking forward to seeing the US once again demonstrate its high-tech weaponry by unleashing death and destruction on a small country containing Muslims and Arabs, whom we all know are sub-human and thus their lives don’t count. [Read more…]
By making it into a dumb phone and disabling its internet and call-making capabilities.
From time to time I have been having fun at the expense of religious institutions that try to find ways of getting around the restrictions that their religious rules place on them. Orthodox Jews are the most source of fun, both because of the Byzantine rules that they have as well as for the convoluted logic used to get around them when they become inconvenient in this day and age. But this latest move is one of the most absurd. [Read more…]
With all the focus on foreign wars, let’s not forget another vicious war that is being waged in the US and that is the war on the poor. The Republicans in the US Congress are proposing to cut funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) program (the one that used to be called ‘food stamps’) by $40 billion. These disgusting people, who think that raising the taxes of the immensely wealthy by even the slightest amount is a travesty of justice, think that we need to reduce aid to those people who are already struggling mightily to just survive. [Read more…]
On my way across the campus earlier today for a meeting, I saw that a big (roughly 4ft x 16ft) yellow board had been set up in front of the library asking people to write what they thought about a US war with Syria. There were a mix of comments, with those opposed slightly outnumbering those who were either ambivalent or in favor of direct US intervention. I noticed that the board had been put up by the student group Young Americans for Liberty (YAL), a libertarian counterweight to the more establishment conservative Republican Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) which seems to be dormant. (Warning: Audio may begin upon clicking. I hate it when they do that.) [Read more…]
With all the stories about the NSA spying on the communications of people all over the world, we may have an exaggerated sense of the NSA’s code-breaking capabilities. Matthew Green, the cryptography researcher at Johns Hopkins University who was temporarily censored, explains that there are three ways to get past encryption. [Read more…]
The US government says that its goal is to not to overthrow the Syrian government militarily, something it could do easily if it were not for overwhelming public opinion against such a move. It also says that it is not allied with the Syrian rebels, an understandable public distancing since some reports indicate that about half of that motley group consists of extremely undesirable elements, including violently anti-US groups. [Read more…]
I apologize for the trouble that disrupted the blog for much of the day. It was out of my hands and seems to be fixed now.
I have also been a little busy the last few days and so missed this series of three good clips in the Syria issue from The Daily Show that were shown last Friday. They are a little dated but worth watching. [Read more…]