Me reading the comics while Baxter the Wonder Dog takes a nap by my side.
Blogging will be more sporadic over the holidays as I will be together with my children and their significant others. Now that they are older and living independent lives elsewhere, these times together are few and far between and to be savored. I thought that I would pass on a couple of personal recommendations. Others should feel free to add their own in the comments. [Read more…]
The good news out of Ohio is that the Medicaid expansion program has been upheld by the courts. This was part of the Affordable Care Act that was meant to take care of the people who fell into a gap, who earned too much (although still poor) to be eligible for Medicaid but did not earn enough to get affordable insurance through the new health exchanges. [Read more…]
The clip below discusses why it is so disorienting to go into one of those rooms that are just like normal rooms, except that they are tilted. Even being aware of the source of the effect does not prevent people from feeling a strong sense of discomfort, even nausea. [Read more…]
Chris Mooney makes the case that the Affordable Care Act could eventually result in more people becoming atheists. Why? [Read more…]
The New Mexico Supreme Court ruled on Thursday in a unanimous that the ban on same-sex marriage in unconstitutional, making it the 17th state to do so. This was not such a big surprise. The same court had ruled in August 22 of this year that a photographer could not deny services to a same-sex couple. (I will write more about this case later because it offers some interesting features.) [Read more…]
Stephen Colbert takes a look at what the NSA is up to in the virtual worlds of World of Warcraft and Second Life, while the FBI spies on people through their computer webcams. It is easy to see how the people doing this might have started out justifying it as a way of fighting terrorism but that it acquired a life of its own and became an addiction. Like World of Warcraft and Second Life, in fact. [Read more…]
President Obama’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies tasked to review NSA procedures has released its report and I must say that I was pleasantly surprised. Given that the committee was stacked with intelligence services insiders, I had expected it to offer merely superficial changes but that was not the case. While it did not go as far as I would have liked, it was not a rubber stamp for existing programs either. This may be because there has been so much publicly expressed skepticism about this committee that it made it hard for them to appear to confirm those suspicions. [Read more…]
Another day, another blockbuster Snowden-based revelation.
From previous revelations, we knew that the NSA and Britain’s GCHQ have been vacuuming up and storing people’s information pretty indiscriminately. But today brings new revelations from the Edward Snowden documents reveal the stunning extent of targeted spying on people and organizations., including such organizations as the well-known United Nations children’s charity. [Read more…]