Nature never ceases to surprise us. Dennis Mersereau published this photo that was supposedly taken in the skies over Tunisia. It had been circulated widely in social media and Mersereau was rightly skeptical of photographs that go viral because they are often doctored.
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Ed Brayton of Dispatches from the Culture Wars, who is the person who maintains and is responsible for the FtB network, gives the sad news that a fellow FtB blogger over at A Million Gods has been removed from the network because of serial plagiarism. The charge is that he lifted entire chunks from the writings of others without attribution.
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It is a source of increasing concern to the establishment media that younger people are tuning in to comedy shows like The Daily Show that skewer the supposedly serious news shows and not tuning in to them, causing the demographic of their viewers to steadily inch upwards and well into retirement ages. This has naturally discomfited the people who host those shows and caused some of them to argue that this satirical attitude is making younger people more cynical about the political system and the media.
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It is well known that salmon return to their old spawning grounds, a journey that requires an arduous journey upstream, and that they somehow manage to overcome the huge hurdles involved. But what happens when human beings build dams that put that goal out of reach for even the most intrepid fish?
John Oliver says that some people are resorting to technology to help the salmon out.
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Matt Taibbi has an interesting article about the surreal aspects of the work slow down organized by the New York City police, where they have stopped arresting and ticketing people for minor offenses or what are often called offenses against the ‘quality of life’ which is part of the controversial ‘Broken Windows’ theory of policing. As a result, those arrests and citations have dropped by a staggering 94%. He says that it exposes an underlying issue about the proper use of police.
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Over three years ago, I wrote about Rob Bell, the head of one of the Mars Hill evangelical megachurch in Michigan that had an estimated 10,000-strong congregation. He was once touted as the next Billy Graham but then had some kind of epiphany that he expounded in a book Love Wins in which he argued that hell may not exist and that heaven may be open to everyone, not just those who accept Jesus as their personal lord and savior, the usual standard for admission among evangelicals.
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We know that blackmail, the attempt to extort money from someone by threatening to reveal some secret about them if they don’t cough up, is illegal. It is viewed as a particularly despicable crime that usually preys on the weak and defenseless. It seems self-evident that blackmail is wrong and should be punishable by law. But this website brought to my attention something that I had not considered before and that is that it is not clear why blackmail should be illegal at all.
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Glenn Greenwald looks at how rapidly the US media accepted and spread the US government’s story (confidently affirmed by president Obama) that North Korea was behind the Sony hack without any evidence being presented in support. Those of us who follow the news almost minimally know how the government has brazenly lied in the past and some may marvel that the media could have such short memories or be so obtuse as to accept these claims at face value. While there is a small possibility that North Korea was behind the attack, the fact that a week has gone by since the supposedly offending film The Interview was shown and the promised apocalypse still hasn’t occurred suggests that a non-state actor was behind the original hack and other players later exploited the situation and sowed confusion for who knows what reason.
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Since I am an old geezer, I welcomed the new year by being fast asleep. But I am not a total misanthrope. I will be entertaining some friends this evening. But what better way to start the new year than with some laughter?
Here’s John Oliver with advice for anyone who wants to get out of attending new year’s eve parties. This is a bit late I know but it also applies to any other parties.
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