I retired from Case Western Reserve University a little over two years ago. About a year after I left I got a phone call at home from the head of the computer’s security division, whom I know pretty well, to tell me that they were investigating the activities of a former student at the university who had infiltrated the computers of quite a few people. The investigators had determined that my work computer was one of those hacked.
[Read more…]
Texas is often seen as such a drearily and reliably extreme conservative state that its elections are often just referenda between extreme right and nutty right wings of the Republican party but this year is turning out to be interesting, more for what is going on within the two major parties than between them. Last Tuesday was primary election day in Texas and since primary elections are now where most of the action is, there were some interesting outcomes.
[Read more…]
Martin Shkreli’s name is infamous for having bought the rights to a life-saving AIDS and cancer drug and then jacking up the price from $13.50 a pill to $750 without a care for the consequences for the people who depended on the drug. He was sentenced yesterday to seven years in prison for a different offense, of running something like a Ponzi scheme.
[Read more…]
I just discovered that the documentary that I highly praised earlier today can be viewed in its entirety at the Frontline website. I strongly recommend it. When I watched the documentary, I was surprised at the access the Sung family gave the filmmakers., allowing them to sit in on their conversations. Director Steve James discusses the making of the film and why he wanted to show so much of the family and why thinks they took that risk.
[Read more…]
Long time readers may recall that I used to check in from time to time on a website known as The Thinking Housewife, seeing it as a somewhat genteel and quaint version of highly conservative views based on a Roman Catholicism that was so ultra-traditional that it viewed the current pope Francis as some kind of liberal anti-Catholic imposter who had infiltrated the church in order to subvert if from inside. All that was good clean fun until in 2015 she suddenly put up a post where she went on an extraordinary anti-Semitic rant. At that point, I decided that the site was not funny anymore and stopped visiting.
[Read more…]
This is a must-see documentary about one overlooked story on the financial crisis of 2008. I did not hear about it until last week when it was discussed on the radio as one of the Academy Awards nominees for best documentary. There have been many good films about that crisis that I have reviewed before, such as Inside Job, Requiem for the American Dream, The Big Short, Margin Call, Capitalism – A Love Story. In each of them, the viewer is left furious at the fact that the top officials at the big banks were not criminally prosecuted and were able to escape scot-free while so many people suffered as a result of their actions.
[Read more…]
It looks like angry high school students have succeeded where adults have failed, in getting the Florida state legislature to pass at least some gun control laws.
Florida lawmakers bucked the National Rifle Association on Wednesday to pass new firearms regulations and create a program for arming some school employees in a rare act of Republican compromise on the divisive issue of gun violence.
The response to the slayings at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, signaled a major shift for a state known as a legal laboratory for gun rights activists. It could become a blueprint for other states looking at new measures to address mass shootings.
[Read more…]
The regular columnists on the editorial pages of the New York Times are people who range from centrists to right-wingers. In particular, the paper has always taken a strongly pro-Israel and anti-Palestinian stance. Glenn Greenwald takes apart the bogus claims of that newspaper that it seeks viewpoint diversity in its editorial pages by showing how its recent hires have gone in the opposite direction, especially with the hiring of Brett Stephens and Bari Weiss, the latter being pretty much a propagandist for Israel who has long been on a crusade to suppress any criticisms of that country’s atrocious treatment of Palestinians.
[Read more…]
I have commented before on how top executives of the big banks (Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs) take on top economic jobs in both Democratic and Republican administration (usually as Treasury Secretary or White House economic advisor) and then push through changes that hugely benefit the banking sector they used to work for and then leave and return to the grateful embrace of those banks.
[Read more…]