In this interview with Noam Chomsky (which I date from the exchanges as having taken place soon after the Gulf War in 1991), he schools a British journalist on the reality that most journalists for the big media are not the crusading types they think they are but don’t even realize how much they work within a very narrow range of views. [Read more…]
You know what is a major problem with most religions? They are killjoys. The thought that people are engaging in enjoyable acts somehow bothers them, hence the prohibitions against ordinary pleasurable activities like eating, drinking, singing, dancing, films, sex, and contraception (because it allows people to have more sex). Most of the time these prohibitions stay is the realm of the laughable and absurd but sometimes become deadly. [Read more…]
Earlier attempts by privacy and civil liberties advocates to sue the NSA over it data gathering activities were rejected by the courts because of a two-pronged government defense strategy: (1) refuse to confirm or deny that such programs exist on grounds of national security and then (2) argue in court that since the plaintiffs could not prove that they had been under surveillance, they had no right to sue. Shamefully, the courts accepted this Catch-22 style argument. [Read more…]
We have all experienced occasions when a family member or friend tells us a story that they have told us before. Usually we pretend it is new to us because it seems somehow rude to tell them that they are repeating themselves. Also it is likely that we have done the same thing to others and so we also benefit from this act of politeness. I know that I have done so and only realized what I was doing later or half way through the story and, in the latter case, felt obliged to quickly complete it. This is because we all have a repertoire of stories that we draw upon repeatedly in conversations with others. [Read more…]
Remember the Segway? Now along comes a unicycle that operates similarly to that and has a self-balancing technology that makes it so stable that it is impossible to fall off it. It is called the RYNO and you can read more about it here. It can be parked anywhere that a bicycle can be parked. It is being marketed to commuters in dense traffic areas that have high parking charges. [Read more…]
When people get tired of modern life and yearn for the languid bygone age of genteel manners where everyone knew their proper place and there wasn’t all this talk of ‘equality’ and ‘rights’ and so on that give so many people uppity ideas, many may tune in to Downton Abbey for a refreshing breeze of nostalgia. As for me, I go over to the website The Thinking Housewife where I can be assured that right thinking will prevail and old-fashioned values upheld. [Read more…]
Employees of the Department of Homeland Security (an Orwellian name if there ever was one) have been warned not to read on an unclassified machine an article in the Washington Post because a slide shown in the article is one of the classified slides revealed by Edward Snowden. [Read more…]
I have long been fascinated by the fact that although we have gone so far in space exploration, we find it much harder to penetrate into the Earth. The deepest we get is in the oceans where we have gone to a depth of around 11 km in the place known as Challenger Deep that is located in the Marianas Trench. Here is a graphic of what we know about the Earth. [Read more…]
In a news report that appeared in the German magazine Der Spiegel, former president Jimmy Carter is reported to have said that the leaks by Edward Snowden were “beneficial” to the country and that “America has no functioning democracy at this moment.” [Read more…]