Book review: No Place to Hide by Glenn Greenwald

I finished the book (its full title is No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State) in two sittings. It is not too long (about 250 pages) and Greenwald has a direct style where he says what he means without weasel words that makes it easy to follow. It describes how Edward Snowden came to gain access to all the materials he chose to reveal, what made him decide to reveal it, the main contents of the revelations, why it is important, and the reactions to his disclosures. (Notes on each chapter, the index to the contents, and many of the source documents from the NSA that are not in the book or are hard to read because of the size of the font can be found here.)
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All poor children are not equal

The war on the poor goes on apace in the US but it seems like not all poor are equal and recent action in Congress reveals a difference. For many poor children, the free meals that schools provide are their main source of food. This is one reason why school closings due to bad weather are harder on poor families than richer ones. But when schools close for the summer, these children face an extended period without those meals. In order to alleviate the problem, Congress has in the past allocated funds to provide some free meals during the summer as well.
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Co-ed lab rats

It is quite odd how some things that should be obvious are not so purely because tradition has deadened our sensibility. For example, it has long been standard practice for medical research on animals to use only male specimens since it was argued that the presence of female hormones would add another uncontrollable variable in the testing. This seemed reasonable enough that it was uncontroversial until people started finding that when the resulting medicines were used on women, unexpected things happened. The National Institutes of Health now demands that all testing be done on both males and females, something that seems glaringly obvious now.
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Disturbing holding back of news

The Cleveland Museum of Art, a magnificent organization, has recently had a troubled time with three directors and four interim heads in the last fifteen years, a high rate of turnover for museums. Yesterday it announced a new director William Griswold but in a long article that had a lot of positive things about him, Plain Dealer reporter Arts reporter Steven Litt inserted this odd and unexplained passage.

Under an accord with the Cleveland museum and the Morgan, The Plain Dealer agreed Thursday not to publish news about Griswold’s impending appointment until 10 a.m. Tuesday — after the Cleveland board of trustees voted to accept the search committee’s recommendation.

The museums said that The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal agreed to the same conditions.

So the papers had the news but sat on it for nearly a week? Why should a news organization agree to such an arrangement? It is not as if there was any investigation going on that warranted secrecy. This is the danger when newspapers don’t face any real competition.

The PD has long been accused of being too cozy with the local elites. Their publisher (Terrance C. Z. Egger) also sits on the board of the museum and was accused of being the reason the paper sat on the story about the last director who resigned after it was revealed that he had been having an affair with a staffer who died under mysterious circumstances and were scooped by the local alternative weekly newspaper Scene. That newspaper also reported on the new director William Griswold and added this last sentence: “The 53-year-old Griswold, for what it’s worth, lives with his partner of 23 years, Christopher Malstead.”

Cleveland elites are a pretty traditional bunch. The fact that they hired an openly gay person to head one of its most esteemed civic gems tells us how far we have come, even if the state of Ohio still bars same-sex marriage.

Southern Baptists going soft on homosexuality?

I was surprised to hear a report on NPR by Blake Farmer about the meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention. The Southern Baptists compete with the Catholic church for being the Christian sect that most stridently opposes equal rights for the LGBT community. But the report quoted some pastors at the meeting who shocked the audience into silence by saying that it was time to tone down the anti-gay rhetoric when other problems such as divorce were much more important moral issues.
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