More information has emerged on why Ladar Levison, the owner of the encrypted mail service Lavabit, chose to shut down his service entirely rather than comply with government demands to provide a back door for them to secretly access all his clients’ communications. [Read more…]
In reports on the death of legendary Vietnamese general Vo Nguyen Giap, while his strategic and tactical prowess were noted, much was made of the fact that his leadership resulted in the loss of life of large numbers of Vietnamese soldiers in their struggle to rid their country of invaders, first the French and then the US. [Read more…]
Via PZ Myers, I learned that ABC TV is going to show a special program about the ‘Manosphere’ on Friday at 10:00 pm Eastern Time.
My first reaction was “Wait, really? They named a whole sphere after me?” It is not as big a deal as having a comet or minor planet named after me, but surely it must be an honor, right? At first I was gratified by the recognition but on reading the article, things got dark very quickly. [Read more…]
The story of the way that Danielle S. Lee, a biologist who also writes a blog for Scientific American titled Urban Scientist, was treated has been written about quite extensively in the blogs, including by many of us here at FreethoughtBlogs. [Read more…]
Now that the shut down has ended, we can expect to see focus shift (at least until the next doomsday on January 15, 2014) to the question of immigration. Because of the rising numbers of Hispanics in the US partly fueled by immigration, there will be greater focus on the views of Hispanics are on various issues. [Read more…]
After talking tough like the Hulk about how you don’t want to make him angry because he is dangerous when he is angry, senator Lindsey Graham is now pleading with his opponents not to hurt him, something that The Hulk would never do. [Read more…]
So Congress passed, and president Obama signed into law, the bill that extended government funding until January 15, 2014 and raised the debt ceiling to last until February 7, 2014. So after all the political grandstanding and posturing and interminable news conferences, we seem to have returned to the status quo, set to repeat the process in three months. And to what end? There was no repeal, defunding, delay, or anything other than the most trivial modification made in the Affordable Care Act, the supposed reason for the whole drama. [Read more…]
If the debt ceiling is raised and the government is opened, get ready for more talk of the need for a ‘Grand Bargain’ to cut spending on earned benefits (I refuse to call them by the common but misleading name of entitlements) and other programs that benefit the less well-off in order to rescue the country from the pending disaster caused by runaway debt.
But all that talk is a fraud. [Read more…]
It turns out that devout French Catholics may have been committing blasphemy for the last half-century when saying the Lord’s Prayer. It appears that the official French translation of the line “Lead us not into temptation” was translated into French in 1966 in a way that could be wrongly interpreted. [Read more…]