Many people seem to be quite complacent about having the US’s NSA, the UK’s GCHQ, and other government agencies spy on people’s communications and compile dossiers on their lives and associates because they have been convinced that they are under serious threat and that such measures are necessary to keep them safe. [Read more…]
I have long felt that what people really want to believe in is an afterlife, not in a god so much. Belief in a god serves as a gateway to belief in an afterlife but if you asked people which they would prefer (a god but no afterlife or an afterlife and no god) I suspect that they would choose the latter by a landslide. (I explained my reasoning back in 2010.) [Read more…]
You may recall that during the run up to the 2012 election I referred to Sam Wang’s Princeton Election Consortium website a lot because I liked (even more than I did Nate Silver’s work) his statistical approach to dealing with all the polls and the way he translated all that data into easily understandable likelihoods for outcomes. [Read more…]
Stephen M. Walt says that the rhetoric being used against allowing Iran to have any nuclear capability is similar to what was said about China back in the 1960s when that nation was developing nuclear technology, right down to impugning its leaders as irrational crazy people who might go berserk and blow up the world if they were able to make a bomb. [Read more…]
As expected, this year’s Nobel prize in physics, announced today, was awarded for the discovery of the Higgs boson. The prize was awarded to two people, Francois Englert and Peter Higgs. As I said in one of my series of posts on the Higgs boson, the award of the prize was bound to raise hackles because five theorists had some claim to the discovery (there were six but Robert Brout died in 2011), as well the experimental groups that found the particle last year, not to mention CERN, the laboratory where the experiment was done. [Read more…]
I have been trying to understand some of the arcane issues surrounding the way the US government is run and what follows is what I have been able to learn. Take it with a grain of salt since I am neither an economist nor an accountant.
The current debt limit, the maximum amount that the government is allowed to borrow, was raised on May 19, 2013 to $16.70 trillion, which is projected to be reached on October 17, 2013. When the government’s expenditures exceed the amount it has in its checking account, the government is authorized to sell US Treasury notes to raise cash make up the difference provided the total amount does not exceed that limit. [Read more…]
The Onion had a point-counterpoint exchange with John Boehner debating himself over the shutdown and his role in it. In the first part, Boehner recites the official line, saying the same things he has been saying at his public appearances. [Read more…]
The so-called millennial generation in the US is the focus of much media attention, much of it negative, decrying them as whiny, praise-seeking, self-absorbed, slaves to social network technology, and having a sense of entitlement. But a new survey finds that as they progress towards adulthood, they display many of the same characteristics as the generations that came before. [Read more…]
Via reader EJ, I learned of this congressional testimony by the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and head of the NSA Keith Alexander that the government shut down is hurting their intelligence gathering programs. Since many of their people are not being paid and may thus be hurting financially, Clapper says that they will become easy targets for subversion. [Read more…]
In the widely publicized interview with New York magazine’s Jennifer Senior, Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia talks, among other things, about his religious beliefs and they turn out to be pretty orthodox. [Read more…]