The head of the NSA Keith Alexander has asked Congress to pass legislation that would give blanket immunity to companies that commit illegal activities at the request of the NSA. Alexander explains it this way, “If the government asks the company to do something to protect the networks, or to do something and a mistake is made, and it was our fault, then they should have liability protection for that.” [Read more…]
When it comes to issues of morality, I take the attitude of live and let live. If people are not harming others, then I think that they should be given a great deal of leeway for their actions. Similarly, consenting adults who are of sound mind should be allowed to live their lives as they wish. Since this approach to morality does not use as its basis religious texts written by men thousands of years ago when standards of morality were less enlightened than they are now, it is bound to come into conflict from time to time with the moral standards of religions. [Read more…]
The group Exodus International, a Christian ministry that tried to ‘pray away the gay’ (which I have to admit is a pretty catchy slogan) has suddenly announced that they are closing shop. But that is not all, they are closing because they are admitting that they were wrong and their head Alan Chambers has issued a statement explaining his reasons and in the process given an apology that is remarkable for its unequivocal nature. [Read more…]
The Girl Guides of the UK (the equivalent of the USA’s Girl Scouts) no longer require their members to take an oath to “love God and serve the King/Queen.” Instead they will promise to “be true to myself and develop my beliefs” and “to serve my Queen (Elizabeth II) and my country.” [Read more…]
One sign of an authoritarian society is how authorities react to those whom they feel are not properly subservient to them. The American people are slowly being conditioned to be obsequious to government power. Mike Spindell writes about a bill being discussed in the New York State Senate that would make it a felony to, among other things, ‘annoy’ a police officer in the course of his duties. He gives a long list of cases where the police have taken offense at people who were acting perfectly legally but not subserviently. [Read more…]
As part of my series on the Higgs boson, I mentioned that it used to be that we thought of objects in the macroscopic (‘classical’) world as consisting of either particles or waves while in the microscopic (‘quantum’) world, we had wave-particle duality, where entities had both properties. Both worlds were governed by different laws. [Read more…]
Anyone who has ever been to a church has probably wondered what the letter IHS on the crosses and other icons stand for. I know I did but never bothered to actually find out, limiting myself to making guesses during the times when my mind wandered during the ceremony. I remember thinking that maybe it stood for ‘In His Service’ or, as I got older and more sophisticated in my wild guesses, for ‘Jesus of Nazareth, Savior’ in some other language, say Greek, with I standing for the J sound and the H for the N sound. [Read more…]
Celebrity chef Paula Deen is being sued by a former employee for sexual harassment and the use of the N-word. In a deposition, Deen freely admitted that she did use the word and added: “It’s just what they are — they’re jokes…most jokes are about Jewish people, rednecks, black folks…I can’t determine what offends another person.” [Read more…]