This had better become required by law, and soon, if the government wants people to trust electronic voting machines. Every security expert who’s even glanced at them has been appalled at how easily they can be manipulated. Related and possibly-interesting note: a significant part of one of the Stainless Steel Rat books — written long [...]
Archive of posts filed under the Politics category.
“Your Fellow Citizens”
Sometimes Dilbert creator Scott Adams comes up with some really amusing blog posts. This one is one of them. Unfortunately it’s mostly amusing because it’s true. I can only hope that this is just the same relatively tiny group of vocal and stupid people that I see commenting everywhere. If not, our future may be [...]
“Moon *Not* Made of Cheese, Physicist Explains”
Just in case you were wondering. I don’t know the context of that quote, but I’m very concerned about the science deniers in the US. It seems that, despite mandatory science classes in high school, most people still don’t understand science. Conservatives seem to think that science is like religion: convince enough people of something [...]
“We like zombies… because we *are* zombies”
I always wondered at the popularity of zombies in popular fiction. They have no skill and no intelligence, and they move very slowly, their only truly horrifying trait (other than their dire need of cosmetics) is that they won’t stop so long as they can move even a single digit in your direction. It requires [...]
“‘Cookie Monster’ Offers Best Explanation Yet for Occupy Wall Street”
Beautiful. Simply beautiful. I’m going on the possibly-naive assumption that most rich people got that way honestly, and deserve everything they’ve earned (though not the ridiculous tax breaks they currently enjoy), and that it’s just a few crooked ones who are using their ill-gotten gains to manipulate the political system and screw the rest of [...]
“War boffin: Killer cyber attacks *won’t* happen”
Sorry, conservative politicians. You can’t use cyberspace as an excuse to continue your campaign to involve the US in a major war every twenty years or so. But don’t be too disappointed, it wouldn’t kill enough young men to satisfy you, or be very lucrative for your weapon-manufacturing backers, anyway.
“8 Reasons Young Americans Don’t Fight Back: How the US Crushed Youth Resistance”
I’ve often wondered why things were so different in my parents’ childhood books, which I often read as a child myself. Teenagers seemed far freer to do things in those days than what I experienced in my youth, as well as far more willing. While part of that might be poetic license and wishful thinking [...]
“The neurobiology of politics”
Science is all about reproducible facts. Politics is all about who can fool the most people that he’ll listen to them long enough to get into office. The intersection between them is apparently as chaotic as the subject matter.
“Isaac Asimov on Security Theater”
In another case of life-imitates-science-fiction, Bruce Schneier reports that someone has discovered the perfect description of today’s “security theater” in a 1956 Asimov story. (For those of you not following along at home, “security theater” refers to all the crap the TSA is doing that is trivial to get around, but that they’re doing just [...]
“Citizens against Governments”
This one is interesting because it’s what a lot of people are thinking, in one form or another: [...] Everywhere we look, citizens are chipping away at the power of government. And behind much of it is the Internet. [...] The basic idea is that politicians play politics, at the expense of those they’re supposed [...]