Stuff about politics and politicians.
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 …
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 …
Bruce Schneier points out a newly-published analysis on recent terrorism in the US, and provides his own comments (which I fully agree with). From one of the final paragraphs: The risk of dying in the U.S. from terrorism is substantially less than the risk of drowning in your bathtub, the risk of a home appliance …
A primary theme of this blog is that science fiction drives science. Apparently science is now directly feeding back into science fiction too. 🙂 I don’t expect this to really go anywhere. The motivation for it is pretty transparent: keeping NASA in the public eye now that there are no shuttle launches, so that Congress …
Continue reading ‘“NASA to work on approved sci-fi books”’ »
This week, on the Colbert Report, I heard something that shocked me: some evangelical Christian scientists were beginning to publicly doubt that humanity could be descended from one man and one woman, as described in the book of Genesis. The reason it shocked me is that I couldn’t believe that someone who identified himself as …
Continue reading ‘“Are Some Evangelicals Beginning to Question the Existence of Adam and Eve?”’ »
Scott Adams, of Dilbert fame, points out a Bloomberg article about the CEO of Starbucks Corp. urging other business leaders to suspend donations to political campaigns “until the Congress and the President return to Washington and deliver a fiscally disciplined long-term debt and deficit plan to the American people.” Other than armed revolt, that’s likely …
A few days ago, I was catching up on my reading when I discovered a paper on political conservatism and personality traits. I haven’t been able to wade through the paper myself yet, but according to the article where I discovered it, it reports “that overall, political conservatism was associated with things like death anxiety, …
The countries of the world are in dire financial straits. They have been for years, but it’s finally coming to a head because they’re reaching the end of their credit. Everyone who watches the least bit of news knows about Greece, but that’s just the first; Portugal and Spain have also had their credit ratings …
I try to keep this blog away from politics, but for issues of sufficient magnitude and importance, I have to bend that rule on occasion. If you’re American (and maybe even if you’re not), you’ve probably heard by now about the Supreme Court case Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which ruled that money was …
Continue reading ‘“Move to Amend: coalition to abolish corporate personhood”’ »
I wonder how this plays out in peoples’ politics? (No I don’t, I know exactly how it plays out. And if you think about it, so do you. But I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader, along with the corollary of what it says about a those who subscribe to a particular political …
Continue reading ‘“Why Too Much Self-Control Breeds Aggression (and What to Do About It)”’ »