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 [...]
Archive of posts filed under the Politics category.
“‘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 [...]
“Terrorism in the U.S. Since 9/11″
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 [...]
“NASA to work on approved sci-fi books”
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 can’t [...]
“Are Some Evangelicals Beginning to Question the Existence of Adam and Eve?”
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 [...]