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Three months after Edward Snowden’s leaks began to reveal the extent of the U.S.’ mass surveillance program, “serious people” are beginning to make the case that it’s time for the outrage and indignation to subside and give way to a “national conversation” about the future of surveillance. So has the moment come for us to …
The other night, I tuned into The Flaw, a 2011 documentary about the 2008 financial crash. While telling the crash story, the movie flashes in and out of a street tour offered by an ex-mortgage bond trader. The young man has the required effervescence to keep a dozen tourists entertained while they look at nothing …
My community in the Deep South prides itself on friendship, community feeling, and an overall happy spirit. So it was a bit strange for all of this to be utterly smashed and obliterated in the course of a few calamitous weeks in which friend turned against friend, colleagues became antagonists and enemies, and families were …
In all likelihood, Republican efforts to defund Obamacare are toast — and sooner rather than later. It appears to be a fantasy that a bill to defund would even make it to president Obama’s desk. This straightforward reality has prompted many reasonable observers to ask why frustrated conservatives would bother risking a government shutdown over …
Stocks settled down recently. The Dow dropped 40 points. Either the market had already priced in “QE forever”… or investors are starting to wonder. Maybe an economy with falling household incomes is not a good place to own stocks. Maybe an economy that is barely growing doesn’t justify the highest stock prices of all time. …
A sixth-grader has been suspended for drawing an inappropriate picture. The drawing did not include any gun, but showed a checkpoint backed up by a SWAT team carrying flower pots while an unarmed drone hovered above. The suspended girl, whose name is kept secret at the request of her family, said she “just wanted to …
As much as I love technology, part of me hates being so dependent on a live wall plug wherever I go. You find yourself trapped in some setting without accessible wall plugs and your phone is dying. You charge from you laptop, but that is dying too. You take recourse to your tablet, but that …
Every year, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) adds to its short-term budget forecasts (10 years and 25 years) a long-term (75-year) outlook.The 2013 Long-term Budget Outlook was published earlier this week. The CBO, of course, admits that “the uncertainty of budget projections increases the farther the projections extend into the future.” Some would argue that …
It has now been nearly two centuries since French political scientist Alexis de Tocqueville visited America and compared American democracy to the French variety. The Martian asked his Earth correspondent to redo the comparison. The typical Frenchman thinks that Paris is the center of the universe, life without a baguette is not worth living, France …
Mobsters shake down, say, a restaurant owner. They drink all the booze and eat all they want and pay nothing. They rob the cash register. They even go out and borrow money against the place and spend it. When they’ve finally bled the thing dry and the business is about to collapse, they burn the …