(The Guardian::NSA) – Spencer Ackerman and James Ball:
Britain’s surveillance agency GCHQ, with aid from the US National Security Agency, intercepted and stored the webcam images of millions of internet users not suspected of wrongdoing, secret documents reveal. …
(The Intercept) – Glenn Greenwald and Murtaza Hussain:
While government suppression of activists usually begins by targeting unpopular minority groups such as Muslims, it is clear that the dragnet is already beginning to expand, as exemplified by the recent threats and detentions of journalists, whistleblowers and other activist groups under terrorism laws. …
theintercept/2014/02/27/moazzam-begg
(Patheos::Camels with Hammers) – Daniel Fincke:
When I am talking to otherwise clever and curious people and the subject turns to Jesus and they start gushing his praises and distorting reality to fit the received narrative of his wonderfulness, I watch the termination of thinking in otherwise critical minds happen before my very eyes. I feel my worthwhile conversation partner slipping away. I see two millennia worth of Christian constraint on thinking perpetuate itself. …
camelswithhammers/2014/02/opposing
(The Intercept) – Glenn Greenwald:
Western intelligence agencies are attempting to manipulate and control online discourse with extreme tactics of deception and reputation-destruction. …
(Patheos::Camels with Hammers) – Daniel Fincke:
I rankle at the undue reverence afforded Jesus even by many atheists and so in a post at the Richard Dawkins Foundation website lamenting the spiritual and intellectual analogue of Stockholm Syndrome that I see many liberal believers who can’t let go suffering, I explained why I want no part of the attempts to reclaim and rehabilitate Jesus …
(The Intercept) – Glenn Greenwald:
Clapper considers himself some sort of victim rather than what he is: the completely undeserving beneficiary of a system of “justice” in which ordinary and powerless people are imprisoned for trivial offenses at greater numbers than any other nation in the world, while those who wield political power, like him, are free to commit crimes without even losing their powerful jobs, let alone being prosecuted for them. …
theintercept/2014/02/24/inside
(FTB::Mano Singham) – While much attention has been placed on the rise in numbers of the religiously unaffiliated and outright disbelievers in a god, Mitchell Stephens looks at a less-publicized aspect and that is that even those who still consider themselves as believers now think of their god in very diminished terms. …
(Charlie’s Diary) – Ramez Naam:
The last year has brought with it the revelations of massive government-run domestic spying machineries in the US and UK. On the horizon is more technology that will make it even easier for governments to monitor and track everything that citizens do. Yet I’m convinced that, if we’re sufficiently motivated and sufficiently clever, the future can be one of more freedom rather than less. …
(Telepolis) – Harald Zaun:
Weltraumsternwarte PLATO soll ab 2024 gezielt nach bewohnbaren Zwillingserden suchen und kann sogar masseärmere Exoplaneten als die Erde finden. …
(YouTube) – Google ATAP:
Project Tango is an exploration into giving mobile devices a human-scale understanding of space and motion. …
(Heise) – Thomas Drilling:
Unter dem Motto „Damit Privates privat bleibt“ hat die Berliner Heinlein Support ihren neuen E-Mail-Dienst mailbox.org eröffnet. Das Angebot punktet nicht nur mit dem deutschen Datenschutzrecht sondern dank starker Verschlüsselung auch mit Sicherheit. …
(APoD) – Fading now as it returns to the outer solar system Comet Lovejoy still graces planet Earth’s sky.
The serpentine shape below is the ancient Great Wall of China. …
(Slate::Bad Astronomy) – Phil Plait:
It’s not hard to see that over the past few years, the oldest ice has melted away, and over time the ice gets younger. That’s not good: Older ice is thicker and tends to hang around longer; young ice is generally thinner and melts away every summer. That means that the year-round amount of ice is dropping, and dropping rapidly. As the Arctic warms, its ability not just to form ice but to keep it wanes. …
bad_astronomy/2014/02/20/global_warming
(Patheos::Camels with Hammers) – Daniel Fincke:
Neither gods nor any other supernatural agencies explain anything about the world.
In this context, is there a place for such a thing as Philosophy of Religion? If so, what could it study that would be a fruitful field of inquiry distinguishable from other areas of philosophy, social science, and natural science? And can we still say things such as “religions are a source of philosophical discoveries”? …
camelswithhammers/2014/02/what
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