A harassed driver named Terrance Huff was lied to and threatened by of a police officer named Michael Reichert outside of the city of Collinsville, Illinois. Huff is also a filmmaker, and he has offered us this vivid lesson in how the police sometimes lie.
Glenn Greenwald compares the danger of government secrecy with the dangers of excessive disclosure of government secrets:
The harms from excessive governmental secrecy vastly outweigh the harms from excessive disclosures; they’re not even in the same universe That’s why WikiLeaks is such a vital and important movement. It’s also why I have zero respect for those who so vehemently denounced WikiLeaks’ supposed disclosure recklessness without devoting even a fraction of the same rage to the obsessive, anti-democratic, dangerous government secrecy regime being not only maintained, but vigorously increased, even a full decade after the 9/11 attacks. Such critics have little interest in issues of transparency v. secrecy; their manifest agenda (like the often-overlapping American “terrorism expert” industry: more on them in the next couple days) is to serve the state, demonize its adversaries, and protect its interests. That’s what indiscriminate secrecy achieves, and it’s why such people are so rarely bothered by it.
Rob Reid has some extremely serious points to make through his humorous six-minute talk. Excellent and well-deserved attack on copyright content owners.
What do the New and Old Testaments of the Bible tell us about drinking alcohol? Michael Morris is as witty and informative as ever at Funmentionables.
I've run into more than a few fundamentalist Christians who have insisted that the Earth is only 6,000 years old. "Then please explain the results of radiometric dating," I typically ask, adding that even carbon dating can accurately date materials up to 60,000 years old, far older than 6,000 years. Most modern savvy Young-Earthers won't fight me on the general usefulness or accuracy of carbon dating. Instead, they will insist that A) God has created an Earth that only looks like it is billions of years old, and B) I need to have faith. That is how they would explain everything older than 6,000 years old, including the Old Tjikko tree in Sweden, which certainly appears to be 9,550 years old. God must have transplanted it from another universe when he made this universe. The Young-Earthers thus offer an provocative argument. I don't believe it, but there's would be no way for me to disprove it.