Oh, the revolving door. How I hate thee. It’s becoming quite common for corporate lobbyists to get seats in key bureaucratic committees overseeing funding for their former employers (see: Comcast and the FCC or Monsanto and the FDA/EPA). The latest entry in that increasingly ballooning file involves the ever-repugnant TSA: Rapiscan Systems lobbied aggressively to win a […]
Continue reading →The Social Security Administration has been releasing heavily biased and overly optimistic numbers for about fifteen years, according to a new report by Harvard and Dartmouth: According to the report, the SSA’s actuarial projections in the 1980s underestimated revenues and overestimated costs by $27 billion; in the 1990s, that figure was $200 billion. Now, in […]
Continue reading →The USDA is urging Americans to eat more expired food, up to 18 months after expiration for some foods: USDA provided a video in which one official explains, “Many products may have a sell-by date of say April 1 but they could be good in your pantry for another 12 or 18 months. And by […]
Continue reading →As if we needed any more reason to hate the TSA, two agents have been dismissed recently for their involvement in “hand”-picking attractive men and manipulating the scanner to facilitate groping. The TSA requires pat-downs to be administered by officers of the same gender, which would be somewhat reassuring if homosexual TSA officers (and their […]
Continue reading →A new act in the Georgia legislature, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), was designed to protect the right of religious people to exercise their beliefs without molestation from the government. But some critics are condemning the act, saying its wording would actually protect any behavior a person claimed was connected to his religion—like child […]
Continue reading →As recently as last year, the FCC did not have any plans to ensure Net Neutrality through internet regulation. Nope. Not even an inkling. So why is the FCC suddenly desirous to bring the entire internet under rules designed to break up phone company monopolies? According to some in the FCC, this shift in policy […]
Continue reading →An FCC Commissioner, Ajit Pai, is blasting new net neutrality rules as a “solution that won’t work to a problem that doesn’t exist.” What does he mean by that? First, concerning the problem that doesn’t exist: Nowhere in the 332-page document that I’ve received will anyone find the FCC detailing any kind of systemic harm […]
Continue reading →The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is teetering on the precipice of a shutdown, and it doesn’t appear that either Democrats or Republicans are all that concerned about it. In this context, an article in Vox postulates that the DHS was never necessary and should be allowed to die: But the nonchalance with which both […]
Continue reading →Timothy DeFoggi, a former head of cyber-security for the increasingly misnamed Department of Health and Human Services ( HHS ), has been sentenced to twenty-five years in prison for accessing and soliciting child pornography and conspiring to act out his fantasies of child rape and murder: “Using the same technological expertise he employed as Acting […]
Continue reading →The National Forest Service announced recently that it is considering regulations to restrict the photography of “government-owned” natural beauty to those photographers who have paid a $1500 registration fee. Unregistered photographers could be fined by the National Forest Service: If the plans are finalized in November, any media with a camera, even a simple cell […]
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