New York Times: Supreme Court to Revisit ‘Hillary’ Documentary

There's a real tension here. Speech should be as absolutely free flowing as possible. I'd certainly like to think I can say what I want about a campaign candidate, and use what resources I have to disseminate my sincere feelings about that person and their relationship to the issues. However, with sufficient power and money, it is possible to overwhelm the airwaves and drown out the opposition. This may sound impossible. However, the so-called "conservative" (really corporate and would-be totalitarian) strategy for the past several years has been to activate the reptilian brains of its most loyal and unquestioning followers, using infantile arguments to whip them into a frenzy of anger and, above all, noise, that makes rational thinking and debate extremely difficult, magnifying the power of the distribution of a given broadcast or article. To the conservative thinkers out there: don't be offended, the preceding comment doesn't apply to you if you actually think, and believe in thinking and rational debate. Another perquisite that comes with corporate wealth and power is the ability to hire a lot of people to write propaganda and push it on the media. Often they even own the media, or heavily sponsor it, as Noam Chomsky points out in "Manufacturing Consent". Corporations don't care, if a corporation can do such a thing as "care", about the origins or private lives of a candidate. They care about being free to maximize profits, and they don't want to be bothered with regulations that force them to do anything, including taking proper care of their workers or reducing pollution. But they are happy to paint candidates as crawling from corrupt ooze if that will inflame people to not vote for the person who might want to actually limit corporate power. We're all afraid of government getting too big and powerful, but it is the big corporations that really dominate our lives, and who are all too happy to own the government as well, if allowed to do so.

NYT: "Judges’ Dissents for Death Row Inmates Are Rising"

Executing innocent human beings is not law and order. It is murder. Or at least manslaughter, if one wants to get technical about it.

BBC Asks "Is an ageing population a good thing?"

If it is comfortable and satisfying, long life is a great thing. After all, we only get a little time out of eternity. But of course having more people alive also further strains our planet's resources, and eventually, as Kurt Vonnegut pointed out in "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow", tempers as well. So if we're going to stick around a long time, we should either think about how to extend resources without overtaxing our planet any further, about having fewer children, or colonizing the moon.