Originally published by ANewDomain.net:

The votes are in. Greece has handed a resounding rebuke to austerity measures imposed by the world banking community and the European Union (EU) in Sunday’s much-anticipated referendum.

The six-month old socialist government of Alexis Tsipras was careful to emphasize that this vote, which he campaigned for against the express wishes of the leaders of other European nations, does not mean an end to negotiations with the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank, or the European Union. But the vote certainly strengthens the Prime Minister’s hand in those talks.

But most of all, however, the prospective Grexit is about the morality of debt, and the perception of who holds the power in the debtor-debtee relationship.

Germany, which dominates the European Central Bank (their version of the Fed), has relentlessly insisted that Greece and the other struggling southern European states slash their social safety nets to fiscal solvency, or at least euro compatibility. This, as Krugman and others predicted, proved counterproductive. With Greek unemployment over 25% and underemployment many times higher than that, spending has all but ceased, replaced by a barter economy in many places. The less government aid there is, the less people spend, the less businesses earn, the more people they lay off. It’s an austerity death spiral.

Germany’s Angela Merkel has couched this as a simple matter of reckless Greeks having gone on a spending spree that they must now pay for, and many of her fellow Germans agree with her. Greece, you see, is not a “virtuous” economy. Not like Germany.

Which may or may not be true.

What is true is that Merkel, like many Protestants of her ilk, fails to recognize that people who are owed money are not automatically dominant over those who owe it. Default hurts the deadbeat — but it also hurts the schmuck holding the now-worthless IOU. It is important, therefore, for lenders not to push borrowers too far…which is exactly what has happened in Greece.

Regardless of where you stand on this (pardon me) Greek tragedy (or farce), there is a detail that galls many Greeks, yet which has remained largely unreported by the American business press.

“Greece owes various European bodies a combined 240 billion euros across two bailouts extended by the International Monetary Fund, the European Commission, and the European Central Bank,” The Christian Science Monitor reported three months ago.

But Germany destroyed massive amounts of infrastructure during World War II — and looted the nation’s Treasury. The Greek government estimates that Germany owes it 279 billion euros for the damage.

Greece doesn’t have a legal leg to stand on. But the morals, and the optics … yeah, those play well in a country where history isn’t an abstraction — it’s the main tourist attraction.

Unlike the Western financial media, Greeks remember the 1953 London Agreement, under which West Germany was forgiven massive amounts of debts it owed to foreign nations — including Greece — in order to allow it get its economy going again without a crippling debt burden.

Germany benefited from international largesse, but now that it enjoys a dominant role in the world again, it’s playing the hardass. The Greek vote showcases the limitations of hardassery.

Originally published by ANewDomain.net:

Oppression has positive side effects. Sometimes. Among the advantages of being discriminated against vis-a-vis marriage rights: The law gave many gays and lesbians the perfect excuse for not getting married. Now, thanks to Anthony Kennedy and the other four Supreme Court justices who ruled in favor of same-sex marriage last week, that’s no more. Was it good while it lasted, though?

 

Originally published by ANewDomain.net:

Michaelangelo said: “Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.”

I thought of this famous quote on Friday when I heard that the United States Supreme Court had overturned laws against same-sex marriage in every state.

The court’s majority didn’t legislate from the bench — they confirmed an intrinsic constitutional right. The justices revealed something that was hardwired into the document back in 1789.

It just took a while.

This is what Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote the majority opinion, argued: Everyone has a “fundamental right” to marriage. This line of reasoning has been criticized by conservatives as well as by some liberal legal analysts who would have preferred to rely on the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution: If straight people can get married, why not gays?

But that would have been very 2015 —  very small, lowbrow, petty, the kind of thing that Bill or Hillary Clinton would come up with.

Justice Kennedy aimed high, harkening back to the Age of Reason 250 years ago.

That is when philosophers and politicians agreed that there were certain inalienable, inherent rights.

The list of those rights has expanded steadily over the years, especially in other countries, some of which even go so far as to include the right to a job or the income equivalent of one, not to mention housing and healthcare.

Here in the United States, however, the tendency has been to yield to the conservative side, which has steadily pushed for a society in which one’s responsibilities to the state are constantly increasing in scope. At the same time, one’s rights – to be free from unreasonable search and seizure and to enjoy private communications, for example – erode to virtually nothing. 

That, almost more than any joy you get in watching men who fall in love with men and women who fall in love with women marry one another, is the real cause for celebration.

Said presidential candidate Mike Huckabee:

Conservative Republicans are accusing the court of legislating from the bench … the Supreme Court can no more repeal the laws of nature and nature’s God on marriage than it can the law of gravity.”

Well, actually it can: Despite people like Huckabee, the United States is still a secular nation.

Added Bobby Jindal,

Marriage between a man and a woman was established by God, and no earthly court can alter that.”

Again, it can and it did. But I think Huckabee and Jindal are wrong — not only on the legal side of the argument, but on the religious one, too.

There is literally nothing in Christianity that prohibits same-sex marriage.

Yes, I know. There are those sections in Leviticus and other passages in the Old Testament that Christian conservatives like to say prohibit gay sex. But in cases where the Old Testament conflicts with the New Testament, the New Testament prevails the same way that a newer law prevails over an older one in Civil Code.

And the New Testament is clear: Everyone is redeemed by Jesus’ self-sacrifice.

In other words, in a Christian sense, we are all forgiven.

There is, and there never was, any good reason to prohibit same-sex marriage. When the idea first came up, in the 1980s and 1990s in the United States, I remember asking myself two questions.

First: Why would gay people even want to get married? And then: What would be the harm?

No one has ever been able to articulate to my satisfaction, or evidently to the satisfaction of the majority of the American voting public, exactly what problems would be created by guys marrying guys and girls marrying girls.

The best that the right wing has ever been able to come up with is some empty pabulum about the “sanctity of marriage.” Please.

How on Earth does someone else’s marriage, or lack thereof, affect yours?

The answer to that question is: It can’t. It doesn’t. Most people realize that. That’s why this debate has moved so quickly.

It is also worth noting that conservatives only have themselves to blame for this week’s historic court ruling.

Stonewalling “civil unions” is what led to the SCOTUS same-sex marriage decision …

And remember “civil unions?”

Civil unions were the legal compromise homosexuals wanted in lieu of gay marriage – not full-fledged same-sex marriage, but an arrangement that protected the legal rights of a gay or lesbian to, for example, visit their partner in the hospital or inherit their property after they died.

They were tired of having to legally adopt their lovers as adults and calling them “nephews” or some other far-fetched relation just to get these basic rights.

But right-wingers stonewalled civil unions, which led to the first lawsuits filed by gays requesting the right to be married, lawsuits that many gay activists worried at the time were overreaching.

Because Republicans, and many Democrats, including Bill and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, wouldn’t budge on civil unions, a more radicalized legal process was initiated.

And that is what just culminated with this week’s Supreme Court decision.

As James Antle wrote in The American Conservative in 2013:

Social conservatives avoided compromises, like decoupling some incidents of marriage from the institution itself and extending them to individuals regardless of relationship status. While this wouldn’t have satisfied those whose main goal was ‘marriage equality’ in culture and law, it might have met the need for tangible benefits like hospital visitation without the ‘separate but equal’ approach of civil unions or domestic partnerships—which social conservatives opposed in any event.”

There is a strong case to be made that Roe v. Wade’s legalization of abortion rights, and even the belief in many privacy rights (which back Roe v. Wade, for example), are not inherent in the Constitution, at least not as interpreted by so-called originalists.

Certainly, the Supreme Court has often violated the Constitution with its decisions, for example in the case of Bush v. Gore in 2000, which supplanted Florida’s right as a state to conduct its own electoral recount.

But gay marriage is not novel.

Gays have always enjoyed the constitutional right to get married. We’re just finally seeing it.

Originally published by ANewDomain.net:

Hobbled by Bridgegate, in which New Jersey officials shut down the George Washington Bridge in order to get even with the clueless mayor of Fort Lee for forgetting to endorse him for Governor, Gov. Chris Christie is nevertheless running for president.

At least he knows where he can score some easy money.

Originally published by ANewDomain.net:

Congratulations, gay Americans! You can get married now!

If you and your partner have a significant difference between your income, you’ll save a little bit of money on your taxes. You’ll be able to visit each other in the hospital easily if one of you happens to be dying. Today’s decision by the United States Supreme Court is very, very exciting, a long time in coming and absolutely the right decision. It’s something that every patriotic American ought to be happy about.

By the way, you guys are totally boring now.

Today’s 5 to 4 decision marks the end of gay people as dangerous or interesting. Now LGBTQA people are just as dull and un-noteworthy as any random straight married Midwestern middle-class television-watching, ranch-home-living-in schlub.

But really, that’s great. Congratulations!

No more late nights at the bathhouse scoring anonymous sex, though. From now on, a late night in an IKEA piece of furniture will have to be just as good.

Hey, and remember that time you and your same-sex partner went out to the bar and picked up a cutie for the two of you to share in a threesome?

Yeah, me neither. Because now you’re married!

And once married, you guys won’t have sex with each other, much less with anyone else.

Back in the 1970s, you guys practically ran the counterculture. You were so cool. Now, counterculture will essentially be just a marketing term you use to describe shopping for, you know, a brand new kitchen counter. How exciting!

Well, look, there’s nothing wrong with being boring. So what if you won’t be a trendsetter anymore. And who cares, really, if the media pays zero attention to you these days. Thanks to the Supreme Court gay marriage decision, you now get to be just like the rest of us: bland, typical and uninteresting. And, like the rest of us married people, you’ll be having very little sex – or at least not good sex.

But hey, this is what you wanted, right! To be accepted!

So now you can join the army and kill brown people and lie awake at night wondering why you chose the life you chose.

Enjoy!

Originally published by ANewDomain.net:

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 to sustain the Affordable Care Act against what is likely to be the last major court challenge against it. On the one hand, it’s a victory for common sense, affirming the will of Congress. On the other hand, it means we’re stuck with the ACA for the foreseeable future, which is less healthcare than Americans want or need.

Originally published by ANewDomain.net:

WiFi connects me to the Internet; it even allows me to watch TV. Bluetooth lets me – or used to let me – connect my phone to my ears from 20 feet away.

So why am I still tied down by so many wires?

Like many frequent travelers, I carry so many bundles of wires to connect my electronic devices that I feel like Gulliver overwhelmed by the infernal Lilliputians. Let me show you what I mean.

I mean, it’s 2015. Weren’t we supposed to be living in a wireless future by now?

Perhaps the biggest disconnect between hype and reality is the AC power adapter for my MacBook Pro “laptop.”At over eight pounds, it’s a lie to even call it that. But never mind. The late Apple cofounder Steve Jobs is rightly revered for his love of industrial design.

But that Macpro AC power adapter, which pundits often point to as an example of his supremely evolved attention to detail, is definitely not Apple at its best.  First and foremost, you have to wrap that sucker very carefully, or it will tend to bend at the exit point from the box. Look at the photo I shot below. You can see the loop sticking out to the right. And this is a replacement, for which I spent $79. So I’m really careful with it.

But really, this thing weighs 1.5 pounds — it weighs nearly as much as a 12-inch MacBook air! But there’s no choice. I must lug it around everywhere. This is the first thing to go in the carry-on:

And I’ll need an extension cord. Plugs are rarely close enough to the desk or the bed where you want to use your computer. This is always when you need an extension cord. Another must. This is another thing to pack:

And I need the standalone mouse. This, for me, isn’t optional. Track pads wear out and they’re clumsy. If you must use Photoshop on the road, as I do, this guy is indispensable. And its connector, of course:

And headphones. That’s a must. Gotta have headphones to listen to music or watch a video on the plane. 

What about Bluetooth? Nah. Tried that. I used to have one of those dorky Bluetooth units. It was too fragile. Couldn’t take the road. I had to replae this thing twice after it fell apart. Also, the dorky Bluetooth unit had to have its own docking port, which also needs to be charged by itself. Another item to pack. No, thank you.

I have tried the Jaybird Bluetooth earphones, but the most irritating thing in the world has got to be the wire that connects the two earpieces. It pulls on the back of your head, and it’s either long enough to pull your hair or short enough to pull out of your ears. Bluetooth headphones are another imperfect solution.

And so $20 headphones are still the way to go. If these break, I won’t cry too hard.

And then there’s the WiFi equipment. This part is sad. Like other tech companies, Apple seems to assume that everyone lives in San Francisco or Portland, where free wireless Internet access is easy to come by. But in the real world, Wi-Fi can be exorbitant – up to $40 on an airplane or $20 a day at a hotel. Or, worse, it is simply nonexistent. This is why most seasoned travelers rely on a Mi-Fi device that pulls 4G or LTE service from the sky. (I use a Verizon model).

It’s true that upload and download speeds are as slow as molasses with this unit, but it’s a miracle to be able to get online in places where no one else can. Alas, the Mifi requires another wire for a device that, yes, must be charged. So this goes into the bag:

As a cartoonist, I used to hunt down FedEx Office outposts in the cities I visited in search of graphic design computer stations where I could scan my cartoons and work on them in Photoshop. In the age of the portable digital scanner, thank God, instead you can spend just over $100 for a device that will break even after avoiding three visits to FedEx.

On this, I have good news and bad news. The good news: There’s no need to charge them! But the bad news is: They are not wireless. As you can see below, that adds up to another wire to pack.

Note: the outlet for the portable scanner that I use is similar to an almost the same size as the one that I use for the MiFi – but not quite. So I don’t get to cheat by leaving one wire at home.

And there’s the phone charger. Because I’m lucky if my iPhone can make it one entire day without running out of power, I’m always carrying its charger: 

Last, but not least, and probably not even last – who knows what additional wires I’m going to need in the future? – there’s the extra battery pack I carry. I’ve lost power in bad situations, like during power outages and at airports while dealing with canceled flights, and I’ve lost power often enough to know that I might need to charge my iPhone without access to an outlet. So I always have to carry and keep charged, my Mophie battery pack.

Yes, you heard that right. The backup battery pack has to be charged, too. It comes with its own … you know:

Induction charging pads are interesting for home use, but they do nothing for people like me who spend a lot of time on the road. Besides, Apple still isn’t playing — it’s only for Android. Even the charging station for the Apple Watch plugs into the wall.

As a former engineering school dropout, I humbly request my former colleagues now working at various tech companies to please turn their attention to the massive lump of constantly breaking, repeatedly tangling wires clogging up my luggage.

Never mind flying cars.

And for sure I can live without driverless cars like the Google Car, for sure.

But I would give up an organ to get rid of half the wires I carry.

Originally published by ANewDomain.net:

Jack Dorsey, the corporate hipster who is now running Square, looks like he is likely the next CEO of Twitter. As such he will be first major head of an American corporation to wear a serious Nebuchadnezzar beard.

The beard even has its own parody account, @dorseysbeard.

Originally published by ANewDomain.net:

Brian Williams was earning $10 million a year as an anchor for NBC News, where his primary responsibility was mainly reading the news off a prompter. He lost this fat job six months ago, when he was suspended for lying about what happened to him as an embedded war reporter in Iraq. Now Williams is back. He has been demoted, in the network’s eyes certainly, because he returns not as an anchor at NBC but as a reporter on MSNBC. But in reality, he’s in more of a journalistic role. At MSNBC he’ll actually be reporting and interpreting news.

Two questions: Will anyone notice? And will anyone believe anything he reports now?

One thing is certain. Brian Williams and his “misremembered” false memory about being shot down during the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq speaks volumes about all of us.

Originally published by ANewDomain.net:

Drone operators are burning out, so the Air Force is cutting back on attacks even as Pentagon and CIA officials demand more strikes against the people of Iraq, Syria and Yemen. Armed surveillance drones will only fly 60 times a day by October from a recent peak of 65 as it responds to the attrition of crew members. More drone pilots are worn down by the work than they can train.