President Obama seems to be trying to wriggle out of his ‘red line’ comment, perhaps realizing that if the Syria attack goes badly awry, then people will use that statement to suggest that it was he who was solely responsible for getting the US into the mess even if Congress authorized him to act, since it was that statement that people are repeatedly using to suggest that US ‘credibility’ is on the line. [Read more…]
Diana Nyad successfully completed, on her fifth attempt, her 103-mile swim from Cuba to the US. News reports emphasized that she was the first person to do so without a shark cage. David Shiffman, who studies sharks, says that the repeated mentioning of that statement may have given the impression that sharks pose a particularly acute danger when they do not. Jellyfish were more likely to have derailed her, as The Onion notes. [Read more…]
In this report by Philip Weiss, he says that members of congress are getting an earful from their constituents who oppose any US war against Syria. The Washington Post has a breakdown of the current views of members. [Read more…]
The Brazilian newspaper O Globo, one of the outlets for the NSA documents, reports that the NSA intercepted the communications between the leaders of Mexico and Brazil and their associates. Naturally enough, this latest revelation courtesy of Edward Snowden has sparked outrage in those countries. You can be assured that the leaders of countries all over the world are realizing that ‘fighting terrorism’ seems to be merely a side issue for the NSA, and that their real purpose is political and economic espionage against other countries, irrespective of whether they are allies or not or whether those countries are involved in terrorism or not. It is just the same as domestic spying in the US, where combating terrorism is a cover for anti-democratic surveillance of everyone. [Read more…]
He talks about the impending war against Syria and, unlike most news outlets, in just a few minutes manages to remind us of the similarity of the drive of this latest war to wars of the past, the hypocrisy of US policy, and the absurd arguments being given in favor of this latest war. [Read more…]
We are constantly told to make our passwords more complex and harder to guess. And that is a good thing. But we should not imagine that merely making them longer or more obscure is sufficient.
Consider for example the password: Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn1 [Read more…]
I hate to say it but it looks like war with Syria is now inevitable.
Philip Weiss reports that the Israel lobby, which was keeping a low profile on its views about Syria, has come out into the open with a full-throated lobbying effort in Congress to authorize a war with Syria. Obama’s statement that he seeks a broader goal than merely ‘punishing’ Syria and that he seeks to destabilize the government must have helped in its decision. [Read more…]
I have been hard on NPR for sometimes seeming like a propaganda outlet for the Pentagon but I have to credit Scott Simon and the Weekend Edition Saturday team for airing an interview with a Syrian that ran counter to the usual narrative. The interviewee was Nada Keuttnen, someone who acts a ‘fixer’ for NPR and other western journalists in Damascus to help them navigate the area and meet people. This is just one person’s view, of course, but it was a change from what we normally hear in the western media. [Read more…]
The issue of whether the words ‘under God’ in the Pledge of Allegiance made it unconstitutional to say at state-sponsored events seemed to have been settled in 2010 when several US Courts of Appeals ruled that since no federal law required people to recite the pledge, no violation of the US constitution occurred. Since there was no divergence in the various appeals court rulings, it was unlikely to be heard by the US Supreme Court and the issue seemed no longer contestable. [Read more…]
It became increasingly clear during the last election that the Republican party strategy in several states was to try and suppress the minority vote by adopting various local rules that made it harder to register and vote and also removing minority voters from the rolls on dubious grounds, fearing that that vote would go overwhelmingly for the Democratic party. That strategy failed to sway the eventual outcome (at least at the presidential level) but now with the US Supreme Court striking down the provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that required certain parts of the country to get pre-clearance from the US Justice Department before changing voting rules, some elements of the party seem to think that this gives them much greater freedom to adopt measures that can suppress the minority vote more effectively. [Read more…]