Film review: A Most Wanted Man (2014)

I saw this film over the weekend. It is one of the final ones by Philip Seymour Hoffman and he gives a typically fine performance as the head of a small German counter-terrorism unit based in Hamburg that is keeping track of potential Islamic terror networks who might be using that city as a stage to launch operations. Hamburg is where Mohammed Atta plotted the 9/11 attacks and none of the German authorities want a similar plot to go undetected.
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The Day Israel Attacked America

One of the ways you can tell that much of the major US media functions as a propaganda system is the way that inconvenient stories are sent down the memory hole. One such story is when Israel attacked a US warship the USS Liberty during the six-day war in 1967, killing 34 US servicemen and leaving the state-of-the-art intelligence gathering ship to be disposed of as scrap. The motives for the attack were never made clear and the US government seemed to have little interest in taking any action against Israel for that act.
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Another humanitarian success story!

Glenn Greenwald writes that the country of Libya is now in a state of total collapse and anarchy, not quite what we were promised when we bombed that country on ‘humanitarian’ grounds.

So widespread is violence and anarchy there that “hardly any Libyan can live a normal life,” Brown University’s Stephen Kinzer wrote in The Boston Globe last week. Last month, the Libyan Parliament, with no functioning army to protect it from well-armed militias, was forced to flee Tripoli and take refuge in a Greek car ferry. The New York Times reported in September that “the government of Libya said . . . that it had lost control of its ministries to a coalition of militias that had taken over the capital, Tripoli, in another milestone in the disintegration of the state.”
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Gauging how well we know important facts

When it comes to current events, we like to think that we base our opinions about the news on facts. But very often we do not have the facts at hand and may not have the time or the ability to summon them at short notice. Even if we do have a smartphone with us when we are engaged with someone in a discussion, it is very rarely that we actually use it to get the required information to make sure that we are right. We go with what we think we know to be true.
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Was I too gloomy about Obamacare’s prospects?

Brianne Gorod, an Appellate Counsel at the Constitutional Accountability Center, says that those who think (like I do) that the US Supreme Court agreeing to take on the federal subsidies issue is a sign that they are going to disallow it and thus seriously wound Obamacare are being too pessimistic (or too optimistic, if you happen to be an opponent of the health care law).
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Where feeding the homeless is a crime

I read a news item recently about a 90-year old man who was arrested (twice!) in Fort Lauderdale because he violated a city ordinance that prohibited people from feeding homeless people in public. While the city asserts that it is doing so for the good of the homeless, one cannot help but have the suspicion that the real reason is that they don’t want the sight of homeless people to ruin the tourist experience for this popular vacation spot.
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