Happy Anniversary, Edward Snowden!

On June 5, 2013, the first of the stories based on Edward Snowden’s documents were published, creating a firestorm of attention around what had been a vast secret data-gathering operation conducted y the NSA under the maxim of ‘collect it all’, where they sought to gather up everyone’s communications. I went back to my own archives to see what I had written then on June 6, June 6, June 7, and June 8 and it was clear from the very beginning that this was a major scandal. Snowden revealed his identity on June 9, surprising everyone by being a young, soft-spoken person with deep principles..
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War is a racket

A few days ago, I excerpted some of former president Eisenhower’s criticisms of the cost of war. What follows is an excerpt from a speech delivered in 1933, by Major General Smedley Butler of the United States Marine Corps, that goes even further.

War is just a racket.
…

A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many.
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Fighting wars by proxy is a dangerous game

As the Middle East continues to spiral into chaos as a result of the mess that the US has created in that region, it is remarkable that the very same people who were responsible for that disaster are being invited back by the media to provide analyses of what should be done now. And their advice tends to be uniformly the same: send more weapons to one of other faction in that conflict to fight on behalf of the US.
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Where Sanders and Clinton differ

The difficulty with election campaigns is that it is easy for candidates to promise the moon and then change their views when they get elected and it comes to actual implementation of policies. So comparing them is hard. But in the case of Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, both have served at the same time in the US Senate from January 2007 to January 2009 and this gives us a good way to directly compare their records by looking at how they voted on the same issues.
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Snowden vindicated again

After much manufactured drama, the USA Freedom Act (which stands for Uniting and Strengthening America by Fulfilling Rights and Ending Eavesdropping, Dragnet-collection and Online Monitoring) has been signed into law by president Obama, modifying key provisions of the USA Patriot Act (which stands for Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism).

As I have said before, you know that any legislation that has such contrived and tortured acronyms has to be a piece of rubbish intended to either hide something truly noxious or is utterly useless and is meant to provide window dressing to hide inaction.
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Chicken Little throws his hat in the ring

And so we have senator Lindsey Graham, a man who is perpetually terrified that all of us are going to die from one catastrophe or another, announcing that he too is entering the race for the Republican nomination for president. This was undoubtedly good news for The Daily Show, to be exceeded in its comedic potential only by Donald Trump also joining the race.
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Girls and education

One of the best ways for a nation to develop is to provide equal opportunities for education for its girls, followed closely by easy availability to clean water and sanitation, the latter two being important factors in improving health and life expectancy. Although education for girls may seem to be an unmitigated good, there are many factors that work against it.
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Why not a church that uses cannabis?

As we all know, Christians are a highly persecuted group in the US, forced against their deeply held beliefs to not discriminate against the LGBT community. The situation has got so bad that various states are passing their own versions of the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) to provide relief to this beleaguered group. Indiana is one of those states that passed such legislation and the governor of the state Mike Pence signed it into law
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