How will the shut down end?

So we have come to the end of week one of the government shut down with no end in sight. I do not usually concern myself with following the details of political maneuvering since much of it is posturing and lacking any substantive content. It is usually Kabuki theater designed to distract the public while secret deals are made behind the scenes. But this conflict seems genuine and I have been curious about what will bring the shut down to an end because of course it must at some point. [Read more…]

How the government forces people to spy on their friends

In all the focus on the NSA, we should not forget that the FBI is also part of the massive government intrusion into people’s privacy and in the violation their rights. The ACLU in a new report titled Unleashed and Unaccountable: The FBI’s Unchecked Abuse of Authority describes the many ways that the relaxation of rules governing how the FBI can operate (justified as always by the ‘war on terror’) has resulted in an explosion of abuses. [Read more…]

Some good news from Afghanistan

The country has qualified for the 2015 Cricket World Cup to be played in Australia and New Zealand. Given the fact that this country has been in pretty much a permanent state of major war for the past three decades, that turmoil in the country has seemed to be continual fact of life, and the fact that cricket is relatively new to that country, this is a remarkable achievement. [Read more…]

When everyone is seen as a potential terrorist

The Russian government has set in place a monitoring system that will enable their security services to gather up all communications during the Winter Olympics in Sochi. The program is being described as ‘PRISM on steroids’, comparing it to one of the monitoring programs of the NSA.

Athletes and spectators attending the Winter Olympics in Sochi in February will face some of the most invasive and systematic spying and surveillance in the history of the Games, documents shared with the Guardian show.

Russia’s powerful FSB security service plans to ensure that no communication by competitors or spectators goes unmonitored during the event, according to a dossier compiled by a team of Russian investigative journalists looking into preparations for the 2014 Games.
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Tellingly, the FSB has appointed one of its top counterintelligence chiefs, Oleg Syromolotov, to be in charge at Sochi: security will thus be overseen by someone who has spent his career chasing foreign spies rather than terrorists.
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In the end, the goal is overarching, but simple, says Soldatov: “Russian authorities want to make sure that every connection and every move made online in Sochi during the Olympics will be absolutely transparent to the secret services of the country.”

I am surprised that the Russians did not hire Keith Alexander, the head of the NSA, as a consultant on this effort.

I am waiting for the US and UK governments to denounce this massive invasion of people’s privacy as an indicator of how that country does not share its democratic values for the rights of the individual.

Medicaid expansion efforts in Ohio

The Affordable Care Act has two main elements. One is to provide affordable health insurance to working people through the health care exchanges but these can be taken advantage of only by people who are working and roughly in the middle class in terms of income but do not have health insurance through their employers. It is this part that was inaugurated on October 1 and has received a lot of attention. [Read more…]

Power tipping

I have previously railed against the practice of tipping, seeing it as something that encourages servile behavior and is demeaning. It seems to me to be a relic of the feudal system in which the nobility acted patronizingly towards the peasantry by giving them gifts in exchange for acting obsequiously towards them. So I was pleased to see that some restaurants are adopting a no-tipping policy and paying their employees a living wage, by either raising their menu prices and/or adding a service charge automatically. [Read more…]

A Republican traitor

Scott Rigell, a Republican congressman, seems to have decided to not follow the party line on how to vote on the shut down and is now calling for a vote on a ‘clean’ continuing resolution. He was the only Republican to vote against a continuing resolution that defunded the Affordable Care Act, though his reason for doing so was because it didn’t replace the sequester. [Read more…]

Scientists call for boycott of NASA conference

It turns out that in March this year, congressman Frank Wolf, chair of the House of Representatives Appropriations Committee initiated a bill that incredibly was allowed to become a law that prohibited Chinese nationals, even those who are already in the US and working at US universities and other institutions, from even setting foot in a NASA building. The reason given was the risk of espionage. [Read more…]

Vo Nguyen Giap (1911-2013)

Old timers will remember the name Vo Nguyen Giap. He was the legendary leader of the North Vietnamese army who is credited with leading the Vietnamese to victory over much more powerful armies, first famously defeating the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and later successfully resisting the US invasion of his country and forcing them out, leading to the reunification of Vietnam in 1975. [Read more…]

Netanyahu strikes out?

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is clearly alarmed at the way that Iran’s new president Hassan Rouhani has made inroads in the west and the thaw that seems to be occurring between Iran and the US. The goal of Israel has been to have the US go to war with Iran and so you could expect him to use his annual speech to the UN to whip up alarm about the extreme danger posed by Iran’s nuclear program and urge that everything be done to completely dismantle it. But it would be hard to top the comedic effect produced by last year’s speech with the ridiculous cartoon of a bomb that spawned numerous parodies inspired by the similarities to the Road Runner and Bugs Bunny. [Read more…]