Why I stand with Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning

It is obvious that the US government is taking extraordinary measures in trying to capture Edward Snowden, from revoking his passport, using massive pressure and threats of retribution to those countries that might seek to give him asylum, to the incredible step of forcing the Bolivian president’s plane to land in Austria. President Obama might say publicly that he is not going to go out of his way to get Snowden back to the US but it is clear that he is throwing all the massive power that he has at his disposal in pursuit of this goal. He has not (as least as yet) tried to kidnap Snowden or kill him with a Nave Seal operation or a drone strike but you can bet that it is among the possibilities that are being considered. [Read more…]

LeVar Burton on the danger of being black in America

LeVar Burton is a much-beloved actor, well known for his roles in Star Trek and Roots. But I watched him most along with my children when he was the host of Reading Rainbow. In this clip, he describes what he has to do to avoid being shot and killed if he is subjected to even a routine traffic stop, things that would have never occurred to me to do. Then Tim Wise compares that with his own experiences with the police as a young white man. [Read more…]

Independence lost

On this July 4th holiday when the nation goes through the annual ritual of celebrating its history and praising itself for the freedoms it gained from the British 237 years ago, it is sobering to realize that it has, almost casually, allowed the government to gut those very freedoms leaving just a brittle, hollowed-out shell that looks good on paper but has little or no substance.
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Even the Amish are not exempt from government spying

With all the attention so far on the US government scooping up the electronic communication records (email, phone calls, internet use, etc.) of people around the globe, we could be excused for thinking that old-fashioned postal mail was the only thing that was safe from their prying eyes. It now turns out that even our snail mail is tracked by the government, something that a victim discovered by accident when he discovered a card that had been inadvertently placed in his mail that contained instructions that his mail was to be monitored. [Read more…]

Yeshiva University cover up of sex scandals

Yeshiva University is the latest all-male religious institution that has been exposed as covering up the sexual abuse of students by religious leaders. The newspaper The Forward reports, in a long article that details the abuses, that many but not all of the offenses occurred at an all-male high school run by the university and then, when the crimes were brought to the attention of the school authorities, they covered them up and quietly transferred the perpetrators to other institutions where they could continue to prey on students. Two of the accused, both rabbis one of whom taught the Talmud, now live in Israel. Once again, we see families of the violated young people being reluctant to go to the police because of fears that they would be seen as damaging the religious institutions to which they belonged. [Read more…]