M. J. Rosenberg says that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is ramping up the rhetoric on US media and that Iran now plans to actually launch a military attack the US, and the Israel lobby led by AIPAC is joining him in urging that the US take military action against Iran or at the least impose even greater sanctions against that country. [Read more…]
You know what is a major problem with most religions? They are killjoys. The thought that people are engaging in enjoyable acts somehow bothers them, hence the prohibitions against ordinary pleasurable activities like eating, drinking, singing, dancing, films, sex, and contraception (because it allows people to have more sex). Most of the time these prohibitions stay is the realm of the laughable and absurd but sometimes become deadly. [Read more…]
Earlier attempts by privacy and civil liberties advocates to sue the NSA over it data gathering activities were rejected by the courts because of a two-pronged government defense strategy: (1) refuse to confirm or deny that such programs exist on grounds of national security and then (2) argue in court that since the plaintiffs could not prove that they had been under surveillance, they had no right to sue. Shamefully, the courts accepted this Catch-22 style argument. [Read more…]
Employees of the Department of Homeland Security (an Orwellian name if there ever was one) have been warned not to read on an unclassified machine an article in the Washington Post because a slide shown in the article is one of the classified slides revealed by Edward Snowden. [Read more…]
In a news report that appeared in the German magazine Der Spiegel, former president Jimmy Carter is reported to have said that the leaks by Edward Snowden were “beneficial” to the country and that “America has no functioning democracy at this moment.” [Read more…]
My post on why I supported Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning produced quite a strong reaction in which some people took issue with my harsh criticism of Barack Obama. I wrote a follow-up that addressed some of the concerns and I would strongly recommend that people particularly read the responses by Jeffrey Johnson that appeared in the comments to the latter post because he very thoughtfully took issue with my stand. [Read more…]
There is a documentary based on the book Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield (2013) that I am currently reading.
Here is the trailer.
The Queen of England today approved legislation legalizing same-sex marriage, the last formal step in their legislative process. But couples will have to wait until 2014 to get married. The country already has civil partnerships. Churches will not have to conduct those weddings if they do not want to. [Read more…]
So senator Lindsey Graham (R-Crazy) is so upset at the possibility of Russia giving asylum to Edward Snowden that he wants the US to boycott the Winter Olympics if they do so. One can only imagine how ballistic he will get if one of the smaller Latin American countries that have offered Snowden asylum (Ecuador, Bolivia, Venezuela, Nicaragua) make good on their promise. Will he call for an invasion? [Read more…]
In yet another sign of how the proliferation of social media is worrying authoritarian regimes because it allows people to communicate laterally easily and bypass official news channels, the head of the religious police in Saudi Arabia has warned Twitter users that they have pretty much forfeited any hope of a good afterlife. In addition, the country’s most senior cleric (who has the Monty Pythonesque title of ‘Grand Mufti’) has called Twitter users ‘fools’. [Read more…]