Max Blumenthal has spent considerable time in Israel and has written a new book Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel and he says that there is an increased right-wing trend in Israel, and that intolerance and outright racism are taking hold, even among the secular youth, and that these disturbing trends are being encouraged by the central institutions of Israeli society. [Read more…]
It is rapidly becoming conventional wisdom, because of the determined effort to repeat it at every opportunity by supporters of the NSA and the national security state in general, that all these revelations of government spying is no big deal. Didn’t these people’s mothers’ tell them what mothers all over the globe tell their children when they ask to do something because all their friends are doing it: “If they jump over a cliff, are you going to jump too?” [Read more…]
British prime minister David Cameron is threatening to take action against British newspapers like The Guardian for publishing the Snowden leaks. He used as his excuse for such an action a newspaper report in which an anonymous security source had said that the leaks had hampered their terrorist investigations. [Read more…]
Today is the 75th anniversary of the famous radio broadcast of the Orson Welles production of the H. G. Wells story The War of the Worlds, that began with a series of fake news bulletins that announced an alien invasion and supposedly triggered widespread panic. There are bound to be news items that refer to this event. [Read more…]
YouGov has a new poll that says that only 76% of Americans believe in a god. Why do I say ‘only’ when it is a large majority? Because it really is quite surprising that a quarter of the public in America say they do not believe in a god. Recall that previous polls have put atheists and agnostic in the single digits and that the ‘unaffiliated’ groups at around 20% but the last number may include people who believe in a god but do not belong to any religious denomination. [Read more…]
Yesterday the US Senate voted on whether to disapprove the raising of the debt ceiling. The motion to disapprove failed by a vote of 45-54, along strict party lines. [Read more…]
That the US has systematically engaged in torture is no longer in doubt. But the full extent of it, exactly how much, to how many people, and in what form is still not clear, since the Obama administration has resisted calls for a full accounting. [Read more…]
The Daily Show looks at all the things that president Obama has been kept ignorant about. Or so we are told. [Read more…]
I have seen almost all the Alfred Hitchcock films. I enjoyed most of them because he showed how you could build up suspense without gratuitous violence and gore, and he avoided horror merely for the sake of it. In particular, I liked the fact that he never resorted to the supernatural. All the weird things in his films always turned out to have rational explanations at the end. [Read more…]
The story about the NSA spying on the leaders of other governments is turning out to have legs and is causing some serious discomfort to the Obama administration. While governments and elites (including elite media) don’t care if the rights and privacy of ordinary people are trampled, they get up in arms if those of the elites are. This is why the story of the wiretapping of these national leaders is getting so much play. The suggestion that president Obama knew about the tapping of German chancellor Angela Merkel’s cell phone and her conversations is causing particularly acute discomfort. [Read more…]