We are watching in real time a chess game between Snowden and his supporters and the US government that is bordering on the absurd. The latest is the news that the 12-hour Aeroflot flight from Moscow to Havana that Snowden was supposed to be on left without him but with a large number of journalists who had hoped to travel with him, as the Guardian‘s live blogging reports. [Read more…]
Ken Wilson died on June 15. He won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1982 when he was at Cornell University, and then moved to Ohio State University in 1988 which is where I got to know him. [Read more…]
Forget al Qaeda, the Taliban, terrorists, drug smugglers, Russians, Chinese, and North Korea. It is becoming clear that the entire government apparatus is being utilized to ferret out the people whom the Obama administration considers to be the greatest threat – people who reveal information about government wrongdoing. [Read more…]
NBC’s David Gregory is one of the best examples of establishment journalists who see their main role as being to suck up to politicians in return for receiving minor news items that they trumpet as scoops. They see any challenge to the establishment as an attack on themselves and their friends and react accordingly. Here Greenwald puts him in his place when asked why he should not be considered as aiding and abetting Edward Snowden in a crime. [Read more…]
I came across this little gem in a news report on the NSA whistleblowing story about how the Obama administration has issued charges of espionage against Edward Snowden.
As Snowden made his latest disclosures, the US issued an extradition request to Hong Kong and piled pressure on the territory to respond swiftly. “If Hong Kong doesn’t act soon, it will complicate our bilateral relations and raise questions about Hong Kong’s commitment to the rule of law,” a senior Obama administration official said. [My italics-MS]
Stephen Walt points out how scaremongering about terrorism has become the easiest way for the government to accrue more secretive power, which is the kind they like best because it is unchecked. [Read more…]
Mr. Deity explains why this is so in an episode riddled with clichés and bad puns.
(Via Machines Like Us.)