The hyperpatriotism trap

Bill Maher had a good segment on the deep strain of jingosim in America that demands that one should never say anything negative about its past or present actions. The problem with such a stance should be obvious. If you think that your country can do no wrong and has never done anything wrong, then you are going to continue doing those wrong things. Politicians of the major parties relentlessly pander to this way of thinking, making it worse. Obama panders a lot too but not enough for some people because he has the audacity to say that maybe not everything was always great.
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How the government treats whistleblowers

The Daily Show looks at how governments treat whistleblowers, starting with the case of the UK-based megabank HSBC where a whistleblower accused his employer of helping its clients avoid taxes in their home countries. Of course the people who take advantage of these kinds of sophisticated tax avoidance schemes are the very wealthy and well-connected and includes the HSBC chief so you can guess how they were punished, and what happened to the person who revealed it.
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More on Chicago’s black sites

Spencer Ackerman of the Guardian has been all over the story about Chicago’s ‘Black Sites’, a kind of Guantanamo on the US mainland whose location is in a drab building complex known as Homan Square, where people were taken and effectively disappeared from sight while they were being abused and interrogated. If there is one thing that we have learned in the last few months, it is that the willful disregard of people’s constitutional rights, especially if they are poor and minority, is endemic in the US and that this kind of knowledge is shared within the police system so that the revelation of an abuse in one location is usually a predictor that similar abuses are occurring elsewhere.
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Ferguson and the hidden tax on the poor

The Department of Justice has issued a scathing report of the policing practices of the city of Ferguson, MO in the wake of the shooting of unarmed teenager Michael Brown last August. It reveals instance after instance of the way that the police abused poor and minority people, subjecting them to systematic arrests and harassment. The report details instances of racist, discriminatory, and abusive behavior.
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What is ISIS trying to achieve?

It seems like not a day passes without hearing about yet another atrocity carried out by the group known as ISIS (or ISIL or IS). The level of horrific actions, such as the most recent brutal beheadings by ISIS of a large number of Egyptian Christians, seems to be steadily increasing and designed to provoke the west and draw them further into the conflict. It seems likely that ISIS is going to keep upping the shock value of their actions until they get what they want. But what do they want exactly and why would ISIS want to goad the world’s largest military power into a fight against them?
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Infrastructure – The Movie

Jon Oliver has another excellent investigative report, this time on the way that America’s leaders act so cavalierly about the nation’s crumbling infrastructure. The American public of course thinks that raising money to pay for repairs and maintenance is a sign that godless Communists are taking over by taxing the rich of their hard-earned dollars when that money could be used to buy yachts. They seem to think that elves will magically appear in the night and repair things for free.
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What Iranians think about Netanyahu’s visit to the US

There has been quite a to-do about Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the US and his speech today to the joint session of Congress. For the first time that I can remember, there was not universal approval in Congress and the establishment media about his blatant attempt to direct US foreign policy and undermine negotiations with Iran.
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