The Cleveland area is going through another round of wealthy sports owners putting the squeeze on residents to enrich themselves. To recap, a couple of decades ago the county passed taxes to pay for building three major sports stadiums downtown for baseball, basketball, and football. Of course, while people paid for the stadiums with their taxes, team owners were the ones who reaped the benefits.
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In covering Ukraine and Crimea, much of the western press has given the indication that Russia has been isolated internationally on this issue. But that is not quite the case. Much of the analysis has focused on the G8 grouping of nations that is dominated by US allies such as the NATO countries. But there are other economic groupings such as the BRICS alliance consisting of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, and it turns out that that alliance has unanimously backed Russia’s position.
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Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders has been consistently sounding the alarm about the danger to democracy posed by a few super-wealthy people who are now in a position to buy elections and media coverage. In a speech to the US Senate titled A Threat to American Democracy, he laid out what is happening.
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Islam is not one of the religions that come to mind when one thinks of providing equal status for women. Its rules about their dress and behavior in public are notorious for their restrictiveness. But at the same time, as Juan Cole points out, there is the curious phenomenon that many Muslim-majority countries have had women as their leaders, almost all of them elected to office. Here’s his list.
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During Jacob Appelbaum’s talk about how he suspected that Apple might be colluding with the NSA to enable the agency to spy on people, he spoke about how they could take control of your cell phones, saying “They would be able to break into this phone, almost certainly, and turn on the microphone” and that the NSA builds fake cell phone towers to grab and store data. One of the things that Edward Snowden revealed was that the NSA had the capability to remotely turn on the cameras in people’s computers so that they could spy on them.
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The Daily Show has some commentary on Chris Christie, starting with the investigation that he commissioned that (surprise!) cleared him of any involvement with the closing of the lanes on the George Washington Bridge and then moving on to join the parade of Republican presidential hopefuls who groveled before Sheldon Adelson in what has been dubbed ‘the Adelson primary’.
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Younger people today are fortunate that they grew up in a post-Cold War era, where the fear of a nuclear war has been lifted. So it is despicable when politicians try to re-create the fears of that era by using one of the worst fear mongering tactics, and that is to scare people about the possible use of a nuclear device in a populated area. Cynical politicians use that to justify any and all abuses of the violation of people’s civil rights and privacy, by arguing that if they are not allowed to do what they want, this awful scenario may well be the consequence.
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There has been a lot of righteous indignation expressed in the US Congress and White House about how terrible it is when Russia interferes in the affairs of other nations and how it must be punished for its actions in Ukraine and Crimea, including the imposition of sanctions.
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It is clear that there are rumblings of great discontent around the world about how the internet is being hijacked by government spying agencies and I suggested that it may lead to some kind of organized revolt. As usual, I am behind the times because reader John Horstman informs me that there is already a project in the works known as Reset the Net that calls upon everyone to do their bit to reclaim the promise of the internet as a free and open space
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