Open carry meets open resistance

As a result of negative reactions, more and more fast food places are telling their customers not to carry their guns openly into their stores. The list now includes Starbucks, Wendy’s, Applebees, Jack In The Box, Chipotle, Chili’s and Sonic. Some gun owners feel that these places are no longer safe to eat in because they are not allowed to take their guns into them, because of course no place is more dangerous than your neighborhood Wendy’s.
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Pope Francis visits Israel’s apartheid wall in the Occupied Territories

News media were agog with the news of how during his visit to Israel and the Occupied Territories, pope Francis stopped his motorcade and went up to the apartheid wall that Israel has constructed, touched it with his head and prayed. Kelly Lynn describes, along with many photographs, how Palestinian activists managed to evade Israeli security guards and spray paint messages on the wall and a massive gate that the government had just painted over earlier to hide previous messages.
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Snowden in his own words

We are approaching the first anniversary of the publication on June 5, 2013 of the first revelation from Edward Snowden, that the US government had obtained from Verizon without a warrant the phone records of all its customers. I want to reproduce some of the messages that Snowden gave Glenn Greenwald early in their interactions, where he explains what motivates him. These passages are in Greenwald’s book No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the US Surveillance State that I reviewed here.
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Narendra and Me?

Jason Jones files his final report on the Indian elections with a look at the controversy over the new prime minister Narendra Modi’s record while he was chief minister of Gujarat state when riots resulted in the deaths of 1000 people, mostly Muslims. In the manner of Michael Moore in his Roger and Me documentary, Jones tries repeatedly to interview Modi to get answers about his role in those events.
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Is this the secret to trolling?

Some people in the media, especially activists and pundits, feel a compulsion to stay visible in the public eye either because of ego or because that is how they make their living by giving talks and selling books and the like. The way they do that whenever they sense that they are being forgotten is to troll for attention. In an earlier post, I said that it was easy to be a conservative troll. All you had to do was say something outrageous or extreme that would anger or at least annoy and exasperate liberals who would then rise up and condemn you.
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Book review: No Place to Hide by Glenn Greenwald

I finished the book (its full title is No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State) in two sittings. It is not too long (about 250 pages) and Greenwald has a direct style where he says what he means without weasel words that makes it easy to follow. It describes how Edward Snowden came to gain access to all the materials he chose to reveal, what made him decide to reveal it, the main contents of the revelations, why it is important, and the reactions to his disclosures. (Notes on each chapter, the index to the contents, and many of the source documents from the NSA that are not in the book or are hard to read because of the size of the font can be found here.)
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