Max Blumenthal on the Israeli apartheid state

Joshua Frank interviews Max Blumenthal about his new book Goliath and how it has exposed the many PEPs (progressive except for Palestine) in the US who will talk freely against injustice except when it comes to the apartheid policies of Israel and the support it gets from the US government and Congress as a result of the powerful Israel lobby. On this issue, the PEPs become strangely silent or attack those who try to bring greater awareness to what life in Israel is really like. [Read more…]

NPR’s Dina Temple-Raston vs. Glenn Greenwald

I have written harshly in the past about NPR’s national security correspondents Tom Gjelten and Dina Temple-Raston, describing them as serving pretty much as mouthpieces for the national security state. I came across this clip from a conference at New York University in 2010 in which from the audience she posed a question regarding Anwar al-Awlaki to Glenn Greenwald who was on the panel that showed how much she is locked into the mindset of believing what the government tells her. The exchange between her and Greenwald is very revealing. [Read more…]

The sad plight of poor people in Republican-controlled states

It turns out that about 6 million people have signed up for lower-cost health insurance under either the health care exchanges or are eligible for the Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act, the latter being designed to take care of those who earned too little to be eligible for the former. That is undoubtedly good news. [Read more…]

Calls for clemency for Snowden

Both the Guardian and the New York Times have editorially called for clemency for Edward Snowden. The NYT did not, unlike the Guardian, call for the full pardon that Snowden deserves. That was a bridge too far for a solidly establishment US newspaper. But the NYT call is particularly significant because it has an unsavory reputation of being overly solicitous of US government interests. [Read more…]

The goal of the worldwide spying program

Glenn Greenwald gave the keynote address via Skype at the 30th Chaos Communications Congress (30C3) on December 27, 2013 in Hamburg. It is a great speech. His talk begins around the 5:00 minute mark and ends at the 46:00 minute mark followed by a Q&A. (Here is a transcript of just the talk.) It is well worth watching and/or reading the whole thing (including the Q&A). [Read more…]

More blockbuster NSA revelations

Today comes a story about a talk that privacy advocate Jacob Appelbaum gave at a conference where he says that the NSA has the ability to tap into everyone’s iPhones.

Independent journalist and security expert Jacob Appelbaum on Monday told a hacker conference in Germany that theNSA could turn iPhones into eavesdropping tools and use radar wave devices to harvest electronic information from computers, even if they weren’t online.

Appelbaum told hundreds of computer experts gathered at Hamburg’s Chaos Communications Conference that his revelations about the NSA’s capabilities “are even worse than your worst nightmares.”

“What I am going to show you today is wrist-slittingly depressing,” he said. [Read more…]

The real difference between polygamy and bigamy

Bigamy, the act of one person getting formally married with a civil marriage license to two different people, is a crime in the US and most countries. I had always thought that polygamy was the same act carried out with three or more people. No doubt I had been swayed by the parallel with mathematics where the prefix ‘bi-‘ signaled two and ‘poly-‘ signaled an indeterminate number that was more than two. [Read more…]