Yesterday was father’s day, one of those bogus celebrations that are meant to pressure people to buy useless stuff by implying that they do not appreciate their fathers if they do not. It is also an occasion to pontificate on the nature of fatherhood. David Mitchell takes aim at those who criticize humor writers for their depiction of characters such as Homer Simpson and say that people like him are poor role models of fathers. In the process, Mitchdell makes an important larger point. [Read more…]

The Q&A with Edward Snowden has ended. While journalists all over the world were dying to directly interview him for an exclusive scoop, he chose instead to answer questions from ordinary people. And the questions and answers were very interesting. In response to one question about why he chose to make his revelations from Hong Kong, he replied that he felt that he could not get a fair trial in the US. [Read more…]

Edward Snowden will be having a live Q&A at 11:00 am Eastern US time today. I will not be able to follow it live but it should be interesting, especially since he is in hiding and you can be sure that the NSA will be trying to track him down. They likely already know where he is but there is nothing they can do at the moment. [Read more…]

The late David Halberstam was an excellent journalist who worked within the establishment framework. His best know work is The Best and the Brightest (1972) that has become a classic in the genre of modern political history. It exposed how a group of elite, Ivy League-educated people in the highest reaches of government during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations led the US government into the criminal disaster that we now know as the Vietnam war. [Read more…]

James Bamford has an detailed article titled The Secret War that look at General Keith Alexander, the head of the NSA, and what he has been secretly constructing. As the subheading says, “INFILTRATION. SABOTAGE. MAYHEM. FOR YEARS, FOUR-STAR GENERAL KEITH ALEXANDER HAS BEEN BUILDING A SECRET ARMY CAPABLE OF LAUNCHING DEVASTATING CYBERATTACKS. NOW IT’S READY TO UNLEASH HELL” [Read more…]

As we all knew would happen, there has been a concerted effort to discredit Edward Snowden the person, which is the usual means adopted by the ruling class. When they cannot defend their actions, they go after the messenger. The latest charge is that he is a double-agent, likely working for the Chinese. It is a story spun out of purely circumstantial evidence. [Read more…]

No system of detection is perfect, whether it be in medicine or police work. There is always the chance of false positives and the wider you make your dragnet, the larger the number of false positives that you are going to get. While the massive secret databases of the NSA are touted as an efficient means of detecting patterns to thwart terrorist attacks, it is simply a statistical fact that any pattern matching software will throw up false positives. [Read more…]

Despite the massive efforts by the administration and leading members of Congress and elements of the servile establishment media to downplay the NSA spying revelations and attack those who brought them to light, opposition and anger about the programs is starting to build. [Read more…]