When I said that I had no interest in watching any of the Olympic events, I was wrong. There is one event that intrigues me and that is curling. That fascinates me. It looks like a sport of great skill and precision and teamwork. [Read more…]
I am not a huge fan of the Olympics. It seems to me to be an over-hyped extravaganza in which the emphasis has shifted from a focus on pure athleticism to anything that gets good ratings and brings in money to the IOC. It also results in governments spending huge amounts of money to construct buildings and facilities that often turn into white elephants later. [Read more…]
As promised last week, the first magazine of the new Omidyar-Greenwald-Poitras-Scahill First Look Media venture is out today. It is called The Intercept and has an article The NSA’s Secret Role in the U.S. Assassination Program by Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill on how the drones target cell phones not people. [Read more…]
Two cheerleaders for the Oakland Raiders football team, identified as just Lacy T. and Sarah G. have initiated a class-action lawsuit against the team alleging ‘wage theft’, denying them compensation that they feel they are entitled to. They are not paid for practices or overtime or for other appearances like at charity events, which results in them getting paid at roughly $5 per hour, which is below the California minimum wage. Plus they only get paid at the end of the season so they have to pay their own expenses up front. As Lacy T. says, she was surprised by this since football teams make so much money. [Read more…]
Last month I wrote about an important ruling handed down on January 14, 2014 by US District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco where he slapped down the government for placing a Malaysian architect Rahinah Ibrahim on the no-fly list in 2005 and not telling her why. The trial lasted five days from December 6-10, 2013 during which at least on ten occasions the judge reluctantly closed the court to the public and the press at the request of the government because the case supposedly involved ‘sensitive security information’ or SSI. [Read more…]
This film is set in London and begins with a terrorist bombing at a crowded market that kills 120 people. An immigrant from Turkey who has a wife and teenage son is immediately arrested on the basis of a tip and accused of being the mastermind of the plot. [Read more…]
It is rumored that Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, Ewen MacAskill, and Barton Gellman who broke the first stories based on the Edward Snowden documents may get the prestigious George Polk award for 2013, a major honor in journalism. As Matthew Zeitlin writes: [Read more…]
Karl Marx is one of the major influences in the whole field of political economy. Even those who think he is the embodiment of evil have to acknowledge how much his analyses of capitalism has shaped the way we view things and structure our socieities. But some of his most publicized predictions were spectacularly wrong, chief among them that the communist revolution would first occur in advanced industrial societies like Germany during his time. The fact that it happened in the more backward feudal and agrarian country of Russia, plus the collapse of the Soviet Union and the shift of so many formerly Communist nations such as those in Russia, Eastern Europe, and China to more market-based economies were widely portrayed by his critics as conclusively demonstrating failure of his entire theory of political economy and seemed the occasion to bury Marx’s ideas for good. [Read more…]
One of the worst aspects of the current US health insurance system is that it is employer-based, which means that people can get trapped into jobs just in order to get health insurance, a phenomenon that has been given the name of ‘job lock’. So any improvements in the system that would enable people to get affordable health care outside of employment was bound to result in people deciding to leave their jobs voluntarily, either to stay at home to look after children or others who need them, to start their own businesses, to freelance, and so on. [Read more…]