I was curious as to what Stephen M. Walt would have to say about the deal with Iran and he says that while the proximate issue is about nuclear technology, the ultimate issue is something else and it is the latter that explains the somewhat paradoxical reactions of both supporters and opponents of the deal. [Read more…]
Back in 2008, I wrote a 12-part series titled The Propaganda Machine in which I laid out how the right-wing propaganda machine works in the US. Much of that machine became created because of what is now known as the Powell Memo. [Read more…]
The ACLU has gone to court to stop the government from collecting the phone records of everybody. The government has asked the judge to trust the “national security experts” when they say that they are doing this only to combat terrorism and not to poke into the lives of ordinary people. The judge heard the case last Friday. [Read more…]
Reader Norm sent me this shocking news report that the government of president Hamid Karzai is considering re-introducing the practice of stoning adulterers in public in Afghanistan, an abomination that occurred under the rule of the Taliban but was mercifully halted after they were overthrown. [Read more…]
Believers in an afterlife will often point to near-death experiences (NDE) or out-of-body experiences (OBE) as proof. These are situations where people who for whatever reason come close to dying say they had an out-of-body experience where their spirits/souls moved around freely and they saw things they could not have known about prior to that experience. Close examination of their claims usually find flaws in their story and there have been no conclusive evidence that such a phenomenon actually occurs, but this does seem to deter true believers who eagerly lap up such stories. [Read more…]
Reports are emerging that the Geneva talks were preceded by many secret meetings between representatives of the Obama administration and the Iranian government, facilitated by the Sultan of Oman, of which the Europeans and Israel were informed only in late September of this year. (Here is a fact sheet on the deal put out by the White House.) [Read more…]
The way that religious people get tax breaks in the US is a disgrace. But Barbara B. Crabb, US District Court judge in Wisconsin, ruled yesterday that the tax exemption given to clergy for their housing allowance is unconstitutional. This allowance is taken advantage of by about “44,000 ministers, priests, rabbis, imams and others” and “some clergy members could experience an estimated 5 to 10 percent cut in take-home pay.” [Read more…]
It turns out, according to the latest revelations from the Edward Snowden documents, that the NSA has infected more than 50,000 networks worldwide with malicious computer software that turns those computers effectively into ‘sleeper cells‘ that can be exploited by the NSA when it wants. [Read more…]
So it looks like a deal has been reached between Iran and the P5+1 nations. (Here is a fact sheet on the deal put out by the White House.) This is supposed to be an interim deal until a more comprehensive deal is worked out in six months. Juan Cole looks at what both sides got in the deal. [Read more…]
Much of the recent conversation amongst the political chattering classes in the US media has been about the partial elimination of the filibuster rule in the US Senate. This change in one of the many arcane internal rules of the Senate has been hyped by the chronically hyperventilating US media as if we have just witnessed a major political cataclysm. [Read more…]