The US government and supporters of the authoritarian state say that snooping on everyone all over the globe is standard practice, everyone does it, and hence the cascade of NSA revelations are no big deal and that the only reason the US does more of it than others is that they have the technology to do so. [Read more…]
Psychologist Susan K. Perry writes that books like Heaven for Kids by Randy Alcorn with Linda Washington that make heaven seem appealing can be dangerous. (Alcorn is described on the book jacket as ‘a leading authority on heaven’, which prompts the question of how anyone could earn such a title.) [Read more…]
Now that opinion is increasingly turning against the NSA’s spying activities, the supposed supervisors and watchdogs of these programs in the White House and Congress are scurrying to deflect blame from themselves and we are seeing the familiar ‘rogue elephant’ theory emerging, suggesting that the NSA was doing things on its own initiative and that the policy makers at the top were unaware. [Read more…]
Reader Norm kindly sent me a copy of the above book and said that he had enjoyed it and I must say that it was a real page-turner. I had intended to write a full review but I came across a good one by Diane Johnson in the New York Review of Books, along with a review of a memoir by Jenna Miscavige Hill (the niece of the current Scientology leader David Miscavige) who defected from the church, that captured much of what I wanted to say so I will just refer you to that review and add some thoughts of my own. [Read more…]
New Jersey governor Chris Christie clearly has ambitions to run for the presidency in 2016. It is also clear that he is pushing the ‘maverick’ shtick that worked for John McCain, at least as far as getting the Republican nomination was concerned, and to aim for the support of the party establishment, territory that is open since all the other putative candidates (Rand Paul, Ted Crux, Rick Santorum, Marco Rubio, Paul Ryan, Rick Perry) seem to be angling for the Tea Party wing’s support. He clearly wants to be portrayed as the straight-talking, no-nonsense, get-stuff-done, not-totally-nuts kind of guy. [Read more…]
Leading Germans, including some from chancellor Angela Merkel’s own party, are calling for Germany to give Edward Snowden asylum, with the former general secretary saying “Snowden has done the western world a great service. It is now up to us to help him.” This suggests that the tide is definitely shifting in his favor, despite a massive US effort to portray Snowden as a traitor and a criminal. [Read more…]
The Cleveland area has been the scene of an appalling sequence of crimes recently. We had one case of a serial killer Anthony Sowell who preyed on poor women, raping and killing them and burying them on the premises. Then we had the case of Ariel Castro who kidnapped and held captive three women for about a decade, fathering a child with one. Now we have another person accused of being a serial killer too. [Read more…]
When William Shakespeare had Hamlet say (Act 2, Scene II), “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so”, he had not anticipated the rise of the 24/7 cable news networks in the US that, despite the fact that they have so much time to discuss the inevitable nuances of complex political issues, still seem to be so rushed that everything must be quickly reduced to a one-word answer to a simple question: Is it good or bad? [Read more…]
Some of us old-timers will recall the time when the word ‘gay’ started to become identified with homosexuality and calls for equality for people of all sexual orientations, and the phrases ‘gay rights’ and ‘gay liberation’ came into vogue. Since at the same time homosexuality was still strongly stigmatized, some would complain that the word gay was being been appropriated by the ‘gay lobby’ and that they could no longer use the word with its original meaning of being happy because people might misunderstand. [Read more…]
The Obama administration and its allies in Congress and the media have defended the widespread global spying by the NSA on the grounds that it has prevented 54 terrorist attacks, giving the impression that most of them were aimed at the US. This became accepted as a fact, as unchallenged statements by authority figures often do, and one hears it being thrown around by supporters of the authoritarian national security state. [Read more…]