It turns out that the NSA was spying on all Vatican communications too, including those of pope Francis even before he became the pope and was just cardinal Jorge Bergoglio. The report is from an Italian newsmagazine and has not been confirmed but given all that we know about the NSA’s activities, it would not be at all surprising. [Read more…]
And the Edward Snowden hits keep coming.
Barton Gellman, one of the outlets for the NSA documents provided by Edward Snowden, has another big story that expands yet again the range of spying done by the NSA on American companies and Americans, even to the extent of storing actual content and not just metadata. [Read more…]
My daughter is getting married in Cleveland in the summer (northern hemisphere!) of 2014 and she is looking for a DJ for the reception. The catch is that she has not lived in this area since 2004 and so does not know the local music scene. And of course I am a total washout when it comes to knowledge about DJs or dance music or popular culture in general.
So are there any readers of this blog who could recommend good DJs in this area? We are looking for someone fairly mainstream, not too avant-garde, provides good service, and is easy to work with.
My daughter has heard of two DJs Rock the House and Selective Sound Entertainment. Feedback on these two or any other suggestions would be welcome.
Thanks in advance.
Max Blumenthal has spent considerable time in Israel and has written a new book Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel and he says that there is an increased right-wing trend in Israel, and that intolerance and outright racism are taking hold, even among the secular youth, and that these disturbing trends are being encouraged by the central institutions of Israeli society. [Read more…]
It is rapidly becoming conventional wisdom, because of the determined effort to repeat it at every opportunity by supporters of the NSA and the national security state in general, that all these revelations of government spying is no big deal. Didn’t these people’s mothers’ tell them what mothers all over the globe tell their children when they ask to do something because all their friends are doing it: “If they jump over a cliff, are you going to jump too?” [Read more…]
British prime minister David Cameron is threatening to take action against British newspapers like The Guardian for publishing the Snowden leaks. He used as his excuse for such an action a newspaper report in which an anonymous security source had said that the leaks had hampered their terrorist investigations. [Read more…]
Today is the 75th anniversary of the famous radio broadcast of the Orson Welles production of the H. G. Wells story The War of the Worlds, that began with a series of fake news bulletins that announced an alien invasion and supposedly triggered widespread panic. There are bound to be news items that refer to this event. [Read more…]
YouGov has a new poll that says that only 76% of Americans believe in a god. Why do I say ‘only’ when it is a large majority? Because it really is quite surprising that a quarter of the public in America say they do not believe in a god. Recall that previous polls have put atheists and agnostic in the single digits and that the ‘unaffiliated’ groups at around 20% but the last number may include people who believe in a god but do not belong to any religious denomination. [Read more…]
Yesterday the US Senate voted on whether to disapprove the raising of the debt ceiling. The motion to disapprove failed by a vote of 45-54, along strict party lines. [Read more…]
That the US has systematically engaged in torture is no longer in doubt. But the full extent of it, exactly how much, to how many people, and in what form is still not clear, since the Obama administration has resisted calls for a full accounting. [Read more…]