ProPublica had a disturbing report about an attempt to censor a Johns Hopkins University computer science professor Matthew Green, an expert on cryptography, who blogged about the NSA’s efforts at breaking encryptions. The university, which is physically located very close to the NSA’s headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland, does a lot of work for the NSA, especially in its Applied Physics Laboratory. [Read more…]
Thanks to a link provided by commenter rdmcpeek43 in response to my post on Billie Jean King , I watched the American Masters program on Billie Jean King last night. It was very good. I am not sure how much longer it will be freely available on the web. The film was a biography of her but was less about her tennis as such and more about her pivotal role in advancing equality for women on the tennis circuit, all taking place at a time when women were vocal about the need for equality and justice in all areas of life. [Read more…]
Bill Di Blasio won the Democratic primary for the mayoralty of New York City and will likely be elected mayor in the general election. He is reputedly a progressive who has opposed things like the random ‘stop and frisk’ tactic by police that targeted young men of color and was favored by outgoing mayor Michael Bloomberg. [Read more…]
It is quite astonishing how when it comes to diplomacy, the US finds it so hard to take yes for an answer.
Take for example Syria. Whether or not chemical weapons were used and by whom, I think all reasonable people would agree that getting rid of those weapons anywhere is a good thing. And that is what we seem to be moving towards in Syria as a result of the Russian/Syrian plan triggered by John Kerry’s remark. It is going to take some time. After all, the US is far behind schedule on its own promises to reduce its chemical weapons stockpile. [Read more…]
The pastor who gets himself in the news by periodically threatening to burn copies of the Koran has done it again. This time he threatened to burn 2,998 copies of it (one for very person killed in in the 9/11 attack) on the anniversary but he and his assistant pastor were stopped and arrested by police as they were taking the fixings to the bonfire site, and slapped with a felony charge of “unlawful conveyance of fuel”, plus a misdemeanor charge of “unlawful open-carry of a firearm”, and also for not having a valid registration for the trailer. [Read more…]
The Russian president Vladimir Putin took to the op-ed pages of the New York Times to give Americans a short lecture on history and international law and why bombing Syria without UN authorization would be wrong. [Read more…]
As sure as sunrise follows sunset, the possibility of war breeds a new generation of ‘experts’ and ‘analysts’ who occupy the numerous ideological think tanks and make the media rounds providing seemingly impartial analysis but in reality pushing an agenda of their own, usually in favor of war. [Read more…]
One of the most famous experiments in psychology is that of Stanley Milgram who in 1962 purported to show how a surprisingly high percentage (65%) of ordinary people could be persuaded by authority figures to inflict extremely high levels of pain on others, well beyond what one might expect normal people to do. I wrote about this back in 2008. [Read more…]
The latest revelation from the Edward Snowden documents is that the NSA hands over raw intelligence containing personal data it has collected on Americans to Israel. The top secret memorandum of understanding between the US and Israel has been released that show that the US did not place any legal limits on the use of the data by Israel though even if it had, it hardly seems likely that the Israeli authorities would have felt constrained by them. [Read more…]
There are a lot of people in the US who advocate for war. The neoconservatives are one such group, because they have as their goal the projection of US power all over the globe to establish complete dominance. The Israel lobby is another group that seeks to have the US act on Israel’s behalf and attack and destabilize and even overthrow all the Middle Eastern countries that it sees as enemies. And of course, there is the military-industrial complex that makes a lot of money out of the death and destruction wreaked by the US on other people. [Read more…]