Is this to be Syria’s future?

Although Libya has vanished from the US news front pages, it may be good to revisit that country to see what has happened since the US last attacked another country. (At least I think it was the last, it is hard to keep track of all the US military campaigns.) Patrick Cockburn writes that two years after that attack, Libya has descended into lawlessness and ruin, a country that now resembles Somalia, where militias fight for control of land, with a weak government unable to do much about it. [Read more…]

The goal of US spying revealed: “Unrestricted access to and use of cyberspace”

The Guardian, ProPublica and the New York Times yesterday simultaneously published articles on the latest revelation to come out of the Edward Snowden documents and they are doozies. The articles reveal that the government has been very successful in trying to break the encryption codes that are used to protect all our data, like our medical records and bank accounts and everything else. And it reveals that US tech companies (both hardware and software) have colluded with the government to provide backdoor access to the government in order to gain that access. The result is a system where little or nothing in our lives is safe from the prying eyes of the government. [Read more…]

Why is breakfast different?

In principle, there should be no difference between what one eats at the three canonical meals of breakfast, lunch, and dinner. You should be able to easily switch the menus. But in actual practice, the interchangeability only applies to lunch and dinner, with the food eaten at breakfast being distinctively different from the other two meals. [Read more…]

Collision course?

President Obama seems to be trying to wriggle out of his ‘red line’ comment, perhaps realizing that if the Syria attack goes badly awry, then people will use that statement to suggest that it was he who was solely responsible for getting the US into the mess even if Congress authorized him to act, since it was that statement that people are repeatedly using to suggest that US ‘credibility’ is on the line. [Read more…]

Diana Nyad’s swim

Diana Nyad successfully completed, on her fifth attempt, her 103-mile swim from Cuba to the US. News reports emphasized that she was the first person to do so without a shark cage. David Shiffman, who studies sharks, says that the repeated mentioning of that statement may have given the impression that sharks pose a particularly acute danger when they do not. Jellyfish were more likely to have derailed her, as The Onion notes. [Read more…]

More exposes of US government spying

The Brazilian newspaper O Globo, one of the outlets for the NSA documents, reports that the NSA intercepted the communications between the leaders of Mexico and Brazil and their associates. Naturally enough, this latest revelation courtesy of Edward Snowden has sparked outrage in those countries. You can be assured that the leaders of countries all over the world are realizing that ‘fighting terrorism’ seems to be merely a side issue for the NSA, and that their real purpose is political and economic espionage against other countries, irrespective of whether they are allies or not or whether those countries are involved in terrorism or not. It is just the same as domestic spying in the US, where combating terrorism is a cover for anti-democratic surveillance of everyone. [Read more…]