I have written before of how one failing of our politics is that it focuses more on how we feel about the people who are on the side of the issues, and less on the issues themselves. Here is another example of that phenomenon, with a contributor to the liberal website Balloon-Juice smacking down Noam Chomsky. [Read more…]
The singer Linda Ronstadt has said that she is suffering from Parkinson’s disease that has progressed to such a stage that she is no longer able to sing. That is sad because she had a lovely voice. [Read more…]
The provincial government of Quebec is reportedly moving forward on legislation that would ban the wearing of some religious apparel by public employees. [Read more…]
More revelations have emerged that despite the NSA’s claims of strict safeguards to prevent abuse of its spying capabilities, the it systematically violated its pown privacy requirements in thousands of cases and committed even more illegal acts, with a judge ruling back in 2011 that the NSA had also been deliberately misleading the courts about what it has been doing. What a surprise! This information emerged as a result of the declassification of some documents in the wake of the uproar over what the Snowden revelations told us about the government spying on its own citizens. [Read more…]
A few days ago I linked to a story of Kadra Abdi, a young Somali-American woman who was profiled and harassed by immigration authorities on her return from a trip to Sweden. Now comes along an even worse story of TSA harassment on a domestic trip of Aditya Mukerjee, a young man of Indian origin. Mukerjee gives detailed account of his ordeal. [Read more…]
Whenever whistleblower reveals government actions, especially those that seriously embarrass the government, their reaction is that they are angry because the leaks have endangered nation al security and/or put people’s lives at risk. This was dutifully picked up by the lapdog media and trumpeted far and wide. This was the charge made against Chelsea Manning and then against Edward Snowden. But at Manning’s trial, the prosecution could not make the case that her revelations had actually put people’s lives at risk. [Read more…]
Despite the enormity of Edward Snowden’s NSA revelations, some US senators who are in the know but are forbidden to speak openly are hinting that what has already been revealed is just the ‘tip of the iceberg’. [Read more…]
In writing the earlier post about the Freedom From Religions Foundation’s lawsuit, I happened to browse their site and looked up the Honorary Board of that organization and came across this photograph of them, along with their names: Jerry Coyne, Robin Morgan, Richard Dawkins, Daniel C. Dennett, Ernie Harburg, Jennifer Michael Hecht, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, Susan Jacoby, Mike Newdow, Katha Pollitt, Steven Pinker, Ron Reagan, Oliver Sacks, M.D., Robert Sapolsky, Edward Sorel, and Julia Sweeney. [Read more…]
According to the lawyer for Shaker Aamer, one of the many prisoners at Guantanamo who have been cleared for release but not allowed to leave, the authorities did not pass on to his client a copy of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s book The Gulag Archipelago that he had brought for him. That book dealt with the prison camps in the Soviet Union and was suppressed in that country. [Read more…]