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…]
People of my generation will remember Billie Jean King well. Not only was she a terrific tennis player, winning a bucket load of titles and dominating the sport for a decade, she was also a tireless fighter for women’s equality in sports and elsewhere and was instrumental in getting the major tennis tournaments to give equal prize money for both the men’s and women’s contests. She was one of the most colorful players in the game. [Read more…]
Both The Daily Show and The Colbert Report weighed in on the bad arguments being made both for and against war with Syria. [Read more…]
I wrote earlier about how the stock market is rigged against small investors. Matt Taibbi provides another example. As a result of a wrongful termination suit by a former Thomson Reuters employee named Mark Rosenblum who became a whistleblower, a document has been released that shows how key economic data that is influential in predicting how the stock market would move was released early to a few special institutions that were willing to pay for the privilege. [Read more…]
We can all breathe a sigh of relief that the impending war with Syria has been at least postponed. It is clear that it was the massive and rising antiwar sentiment that put a check on the Obama administration and its war-loving supporters to back off (at least temporarily) from their threats to bomb Syria and instead accept the offer of Russia to find a diplomatic solution. The Obama administration’s Syria policy was incoherent and based on hypocritical fear-mongering and his speech last night reflected all those things. [Read more…]
While I am pretty ignorant about the processes of encryption and decryption, I have become intrigued with the topic, particularly since the decision by the mail service companies Lavabit and Silent Mail to shut down their businesses rather than having to be forced to hand over the keys to the government to snoop on their clients’ emails. [Read more…]
In this interview, the host of an MSNBC talk show actually makes New York mayoral candidate Anthony Wiener, as obnoxious and unlikable a person as I have ever seen in public life (and I am not even talking about his much-publicized private life), actually come off as sympathetic. What is it with people like O’Donnell who invite people for interviews on their shows and then self-righteously lecture them? Wiener clearly has a massive ego but O’Donnell seems to have an even bigger one, covered with a generous coating of sanctimony. Wiener, for all his faults, was exactly right in calling him out. [Read more…]
The trouble with John Kerry is that he is clearly in love with his own voice and does not know when to stop talking. While in the senate, he was notorious for long droning speeches at committee hearings that often resulted in him running out his allotted time before he could ask questions of the people before the panel. The Daily Show lampooned his performances back in 2009. [Read more…]