You may recall that in George Orwell’s book 1984, historical events and the documents recording them were regularly re-written to conform to what the current political situation required. The process involved taking existing publications, destroying them, and replacing them with new ones that said the opposite of what the earlier ones said, and then pretending that the old ones had never existed. [Read more…]
For some reason, the US public and media seem to have an endless and deep fascination with the parasitic, good-for-nothing, British royal family. There seems to be something about all the pomp and pageantry associated with them that makes them go weak at the knees and completely lose their sense of reason, something that I wrote about in 2009 in a post titled God save us from the Queen on the occasion of the Obamas’ visit to England. [Read more…]
The US is clearly trying the good ‘cop-bad cop tactic’ in its efforts to have the Russians hand Edward Snowden back to the US.
In the bad cop role, we have the usual idiots like Lindsey Graham issuing what seem like daily threats to the Russians that if they grant Snowden asylum, there will be repercussions like a US boycott of the Winter Olympics. That, of course, is never going to happen. But the US congress is introducing legislation mandating some sort of sanctions to any country that gives Snowden asylum. [Read more…]
Florida Democratic congressman Alan Grayson will be holding hearings on Wednesday where, for a change, critics of the NSA (including the ACLU, the Cato Institute, and Glenn Greenwald) will be invited to counter all the misleading information that government witnesses have been making about the spying programs. [Read more…]
Opponents of same-sex marriage argue that it is wrong to redefine marriage to include same-sex couples. But Hannah Ridge writes that that major authority on the usage of words, the Oxford English Dictionary, has announced that is going to do just that and include same-sex marriage in future definitions. A major French dictionary is doing the same. [Read more…]
Remember when someone in the White House derided those of us he described as stuck in a “reality-based community”, saying “That’s not the way the world really works anymore, We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality”? Democrats had a field day with that because the speaker was the much-hated Karl Rove at the height of his hubris during the Bush administration. It was taken as symbolic of the arrogance of that administration.
Well, reality denial is back, and in a big way. [Read more…]
Via Xeni Jardin, here is the story of Pascale Honore, an Australian woman who became a paraplegic after an accident. She has a love for the ocean and wanted to surf and that now seemed out of her reach. But with sheer dogged determination, the help of her friend, and a roll of duct tape, she not only surfed but also went scuba diving.
It used to be that Protestants and Catholics were at loggerheads over various doctrinal issues. It is hard to imagine that in the early days of the American republic there was deep hostility towards and prejudice against Catholics, with some even arguing against them receiving full citizenship because their allegiance to the pope made their loyalty to the new nation suspect. [Read more…]
Nancy Pelosi is the Democratic politician that conservatives love to hate. She is painted as the San Francisco liberal who stands for everything they despise. And she is also the darling of ‘Democratic liberals’, that group of people who support liberal issues as long as their party supports it. But in reality she is just another political apparatchik in the service of power. [Read more…]
Xeni Jardin reports that the press covering the final arguments yesterday at the ‘trial’ (i.e., which is the name that the Obama administration gives to the farcical proceedings presided over by a military judge who has been clearly hostile to Bradley Manning) are being intimidated by heavily-armed military police looking over their shoulders as they type, forbidding the use of Twitter, shutting down internet service, forbidding the use of the internet when it is up, etc. [Read more…]