Who is a journalist?

The government’s vicious assault on whistleblowers and those who report the leaks has led them to a confrontation with the press and opened up a debate on who is a journalist and what protections they should have to report the news. The First Amendment protections of freedom of speech and the press should protect everyone who publishes any news or opinion in any forum. But the government does not want that. What they want is a compliant media, and they have sought to find a way to separate the ‘good’ media (i.e., those who know their proper role is to be subservient to the government) from the ‘bad media’ (i.e., those who actually break news even if it is not in the government’s interest). [Read more…]

Josh Fox on Gasland Part II

Documentarian Josh Fox has been on a crusade against the practice of hydraulic fracturing (‘fracking’) that is used to extract natural gas from shale rock, because of the harm it does to the environment and ground water supplies. He has just released Gasland Part II, the sequel to his earlier Oscar-nominated documentary Gasland that I reviewed two years ago. Here’s the trailer. [Read more…]

FtBConscience this weekend

Many of the bloggers on the FtB network have organized a free online conference to be held July 19-21. It is called FtBConscience: Atheism with a conscience and is expected to be an annual event. This year will focus on social justice, technology, and the future of the freethought movement.

You can see the full schedule here. The organizers have put together a wide array of speakers (73 in all) and a range of topics that should appeal to almost anyone.

How the US set the gold standard for torture

Jeremy Scahill’s book Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield (2013) describes how the US became one of the most sophisticated torture regimes the world has ever known. It started out by the government creating the program known as SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) that was meant to train US forces to be able to resist torture if they were captured by enemy forces. They studied all the torture practices from medieval times onwards to distill out the most effective ones and created a SERE manual to be used as part of survival training exercises. [Read more…]

The oppression that is being scandalously ignored

Suzanne Venker has come to the defense of the most beleaguered group in America, one that is cruelly put upon from all sides, from being bashed in the media to having schools and colleges stacked against them, all the while being falsely accused of all manner of abuses while their own victimhood is ignored. She says this group has become second-class citizens. [Read more…]

Another mysterious burglary

Remember the mysterious burglary of a computer laptop in Brazil in Glenn Greenwald’s home just after he emailed that he would be sending an encrypted message home? We now have another mysterious burglary at a Dallas law firm which only computers were taken and other valuables (including silver bars and video equipment) were ignored. The firm had been hired by a different whistleblower, this time in the State Department. [Read more…]