More explosive NSA revelations to come soon

In an interview today on the ABC TV’s This Week, Glenn Greenwald says that this coming week will see the release of yet another story that backs up one of Edward Snowden’s most explosive allegations that has been vigorously denied by the government, that low-level people in the NSA could, if they wished, search through all the records they have collected and listen in to the stored phone calls of anyone at all, including the president. [Read more…]

A ‘Clergy Project’ needed for rabbis too?

Inspired by the work of Daniel Dennett and Linda LaScola who studied the situation of Christian clergy who become atheists and created the Clergy Project, a support group that enables these late unbelievers to secretly share their experience with others going through the same transition, Paul Shrell-Fox, a clinical psychologist and researcher at Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies, realized that there must be rabbis in the same boat. So he put out a call for them, and finds that their experience is similar to that of disbelieving clergy. [Read more…]

Great moments in capitalism

The Daily Show looks at the latest effort by Goldman Sachs to squeeze money out of Americans by using loopholes in the laws, this time involving the moving of aluminum from one warehouse to another and back again. And of course, nothing will come of this because being a major Wall Street bank means never having to be accountable.

Yet more evidence of how the big banks rule our world.

Part 1: [Read more…]

Half way to Orwell-land

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…]

Hilarious prank

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…]

US plays good cop-bad cop with Russia

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…]

Et tu, OED?

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…]

When a coup is not a coup

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…]

Duct tape surfing

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.