So senator Lindsey Graham (R-Crazy) is so upset at the possibility of Russia giving asylum to Edward Snowden that he wants the US to boycott the Winter Olympics if they do so. One can only imagine how ballistic he will get if one of the smaller Latin American countries that have offered Snowden asylum (Ecuador, Bolivia, Venezuela, Nicaragua) make good on their promise. Will he call for an invasion? [Read more…]
In yet another sign of how the proliferation of social media is worrying authoritarian regimes because it allows people to communicate laterally easily and bypass official news channels, the head of the religious police in Saudi Arabia has warned Twitter users that they have pretty much forfeited any hope of a good afterlife. In addition, the country’s most senior cleric (who has the Monty Pythonesque title of ‘Grand Mufti’) has called Twitter users ‘fools’. [Read more…]
Annie Robbins reports that yesterday the European Union has, in a significant step, warned Israel that its continued expansion of illegal settlements in the Occupied Territories has consequences.
“Effective Friday, a new European Union directive with a “territorial clause” bans all EU funding of projects in territories occupied by Israel since the ’67 war: the West Bank including East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights. The new directive (pdf), which covers all areas of co-operation between the EU and Israel, culture, academia, sports, economics and science, requires the Israeli government to “recognize in writing that the West Bank settlements are not part of Israel.”
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…]
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…]
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.
I have written before about how similar is Israel’s treatment of the Palestinian people and its occupation of Palestinian lands to the apartheid policies of the former Afrikaner South African regimes. [Read more…]
Do you recall the Cheerios commercial I wrote about last month that featured a mixed-race couple and their child and that sparked so much anger when it was shown on YouTube that the comments had to be shut down? Well, the show Kids React showed the commercial to their child panelists to get their reaction. It is well worth watching. [Read more…]
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…]