Christopher Hitchens angered a lot of people with his expose of Mother Theresa in his 1995 book The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice, and he was dismissed by her fans as an angry atheist who wanted to tear down anyone who was held up as exemplifying what was good about religion. [Read more…]
Indefinite detention, torture and testimony obtained from torture, spying on attorney-client conversations, solitary confinement for months and years, no habeas corpus, military tribunals that suspend normal rules of due process, all these are now part of the brave new world that we live in as a result of the war on terror. Ah, for the days of the Cold War when the US used such charges to bludgeon the Soviet bloc nations as part of the propaganda blitz to show the world how evil they were and how superior the US system of justice was. [Read more…]
Any government that engages in willful wrongdoing, such as the US government now routinely does, must also by necessity simultaneously retaliate against those who would reveals such acts. This explains why the Obama administration has been engaged in the most vicious persecutions of whistleblowers and the case against Bradley Manning provides a prime example. [Read more…]
This is pretty impressive. Incidentally Ravi Fernando, the person doing this trick, is the son of one of my oldest friends, going all the way back to middle school days in Sri Lanka, and so I was really pleased to stumble across this video on a news site quite by accident. [Read more…]
The invaluable Glenn Greenwald provides further evidence of how the US is now a lawless state, pointing out that president Obama and his nominee to head the CIA John Brennan (both of whom are key players in the current drone execution program that have murdered Americans and foreigners abroad) have repeatedly shown themselves unwilling, even under direct questioning, to deny that they have the power to order the extrajudicial killing of Americans even within the US. [Read more…]
When I wrote my post on the New York City politician who had put on blackface and donned an Afro wig to portray himself as a basketball player and his subsequent non-apology apology, I had not known that Dov Hikind is a well-known figure in the Orthodox Jewish community who has a reputation for being extremely sensitive to perceived slights. [Read more…]
I didn’t watch the Oscars. I never watch these awards shows as they seem to me to be incredibly boring. But I did read about the fact that the company Rhythm & Hues that won the Academy Award for special effects for their work on the film Life of Pi had filed for bankruptcy, making the occasion bittersweet for them. [Read more…]
The nomination of Chuck Hagel to be Secretary of Defense should have been a fairly routine affair. After all, he had actually served in the military (and as an infantryman on the front lines and not an officer), he had been a US senator and a Republican one to boot. He was a typical run-of-the-mill politician. [Read more…]
One day in April last year, I opened the local newspaper to read a sensational story of the successful thwarting of a plot by five ‘terrorists’, people from the area, to blow up a bridge south of Cleveland. They accepted a plea deal in November that resulted in four of them receiving sentences ranging from 6 to 11 years with the remaining person still awaiting mental competency evaluation. The US attorney’s office had asked for sentences ranging from 19 to 30 years. [Read more…]
Stephen Colbert promises full coverage of the papal transition while keeping track of the current scandals in the Vatican. [Read more…]