Film review: Risk (2017)

On Friday I saw the new film Risk produced and directed by award-winning documentarian Laura Poitras, who won the Academy Award for Citizenfour, the film about Edward Snowden and his leaks. The focus this time is Julian Assange and WikiLeaks and unlike the earlier one, the narrative structure of this film is, to say the least, a bit confused. But that is not due to the lack of skill of Poitras but due to the fact that after she started filming it, the story went off in many directions and she too became part of it.
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Stephen Fry investigated under Ireland’s blasphemy law

When we think of people being targeted for blasphemy, Muslim-majority countries like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia immediately come to mind. But it turns out that atheist Stephen Fry is being investigated for this offense in Ireland for comments he made on a television show when he was asked what he would say to god if it so happened that after he died he was confronted by god.
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Republicans move towards their goal of depriving people of health care

So the Republicans in the House of Representatives managed to squeeze through their repeal of Obamacare by the thinnest of margins of 217-213 even though it did not undergo any of the normal scrutiny that a major bill should receive. But we do know that it seeks to deprive many people of basic health care protections and is a huge siphoning of money from the poor to the rich.
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Ads, adblockers, and ‘family friendly content’

Some of you use ad blocker software and that may prevent you from seeing some of the content on this page. Part of the problem may be, as Trickster Goddess said in a comment, that the FtB content is not encrypted (as you see since our URL begins with ‘http’ and not ‘https’) and if you are using browsers and settings that allow only encrypted content to get through, it may strip out some content, like images. I suggested a long time ago that FtB join the wave and use encryption for all its content but it did not go anywhere. Part of the problem is that this site is run on a shoestring budget and anything that is not critical to just keep the site running tends to get deferred.
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Money does buy politicians

There is a persistent paradox in discussions about politics, especially in academia. Businesses, interest groups, and their lobbyists give vast amounts of money to politicians and this naturally leads to the impression that many of our politicians can be bought and sold like commodities. After all, why throw money away on some thing that produces little or no returns? And yet, I have found that academic studies by political scientists and economists tend to argue that money is not a decisive factor in how legislators vote on issues. I have been to many seminars and political scientists almost always dismiss as ignorant those who suggest that money buys votes or can change the way people vote. They suggest other reasons why money flows to politicians, such as that people give money to those politicians who already agree with them. In other words, it is a reward for past practices rather than a bribe to change future behavior, to keep people who are already on your side from defecting rather than trying to win over opponents.
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Film review: National Bird (2016)

[Note: You can stream the film for free until May 15.]

The documentary National Bird directed by Sonia Kennebeck and released by Independent Lens looks at the US drone warfare program from the point of view of three former US Air Force (Heather, Daniel, and Lisa) whose jobs were to identify targets seen in the drone videos, and from the survivors of the infamous attack on February 21, 2010 on a convoy carrying a group of families that resulted in the deaths of 23 people, all civilians, and caused serious injuries to many others. All three of them have since left the Air Force. They all suffer from guilt at what they were part of, with Heather being suicidal and diagnosed with PTSD. Daniel is under threat of charges under the draconian Espionage Act and all three fear that the government will take severe action against them as it has with other whistleblowers.
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Cartoons on religion

Today’s newspaper had not one but two cartoons disparaging religion. The first one touches on a topic that I often raise when I have been invited to be on panels that include representatives from many religions. In such forums, those representatives go strongly into the kumbaya mode, vaguely suggesting that they all believe in the same god and focusing on common elements of morality and ethics that they happen to agree on. Boring!
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