When president Obama talks about torture practiced by the US, and excuses the actions of the torturers, he gives the impression that they occurred under the Bush-Cheney regime. But a new Amnesty International report says that torture continued well into the Obama presidency even as recently as a year ago. Nico Hines and Sami Yousafzai describe some of its contents.
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There has been increased attention to the abuse of civil forfeiture laws. These are laws that enable authorities to seize the property of individuals even if they are never even charged with a crime and putting the burden on them to go through the complex and expensive legal process to get back their property. Mark Frauenfelder describes what happens in Philadelphia.
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A magician does a trick where there seems to be a wiener floating in front of dogs’ faces. What surprises me is the reaction of two of the dogs. While most try to eat it, as I would expect them to, these two shy away from it in seeming fear. It is as if they realize that the laws of nature are being violated in some way and that hence something is seriously wrong and alarming.
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The MIT linguist and political analyst does a quick recent history of the situation in the region and what Israel hopes to achieve by its successive military assaults on Gaza that are causing outrage and protests in the rest of the world, as this report of a recent rally and demonstration in London demonstrates.
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The actor and comic died yesterday, an apparent suicide, the cause of death whose reasons are often completely inscrutable. In his case, he apparently suffered from depression and addiction to drugs and alcohol, a deadly combination.
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My nomination for that would be its ‘national security reporter ‘ Dina Temple-Raston whom I have long castigated for being an unapologetic propagandist for the organs of the national security state. Glenn Greenwald gives yet another example of her breathless and uncritical coverage, this time of claims made by the CIA and its front organizations.
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I could never get a Yo-Yo to obey me. It would roll down the string and stay there despite my best efforts. So I am impressed with the skills of world champion Gentry Stein who won the title in Prague in 2014.
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There has been an orgy of remembrances about Richard Nixon’s resignation as president because the 40th anniversary was on the 9th. I am not a big fan of these retrospectives but I found the following video clip intriguing. It is from a TV series called Nixon’s the One that has not yet been broadcast in the US. It is supposed to be an accurate verbatim portrayal of events based on transcripts and notes of those present.
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There is a curious thing about death. We all know it is inevitable, that we will all experience it some day, but yet our own death is a subject that we recoil from contemplating. While death, often violent, is a common feature of our entertainment culture, as can be seen by its ubiquity in the storylines in books, films, TV programs and even video games, few people like to think about their own mortality. They are more comfortable talking about the death of others because then death can be talked about in the abstract, not as something real.
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I find that directly facing the fact of one’s eventual death to be extraordinarily liberating. It makes one realize that life is precious and should not be wasted. It does not matter at all how much money or possessions you have when you die. Now that my own children are grown and educated and no longer dependent on me, there seems to be no point at all in accumulating more wealth or possessions. In fact, the opposite is the case, I have consciously started reducing the amount of things I own. I try not to buy anything that I don’t really need or that does not serve some fairly direct purpose. My main indulgence is books which I still continue to buy.
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