The news is that the FBI has requested that Apple comply with a court order to crack a single iPhone—that belonging to one of the suicide killers at the San Bernardino massacre last year.

A lot has been said about this case that is wrong. I’ve read a few articles and comments from relatively knowledgable sources and what they have to say makes a bit more sense than the typically hyperbolic interpretation in the major media—and, of course, social networking sites.

The Law is Bigger than You... [More]

I find James Howard Kunstler to be worth reading more often than not. He writes engagingly and his insight into the devolution of capitalist society can be quite valuable, But he’s been more and more prone to going off the rails when he discusses issues of race. It’s usually not out-and-out racism; there’s a kernel of an idea that’s worth discussing, but usually not the way he’s discussing it. His phrasing betrays a tone-deafness that underlies much of his opinion in these areas.

For example,... [More]

I haven’t read much about Ammon Bundy and his gang’s standoff in Oregon. I’ve read so little about it that I had to look up where it was actually happening (other than knowing it was “somewhere in the U.S.”). So it’s some Arizona ranchers occupying a federal building in Oregon. This is definitely a step up from the domestic terrorism of the Unabomber or Timothy McVeigh because at least fewer people are being killed. Still, armed men have occupied federal property and are demanding the release... [More]

In defense of Islam (3QuarksDaily) cites a same-named blog post by Ross Douthat (New York Times) in which he uses quite-dense prose to obfuscate the central message: he argues that the fanaticism of ISIS rises directly from Islamic scripture and shouldn’t be treated as necessarily crazy. The first step in ending a needless war is the recognition that the enemy is not crazy, but Douthat’s interpretation is more insidious, I think.

“Western analysts tend to understate not only the essential religiosity of ISIS’s worldview, but the extent to... [More]”

HRW is clearly in the pocket of the U.S. government. From a recent tweet, which linked to the article Saudi Arabia: King’s Reform Agenda Unfulfilled (HRW),

“King Abdullah’s reign brought about marginal advances for women but failed to secure the fundamental rights of Saudi citizens to free expression, association, and assembly. […]”

King Abdullah's Twipitaph from HRW

The verb employed here is not accurate. You cannot fail at something without actually trying it. In the main tweet, they do it again, characterizing a purely... [More]

I have not seen American Sniper for the same reason that I have not seen Act of Valor, Zero Dark Thirty or Lone Survivor. I did watch one season of Homeland and lasted that long only because my watchin’ buddy refused to stop mid-season. This type of entertainment is mostly just the U.S. military advertising itself through Hollywood’s mouth. I’d rather read the news and come to my own conclusions without the hagiographies.

I watched Battleship ‘cause it had aliens and The Hurt Locker ‘cause the... [More]

After a few days of coverage, the Charlie Hebdo attack had already started to resonate with the same vibrant religious fervor in France as the 9–11 attacks quickly did in America. Through the entire (mainstream and largely fringe) spectrum, though, there was an utter lack of awareness that what happened at those offices was just another normal day in the many places where the West exerts its influence.

Just how sympathetic do the French suppose an average Libyan would be to Parisian wails... [More]

A few month ago, a friend sent a link to this article, The Islamic State Panic by Michael Brenner (Huffington Post). I found this response in my inbox.

tl;dr: Michael Brenner makes the point that the West—especially America—simplifies foreign policy to the detriment of all. He argues that they should stop doing this. I heartily concur and feel that they should, in fact, stop blowing things up entirely.

HuffPo? Really? Ok, fine. Ignore stupid chain of articles littering the right-hand side. Avoid long diatribe about our... [More]

I’d heard that the article In Conversation: Chris Rock by Frank Rich (Vulture) including some groundbreaking statements on race by Chris Rock. I like Chris Rock and I like his standup. He’s a comedian, though, so while his niggers vs. black people bit was funny at the time, in retrospect, it’s a savage attack on the poor and uneducated. Still, admittedly funny at the time.

On Bill Maher

Seeing that Frank Rich of the New York Times had interviewed him was not encouraging. So let’s see what Rock has to say. It starts... [More]

I haven’t really weighed in on this topic because I’m still digesting it. There are so many interlocking parts and so many reasons for why things are not right that an off-the-cuff article just doesn’t do the topic justice. A lot of what you read gives the impression that the fact that people are rioting in one town in the Midwest is a good excuse for trotting out more unsavory opinions in the guise of chastening those thugs and hoodlums who can’t abide by the rule of law.

If you assumed that... [More]

I received the post Maine Just Changed Their Food-Stamp Policy… Every State Should Do This (Conservative Tribune) from a friend.

The friend wondered whether the following was a good idea. They thought it might be, but asked if I could confirm.

“[…] adults 18 to 50 years old with no children and who are able to work must do so or volunteer for 20 hours each week. Otherwise, their benefits will be limited to three months over a three-year period”

This is one of those superficially seductive ideas that keeps coming... [More]

“What do you think of Obama?[1]”

He is Barack Hussein Obama,

44th—and first black—President of the United States of America.

Nobel Peace-prize winner.

So-called leader of the free world.[2]

O-bomber.

The Drone Ranger.

Mr. Guántanamo.

Mr. extraordinary rendition.

Mr. N.S.A.

The whistle-blower hunter.[3]

Defender of the 0.1%.

The question above is posed in different ways, in different tones. It depends on the person posing it. If the person hates Obama—for any of a variety of reasons,... [More]

Congress may be at an ineffective standstill and the next two years are a legislative wasteland stretching before America and the world. The state legislatures, though, aren’t sitting still. Instead, they’re filled with the crème de la crème that America has to offer: from mildly racist to super-racist, from batshit crazy to crazier than a shithouse rat.

After introducing many of the lunatic creatures that will have an inordinate effect on ordinary citizens’ lives, Oliver notes that they are... [More]

The article The IMF’s New Cold War Loan to Ukraine by Michael Hudson (CounterPunch) provides some interesting insight into the IMF’s machinations on behalf of its masters in Europe and the U.S.

“[…] the IMF signed off on the first loan ever to a side engaged in a civil war, not to mention rife with insider capital flight and a collapsing balance of payments.”

The IMF has hard and fast rules for loaning money and is famous the world over for being an exceedingly unforgiving creditor…unless the creditor is the European... [More]

The article Theater of Justice by Molly Crabapple (VICE) is an article by an artist who also occasionally does courtroom sketches.

She tells of Cecily McMillan, who was beaten into a seizure by police offers and who two years later stands trial for assaulting a police officer, facing seven years in prison. The officer’s record of having beaten other suspects was deemed inadmissable.

Or there is the other recent case of a black woman who tried to stand her ground, as others have successfully done. She fired a warning... [More]

I am so tired of hearing of scintillatingly smart people who can’t seem to ever say anything that is even tangentially well-informed. We knew that the Bush administration was a booby-hatch full of cantankerous old farts who hadn’t been right about anything or even had an original thought since before it became illegal to beat your wife and black people, not necessarily in that order. That doesn’t excuse them in any way at all, but they didn’t even really have a veneer of intelligentsia to them.... [More]

As you can well imagine, this is an exhaustive topic. Trying to get a handle on it is like drinking from a firehose. My style of research involved a lot of reading, evaluation and collection of interesting tidbits, some of which are contradictory to previous bits. Interesting for me does not mean “believable” or “true” but that it was well-written, intriguing or contributed to my knowledge. This piece will start with an attempt at an overview with some interwoven notes, followed by a lot of... [More]

The first rule of policing

The post Dallas Cops Fight For the First Rule of Policing by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice) defines that rule as “make it home for dinner”. No matter what else is going on that day or how a given situation develops, the first rule is self-preservation. Everything else—including gunned-down innocents—can be handled later and usually papered over with the help of others, both on the force and on the bench.

This post discusses a shooting incident in Dallas, in which a 48-year–old officer was,... [More]

Cartoonist Ted Rall published the following cartoon at the end of 2013:

On Sec. 107(a) of the NDAA

The first couple of panels document the most recent transgressions that the Obama administration has made under the auspices of the NDAA—the National Defense Authorization Act. These include sweeping away constitutionally guaranteed rights in a manner breathtaking even for citizens who survived eight years of the Bush/Cheney administration.

The final panel shows a soldier wondering how this can be, while another... [More]

Purely out of morbid curiosity, I visited Healthcare.gov to see what’s going on over there. I’d heard so much.

Here are some comments additional to those embedded in the screenshot:

Home page is decent, if a little careless

• It did not reject me because I’m browsing from a foreign country. +1
• It redirected me from www.healthcare.gov to healthcare.gov. Canonical name is the short one. +1
• It loaded quickly. +1
• It’s pretty light on graphics. +1
• There are way too many fonts and font sizes. –1
• Stop using small-caps for anything other... [More]

Why buses represent democracy in action by Enrique Peñalosa (TED)

The title is a way of saying that building bus lines before four-lane highways for cars is inherently more democratic because more people use the buses. It has less to do with democracy and more to do with social fairness and providing for the basic rights to which civilized peoples are entitles. We are talking about a form of socialism here. Instead of letting the elites bend the will of the market with their gravitational wells of overwhelming buying... [More]

So there is, apparently, a redneck actor on a fake-reality show called “Duck Dynasty” who turns out to be, in real life, an anti-gay bigot with completely humdrum and bigoted ideas of everyone’s place in society.

I’ll let you gather your wits as you recover from your shock.

Also unsurprisingly, he thinks that white guys with beards, guns and inappropriate sunglasses sit at the top of the heap.

A&E, which broadcasts this paragon to culture, pulled on his leash and suspended him for a little... [More]

Whether there is such a thing as truly objective journalism—reporting without any explicit or implicit bias—is the subject of the article Is Glenn Greenwald the Future of News? (New York Times). It’s a conversation between Bill Keller—editor of the New York Times—and Glenn Greenwald—currently of the Guardian and, most recently, the driving force behind reporting on NSA spying and distributing Edward Snowden’s revelations.

Greenwald argues quite convincingly that there is only journalism and... [More]

Russell Brand has been in the media of late, the first time because of an acceptance speech at an awards ceremony sponsored by Hugo Boss, during which he reminded everyone from whom their sponsor had gotten his inauspicious start (the S.S. in the 1930s).

In response to that hullabaloo, he responded with the relatively well-written essay Russell Brand and the GQ awards: ‘It’s amazing how absurd it seems’ (Guardian), in which he wrote,

“I could see the room dividing as I spoke. I could hear the laughter... [More]”

The article Girl buys water, spends night in jail by Dylan Stableford (Yahoo! News) describes an utterly lunatic crime-stopping scene:

“[…] the student, [20-year–old] Elizabeth Daly, was walking to her car on April 11 at approximately 10:15 p.m. with a box of sparkling water […] when the agents—six men and one woman, all in plainclothes—approached suspecting the box […] to be a 12-pack of beer. One jumped on the hood of her SUV; another pulled out a gun […]”

Seven agents. Tailing and taking down a college student... [More]

From the article Rand Paul’s Confederacy Scandal Is Not an Anomaly – Libertarianism Is a ‘Philosophy’ That Papers Over Deep Racism in America by Thom Hartmann (AlterNet),

“So now comes a political philosophy—libertarianism—that says everything is fine, everything is equal, and government should get the hell out of the way. […] Of course, […] most [libertarians] probably don’t see how their “get rid of government” policies prop up institutional bigotry, but the reality is that when you blast government as... [More]”

Gibney has quite a good string of documentaries behind him, but We Steal Secrets seems to be a good deal shakier. I have not seen it, but it’s a documentary about WikiLeaks that focuses on the personal weaknesses and personality characteristics of Bradley Manning and Julian Assange without having interviewed either one of them, indeed without having interviewed anyone in the WikiLeaks organization. I reserve final judgment until I’ve seen it, but it doesn’t bode well.

Given that background,... [More]

A couple of days ago, Gleen Greenwald, constitutional and civil-rights lawyer, former Salon blogger and current Guardian blogger and columnist, revealed some top-secret U.S. documents that lay out in quite clear terms the degree to which U.S. government agencies are proud to be intercepting data from myriad sources.

Phone records, social-networking sites, large cloud-data providers, chat tools, video-calling software—almost anything you can think of—were mentioned as current and past... [More]

I’ve been following Lee Camp, a stand-up comedian/activist/blogger for several months now. He’s always been quite good, but he’s hit his stride lately. His “Moment of Clarity” videos are short and interesting and often funny.

The following videos were posted while he’s on tour in the British Isles.

The Most Dangerous Discussion In The World? − MOC #232 by Lee Camp (YouTube)

Citing from the video description:

“There’s a discussion that most people aren’t having and that our media will never dare mention. If we never have it, we may all end up dead. […] So here it... [More]”

Guantánamo is a war crime. It’s illegal by both U.S. and international law. And now, in the article Amid Hunger Strike, Obama Renews Push to Close Cuba Prison (New York Times), we hear that President Obama wants to try closing it again. Does he mean it this time? But what does he mean by close it? And why now? Should we believe his high-minded though glib reasons? Or is cynicism once again more justified than hope?

Why is he trying again? Why now?

As even the article states,

“Mr. Obama made his remarks... [More]”