Just look at the individual words which we have recently co-opted from the US military. When we westerners find that ‘our’ enemies — al-Qaeda, for example, or the Taliban — have set off more bombs and staged more attacks than usual, we call it ‘a spike in violence’. Ah yes, a ‘spike’! A ‘spike’ in [...]
Just in time for November’s congressional elections, the Supreme Court today handed down a 5-4 ruling (Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission [PDF]) that decrees that the Government may not restrict corporations from spending as much money as they want to influence political campaigns, particularly with the production and airing of ads. The decision reversed [...]
The more we undermine our own laws, the more we convert our buildings into fortresses, the more we reduce the freedoms and liberties at the foundation of our societies, the more we’re doing the terrorists’ job for them. (via Bruce Schneier) » Share on Facebook
Passengers aboard a December 25th Northwest Airlines flight subdued a Nigerian man who had ignited a device taped to his leg. Ever the reactionaries, the fine people at the Transportation Security Administration (as directed by the US Department of Homeland Security) have hatched some wide-ranging measures in order to alleviate the rest of us from [...]
Further evidence that many Americans are emotional, intellectual infants. Transportation Security Administration officials said passengers aboard U.S. Airways Flight 192 from Orlando, Fla., on Saturday night reported that two men, described as Middle Eastern, were acting strangely and talking loudly to each other in a foreign language. A nearby passenger also observed one of men [...]
“We are an agricultural company,” begins Monsanto’s marketing spiel. And wouldn’t you trust the company who invented aspartame and bovine growth hormone to invent food for you? How about if that company also helped develop Agent Orange? The fact is that you’ve probably eaten food genetically enhanced by Monsanto in the past day alone, and [...]
According to National Review writer (and self-styled philanthropist) John J. Miller, a little shame is good medicine for the one-in-eight Americans currently taking advantage of state welfare: The federal government may think it’s doing people a favor by providing them with access to food, but it’s doing them a disservice if it also robs them [...]
Ever wonder why Pakistanis fear the US more than they fear the Taliban? In this appearance on GRITtv, Jeremy Scahill provides some good reasons why they might, and why you should too: Beginning almost immediately after September 11th, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld essential segregated JSOC (about JSOC) from the rest [...]
The Financial Times is saying that Microsoft is ready to pay Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. to remove its news content from Google (no one tell Fox about robots.txt, please). The fact that this is a user-hostile strategy — users don’t keep track of which companies may be listed in which search engine — is right [...]
I wrote two years ago about the carrot of convenience the corporations will dangle over the heads of the consumer nation to coerce them into forfeiting their own freedoms. New “fast-pass” traffic lanes between California and Mexico promise to speed processing of the 55,000 vehicles that enter the U.S., provided they’re willing to be tagged [...]
Klaus Ek doesn’t like things that are bad, to put it succinctly. Read more about him here.