By Tom Engelhardt | ( Tomdispatch.com ) | – – This is not about Donald Trump. And I mean it. From the moment the first scribe etched a paean of praise to Nebuchadnezzar into a stone tablet, it’s reasonable to conclude that never in history has the media covered a single human being as it […]
Archives for October 2016
De Mistura: al-Qaeda must leave E. Aleppo to save it from Destruction
by Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – UN Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura has addressed the Levant Conquest Front, whose leader, Abu Muhammad al-Julani, has pledged allegiance to al-Qaeda leader and 9/11 mastermind Ayman al-Zawahiri. De Mistura said that among the 8,000 or so fighters from rebel groups in the East […]
Hurricane Matthew a Herald of Man-Made Climate Change
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – If your tv isn’t telling you the below, turn it off and read more Informed Comment columns instead. Hurricane Matthew is unusually strong, and was for a while there a level 5 tropical storm. Level 5 hurricanes only form when the top layer of the ocean […]
Return of Virulent Nationalism: how language is being used to mark national borders
Mario Saraceni | (The Conversation) | – – According to a series of newspapers, immigrants will apparently change the English language in Britain beyond repair over the next 50 years. The Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express have all run alarming stories on this topic. Language will change “because there are so […]
NSA again hacked by own Contractor, but wants us to trust them with our Data
TeleSur | – – “I thought the Third World War had started,” the man’s neighbor described the raid and arrest in August. A National Security Agency (NSA) contractor has been arrested and charged with stealing highly classified information, U.S. authorities said Wednesday, a data breach that could result in a damaging new leak about the […]
Israeli Military seizes Female Gaza aid Flotilla
By Andrea Germanos, staff writer | (Commondreams.org) | – – Group including Nobel laureate Mairead Maguire aimed ‘to highlight the vital role women play not only in the resistance movement, but in the survival of the Palestinian people as a whole’. The Israeli navy on Wednesday stopped a boat carrying international female activists, preventing them […]
“Little Trump” Pence: Bomb Syria, confront Russia, smear refugees; & smoking doesn’t cause Cancer
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – Trump running mate Mike Pence continued the unreality of this election season in Tuesday’s debate by denying many things that are true and asserting many things that are not true. For example there was this exchange: “KAINE: [Trump said that] More nations should get nuclear weapons. […]
Balder & Dash: Would our presidential Candidates start a Nuclear War? They won’t answer.
By Andrew J. Bacevich | ( Tomdispatch.com) | – – You may have missed it. Perhaps you dozed off. Or wandered into the kitchen to grab a snack. Or by that point in the proceedings were checking out Seinfeld reruns. During the latter part of the much hyped but excruciating-to-watch first presidential debate, NBC Nightly […]
Yahoo helped in unconstitutional US Gov. mass Surveillance of Americans’ Email
By Andrew Crocker and Mark Rumold | (Electronic Frontier Foundation) | – – In a bombshell published today, Reuters is reporting that, in 2015, Yahoo complied with an order it received from the U.S. government to search all of its users’ incoming emails, in real time. There’s still much that we don’t know at this […]