Jon Stewart has discovered the most horrible thing in the world on Fox Cable News. A YMCA in St. Paul Minnesota has set aside an hour for Somali Muslim women to swim at the pool, no men allowed. Actually gender-segregated swimming is quite common and is an accommodation also made for some Jewish Americans and […]
A Jewish Woman in Tunis, 1880: Photo of the Day
Jewish Woman in Tunis, c. 1880. via University of Chicago Middle East Photos For the history of Tunisian Jews see this site
Trashing the Law against warrantless GPS tracking: NSA nabs 5 Billion Phone location Records a Day
Remember when the National Security Agency officials maintained that they were “only” collecting “metadata” from your cell phones? What they meant by that was that they weren’t listening in on your calls, just noting who you call and when. I said at the time that ‘metadata’ on cell phones inevitably includes information on where you […]
GOP: No Climate Change because, Bible
Opposing views points to the scary ignorance and bible-thumping to which GOP representatives in Congress are appealing in their genocidal stand against quick action on climate change. If you have to have a biblical theology about these things, it should be the old-fashioned one that human beings are stewards of the earth and have a […]
Jazz Oud from Tunisia: Dhafer Youseff, “Eastern Waves”
Tunisian oud jazz by Dhafer Youseff Dhafer Youseff Quartet, “Eastern Waves” (“Les Ondes Orientales”) For more on the artist see CCTV :
Almost Human: How Robots, Race and Neoliberalism killed Detroit and what it Means for You
Detroit can go into bankruptcy, a judge has ruled. Likely it means that workers’ pensions will be at least in part stolen from them. It is a good occasion to reprint this recent piece on post-industrial decline, robots and the future of capital and labor: Reprint Edition The big question is whether Detroit’s bankruptcy and […]
Nevada’s “Crescent Dune” Solar Facility will Produce Energy at Night
Jared Anderson at Breaking Energy writes of technologies for solar power storage that allow the energy generated by the sun to be released at night: “a US-based company will jump ahead of the competition next year with its molten salt storage technique. “This technology at this size would leap-frog us into [energy] storage leaders,” Solar […]
Blacked Out: Could Governments just Erase Dissidents from the Internet with a Click?
By Peter Van Buren What if Edward Snowden was made to disappear? No, I’m not suggesting some future CIA rendition effort or a who-killed-Snowden conspiracy theory of a disappearance, but a more ominous kind. What if everything a whistleblower had ever exposed could simply be made to go away? What if every National Security Agency […]
Sunni-Shiite Tensions soar in Lebanon; Hizbullah accuses Saudis in Iran Embassy Bombing
Several dramatic accusations and events have heightened Sunni-Shiite tensions in Lebanon, as the Syrian Civil War continues to spill over onto Beirut’s politics. In the northern city of Tripoli, Sunni Salafis (who support the rebels in Syria) have fought in recent days with `Alawis (a sect of the Shiites, who support Syria’s Alawite-dominated Baath government), […]
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