Mahler's Prodigal Son

Take a deep breath........The NSA has been collecting data to the extent of 5 billion records a day. "Every new revelation about the global reach of the National Security Agency underscores that the extremism of the surveillance state has reached gargantuan proportions. The Washington Post just reported that the NSA “is gathering nearly 5 billion records a day on the whereabouts of cellphones around the world.” Documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden have forced top officials in Washington to admit the indefensible while defending it. One of the main obstacles to further expansion of their Orwellian empire is real journalism. Real journalism is “subversive” of deception that can’t stand the light of day. This is a huge problem for the Obama administration and the many surveillance-state flunkies of both parties in Congress. What they want is fake journalism, deferring to government storylines and respectful of authority even when it is illegitimate. In motion now, o...

How utterly, utterly appalling that Great Britain faces the crisis it does - namely, hunger to the extent of it being a "public health emergency".    The Independent reports. "Hunger in Britain has reached the level of a “public health emergency” and the Government may be covering up the extent to which austerity and welfare cuts are adding to the problem, leading experts have said. In a letter to the British Medical Journal, a group of doctors and senior academics from the Medical Research Council and two leading universities said that the effect of Government policies on vulnerable people’s ability to afford food needed to be “urgently” monitored. A surge in the number of people requiring emergency food aid, a decrease in the amount of calories consumed by British families, and a doubling of the number of malnutrition cases seen at English hospitals represent “all the signs of a public health emergency that could go unrecognised until it is too late to take preven...

We always read about corruption in African and South American countries.    However, many Western nations don't come out looking all that good in Transparency International's 2013 Global Corruption Table . "Afghanistan, North Korea and Somalia are seen as the world's most corrupt countries while Denmark with New Zealand are the least corrupt each scoring 91 out of 100 on the least sleazy list. Australia had a score of 81 in the top 10 clean countries." Meanwhile, perhaps coincidentally, Professor Juan Cole, on his Informed Comment deals with corruption in the US in a piece " Top 10 Ways the US is the Most Corrupt Country in the World ". "While it is true that you don’t typically have to bribe your postman to deliver the mail in the US, in many key ways America’s political and financial practices make it in absolute terms far more corrupt than the usual global South suspects. After all, the US economy is worth over $16 trillion a ye...

Writing on truthdig , Eugene Robinson, poses a salient and relevant question.   The use of drones might be the weapons of choice to-go-to for Obama, but are they not mere implements for murdering people - and therefore aren't all Americans complicit in standing back and allowing the drones to be used as they are? "U.S. drone attacks in Afghanistan, Pakistan and other countries may be militarily effective, but they are killing innocent civilians in a way that is obscene and immoral. I’m afraid that ignoring this ugly fact makes Americans complicit in murder. It is understandable why President Obama has made drone attacks his go-to weapon in the fight against terrorists and the Taliban. Armed, pilotless aircraft allow the CIA and the military to target individuals in enemy strongholds without putting U.S. lives at risk. But efficacy is not legitimacy, and I don’t see how drone strikes can be considered a wholly legitimate way to wage war. This is an unpopular view in Washing...

Pleasing piece in The New York Times that the sale of ebooks has stalled somewhat as people, including teenagers, discover the magic of books of old (paper to you!) over pixels on a Kindle or whatever. "I’ve struggled in the past with the pros and cons of print versus digital, and often opted for digital, with the ability to stuff a thousand books on a single device, a built-in dictionary and the ease of being able to share passages on social networks. But e-books can also be really annoying. On my iPad, if a text message, email or other alert comes through, I’m quickly jolted out of the book I’m engrossed in. Even when my devices are in airplane mode, or I’m using a Kindle, I still have to contend with Pixel. But when I touched that physical book again for the first time in years, it was like the moment you hear a nostalgic song on the radio and are instantly lost in it. The feeling of a print book, with its rough paper and thick spine, is an absorbing and pleasurable experi...

"Ten percent of all of the photographs made in the entire history of photography were made last year — an astounding figure. More than ever before, thanks in part to cell phone technology, the world is engaged with photography and communicating through pictures." So writes Time in relation to its Time Picks the Top 10 Photos of 2012 . "Nonetheless, a great photograph will rise above all the others. The ten photographs we present here are the pictures that moved us most in 2012. They all deliver a strong emotional impact — whether they show a child mourning his father who was killed by a sniper in Syria (slide #3); a heartbreaking scene in a Gaza City morgue (slide #1); a haunting landscape of New Jersey coastline after Hurricane Sandy, a rollercoaster submerged under the tide (slide #2); or a rare glimpse of President Obama moments before he goes out on stage during a campaign rally (slide #9). We spoke to each of the photographers about their images, and thei...

From CommonDreams : "Launched this week on the streets of D.C: Buses with signs reading, "Thank You to Edward Snowden - We the People Say No to the Surveillance State." Brought to you by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fun, whose ongoing, crowd-funded campaign was so successful they've expanded the project." And it's no wonder that the general populace is against government when one reads the startling revelation in The Guardian , today, of Australia having actually volunteered to deliver up data about its citizens to the USA. "Australia's surveillance agency offered to share information collected about ordinary Australian citizens with its major intelligence partners, according to a secret 2008 document leaked by the US whistleblower Edward Snowden. The document shows the partners discussing whether or not to share "medical, legal or religious information", and increases concern that the agency could be operating outside its ...