Mahler's Prodigal Son

There are millions of people around the world who almost idolise Apple, the brand per se and the whole Apple ethos and ecosystem.  Then there are others who adopt the tall poppy syndrome about the wealthiest company in the world.   But all that is immaterial as Apple takes up the challenge of safeguarding the security and integrity of its iPhones.  An analysis in this piece " Like Your Privacy? Then Get Behind Apple’s Battle to Save It " from truthdig (given the importance of the subject re-published here in full) is well-worth reading. "John Kiriakou spent 14 years at the CIA and two years in a federal prison for blowing the whistle on the agency’s use of torture. He served on John Kerry’s Senate Foreign Relations Committee for two years as senior investigator into the Middle East. He writes and speaks about national security, whistleblowing, the prison-industrial complex, and foreign policy, and is an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies and w...

Ouch!   Rolling Stone's take on Donald Trump, his chances of getting that presidency and America's electoral "system" (!)...... "The pundits don’t want to admit it, but it’s sitting there in plain view, 12 moves ahead, like a chess game already won: President Donald Trump. A thousand ridiculous accidents needed to happen in the unlikeliest of sequences for it to be possible, but absent a dramatic turn of events – an early primary catastrophe, Mike Bloomberg ego-crashing the race, etc. – this boorish, monosyllabic TV tyrant with the attention span of an Xbox-playing 11-year-old really is set to lay waste to the most impenetrable oligarchy the Western world ever devised. It turns out we let our electoral process devolve into something so fake and dysfunctional that any half-bright con man with the stones to try it could walk right through the front door and tear it to shreds on the first go. And Trump is no half-bright con man, either. He’s way better than aver...

Credited to Chappette, New York Times

There seems to be no end to which multinationals will go - especially those selling food or drink products - in seeking to mislead the public.    The name of the game is to divert the message from what it ought to be - a la a health warning - to something which benefits the manufacturer.     Take Coca-Cola as a good example. "Coca-Cola is bankrolling a campaign to focus the discussion about obesity in Australia on exercise and away from diet as the solution to the health epidemic. Last August, Coca-Cola's global boss promised to publish all financing of health groups and research globally after revelations of its activities by the The New York Times. Within six weeks it disclosed that the soft drink giant had given $US21.8 million ($30.5 million) to fund research and $US96.8 million to fund what it calls "health and wellbeing partnerships" in the United States. More than six months later, no such disclosures have been made in Australia." Continue...

  Far from home: Syrian refugees disembark from a flooded raft on a beach at Lesbos last October (Yannis Behrakis / Reuters) The realities of what the people of Greece are facing on a daily basis - the flood of refugees from Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East landing on their shores - is clearly detailed in this piece in The Nation .     One would have to conclude that the people of Lesbos are real heroes.......not the pious politicians standing on their soap-boxes. "Stratis Valiamos, 40, is a fisherman from Sykamnias, a village on this Greek island that is at the epicenter of Europe’s refugee crisis. Valiamos and other fishermen now routinely abandon their daily work to rescue people stranded in the Aegean, hauling rickety wooden ships crammed with hundreds of refugees off the rocks and towing them to port. They dive in the sea fully dressed to save drowning people of all ages. “Every time I go to sea, I know something’s going to happen,” Valiamos...

We have an image of Saudi Arabia of heat, lots of sand, a wealthy country, a major oil supplier and a regime of sheiks who "run" the Kingdom.   Not to be forgotten in all of this is that the Saudis are allies of the Americans and that country's allies.    But, a question now increasingly being asked is whether the Kingdom can continue to exist as is . "For half a century, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has been the linchpin of U.S. Mideast policy. A guaranteed supply of oil has bought a guaranteed supply of security. Ignoring autocratic practices and the export of Wahhabi extremism, Washington stubbornly dubs its ally “moderate.” So tight is the trust that U.S. special operators dip into Saudi petrodollars as a counterterrorism slush fund without a second thought. In a sea of chaos, goes the refrain, the kingdom is one state that’s stable. But is it? In fact, Saudi Arabia is no state at all. There are two ways to describe it: as a political enterprise with a cle...

Guy Rundle, who writes for Australia's on line crikey, reports on the last 48 hours' odd and extraordinary "happenings" in the US Presidential race.......   "In the past 48 hours alone, we had: Donald Trump serve a libel threat, cease-and-desist letter on Ted Cruz, for an ad that consists entirely of footage of Trump saying he is pro-choice on abortion; Cruz holding a presser saying that he would take the suit, and might even run the case himself, taking evidence from Trump himself; Jeb tweeting a picture of a gift he was presented with -- a gun, engraved with his name. The picture was labelled "America"; Rubio laughing at an audience member yelling "Waterboard Hillary!" Hillary running an ad with footage from a meeting where an eight-year-old girl says she's worried that her parents may be deported, and Hillary nuzzles her and says, "Let me do the worrying"; Team Cruz running an ad that "shows" Rubio and Obama...