Are Feds Investigating “Boston Bomber” Trail, or Covering It Up?

Posted on by
Reply

Feds Accused Of Harassing “Boston Bomber” Friends, And Friends Of Friends

by: Dave Lindorff, Russ Baker and Milicent Cranor

(This story originally ran in Who What Why News)

In the six months since the Boston Marathon bombing, the FBI has by all appearances been relentlessly intimidating, punishing, deporting and, in one case, shooting to death, persons connected, sometimes only tangentially, with the alleged bombers.

All of these individuals have something in common: If afforded constitutional protections and treated as witnesses instead of perpetrators, they could potentially help clear up questions about the violence of April 15. And they might also be able to help clarify the methods and extent of the FBI’s recruitment of immigrants and others for undercover work, and how that could relate to the Bureau’s prior relationship with the bombing suspects—a relationship the Bureau has variously hidden or downplayed.

Who Cares? We Do

The Boston tragedy may seem like a remote, distant memory, yet the bombing warrants continued scrutiny as a seminal event of our times. It was, after all, the only major terror attack in the United States since 9/11. With its grisly scenes of severed limbs and dead bodies, including that of a child, it shook Americans profoundly.

As importantly, in its aftermath we’ve seen public acquiescence in an ongoing erosion of civil liberties and privacy rights that began with 9/11—and to an unprecedented expansion of federal authority in the form of a unique military/law enforcement “lockdown” of a major metropolitan area.

Ashur Miraliev and Tatian Gruzdeva, threatened with deportation or deported, and Ibragim Todashev, killed during an

FBI victims: Ashur Miraliev and Tatian Gruzdeva, threatened with deportation or deported, and Ibragim Todashev, killed during an interrogation

Nonetheless, at the time, most news organizations simply accepted at face value the shifting and thin official accounts of the strange events. Today few give the still-unfolding saga even the most minimal attention. And it is most certainly still unfolding, as we shall see.

The Little-Noticed Post-Marathon Hunt

The FBI’s strange obsession with marginal figures loosely connected to the bombing story began last May, with the daily questioning of a Chechen immigrant, Ibragim Todashev, and of his girlfriend and fellow immigrant, Tatiana Gruzdeva. Todashev had been a friend of the alleged lead Boston Marathon bomber, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who died in a hail of police gunfire four days after the bombing. Tsarnaev’s younger brother Dzhokhar barely survived a massive police strafing of a trailered boat in which he was hiding, trapped and unarmed.

During one interrogation in Orlando, Florida, where Todashev was living, something went awry and he ended up dead from gunshots. Although to date the FBI has provided only hazy and inconsistent accounts of that incident, the killing of a suspect and potential witness in custody was clearly a highly irregular and problematical occurrence, replete with apparent violations of Bureau and standard law-enforcement procedure.

On the heels of those two deaths and the one near-death has followed what appears to be a concerted effort directed against a larger circle of people connected, if not to the Tsarnaevs, then to Todashev.

The purpose of this campaign is not clear, but it has raised some eyebrows.

In an interview with WhoWhatWhy, Hassan Shibly, executive director of the Florida chapter of the Center for American Islamic Relations (CAIR), described aggressive behavior directed by FBI agents at vocal friends of the dead Todashev: using suspected informants to monitor their press conferences, following targeted individuals around, interrogating them for hours—often without an attorney, and jailing them on what he says are trumped-up charges.

Shibly further claims that government agents are threatening these immigrants with deportation unless they agree to “cooperate”—a tactic which he portrays as seeking to enroll these people as de facto spies for the federal government.

Two people have left the country to escape further harassment. Another has been deported, while a fourth is currently facing deportation; none  of them has a criminal record. The bulk of this group were at most friends of a friend of Tamerlan Tsarnaev—and apparently didn’t personally know either of the Tsarnaevs.
For the rest of this article, please go to: Who What Why News

Podcast Roundup: Halloween Edition

Posted on by
Reply
Photo: The Onion

Photo: The Onion

Though I don’t regularly feature podcasts delving into horror/sci-fi aspects of pop culture or the world of metaphysics and the paranormal, today seems an appropriate time to share a few in observance of Halloween, All Hallow’s Eve, Samhain, Day of the Dead, etc.

10/27 Maja D’Aoust and Erik Davis discuss magical and synchronistic aspects of politics and modern culture at Expanding Mind: Show link: http://prn.fm/category/archives/expanding-mind/

10/28 A great discussion on John Carpenter’s 1982 remake of “The Thing” and what makes it a classic horror film at the Debatable Podcast: Show link: http://debatablepodcast.tumblr.com/post/65307821240/episode-56-the-thing-with-sip-eric-sipple-joins

10/29 Guillermo Jimenez and Dr. Paul Cantor have a conversation about the political meaning of apocalyptic “end of the world” narratives in shows like The Walking Dead, X- Files, Fringe, and Falling Skies from a libertarian perspective: Show Link: http://tracesofreality.com/2013/10/29/tor-radio-the-truth-behind-the-walking-dead-liberty-vs-authority-in-pop-culture-with-dr-paul-cantor/

10/30 Tim Binnall and David Acord commemorate the 75th anniversary of Orson Welles’ infamous “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast with an analysis of the program, how it came to be, its importance in the context of emerging technology and the field of media literacy, and how it’s connected to conspiracy and UFOlogy: Show link: http://www.binnallofamerica.com/boaa103013.html

Judging from the last few minutes of this trailer for his film “F For Fake”, Welles himself was involved in perpetuating the mystery and speculation surrounding his War of the Worlds broadcast:

10/30 The always educational “Stuff They Don’t Want You to Know” video podcast covers the origins of Halloween traditions:

Show link: http://www.howstuffworks.com/podcasts/stuff-they-dont-want-you-to-know.rss

The Real Reason U.S. Government Targets Whistleblowers

Posted on by
1

BHO Prosecutes Whistleblowers_thumb[1]

I’ve mentioned in past posts such as this my thoughts on reasons behind the government’s war on whistleblowers, and it has nothing to do with protecting national security (except in the sense of protecting criminals working within the national security state). Recently, Washington’s Blog supported this view in greater detail with an abundance of documentation and the following commentary:

…Indeed, the worse the acts by officials, the more they say we it must be covered up … for “the good of the country”.

…Obviously, the government wants to stop whistleblowers because they interfere with the government’s ability to act in an unaccountable manner. As Glenn Greenwald writes:

It should not be difficult to understand why the Obama administration is so fixated on intimidating whistleblowers and going far beyond any prior administration – including those of the secrecy-obsessed Richard Nixon and George W Bush – to plug all leaks. It’s because those methods are the only ones preventing the US government from doing whatever it wants in complete secrecy and without any accountability of any kind.

But whistleblowers also interfere with the government’s ability to get away with hypocrisy. As two political science professors from George Washington University (Henry Farrell and Martha Finnemore) show, the government is so hell-bent to punish Manning and Snowden because their leaks are putting an end to the ability of the US to use hypocrisy as a weapon:

The U.S. establishment has often struggled to explain exactly why these leakers [Manning, Snowden, etc.] pose such an enormous threat.

The deeper threat that leakers such as Manning and Snowden pose is more subtle than a direct assault on U.S. national security: they undermine Washington’s ability to act hypocritically and get away with it. Their danger lies not in the new information that they reveal but in the documented confirmation they provide of what the United States is actually doing and why. When these deeds turn out to clash with the government’s public rhetoric, as they so often do, it becomes harder for U.S. allies to overlook Washington’s covert behavior and easier for U.S. adversaries to justify their own.

As the United States finds itself less able to deny the gaps between its actions and its words, it will face increasingly difficult choices — and may ultimately be compelled to start practicing what it preaches. Hypocrisy is central to Washington’s soft power — its ability to get other countries to accept the legitimacy of its actions — yet few Americans appreciate its role.

Manning’s and Snowden’s leaks mark the beginning of a new era in which the U.S. government can no longer count on keeping its secret behavior secret. Hundreds of thousands of Americans today have access to classified documents that would embarrass the country if they were publicly circulated. As the recent revelations show, in the age of the cell-phone camera and the flash drive, even the most draconian laws and reprisals will not prevent this information from leaking out. As a result, Washington faces what can be described as an accelerating hypocrisy collapse — a dramatic narrowing of the country’s room to maneuver between its stated aspirations and its sometimes sordid pursuit of self-interest. The U.S. government, its friends, and its foes can no longer plausibly deny the dark side of U.S. foreign policy and will have to address it head-on.

The era of easy hypocrisy is over.

Professors Farrell and Finnemore note that the government has several options for dealing with ongoing leaks. They conclude that the best would be for the government to actually do what it says.

What a novel idea …

As examples of the hypocrisy Farrell and Finnemore were talking about, Washington’s Blog listed the following:

  • Labeled indiscriminate killing of civilians as terrorism. Yet the American military indiscriminately kills innocent civilians (and see this), calling it “carefully targeted strikes”. For example, when Al Qaeda, Syrians or others target people attending funerals of those killed – or those attempting to rescue people who have been injured by – previous attacks, we rightfully label it terrorism. But the U.S. government does exactly the same thing (more), pretending that it is all okay
  • Scolded tyrants who launch aggressive wars to grab power or plunder resources. But we ourselves have launched a series of wars for oil (and here) and gas

Read the complete article here: http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/10/the-real-reason-u-s-targets-whistleblowers.html

Chemtrails: A Planetary Catastrophe

Posted on by
Reply

chemtrails-292x300

Originally posted at GeoEngineering Watch on September 20, 2013

Planet Earth has been besieged by many and diverse scientific experiments over the past one hundred years. Applied science and technology have seen a literal explosion of top secret and highly classified operations conducted in the atmosphere, throughout the planetary surface, as well as deep within the Earth’s crust. However, none comes close to the degree of round-the-clock damage inflicted on the biosphere as the DARPA-sponsored program of geo-engineering.

Just one component of this secret geo-engineering program is known as chemtrails. For those who have never heard of chemtrails, they are not to be confused with contrails, which are the normal exhaust vapors ejected from jet engines in flight. Here is a photo of numerous chemtrails having just been laid down by special jets equipped to do the job:

Can you imagine that the government has labeled these chemtrails as normal contrail activity?

Geoengineeringwatch.org
(This website is the most definitive on the internet regarding geoengineering, chemtrails, and other related subjects which inform the thesis:
Geo-engineering is systematically pushing the planet past points of no return because of the convergence of several other destructive paradigms.)

Every reader of this article needs to understand that, where it concerns the outright destruction of the human habitat, geo-engineering reigns supreme in it’s potential to render the planet unfit for life … all life — human, animal, and plant. Geo-engineering has so many different facets to it, each of which are extraordinarily harmful to all levels of the Earth’s atmosphere, the entire surface environment, as well as the subterranean geology and oceans of the world.

So dangerous and little understood are the far-reaching repercussions of this geo-engineering assault that those of us who are initiated in this realm wonder if we are literally “one minute to midnight“.

For the reader’s benefit we have included a short photo-documentary so that all doubt will be removed as to the pervasiveness and relentlessness of chemtrail spraying of the skies throughout the world.
image004

image006

image008

image009

image011

image012

image013

image015

image017

image019

image020

image021

image022

image024

image027

image028

image030

image032

image033

Surely we have made the point by now, and that point is well taken. If not, then one is necessarily compelled to read further.

What exactly is a chemtrail? What are the toxic chemicals they are spraying on us?

“The term chemtrail is a combination of the words “chemical” and “trail,” just as contrail is a contraction of “condensation trail.” The term does not refer to other forms of aerial spraying such as agricultural spraying (‘crop dusting’), cloud seeding, skywriting, or aerial firefighting. The term specifically refers to aerial trails … caused by the systematic high-altitude release of chemical substances not found in ordinary contrails, resulting in the appearance of characteristic sky tracks.

“The chemtrail … trails left by aircraft are chemical or biological agents deliberately sprayed at high altitudes for purposes undisclosed to the general public and directed by various government officials.

“… the existence of chemtrails … phenomena as streams that persist for hours and that, with their criss-cross, grid-like or parallel stripe patterns, eventually blend to form large clouds. Proponents view the presence of visible color spectra in the streams, unusual concentrations of sky tracks in a single area, or lingering tracks left by unmarked or military airplanes flying at atypical altitudes or locations as markers of chemtrails.
– Wikipedia

(You know when Wikipedia provides such an accurate description, superficial though it may be, that there’s much more to this covert op than even the best researchers have been able to determine.)

For a more in depth discussion we will defer to the experts who have scientifically analyzed chemtrails to the greatest extent possible. Their explanation is as good as it gets.
GeoEngineering Watch

As for the chemical components which have been found in their wake, these known toxins can no longer be denied. The following website is a good place to start to answer these two questions.
Geoengineering & Chemtrails: What In The World Are They Spraying? And Why?

Here is a list of chemicals which are routinely disseminated via chemtrail spraying:

“Over the past decade, independent testing of Chemtrails around the country has shown a dangerous, extremely poisonous brew that includes: barium, nano aluminum-coated fiberglass [known as CHAFF], radioactive thorium, cadmium, chromium, nickel, desiccated blood, mold spores, yellow fungal mycotoxins, ethylene dibromide, and polymer fibers. Barium can be compared to the toxicity of arsenic. Barium is known to adversely affect the heart. Aluminum has a history of damaging brain function. Independent researchers and labs continue to show off-the-scale levels of these poisons. A few “anonymous” officials have acknowledged this on-going aerosol spraying.”[1]

We in no way mean to minimize the incessant injury to human health across the planet which occurs through the breathing and ingestion of the chemicals which are contained in chemtrails. What good can possibly come from barium salts or aluminum oxide or vaporized mercury or strontium 90 or uranium 238 being sprayed throughout the skies worldwide? Clearly, the extremely deleterious effects to human health, as well as to all living organisms, is self evident.

However, the purpose of this essay is not to further unveil their agenda with regard to human engineering of the physical organism. Rather, the scope of this article is to lay bare the most profound and fundamental alterations which geo-engineering is producing to the planet and its atmosphere. When these are both permanently altered in ways that are irreversible, the human race is then confronted with an extinction level event (ELE). Ongoing, slow motion, insidious, under the radar, pernicious to living organisms, but nevertheless an ELE.

Geo-engineering is a term which includes highly advanced forms of applied science and technologies, various newfangled chemical agents and synthetic materials, scientific bending of physical reality, as well as an assortment of reverse engineered modalities which are combined to produce specific outcomes. Because of the complexity of this essentially callow experiment, there are an infinite number of permutations which can be executed at any given time or place. Therefore, the number of opportunities for things to go wrong can be intensified exponentially.

Of course, the Butterfly Effect takes on new and dramatic meaning in the context of geo-engineering because nothing ever happens in a vacuum on this blue orb of ours. In fact, the more that the scientific community attempts to engineer weather (e.g. by manipulating hurricane and tornadoes or creating rain clouds) the more the boomerrang effect takes hold.

“A butterfly flaps its wings somewhere and the wind changes, and a warm front hits a cold front off the coast of western Africa and before you know it you’ve got a hurricane closing in. By the time anyone figured out the storm was coming, it was too late to do anything but batten down the hatches and exercise damage control.”
― Karen Marie Moning, Darkfever

For those who have never seen the actual aerosol sprays being ejected from the planes which are specially equipped, here are just a few snapshots. We only wish to make the point that this global chemtrail operation is certainly a ‘little more’ consequential than a butterfly beating its wings in Brazil or Botswana.

image036

image038

image039 image041 image043

DF-ST-90-05759

image046

image047

image049

image051

image053

image055

image056

image058

image059

image060

image061

image062

image063

image064

image065
HAARP-generated frequencies being conveyed through chemtrail-laden skies

The rapid proliferation of chemtrail spraying over the past few years has greatly increased the opportunities for frequencies to be disseminated through the ‘new’ atmosphere that is being engineered. These frequencies are set to produce a number of different outcomes, the most significant being to slow down the global warming phenomenon which is currently manifesting everywhere on the planet.

Because of such ill-fated attempts to effectuate such drastic changes in weather patterns that have been established for centuries, we now see drought where rain was once plentiful. And monsoons where there was drought.

For instance there are locations in Northern California and Oregon that have been without rain for six months. The forests in that area are literally dying because of lack of water and their consequent weakening which makes them susceptible to pestilence and disease.

Likewise, there are areas in the Southeast such as Florida and South Georgia which have just seen their first monsoon season in modern history. The meteorological dynamics for both of these radical shifts are directly cause by geo-engineering.  In fact, although it is a very complicated story, and one that is almost unbelievable at times, conclusive evidence has been amassed that supports the ubiquitous damage to the environment caused by chemtrails and geo-engineering.

In our next essay we will lay bare the geo-engineering agenda which has given rise to these climatological anomalies. When evaluated in the aggregate around the globe, it will be understood that weather patterns on Planet Earth will never be the same again. It is for this reason that the Cosmic Convergence Research Group (CCRG) has begun this series on Geo-engineering and Chemtrails.

There is perhaps no greater threat to the sustainability of life on Earth than this issue of geo-engineering. One of the primary reasons is because it remains hidden and denied by the governments of the world. Therefore it continues unabated, and is expanded with every turn of the globe.

Those of us who know and have witnessed its exceptionally destructive results, and have protested, have been faced with fierce resistance. We intend to deeply explore the reasons for this unparalleled obstruction, and reveal how critical it is that humankind terminate this agenda once and for all.

For reasons that will become obvious, the CCRG highly recommends the viewing and distribution of the following two videos:

What in the World Are They Spraying? (Full Length)

Why in the World are They Spraying? (Full Length Documentary)

Conclusion:

How can their possibly be a conclusion to this introductory piece on geo-engineering when we’ve barely scratched the surface?

When glaciers that have survived over millennia are melting at record rates, and the polar icecaps are disintegrating before our eyes, one begins to apprehend the gravity of this matter. Were one to objectively assess the catastrophic weather events over the past ten years, it would become readily apparent that forces are at work that cannot be slowed down. Any attempt to do so will only make matters substantially worse. And so they have.

Because of man’s insistence on playing god with the forces of nature, the normal balance has been irrevocably altered. As the scientific community continues to apply a “pharmaceutical approach” to fix things, it is clear that much worse scenarios are being set in motion. By treating the symptoms of a planetary transformation which must take its course, those governments and corporations responsible have essentially thrown more fuel on the fire. The “fire” of global warming (or global climate change, whichever you prefer) will not be extinguished until Mother Earth has completed a requisite period of renewal and rebirth.

It’s now time for the planetary civilization to participate in, rather than impede, this necessary process of planetary metamorphosis.

Cosmic Convergence Research Group
Submitted: September 11, 2013
cosmicconvergence2012@gmail.com

Endnotes:
[1] “Chemtrails: The Consequences of Toxic Metals and Chemical Aerosols on Human Health” By Dr. Ilya Sandra Perlingieri, Global Research, May 12, 2010

Required Reading:
To fully understand why such a fundamentally flawed geo-engineering paradigm
was even created, the following essay will provide some answers:
Cosmic Convergence Accelerates Epochal Planetary Transformation

Author’s Note:
The key take-away from this essay is that geo-engineering represent perhaps the single greatest threat to the biosphere. Because of its pervasiveness and profundity, geo-engineering has the potential to perpetuate numerous self-destructive feedback loops many of which have already been operative for decades.
Especially when considered in the context of 2013 catastophism, geo-engineering may very well provide the straw that breaks the back of Planet Earth. Why? Because of the convergence of so many other ongoing events and processes – both manmade and naturally occurring on the earth and within the solar system – which present considerable stresses to the planetary living environment.
When the multitude of ecosystems start to collapse around the world, those breaking points become history. Each of them may eventually translate to a point of no return, if they haven’t already. As certain key environmental thresholds are exceeded, humankind is challenged to reverse trends which may no longer be possible to reverse.  Too many detrimental and/or counter-productive trajectories are already pointing northward.
It is in this global context which geo-engineering can produce many awesome, unknown, and irrevocable unintended consequences. It appears to serve as a trigger for much of what has already been thrown out of balance. By working synergistically with other negative feedback loops, geo-engineering can also serve to significantly accentuate various downward spirals of planetary and atmospheric degradation.
That’s precisely why it must be terminated — NOW!

image067

image069

image071

image073
image074
image075
image076
image077
image078

Out of the Wild

Posted on by
Reply

london20after20people-jj-001

At Orion Magazine, authors William Cronon and Michael Pollan share a stimulating conversation about how language shapes our world. They cover questions such as “what is wild?”, “what is cultivated?”, and “what can these ideas teach us about our relationship to landscape?”. What I found most compelling was the last part of the conversation where they talk about the power and importance of storytelling:

Bill:  Right. Ecology, storytelling, history—they all render connections visible. We make that which is invisible visible through story, and thereby reveal people’s relationships to other living things.

Michael:  Stories establish canons of beauty, too. There is a role for art in changing cultural norms about what’s worth valuing. One hundred fifty years ago, certain people looked at a farm and saw what you might see if you look today at a nuclear power plant or some other degraded landscape. Part of the reason we tell stories is to create fresh value for certain landscapes, certain relationships.

Bill:  And stories make possible acts of moral recognition that we might not otherwise experience. They help us see our own complicity in things we don’t ordinarily see as connected to ourselves.

Michael:  Yes, exactly. That recognition can help remove the condescension in so much environmental writing by showing us that, look, these things we abhor are done in our name, and we are complicit in them, and we need to take account of them. It was Wendell Berry’s idea that the environmental crisis is a crisis of character. The big problem is the result of all the little problems in our everyday lives. That can be a guilt trip, but it doesn’t have to be. You can tell that story in ways that empower people.

Storytelling can also help us find hopeful solutions. For example, when I was writing Omnivore’s Dilemma and I went to Joel Salatin’s farm in Virginia, I learned how his grazing worked—intensive rotational grazing—and he explained to me what happens under the surface, how every time the ruminants come through and shear that pasture and reduce that leaf mass, a roughly equivalent amount of root mass is broken down and turned into soil. I learned that he takes vast amounts of food off this pastureland, without subtracting anything. To the contrary, the sun is feeding the grass, and the grass is feeding the ruminants; the ruminants are feeding us, and they’re also feeding the soil.

I suddenly saw a whole other way of conceiving our relationship to nature, that there are systems that exist, and could exist, that are non zero sum. There is a free lunch in nature: it’s solar energy, which means it isn’t necessarily true that for us to feed ourselves we have to diminish the world.

When you tell an audience that story, it fills them with hope and a sense of possibility, and that’s a function of storytelling. But, of course, it isn’t always so neat. There are questions of scale, and if you eat meat, there are problems with cattle. But I’m always looking for stories that refresh this narrative about nature that we’re so stuck in.

Bill:  Messy stories invite us into politics. They also invite us to laugh at ourselves. And those things together—the ability to laugh, to experience hope, to be inspired toward action at the personal and political levels—these strike me as the work of engaged storytelling in a world we’re trying to change for the better.

Michael:  I do have a lot of faith in the power of stories to do things. My greatest thrill as a writer is when I see people changed by the work, when people tell me that they’ve changed their behavior in some way because of something they’ve read.

One of the things I’ve fought very hard to do with my editors is to talk about alternatives when I talk about problems. For example, if I’m writing an incredibly dark story about industrial meat production and following a cow through the feedlot and slaughterhouse, I really want three paragraphs on the alternative to this system, which is to say, grass-finished beef. Those three paragraphs have more impact than anything else in the piece. And I still hear from ranchers that it was on the day that an article on that topic came out that we began to see the stirrings of a new market for grass-finished beef. “We no longer send them to the auction barn right away,” they tell me. “We’re finishing on grass now.”

Bill:  That’s a good story about storytelling.

Michael:  You have to pass through the dark wilderness of the feedlot before you can get there, but I think that there’s an appetite for hope that journalists don’t often satisfy.

I’ve met people, in their twenties especially, who really hate the model of the investigative article that tells them how messed up things are and doesn’t point to some alternative. True, the alternative you’re proposing can seem tacked on, and it can be incommensurate with the scale of the evils—but I think people want hope, a course of action they can take. This is something many journalists are missing right now. I think if our writing doesn’t include that dimension in some way, we lose people.

Bill:  It strikes me that you’re pointing to a great tradition in the environmental movement, which is the power of good storytelling, going back to Rachel Carson.

Michael:  She was incredibly effective rhetorically. Silent Spring is a very sophisticated piece of work.

Bill:  It’s stunningly done.

Michael:  It’s stunningly done. And it speaks to the power of fictional ideas like wilderness. Carson understood that, even if you’re writing about science, narrative is important. The trick I learned from her is never to talk about “neurotoxins”; instead, you tell the story of the molecule in the cell. Because there’s a narrative everywhere, even at the level of molecules.

Bill:  Maybe that’s a good note for us to end on, don’t you think? The poet Muriel Rukeyser once said that “the world is made of stories, not of atoms.” When we lose track of the narratives that human beings need to suffuse their lives and the world with meaning, we forget what makes the world worth saving. Telling stories is how we remember.

Read the complete transcript here: http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/7811

NSA Under Fire

Posted on by
Reply
(PHOTO by Nemo, 21WIRE/GMN)

(PHOTO by Nemo, 21WIRE/GMN)

The past few days have been especially turbulent ones for the NSA and its Director Keith Alexander. On Friday afternoon the NSA website experienced a shutdown which was widely reported as a denial of service attack, possibly involving members of hacker collective Anonymous. The NSA later claimed the problem was due to an “internal error” during a scheduled update. It goes without saying that we should take what the NSA says with an industrial-sized carton of salt.

On Friday night Foreign Policy magazine reported a multinational coalition has formed in the U.N. to draft a General Resolution to curb the power of the NSA’s surveillance network. The delegations involved include Brazil, Germany, France, Mexico, Cuba, Venezuela, Argentina, Austria, Bolivia, Ecuador, Guyana, Hungary,
India, Indonesia, Liechtenstein, Norway, Paraguay, South Africa,
Sweden, Switzerland, and Uruguay. This action follows the political upheaval caused by Thursday’s release of Snowden documents which revealed at least 35 world leaders were spied on by the NSA. Since it’s doubtful they were under suspicion of terrorism, what’s a more likely explanation for the spying? Blackmail.

Just yesterday a massive “Stop Watching Us” rally demonstrated near the White House demanding an investigation, regulatory reform and accountability for those found to be responsible for unconstitutional surveillance. Twelve large boxes of 575,000 petition signatures were shown to the crowd at the foot of the US Capitol. According to a Reuters report:

The march attracted protesters from both ends of the political spectrum as liberal privacy advocates walked alongside members of the conservative Tea Party movement in opposition to what they say is unlawful government spying on Americans.

…The event was organized by a coalition known as “Stop Watching Us” that consists of some 100 public advocacy groups and companies, including the American Civil Liberties Union, privacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation, Occupy Wall Street NYC and the Libertarian Party.

As damaging as the NSA has been to our privacy, they may prove to be more damaging to the government itself. The first steps towards ending an abusive relationship are to snap out of denial, seek support, and address the underlying root of the problem. A positive aspect of the NSA spying scandal is that it’s helping the world wake up to the previously hidden (to many) evil behind the friendly facade. It’s truly a hopeful development to see countries around the world and groups of different political stripes in solidarity organizing around the issue of NSA criminality. We need more of this type of focus and cooperation if we are to confront the sources of our biggest problems and make positive changes in this arena and others.

Russell Brand on Voting and Revolution

Posted on by
4

Though I’m not familiar with Russell Brand’s work as an actor, judging from interview clips he’s a pretty good comedian and social critic in the tradition of Bill Hicks. In this excerpt from the BBC program Newsnight he defends his choice not to vote and voices concern for a number of topics not usually discussed on television.

While I understand the position of not voting, I believe in the U.S. there’s still good reason to vote at least for local elections, initiatives or referendums. Voting may be a form of coersion but in some cases it can block the enaction of policies leading to greater coersion. If one uses absentee ballots voting doesn’t take much time and effort and though vote rigging is a problem, not all elections are rigged and voting can in some cases make it more difficult to do. For now in this country, with education and organization, voting can still lead to positive change or prevent things from getting worse, and of course one’s political activity shouldn’t be limited to voting. However, when it comes to presidential elections, low turnouts are one way to send a message of illegitimacy and disgust. Despite political disagreements I’m glad public figures such as Brand use their fame as a platform for thoughtful and substantive ideas not usually found in the world of corporate media. It seems he’s been on a roll lately because just last month he was banned from the GQ Awards for this speech:

And earlier this year he made a mockery of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” program:

While Brand may have good reason to be annoyed with the hosts, it’s unfortunate that he resorted to lewd jokes near the end. Stooping to their level undermines the effectiveness of his critique, in my opinion.