Sunday, October 27th, 2013
COLUM LYNCH, JOHN HUDSON, and SHANE HARRIS, - Foreign Policy
Stephan: The outrage over America's over-reaching surveillance just keeps gathering steam. Whether the UN acts or not it has inevitably eroded America's stature and respect in the world, and increased anti-Americanism. Anyone who has been to Europe recently I am sure has heard comments.
An effort in the United Nations by Brazil and Germany to hold back government surveillance is quickly picking up steam, as the uproar over American eavesdropping grows.
The German and Brazilian delegations to the U.N. have opened talks with diplomats from 19 more countries to draft a General Resolution promoting the right of privacy on the Internet. Close American allies like France and Mexico — as well as rivals like Cuba and Venezuela — are all part of the effort.
The push marks the first major international effort to curb the National Security Agency’s vast surveillance network. Its momentum is building. And it comes as concerns are growing within the U.S. intelligence community that the NSA may be, in effect, freelancing foreign policy by eavesdropping on leaders like Germany’s Angela Merkel.
The draft, a copy of which was obtained by The Cable, calls on states ‘to respect and ensure the respect for the rights’ to privacy, as enshrined in the 1976 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. It also calls on states ‘to take measures to put an end to violations of these rights’ and to ‘review their procedures, practices and legislation regarding the extraterritorial surveillance of private communications and interception of […]
No Comments
Saturday, October 26th, 2013
CHRIS KIRK and DAN KOIS, - Slate
Stephan: The carnage continues. That it goes along with so little public discussion tells us something about the gun psychosis that cripples the U.S. And these numbers are known to be under-reported, and they are five weeks out-of-date. The real number is much larger.
Click through to see the remarkble graphics that accompany this report.
The answer to the simple question in that headline is surprisingly hard to come by. So Slate is collecting data for our crowdsourced interactive. This data is necessarily incomplete (click here to see why, and to learn more about @GunDeaths, the Twitter user who helped us create this interactive). But the more people who are paying attention, the better the data will be. You can help us draw a more complete picture of gun violence in America. If you know about a gun death in your community that isn’t represented here, please email a link to a news report to slatedata@gmail.com. And if you’d like to use this data yourself for your own projects, it’s open. You can download it here.
Update, June 19, 2013: As time goes on, our count gets further and further away from the likely actual number of gun deaths in America-because roughly 60 percent of deaths by gun are due to suicides, which are very rarely reported. When discussing this issue, please note that our number is by design not accurate and represents only the number of gun deaths that the media can find out about contemporaneously. Part of the purpose of this interactive is to […]
No Comments
Saturday, October 26th, 2013
JONNY SCARAMANGA, - Salon
Stephan: This story sounds like an Evelyn Waugh satire novel from the 50s, or the interview with the North Carolina official about voter suppression that ran on the Daily Show yesterday. It's weirdness is further evidence of the Schism Trend and, I am astonished at the speed with which this trend is accelerating.
Texas is such a large market that the state's choices traditionally have dictated what was in schoolbooks. But I don't see the Blue states putting up with this misinformation.
The Theocratic Right view of the world is passionately held by those who believe it, but it requires a disdain for facts. It is a very aggressive movement, as can be seen in the anti-choice and, now anti-contraceptive movement. This is activating social progressives in Blue states who feel compelled to define themselves in contrast. The social decisions in the Blue states will be made on the basis of facts and will move toward a more compassionate life-affirming model. As a result there will be a noticeable increase in social wellness. Remember the piece I ran about Denmark the other day. If this difference goes beyond a certain point there will be migrations.
When Joshua Bass, an engineer, sent his son to iSchool High, a Houston charter school, he was expecting a solid college preparation, including the chance to study some college courses before leaving high school. Instead, the Basses were shocked when their son came home from the taxpayer-funded school with apparently religiously motivated anti-science books.
One of these books blamed Darwin’s theory of evolution for the Holocaust:
[Hitler] has written that the Aryan (German) race would be the leader in all human progress. To accomplish that goal, all ‘lower races
No Comments
Saturday, October 26th, 2013
Stephan: Here is a really important project you can undertake in your community, and I urge you to do so. I plan to do so here on the island. Seriously, think about doing this. It will make a big difference.
If you read SR regularly, or read my Explore essays, you know I have been writing about the problems produced by anti-biotic run-off from industrial animal husbandry industry; the saturation of waterways with antibiotics from flushing medications down the toilet, or putting them in landfills. It is notable that Austin is a Blue enclave in a Red state.
If you have old medicine taking up your cabinet space, mark Saturday on your calendar for the City of Austin’s ‘drug take-back day
No Comments
Saturday, October 26th, 2013
Stephan: Here is yet more information showing that the American surveillance state was not built just, or even principally, for terrorism. It is a bureaucracy's fantasy to control all the information in the world. We have created a monster bureaucracy that, in turn, controls other bureaucracies, and it has been given bags of money and the vaguest of tasks: collect information about any threats to the institutional being of the United States. How can anyone find it surprising that once set in motion this information devouring machine would behave exactly as it has -- as the Snowden documents reveal.
Click through if you want to explore the documentation that supports each of this report's assertions.
The NSA not only spied on the leaders of Germany, Brazil and Mexico, but on at least 35 world leaders.
The Guardian reports:
One unnamed US official handed over 200 numbers, including those of the 35 world leaders, none of whom is named. These were immediately ‘tasked
No Comments
