Culture and Society

To End Government Spying, Stop Buying Stuff

The thrust of Robert Scheer’s new book, They Know Everything About You, is that the U.S. government’s mass surveillance and permanent storage of everything you do on the internet is piggybacking on Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, AOL, Yahoo, and other companies that suck up and permanently store every scrap of information about you that they can lay their virtual hands on — and that this data mining is driven primarily by the profit to be gained from carefully read more

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Lower Drinking Age, Raise Killing Age

The United States sends people to kill and die in war that it doesn’t trust with a beer.

It trains police in war skills to assault young people it suspects of going near beer.

Here’s an idea: Drink At 18, Don’t Kill Till 21.

Alcohol prohibition is not working, and creates unsafe drinking by people old enough to vote, drive, and work. A case can be made, and is being made, for returning the drinking age to 18.

But allowing 18-year-olds to join the military has created illegal and read more

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Department of Education Mandates Teaching of Satire

Buried in a regulation produced under the No Child Left Behind Act by the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education at the U.S. Department of Education is an odd and apparently little-enforced requirement that every public school student in the United States be taught literacy in the art of satire.

When questioned about the matter on Tuesday, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan defended the regulation with some fervor. “Satire,” he said, “is at least as critical to success in read more

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Blood on the Corner: Dear UVA From an Alumnus

I’m just back from a rally in front of the Charlottesville Police Department at which I heard a black UVA student say that black friends were going to think twice about trying to attend UVA after what happened tonight.

Unless more video materializes we won’t know exactly what happened, but we know this: a black UVA student needed 10 stitches to the head. The policemen who injured him have made known no injuries to themselves whatsoever. In fact they’ve charged him with “obstruction read more

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Not a Bug Splat, Not Chattel

U.S. drone “pilots” refer to people they burn to death in places like Pakistan as “bug splat” because they look like bugs being squished to death on the pilots’ video monitors and because it’s easier to murder bugs than humans.

Hence the need for the brilliant artwork made visible to a drone (http://notabugsplat.com):

The human brain is a funny thing. Numerous human brains know that every human is a human, yet insist that various types of humans must be “humanized” read more

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Washington Post Erases History With Cuba

The Washington Post says:

“‘We walked freely around the streets and talked with anyone we wanted,’ Klobuchar said. ‘I did not know what to expect. . . . The people were really positive about Americans — I didn’t expect them to be that positive and that excited.’ (Well, most Cubans weren’t alive the last time we invaded.)”

Really? Havana is full of very visible celebrations of the return of the Cuban Five, who every Cuban knows were imprisoned in the read more

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Cuba: Land of Opportunity

What can I be sure of after only one week in Havana? Very little. There are exceptions to every pattern, and sometimes more exceptions than patterns. But a few claims, I think, are possible:

1. The sea and this island in it are stupendously beautiful even to someone longing for people and places up north.

2. The people of Cuba are sincerely warm and friendly. And, although they know the history of U.S. aggression, they sharply distinguish the U.S. government from the U.S. people. They are surprised read more

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Cuba Through the Looking Glass

Today in Havana, Mariela Castro Espin, director of the national center for sexual education and daughter of the president of Cuba, gave us a truly enlightened talk and question-and-answer session on LGBT rights, sex education, pornography (and why young people should avoid it if they want to have good sex) — plus her view of what the Cuban government is doing and should be doing on these issues. She advocates equal rights for same-sex couples and a ban on discrimination, for example.

In other read more

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Cuba Is Our Family

Cuba and the Estados Unidos have been family for so long that relationships have been reversed, forgotten, turned inside out, and repeated.

In the 19th century, the Cuban community in the United States and their supporters there were the base for revolutionary democracy and the ousting of Spanish colonial rule. Americanism and Protestantism and capitalism were seen as progressive democratic challenges to colonial control — and I mean by more than just the equivalent of Fox viewers.

Of course read more

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