The tragic shooting in Paris of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, which published caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed in 2011, that left 12 people dead is a direct consequence of Western imperialism’s interventions in the Middle East.
The view is from room 300, level 3 of the Faculty of Arts, Charles University. The sunlight has long vanished, leaving the twinkling lights of the old castle quarter, Hradčany, to do their magic outside the windows. The students funnel in. The chalk is waiting to be used. The topic is something that is already wearing thin, not because it lacks weight, but because it has begun to disappear into the ether. What effect did Mr. Edward Snowden have, notably in states with a previous history of massive surveillance?
At a recent American Antitrust Institute (AAI) symposium in Washington, D.C., I asked the presenters about the ability of cash and checks to compete with the credit card industry and its strict controls on merchants. This obvious point becomes less obvious when one takes into account the expanding exclusion of cash/check payments due to the overwhelming expansion of goods and services that you cannot buy unless you have a credit card or a friend with one whom you can reimburse.
Can we make anything of what, according to The Independent, is one of “the biggest celebrity hacks of all time”? Celebrities who crow and drape themselves over each other for the next ghastly “selfie” rush to lawyers and authorities when their fleshier items are revealed. Starring in the list of photos hacked from Apple’s iCloud service are images of Jennifer Lawrence, Mary E. Winstead and Kirsten Dunst. The website 4Chan proved to be a happy recipient.
Ed Snowden recently gave fellow NSA whistleblower James Bamford an “extended cut” interview in Moscow.1 While Snowden offered up a few morsels of headline-worthy information, like how he purposefully left forensic artifacts for investigators or details on the NSA’s automated cyber-attack system called MonsterMind, Bamford’s piece ends with Snowden describing what he views as the answer to the NSA’s global surveillance program:
Huron Historic Gaol was once a prison complex for the Huron County of Upper Canada. The prison was designed by Thomas Young and modeled after Bentham’s Panopticon. The Panopticon, named after a hundred eyed giant watchman from Greek mythology called Panoptes, is an institutional structure where a watchman can observe all inhabitants anonymously.
Even as an international drive against the data merchants is gathering force and voice (see, for instance, those “nature walks” by Germans from Griesheim to the Dagger Complex, stacked with spooks), the Australian side of the Five Eyes spy arrangement is being shored up. If there is one place in the Western world that has shown conspicuously little administrative and policy reform on the subject of bulk surveillance and whistleblowing, Australia is it.
BERLIN – Following German media’s recent campaigning against massive USA/CIA/NSA spy activities in Berlin (and the Pentagon’s prosaic indifference) evokes what the Germans call ‘Fremdschämen’ –the feeling of shame for the embarrassment of others: What were the Germans thinking, anyway? That they were special? Equal? Bosom buddies, perhaps, on a par with the world’s sole superpower?
The Emperor Is Naked
Here is what the DNA of many Jewish Israelis is all entwined with, whether academic (sic), politician (sic), businessman/woman (sic), with or without dual USA-Tel Aviv citizenship (sic) – bombing clinics, women, children, developmental disabled, quadriplegics, the blind, wheelchair bound, tinker-tailor-hummus salesman, student, granny, the blind, deaf, bedridden, journalist. That is the legacy of syphilis, the seeders of Native American blankets, the gas chamber designers.
