New revelations about the National Security Agency’s ability to track phone calls in pre-9/11 America are raising the specter of a massive government cover-up. One that could have been used to hide intelligence failures, and fuel arguments for mass domestic spying. In 2000, Khalid al-Mihdhar was living in San Diego. One year later, he would go on to be one of the five hijackers aboard American Airlines Flight 77, steered into the Pentagon on September 11. But in the months leading up to that horrifying day, al-Mihdhar made a number of phone calls to Yemen from his California apartment. Those calls went directly to one of Osama bin Laden’s operation centers in Sanaa, already … Continue reading →

A particular act or policy might not have a discriminatory intent, but that doesn’t let you off the hook. If it has a disproportionately negative impact on so-called protected classes, it is said to have a disparate impact and risks being prohibited by law. The uninformed assumption made by judges, lawyers and academics is that but for the fact of racial and sex discrimination, we all would be distributed across occupations, educational backgrounds and other socio-economic characteristics according to our percentages in the population. Such a vision is absolute nonsense. There is no evidence, anywhere, at any time, that but … Continue reading →

If something’s desirable it ought not to be necessary to force people to buy it. Chipotle, for instance, doesn’t need to spend millions in de facto bribes (“campaign contributions”) to wheedle Congress into passing burrito subsidies. Nor are you forced to eat at Chipotle if burritos and bowls are not your thing. The market has voted – freely, without being prodded or pushed – that Chipotle is a good place to eat and so people go there willingly, part with their money gladly. Why doesn’t the same standard apply  to “renewable” fuels, specifically – ethanol and biodiesel? If, as we’re told, … Continue reading →

Of the 2.2 million Americans in prison right now, about half are there for drug-related offenses. It’s a tricky number to determine because felonies such as murder, assault, burglary, arson, robbery, and even kidnapping can still be linked to the drug war. The Bureau of Justice Statistics claims, “Between 2001 and 2013, more than half of prisoners serving sentences of more than a year in federal facilities were convicted of drug offenses.” There are no prominent right-wing politicians today condoning legalization, but can we at least start with pot? Making teenagers play videogames for hours and laugh too hard at … Continue reading →

In his new biography “Being Nixon: A Man Divided,” Evan Thomas concedes a point. Richard Nixon, he writes, “was not paranoid; the press and the ‘Georgetown set’ really were out to get him.” Carl Bernstein’s review found Thomas’ book deficient in its failure to chronicle the “endemic criminality” of the Nixon presidency. Yet, recent revelations suggest that “endemic criminality” is a phrase that might well be applied to the newsroom of The Washington Post when Bob Woodward and Bernstein worked there. Consider. In “All the President’s Men,” Woodward and Bernstein admit that, in collusion with Post editors and with the … Continue reading →

At least our state-school system maintains schools, terrible as many of them are. The NHS, creaky as it is, still treats actual patients. And in the dear dead days of big nationalised industries, British Coal dug actual coal, British Steel made actual steel, and the same was true of the gas and electricity boards. But the police force now can’t even be bothered to turn up and investigate burglaries, and its chief spokesperson openly says so. For the first time we now have a huge and expensive nationalised industry that does not do what it says on the label. The … Continue reading →

If you are feeling STRESSED OUT and FATIGUED, then you may need a supplement that supports the adrenal glands. The ADRENAL GLANDS help us handle stress and they make several important hormones that run many significant functions in our bodies. ADRENALINE is our “fight or flight” hormone, that helps speed up metabolism and helps the body cope with danger. Over time, we lose our ability to distinguish between life threatening stress, such as almost having a car wreck, and situational stress, such as being stopped at a red light too long. The end result is stressed out adrenal glands. General … Continue reading →

I generally like Dimitry Orlov’s outlook. He is more apocalyptic than I am, but his heart is in the right place. He thinks the West’s Establishment is the Wizard of Oz. So do I. But let us not forget that the Wizard ran Oz without opposition for quite some time. Orlov thinks we are getting close to the end of the movie, when the Wizard gets exposed. Recall that it was Toto who did it. Here is his latest article. There are times when a loud cry of “The emperor has no clothes!” can be most copacetic. And so, let … Continue reading →

Paul Krugman’s obsession with Ron Paul has not stopped. In a new post at NYT, he doubles down on his charge that Ron Paul’s warning about price inflation makes him Bernie Madoff-like: It seems increasingly clear to me that what we’re looking at here has nothing to do with intellectual discourse as we normally understand it. It is, instead, about tribal identities: there’s a certain kind of person who rails against policies that debase the dollar, and that kind of person admires others who do the same no matter how wrong their predictions and disastrous their financial advice. As I … Continue reading →

The siege of Knightsbridge is both an emblem of gross injustice and a gruelling farce.  For three years, a police cordon around the Ecuadorean embassy in London has served no purpose other than to flaunt the power of the state. It has cost £12 million. The quarry is an Australian charged with no crime, a refugee whose only security is the room given him by a brave South American country. His “crime” is to have initiated a wave of truth-telling in an era of lies, cynicism and war. The persecution of Julian Assange is about to flare again as it … Continue reading →

Meet 31-year-old Dan Price. Dan is the CEO of Seattle-based credit card payments processing firm Gravity Payments, and three months ago, he did a funny thing. After talking with a friend who confessed to having difficulties making student loan payments and rent each month on an annual salary of $40,000, Dan decided to set a $70,000 per year pay floor at Gravity. Dan was not, The New York Times says, looking to insert himself into “the current political clamor over low wages or the growing gap between rich and poor.” All he wanted to do was improve the lives of … Continue reading →

Even though it is true that the government currently bans all kinds of things, I am asking a serious question. Let me expand and clarify it. Is the federal government authorized by the Constitution to make illegal the possession of any substance that it deems it to be harmful, hazardous, immoral, addictive, threatening, damaging, injurious, destructive, unsafe, or dangerous to an individual or to society? I am not talking about state governments—that is a separate issue. I am talking about the U.S. national government that was set up by the Constitution in 1789. The Constitution that was amended in 1791, … Continue reading →