Even if SOPA passes in its current form, largely intact and full of overreach opportunities, there's no reason to believe this will be the last (or even the most overreaching) legislation crafted at the behest of the content industries.
The -AA's long history of overreaction to various "threats" (read: technological advancements) has been ... (more)
A superb advertisement for Ron Paul from RevolutionPAC.
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Imagine for a moment that somewhere in the middle of Texas there was a large foreign military base, say Chinese or Russian. Imagine that thousands of armed foreign troops were constantly patrolling American streets in military vehicles. Imagine they were here under the auspices of "keeping us safe... (more)
If you thought that the use of a Predator drone to target a family in rural North Dakota was overkill, wait until you hear what happened in Jamaica. The Department of Homeland Security aided Jamaican authorities in massacring 73 civilians as part of a botched drug raid conducted with the help of a DHS surveillance aircraft – before attempting to cover up the atrocity by refusing to release the footage.
“At the DEA’s insistence, Jamaican authorities reluctantly r... (more)
Condemnation of President Obama is intense, and growing, as a result of his announced intent to sign into law the indefinite detention bill embedded in the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). These denunciations come not only from the nation’s leading civil liberties and human rights groups, but also from the pro-Obama New York Times Editorial P... (more)
PHOENIX (CN) - A young mother claims Transportation Security Administration agents mocked her for 40 minutes and made her stand in a glass enclosure in front of other airline passengers because she requested an alternate screening process so her breast milk would not be exposed to radiation.
Stacey Armato sued the Department of Homeland Security, the TSA and four TSA agents for false imprisonment, false light, intentional infliction of emotional distress and federal torts.... (more)
Members of the House Homeland Security Committee introduced a cybersecurity bill on Thursday that would establish a quasi-governmental entity to oversee information-sharing with the private sector.
Responding to a hypothetical question about whether the United States should support an attack against Iran by Middle East-ally Israel, U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann noted that Iran already has announced plans to strike Israel.
"They've stated, as recently as August just before President (Mahmoud) Ahmadinejad came ... to the U.N. General Assembly. He said that he wanted to eradicate Israel from the face of the Earth," Bachmann said during the Nov. 22, 2011, CNN debate.
BAGHDAD: One by one, the marines sat down, swore to tell the truth and began to give secret interviews discussing one of the most horrific episodes of America's time in Iraq: the 2005 massacre by marines of Iraqi civilians in the town of Haditha.
''I mean, whether it's a result of our action or other action, you know, discovering 20 bodies, throats slit, 20 bodies, you know, beheaded, 20 bodies here, 20 bodies there,'' Colonel Thomas Cariker, a commander in Anbar province at the t... (more)
The founder of a newspaper that investigated government corruption has been shot dead outside the newspaper's office in Russia's North Caucasus region, police say.
A gunman shot Gadzhimurat Kamalov as he was leaving the offices of the newspaper Chernovik in Makhachkala, the capital of Dagestan province, shortly before midnight on Thursday, the regional interior ministry said.
Police said Kamalov was shot eight times and pronounced dead on the way to hospital.
The outpouring of grief, goodwill, and teary encomia that has attended news of Christopher Hitchens' passing would—if he was anything like the persona he presented in print—have turned his stomach. He loathed sentiment, welcomed combat, and delighted in inflicting hard truths. In that spirit, it must not be forgotten in mourning him that he got the single most consequential decision in his life horrifically, petulantly wrong.
In its obituary, the New York Times quoted... (more)
Are your tax dollars helping hide global warming data from the public? Internal emails leaked as part of “Climategate 2.0” indicate the answer may be "Yes."
The original Climategate emails -- correspondence stolen from servers at a research facility in the U.K. and released on the Internet in late 2009 -- shook up the field of climate research. Now a new batch posted in late November to a Russian server shows that scientists at the University of East Anglia’s Cli... (more)
Congressional negotiators struck a deal Thursday that overturns the new rules that were to have banned sales of traditional incandescent light bulbs beginning next year.
That agreement is tucked inside the massive 1,200-page spending bill that funds the government through the rest of this fiscal year, and which both houses of Congress will vote on Friday. Mr. Obama is expected to sign the bill, which heads off a looming government shutdown.
Should we just get it over with and change the spelling of America to "Amerika"? Every single day, the United States of America is becoming more like North Korea. In North Korea, the citizens are told that everything that they do needs to be monitored, tracked, recorded and very tightly controlled so that everyone can be kept safe. No dissent is allowed at all. If government officials in North Korea even suspect that you are thinking the wrong thing, your entire extended family can be shippe... (more)
The House has overwhelmingly passed HR 1540, frightening legislation that codifies the president’s totalitarian power to detain militarily terrorist suspects indefinitely without meaningful due process, including U.S. citizens captured on American soil. This legislation has many other horrible war-on-terror provisions, but the solidification of the Bush-Obama claim of imperial prerogative over imprisoning any soul in the world t... (more)
In one of the least surprising developments imaginable, President Obama -- after spending months threatening to veto the Levin/McCain detention bill -- yesterday announced that he would instead sign it into law (this is the same individual, of course, who unequivocally vowed when seeking the Democratic nomination to support a filibuster of "any bill that includes retroactive im... (more)
The U.S. Lies about the top-secret U.S. Stealth Drone the Iranians have now put on world display completely intact is typical of the U.S. Big Lies about almost everything important to their Global Empire, obviously including the existence of that U.S. Global Empire. First they denied it in non-denial denials in case the Iranians did have it, then they said it crashed somewhere unknown to the U.S., then they said it must have drifted by malfunction into Iran, then when the Iranians showe... (more)
Gold’s biggest rout in three months means traders are the least bullish since July and Dennis Gartman, the economist who sold the last of his metal on the day the slump began, warned of further declines.
Ten of 21 surveyed by Bloomberg expect the metal to gain next week, the lowest proportion since July 29. Three were neutral. While bullion’s slide of as much as 9 percent this week took its drop from the record $1,923.70 an ounce reached in September to almost 20 perce... (more)
The latest data show that book sales are way up this season. So much for the prediction that books will be killed by technology. On the contrary, technology has enabled the great literature of the ages and the present to be put in the hands of everyone. I can't think of a better time to begin refurbishing Laissez-Faire Books (founded in 1972), because it is the market that laissez-faire celebrates that has made all the literature we love more accessible than ever.
Google co-founder Sergey Brin blasted the Stop Online Privacy Act in some of the toughest language yet from a corporate executive about the controversial legislation.
In a post on the Google+ social network, Brin lamented censorship from regimes in China and Iran, and other countries that have blocked Google's Web sites.
"Thus, imagine my astonishment when the newest threat to free sp... (more)
Yesterday, the home of the climate skeptic blogger Tallbloke, was legally invaded by six detectives from the Norfolk constabulary and the Metropolitan police. When they left, they took two laptops with them, stating that they would be returned after having their hard drives cloned. The previous day, the WordPress host of his site and the sites of two other skeptic bloggers w... (more)
