In politics, as in sports, you can’t win ‘em all. With a divided government and a House of Representatives firmly in the control of tea partiers, it was a tough year for progressives in Washington – one marked by the painful cuts of sequestration…
The last time I put my own atheism through the spin cycle rather than simply wiping it clean was when I wanted to make a ceremony after the birth of my third child. Would it be a blessing? From who? What does the common notion of a new baby as a gift mean? How would we make it meaningful to the people we invited who were from different faiths? And, importantly, what would it look like?
One of the problems I have with the New Atheism is that it fixates on ethics, ignoring aesthetics at its peril. It tends also towards atomisation, relying on abstracts such as "civic law" to conjure a collective experience. But I love ritual, because it is through ritual that we remake and strengthen our social bonds. As I write, down the road there is a memorial being held for Lou Reed, hosted by the local Unitarian church. Most people there will have no belief in God but will feel glad to be part of a shared appreciation of a man whose god was rock'n'roll.
When it came to making a ceremony, I really did not want the austerity of some humanist events I have attended, where I feel the sensual world is rejected. This is what I mean about aesthetics. Do we cede them to the religious and just look like a bunch of Calvinists? I found myself turning to flowers, flames and incense. Is there anything more beautiful than the offerings made all over the world, of tiny flames and blossom on leaves floating on water?
Already, I am revealing a kind of neo-paganism that hardcore rationalist will find unacceptable. But they find most human things unacceptable. For me, not believing in God does not mean one has to forgo poetry, magic, the chaos of ritual, the remaking of shared bonds. I fear ultra-orthodox atheism has come to resemble a rigid and patriarchal faith itself.
This is not about reclaiming "feeling" as female and reason as male. Put simply, it seems to be fundamentally human to seek narratives, find patterns and create rituals to include others in the meanings we make. If we want a more secular society – and we most certainly do – there is nothing wrong with making it look and feel good.
Yet as I attend yet another overpoweringly religious funeral of a woman who was not religious – as I did recently – I see that people do not know what else to do. They turn to organised religion's hatch 'em, match 'em and dispatch 'em certainties. For while humanists work hard to create new ceremonies, many find them vapid. Funerals are problematic, as one is bound by law to dispose of the body in a certain way. I always remember the startled look of the platitudinous young vicar who visited our house after my grandad died, when my mum said, "Don't come round here with your mumbo-jumbo. If I had my way I'd put him in the vegetable patch with some lime on him."
Unless someone has planned their own funeral it can be difficult, but naming or partnership ceremonies are a chance to think about what it is we are celebrating. A new person, love, being part of a community. For my daughter's, we pieced together what we wanted, but I found some of the humanist suggestions strange. "Odd parents" for godparents? No thanks. I guess it's just a matter of taste.
What, then, makes ceremony powerful? It is the recognition of common humanity; and it is very hard to do this without borrowing from traditional symbols. We need to create a space outside of everyday life to do this. We can call it sacred space but the demarcation of special times or spaces is not the prerogative only of the religious. One of the best ceremonies of late was the opening of the Olympics, where Danny Boyle created a massive spectacle that communicated shared values in a non-religious way. It was big-budget joy. Most of us don't have such a budget but there has to be some nuance here. We may not have God. We may find the fuzziness of new age thinking with its emphasis on "nature" and "spirit" impure, but to dismiss the human need to express transcendence and connection with others as stupid is itself stupid.
Our ceremony had flowers and fires and Dylan, a Baptist minister and the Jabberwocky, half-Mexican siblings and symbols, a Catholic grandparent reading her prayer, a Muslim godparent and kids off their heads on helium at the party. A right old mishmash, then, but our mishmash.
In saying this I realise I am not a good atheist. Rather like mothering, perhaps I can only be a good enough one. But to move many away from religion, a viable atheism has to weave itself into the social fabric and shed this image of dour grumpiness. What can be richer than the celebration of our common humanity? Here is magic, colour, poetry. Life.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
[Image via Flickr user abiodork, Creative Commons licensed]
Martin Scorcese’s new film, The Wolf of Wall Street, depicts a culture of hyper-masculinity and emotional immaturity, as Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, Jordan Belfort, parties hard and cuts shady deals in a drug-induced haze. A report by Max Abelson…
It was a big year for bigots of all stripes, but particularly for anti-LGBT bigots. The U.S. Supreme Court's decision to strike down 1996's federal anti-LGBT statute -- the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) -- and declare California's Proposition 8 unconstitutional inspired America's anti-LGBT jerkwads to a whole new level of hateful excellence.
This year, they proclaimed that "traditional marriage" is in danger and that the LGBT shock troops are going to force everyone to get same sex married. They declared that Christians are going to be rounded up and put into camps (if only!) and that the future will be nothing more than a fabulous Gucci jackboot stamping on a human face...forever.
Here are Raw Story's nominees for the Top Five anti-LGBT assholes of the year, as well as some mitigating factors about each one and our proposed punishments for each offender.
5. Sandy Rios: Heterophiliac Mary Kay Cosmetics spokesmodel Sandy Rios has carved out a nice little niche for herself as an AM radio "personality" and a contributor to Fox News. This wingnut welfare queen keeps herself in poly-cotton blazers and Extra Super-Hold Aqua Net by making statements comparing same sex relationships to the relationship between Cleveland kidnapper Raoul Castro and his three female captives. She also informed the world that among same sex couples, "there aren’t many lasting relationships -- maybe among lesbians, but certainly not among gay men, that’s not the norm.”
Mitigating factors: With a little training, she would make an excellent speed bump.
Punishment: A continued life of hairstyles from heterosexual stylists.
4. Justice Antonin Scalia: Truly, one of the finest judicial minds of the 15th century, our nation's highest-ranking right wing troll wrote a shrill, hackish dissent to the historic decisions regarding DOMA and Prop 8 last summer. In it, he lamented our nation's moral decline, played the part of persecuted Christian victim, said that the Court's decisions were based on "legalistic argle-bargle" and pleaded for the return of Texas' old-school anti-sodomy laws.
A Utah judge on Friday declared that that state's 2004 ban on same sex marriages is unconstitutional and in his decision took specific aim at Scalia, taunting him and calling his legal arguments facile and absurd.
Mitigating factors: Wife doesn't make Xanax-laced, early Sunday morning calls to Anita Hill.
Punishment: Pink, sparkly robes. Permanently assigned to translate Clarence Thomas' opinions from the original crayon and erase the doodles of naked ladies and giant penises in the margins.
3. Pat Robertson: Somewhere, right now, a damp old wad of chewing gum, a hairpiece and a pair of dentures are snoring together in a tank of life-giving protoplasm. That hair-studded pink mass is the world's oldest living televangelist, Pat Robertson, who will doubtless rise within 72 hours to say something breathtakingly hateful and ignorant in his quavering old man's voice, like, gay men wear special rings that allow them to slash the hands of other people during a routine handshake and infect them with HIV.
Or that men are driven to have sex with other men by "demonic possession." Or that seeing two men kiss makes him "want to throw up." Or that early exposure to lesbians will make your children gay.
Mitigating factors: He will be dead soon.
Punishment: Replacement of his regular enema with fast-hardening epoxy so that he will also be literally full of shit.
2. Bryan Fischer: Fischer, national spokesman for the American Family Association, lands on this list mainly for his absolute tirelessness. He is a deeply unoriginal man, sticking to an age-old litany of false accusations against LGBT people, that we're mentally ill child molesters, that we're anti-Christian and that the horrible, secular gay mafia is going to come to your house and break the legs of your end tables and force you to marry someone of your own sex.
But you've got to hand it to Bryan. He's reliable. Every day he's there on his Internet-only radio show, sawing away on the one issue he has, how much he hates LGBT people, how mean and fascistic we are and how terrifyingly powerful we have become.
Mitigating factors: Soft, pretty hair.
Punishment: Forced to spend the rest of his life maintaining the furs, handbags and other fashion accessories belonging to Magic Johnson's fabulous gay son, EJ Johnson. While wearing pretty, pretty dresses.
1. That pig-ignorant cracker from "Duck Dynasty": What's his name? Hap? Spud? Keebo? Oh, right, Phil Robertson. Some might argue with his placement at the top of this chart due to his newness to the field, but this patriarch of a family of yuppie poseurs turned unkempt millionaires really made a splash this year with his statements conflating gay sex and bestiality -- as well as his assertion that African-Americans were happier when they were singin', field-workin' indentured servants.
And while every right-wing grifter with an anti-LGBT ax to grind has leapt to Robertson's defense, we feel that the main lesson to take away from his offensive statements and subsequent suspension by A&E is this:
Yes, this is America and everyone here has a right to say whatever half-witted, ignorant thing comes into their head, sure, but you can't talk about LGBT people anymore like we're not in the room. We're going to talk back, and in the case of all the LGBT people at A&E who have been coordinating his interviews, publicizing his show and making him a very, very wealthy homeless-looking person, we might decide we don't want to sign your checks anymore.
Mitigating factors: The only people we know who watch "Duck Dynasty" are horny bears.
Punishment: Bath and flea dip.
An honorable mention must go to the entire country of Russia -- which has proudly thrown off the repressive yoke of totalitarian communism and resumed its rightful place as the gay-bashing, trailer trash capital of Europe. We would also like to extend our sympathies to Alabama Tea Party blowhard state Sen. Dean Young, who ran for Congress on the platform that the Republican Party isn't stridently anti-LGBT enough...and lost.
They prayed whenever they could find 15 minutes. "Preacher Man", as we called him, would read from the Bible with his tiny round glasses. It was the only book he had ever read. A dozen or so others would listen, silently praying while stroking rosaries, sitting on bare mattresses, crammed into a half-painted dorm room.
I was the outsider, a 16-year-old working on a summer custodial crew for a local college, saving money to pay for my escape from my hometown. The other employees, close to three dozen, were working to feed themselves, to feed their kids, to pay child support, to pay for the basics of life. I was the only white, everyone else was African-American.
Preacher Man tried to get me to join the prayer meetings, asking me almost daily. I declined, preferring to spend those small work breaks with some of the other guys on the crew. We would use the time to snatch a quick drink or maybe smoke a joint.
Preacher Man would question me, "What do you believe in?" I would decline to engage, out of politeness. He pressed me. Finally I broke,
I am an atheist. I don't believe in a God. I don't think the world is only 5,000 years old, I don't think Cain and Abel married their sisters!
Preacher Man's eyes narrowed. He pointed at me, "You are an APE-IEST. An APE-IEST. You going to lead a life of sin and end in hell."
Three years later I did escape my town, eventually receiving a PhD in physics, and then working on Wall Street for 20 years. A life devoted to rational thought, a life devoted to numbers and clever arguments.
During that time I counted myself an atheist and nodded in agreement as a wave of atheistic fervor swept out of the scientific community and into the media, led by Richard Dawkins.
I saw some of myself in him: quick with arguments, uneasy with emotions, comfortable with logic, able to look at any ideology or any thought process and expose the inconsistencies. We all picked on the Bible, a tome cobbled together over hundreds of years that provides so many inconsistencies. It is the skinny 85lb (35.6kg) weakling for anyone looking to flex their scientific muscles.
I eventually left my Wall Street job and started working with and photographing homeless addicts in the South Bronx. When I first walked into the Bronx I assumed I would find the same cynicism I had towards faith. If anyone seemed the perfect candidate for atheism it was the addicts who see daily how unfair, unjust, and evil the world can be.
None of them are. Rather they are some of the strongest believers I have met, steeped in a combination of Bible, superstition, and folklore.
The first addict I met was Takeesha. She was standing near the high wall of the Corpus Christi Monastery. We talked for close to an hour before I took her picture. When we finished, I asked her how she wanted to be described. She said without any pause, "As who I am. A prostitute, a mother of six, and a child of God."
Takeesha was raped by a relative when she was 11. Her mother, herself a prostitute, put Takeesha out on the streets at 13, where she has been for the last 30 years,
It's sad when it's your mother, who you trust, and she was out there with me, but you know what kept me through all that? God. Whenever I got into the car, God got into the car with me.
Sonya and Eric, heroin addicts who are homeless, have a picture of the Last Supper that moves with them. It has hung in an abandoned building, it has hung in a sewage-filled basement, and now it leans against the pole in the small space under the interstate where they live.
Sarah, 15 years on the streets, wears a cross around her neck. Always. Michael, 30 years on the streets, carries a rosary in his pocket. Always. In any crack house, in the darkest buildings empty of all other furnishings, a worn Bible can be found laying flat amongst needles, caps, lighters, and crack pipes.
Takeesha and the other homeless addicts are brutalized by a system driven by a predatory economic rationalism (a term used recently by J. M. Coetzee in his essay: On Nelson Mandela). They are viewed by the public and seen by almost everyone else as losers. Just "junkie prostitutes" who live in abandoned buildings.
They have their faith because what they believe in doesn't judge them. Who am I to tell them that what they believe is irrational? Who am I to tell them the one thing that gives them hope and allows them to find some beauty in an awful world is inconsistent? I cannot tell them that there is nothing beyond this physical life. It would be cruel and pointless.
In these last three years, out from behind my computers, I have been reminded that life is not rational and that everyone makes mistakes. Or, in Biblical terms, we are all sinners.
We are all sinners. On the streets the addicts, with their daily battles and proximity to death, have come to understand this viscerally. Many successful people don't. Their sense of entitlement and emotional distance has numbed their understanding of our fallibility.
Soon I saw my atheism for what it is: an intellectual belief most accessible to those who have done well.
I look back at my 16-year-old self and see Preacher Man and his listeners differently. I look at the fragile women praying and see a mother working a minimum wage custodial job, trying to raise three children alone. Her children's father off drunk somewhere. I look at the teenager fingering a small cross and see a young woman, abused by a father addicted to whatever, trying to find some moments of peace. I see Preacher Man himself, living in a beat up shack without electricity, desperate to stay clean, desperate to make sense of a world that has given him little.
They found hope where they could.
I want to go back to that 16-year-old self and tell him to shut up with the "see how clever I am attitude". I want to tell him to appreciate how easy he had it, with a path out. A path to riches.
I also see Richard Dawkins differently. I see him as a grown up version of that 16-year-old kid, proud of being smart, unable to understand why anyone would believe or think differently from himself. I see a person so removed from humanity and so removed from the ambiguity of life that he finds himself judging those who think differently.
I see someone doing what he claims to hate in others. Preaching from a selfish vantage point.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
The annual "war on Christmas" took an unexpected twist this holiday season, when the UK-based website the Freethinker published the ironic headline "First known casualty in America's 2013 'War on Xmas' turns out to be a Salvation Army member". A woman attacked a bell ringer in Phoenix, Arizona because she was angry at being wished a "Happy Holidays" instead of honoring Jesus' birth by saying "Merry Christmas". In another act of Christmas violence, unidentified arsonists tried to torch one of the Freedom from Religion Foundation's billboards that proclaimed "Keep Saturn in Saturnalia" – a reference to an ancient celebration of the Roman god of agriculture.
The Gospel According to Fox News preaches a tale of Christian persecution running rampant through America. While others around the world face imprisonment or even execution for their religious beliefs, Christians in the states suffer the indignity of facing a holiday season sans baby Jesus Christ's omnipresence in the public square. Instead of sharing parables of the Beatitudes in practice, Fox's Meghan Kelly's chose to push forth the blatantly racist proposition that Jesus and Santa are white; the line between Fox News and the Daily Show's parodies have now become almost indistinguishable.
Kelly added to her extensive mythmaking repertoire by claiming that the American Humanist Association (AHA) is denying toys to poor children. Roy Speckhardt, executive director of AHA, recounts his televised appearance with Kelly where he tried to discuss how Samaritan Purse's Operation Christmas Child tries to use public schools as a workforce for their presents for conversions program. He noted:
It's hard to take seriously a program that expects poor kids to convert just because they receive a Christmas present and a pamphlet about Jesus. If only it were so easy to convert, and de-convert, kids would be getting presents from all sorts of groups.
Fred Edwords, the national director of United Coalition of Reason offered this perspective on the history of the war between evangelical Christians and atheists:
The religious right started this whole "war on Christmas" myth when a few years back they launched their organized attack against calling the trees erected at the capitol and White House "Holiday Trees". They also boycotted major businesses that said "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas". As a result, their pressure effected some change, and they gloated on their success. But then humanist and atheist groups decided to launch awareness campaigns during the winter holiday season, reaching out to those who may have felt excluded by all of this nonsense. And the religious right went ballistic. After awhile, however, these campaigns got predictable and became less effective. So fewer of them were launched. But the religious right was still there – never having needed atheists to prompt them in the first place. And this year is making that reality abundantly clear.
Crossing the front lines to the atheist base, one finds a spirit of fun and playfulness seems to have replaced the angry atheist persona of yesteryear. For example, instead of protesting the presence of a nativity scene in the Florida State capitol, an atheist chose to erect a Festivus Pole made from beer cans. This pole was designed to commemorate the infamous holiday popularised by the television show Seinfeld joins other displays in the rotunda including a nativity scene, posters from atheists, and a crudely-made Flying Spaghetti Monster. (A petition to include a similar satanic display was denied.)
According to David Silverman, president, American Atheists, this shift from activism to pluralistic accommodation "sends the clear message that the season is not owned by one religion, but rather everyone, and reinforces the idea that Christianity is one religion of many. While this is correct, ethical, and American, it's a clear defeat for those who prefer the old days of inequality."
A recent survey by the Public Religion Research Group points to a shifting toward such pluralism, with close to half of Americans (49%) surveyed agreeing that stores and businesses should greet their customers with "happy holidays" or "season's greetings" instead of "merry Christmas", out of respect for people of different faiths. This number is up from 44% when they conducted this survey in 2010.
Michael Dorian, co-director of the documentary Refusing My Religion notes, "many now understand that most people – whether believers or nonbelievers - can appreciate the holidays and just want to celebrate the season by socializing with friends and family, and that can be easily achieved with or without the trappings of religion".
As the number of Americans who understand what it means to live in an increasing pluralistic country continues to grow, those faithful to the Fox News brand of Christianity – and its need to be ever dominant and combative around the holidays – will continue to look ever more foolish and out of touch.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
The private sector is far more timid than it appears, so if we want to mine the untold riches of the moon, international socialism must step in
Such is the state of advanced capitalism: we can't pay our bills, but China's on the moon. In fairness, the Chinese government is doing humanity a favor.
The race to populate space has been staggeringly slow, and the idea that someone would finally think to scan below the moon's surface for precious minerals is rather moving. For so long, the moon had appeared to us as merely a dull, lifeless wodge of dust and space-shit. To think of it as being radiantly packed with precious minerals is actually quite romantic. One can imagine poems being written about it.
It gets better. Apparently, the substance sought is helium-3, an isotope of the element that could potentially replace oil and gas as our energy generators. Not only is the moon redeemed, but the earth is saved.
It takes a lot to make this cynic weep, but I'm seriously waxing lachrymose now.
The question is, why haven't the moon's resources been thoroughly plundered by now? Why hasn't it provided us with the energy necessary to colonize the rest of space? I'll tell you why: it's because capitalism is weak and timid.
In principle, it shouldn't be this way. Capitalism, said Rosa Luxemburg, always needs a periphery. There needs to be a non-capitalist outside to appropriate – new land, new resources, to provide profitable investment opportunities. Whether it takes the form of colonization, privatizing public goods, turfing peasants off their lands or creating "intellectual property", there is a need to accumulate beyond the existing realm of capitalist property relations.
The geographer David Harvey points out that the world capitalist system needs to find $1.5tn profitable investment opportunities today in order to keep growing at its historical average of 3% a year. In 20 years' time, it will need to find $3tn.
The effects of this are complex. On the one hand, such production places a tremendous burden on the planet and risks making large parts of it uninhabitable and extinguishing a great deal of life. Further, this production both exploits workers and becomes imbricated with all manner of brutality – consider the relationship between coltan production and war in the Congo. On the other hand, well: tablets, smartphones, DVD players, advanced sex toys that do something other than just buzz, cars that don't smell like foot disease, an abundance of stuff that makes life easier and more interesting.
The problem with capitalism, though, is that it's actually staggeringly timid in some respects. For all that the Communist Manifesto breathlessly extolled the revolutionary spirit of capital – "constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions … all that is solid melts into air" – businesses are really quite conservative. They aren't going to invest unless they're reasonably sure of a profit, even if the result is sluggish growth and flatlining innovation.
This is why, as Mariana Mazzucato points out, it falls to states to undertake the risky investments that pay off in the technology that makes, for example, iPhones possible. Of course, capitalist states do a great deal else to overcome the inertia of the system, from war to violent enclosures. It doesn't do to idealise the state. The point here is that, if it were left to private sector enterprise, we would never have seen a human foot touch down on the moon's surface.
Of course, under capitalism the state's ability to explore the unknown is limited by its priority of making things work for business, or developing a greater war machine. States don't need an immediate return on investment, but if they're to justify taxing profits, they need to demonstrate some sort of plausible return. Hence, there's always more money for military arsenals than spaceships. We could be holidaying on Mars, but some people would rather bomb Afghanistan. Put that on a placard.
However, as Leigh Phillips explains, even the limited exploration of space thus far has produced unexpected bounties for the Earth-bound: cooling suits used by nuclear reactor technicians, dialysis technology, running shoes, water purification, housing insulation, food preservation, fire retardants and so on. And even if it didn't provide all these spin-offs, human curiosity is an end in itself. So what if we don't find the aliens who have been kidnapping drunk rednecks and plumbing their lower intestines? We'll find precious mineral ore on an asteroid, and that's more than enough.
So, this is what we need. First, international socialism. And to paraphrase Lenin, socialism = soviet power + interstellar travel. Don't ask me how we get that, we just need it as a precondition for everything else. Second, an international space exploration program, funded with the express purpose of adding to the sum of stuff and human knowledge. Third, a popular space tourism program. We have to be careful with this. The last thing anyone wants to see is a conga line of pot-bellied fortysomethings drinking Red Stripe on Jupiter. But hopefully socialism will elevate the culture. Finally, a publicly funded cryogenics program now for everyone who wants to live to see this day.
Is that really too much to ask?
The United States has about five percent of the world’s population and houses around 25 percent of its prisoners. In large part, that’s the result of the “war on drugs” and long mandatory minimum sentences, but it also reflects America’s…
Notice how the White House moved quickly to thwart the only substantive NSA changes the Review Group was making
In case you missed it, on Thursday night, the Wall Street Journal and New York Times published leaked details from the recommendations from the Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies, a panel President Obama set up in August to review the NSA's activities in response to the Edward Snowden leaks.
The stories described what they said were recommendations in the report as presented in draft form to White House advisors; the final report was due to the White House on Sunday. There were discrepancies in the reporting, which may have signaled the leaks were a public airing of disputes surrounding the Review Group (both articles noted the results were "still being finalized"). The biggest news item were reports about a recommendation that the director of the NSA (DIRNSA) and Cyber Command positions be split, with a civilian leading the former agency.
Before the final report was even delivered, the White House struck. On Friday, while insisting that the commission report was not yet final, national security council spokesperson Caitlin Hayden announced the White House had already decided the position would not be split. A dual-hatted general would continue to lead both.
By all appearances, the White House moved to pre-empt the results of its own Review Group to squelch any recommendation that the position be split. The Christian Science Monitor even reported that the final report now recommends that DIRNSA and CyberCom remain unified, suggesting either that the faction that supported that recommendation prevailed on the review, or the review changed its recommendations to accord with the president's decision, announced after receiving initial recommendations to split it.
Then there was the Sunday night CBS 60 Minutes interview with General Keith Alexander, a seeming sideshow to the real issues of NSA reform.
Consider that by the end of the day Friday, NSA deputy director John "Chris" Inglis, who weeks earlier had been floated as the leader of a civilian-led NSA, retired. (His plan to do so had been reported earlier this year).
Two things are at issue with this jockeying. First, all the evidence about this Review Group suggested it was a typical Washington DC whitewash. Rather than appointing outsiders, as Obama had promised, the group members – made up of Cass Sunstein, Geoffrey Stone, Peter Swire, Richard Clarke, and led by former acting CIA director Michael Morrell – have close ties to the president and/or the national security community. And the group reported through director of national intelligence James Clapper, whose performance should have been reviewed. No pure technical experts were included on a panel that ought to be assessing technical alternatives.
As the Guardian reported in September, experts who had advised the group came away with the impression that the team wouldn't consider substantive changes. All the evidence suggested this group was designed to stave off change, not recommend it.
Nevertheless, as soon as it did recommend changes, the White House moved quickly to shut down any discussion of that main recommendation. More important is the substance of the rejected recommendation, which will keep the NSA and CyberCommand under the same military general. One of the most alarming reports from the Snowden documents pertains to how NSA has weakened encryption to make both data collection and offensive cyberattacks easier. As the Guardian reported in September, the NSA has covertly worked to make encryption standards weaker. NSA's British partner GCHQ has been working to break the encryption of the top email programs. Ultimately, the NSA is trying to "insert vulnerabilities" into commercial encryption systems.
That means the NSA, to fulfill its data collection and cyberoffensive roles, has been creating holes that cyberattackers – hackers, thieves, and other countries – can also exploit. Meanwhile, the NSA's domestic collection programs increasingly focus on preventing cyberattackers from exploiting those and other vulnerabilities. That's even one of the biggest successes it touts from the FISA Amendments Act bulk collection program. The NSA is creating holes. Then it says it needs to collect more and more data domestically to prevent anyone from exploiting those holes.
A different independent review even suggested our cybersecurity continues to fail because our intelligence agencies are so busy building offensive weapons rather than building up our defenses. As a top intelligence venture figure told the New York Times last month:
It is easier and more intellectually interesting to play offense than defense.
Whatever else the dual-hatted DIRNSA and CyberCom position does, it fosters this condition. Not only is the combined position incredibly powerful from a bureaucratic standpoint, but having the same person oversee information collection and cyberattacks puts a premium on those encryption holes that make both collection and attacks easier. As a result, no powerful entity champions cyberdefense, plugging the holes that makes us all less safe.
The Wall Street Journal also reported the Review Group planned to recommend the NSA move the Information Assurance Group – the entity within NSA that makes code and plugs holes – out of the NSA. And that may improve things somewhat (though the most likely place to move it is Department of Homeland Security, not exactly the most effective bureaucratic agency). Yet that function would still be fighting the bureaucratic weight of a dual-hatted general.
The Obama administration revealed two things on Friday: first, even a whitewash review group proved too disruptive for the White House and the military figures who won in last week's pissing contest. Second, Obama has chosen to continue prioritizing attacks over keeping us safe.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
The U.S. death toll from gun violence since Newtown is more than 33,000. When will we wake up?
One year ago this week, a seemingly unimaginable event took place in Newtown, Connecticut. Adam Lanza, a disturbed and isolated young man took the guns that were legally purchased and kept in his home and drove to the Sandy Hook elementary school. He shot his way inside with an AR-15 assault rifle and proceeded to kill 26 people – 20 of them young children.
It was a crime that spoke, perhaps more than any other in recent memory, to America's deadly and debilitating fascination with guns. Here was the sickness of this nation's gun culture on vivid display.
But a year later what is even more unimaginable, more difficult to comprehend and more shocking than this horrible act of violence – is that the carnage continues with seemingly no end in sight.
Soon after Newtown, Slate.com began assembling an extraordinary (and deeply depressing) database of every media mention of a gun death in America. The stories are often short crime blotter articles. The victims are frequently unidentified and the motive unclear, but the senselessness was all too evident.
Just take the past two weeks: a three-year old in Indianapolis pulled his parents' loaded gun off a kitchen counter and shot himself in the head. Neighbors were surprised because even though the little boy's parents frequently carried their arms in public, they always seemed "responsible" enough not to leave a gun where their child could get it. A 16-year girl in Noblesville, Indiana was shot and killed when her friend pointed a gun at her chest and pulled the trigger. He thought the weapon was not loaded. In Arkansas, a grandfather with a gun killed himself and three others including his two grandchildren – one was 4 years old, the other only 4 months.
In Chickamauga, Georgia a 34-year old man heard a prowler outside and rather than wait for police, he went outside with his .40 caliber handgun and fired four shots at the silhouette of a man behind his house. It turned to be a 72-year old suffering from Alzheimer's who had wandered away from his house. And there was the 21-year old San Diego man whose "long-time friend" was showing him a gun. He dropped the weapon and it went off, striking the man in the chest – and ending his life.
These are just a few of the more than 11,000 gun deaths that Slate has compiled in the year since Newtown. Assembling gun statistics is quite difficult – largely because the NRA and its congressional allies have pushed for legislation to make it harder for the federal government to collect such data. So the actual number is likely much higher. In fact, researchers at Slate believe the death toll from gun violence since Newtown is more than 33,000 people.
Of course, what made Newtown so uniquely awful was that the victims were young children. But, in the year since Newtown, children continue to die from gun violence at a terrifying clip. According to a recent report from Mother Jones, 194 kids have been gunned down since last year. It's an appalling number, but it may actually underestimate the problem. Two Boston-based researchers believe that as many as 500 children and teenagers die every year (and 7,500 are hospitalized) at the hands of a firearm.
As if to add insult to unspeakable tragedy, rarely is anyone punished when a child dies in this manner. Justin Peters at Slate.com has done yeoman's work in addressing this issue. He points out that when children find a gun in their home and harm themselves or someone else that the parent, guardian or the friend is almost never held responsible. In fact, in 23 states there are no child gun-access prevention laws on the books. In the states where the laws do exist they are rarely enforced. Take, for example, the aforementioned case of the three-year old Indianapolis boy who found his parents gun and killed himself. The police are still not sure if a crime was committed.
But it seems almost impossible to understand how a three-year old being able to procure a loaded gun is anything but a crime of negligence. It's even more difficult to understand how there can even be an affirmative defense for parents who are so careless.
At some point, someone left a loaded gun where they clearly shouldn't have – and a child died as a result. With tougher punishments would a parent think twice about bringing a gun into their home? Would they take greater precaution to make sure that a gun in the home was locked and unloaded? Would they install gun safes in their home or gun locks on their weapons?
We're unlikely to find out any time soon. One might think that such unceasing bloodshed and the shock of Newtown would lead to not just national outcry but reform of America's lax gun laws. And it has. Ironically, they've been further weakened.
As the New York Times reported earlier this week there have been 109 gun laws passed in state legislatures since Newtown – 39 of them tightened gun restrictions and 70 loosened them. On the federal level, a bill to expand background checks for potential gun buyers was defeated by a Republican filibuster. In Colorado, which is one of the few states to toughen its gun laws in the last year, two state legislators who supported the bill were defeated in recall elections. The NRA's power to thwart public opinion and to uphold the narcissistic belief among gun advocates that their "freedom" must outweigh the costs to society of practically unfettered access to guns remains as strong as ever.
At the same time, gun manufacturers are seeing higher profits and gun sales, at least in the first quarter of the year, appeared to increase dramatically. Of course, this will mean even more gun deaths. A 2010 meta study by a researcher at the Harvard Injury Control Center lays out the sobering consequences of expanded gun ownership:
The evidence is overwhelming … that a gun in the home is a risk factor for completed suicide and that gun accidents are most likely to occur in homes with guns.
Ah, but what about protection say gun advocates? How will I ever keep my family safe from the hordes of home invaders? As the study says, "There is no credible evidence of a deterrent effect of firearms or that a gun in the home reduces the likelihood or severity of injury during an altercation or break-in."
If there is one thing that we do know about gun ownership in America, it is that buying a gun and keeping it one's home for "protection" dramatically increases the possibility of dying (or having a family member or friend die) from gun violence.
It's even worse for children. By one estimate, more than 75% of guns used in suicide attempts and unintentional injuries in those between birth and age 19 were kept in the home of the victim, at relatives or with friends. Imagine if Americans were told that every time they went to the gun store to buy a weapon.
It begs the question if the United States can't protect its own kids from gun violence is there any hope for the rest of us? In the end, this is what makes Newtown such an enduring tragedy. An event this devastating should have woken Americans up to the horror of gun violence – a horror that is all around them and that not only takes tens of thousands of lives but destroys families and communities in its wake.
But alas a year later nothing has changed – and the death toll from America's gun culture continues to rise.
As you may have heard, Time magazine just plastered the pontiff on its cover as person of the year. Some of us in the US take that to mean that, indeed, the meaning of life is not about how many securitized derivative products you can create that will cause the collapse of banks and financial markets. Nor is it about how many government shutdowns you can mastermind, or how many food stamps you can take from the hands of the hungry and poor.
Hark the herald angels are finally singing, one of whom is … tada! John Boehner.
The Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, who earlier this fall shrugged his shoulders at a corporatist-led shutdown of the federal government, appears to have gotten the pope's memo. Or maybe Representative Paul Ryan passed the pope's memo to Boehner. Ryan, the former GOP vice presidential candidate has also shirked his Tea Party masters by authoring a budget deal that will stave off any more shutdowns and defaults, at least for two years.
When asked this week if the modest US budget deal worked out by Ryan and Democratic Senator Patty Murray deserved to be immediately blasted by conservative groups, Boehner delivered his own scathing bit of fire and brimstone:
You mean the groups that came out and opposed it before they ever saw it?
That was just the warm up. Boehner then expanded on his sermon by unmasking the GOP civil war that has not only plummeted the Republican party into a death spiral but also hijacked Congress by keeping it from doing any meaningful work on behalf of the American people.
They are using our members and they are using the American people for their own goals. This is ridiculous. Listen, if you're for more deficit reduction, you're for this agreement, Boehner said.
We're thankful this holiday season that Boehner has decided to (finally) declare that the emperor has no clothes; that the Koch brothers, Ted Cruz, the Club For Growth, Dick Armey and Freedom Works are now the Wizards of Oz left standing naked before us. The American people deserve to see just how it is that the so-called "grassroots" movement called the Tea Party was long ago co-opted by these billionaire corporatists.
Never mind that nagging voice inside our heads that begs the question: where was this version of Boehner three months ago? Did he develop a conscience and a spine in two months? Can a merlot hangover produce some long overdue cut-the-crap honesty?
Or maybe it was the pope, because some of us consider the Time magazine cover of an alms-delivering pontiff and Boehner's political epiphany as very good signs, even if they're simply, oddly, coincidental.
In a time when the anti-government forces got a little too close to being "in charge" of Congress during the $24bn-in-lost-revenues-courtesy-of-Ted-Cruz's shutdown, some of us have even had a fleeting, flirtatious idea about converting to Catholicism. A world leader who is willing to call the end game of capitalism antithetical to humanity? What? When did the Vatican take over the wheels of John McCain's straight-talk express?
Boehner's latest "outburst" is so out of left field, so refreshing, that some of us wonder whether Boehner's brain and Twitter accounts might have been hacked.
So far, it doesn't appear to be that way. There are no retractions, no capitulating to the campaign-donor captors who threaten primaries against Republicans who dare to make deals with Democrats.
Today, Boehner went back to the congressional leader's pulpit and expanded on his civil-war-cracking diatribe against the handful of rich people who are trying to goad an entire nation to work against the interests of a majority of its people. As he said:
You know, they pushed us into this fight to defund Obamacare … It wasn't exactly the strategy I had in mind. But if you recall, the day before the government re-opened, one of the people at one of these groups stood up and said, 'well we never really thought it would work.' Are you kidding me?
No, sir. You've got to be kidding us. Even since the days after Boehner and Barack Obama went golfing and tried to cook up the grand bargain, Boehner toddled away from the reservation called procedural and policy sanity.
However, in the spirit of Nelson Mandela's forgiveness, which the South African leader granted his jailors, we'll forgive Boehner, who has finally emerged from a three-years-long, Club-For-Growth-induced coma.
Welcome back to the real America, Mr Speaker.
Richard "Dick" Cheney was once tremendously uncool, but now that Vanity Fair has declared George W. Bush to be a hipster icon, it made us realize that if there's one warmonger who could use a media makeover, it's the Wyoming Kid. And since the arbiters of Internet cool were tweens in 2009 when Cheney left office, they're more likely to know how much he loves his gay daughter then the fact that he earned five deferments, because what's a deferment? Here's why Cheney's the VP all the kids want to be.
1. He's an extreme hunter.
Long before hipsters started strapping handguns smithed in the '70s by men with unironic beards, Dick was out there shooting his friends in the face just to watch them cry.
2. He's got a hacker-proof heart.
Try as they might -- and they try mightily -- no hacker will ever find his way into Dick Cheney's heart. His pacemaker contains security protocols that make Apple weep with envy.
3. He knows a fine pair of hipster spectacles when he spies one.
Who's rocking those rims? Rumsfeld's rocking those rims.
4. He put the "self" in "self-esteem."
When they asked him who should be vice president, he just looked in the mirror and smiled.
5. Man. Sized. Safe.
Strong enough for classified top secret documents, but large enough for something man-sized.
6. He was into invading Iraq before you'd ever even heard of it.
Cheney and The Project for the New American Century wanted to invade Iraq in 1997, four years before anyone had even heard of 9/11.
7. He makes the Batman cringe every time he impersonates the Penguin.
Which is only every time he laughs.
8. He has an undisclosed location, but you’ve probably never been there.
It’s, like, totally underground.
9. He was into domestic surveillance way before it went mainstream.
Obama is like Stone Temple Pilots to his Pearl Jam when it comes to spying.
Image credits:
["Portrait Of A Hunter Isolated On White" on Shutterstock]
["Wrench On The X-Ray Film Background , Health Care" on Shutterstock]
["President Gerald Ford’s White House Chief of Staff Donald Rumsfeld, right, and his deputy, Richard Cheney, Nov. 7, 1975, in Washington"]
["Campaign Rally In Ohio Attended By Vice Presidential Candidate Dick Cheney, 2004" on Shutterstock]
["The Metal Safe" on Shutterstock]
["Silhouette Of Soldier With Machine Gun On A Car Against A Sunset" on Shutterstock]
["King Penguins At Volunteer Point On The Falkland Islands" on Shutterstock]
["An Almost Empty Field In Rural South Africa Against A Dramatic Blue Sky" on Shutterstock]
["Girl Is Spying On Boyfriend He Is Using A Smart Phone" on Shutterstock]
Since Barack Obama’s election, Democrats have been united by an increasingly reactionary oppposition. But beneath that veneer of tranquility, longstanding political and philosophical differences over the role the government should play in our economy…
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