John Kiriakou’s Doing Time Like a Spy: How the CIA Taught Me to Survive and Thrive in Prison paints a disturbing portrait of a U.S. prison in which Kiriakou spent time as retribution for having admitted that the CIA used torture. His ongoing whistleblowing on the state of U.S. prisons, as well as on the ways in which the U.S. government has gone after him, is as valuable as his opposition to CIA torture. This is not a congratulatory puff piece.
The mainstream media’s obituaries for Gen. Manuel Noriega missed the real story: the U.S. government’s rank hypocrisy in justifying a bloody invasion that deepened Panama’s role in the drug trade,
Anatomical penises may exist, but as pre-operative transgendered women also have anatomical penises, the penis vis-à-vis maleness is an incoherent construct. We argue that the conceptual penis is better understood not as an anatomical organ but as a social construct isomorphic to performative toxic masculinity. Keywords: penis; feminism; machismo braggadocio; masculinity; climate change
In the tradition of Saul Alinsky and Antonio Gramsci, Smucker points out that “knowledge of what is wrong with a social system and knowledge of how to change the system are two completely different categories of knowledge.”
The many reports I have seen where pundits share their shock and awe that Trump allowed a Russian into the Oval Office have brought me a laugh from the past.
Ever since Chelsea Manning was revealed as the whistleblower of one of the most important journalistic archives in history, her heroism was manifest. She was the classic leaker of conscience: someone who went at the age of 20 to fight in the Iraq War believing it was noble, only to discover the dark reality not only of that war but of the U.S. government’s role in the world generally: war crimes, indiscriminate slaughter, complicity with high-level official corruption, and systematic deceit of the public.
SOMETHING VERY UNUSUAL happened in the U.S. Senate today: a vote scheduled by the Majority Leader failed. The legislation would have repealed an Obama-era rule designed to prevent methane emissions from leaking out of drilling operations on public lands.
The European elites want the European Union as a means for controlling the Continent’s economies, but that often requires overriding the popular will of nation states, a dilemma for “democracy,” explains Andrew Spannaus.
AUSTIN, Texas — A team of engineers led by 94-year-old John Goodenough, professor in the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin and co-inventor of the lithium-ion battery, has developed the first all-solid-state battery cells that could lead to safer, faster-charging, longer-lasting rechargeable batteries for handheld mobile devices, electric cars and stationary energy storage.
The researchers demonstrated that their new battery cells have at least three times as much energy density as today’s lithium-ion batteries.
The Washington Post has an important column By Robert Kagan in Sunday’s edition. It is behind a paywall. Extensive excerpts with opinion added is here.
Thirty-six hours after the pre-dawn cruise-missile strike against Syria’s al-Shayrat airfield, neoconservative hawks, many of whom beat the drums for war in Iraq 14 years ago, are feeling the warm spring breezes of renewal and rejuvenation.
Even as The New York Times leads the charge against the Syrian government for this week’s alleged chemical attack, it is quietly retreating on its earlier certainty about the 2013 Syria-sarin case, reports Robert Parry.
Masha Gessen: A student asked me the other day whether I approved of exaggerating for a good cause. The topic had apparently been discussed at an environmental forum, and the question was, essentially, “Does saving the climate justify lying?” Wouldn’t it be a good idea to use an impressive, if not necessarily factually correct, message to counteract the mind-numbing cacophony of the Trump administration, which drowns out more reasoned speech?
At the kind of journalism conferences I attend, Aron Pilhofer, who had key roles in the digital operations of the New York Times and the Guardian in recent years, has been asking a very good question. What if news organizations optimized every part of the operation for trust?Not for speed, traffic, profits, headlines or prizes… but for trust. What would that even look like?
There are two books called The Wikileaks Files. One is by Jullian Assange. This is about the other one. It has contributions by Dan Beeton, Phyllis Bennis, Michael Busch, Peter Certo, Conn Hallinan, Sarah Harrison, Richard Heydarian, Dahr Jamail, Jake Johnston, Alexander Main, Robert Naiman, Francis Njubi Nesbitt, Linda Pearson, Gareth Porter, Tim Shorrock, Russ Wellen, and Stephen Zunes. Here are reviews at Amazon.
