Netanyahu at it again.
Benjamin Netanyahu wants to redefine Israel as “the nation-state of one people only – the Jewish people – and of no other people” Here. What an interesting notion: anyone living in Israel who is not Jewish would be considered a minority. Netanyahu mentioned Arabs in this reassurance, but his new law would affect many other non-Israelis living there as well.
Imagine becoming an official minority because you did not share the religion of founders. The U.S. might follow Israel’s example and declare itself a nation-state of Christians only, but promising to protect the rights of its minority citizens who are not Christian. Suddenly one’s neighbor might become a “minority citizen” by law.
The idea of minority citizen is one which the U.S. has striven and still strives to rid itself of. It is repulsive to me, because as a child I raised by parents born of two immigrants and though they had work here and though my father became an educated man and did well , we lived as children as outsiders. My parents grew up in tenements: their parents world was circumscribed by non-acceptance. Those barriers took three generations to fall, but in the U.S. there are still minorities whose rights are supposedly protected but who suffer simply because they are minorities.
I hope that the final vote will deny Netanyahu this bizarre notion that Democracy and citizenship can be separated in the modern world. Tzipi Livni said she could only support legislation where “Jewish and democratic would have the same weight, not more Jewish than democratic, nor more democratic than Jewish” HERE. Let’s hope that her point of view prevails in an already troubled Middle East.
A provision passed by the Senate Intelligence Committee in November of 2014 and included in a bill about to be brought to the Senate Floor so offended Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, that he asked Diane Feinstein to remove it. The provision would have required the President of the U.S. to issue a yearly report to the public about the deaths of “combatants” and “non-combatants” as a result of drone attacks. Evidently Clapper thought the President did not have the means to appropriately disclose information to the public without interfering with Clapper’s needs. He suggested to Feinstein that
“To be meaningful to the public, any report including the information described above would require context and be drafted carefully so as to protect against the disclosure of intelligence sources and methods or other classified information. … We are confident we can find a reporting structure that provides the American people additional information to inform their understanding of important government operations to protect our nation, while preserving the ability to continue those operations,” HERE
Pardon me for thinking that the President’s staff could prepare a report to the people of the U.S. that had context, was carefully drafted, and did not in any way interfere with or reveal information vital to the security of the country. (I say this despite the fact that I am not overly fond of President Obama’s record so far.)
Perhaps James Clapper is so worried about what the citizens of this country might learn that he has to continually dissemble and manipulate the information we are given about what is being done in our names. Perhaps he is simply so full of his own authority that he can not concede that he lives in a democracy or at least the remnants of one. Fortunately for him he has Diane Feinstein to cater to his need to protect his secrets
whatever they may be.
Obomba opened his mouth once too often.
When our resident Bomber-in-chief told us that he ordered the drone strike that killed Anwar Al-Awlaki, he opened a unexpected constitutional door, something I’m sure he never intended.
Despite the government’s claim that the papers relating to the strike could not be released, and despite the fact that a circuit court judge had upheld that argument, government officials talked about the strike (including our “I’m really good at killing people” president my post HERE).
Luckily for us, a panel of judges ruled that after government officials had talked about the strike, there could no longer be any objection about releasing information requested by the ACLU and 2 reporters for the New York Times.
Whatever documents pertain to the decision for the drone strike must now be released. Citizens of the U.S. will now have a chance to understand what drives the choice to kill another U.S. citizen without trial in open court. Whether this will simply be a precedent for democracy or a lesson for the government to keep its secrets secret remains to be seen.
full story HERE at the New York Times
Oregon family blames cat for its own behaviour
The story of a 22 pound Himalyan which trapped its owners and their seven month old baby in their bedroom HERE was brought to my attention by my daughter last night Today, I listened to the recording of the husband’s emergency call and discovered that he had misrepresented the facts. According to the original story, the baby had pulled the cat’s tail and the cat had responded (as most cats will) by slashing at her attacker. According to the father, the boy had only one or two tiny scratches on his forehead.
However, the father reacted in a rather violent manner himself by kicking the cat hard and the cat became enraged thereafter going after the parents.
I have throughout my lifetime owned cats and dogs and know that they can sometimes inflect slight wounds when threatened, but I also know that cats can be gently distracted when threatened. Nowhere did I find a reference indicating that the animal handler who answered the emergency call was attacked.
In this instance, the owners of the cat indicated that the animal had a history of violence. So I wonder why they kept the violent cat, allowed it to have access to a seven-month child. Would they have kicked an older child if it had scratched the baby in retaliation?
I have in my life lived with cats and dogs and for many years with children present as well. Right now, I have a five year old grandchild, a dog, a 3 cats. The child respects the animals and they respect her. Occasionally, the animals inflict a minor scratch on us but none of us has ever responded by kicking the animal. They know by a simple “no” or a
word of pain, “ouch,” that they have done wrong. It’s about training and patience and if you don’t have any, don’t live with animal.
At present the owners are trying to decide what to do with the cat. The only real options are to “to put it down” or to put it up for adoption. Please, please someone step forward and offer this cat a home where it can live out it’s life. Some kindness and training might reveal another sweeter side of its character.
Anyone else agree?
Distopia is Upon Us
Some psychopath(s) must have read 1984* as a guidebook to a disutopian future rather than as a warning or an insight into the dangerous possibility of one and decided to put it into existence. I don’t claim to know who it is/was or when it began but the existence of an us or them outlook, the “western” nations vs. the “eastern” nations, the constant state of war, the increasing poverty in even the “wealthiest” nations and the recognition that the wealth of those nations is held by small percentage of its population as well as the increase of “new speak” are frightening indicators of how far we have progressed along the path toward Oceania. [*available on the main page heading at Why News Speak?]
The recent revelations from the files Edward Snowden released to The Guardian’s former writer Glen Greenwald have shown us how much further along the process is than many of us suspected. It was implicit that Nations spied upon one another under certain circumstances, but the few of us suspected that our own governments were actually spying on us, accumulating personal data from our emails, phone calls, browsing habits, GPS, tablets and that we did not need to be a “person-of-interest” for this to be true. In the past few days, we have also been told that our web cams can not only be viewed when we are using them, but that they can be turned on remotely and that photos of us can be taken and stored indefinitely, run through face recognition software and shared with possible “suspects.”
Glen Greenwald has also told us
that western intelligence agencies are attempting to manipulate and control online discourse with extreme tactics of deception and reputation-destruction. HERE
In the article cited above, Greenwald provides links to four documents published in a series he wrote for NBC as well as another in the article he is writing for firstlook.org. These documents should arouse fear and anger at the lengths the NSA and GCHQ have gone to subvert the freedoms of its own citizens, using tactics that were once used against the enemies of those freedoms, including Germany during WWII and the USSR during the Cold War.
It is not enough to be a terrorist nor a criminal to bring the intelligence community into your life, and the fact that you have done nothing wrong is clearly not going to save you from being spied upon.
If only Orwell had provided a primer for how to prevent or to bring down this subversion of our liberties, freedom, and daily lives.
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