United States attempts to blackmail Ecuador over Edward Snowden

From Democracy Now:

Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa: "All of a sudden, trade tariffs became an instrument of blackmail: behave or leave the free trade movement. In the face of threats, insolence and arrogance of certain U.S. sectors, which have pressured to remove the preferential tariffs because of the Snowden case, Ecuador tells the world: We unilaterally and irrevocably denounce the preferential tariffs. Our dignity has no price." Correa’s government followed up with a dig at the Obama administration by offering to donate millions of dollars for human rights training in the United States on matters of "privacy, torture and other actions that are denigrating to humanity.

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Lee Camp unleashes ridicule toward big banks who censor chalk protester

Lee Camp says things that I think, but I also filter them. More and more, I'm feeling that being civil to the forces crushing democracy is not getting us anywhere. Therefore, Camp's bursts of ridicule toward the rich and abusive are feeling cathartic. This episode takes a look at more abuses by big banks, especially a huge penalty levied toward a man who wrote his bank protests in chalk.

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The process of losing one’s faith

Faith is not like a switch that gets flipped on or off. Former Pentecostal Minister Jerry DeWitt explains:

I dearly wish that there was one day or even better, one particular moment when I stopped believing (lost my faith). It would make my story much easier to tell. But instead, like so many others in the growing Secular movement, there was no one particular event, no one particular day when faith suddenly disappeared. Instead, it was like my faith in the supernatural and all things related to it were a pot filled with water on the stove. For the first several years of my spiritual journey the burner dial was set to high-heat and the water of my faith was continuously boiling over. Unbeknownst to me, as I entertained thoughts, concepts and belief systems outside of the Pentecostal doctrine that I had inherited, my belief dial was being turned down and the water temperature was decreasing. Along with doctrines, there were also new life experiences that generated thoughts that couldn't be easily ignored and over time they changed me. In other words, when a challenging thought came my way, I faced it and adjusted according. It took years for all of those small adjustments to add up to atheism. Eventually I simply recognized that I no longer believed.

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