Congress insists that the massive, invasive, unprecedented spying that they have authorized the government to perform is legal and necessary to stop terrorists. I didn't notice any exceptions written into the Bill of Rights that nullify the rights in cases of terrorism . . .
Beware the gut feeling that like begets like and that we should thus be able to anticipate effects from their causes. This leads far too many of us to doubt that sentience can emerge from primal goo. Those of us (like me) who are enthralled by complexity know that like begets like is far too often untrue. I've constantly seen that nature creates elaborate macro patterns using only a dynamic process involving far-too-simple component parts. With that background, take a look at these sand patterns generated by nothing but sound waves. I knew what was coming and I still felt chills when the patterns emerged. There is a deep lesson in these shallow grains of sand. Here's a web page with further explanation.
"My job this morning is to be so persuasive...that a light will shine through that window, a beam of light will come down upon you, you will experience an epiphany, and you will suddenly realize that you must go to the polls and vote for Barack," he told a crowd of about 300 Ivy Leaguers--and, by the looks of it, a handful of locals who managed to gain access to what was supposed to be a students-only event.
Josh Silver of Represent.us explains why he dumped $100 bills on NY legislators: To push for passage of the American Anti-Corruption Act.
From Glenn Greenwald: Many news outlets around the world, in the age of the internet, have struggled to find an economically sustainable model for supporting real journalism. The results, including for some of the largest, have been mass lay-offs, bureau closures, an increasing reliance on daily spurts of short and trivial traffic-generating items, and worst of all, a severe reduction in their willingness and ability to support sustained investigative journalism. All sorts of smaller journalistic venues - from local newspapers to independent political blogs - now devote a substantial portion of their energies to staying afloat rather than producing journalism, and in many cases, have simply ceased to exist. . . As governments and private financial power centers become larger, more secretive, and less accountable, one of the few remaining mechanisms for checking, investigating and undermining them - adversarial journalism - has continued to weaken. Many of these large struggling media outlets don't actually do worthwhile adversarial journalism and aren't interested in doing it, but some of them do. For an entity as vast as the US government and the oligarchical factions that control it - with their potent propaganda platforms and limitless financial power - only robust, healthy and well-funded journalism can provide meaningful opposition. For several years, I've been absolutely convinced that there is one uniquely potent solution to all of this: reader-supported journalism. That model produces numerous significant benefits. To begin with, it liberates good journalists from the constraints imposed by exclusive reliance on corporate advertisers and media corporations. It enables journalism that is truly in the public interest - and that actually engages, informs, and inspires its readers - to be primarily accountable to those readers.