Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “Articles”
Implantable RFID tracking chips. You know, to stop terrorism. And to keep tabs on all the welfare queens, in order to keep tax dollars accountable. There will be other rationales, too. But really, governments just want to do all the spying they can within their power – and right now, technology offers more power than ever before to carry out …
Every quasi-mushroom cloud has a silver lining. That was our cynical conclusion yesterday when we noticed that as part of China’s tragic Tianjin mega-explosion, thousands of channel-stuffed cars parked at the Chinese port which likely would have quietly rusted away into the epic nothingness of China’s unprecedented excess capacity of pretty much everything, were destroyed, thereby one-time reducing at least …
Though transparency was a cause he championed when campaigning for the presidency, President Obama has largely avoided making certain defense costs known to the public. However, when it comes to military appropriations for government spy agencies, we know from Freedom of Information Act requests that the so-called “black budget” is an increasingly massive expenditure subsidized by American taxpayers. The CIA …
Eventful days in the middle of summer. Just as the Greek Pandora’s box appears to be closing for the holidays (but we know what happens once it’s open), and Europe’s ultra-slim remnants of democracy erode into the sunset, China moves in with a one-off but then super-cubed renminbi devaluation. And 100,000 divergent opinions get published, by experts, pundits and just …
The decision by Amnesty International’s decision-making forum, the International Council Meeting, to call for the decriminalization of prostitution is another in a long line of triumphs for heartless neoliberal economics and the grotesque commodification of human beings that defines predatory capitalism. Salil Shetty, secretary-general of Amnesty International, said: “Sex workers are one of the most marginalized groups in the world …
Claiming that the continued development and burning of fossil fuels violates their constitutional rights, 21 young plaintiffs—ranging in age from 8 to 19—filed a landmark climate change lawsuit against the federal government on Wednesday. “The federal government has known for decades that CO2 pollution from burning fossil fuels was causing global warming and dangerous climate change,” said one of the …
Gambit I was the start of false accusations by the then Bush Administration in 2007 that Iran was preparing a nuclear weapon, when in fact Iran had no such ambitions at all, but a plan to open an Iranian Oil Bourse (IOB) in Teheran, an international hydrocarbon exchange, where all countries, hydrocarbon producers or not, could trade this (still) principal energy …
The worth of gold in the world is growing by the day. That might seem like a paradox but it isn’t. The worth of gold is not fixed on the Comex futures exchange, or the trade in London or Zurich. True, most of the gold-trading public takes its cue today from the CME’s COMEX gold futures price where it does …
Robert Mercer, a Wall Street hedge-fund magnate who started at I.B.M. and made his fortune using computer patterns to outsmart the stock market, has already put more than $11 million into Ted Cruz’s SuperPAC Once upon a time in our Good Ol’ US-of-A, presidential contenders and their political parties had to raise the funds needed to make the race. How …
The headline over a recent article in The Times of Israel by the paper’s Middle East analyst, Avi Issacharoff, was The end of the two-state solution. And the strapline (secondary headline) underneath that was a quote from the body of his article. “It’s time to say it out loud: The Israeli right has won – a temporary, pyrrhic victory that …
