John Sifton is an attorney at Human Rights Watch. He worked in Afghanistan and Pakistan from 2001 to 2004 and was senior researcher on terrorism and counterterrorism from 2005 to 2007. He is currently the Asia Advocacy Director.
The first thing I did after I heard about the highly classified NSA PRISM program two years ago was set up a proxy server in Peshawar to email me passages from Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. A literary flight of fancy. I started sending back excerpts from Gerard Manley Hopkins poems.
I have watched with a mixture of awe and sadness as the Chinese have so successfully kicked our President in the balls over cyber-war, and started an astonishingly active national conversation over whether or not the active measures taken by the US Government against its own citizens are lawful, necessary, or even affordable.
I have taken several oaths over the past 36 years of service — all to defend the Constitution of the United States of America against all enemies, domestic and foreign — and I have to confess that it was not until I spent 20 years wandering in the wilderness — the longest “walk-about” ever taken by any serving intelligence officer in US history that I know of — that I have really appreciated how few in government service reflect on or honor their oath on a day to day basis, and how few of our citizens are intelligently engaged with the non-transferable responsibility of being citizens.
The Constitution is “root.” Anyone that forgets that — or worse yet, demeans it as Henry Kissinger, Michael Bloomberg, Colin Powell, Mike Hayden, Jim Clapper, and Keith Alexander have all been so quick to demean it — is part of the problem. I balance my sense that we need a ruthless counterintelligence service with a recognition that at this juncture, “truth and reconciliation” is the only path that might allow us to move past the old paradigm of money as the controlling authority, never mind that it is illicit money rooted in crimes against the public legalized by a corrupt Congress.
Barack Obama is our President. Get over it, those of you that have so many reasons for questioning everything about his presidency. It is what it is. The question we have to ask ourselves is this: what now? What can we do to save Obama, save the US Government, and save the Republic from three more years of domestic poverty and foreign war?
Mr. President, if I were a professional con artist paid to give you the pros and cons on engaging in a war in Syria, here's what they would be:
As you know, former president Clinton, probably understood by many to also be speaking on behalf of his wife, has called you a wuss. Virtually nobody remembers or cares that you said “I want to end the mindset that got us into war in the first place.” The majority of Americans, exercising that mindset, want you to get us into a new war in the first place if the alternative is having a wuss in the White House. I don't have a poll on that, but trust me.
This is not contradicted by public opposition to U.S. engagement in the war in Syria (as seen in the polls). If U.S. casualties are minimized and if the financial cost can come out of the base DOD budget — at least at first — then the political cost is negligible while the political gain is enormous. Unless you drag this out. The military budget is being increased right now, and in violation of the sequester, and nobody gives a rat's ass. They think it means jobs and non-wussiness. Unless you drag it out.
A compilation of historical reflections on cannabis in alchemical literature.
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Three things suffice for the work: a white smoke, which is water; a green Lion, which is the ore of Hermes, and a fetid water… The stone, known from the chapters of books, is white smoke and water.
Michael Maier
Atalanta Fugiens
Of this self-same body, which is the matter of the Stone, three things are chiefly said; that it is a green Lion, a stinking Gum, and a white Fume. Having twelve pounds of Green Lion thus brought into gum, thou mayst believe…
Every day we're faced with hundreds of decisions, and each and every one is a chance to take a step toward societal evolution.
1) Music by Anarchiel – https://soundcloud.com/anarchiel/you-…
2) More info on plastic bags
3) More info on Nestle–
