The targets are journalists, activists, opposition party leaders, human rights lawyers, 11 unnamed U.S. officials in Uganda, Palestinian activists. The Israeli-made Pegasus spyware, sold by the cyberoffense firm NSO to state intelligence agencies around the world, has become infamous in recent years. Exploiting unknown loopholes in WhatsApp, iMessage and Android has allowed the group’s clients to potentially infect any smartphone and gain full access to it – in some cases without the owner even clicking or opening a file. Digital forensics groups such as Amnesty International and the...
U.S.
Where U.S. Police Spending Ranks Among Worldwide Military Expenditures
12/30/21 Basir Bita on the Economic Crisis in Afghanistan
Scott interviews activist Basir Bita about the economic calamity that’s hit Afghanistan since the U.S. withdrawal this past summer. With the U.S. and IMF freezing Afghan government funds as well as widespread market corrections after the fall of the previous regime, Afghanistan has been thrown into turmoil. Food prices have tripled since the summer and many Afghans face issues with food security. Bita argues that the Biden Administration and others should get over their hesitation to work with the new government of Afghanistan. And that a refusal to do so reveals how little they truly...
12/30/21 Daniel Larison: US Militarism Should Have Died With the Soviet Union
Scott is joined by Antiwar.com contributing editor Daniel Larison to discuss his most recent piece. Larison argues that the period following the peaceful breakup of the USSR was the best moment for the U.S. to shed the militaristic blob it had built up in the name of fighting communism. Instead, the military-industrial-congressional complex scrambled to find a new enemy. And the next thirty years of meddling in the Middle East and Eastern Europe have resulted in today’s messy geopolitical status quo. Discussed on the show: “US Militarism Should Have Died With the Soviet Union”...
TGIF: Pursue Your Happiness and Forget the Rest
How about we do something novel in the new year? Let's stop worrying about the stuff most politicians, pundits, and activists want us to worry about and instead think about ourselves, our families, our friends, and whatever communities we choose to be part of. Let's forget about "the country" and the rest of the world. Let's individually pursue happiness. All I'm saying is that it's finally time for the politicians, bureaucrats, and know-it-all intelligentsia, left or right, to get out of the way and let us set our own agendas. Too self-centered? Well, too bad. Much evil results from...
COI #207: Is Biden Turning to Diplomacy with Russia and Iran?
On COI #207, Kyle Anzalone and Connor Freeman update the JCPOA talks’ recent developments and the Russians’ security proposals presented to Washington. Kyle discusses the Russians pulling 10,000 troops off the border with Ukraine and sending them back to their bases. This is potentially a show of goodwill before the upcoming talks with the U.S. next month. Kyle and Connor then cover some recent escalations that do not necessarily bode well for substantive diplomacy like the Americans flying spy planes over Ukraine not far from the separatist Donbas region. There is also talk of a...
The Human Under the Numbers
The story of Anne Frank is tragic. If not for the words that she wrote in her diary, she would be a digit of history. Her diary is relatable, and the thoughts that collected inside her being during a horrible time in history gives the reader an idea of who she was. She is immortalized because of the little things that she wrote, not because of any great deeds recorded by others. As a victim of tyranny she is remembered as an innocent murdered. She is a story found inside the numbers. Thanks to her diary, we have a human figure to know and mourn, despite the mechanized bureaucratic...
Salafis Throwing Bombs: How American and British Planners Partnered With Al-Qaeda Affiliated Groups At the Start of the Syrian Civil War
Introduction In the mainstream view, al-Qaeda did not play a role in the Syria conflict until Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi dispatched his deputy, Abu Muhammad al-Jolani, to Syria in August 2011 to establish a wing of the group there, called Jabhat al-Nusra, or the Nusra Front. Additionally, al-Qaeda allegedly did not carry out any military operations until December 2011 and did not announce its establishment until January 2012. However, there is evidence that al-Qaeda affiliated militants were involved in the Syrian conflict much earlier. Saudi intelligence...
Lunatic With a Plan: Erdogan and Turkey’s Economic Woes
Since the first assault on Turkey’s finances in 2018, which I wrote about multiple times (here, here, and here), I’ve been the lone voice telling everyone that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is a lunatic but he’s a lunatic with a plan. That plan is to de-dollarize the economy of a valuable member of NATO geostrategically. Since the first shots across the bow by the Trump administration at Erdogan’s toying with those powers east of the Bosporus (Russia, China and Iran) the Turkish lira has been the primary mode of attack against Erdogan. Erdogan has pursued what has been deemed unorthodox...
Is Virtue Signaling Vicious?
Virtue signaling—the practice of highlighting what one takes to be one’s own moral superiority, often by loudly denouncing the character and comportment, including the speech, of other people—has become a dominant mode of rhetoric throughout social media and network television. Virtue theory, in contrast, is a teleological approach to normative morality concerned with how actions affect one’s soul or character. Historians of philosophy usually trace virtue theory to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, the first extant articulation of ideas such as that habits build character, and virtues...