Ninety miles from the South Eastern tip of the United States, Liberty has no stead. In order for Liberty to exist and thrive, Tyranny must be identified, recognized, confronted and extinguished.
The National Security Agency has a gun aimed at the head of each and every American, Edward Snowden says in a new interview, and they’re being asked to accept the NSA’s vast surveillance operations in the name of counterterrorism.
The NSA contractor turned whistleblower met comedian John Oliver at a Moscow hotel opposite the KGB’s former HQ in a room with all windows covered.
During the frank interview, which aired Sunday on Oliver’s ‘Last Week tonight’, Snowden tells the comedian-host “The NSA has the greatest surveillance capabilities that we have ever seen in history. Now what they will argue is that they don’t use this for nefarious purposes against American citizens." ‘Trust me'
Snowden himself admits ‘In some ways that’s true. But the real problem is that they’re using these capabilities to make us vulnerable to them and then saying, well, ‘I have gun pointed at your head. I’m not going to pull the trigger. Trust me.'"....
For the 10th century holy man and jurist Ahmad Ibn Fadlan, the violent, orgiastic, drunken spectacle put on by mourning Vikings in Bulgaria must have been shocking. In Ibn Fadlan’s Muslim tradition, loved ones cleaned the deceased person’s body, said prayers over him, placed him in a shroud and buried him in a relatively shallow grave the same day he died – the grave was shallow so the dead person could hear the call to prayer. In the Viking tradition, if it was a chief who died, he was placed in the ground while his burial clothes were prepared for 10 days, during which his followers drank and had sex with doomed slave girls “purely out of love.” On the day of cremation, the Viking’s body was exhumed, then his companions burned him, along with volunteer slave girls or boys who were slain, slaughtered dogs, horses, cows and chickens, food offerings, his weapons and his ship. For many years people have been fascinated by Vikings. Their reputation as rapacious, violent, deadly marauders up and down the coasts of Europe and farther east are famous. But in recent years people have..
