Tag: news

“We as civilians—who elect certain leaders and rally behind a
war—have an obligation to understand what we’re asking [the troops
to give up] and I hope that these letters do that,” says Andrew
Carroll, a Washington, D.C., based historian. Carroll has devoted
the past 16 years to collecting and preserving war correspondences
throughout American history.

Carroll sat down with Reason TV to reveal the importance of his
project and how he hopes it shapes America’s attitude toward war in
the future. 

View this article.

Protests that began last week in Hong Kong over
Beijing’s decision to vet all candidates for a 2017 election for
chief administrator have turned into some of the largest
demonstrations Hong Kong has seen. The growing protests are thanks
in part to a disproportionate response from local police in Hong
Kong, who fired tear gas at protesters in an attempt to disperse
them. Over the weekend demonstrators took to the streets
surrounding government buildings as part of the campaign of

mass civil disobedience “Occupy Central” activists
promised.

So far, the Chinese government has officially insisted it had
confidence in Hong Kong’s ability to police the protests itself.
But it’s busy censoring news of the protests on the mainland, which
in 2014 includes a slew of social media and communication apps that
have become popular in China and Hong Kong, as well as disrupting
mobile networks and conducting surveillance on the island.

Reuters reports:

The intervention is beyond what is normal for the usually
free-talking Hong Kong, even as people are used to Chinese censors
scrubbing the Internet in the mainland when mass demonstrations
erupt.

On Sunday, users reported that Facebook Inc’s photo sharing app
Instagram was inaccessible on China’s mainland.

Chinese websites, including Baidu Inc’s search engine and the
Twitter-like Weibo Corp microblog, have set about deleting
references to the Hong Kong demonstrations.

Others have reported messages on Tencent Holdings Ltd’s hugely
popular WeChat messaging app being removed.

“I think it is still quite safe except WeChat, which is China,”
said Oscar, a 21-year-old student at Hong Kong’s Polytechnic
University, who uses Facebook and WhatsApp to communicate and plan
with other protesters.

“It depends on your phone, because some China (brand) phones,
they can detect your messages,” he said.

The Chinese government’s attempt to censor news of the protests
extends to all opinons, something that appears to frighten even
some pro-government activists in China:

“WeChat is not blocked, I think some stuff is being deleted,”
said Jennie, who, after growing up in mainland China and being
educated in the United States, now runs a Hong Kong-based
charity.

“I forwarded an article (on Hong Kong) on today and it was
deleted. The mainland should think it’s good people are expressing
ideas on behalf of the mainland government, but they even deleted
that. Basically they’re preventing the opportunity for dialogue,
which if you think about it is quite scary.”

The Chinese government may not be able to prevent its citizens
from knowing about protests in Hong Kong, but it can try to keep
them from thinking about it. The last word in the Reuters article,
from the pro-government activist:

“All my friends … know what’s happening in Hong Kong,” said
Jennie in Hong Kong. “They’re tweeting from Weibo and WeChat and
forwarding articles. Not expressing personal views, but there are
articles being forwarded.”

At the same time, Chinese authorities ordered all websites to
“immediately clear away information about Hong Kong students
violently assaulting the government and about ‘Occupy Central’,”
according to China Digital Times, another censorship watchdog.

“My dad saw an article discussion I forwarded on the ‘deeper’
issues causing the current situation, and he replied: ‘Oh it’s been
deleted’,” said Jennie. “And that’s it, he didn’t seem to be
bothered by it.”

Across the country, China had about
500 protests a day in 2012, but even when governemnt buildings
are taken over protesters express support for the Communist
Party.

NPR’s Sanjena Sathian
looks back at the left/right coalition that brought
homeschooling out from under a legal cloud. The left wing of the
alliance featured fans of John Holt and
other radical critics of institutionalized education; the right
wing reflected Christian conservative concerns. Those worldviews
may have been far apart (though inevitably, people managed to

combine them), but the different groups managed to work
together:

Fast-forward to the 1980s, when
left met right. [Home School Legal Defense Association founder
Michael] Farris found himself defending a hodgepodge of
home-schoolers/unschoolers throughout the decade, mostly Christians
like him and his family, but also “black Jews, Muslims…even one
woman who told me her religious practices were a cross between Zen
Buddhism and the philosophy of Winnie the Pooh.”

States got creative, defending compulsory school attendance laws by
leveraging truancy and even child abuse charges against
home-schooling parents, and lawyers like Farris rose to the top of
a booming individual rights movement.

Farris and other lawyers fought to change the
definition of a private school to include home schooling; they
combated truancy charges aplenty and faced down the dictum that
students should only be taught by certified teachers. But mostly
they won the courts’ silence, as judges refused to rule on the
inherent value of home schooling and instead considered it from a
rights perspective. That, in itself, was victory.

Today, most of the nearly 2 million home-schooled kids are probably
still seen as
fringe—but the idea of criminalizing parents for teaching kids
at home? Equally fringe.

Sathian wraps up by contrasting those “1980s debates that could
unite two opposing value systems under the shared umbrella of a
libertarian ideal” with “today’s deeply personal and political
battles” over issues like Common Core. But I wouldn’t rush to
consign the left/right education alliance to the nostalgia pit just
yet. Both the Christian right and the John Holt left object
strongly to Common Core, and lately they’ve been joined by many

voices within the
teachers unions, which certainly wasn’t the case with the
homeschooling battles. Unity at last!

[Via Ralph
Nader.]

Last week the U.S. began
conducting airstrikes in Syria as part of its war against the
Islamic State (a.k.a. ISIS or ISIL). The Obama administration is
deliberately hitting oil fields under ISIS control in order to hit
them in the moneymaker. American military leaders were quick to
say, “The
strikes were successful.”

An ISIS fighter under the pseudonym Abu Talha
tells CNN that’s a lot of hot air:

We’ve been ready for this for some time. … We know that our
bases are known because they’re tracking us with radars and
satellites, so we had backup locations. …

We have revenues other than oil. We have other avenues, and our
finances are not going to stop just because of oil losses. …

They thought they knew everything. But thank God, they don’t
know anything. And God willing, we will defeat the infidels.

They hit us in some areas, and we advance in other. … If we are
pushed back in Iraq, we advance in northern Syria. These strikes
cannot stop us, our support or our fighters

Can we take his word for it? If not, the former head of the
U.K.’s military
also says that airstrikes aren’t going to work.

President Barack Obama acknowledged yesterday that his
administration has “underestimated”
the Islamic State.

America’s bombing campaign could cost as much as
$10 billion a year, according to Foreign Affairs.

Several foreign policy voices have
said American airstrikes run the serious risk of
bringing together ISIS with other anti-American jihadists while
angering moderate rebels that have previously been pro-U.S.

Reuters
reports today that “U.S.-led air strikes hit grain silos and
other targets in Islamic State-controlled territory in northern and
eastern Syria overnight, killing civilians and wounding
militants.”

As Reason‘s Peter Suderman highlights, despite Obama’s
insistence that he won’t get America tangled up in a ground war,
the
vast majority of Americans believe the fight against ISIS will
expand beyond airstrikes to include ground troops. 

The newly inaugurated president of Afghanistan,
Ashraf Ghani, is
expected to sign a security deal tomorrow that will allow
10,000 U.S. troops to remain in Afghanistan after the international
operation officially finishes at the end of the year.

Nevertheless, Ghani is
also interested in restarting negotiations with the Taliban,
which claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing near the Kabul
airport, and other militant groups in the country. “Fighting is not
the solution to the political differences,”the new president said
at his inauguration. “We proved that political differences can be
solved through political negotiations. Therefore I call upon the
opponents of the government – especially the Taliban and
Hezb-e-Islami to join political talks.”

Ghani’s electoral rival, Abdullhah Abdullah, who
also supported extending the U.S. mission in Afghanistan, was
also sworn in as a “chief executive,” part of a power-sharing deal
after the disputed election.

Former President Hamid Karzai, who left office today, and

refused to sign a security deal with the U.S. as a lame duck,

used his farewell speech last week to lambast the U.S.,
claiming “America did not want peace for Afghanistan, because it
had its own agendas and goals here,” mainly the “personal interest
of the foreign policies of others.”

Virginians who will vote in November’s Senate
race have a choice between two hopelessly partisan hacks, say the
candidates themselves. The Republican challenger, Ed Gillespie,
constantly accuses incumbent Democrat Mark R. Warner of marching in
lock step with President Barack Obama and Senate Majority Leader
Harry Reid. By way of rebuttal, Warner says things like this:
Gillespie “comes from a world where it’s all about partisanship,
one team versus another team. If there’s ever a time where you have
to check your Republican and Democrat hats and put our country
first, it’s now.” A. Barton Hinkle says it’s time to drop the
partisan hackery.

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