Just started watching The Bridge, but I imagine the whole world has seen that by now. Not too bad. Below is the first 14 mins, enough time to decide if you like it.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&feature=endscreen&v=EH3woPBLQAs]
What journalists deserve when they ask incredibly stupid questions. We’ve all been there as hacks. But this woman really cops it from Lou Reed. An interviewee after my own heart. See the very end.
Martin Wolf’s piece on Greece (sub needed) stuck in my mind this week.
The death of Michael Hastings in a car crash made me read his remarkable Rolling Stone story about Stan McChrystal in Afghanistan. It was the end of McChrystal in Afghanistan. He is now reduced to speaking with me at a conference in Wisconsin next week.
Booked my tix for the Young Lions, below, in the Django Rheinhardt festival in NY next week. What is not to like?
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=eEPlVddEpis#at=81]
Only thing you can really say against them is that the original guy had two less (functioning) fingers
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hq0tPjdfHME]
Just in:
US government files sealed complaint against Snowden. Britain’s government and GCHQ are mindless lickspittles (again); with their own, non-existent moral bottom line.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yB3n9fu-rM]
The Snowden White House petition will go through 100,000 signatures today, 22 June. If you are an American, sign this thing. You’ll have something that makes you proud to tell your kids.
Obama (below) does a good job of defending what has been going on (though he weasles around the hard bits). But in the end, he is wrong. Because he is defending a means of opposing terrorism that rests on intrusion into privacy and the support of despotic allies, with money and guns, instead of solving the problems that create terrorism in the first place. He needs to break out of this way of thinking. If he wants to be the greatest American president since Truman — and he should want that — he needs to go back and look at the way in which the United States headed off insurgencies in the 1945-52 period by supporting land reform programmes and tackling the root cause of poverty and anger in the third world. Think bigger. Drones and snooping are not the stuff of a great American leader.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7L6J4Jyrxws&NR=1&feature=endscreen]
Tags: public speaking, recommended