Global

Toshi and Pete Seeger defy description except through the sheer joy and honor it was to know them, however briefly.
Their list of accomplishments will fill many printed pages, which all pale next to the simple core beauty of the lives they led.
They showed us it’s possible to live lives that somehow balance political commitment with joy, humor, family, courage and grace. All of which seemed to come as second nature to them, even as it was wrapped in an astonishing shared talent that will never cease to inspire and entertain.
Pete passed on Monday, at 94, joining Toshi, who left us last year, at 91. They’d been married nearly 70 years.

Somehow the two of them managed to merge an unending optimism with a grounded, realistic sense of life in all its natural travails and glories.

Others who knew them better than I will have more specific to say, and it will be powerful and immense.

But, if it’s ok with you, I’d like to thank them for two tangible things, and then for the intangible but ultimately most warming.

The National Security Agency depends on huge computers that guzzle electricity in the service of the surveillance state. For the NSA’s top executives, maintaining a vast flow of juice to keep Big Brother nourished is essential -- and any interference with that flow is unthinkable.

But interference isn’t unthinkable. And in fact, it may be doable.

Grassroots activists have begun to realize the potential to put the NSA on the defensive in nearly a dozen states where the agency is known to be running surveillance facilities, integral to its worldwide snoop operations.

Organizers have begun to push for action by state legislatures to impede the electric, water and other services that sustain the NSA’s secretive outposts.

Those efforts are farthest along in the state of Washington, where a new bill in the legislature -- the Fourth Amendment Protection Act -- is a statutory nightmare for the NSA. The agency has a listening post in Yakima, in the south-central part of the state.

I still want Dirty Wars to win the Oscar, but The Square is a documentary worth serious discussion as we hit the three-year point since the famous occupation of Tahrir Square in Cairo that overthrew Mubarak -- in particular because a lot of people seem to get a lot of the lessons wrong.

I suppose some people will leave Dirty Wars imagining that we need clean wars, whatever those would be. But too many people seem to be drawing from The Square lessons they brought with them to it, including these: Thou shalt have a leader; thou shalt work within a major political party; thou shalt have an identifiable group of individuals ready to take power. I don't think following these commandments would have easily changed the past three years in Egypt; I don't think they're where Egyptians should be heading; and I'm even more confident they're blind alleys in the United States -- where they serve as supposed remedies for the supposed failings of Occupy.

For the last two years, British Prime Minister David Cameron has been unable to remove a serious thorn in his side, in the form of a wave of hard-right sentiment across the country that threatens to split the Conservative vote in two. The UK Independence Party, these days referred to almost unanimously as Ukip, has become the chief banner for vigorously old-fashioned conservatism.

Ukip was founded in 1993 as a single-issue party, focused primarily on opposing Britain's membership of the European Union as an affront to national sovereignty. They initially contained anti-EU elements from both the left and the right concerned about globalisation and immigration respectively, but in the past 10 years the leadership has morphed the party's position to the right so that it has become a hotbed of xenophobia, sexism, homophobia, and frothing-at-the-mouth rage against windfarms.

Where other strains of hard-right conservatism have failed in the past, Ukip has succeeded, partially because they attract protest votes in a political environment that is increasingly hostile to Westminster, but much more due to the no-nonsense charisma of their leader, Nigel Farage.

A flowing sensation on my mind waves a rising
To poems, awake to hear human heart beating,
Making it out of being, trance, agony and bliss
The shape of heart rejoices, shudders to verses
In perfect harmony between the poem adorned
By me in aspiration and the soul who reads

Perhaps some are poets, not we all but
To the heart paramours take it by surprise
Odes chosen to the meeting of minds fair in love
Known to protesters a language of slogan to rights
Or a lullaby calms a baby to rest and quiet
Merging with many minds, poetry stays alive.

In late August 2013, President Obama announced a review panel on the intelligence community in the wake of Edward Snowden's revelations. The panel, which the president described as composed of outsiders, was actually composed of intelligence community and Obama administration insiders and delivered the whitewash that many observers expected.

The panel, according to panel member Cass Sunstein, was “not thinking in constitutional terms,” and gave the president cosmetic recommendations that would do little to materially reduce the fine scrutiny that the NSA has placed the entire world under. According to a New York Times analysis of the president's speech, and the Free Press's examination of the accompanying presidential policy directive, President Obama seems to be resolved to apply a much thinner veneer of cosmetics than even his cherry-picked panel advised.

Since its founding six years ago, J Street has emerged as a major Jewish organization under the banner “Pro-Israel, Pro-Peace.” By now J Street is able to be a partial counterweight to AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. The contrast between the two U.S. groups is sometimes stark. J Street applauds diplomacy with Iran, while AIPAC works to undermine it. J Street encourages U.S. support for “the peace process” between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, while AIPAC opposes any meaningful Israeli concessions. In the pressure cooker of Washington politics, J Street’s emergence has been mostly positive. But what does its motto “Pro-Israel, Pro-Peace” really mean?