Good Morning!
(Photo by joanneleon. October, 2012)
“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.
Terrormaker - Nicholson Baker
|
Drop in any time
day or night
to say hello, to post news, art, music, etc.
and feel free to promote your own work,
no matter where it lives.
|
News and Opinion
Keystone XL March Follows 'Do The Math' Event In Washington, D.C.
Following Bill McKibben's "Do The Math" tour stop in Washington, D.C. Sunday, members of 350.org and other activists are marching around the White House urging President Obama to reject the Keystone XL oil sands pipeline.
Following the march, which features a 500-foot mock pipeline, author and 350.org founder Bill McKibben, Sierra Club President Allison Chin and Oklahoma-based environmental leader Earl Hatley plan to speak on the pipeline and encouraged Obama to address climate change.
McKibben recently addressed Washington's inaction on climate change. In an email to HuffPost's Tom Zeller, McKibben wrote, "It's true that D.C. hasn't yet caught on... They're still in the grip of the fossil fuel industry."
‘The climate gap’: Extreme weather hurts poor the most
Over the last three weeks, we’ve seen the fallout from Hurricane Sandy hit the working poor and middle class the hardest. Droughts, heat waves, and wildfires also afflict the lower classes far more than the wealthy, according to a Center for American Progress analysis of extreme weather events in 2011 and 2012.
Who Started the Israel-Gaza Conflict?
So in Israel the question was how to respond to aggression from Gaza, and in Gaza the question was how to respond to aggression from Israel. And each side considered its own use of force--what the other side called provocation--a response to provocation.
On Thursday, after Israel had killed a senior Hamas military commander and his son, and a rocket from Gaza had killed three Israelis, I aired this question on twitter: "Does anybody know of a truly symmetrical timeline of Israel-Gaza escalation--including missiles from Gaza and Israeli strikes?"
A number of people sent links, but none of the timelines seemed wholly objective; all seemed to have at least a wisp of Israeli or Palestinian perspective. Happily, Emily Hauser, an American-Israeli writer who lived in Tel Aviv for 14 years, offered to do her best to assemble a symmetrical timeline from available sources. You'll find it below, with fatalities in boldface.
Since Emily didn't want to devote the rest of her life to this project, she had to choose a starting date, and she chose Nov. 8. But her preamble acknowledges that picking any date is in a sense arbitrary.
So examine this timeline and draw your own conclusions. I'll save my conclusion for the bottom of this post.
Why is Israel tweeting airstrikes?
The @IDFSpokesperson Twitter account, encouraging followers to show support for the strikes, tweeted Wednesday: “More than 12,000 rockets hit Israel in the past 12 years. RT if you think #Israel has the right to defend itself.” More than 5,500 people have retweeted it. On Facebook, a flier-style image with a similar message has been shared 18,000 times.
[...]
Skeptics, particularly in the Arab countries surrounding Israel, have seemed to consider the tweets and posts overly triumphant or insensitive. The IDF’s campaign became a heated topic in the larger social media discussion of the military operation. Its official #PillarOfDefense hashtag has attracted a small fraction of the discussion linked to the Gaza-sympathetic hashtag #GazaUnderAttack.
Biden tours Sandy recovery as New York plans to tear down homes
Hundreds of houses too damaged to repair will be bulldozed in hardest hit areas of Queens, Staten Island and Brooklyn
An article in the New York times claims that 200 properties in badly affected parts of Queens, Staten Island and Brooklyn will be bulldozed in the coming weeks, adding to the 200 that have already been partially or completed destroyed already.
It comes as state officials prepare to ask for more than $30bn in federal disaster aid to help it recover from Sandy's destructive winds and storm surges. Around $1.65bn of that is needed to rebuild homes, it has been reported.
[...]
News of the demolitions were reported as vice-president Joe Biden toured areas in New Jersey that were likewise badly hit by the storm.
"How many of you guys are out of your homes right now?" he asked during a site visit of Seaside Heights in Ocean County.
Most of those present raised their hands.
The Grand Bargain Meets the Bank Bailouts
Two storylines long in the making are converging in a manner that would be hilarious were they not so radically egregious. In the first, President re-elect Barack Obama is joining his supporters in urging that they, his supporters, ‘make’ him do right by their expectations of him as a liberal Democrat. In the second, one of the myriad stealth bank bailouts that transferred what will end up being around $100 billion in liabilities from the banks to the Federal government through the FHA (Federal Housing Administration) is coming unwound. Where this intersects is that some fair proportion of the bailout money soon to be given by taxpayers to the FHA was already paid to bankers in bonuses just as Mr. Obama was agreeing to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
Chris Hayes has been doing some reporting that shows a kind of honesty that you can find, as far as I know, nowhere else in the American corporate media. I suspect that he will be under a lot of pressure after this weekend's shows. There are issues on which the truth of the matter is simply not allowed to be reported in American Propagandaland TV. Below is one 11 minute video segment. You can find the rest at the link in the title. Note that Hayes brings up J. Edgar Hoover. How many people in America even know what Hoover did? That's one of the scary things. How many even know what this kind of Big Brother landscape can lead to? We grew up being afraid of this kind of thing because the zeitgeist was entirely different than it is now. The culture in Hollywood was entirely different then. Now the media magnates in Hollywood are pressuring the government toward more SOPA/PIPA tracking and surveillance because they feel threatened (their profits feel threatened) by file sharing and piracy. Now the burgeoning security industry, perhaps it could now be promoted to the Security-Industrial Complex level, the marketing industry wants every bit of information they can get about you, and our Dept. of War is obsessed with "cyberterrorism" and the Defense $$ are flowing like crazy in that direction. It's all the rage. So the pressure will not be towards more privacy, but less, from influential people who don't give a shit about your privacy and only care about their own profits.
The real scandal of the Petraeus affair
Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
It will be interesting to see how this might change the attitudes of the Beltway toward privacy issues. Despite warnings and protests about the surveillance state, they kept voting for more and more fascism, suppressing media reports about the same (see James Risen), pushing or submitting to the policies, moving the laws further toward a totalitarian state in the courts. Our Congress even provided (unprecedented? unconstitutional?) retroactive immunity for the telecom companies who willing gave and continue to give them communications, wholesale, and now they even profit from that activity.
Presumably the thinking was that it would never affect them, though their data was being hoovered up along with everyone elses. But now the Beltway authoritarian dumbasses are suddenly freaking out now. There has been a big increase in media reports about how the FBI got all of this communications information, etc. When it was informed citizens, political activists, and information technology people yelling about this, it was ignored and they plowed forward with their "fight the terr'ists" meme.
Now that their own stupid policies have been used against one of their own, it's suddenly a problem. It's a bit too late now though isn't it? The mechanisms are in place, bought and paid for by the very people whose every word and move is being tracked (or close to it), paying for our own descent into a Big Brother world. The irony is that the dumbasses are probably not even scratching the surface on the issue of surveillance yet, with the focus being primarily on emails right now. Meanwhile, the huge data warehouse project in Utah steams forward and other projects developed in secrecy continue. The head of the NSA told the world at a recent technical conference that dossiers are not being created on millions of Americans when we know that this is a misrepresentation of the situation, at best. And he is far from the only one who has deceived American citizens about what is going on and what has been going on since the NSA began to break their own commandment about domestic surveillance during the Bush administration, which continues unfettered in the era of Obama. It never skipped a beat when the so called progressive came into power.
How metadata brought down CIA boss David Petraeus
A second account, in which Broadwell and Petraeus corresponded about their affair by saving messages in the "drafts" folder, was also linked to Broadwell in this way. Ian Goldberg, a computer scientist at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, says the important thing to learn from the Petraeus affair is that metadata is at least as, if not more, important than the content of the emails themselves.
"Who's talking to whom, where they are logged in from, what device are they using. That information is way less legally protected," he says.
The problem with trying to use any internet service anonymously, says Chris Soghoian, a privacy technologist at the American Civil Liberties Union, is that once an email address can be tied to where it was accessed – whether a coffee shop, hotel or an internet café – investigators can then hunt for, say, credit card transactions or signals from a cellphone tower to place you there at that time and reveal your identity.
Goldberg is also a director of the non-profit Tor Project, which runs privacy software that is popular with internet activists and dissidents.
The details of this case are really weird.
Ex-Wisconsin man charged in espionage case
A man with Wisconsin roots who worked overseas for the military as an Arabic linguist has been charged under the Espionage Act with allegedly copying classified documents and shipping them back to the United States, including to Stanford University, which maintains a collection in his name.
A Navy commander said the security breach by James F. Hitselberger has the potential to compromise "everything with respect to source operations in Iraq," according to documents unsealed in Wisconsin and elsewhere last week.
Despite the dire warning, the military and civilian contractors failed to root out Hitselberger years earlier, when he was admonished for discussing sensitive information in a public place, court documents show.
The Onion:
Nation Horrified To Learn About War In Afghanistan While Reading Up On Petraeus Sex Scandal
WASHINGTON—As they scoured the Internet for more juicy details about former CIA director David Petraeus’ affair with biographer Paula Broadwell, Americans were reportedly horrified today upon learning that a protracted, bloody war involving U.S. forces is currently raging in the nation of Afghanistan.
Blog Posts and Tweets of Interest
Not Even Wrong - Anonymous Stopped Rove from Stealing the Election
Fire Alarm: Interview with Bill McKibben on Climate Change
Ken Burns' Prequel to the Dust-Bowlification of America's Southwest
War IS the enemy
RICHIE HAVENS "Lives In The Balance" (by Jackson Browne)
Remember when progressive debate was about our values and not about a "progressive" candidate? Remember when progressive websites championed progressive values and didn't tell progressives to shut up about values so that "progressive" candidates can get elected?
Come to where the debate is not constrained by oaths of fealty to persons or parties.
Come to where the pie is served in a variety of flavors.
"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum." ~ Noam Chomsky
|