Good Morning!
Longwood Gardens. Photo by joanneleon. December, 2012
In July, my colleague Jeremy Peters pulled back the blanket on the growing practice of allowing political sources to read and approve quotations as a precondition for an interview. His story got attention inside and outside the Beltway, in part because the quotation is the last refuge of spontaneity in an age of endlessly managed messages. When quotations can be unilaterally taken back, the Kabuki is all but complete.
-- David Carr
Counting Crows - Mr. Jones - Live at Woodstock '99
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News and Opinion
Kabuki Quotes of the Day
“It’s possible that we may be able to lower rates by broadening the base at that point,” he said. “And I’m happy to work with them. In fact, I do believe that we can simplify the tax system and by closing some loopholes and deductions, and cleaning out some of the underbrush in the tax code that we can have a fairer, more efficient system.”
“You’ve got to come together and get this done,” said Gov. Gary Herbert of Utah, a Republican. “This impacts the economy.”
Fiscal Cliff Protestors To Picket Social Security Offices Nationwide
WASHINGTON -- Progressive and labor groups plan to picket outside a hundred Social Security offices around the country on Wednesday, telling lawmakers to keep Social Security out of the "fiscal cliff" negotiations on Capitol Hill.
According to the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), a federal worker union opposed to Medicare and Social Security cuts, the protests will take place in at least 22 states and will involve left-leaning groups such as Common Cause, the American Federation of Teachers, the Alliance for Retired Americans and the AFL-CIO union federation.
"Cutting Social Security’s budget or making modifications to Medicare and Medicaid should not be part of a grand bargain to reduce the deficit," Witold Skwierczynski, the head of AFGE's Social Security council, said in a statement.
FHA Ramps Up Loan Sales
The Federal Housing Administration said it sold off more than 9,400 delinquent home loans to investors and nonprofits for about $617 million this fall, as part of a move to take bad loans off the agency’s books and help stabilize its finances.
The agency also said Monday it plans to sell between 10,000 to 15,000 loans in the first quarter next year as it proceeds with the bulk-sale strategy the agency has been ramping up over the past year. Over the next year, FHA expects to sell at least 40,000 distressed loans.
The Insourcing Boom
Even then, changes in the global economy were coming into focus that made this more than just an exercise—changes that have continued to this day.
Oil prices are three times what they were in 2000, making cargo-ship fuel much more expensive now than it was then.
The natural-gas boom in the U.S. has dramatically lowered the cost for running something as energy-intensive as a factory here at home. (Natural gas now costs four times as much in Asia as it does in the U.S.)
In dollars, wages in China are some five times what they were in 2000—and they are expected to keep rising 18 percent a year.
American unions are changing their priorities. Appliance Park’s union was so fractious in the ’70s and ’80s that the place was known as “Strike City.” That same union agreed to a two-tier wage scale in 2005—and today, 70 percent of the jobs there are on the lower tier, which starts at just over $13.50 an hour, almost $8 less than what the starting wage used to be.
U.S. labor productivity has continued its long march upward, meaning that labor costs have become a smaller and smaller proportion of the total cost of finished goods. You simply can’t save much money chasing wages anymore.
The Wired Syria WMD Claim Is False
Seemingly for lack of knowledge the Danger Room folks are falling for very stupid "Arab country will soon use WMD" propaganda. Do we need to remind anyone that the same claims were made by "American officials" 10 years ago and turned out to be false?
In this case we cane be quite sure that the claims are indeed false. No one in Syria is combining binaries.
[...]
There is no need for the Syrian army to combine stuff and fill it up because the precursors are already stored in the ammunition when that artillery ammunition or aerial bomb is fabricated. They are stored in two separate chambers and the ammunition is safe for transport and storage. Only firing the ammunition or dropping the bomb will combine the binaries.
2013 Sundance Film Festival Announces Films in U.S. and World Competitions
The world premieres of 16 American documentary films.
[...]
99% - The Occupy Wall Street Collaborative Film / U.S.A. (Directors: Audrey Ewell, Aaron Aites, Lucian Read, Nina Kristic) — The Occupy movement erupted in September 2011, propelling economic inequality into the spotlight. In an unprecedented collaboration, filmmakers across America tell its story, digging into big picture issues as organizers, analysts, participants and critics reveal how it happened and why.
[...]
Dirty Wars / U.S.A. (Director: Richard Rowley) — Investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill chases down the truth behind America’s covert wars.
U.S., U.K. caught in middle of huge Swiss spy data leak -- report
The countries had been trading counter-terrorism information, but a data analyst allegedly stole it and tried to sell it to commercial buyers and foreign officials, according to a report.
The U.S. and U.K. have been warned by Swiss spy agency NDB that some of the information they had shared related to counter-terrorism has been stolen, according to a new report.
Last summer, a disgruntled NDB IT technician who believed he wasn't being taken seriously over the way in which data systems should be handled, allegedly downloaded terabytes of counter-terrorism information shared among the NDB, the CIA, and the U.K.'s MI6, and had eyes on selling it off to "foreign officials and commercial buyers," Reuters is reporting today, citing European national security sources.
According to those sources, Swiss law enforcement arrested the person, whose name has been kept under wraps, before letting him go as Switzerland's attorney general's office continues its investigation.
Prior to his arrest, the person was reportedly found to have storage devices containing classified counter-terrorism information. It's believed that he allegedly downloaded "millions" of pages of information on counter-terrorism efforts.
Open, CC-licensed photo course draws up to 35,000 students
The BBC's picture editor Phil Coomes has a long, excellent feature on the open education photography classes offered by Jonathan Worth and Matt Johnston through Coventry University. The course is open to anyone in the world, via webcast, and runs with up to 35,000 students. The class focuses not just on technique, but on the role of photographers in the 21st century, when everyone has a cameraphone, and when controlling copies of photos on the net is an impossibility.
Robin Hood and the Joule Thief, Raiding the Rubbish to Help the Poor
(The above video "Hangout with an inventor for #deSTEMber" is the live feed of the National Geographic/Google Science Fair Google + Hangout where NG Emerging Explorer T.H. Culhane shows how to build the Joule Thief and run a superbright LED off of aluminum can tabs and zinc drywall screws, creating the "Solar CITIES Tab Torch" that he used in Nepal on an expedition. The video also shows how to make a homopolar motor and a lemon battery)
Hangout with an inventor for #deSTEMber
Absolutely sickening.
The US Military Approves Bombing Children
In October, I blogged about an incident in Afghanistan in which three small children were killed in a US airstrike.
In that one small incident, which drew little attention at the time and since, three children aged 12, 10 and 8 were blown to smithereens in a NATO bombing while they were out gathering dung for fuel.
Now, in a despicable article in Military Times, the US military says that children are legitimate targets in the war in Afghanistan because sometimes the Taliban and other insurgents use kids.
Shockingly, the article quotes a senior officer saying that the military isn’t just out to bomb “military age males,” anymore, but kids, too:
“It kind of opens our aperture,” said Army Lt. Col. Marion “Ced” Carrington, whose unit, 1st Battalion, 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment, was assisting the Afghan police. “In addition to looking for military-age males, it’s looking for children with potential hostile intent.”
Blog Posts and Tweets of Interest
The Evening Blues
The Persian Cats Takes Down Another Drone
Liberation Day
Independent Lens Cuts to the Heart of Inequality: Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream
Filibuster reform editorialists refuse to leave their comfort zones, miss the mark
Bob Costas learns the right time to talk about guns in America: Never
Manning's Attorney Speaks Publicly For the First Time, Describes Manning's Torture
So Much for David Petraeus’ Aspirations in Libya
A Long December - Counting Crows
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
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