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Longwood Gardens. February, 2013. Photo by joanneleon.
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OMG, does Yoo sound like anyone else you've heard protesting lately? And I still can't get over the fact that Yoo is a Berkeley professor. Berkeley.
John Yoo to Rand Paul: Leave Barack Obama Alone on Targeted Killing!
John Yoo, the author of the Bush administration legal memos justifying the use of torture, thinks President Obama is really getting too much grief over targeted killing. And he wants Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.)—who filibustered Obama's nominee to head the CIA for 13 hours on Wednesday—to lay off.
"I admire libertarians but I think Rand Paul's filibuster in many ways is very much what libertarians do, they make these very symbolic gestures, standing for some extreme position," said Yoo, now a UC Berkeley law professor, who once suggested it was okay for the president to order a child's testicles be crushed. [...]
Why do we need to learn the same lessons over and over again? It's called the school of hard knocks. It's not like the history books aren't out there.
All Work and No Pay: The Great Speedup
You: doing more with less. Corporate profits: going strong. The dirty secret of the jobless recovery.
Webster's defines speedup as "an employer's demand for accelerated output without increased pay," and it used to be a household word. Bosses would speed up the line to fill a big order, to goose profits, or to punish a restive workforce. Workers recognized it, unions (remember those?) watched for and negotiated over it—and, if necessary, walked out over it.
But now we no longer even acknowledge it—not in blue-collar work, not in white-collar or pink-collar work, not in economics texts, and certainly not in the media (except when journalists gripe about the staff-compacted-job-expanded newsroom). Now the word we use is "productivity," a term insidious in both its usage and creep. The not-so-subtle implication is always: Don't you want to be a productive member of society? Pundits across the political spectrum revel in the fact that US productivity (a.k.a. economic output per hour worked) consistently leads the world. Yes, year after year, Americans wring even more value out of each minute on the job than we did the year before. U-S-A! U-S-A!
Except what's good for American business isn't necessarily good for Americans. We're not just working smarter, but harder. And harder. And harder, to the point where the driver is no longer American industriousness, but something much more predatory.
Young Turks.
Is Eric Holder’s ‘non-combatant’ response to Rand Paul enough to guarantee the president won’t use drones against Americans?
The Washington Post is Wrong on Keystone XL
The day after the Washington Post announced it was moving its top environmental reporter off the green beat to cover politics at the White House, this op-ed went up toeing an uncomfortably familiar line: by speaking out against the Keystone XL pipeline, environmentalists are “missing the climate-endangered forest for the trees.”
Leaving aside for a moment the uncomfortable irony of being reprimanded for missing the big fight by an outlet that is reshuffling focus on that very front: the editorial board, respectfully, is wrong. Not that it doesn’t have a point, but that point is concrete and incremental – and misses the entire meaning of the forest of protests over the last 18 months.
The implication in the Post’s headline is that they’re in this fight, too – that we should all be focusing on better efforts for environmental protection. But missing from the piece is to what end. Instead, they settle for referencing the State Department’s recent, controversial draft review of the pipeline proposal in reciting a list of reasons why the pipeline is not a big deal, and dismiss the protests against it as nothing more than “knee-jerk” “distractions”.
This is America, Now: The Dow Hits a Record High With Household Income at a Decade Low
Stocks surpassed the nominal record set in 2007, while the last recorded real median US household income was 8% lower than its 2007 peak.
Two Drug Busts Made the FBI Think Insane Clown Posse Fans Were a Gang Threat
The agent proposed an investigative plan to use “a variety of lawful methods” to learn more about the gang activities of the Juggalos. ‘[I]nvestigators must start with and work at length at street-level drug purchases of smaller amounts of drugs, surveillance, gang member debriefs, witness debriefs, confidential human source recruitment, and other traditional or non-sophisticated techniques,” the agent wrote.
The Salt Lake City office informed the central Washington bureau of the investigation. Seven months later, the FBI’s nationwide gang task force warned that, among other fears, “social networking websites are a popular conveyance for Juggalo sub-culture to communicate and expand.”
And yet the FBI couldn’t pin so much as a shoplifted Faygo on the Juggalos. On May 4, 2012, the Salt Lake City division “recommended the captioned cases be closed.” Next to “outlaw motorcycle gangs” “Surenos Gang Sets” and “Nortenos Blood Gang Sets”: “Juggalos.”
It remains to be seen if the FBI will continue to warn of a gang threat from the Juggalos. But the Insane Clown Posse actually sued, fruitlessly, to get the bureau to disclose the basis for investigating its fans.
Return of the Borg: How Twitter Rebuilt Google’s Secret Weapon
This software system is called Borg, and it’s one of the best-kept secrets of Google’s rapid evolution into the most dominant force on the web. Wilkes won’t even call it Borg. “I prefer to call it the system that will not be named,” he says. But he will tell us that Google has been using the system for a good nine or 10 years and that he and his team are now building a new version of the tool, codenamed Omega.
[...]
At Twitter, a small team of engineers has built a similar system using a software platform originally developed by researchers at the University of California at Berkeley. Known as Mesos, this software platform is open source — meaning it’s freely available to anyone — and it’s gradually spreading to other operations as well.
How ‘Indie’ Capitalism Will Replace Our Stagnant Economic System
Efficient market theory has fostered an economic system that, over the past two decades, has generated little innovation among most companies, weakened the middle class, widened inequality, and led to the relative decline of the United States. We need to trade in an economics of efficiency for an economics of creativity. We should be moving away from a model of economics based on the “culture of control” toward a new model that embraces a “culture of chance.”
Which presents the question: What do we need instead? What model can replace financial capitalism?
We’re beginning to see evidence of what I call Indie Capitalism. My use of the word “indie” is deliberate. “Indie” reflects an economy that is independent of the prevailing orthodoxies of economic theory and big business. It shares many of the distributive and social structures of the independent music scene, which shuns big promoters and labels. And as happens with many bands, so many of today’s successful creative endeavors began as local phenomena before branching out to new locations and networks.
Why Bin Laden’s Son-In-Law is in New York City, Not Gitmo
By law, Abu Ghaith should have been transferred to military detention under the provisions of the Fiscal Year 2012 National Defense Authorization Act, which requires all members of al Qaeda or associated forces to be taken into military custody at least temporarily. But the NDAA provides a wide carve out for the commander-in-chief’s discretion in war time. And the President is authorized to waive the requirement entirely if he certifies to Congress that end-running the law is in the national security interests of the United States.
Several senior administration officials tell TIME Obama exercised the waiver in Abu Ghaith’s case after consulting his top aides, opting to send Ghaith to trial in the Southern District of New York rather than to Gitmo. “The President’s national security team – including the Defense Department and members of the Intelligence Community, the Department of Homeland Security, the State Department, and the Department of Justice – unanimously agreed that prosecution of Ghaith in federal court will best protect the national security interests of the United States,” one senior official said.
Must read.
Guardian Lays Out Details of How Petraeus Organized Death Squads in Iraq
The most disgusting aspect of this apparent “trial balloon” floated by the Bush administration is that the program quite possibly was already underway when the Newsweek article came out. The Guardian article reminds us that Petraeus, the architect of this program, was sent to Iraq in June of 2004 (this was his second deployment to Iraq) to begin training Iraqis, and the Newsweek article wasn’t published until January of 2005. Steele, who was reporting directly to Rumsfeld, first went to Iraq in 2003 (Rumsfeld delighted in running his own people separately from the chain of command; he did this at times with McChrystal as well).
More evidence that the program was entirely intentional comes from the role of torture in the program and the moves the US made to ignore torture just as the program was put into place. A little over two years ago, the Guardian analyzed a number of documents from Wikileaks and assembled a huge number of reports of torture carried out by the militias the US trained and supported under this program. Most devastating within this cache of information, however, is that the US issued an order to ignore reports of torture carried out by these Iraqi groups.
[...]
Here’s a video the Guardian put together in 2010 based on what they found in the Wikileaks documents and other investigations:
The Torture Trail: What did General Petraeus's special advisor, James Steele, know?
"I thought we had learned the lesson that you don't imitate the methods of your enemies."
From Operation Condor in Latin American Dirty Wars to the U.S. War on Terror Post-9/11
Jack White on the Mississippi blues artists: 'They changed the world'
Jack White learned his craft listening to the blues legends of the 20s and 30s on albums released by a tiny Scottish label. And now he's rereleasing Document Records' archive on vinyl
It was shortly before Christmas when Gary Atkinkson met Jack White just after the latter came off stage at the Winter Gardens in Blackpool. Atkinson runs vintage-blues reissue label Document Records with his wife Gillian in Galloway, south-west Scotland. He and White, whose most recent album was a UK and US No 1, had previously corresponded by telephone and email, but Atkinson fretted that, in the flesh, White might be "one of those shy, Prince types, who recoil at every comment". So when the former White Stripe bounded across the room and hugged him, he was taken aback.
[...]
White is still in awe of the process by which events came together in America's deep south to create the blues. There was the Great Depression, the technology of recording music and the fact that furniture makers had started making record players, and needed something people could play on them. So they started recording the poor black singer-guitarists that were emerging in the Mississippi Delta. "Something magical just occurred to create a moment in history that changed the world."
[...]
The process by which this weird, wonderful music from the delta ended up in Scotland is a story in itself. Document was originally started in Vienna in 1986 by jazz and blues fan Johnny Parth, an Austrian who had first heard Mississippi blues when American GIs brought the records to Europe during the second world war. Atkinson, meanwhile, was a screen printer in Hull who reviewed records in his spare time. One day, he was given a set of Document CDs to review. "I absolutely thrashed them," he chuckles when we meet in a Manchester cafe. "But then I got another batch and realised this Johnny guy was on a mission from God."
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