Welcome! "What's Happenin'?" is a casual community diary (a daily series, 8:30 AM Eastern on weekdays, 10 AM on weekends and holidays) where we hang out and talk about the goings on here and everywhere.
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Just about anything goes, but attacks and pie fights are not welcome here. This is a community diary and a friendly, peaceful, supportive place for people to interact.
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Good Morning!
August, 2012 by joanneleon
A test of a people is how it behaves toward the old. It is easy to love children. Even tyrants and dictators make a point of being fond of children. But the affection and care for the old, the incurable, the helpless are the true gold mines of a culture.
~Abraham Joshua Heschel
The Black Keys- Gold on the Ceiling
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News
Curiosity Lands on Mars!
NASA's most advanced Mars rover, Curiosity, has landed on the Red Planet. The one-ton rover, hanging by ropes from a rocket backpack, touched down onto Mars early Monday EDT to end a 36-week flight and begin a two-year investigation.
NASA.gov
This is the first image taken by NASA's Curiosity rover, which landed on Mars the evening of Aug. 5 PDT (morning of Aug. 6 EDT). It was taken through a "fisheye" wide-angle lens on one of the rover's rear left Hazard-Avoidance cameras at one-quarter of full resolution. The camera is the left eye of a stereo pair positioned at the back left, or port, side of the rover.
The clear dust cover on the camera is still on in this view, and dust can be seen around its edge, along with three cover fasteners. One of the rover's wheels is in the lower right corner.
Police Protection, Please, for Municipal Bonds
YOU’VE got the power. Why not use it? That’s a question for the Securities and Exchange Commission when it comes to the murky market for municipal bonds.
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In light of the report, it’s worth looking at what the S.E.C. has been up to in the municipal bond market. While the commission has been active in protecting investors from some deceptive practices, it has been less inclined to take action on behalf of issuers against financial firms that underwrite these bonds. This, despite the fact that the commission has wide leeway to do just that under fair-dealing rules that have governed the muni market for decades.
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But cases where the agency has alleged unfair dealing on behalf of issuers during the credit boom are rare. One arose last year, when the S.E.C. sued Stifel, Nicolaus and the Royal Bank of Canada, contending that they sold unsuitably complex financial instruments to five school districts in Wisconsin. Royal Bank of Canada settled its case, paying $30.4 million. The Stifel case is pending.
Big Brother just Got Bigger (Fitzgibbon)
When the government told the people of London that the eyes of the world would be on it during the Olympic Games, it failed to mention one particularly powerful watcher; a new software programme used for tracking potential troublemakers.
In the September edition of Wired Magazine, Shane Harris reports on the new American software company Palantir Technologies, new over here in the UK just in time for the Olympics.
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Prodigal financial adviser Alex Karp and PayPal founder Peter Thiel were behind the idea. The duo worked with a coterie of Stanford tech-heads and together dreamed of Silicon Valley’s best brains uniting in a start-up for large organisations.
Launched in 2004, Palantir received early financial backing from In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s technology investment branch. Contemporary estimates put Palantir’s worth at £2.5 bn.
Spy Chief Called Silicon Valley Stooge in Army Software Civil War
This is how nasty and personal the fight over the Army’s wartime brain has become: Pentagon functionaries are now calling one of their own top generals a corporate stooge; the Army’s supposedly independent technology testers are calling for their own reports to be destroyed; and on Thursday, Congress’ top investigators demanded answers from the Defense Secretary and for all documents related to the controversy ASAP.
Under development for the better part of a decade, the $2.3 billion DCGS-A (“Distributed Common Ground System – Army”) is supposed to serve as the primary source for mining intelligence and surveillance data on the battlefield — everything from informants’ tips to satellites’ images to militants’ fingerprints. It’s designed to be the one resource that Army intel analysts can use to find links between events, build dossiers on high-level targets, and plot out enemy attacks.
At least, that’s the plan. In reality, there’s a sizable contingent of troops — including some senior officers — who think that DCGS-A is too slow and too complicated to get the job done. Instead of DCGS — built by defense contracting giants like Lockheed, Raytheon, and IBM — these troops have instead begged for a data mining, information visualization, and link analysis suite from a controversial Silicon Valley firm called Palantir.
Alt Text: How Monitoring Twitter Is Like Peeking Into Society’s Bloodstream
A team of computer-science researchers have reportedly discovered a way to use Twitter to figure out when you are going to catch a cold. Their application scans Twitter for telltale phrases — I’m guessing things like “How come nobody sells tissues at San Diego Comic-Con?” and “I’m so sick, I can barely lick all these doorknobs” — and uses them to map the progress of disease the way a weatherman maps the progress of his ratings.
Meanwhile, Twitter itself is teaming up with data-analysis and polling agencies to measure political sentiment in the United States as reflected by users’ never-ending streams of microstatements. So if you mention on Twitter that you caught the sniffles at the Republican National Convention, you’ll be helping two studies at once.
NATO forces say coalition airstrike has killed Haqqani leader in eastern Afghanistan
KABUL, Afghanistan — NATO forces killed a local commander for the Haqqani insurgent group in an airstrike in eastern Afghanistan, the military alliance said Monday.
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Hakimi was sitting under a tree with some associates when the NATO strike killed him, said Logar province police chief, Raeis Khan Rahimzai. He said four others were injured.
Afghanistan's Karzai accepts dismissal of top security ministers
(Reuters) - Afghan President Hamid Karzai accepted on Sunday a vote by the country's parliament to dismiss his two top security ministers, but ordered both to remain in their jobs pending replacement, a move aimed at safeguarding fragile stability.
The fractious parliament voted on Saturday to remove Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak and Interior Minister Bismillah Mohammadi after recent insurgent assassinations of senior officials, as well as cross-border fire incidents blamed on Pakistan, an inflammatory issue for many Afghans.
Blog Posts of Interest
Curious About Curiosity? Live Blog of a Mars Landing by palantir on DailyKos
Peter King Rejoins the Leak Witch Hunt by emptywheel
Glenn, the Pot-Smoking Pig – Post-Woodstock, 1969 by One Pissed Off Liberal on DailyKos
The Sh*t Train's A-Comin' by by One Pissed Off Liberal on DailyKos
The Black Keys - "Tighten Up" 5/25 Letterman
We are ready for some serious change. We are ready to take up the tools of a free and analytic press to peacefully undermine the stranglehold of the kleptocrats on our battered democracy. We are ready to expose and publicize their greed, lies and illegal machinations and hold their enablers in government and the media to account. Are you in?
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."
~ Margaret Mead
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