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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Betwixt & Between
photo credit: Kid Libertine
“The greatest religious problem today is how to be both a mystic and a militant; in other words how to combine the search for an expansion of inner awareness with effective social action, and how to feel one's true identity in both”
~ Ursula K. LeGuin
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News
If Twitter Doesn't Reinstate Guy Adams, It's a Defining Moment
This time, Twitter has suspended the account of a British journalist who tweeted the corporate email address of an NBC executive. The reporter, Guy Adams of the Independent, has been acerbic in his criticisms of NBC's (awful) performance during the Olympics in London.
Adams has posted his correspondence with Twitter, which claims he published a private email address. It was nothing of the kind, as many, including the Deadspin sports blog, have pointed out. (Here's the policy, which Adams plainly did not violate, since the NBC executive's email address was already easily discernible on the web — NBC has a firstname.lastname@ system for its email, and it's a corporate address, not a personal one — and was published online over a year ago.)
What makes this a serious issue is that Twitter has partnered with NBC during the Olympics. And it was NBC's complaint about Adams that led to the suspension. That alone raises reasonable suspicions about Twitter's motives.
Pentagon plans $40m fiber optic cable from Guantanamo Bay to US mainland
The Pentagon plans to install a $40 million fiber optic cable between the US military jail at Guantanamo Bay and the US mainland, a spokesman said Thursday - an indication the facility will not close anytime soon.
The construction of a fiber optic link would greatly improve telecoms access for those living at the US military base in Cuba. Detention camps at the naval base currently house 169 inmates.
President Barack Obama had promised the detention center would be closed, but Congress has so far blocked any substantive measures.
Lone Senator Blocks Renewal of NSA Wiretap Program
The Obama administration wanted a quick, no-questions-asked-or-answered renewal of broad electronic eavesdropping powers that largely legalized the Bush administration’s illegal warrantless wiretapping program. That’s despite President Barack Obama’s campaign promise to revisit and revise the rules to protect Americans’ rights.
Everything seemed to be going to plan after a Senate committee approved the re-authorization in secret last month.
But Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) has stepped in to stop the bill because the government refuses to say how often the spy powers are being used.
Obama Administration Ducks for Cover on UN Arms Trade Treaty
The breakdown occurred on the eve of the Friday deadline, with several countries with large stakes in the international trade (Russia, China, etc.) raising objections to the working text. But major human rights groups including Oxfam and Amnesty International reserved some of their harshest criticism for the Obama administration. "The White House walked away at a critical moment," Scott Stedjan, Oxfam America's senior policy advisor, wrote in a statement. "In the United States we already have tough regulations governing the trade of weapons—and this Treaty is about leveling the playing field with the many countries around the world that have weak or ineffective regulations, if any at all."
Tentative Deal Reached to Fund Government Through March 2013
Following up on a previous item, Congressional leaders have indeed agreed to a 6-month stopgap spending bill to avoid a government shutdown at the end of September.
This means that the elections will determine the future of the budget, as per usual. But it represents a real retreat from the hard-charging rhetoric of Republicans on budgetary matters.
However, there’s still time for this to blow up. While the agreement was announced today, voting will not take place until after the August recess.
Mass Blackout in India Heralds Need for Energy Diversity
The biggest power failure in the history of the world is happening in India at the moment, affecting a whopping 600 million people, over half of the country. A blackout on Monday was thought to be fixed on Tuesday, but ended up metastasizing and growing throughout the day. While the numbers sound massive, keep in mind that 300 million Indians already have no access to power daily. In addition, the power is so scattershot in India that many carry backup generators. The public infrastructure implications, however, were vast.
The emotions of the Olympics, in real time
When Rowan Atkinson made an unexpected appearance during the opening ceremony of the London Olympic Games on Friday, I let out a yelp of surprise and delight. And a new, live data visualisation dedicated to capturing the flickering emotions inspired by the games showed that I wasn’t the only one tickled by the sight of Mr Bean.
As Atkinson engaged in some light daydreaming, I turned to Emoto2012.org and watched as tweets related to his appearance whizzed by. A quick glance at a “swarm” visualisation made it clear that viewers were thrilled to see him. The design, which resembles a pair of curling ribbons - one in shades of red and orange and the other in hues of blue - lets you take the temperature of public sentiment in real time.
Exclusive Pics: The Navy’s Unmanned, Autonomous ‘UFO’
NAVAL AIR STATION PATUXENT RIVER, Maryland — If you saw it in person, you’d probably think it was a UFO, too.
That’s what happened when the Navy trucked its batwing-shaped drone of the future from California to its new testing bed here in Maryland. Across the country, 911 switchboards lit up with reports that mysterious trucks were hauling a spaceship. In truth, it was a demonstration model for something the Navy desperately wants: to launch an armed, spying, stealthy drone from an aircraft carrier, one of the hardest maneuvers in aviation, conducted with the click of a mouse. But up close, you can see why people freaked out.
Blog Posts of Interest
Thirteen ways of looking at a clang birdby lambert on corrente
If the Presidential campaign seems vacuous to you, that's because it is. Here are some questions that "we" -- by which I mean the legacy party campaigns, their enablers, and our famously free press -- can't seem to bring ourselves to ask during the campaign....
Extremism normalized : How Americans are efficiently trained to acquiesce to ideas once deemed so radical as to be unthinkable by Glenn Greenwald on Salon
Remember when, in the wake of the 9/11 attack, the Patriot Act was controversial, held up as the symbolic face of Bush/Cheney radicalism and widely lamented as a threat to core American liberties and restraints on federal surveillance and detention powers? Yet now, the Patriot Act is quietly renewed every four years by overwhelming majorities in both parties (despite substantial evidence of serious abuse), and almost nobody is bothered by it any longer. That’s how extremist powers become normalized: they just become such a fixture in our political culture that we are trained to take them for granted, to view the warped as normal.
[...] Torture has been permanently transformed from an unspeakable taboo into a garden-variety political controversy, where it shall long remain.
The Evening Blues 7-31-12 by joe shikspack on dailykos
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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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