Coming February 6, 2024 . . .
MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE
by Michael Wolraich
Pre-order at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop
Coming February 6, 2024 . . . MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE by Michael Wolraich Pre-order at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop |
So how much access should governments have? Here are a few things to consider:
In “Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century,” published by Basic Books, Caryl takes an in-depth look at five consequential events that have had lasting effects: both the revolution in Iran and the armed rebellion in Afghanistan, which gave life to political Islam; Margaret Thatcher’s electoral triumph in Great Britain, which helped steer Western politics rightward; the election of Pope John Paul II (in late 1978), which spurred opposition to communism in Europe; and the accession to power of China’s Deng Xiaoping, which helped open communism, or one version of it, to industrial growth.
"All in all, a very successful weekend with the delegation telephony plot."
Apparently this surveillance involved the setup of fake internet cafes. Spied-upon delegates are now realizing why the British coffee seemed even worse than usual.
For years I did not speak up enough, but no more. I could lose everything, but I cannot live a dishonorable life any longer
By Can Oz, guest op-ed @ guardian.co.uk, June 11, 2013
[....] I am the owner of the biggest literary publishing house in the country. In the past few days I have received hate mail and death threats, just because I was publicly part of this passive resistance movement. After each speech Erdoğan gave, the language in these emails became more violent. Today, the lawyers who arrived at the main courthouse of Istanbul were beaten and arrested by the police. These were the lawyers who were there to defend the protesters who had been arrested.
I am scared, not for myself, but for my girlfriend, my mother, my sister, and for my country. It is quite clear at this point that Erdoğan's only way to cope with problems is to ratchet up aggression levels. If he continues to do so, I fear that this aggression will lead to a civil war in Turkey [.....]
By Toby Matthiesen, New York Review of Books blog, June 12, 2013.
Synopsis: Pictures of Hezbollah militants standing amid the ruins of al-Qusayr, the former Syrian rebel stronghold, have offered dramatic evidence of the extent to which foreign Shia fighters are shifting the course of the Syrian war. But Bashar al-Assad is head of an ostensibly secular regime and many Shia think that Alawites are heretics. Why exactly is Hezbollah getting involved, and is this conflict really rooted in religion?
In a relatively short read, this really gets across the awesome complexity of this mess and also how it truly has the makings of a wider major Mideast war. I thought it was complex before, but I didn't really get how complex until I read this. Matthiesen is a scholar of, among other things, the Sayyida Zainab shrine area that is becoming a big focus point of the conflict.
(From the bio. blurb: His book Sectarian Gulf: Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and the Arab Spring That Wasn’t will be published by Stanford University Press in July 2013.)
By Cameron Joseph, The Hill, June 14, 2013
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) is the most popular potential 2016 candidate in the Republican Party — and the least popular with the GOP base, according to a new Gallup poll.
Those numbers come as Christie is set to appear with former President Clinton Friday evening — instead of stopping by the annual Faith & Freedom Coalition gathering of religious conservatives, an event that drew many other potential GOP presidential candidates [.....]
Makes me wonder whether people like Anne Coulter, both a feeder of red meat to the base and a fan of Christie, will be changing their modus operandi somehow.
In sharp remarks directed against his Democratic successor and his wife’s former boss, President Bill Clinton said Tuesday that President Barack Obama risks looking like a “wuss,” a “fool,” and “lame” for not doing more to influence events in Syria
BBC News, 13 June, 2013
The BBC has condemned "unprecedented levels of intimidation" of BBC employees' families by Iran ahead of Friday's presidential elections.
It said Iran had warned the families of 15 BBC Persian Service staff that they must stop working for the BBC or their lives in London would be endangered.
The family members themselves had been threatened that they may lose jobs and be barred from travelling abroad [....]
By Spencer Ackerman in Washington, guardian.co.uk, 13 June, 2013
A senior undercover CIA officer, accused by the spy agency of "war crimes", has alleged that it halted an internal investigation that could have exonerated him and placed him under surveillance instead.
The lawsuit, which comes as US intelligence is reeling from controversy over its surveillance of Americans' communications records, is expected to be filed Friday in a Washington federal court by longtime intelligence attorney Mark Zaid.
It does not name the operative. Nor does it list the crimes that the officer, who is said to still be a serving official, is alleged to have committed. The officer wants the CIA's inspector general to finish investigating – if only to be exonerated.
The lawsuit does not make any charges about the veracity of the alleged crimes, which the suit says also involves other CIA agents [....]
For any of you that have followed this for the last 5-7 years, Myriad Genetics in Utah was charging women thousands for a patented test for BCRA genes (genes Myriad did not even discover) related to breast and ovarian cancer, when running your entire genome would be far less. Academics and the ACLU sued them years ago, that Myriad couldn't stop researchers from studying the genes and their actions, which were found to affect many other functions and tissues in the body. US District court ruled against Myriad. ACLU on the decision:
"Myriad did not invent the BRCA genes and should not control them. Because of this ruling, patients will have greater access to genetic testing and scientists can engage in research on these genes without fear of being sued."
2007, Michael Crichton on the case, 'Patenting Life'.
Now, if I put on my conspiracy glasses, I’d say that the idea of military, defense and national security contractors building a network of “special” energy grids separate from our ordinary, plebian grid smacks hard of creepy. Especially when you realize that one scenario involves the ability to voluntarily disconnect from the regular power grid for weeks or months at a time. Gotta keep those drones in the air, even if conditions at home aren’t so good.
But, conspiracy glasses off, remote energy generation is where it’s at, right? I’m sure it’s really just that the military industrial complex is all about alternative energy ‘cause it’s cost efficient and good for the planet.
Conspiracy on, conspiracy off. Conspiracy on, conspiracy off. Ouch.
http://www.bens.org/document.doc?id=187
ps I like how this is described as a “volunteer” effort.
pps Worth special consideration is the part about why the energy from these grids should not be shared with surrounding communities. Again--conspiracy on, conspiracy off. It's enough to give Kung Fu Panda a migraine.
In just ten months, the United States managed to transform an 82 year-old Catholic nun and two pacifists from non-violent anti-nuclear peace protestors accused of misdemeanor trespassing into federal felons convicted of violent crimes of terrorism. Now in jail awaiting sentencing for their acts at an Oak Ridge, TN nuclear weapons production facility, their story should chill every person concerned about dissent in the US.
Here is how it happened.
"I'm worried about, somebody in our government might kill him with a cruise missile or a drone missile," said Ron Paul a former Texas congressman who twice ran for the Republican presidential nomination, in an interview Tuesday with Fox Business Network. "I mean, we live in a bad time where American citizens don't even have rights and that they can be killed, but the gentlemen is trying to tell the truth about what's going on."
'
'American citizens don't even have rights and that they can be killed...' What about the right to own guns and thousands of rounds of ammo Ron? Are you so crazy you forgot that one?
And Americans 'can be killed' by psychos with guns, even in First Grade classrooms.
In what may some day be termed a landmark speech in modern urban history, Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York City proposed this afternoon an aggressive, long-term plan to protect the city against the ravages of climate change and forestall a future Hurricane Sandy. The elaborate climate fortification program, spelled out in a 400-page report, has elements ranging from public assistance to protect buildings and harden critical infrastructure to far-out concepts for construction of both permanent and temporary seawalls to protect both waterfront and the creeks and canals that can be "back door" gateways to flood waters. The total cost of the program comes to about US $19 billion, which is roughly equivalent—perhaps not coincidentally—to the estimated cost of Sandy.
By Bill Chappell, The Two Way @ npr.org, June 11, 2013
As Google and other large tech companies cope with the aftermath of recent reports that the National Security Agency has had broad access to their users' data, the search giant is asking the U.S. government for permission to publish the number of national security requests it receives, including those made under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
In a , Google's chief legal officer, David Drummond, said that government nondisclosure obligations are keeping the company from being able to ease public concerns about the privacy and security of users' data.
Noting that the search and advertising company "has worked tremendously hard over the past fifteen years to earn our users' trust," [....]
Somewhat related Ad Age article:
Microsoft: 'Your Privacy Is Our Priority.' NSA: LOL!
Five thoughts about the NSA Prism Scandal
By Simon Dumenco, June 7, 2013
By Monica Davey, New York Times, June 11/12, 2013
Home page teaser: Homicides in the city have dipped to a level not seen since the early 1960s, a decline credited in part to a comprehensive analysis of suspected gang members.
CHICAGO — A year after this city drew new attention for soaring gun violence and gang bloodshed, creating a political test for Mayor Rahm Emanuel in President Obama’s hometown, Chicago has witnessed a drop in shootings and crime. Killings this year have dipped to a level not seen since the early 1960s.
So far in 2013, Chicago homicides, which outnumbered slayings in the larger cities of New York and Los Angeles last year, are down 34 percent from the same period in 2012. As of Sunday night, 146 people had been killed in Chicago, the nation’s third-largest city — 76 fewer than in the same stretch in 2012 and 16 fewer than in 2011, a year that was among the lowest for homicides during the same period in 50 years.
In recent months, as many as 400 officers a day, working overtime, have been dispatched to just 20 small zones deemed the city’s most dangerous. The police say they are tamping down retaliatory shootings between gang factions by using a comprehensive analysis of the city’s tens of thousands of suspected gang members, the turf they claim and their rivalries. The police also are focusing on more than 400 people they have identified as having associations that make them the most likely to be involved in a murder, as a victim or an offender [....]
Referring to his roughly 89 million words, Beck wrote (and stared), "How many have been of value? Or positive? Or made a difference? How many would I want to take back? Many I'd bet. How many lifted up, inspired, gave comfort? How many were even well thought out?.. Some have been taken out of context; some didn't need to be. Before I changed my life and sobered up, many of my words were vile. Back then I said mean things about others to make myself feel better about me. It didn't work. It never does. I've changed a lot since the '90s. Lately, I have changed even more."
This is from Dagblog - not the most valid source - but hehehe, it'd be pretty amazing if this were true.
Just need to have a Democratic president, and Viola! Democrats are ready to turn the Constitution on its head too!
The good news is that Marx (not Groucho, sadly) is making a comeback - most Americans think his most famous quote is from our Founding Fathers.
And that Education, but not Privacy, is a basic right. Of course that education doesn't extend to knowing what our Constitution or Bill of Rights actually say, and even if we do know, they're just kinda Heloise Hints at this point, not actual legal requirements.
How far we've come in a few short years.
By Ian Johnson, NY Review of Books Blog, June6,2013
One of the most striking features about daily life in China is how much of what one encounters has been appropriated from elsewhere. It’s not just the fake iPhones or luxury watches—pirated consumer goods are common in many developing countries. In many Chinese cities, foreign ideas and concepts are constantly being used to shape the external reality, from clothes and pop music to contemporary art and film. [....]
Above all are the physical spaces. All over China, planners are busy emptying the countryside of people, leveling villages, and replacing the small-plot agriculture that defined rural parts of the country for millennia with American-style industrial agriculture. Urban areas, meanwhile, have lost most of their distinctive characteristics. Even in cities known for their beauty, uniformity rules: in Hangzhou, the entire waterfront along the Grand Canal has been leveled except for one stone bridge. The rest is now apartment blocks and bars. Cities like Wuxi are even worse; the old city has been eradicated in favor of an industrial park aesthetic wedded to 1950s-style American automobile culture, with everything planned around highways, shopping malls, and subdivisions.
New architecture, when it is notable, is nearly always by foreigners or copying foreign styles, a tendency that has led Western architects to flood into China [....]
By Allan Kozinn, New York Times/Music, June 9/10, 2013
Vinyl is growing out of its niche. [....]
These days, every major label and many smaller ones are releasing vinyl, and most major new releases have a vinyl version, leading to a spate of new pressing plants [....]
Michael Fremer, who monitors the LP world on his Web site, Analogplanet.com, said: “None of these companies are pressing records to feel good. They’re doing it because they think they can sell.”
About a dozen pressing plants have sprouted up in the United States, along with the few that survived from the first vinyl era, and they say business is so brisk that they are working to capacity [....]
By Jonathan Alter, Wired.com, June 4, 2013
Book excerpt from his The Center Holds. Teasers; my bold:
Obama’s reelection campaign was like running for Chicago alderman with the help of nerdy kids who spoke a math language no one else understood. The key was microtargeting, which had bad odor in recent years thanks to the marketing industry. Microtargeting sounded intrusive, even a little creepy, but it had the potential to return politics to the most local level of all: the individual voter.
and
From the start, there was trouble in digital paradise — a culture clash. They often took their mandate for ‘disruption’ too far.
By Aaron Blake, Barton Gellman and Greg Miller, Washington Post, June 9, 6:20 PM
A 29-year-old former undercover CIA employee said Sunday that he was the principal source of recent disclosures about top-secret National Security Agency programs, exposing himself to possible prosecution in an acknowledgment that had little if any precedent in the long history of U.S. intelligence leaks.
Edward Snowden, a tech specialist who has also contracted for the NSA and works for the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, unmasked himself as a source after a string of stories in The Washington Post and the Guardian that detailed previously unknown U.S. surveillance programs. He said he disclosed secret documents in response to what he described as the systematic surveillance of innocent citizens.
In an interview Sunday, Snowden said he is willing to face the consequences of exposure.“I’m not going to hide,” Snowden told The Post from Hong Kong [....]
“This is significant on a number of fronts: the scope, the range. It’s major, it’s major,” said John Rizzo, a former general counsel of the CIA who worked at the agency for decades. “And then to have him out himself . . . I can’t think of any previous leak case involving a CIA officer where the officer raised his hand and said, ‘I’m the guy.’ ” [....]
For those worried about privacy here is an anonymous search engine. Does not track or keep data on your searches.