“The agency, from top to bottom, leadership to rank and file, feels that it is had no support from the White House even though it’s been carrying out publicly approved intelligence missions,” said Joel Brenner, NSA inspector general from 2002 to 2006. “They feel they’ve been hung out to dry, and they’re right.” ...
A second former official said NSA workers are polishing up their résumés and asking that they be cleared — removing any material linked to classified programs — so they can be sent out to potential employers.
Doing the food stamp diet for a week or a month won’t give you a sense of how depressing, humiliating, exhausting and frustrating it is to be poor in our society. It won’t let you experience the ways poor diet and the grinding suffering of poverty degrade your health and your energy to keep going. It won’t give you a sense of what it is like to live on food stamps month after month, what it is like to be ashamed of yourself and your inability to give your children and family what they need.
American food policy has long been rife with head-scratching illogic. We spend billions every year on farm subsidies, many of which help wealthy commercial operations to plant more crops than we need. The glut depresses world crop prices, harming farmers in developing countries.
... it is vastly more tiresome to feed the trolls than to be one of them, and no sane person has the endurance to run all the way down that rabbit hole. ...
They're a homogeneous bunch ... overwhelmingly young, white, male, and reasonably affluent — Young Republicans, essentially, except for their rejection of pastoral Christianity and jingoism.
When I first called [Perry Fellwock], he had been only vaguely aware of Snowden’s disclosures. But as he read more, he said, he'd learned how little had changed since 1976.
“I think Snowden is a patriot,” he said. “I admire Snowden and some of these other whistleblowers because they’ve come out in a time when there’s not a lot of political support.”
Andrew Huszar: Confessions of a Quantitative Easer
Trading for the first round of QE ended on March 31, 2010. The final results confirmed that, while there had been only trivial relief for Main Street, the U.S. central bank's bond purchases had been an absolute coup for Wall Street. The banks hadn't just benefited from the lower cost of making loans. They'd also enjoyed huge capital gains on the rising values of their securities holdings and fat commissions from brokering most of the Fed's QE transactions.
It is often assumed that intelligence agencies are worlds of their own, and that they sometimes act on their own authority. However, they are also an expression of the societies in which they exist, especially of their fears. In other words, it is quite possible that there are not just paranoid agents, but also paranoid democracies that act in hysterical ways out of fear.
Despite the presence of some Occupy agitators, nobody shouts "This is what democracy looks like!" in the irresistible politicians-meet-the-people documentary Caucus, probably because to do so would be to risk inviting despair. AJ Schnack's film follows one of the great humiliations of American life: the slow, soiling ritual of presidential hopefuls pressing the flesh in preparation for the Iowa Caucus — and often discovering that much of that flesh has already been pressed, persuasively, by some other candidate the week before.
There are signs of a pushback among the wealthy, conservative elites and the business community that may see the political pendulum begin to swing back toward the middle.
No one particular event seems to have created this moment.
Several weeks ago, on September 24th, Popular Science announced that it would banish comments from its Web site. The editors argued that Internet comments, particularly anonymous ones, undermine the integrity of science and lead to a culture of aggression and mockery that hinders substantive discourse. ... While it’s tempting to blame the Internet, incendiary rhetoric has long been a mainstay of public discourse. ... What, then, has changed with the advent of online comments?
Levison believes that when the government was faced with the choice between getting information that might lead it to its target in a constrained manner or expanding the reach of its surveillance, it chose the latter. The documents, and Levison’s comments to us, suggest that although he is a skeptic, he was willing to work with the government: he offered to write intercept code himself to capture their target’s metadata, and acknowledged that the government might have a right to the person’s information.
A decade or more ago, Internet publishers entered into what now seems like a collective delusion: That a comments section is a necessary component of a web page. Granted, that notion is a relic of an era predating social media, when there was no effective way to talk publicly about what we read online. But it persists with zombie determination. We’ve bought into the fallacy of comments so completely that they remain nearly universal—and universally terrible. A lot of people have tried to fix them.
A bill sponsored by Senators John Hoeven of North Dakota and Joe Manchin of West Virginia seeks to eliminate a mandate to reduce energy use in buildings:
My daughter and I spent much of Friday and Saturday in cosplay at Otakon, but I got to watch some of NBC's Olympic coverage — which in some events seemed more obsessively focused on Americans than ever.
[The Dish notes that American media won't show this. The youtube poster calls it not totally balanced but interesting. Haven't watched it, but I will tonight.]
[NPR solicited policies agreed to by five economists, all of whom admitted that they were politically unpalatable:]
One: Eliminate the mortgage tax deduction, which lets homeowners deduct the interest they pay on their mortgages. Gone. After all, big houses get bigger tax breaks, driving up prices for everyone. Why distort the housing market and subsidize people buying expensive houses?
