End of January Links

More interesting stories from the previous week or so:

The Fight Over the Future of Football Has Become a Battle for California’s Soul - The Ringer

20 old Cleveland Rams photos to remind you L.A.'s Super Bowl-bound franchise began here - The Plain Dealer

Brianna Decker Will Get Her Prize Money After All, Just Not From The NHL [Update] - Deadspin

James Harden’s Transcendent Step-Back - The New Yorker 

Colorado a hotbed for North American yak ranching – Denver Post 

The 500-Year-Long Science Experiment - The Atlantic 

Particle physics may have reached the end of the line - Backreaction 

No One Is Prepared for Hagfish Slime - The Atlantic  

“Venture capital money kills more businesses than it helps,” says Basecamp CEO Jason Fried - Recode

How a retired couple found lottery odds in their favor - 60 Minutes.  Also featured here.

Chicago billionaire Ken Griffin just bought the most expensive U.S. home ever: A $238 million New York penthouse - Chicago Tribune and Daniel Snyder’s new $100 million purchase is the first superyacht with a certified Imax movie theater - Washington Post.  I don't think a higher top tax bracket would hurt anything.  It beats the guillotine.

Advances in weather prediction - Science.  "But, as the American Meteorological Society celebrates its 100th anniversary, the improvement in forecasting stands out. Modern 72-hour predictions of hurricane tracks are more accurate than 24-hour forecasts were 40 years ago (see the figure), giving sufficient time for evacuations and other preparations that save lives and property." It amazes me how accurate rainfall forecasts can be, with the timing of the beginning of the storm down to the hour.

Interstate Highway System As Transit Map

Via Ritholtz, this map from Visual Capitalist is awesome:

Americans' Overreaction to Islamic Terrorism

Defense One has a must-read piece on our over-sized reaction to the Islamic terrorist threat:

In fact, Muslims account for only a small percentage of the terrorism in Europe over the last several years. Most politically-motivated violence there is carried out by nationalist and sectarian groups, yet the government and the media don’t treat these threats the same. Anders Breivik killed 77 people in separate gun and bomb attacks in 2011, including many children. Many people in Europe share Breivik’s xenophobic, ultra-nationalist, anti-Muslim ideology, but we don’t hold them collectively responsible for his decision to employ violence to further those views. We don’t call for a war on his beliefs; we demand his criminal prosecution.
A similar phenomenon occurs here in the United States, where most media outlets covered the distant Paris attacks far more closely than domestic shooting sprees by white supremacist Fraizer Glenn Miller, or anti-government extremists like Curtis Wade Holley, Eric Frein, and Jerad Miller, who assassinated four police officers in separate instances last year.
The Combatting Terrorism Center at West Point documented 3,053 injuries and 670 fatalities in the United States from far right violence from 1990 to 2012. A 2014 University of Maryland survey indicates U.S. law enforcement now view Sovereign Citizens as the greatest terror threat they face. Yet the federal government effectively treats these acts of politically-motivated violence as hate crimes or lone attacks rather than terrorism. This may explain why an attempted firebombing at a Colorado NAACP office building the day before the Paris attacks received little media attention.....
Deaths attributable to terrorism here in the U.S. are a tiny fraction of the roughly 14,000 homicides committed each year, one-third of which go unsolved. Yet we devote far more resources to uncovering potential terrorists than to finding actual killers. The purpose of putting terrorist acts in context is to better understand how we might respond in a more effective manner.
The second prevalent theme in the early coverage of the Paris attacks was the tendency to exaggerate the capabilities of Muslim extremists. With very little information available — save a brief video showing the execution of a wounded police officer — many counterterrorism officials and policy makers didn’t hesitate to call it a “sophisticated” attack that represented a new and “more complex” threat. The FBI and DHS backed this description in a law enforcement bulletin, claiming the Paris attacks “demonstrated a greater degree of sophistication and advanced weapons handling than seen in previous coordinated small-arms attacks, such as the 2013 Westgate Mall attack” in Nairobi, Kenya. The Somali militant group al-Shabaab claimed credit for the armed assault on Westgate Mall, which killed sixty-seven people. Details regarding the attack and whether some perpetrators escaped are still mired in controversy.
The facts don’t support the hasty conclusion that the Paris attack was as sophisticated as originally claimed. While one or both of the Kouachi brothers may have travelled to Yemen and received some training from al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, their attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices was almost derailed because they went to the wrong address. They had to ask a maintenance man for directions. They caught a lucky break by finding an employee outside the office who they forced to punch the code necessary to enter the building. After the shooting, they crashed their escape vehicle and left identification papers behind when they abandoned it.
Co-conspirator Amedy Coulibaly’s spree appeared even less organized, shooting a police officer, a street sweeper and a jogger before storming the kosher supermarket. The weapons Coulibaly and the Kouachi’s used weren’t financed or provided by organized terrorist groups, but purchased from a known criminal for less than 5,000 euros, which Coulibaly obtained through a fraudulent bank loan.
They did succeed at killing 17 people, which is tragic. But spree shooters here in the United States racked up similar death tolls, in some cases before graduating high school, or saddled with serious mental illnesses. It doesn’t take sophisticated training to pick up a gun and kill lots of unarmed people.

Yes. Yes.  A thousand times, yes.  We face dozens of more likely ways to die every day, but for some reason, people really freak out if Muslims kill some people, somewhere around the world, sometime.  I don't get it.  Well, I suspect that many Christians fear Muslim terrorism as part of some kind of Holy War, and Israelis have their own reasons for making a stink about the attacks, but I see absolutely no reason why anybody would think this minuscule threat to American lives is worth spending trillions of dollars, thousands of American lives, hundreds of thousands of non-American lives, and having a crazy police state apparatus record every phone call and email and web search around the world in order to "protect our freedoms."  Our freedoms (whatever those amount to in a surveillance state) are not under threat from those scary Muslims.  They are under threat from our government and our cowardly reaction to sporadic incidents of violence committed by Muslims.

Dick Cheney and Torture

David Bromwich has a fine essay linking American acceptance of police brutality with acceptance of torture.  It is well worth reading.  I found the description of Dick Cheney's role in pushing the U.S. to torture to be spot on:

The US national security state is the lengthened shadow of Dick Cheney. He made himself a master of the levers of government when he was secretary of defence under George H.W. Bush. His sense of rightful authority will have been confirmed by his regular participation in the continuity-of-government exercises: a yearly ritual enactment of the government’s response to a national catastrophe, begun in the Reagan years and put aside under Clinton, in which the lives of important members of the government and military were preserved at a fortress hideaway, and a design was worked up and executed for a post-constitutional order. An account of these exercises is given in James Mann’s excellent Rise of the Vulcans (2004); a curious detail is that Cheney and his associate Donald Rumsfeld stayed on as participants even when they held no government office.
After the real catastrophe of September 2001, Cheney succeeded in changing America’s idea of itself. He did it with a tireless diligence of manipulation behind the scenes, commonly issuing his orders from a bunker underneath the Naval Observatory in Washington. The element of fear in Cheney is strong: a fact that is often lost in descriptions of him as an undiluted malignity. His words and actions testify to a personal fear so marked that it could project and engender collective fear.
Cheney worked hard to eradicate from the minds of Americans the idea that there can be such a thing as a ‘suspect’. Due process of law rests on the acknowledged possibility that a suspect may be innocent; but, for Cheney, a person interrogated on suspicion of terrorism is a terrorist. To elaborate a view beyond that point, as he sees it, only involves government in a wasteful tangle of doubts. Cheney concedes from time to time that mistakes can happen; but the leading quality of the man is a perfect freedom from remorse. ‘I’d do it again in a minute,’ he said recently of the plan for the interrogation programme and the secret prisons which the office of the vice president vetted and approved.

Cheney is a coward of the first-order.  His demand that the CIA torture highlights his inability to deal with the very, very small chance that we might be subject to another terrorist attack.  He, amongst all the cowards and chickenhawks in the Bush administration, was ready to put other peoples' lives at risk to try to attain the unattainable: total security.  His resort to torture marks an all-time low amongst American statesmen.  All Americans in uniform are more likely to face torture if captured because of him.

An Advertisement Against Religion?

Via the Dish:

Merry Christmas and pass the inclined board, the towel and the water pitcher.

Weekend Before Christmas Links

If, unlike me, you have your shopping done, you can sit back and enjoy these stories:

An honest game - SBNation.  Life in NAIA football, where players get paid, but only because they aren't able to make it in the big-time.

The Ice Breaker: Can P.K. Subban win over hockey's stoic traditionalists? - The New Yorker.  One of the rarest figures in sports, the black hockey star.

Finding the Cleveland Misery Tipping Point - Bill Simmons.  One thing that makes me smile is how miserable Cleveland fans are.

The Vatican Has a Farm, and Pope Francis Is Going to Open It Up To the Public - Takepart

In Final Spending Bill, Salty Foods and Belching Cows Are Winners - New York Times.  Feeding farmer paranoia about EPA.

How Peppermint Tricks Us Into Feeling (Deliciously) Cold - The Salt.

The secret world of ....beer - BBC.  Some strange beer facts, like this:

Knowing that yeast is ubiquitous and that there are thousands of strains, others have taken to novel approaches for harvesting wild yeast from the environment. A US company called Rogue Ales brews one of its beers using yeast cultivated from the beard of the chief brewer.

Waters Warm, and Cod Catch Ebbs in Gulf of Maine - New York Times. This is the kind of climate change impact I fear for Midwestern agriculture.

The largest vessel the world has ever seen - BBC

How Lithium Ion Batteries Grounded the Dreamliner - Scientific American

Bertha, The Giant Borer That Broke, Might Be Sinking Seattle's Downtown - Morning Edition.  Makes the problems in Columbus look pretty minor.

How Long Can the U.S. Oil Boom Last? - National Geographic.  Not nearly as long as the optimists (bullshit artists) claim, but probably longer than I'd figure.

Tough choices amid church mergers - Wall Street Journal.  The challenges facing a Roman Catholic Church with more buildings than they can staff with priests.

Bleeding the IRS Will Make the Tax System Worse - Norm Ornstein.  That's what the saboteurs in the Republican Party want.  They are all for dysfunctional government.  Putting the GOP in power is like making an arsonist the fire chief.

The Greatest Lawyer Who Ever Lived - Texas Monthly

A Self-Made Heiress - Fortune.  The woman who inherited Heineken.  It is a pretty crazy story.

The Unidentified Queen of Torture - The New Yorker.  Only in America. 

Our Favorite Maps of the Year Cover Everything From Bayous to Bullet Trains - Wired.  My favorite:

This map, published this year in Nature, was made by a team of scientists, geographers, and planners who want to see new roads built where they'll do the least environmental harm and the most economic good. Green areas indicate environmental sensitivity, red areas indicate economic potential---the black areas where they meet are sites of potential conflict. William Laurance et al., Nature 

The Chernozem belt covering the Ukraine and Western Russia is amazing.

Photo of the Day

Via the Dish:

Which Republican was the source of each quote here.  I sure wish the Republican party would implode into a bunch of useless small parties which could split the lunatic vote and save us from a dirtbag majority in Congress.

Warriors, Not War Criminal Cowards

Unlike the Bush administration, these guys wouldn't resort to torture, because they had actually fought wars and weren't chickenshit cowards. 

There is a special place in Hell for all the lying, torturing scumbags involved with the CIA "interrogation" operations.  They'll never see justice in a nation where one political party is pro-torture, and the other is too scared to rock the boat and prosecute the lowlifes who continue to pretend that they got anything useful from breaking out the Nazi playbook on their powerless captives.  What a difference a generation makes.

Is This Groundhog Day?

So today the great threat to western civilization is ISIS (or ISIL or IS...fuck, I don't know).  Yesterday it was Putin.  Or Gaddafi (or however you spell his name, it's been spelled a lot of ways over the 25 years he was one of the top public enemies).  Or the Taliban.  Or Al-Queda.  Or just Bin Laden.  Or Saddam Hussein.  Or Kim Jong-Un.  Or Kim Jong-Il before that. Or the Ayatollah.  We've always got somebody who wants to take away our freedoms and end the American way of life, and if we don't stand up to them, we are just like Chamberlain in Munich, and the new Hitler-of-the-day will kill all the Jews (which apparently is us), and history will judge us accordingly.  Well fuck that.  I'm so goddamned tired of hearing that bullshit over and over.  ISIS, or ISIL, or whatever the fuck their name is, is not a threat to our way of life.  If they want to fly the flag of the Caliphate over the White House, I don't give a fuck, because it is much more likely that I'll have sex with Kate Upton tonight. 

I just don't understand the psyche of the American people.  How can the beheadings of two unfortunate journalists make people forget that we spent a dozen years fighting Islamic radicals, and all we did was end up handing them control of more places (From just Afghanistan and Somalia to Afghanistan, Somalia, much of Iraq, much of Syria, Libya, Yemen, Egypt...) than when we started?  And why do people keep getting the idea that somebody is going to come to this country and "take away our freedoms?"  If anybody would do that, and they've been working on it, it would be our own government.  It's not like this massive invading army is going to set sail across the ocean, storm our beaches and then sweep across the country enslaving the freedom-loving, but outgunned American people.  And as great as the supposed threat of ABBA, or, I mean ISIS is, the warmongers can't convince the brave American people to do anything but support air strikes, because we did learn over the last 13 years that ground wars suck, and are unwinnable for us anyway, so we may as well just indiscriminately kill people in Muslim countries from the air. 

But what kind of threat is ISIS anyway?  Al-Queda got ridiculously lucky, and unfortunately killed almost 3,000 Americans.  But in spite of all the stupid things we did afterwards, our way-of-life continued, although forever changed by our unnecessary fear.  Let's suppose that ISIS was more than three times as successful in killing Americans as Al-Queda was.  That would be a tragedy, but life would continue.  10,000 Americans killed by ISIS would still be less than the number of Americans murdered by other Americans with firearms in a year; would still be less than the number of Americans who took their own lives in a year; would still be less than the number of Americans killed in about four months in automobile accidents.  Yet, few people push to ban guns, even fewer push to ban cars, and nobody proposes spending billions and billions of dollars to try to prevent those deaths.  The President and Congress may agree to attack ISIS, but I will consider it a waste of time, innocent lives and huge amounts of money.  Fuck that shit, and fuck the people who use stupid scare tactics to try to convince me to agree to waste all that.

Palm Sunday Weekend Reads

After a long week, it is nice to remember that Lent is almost over.  Here are some interesting links:

How Congress Stayed Wet in the Dry Years of Prohibition - The Atlantic

OSHA Takes a Closer Look at the Most Dangerous Job in America - Pacific Standard

Death on the Farm - Newsweek.  On farmer suicides. A very sad read.


Lab-Grown Vaginas Implanted Successfully in Four Teenagers - Scientific American.  I didn't think I'd ever read that headline.

NSA knew about Heartbleed, exploited it for two years - Salon.  Color me shocked.

Pray for Billy Hamilton - SB Nation

Why We're in a New Gilded Age - Paul Krugman reviewing Picketty's  Capital in the Twenty-First Century. New York Review of Books

Atlanta Stadium for Falcons Prompts Bond Fight - Bloomberg. WTF? 

Home Depot Inc. co-founder Arthur Blank, having bought the Atlanta Falcons, is getting help from the city to build a $1.2 billion football stadium to replace a venue that a skeptic noted is barely older than Miley Cyrus.
The billionaire said his ambition to bring another Super Bowl to town rides on replacing the Georgia Dome, which opened in 1992, with funds including $200 million in taxpayer money.

Are you fucking kidding me?

The Heartbreaking First Legal gay Marriage in Indiana - Slate

A Whole New Ballgame - New York Times.  Baseball from unique angles.

Bars showing Pacquiao- Bradley fight must pay big - or else - LA Times.  Pay-per-view is killing boxing

How 'Choose Your Own Adventure' was born - Marketplace.  Loved those books.

How lobbying dollars prop up pyramid schemes - The Verge.  Herbalife and Amway.  I would guess AdvoCare too. However, it might not be helping Herbalife:  Herbalife Probed by Investigators - WSJ

Miller Samuel, via Ritholtz

MH370

Where would one hide a Boeing 777?  And why would one hide it?

I assumed from the start that it crashed, and never really considered terrorism, especially since there weren't any claims of hijacking or ransom demands.  Now authorities are thinking it may have flown to somewhere in Central Asia and possibly landed safely.  Why would somebody do that and keep it a big secret? Are they the weirdest terrorists ever?

On a separate note, is NSA holding back information, or do they have no fucking clue where a jetliner full of people went?  If that is the case, I'm not exactly impressed with their ability to do anything with the massive amount of data they are collecting every day.  It would seem to be a lot easier to track all the commercial air flights in the world than it would be to collect data on every phone call placed in the world.

Anyway, I'll still wager that the plane crashed in the ocean somewhere.

Dayton At Vanguard of Domestic Drone Use

Washington Post:

DAYTON, Ohio — Shooter and victim were just a pair of pixels, dark specks on a gray streetscape. Hair color, bullet wounds, even the weapon were not visible in the series of pictures taken from an airplane flying two miles above.
But what the images revealed — to a degree impossible just a few years ago — was location, mapped over time. Second by second, they showed a gang assembling, blocking off access points, sending the shooter to meet his target and taking flight after the body hit the pavement. When the report reached police, it included a picture of the blue stucco building into which the killer ultimately retreated, at last beyond the view of the powerful camera overhead....
As Americans have grown increasingly comfortable with traditional surveillance cameras, a new, far more powerful generation is being quietly deployed that can track every vehicle and person across an area the size of a small city, for several hours at a time. Although these cameras can’t read license plates or see faces, they provide such a wealth of data that police, businesses and even private individuals can use them to help identify people and track their movements.
Already, the cameras have been flown above major public events such as the Ohio political rally where Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) named Sarah Palin as his running mate in 2008, McNutt said. They’ve been flown above Baltimore; Philadelphia; Compton, Calif.; and Dayton in demonstrations for police. They’ve also been used for traffic impact studies, for security at NASCAR races and at the request of a Mexican politician, who commissioned the flights over Ciudad Juárez.
Defense contractors are developing similar technology for the military, but its potential for civilian use is raising novel civil liberties concerns. In Dayton, where Persistent Surveillance Systems is based, city officials balked last year when police considered paying for 200 hours of flights, in part because of privacy complaints.....
To that end, the mayor has another idea: She’s encouraging the businesses that own Dayton’s tallest buildings to mount rooftop surveillance cameras capable of continuously monitoring the downtown and nearby neighborhoods. Whaley hopes the businesses would provide the video feeds to the police.
McNutt, it turns out, has cameras for those situations, too, capable of spotting individual people from seven miles away.

It is a little extreme to consider putting drones in the air just to collect video in case crimes are committed.  Of course, companies will probably try to use them to figure out better ways to make us buy their shit.  Unfortunately, this technology will get put to more and more uses that will curtail our privacy.

How Is This Useful?

The Washington Post shows the PRISM slides that Edward Snowden released.  This one got me:

What possible use could all that data be?  There's got to be so much useless information there that they miss so many more important things.  As Andy Borowitz mocks:

Despite having an annual budget in the neighborhood of ten billion dollars, the agency had no idea that a dude who was working for it five days a week was getting ready to send those classified documents to a journalist who would then tell everybody in the world.
“Maybe if we hadn’t been so busy keeping our eye on those other three hundred million people, we would have noticed that this one guy who was working right under our noses was up to something totally fishy,” the spokesman said. “But you know what they say about hindsight.”

Seriously, how can Facebook posts and chats provide almost any useful information, unless the NSA is really interested in what people I went to high school with ate, or where they were drinking beer, or what funny thing their kids said or did?  I haven't seen anybody post a status update saying "Planning to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge."  Anyway, it would probably be more accurate to say, "An FBI plant came to me with an idea to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge." 

I can't believe any Democrats would support this plan because it makes the government look like boorish, incompetent fools wasting taxpayer dollars, and I can't believe any Republicans would support it because it actually lives up to their usually irrational sounding fears about Big Government.  But both parties seem to have an irrational fear of (Islamic) terrorism.

How Big Is the Surveillance State?

Fucking huge:

And as NBC News reports:

NBC News has learned that under the post-9/11 Patriot Act, the government has been collecting records on every phone call made in the U.S.

This includes metadata … which can tell the government a lot about you.  And it also includes content.
In addition, a government expert told the Washington Post that the government “quite can literally watch your ideas form as you type.” A top NSA executives have confirmed to Washington’s Blog that the NSA is intercepting and storing virtually all digital communications on the Internet.
Private contractors can also view all of your data … and the government isn’t keeping track of which contractors see your data and which don’t.
And top NSA and FBI experts say that the government can retroactively search all of the collected information on someone since 9/11 if they suspect someone of wrongdoing … or want to frame him.
The American government is in fact collecting and storing virtually every phone call, purchases, email, text message, internet searches, social media communications, health information, employment history, travel and student records, and virtually all other information of every American.
The Wall Street Journal reported that the NSA spies on Americans’ credit card transactions as well.

Also, this:

So what happens to the communications that the government isn't supposed to have? When they're accurately identified as such -- often that's an NSA analyst's judgment call -- the relevant data is supposed to be destroyed forever. But there are exceptions, when the NSA can keep and store the purely domestic communications of American citizens, and even forward them onto the FBI.
Here's how The Guardian puts it:

...the Fisa court-approved policies allow the NSA to:

• Keep data that could potentially contain details of US persons for up to five years;
• Retain and make use of "inadvertently acquired" domestic communications if they contain usable intelligence, information on criminal activity, threat of harm to people or property, are encrypted, or are believed to contain any information relevant to cybersecurity;
• Preserve "foreign intelligence information" contained within attorney-client communications;
• Access the content of communications gathered from "U.S. based machine[s]" or phone numbers in order to establish if targets are located in the US, for the purposes of ceasing further surveillance.
The broad scope of the court orders, and the nature of the procedures set out in the documents, appear to clash with assurances from President Obama and senior intelligence officials that the NSA could not access Americans' call or email information without warrants.

At a minimum, this makes President Obama's recent public statements look highly misleading, if not outright lies. Says Drum, after parsing the minimization procedure document, "The minimization procedures are fairly strict, but they do allow retention and dissemination of domestic data -- without a warrant -- under quite a few circumstances. 'Threat of harm' is pretty broad, as is 'criminal activity.' The latter, in fact, seems like a loophole the size of a Mack truck. It suggests that NSA could have a significant incentive to 'inadvertently' hoover up as much domestic information as possible so it can search for evidence of criminal activity to hand over to the FBI." Several other objections come to mind, but I presume that, in coming days, we're going to understand these procedures better than we do now, so let's put that line of inquiry on hold.

Yeah, that could never get abused.  Well, considering this, I guess any potential terrorists or other criminals out there don't have too much to worry about.  Now, reporters, political insurgents and other rabble rousers, on the other hand....

The Boss of the Security State

 Wired profiles General Keith Alexander, the head of NSA, CSS,  USCYBERCOM and several other acronym named spy groups:

This is the undisputed domain of General Keith Alexander, a man few even in Washington would likely recognize. Never before has anyone in America’s intelligence sphere come close to his degree of power, the number of people under his command, the expanse of his rule, the length of his reign, or the depth of his secrecy. A four-star Army general, his authority extends across three domains: He is director of the world’s largest intelligence service, the National Security Agency; chief of the Central Security Service; and commander of the US Cyber Command. As such, he has his own secret military, presiding over the Navy’s 10th Fleet, the 24th Air Force, and the Second Army.
Alexander runs the nation’s cyberwar efforts, an empire he has built over the past eight years by insisting that the US’s inherent vulnerability to digital attacks requires him to amass more and more authority over the data zipping around the globe. In his telling, the threat is so mind-bogglingly huge that the nation has little option but to eventually put the entire civilian Internet under his protection, requiring tweets and emails to pass through his filters, and putting the kill switch under the government’s forefinger. “What we see is an increasing level of activity on the networks,” he said at a recent security conference in Canada. “I am concerned that this is going to break a threshold where the private sector can no longer handle it and the government is going to have to step in.”

And the empire is growing:

 In May, work began on a $3.2 billion facility housed at Fort Meade in Maryland. Known as Site M, the 227-acre complex includes its own 150-megawatt power substation, 14 administrative buildings, 10 parking garages, and chiller and boiler plants. The server building will have 90,000 square feet of raised floor—handy for supercomputers—yet hold only 50 people. Meanwhile, the 531,000-square-foot operations center will house more than 1,300 people. In all, the buildings will have a footprint of 1.8 million square feet. Even more ambitious plans, known as Phase II and III, are on the drawing board. Stretching over the next 16 years, they would quadruple the footprint to 5.8 million square feet, enough for nearly 60 buildings and 40 parking garages, costing $5.2 billion and accommodating 11,000 more cyberwarriors.

What a waste of money and effort, and what a likely source of abuse of power.  Also, most likely it was the source of Stuxnet, and the legitimization of cyberwar couldn't possibly blowback on U.S. national interests, now could it?

In Which I Agree With Rand Paul

While I generally think his economic policies are idiotic and extremely detrimental, I have to agree with the gist of Rand Paul's filibuster last night (with some quibbles).  Here is Conor Friedersdorf breaking down some of Paul's major points:

On the purpose of his filibuster:

"I rise today to begin to filibuster John Brennan's nomination for the CIA I will speak until I can no longer speak. I will speak as long as it takes, until the alarm is sounded from coast to coast that our Constitution is important, that your rights to trial by jury are precious, that no American should be killed by a drone on American soil without first being charged with a crime, without first being found to be guilty by a court. That Americans could be killed in a cafe in San Francisco or in a restaurant in Houston or at their home in Bowling Green, Kentucky, is an abomination."

Why he worries about killing within the United States:

"When I asked the president, can you kill an American on American soil, it should have been an easy answer. It's an easy question. It should have been a resounding and unequivocal, 'no.' The president's response? He hasn't killed anyone yet. We're supposed to be comforted by that. The president says, I haven't killed anyone yet. He goes on to say, 'and I have no intention of killing Americans. But I might.'

"Is that enough?

"Are we satisfied by that?

"Are we so complacent with our rights that we would allow a president to say he might kill Americans?"

Amen.  However, I wouldn't limit the case to just American soil, and probably not even American citizens.  But the main thing that bothered me with Paul's performance was that he accepted Eric Holder's explanation without any caveats:

 Attorney General Eric Holder has written a letter to Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) saying that a drone could not be used against a noncombatant American. In response, Paul has said he the Senate should move ahead with John Brennan’s nomination as director of the CIA. The vote is being held this afternoon.
The letter followed a 13-hour filibuster of Brennan by Paul and several other senators, who objected to the possibility of domestic drone strikes on U.S. citizens.
“Does the president have the authority to use a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on U.S. soil?” Holder’s letter reads. “The answer to that is no.”
Paul said Thursday afternoon that he’s happy with the response and that he urges the Senate to proceed to a vote on Brennan’s nomination.
“I’m quite happy with the answer,” Paul said. “Through the advise and consent process, I’ve got an important answer.”

 Wait a second.  If I've learned anything in the past two administrations, I don't trust words like "not engaged in combat on U.S. soil."  Who actually determines whether that individual is engaged in combat?  The President?  A jury of his peers?  A judge?  I don't know about you, but after finding out that John Fucking Yoo advises the President that he has the right to have a child's testicles crushed to extract information from him, and that isn't torture, I don't trust that Eric Holder's  28 or so words rule out attacks on innocent American citizens on U.S. soil.  While it is nice Rand Paul highlighted this issue, and while it is deplorable that almost no Democrats joined in, I think we need much more discussion on what extrajudicial powers are granted to the President under his authority as commander-in-chief.  I believe they are much more limited than the Bush and Obama administrations have argued.

The Ticking Time Bomb Scenario

Johannes Thimm looks at Zero Dark Thirty and the pro-torture argument for finding Bin Laden:

The overwhelming focus of the debate on the role of torture in locating bin Laden neglects an important point. Even in the opinions of advocates of coercion and even in the case of in Laden, bringing a terrorist to justice for acts committed in the past does not justify its use. It is also necessary to make the case that bin Laden is still a danger. If he were an old man hiding out with little communication to the outside world and without much influence on the actions of a lose network of terrorists who increasingly act independent from Al Qaedas leadership, it would be hard to argue that torturing potential informants would be anything but revenge. However, if he is still the central figure continuously plotting attacks from the Middle East to Manhattan…
The point is made explicit in a little-noticed exchange between Maya and her superior. After the failed Times Square bombing Maya presses Joseph Bradley, the CIA station chief in Pakistan, for more ressources to find bin Laden. Bradley tells her that he doesn’t care about bin Laden and that Maya should be more concerned with protecting the homeland. Maya then lectures him about how bin Laden provides the inspiration for all these attacks. She stops just short of saying that if they get him, the attacks will end. Needless to say, in this scene Maya is the one the viewer identifies with. As usual Bradley is just one more obstacle to her doing her job. And the hunt for bin Laden is one great attempt to protect the homeland against further attacks and save the lives of innocent Americans.
This is not to say that the late bin Laden’s had no role whatsoever. He was not hiding in a cave completely cut off from civilization, but lived in a city and was able to communicate through his messenger. But it is questionable how much control he had over the operational activities that led to the diverse terrorist attacks so prominently emphasized throughout the plot. The point is this: There are different ways to tell the story, and, whether intentionally or not, the makers of Zero Dark Thirty consistently tell it in a way that makes the strongest possible case for torture.

The order to violate the Geneva Conventions, federal law and American tradition came from a bunch of cowards and sadists headed by Dick Cheney.  They didn't get shit for useful information, and should be tried as war criminals.  If Hell exists, Dick Cheney and John Yoo will be there for eternity.  Probably in the same room as Bin Laden.

Police State Watch

The Guardian:

In February of this year, Congress passed the FAA Reauthorization Act, with its provision to deploy fleets of drones domestically. Jennifer Lynch, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, notes that this followed a major lobbying effort, "a huge push by […] the defense sector" to promote the use of drones in American skies: 30,000 of them are expected to be in use by 2020, some as small as hummingbirds – meaning that you won't necessarily see them, tracking your meeting with your fellow-activists, with your accountant or your congressman, or filming your cruising the bars or your assignation with your lover, as its video-gathering whirs.
Others will be as big as passenger planes. Business-friendly media stress their planned abundant use by corporations: police in Seattle have already deployed them.
An unclassified US air force document reported by CBS (pdf) news expands on this unprecedented and unconstitutional step – one that formally brings the military into the role of controlling domestic populations on US soil, which is the bright line that separates a democracy from a military oligarchy. (The US constitution allows for the deployment of National Guard units by governors, who are answerable to the people; but this system is intended, as is posse comitatus, to prevent the military from taking action aimed at US citizens domestically.)
The air force document explains that the air force will be overseeing the deployment of its own military surveillance drones within the borders of the US; that it may keep video and other data it collects with these drones for 90 days without a warrant – and will then, retroactively, determine if the material can be retained – which does away for good with the fourth amendment in these cases. While the drones are not supposed to specifically "conduct non-consensual surveillance on on specifically identified US persons", according to the document, the wording allows for domestic military surveillance of non-"specifically identified" people (that is, a group of activists or protesters) and it comes with the important caveat, also seemingly wholly unconstitutional, that it may not target individuals "unless expressly approved by the secretary of Defense".
In other words, the Pentagon can now send a domestic drone to hover outside your apartment window, collecting footage of you and your family, if the secretary of Defense approves it. Or it may track you and your friends and pick up audio of your conversations, on your way, say, to protest or vote or talk to your representative, if you are not "specifically identified", a determination that is so vague as to be meaningless.

What was that about the military-industrial complex, again?  I wonder how often Chuck Hagel or whoever else will use that approval authority.  I wonder if former CIA chief Leon Panetta already has.  It is a number of years late for us to end the "War on Terrorism", aka the war on civil liberties.  As the Romney voters said, "I want my country back."

Just A Reminder

From The Awl:

 "Since September 11, 2001, there have been roughly 30 Americans killed by terrorism (depending on how you do the numbers). Meanwhile, extreme weather deaths in the same time period have totaled 6,408 as of 2011, according to the National Weather Service."

But what sounds scarier?

Interrogations And False Confessions

The Guardian, via nc links:

Depriving a person of sleep removes their ability to think and act coherently. They have delusions and hallucinations, and the desire for sleep becomes so desperate that a person deprived of it will often do almost anything for reprieve – including, as happened in the Central Park case, admitting to murder.
The Central Park Five all took back their confessions upon being formally arrested. They were kids who had been kept awake for nearly two days and interrogated without attorneys present; they were told if they confessed, they could go home. The stories they told in their confessions were inconsistent with each other and with the physical evidence. Several of the boys said they stabbed the victim, but there were no knife wounds. Their stories varied on the location of the crime, the description of the victim and the timeline of the crime itself. There was little physical evidence tying them to the rape and beating. They were prosecuted and convicted anyway.
In the meantime, Matias Reyes, the man who actually raped and nearly killed the Central Park jogger, continued on his spree of serial rapes throughout New York City. Reyes had violently assaulted several women before the Central Park rape, including his own mother; the same year he committed the Central Park assault, he was also actively breaking into women's apartments and stabbing out the eyes of his victims so that they couldn't identify him after he raped them. He killed at least one of them.
In 2002, while in jail for rape and murder, Reyes admitted to the Central Park rape. DNA evidence tied him to the crime.

It goes on to say that after the defendants were exonerated, the police chief still claimed what the cops did was legit.  I don't understand how you could use such flimsy confessions as evidence in a trial when most of it didn't add up.  If several guys claimed to stab the victim, but there were no stabbing wounds, what's up with that?  They got confused?  Our legal system suffers from some extremely serious maladies.