Mutant Bunny from Fukushima Freaks Everyone Out, Adorably Gawker (hat tip reader furzy mouse)
Udderly Gorgeous Der Spiegel (hat tip reader furzy mouse)
Obese child stroke victim aged just six Telegraph (hat tip reader Swedish Lex)
The Green Revolution Backfires: Sweden’s Lesson for Real Sustainability Common Dreams (hat tip reader May S). Eeek.
When Engineers Lie Robert Cringley (hat tip reader Crocodile Chuck)
Panetta: Escalate Shadow Wars, Expand Black Ops Wired. Great. Most everyone agrees Al Quida is a has been, but the Panetta wants to use it as an excuse to expand covert ops. Lovely.
Three Deadly War Myths Robert Parry (hat tip reader May S)
IMF Computers Said to Be Targeted in State-Based Cyber-Attack Bloomberg (hat tip Buzz Potamkin)
Chilling the Arab Spring: Neoliberal financiers in North Africa and Palestine Pambazuka News (hat tip reader May S)
Saudis to pump 10 million bpd Warren Mosler (hat tip Philip Pinkington)
Senate report: The Latin American war on drugs has ‘largely failed’ Raw Story (hat tip reader May S)
American Banks ‘High’ On Drug Money: How a Whistleblower Blew the Lid Off Wachovia-Drug Cartel Money Laundering Scheme AlterNet (hat tip reader furzy mouse). We covered this story and Wood’s role earlier, but it’s worth featuring again.
How police are turning military Politico (hat tip reader May S)
Join Students In Turning Their Back On Speaker John Boehner ProgressOhio. It includes a cute chant.
Signs of Fissure Between GOP Establishment and Religious Right Faith in the Public Life (hat tip reader Jerry F)
The Conservative Anti-Unicorn Caucus David Weigel, Slate (hat tip reader Carol B)
The faith-based economics of deficit reduction Dean Baker, Guardian (hat tip reader Peter J)
In Re Veal StopForeclosures. Another securitization/PSA fail case. This was an appellate decision to boot.
Blocking Elizabeth Warren Joe Nocera, New York Times. Nicely done.
Speech on media propaganda Glenn Greenwald (hat tip reader Crocodile Chuck). Today’s must read.
Antidote du jour:
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The latest info from my mother about the Spanish camps:
Most cities are going to wrap up the camps. Instead, neighbourhood groups are blooming. In Monte Alto (her neighbourgood group) we are more than fifty people on the list. We met yesterday evening. This goes on and if it continues like this there will be something to talk about.
The idea is that each city make their own decisions. Many are choosing to abandon the camps and have instead an information point. But there will still be assemblies and also assemblies in neighbourhoods, and work by neighbourhood groups.
Madrid is wrapping up the camp on 12 June. The next protest is on 11 June when the local authorities change over to the new officials.
That sounds fantastic. Good luck with the local councils and thanks for the update, keep up the fight.
No, I haven’t heard anything about leaving the euro. It doesn’t seem to be in the agenda.
Yves was very nice and posted here the details of their proposals, as my mother sent me:
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/05/are-fissures-in-europe-worse-than-media-reports-suggest.html
What do the Camps want? Do they want Spain to leave the Euro?
Your updates are very interesting Doly. Please keep them coming. I’m quite curious to hear what kind of political philosophy and governmental structure these associations produce.
re: Saudis to pump 10 million bpd
The Saudis might get up to ten (I doubt it, but they might). If they do, it will be a “one, last, futile gesture” type of thing, and totally irrelevant.
The ExportLand Model is eating Saudi Arabia alive.
http://www.jeffrubinssmallerworld.com/2011/06/08/forget-opec-russia-is-key/
(If the Saudi’s are still exporting significant amounts of oil — say 2 million mbd — in 2025, I’ll eat my shorts … the same dirty pair I’m wearing now)
Nice link for tomorrow, perhaps? The Social Psychological Narrative — or — What Is Social Psychology, Anyway?
Ah, never mind. Too much filler, too little content.
be here now
Cringely, for the money quote alone: “This is National Security, remember, which means ethical and common sense rules are suspended without question.” The whole piece is worth a read.
Regarding Panetta’s wanna-expansion of black ops, there are two points behind that progammatic push which to me are as telling as they are salient.
First, this is ALLLL really for show. Shadow moves against tiny, dispersed, and above all vague putatie adversaries involve little real effort, little real risk, and no measurability of ‘success’ i.e. accountability for plan an implementation. Black ops can be endlessly announced as fantastic and ‘nearly complete’ sucesses in time for every bump in the media cycle that needs a happy cushion. Petraus is the past master at this, endlessly announcing how much a winner he is for ops which are _never_ publicly counted, evaluated, or many of them quite likely ever even DONE. We have no way of knowing but his word: this is what Panetta salivates for and promises to put under the fingers of the White House spinmeisters, insta-wins that can be dropped in bromide and bloomed to tube-filling talking heads talking about ‘excellent progress’ with no one, but no one, being able to tell if any action was even ever undertaken, let alone a success. Kinda like the _Capricorn 5_ where in the film the Moon landings were faked for a vote-getting media spectacle. So from that perspective, whatever the black op shadowar is supposedly doing, it is actually generating favorable media and poll numbers, its real objective: this is a Pscywar on the US public more than anything else.
Second, these shadow-faking ops are _cheap_. By that I mean, they are very expensive relative to many things like, oh, feeding poor, infant, US nationals, but they are small change compared to mainforce power projections and ongoing occupations of foreign ‘protectorates.’
So there you have it in my view, a bipartisan, endless win-of-the-week media operation, staged in drones and occasional bone bits of meaningless ‘furriners’ to focus the public on pulling the booth switch and sitting docile in their rotting bungalows while the oligarchy stacks its goldbricks.
The blog you need on the flimsiness of the conviction over the Lockerbie bombing is Robert Black’s.
http://lockerbiecase.blogspot.com/
I knew (and liked) Robert in our undergraduate days: I can vouch for his serious-mindedness and high intelligence.
The necessity to have substantial threats, clear and present dangers to Our Republic, and bind us together as a domestic garrison civilian camp, is a demanding agenda by opinion makers to convince us that there words describing threats are real and factually based.
Here is a leading wholesale outlet for the “be afraid, be very afraid” crowd.
http://www.committeeonthepresentdanger.org/
The International Terrorist threat, this time, al queda, is little more than warmed over commie conspiracy hysteria. Furthermore, it is a standing domestic propaganda mission to promote these threats beyond their real capacity to do us harm, certainly less than the annual hundreds of murders in each of the top 10 cities, and thousands more through out America.
“As a CIA analyst, I’ve seen distortions of intelligence before”:
http://progressive.org/media_1137
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1207-26.htm
Elizabeth Warren is the tip of the republican iceberg trying to sink USS Obama on its maiden voyage.
“Obama nominated 964 people for approximately 1,215 vacancies during the 111th Congress, according to a Congressional Research Service report released in May. He has submitted another 174 nominations in the 112th Congress. Last week alone, the Senate unanimously confirmed 28 of Obama’s nominees, including ambassadors to Israel and Jordan, plus a handful of officials for the Defense, Justice and Treasury departments.
On Wednesday, Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) lifted his hold on Obama’s pick to lead the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service after the administration approved a permit for a 15th deepwater oil well in the Gulf of Mexico.”
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0611/56066.html
As you can see, not all intransigence is ideologically driven, some is simple horse trading for drilling permits in the Gulf on behalf of the Oil Industry.
Three excerpts from Glenn Greenwald’s “Speech on Media Propaganda”:
1. “The Obama administration has taken the extraordinary step of authorizing the targeted killing of an American citizen. . . .”
2. “one would think that media outlets would be interested in covering the weighty issued raised by this assassination program.”
3. “Here, though, we have Reuters doing exactly the opposite: they’re ending the debate before it even begins by “reporting” — falsely — that Awlaki “is the leader of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.”
At this rate, in a few years we can expect to see news reports such as the following:
Reuters, June 12, 2017:….”over the weekend, death squads across the USA have taken the extraordinary step of abducting, torturing and killing thousands of students, trade unionists, teachers and leftist political leaders and activists, as part of the U.S.-backed anti-Terrorist crusade led by President Barack Obama, founder of the Right-Wing Democratic Republican Goldman Sachs Alliance (RWDRGSA), which has been governing the country since 2012…. A few hundred civilians were also caught in the crossfire and killed as collateral damage, including the entire class of F.J. Kingsbury Elementary School in Watersbury, CT.
“As for the unfortunate death of Kingsbury Elementary Schoolchildren, Obama addressed the nation and gave an incredibly moving, uplifting speech, in which he referred to “rain puddles in heaven….” (Robert Siegel of NPR)
“According to liberal publications such as the NY Times and the Washington Post, all of the targeted students, trade unionists, and leftists are reported to have definite, though unconfirmed, links to Al Qaeda operatives in Yemen.”- Reuters
While a few bloggers at Daily Kos were still wondering what happened to the Obama they voted for back in 2008, when he would finally start living up to his campaign promises, the majority of DK bloggers applauded this latest anti-terrorist action as a sign of “change we can believe in”.
Your vision of the outcomes of US government domestic policy into unstoppable terror is clear.
If you write out of concern, for any reason other than partisan propagandizing, why would you point to a particular party or person in government to blame, let alone its titular head, Obama, an inexperienced naif with Chicago crime contacts and a mouth?
I am very curious to know where the person writing the Common Dreams article about Swedish transportation greenhouse gas emissions got the data which presumably underwrites his claim that the increasing use of electric cars has raised Swedish emissions in the transport sector. I’ve been trying to find the relevant data at the Swedish EPA website. Overall, it appears that Swedish emissions have been declining. The transport sector also seems to have improved its rate of emission over the years. I would really like to see a full, informed discussion of the claims in this article.
Ditto. Debrabender states: ‘To everyone’s surprise, however, greenhouse gas emissions from Sweden’s transportation sector are up.’
The reader expects the next sentence to cite the study which established this factoid. But the citation is absent.
As such, this article is junk journalism at its finest.
The UN said that Sweden’s greenhouse stats were cooked and its greenhouse gas emissions were worse than the official reports. I found this based on the most obvious Google search “Sweden greenhouse gas emissions” on the first page. So I would not be so quick to dismiss this article.
http://www.ekopolitan.com/climate/un-statistics-sweden-has-had-127-increase-greenhouse-emissions-1990
It does not discuss the gas v. electric issue, but it does show a lack of honesty in this category.
I’m sorry Yves, but I think you are wrong on this one. The UN report gives no indication of increases in the transportation sector, and explicitly states:
“The reason behind this increase in GHG emissions is, according to the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency, an increase of deforestation. Looking at the figures from the Swedish Forest Agency this deforestation origins from two activities – an increase in man-made deforestation and the damages after the windstorm Erwin (Swe: “Gudrun”) in early 2005.
More than half of Sweden’s land-based areal consists of forests. Out of the country’s 41.0 million hectares land, 22.6 million hectares are forests. In the Erwin windstorm some 75 million m3 of trees were blown down, which represents almost a year of Sweden’s normal man-made deforestation. The country’s annual forest regrowth is about 100 million m3.
/snip /
As you can see in the table below – which includes deforestation – the GHG-emissions in Sweden has evolved differently that its Nordic neighbours and the EU. Denmark has had a 5.6 percent reduction, Finland is status quo, Norway a 22 percent reduction. All went rather well for Sweden until 2005, when Erwin came and changed the situation.”
The meme presented in the article, “Improved Efficiency Promotes Increased Use, Which Increases Overall Energy Use,” is getting massive play currently by the Neo-Denialists, and it has been thoroughly debunked in the academic literature.
Re link: “Speech on Media propaganda”
In video 3 around 10 minutes Glenn refers to the events in Tunisa, Egypt, Libia, etc…. as being proof of how good alternative media can empower people. Something to that effect. So many mid-eastern countries simultaneously uprising at once is hard to believe for me.
I just don;t believe we are getting the true story in the mid-east that all these countries are overthrowing their democracies at once. Just doesn;t ring true. Maybe Glenn has fallen for a bit of the news Propaganda himself.
One video I would like to bring to your attention is the Fareed Zakaria show on youtube showing “New World Order” below the screen for 5 minutes. The guest host(not Fareed that morning) on GPS(Global public Square) discussed the events over in the middle east were unfolding. The New World Order was below the screen for 5 minutes. Pretty shocking.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uX-w3nwNBks
So ‘Jim,’ your estimation of socio-historical eventuation is faulty, I have to say. While any calendar year is a poor frame in and of itself for evaluation, just do your homework on 1989, 1968, 1919, and 1848 for some of the salient historical examples. 1957 in Africa. 1954 in the Near East. Mass, spontaneous surges for change are not only far more numerous than one might suppose, they are far more _typical_ of change than one would think at first regard. Societies demonstrate long periods of relative stability, regardless of the froth of events, marked by occasional sharp disjunctions; the signature of ‘punctuated equilibrium’ in the infelicitous but well-known phrase referring to change at biophysical timescales. What we are seeing now in the Near East is exactly what one would anticipate.
Your remarks on “we’re not getting the whole story” speak to me of laziness if the issues involved are really of concern to you. Where to do you bother to get your information? There are numerous media sources in the Near East itself that publish in English even if one doesn’t command Arabic or other widely used languages, and not al-Jazeera alone. The Daily Star out of Lebanon. Multiple newspapers in Pakistan with online presences and good track records. Turkish media. The wireservices publish _daily_ reportage by diverse correspondents on the ground, including on both sides of conflict lines where movement is restricted. Sooo do your homework, read the range of remarks, and do your own analysis. In my view, the huge majority of popular actions are in fact popular at base. There are some instances of established political factions, typically political parties of Islamist and non-Western orientation, trying to get out in front of popular disaffection but not really acting on their own. If you have reason to believe that there is some other ‘third force’ instigating action, wild rumormongering and calls to paranoia don’t amount to any substantiation. How about you identify sources and actors if you have _serious_ reason to believe any are at work. I don’t see that. What I do see are faxu progressives vehemently anti-Western government (if on credible grounds) simply deserting indigenous popular movements in the Near East because a few of them are favored by said Western powers however reluctantly. Or then again, we have crypto-Republican ‘its all a plot’ seedlings being sewn just in case some of these uprisings go well, as they should, and the party in power in the US declares itself a proud papa of success. You wouldn’t be on board the latter bandwagon would you, ‘Jim?’
Speaking of the New World Order, RFI: Of all the Americans you might want at your sinister oligarchic cabal, Why the Antitrust AAG? Talk about tits on a bull. Since when has antitrust been of more than antiquarian interest?
http://911nwo.info/2011/06/10/bilderberg-2011-liste-des-participants-tandis-que-2-italiens-dont-un-depute-non-invites-sont-violemment-interpelles/
What could she possibly have to say for herself? Are they going to cut out her heart to appease the sun or something?
yves, the way your “recent items” at the top of each view is displayed has changed, sometime within the past few weeks…
if you go to an article a day old, or even one 3 down in the stack, the most recent items are not usually displayed…
its not a problem for me, since im a regular visitor…but when someone who is not familiar with how that works would likely miss your most recent offerings…
The article about engineers lying about data security is itself a collection of lies. Data can never be made 100% secure. That’s the first thing you learn in a course on data security. You can prove it mathematically.
The protocols, implementations and whatnot are mostly out in the open and can be read and tested for yourself. Websites, for example, rely largely on OpenSSL which is developed by a group of independent Canadian hackers who don’t play ball with the U.S. Feds, although there have been allegations of the feds trying to infiltrating them and inserting backdoors. However, it is all open and if you know what you’re doing you can detect these and fix the code yourself. Proprietary and closed-source crypto is in the minority and considered inferior.
The article starts with a kind of sensationalist work-up saying how engineers are liars but never says in the remainder of the article how, or what they lied about.
Can the NSA crack any code? We don’t know since part of their strategy is not to let anyone know about their capabilities. One always assumes that they can in discussions of theoretical cryptography. Making better 4096 bit keys is not a panacea since the attacks could work for an arbitrary number of bits. There are many attacks of different types that don’t necessarily involve brute force where increasing the key size would increase the security.
The important thing for laypeople reading this to understand is that data security is relative and time-limited. You can keep your data safe from some people for a certain amount of time until they figure out how to break the protection. A lot of times this is good enough.
Once quantum computers get better, all bets are off though.
I love that antidote!
I am commenting on the article ‘The Green Revolution Backfires: Sweden’s Lesson for Real Sustainability’. Before we draw too many conclusions let’s remember that Green cars still need energy, and if the source of energy us not green, then the operation of the cars will not be Green… What proportion of Sweden’s power generation comes from ‘Green Sources’. The rest of the article comments on the consumption lifestyle if American and European middleclass; I would like to point out that although many consummer may need to have to become much more expensive in order to accurately reflect it’s true environmental cost (such as meat consumption or new computers), this does not mean that the middleclass needs to live a life of fear and marginal poverty in order to ‘ make space’ for the people of China, India, and south america. Good medicine and good education does not require alot of environmental resources. Homes may need to be smaller(400 sq ft per person) but they could still be comfortable, and we could still have very tasty diets composed of vegetables, beans, grains, spices and some (low on the food chain) fish and oysters at affordable prices , and a little bit of cheese and meat occasionally, and we would have rely on having less shopping for our entertainment. But we must throw off the neo- liberal Ayn Rand nightmare, where the government does not educate people or undertake grand projects on behalf of the nation, where the rich live in luxury of their wealth, and the poor are subservient to their whims.
Financial Times, June 11:
“A defining moment for Greek debt”, on the plan to have “voluntary” restructuring of Greek bonds, so that maturity is seven years or so down the road, and CDSs are not triggered
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/50fc008e-9381-11e0-922e-00144feab49a.html#axzz1P1DQtuN0
“The latest eurozone row has principally pitted Germany against the European Central Bank and France. Wolfgang Schäuble, finance minister in Berlin, has called for a “quantified and substantial contribution” from bondholders in Greece in return for a fresh international bail-out.
The ECB on the other hand wants to avoid a “credit event” or a decision by rating agencies that Greece is in default. It has threatened to stop accepting Greek collateral if either of those events happen, which would almost certainly lead to the collapse of the Greek banking system.
… restructuring without triggering CDS could kill the nascent but growing sovereign CDS market: “If a credit event is not triggered, this reveals sovereign CDS protection as worthless.”
The consequences could be significant. This could lead to mass selling of bonds from the so-called peripheral eurozone countries, raising their borrowing costs, as investors worry that their supposed insurance policy is suspect.”
This doesn’t seem like too bad a plan, given that all the plans are bad options. Investors/bondholders who are short or hedged take a big haircut and Greece gets some relief. Bondholders are going to get huge haircuts if Greece defaults, as matters stand now.
The effect of such a plan, applied in Greece and elsewhere, would be to turn everyone into zombies — entities that are in reality dead and bankrupt but continue to carry on. Greece would continue on for years even though it is insolvent. Greek banks would be dead but live, and so would companies that owe money to the banks. The French and German banks and even the ECB would also be zombies. Maybe this is how capitalism ends — countries, banks and companies are all insolvent, but continue on only because no dares to force them into bankruptcy, since they will be next in line.
Re: Blocking Warren
Re: Blocking Warren
What is most shameful about the treatment that Elizabeth Warren received is that the ranking member of the Committee a Democrat I am not familiar with, did not leap to her defense and chastise the Chair for his abusive treatment of the witness before the Committee.. This whole thing stinks of Democrat and Republican collusion to set up an oversized Devil and an abused Martyr to continue to delay the inevitable serious discussion of the top 19 or 35 banks that the Fed is now openly requiring to submit plans to the Fed in order to continue to operate as banks in this the United States GIPS (Greece, Ireland, portugal and Spain).
This is somewhat off the NC beat, but I submit it for no other reason than as a counter to the reflexive Christianist Anglophone superiority (“They hate us for our freedom”) current in the US. I do not recommend that it be the first thing one reads in the morning as it happened to be for me today.
Susan Chenery, “I can still hear the kids’ screams”
http://www.smh.com.au/national/i-can-still-hear-the-kids-screams-20110611-1fyap.html
When bleak postwar Britain answered Australia’s call for ”good white British stock” to build its population, it saw an opportunity to empty overflowing institutions of the innocent victims of poverty, illegitimacy and broken homes. In the child trafficking that became known as the child migration schemes it cost £5 a week to keep a child in care in Britain but just 10 shillings in Australia. Institutions that took children would be paid a subsidy for each one of them. All the reputable agencies – Barnardo’s, the Salvation Army, the Fairbridge Society, National Children’s Home, the Catholic and Anglican churches – colluded in sending children to the other side of the world for ”a better life”. They were thought a particularly attractive category of migrant, according to a 1945 prime ministerial brief to state premiers, ”on account of their easier assimilation, adaptability, long working life ahead and easier housing”.
In 200 years it is estimated that 150,000 British children were dumped around the globe. Between 1912 and 1970, about 7000 were shipped to Australia. The first big hurt for those children was the rejection. They couldn’t understand what they had done that was so wrong that their own country didn’t want them. They were promised that loving families were waiting to adopt them but they were delivered into institutionalised abuse. Very few were adopted or fostered.
….
”The brothers and sisters were all together,” he says. ”And then they started grabbing the girls away from their brothers. I can still hear the screams of these kids being separated. Some of them never saw their sisters again. I still have nightmares.”
Life at Bindoon, run by the Catholic Church’s Christian Brothers, was a catalogue of cruelty, where beatings and sexual assaults were daily events.
”Bindoon was nothing more than a paedophile ring,” Hennessey says. ”Most of the brothers were into raping and molesting little boys, sometimes sharing their favourites with each other.”
The boys were put to work building the series of grand buildings that Bindoon became. ”It was slave labour,” says Hennessey. Many of them are now deaf or partially deaf because they were constantly bashed around the head.
Re: Green Revolution backfires
Overall a good article providing food for thought. Alas, this professor lost me completely when he couldn’t restrain himself from letting slip a totally bogus notion:
“eating less meat (which the UN estimates is responsible for a fifth of all greenhouse gases.”
This is utter BS. The reason why the UN makes such an estimate is because of the brain dead factory meat farming practices.
For a rational discussion about this topic and truly sustainable farming (including raising cattle and poultry) see this interview with Joe Salatin:
http://www.alternet.org/food/150422/joel_salatin%3A_how_to_eat_animals_and_respect_them%2C_too_?page=entire