NYT: A Tax System Stacked Against the 99 Percent

Joseph Stiglitz on our unfair tax system.
Posted by Ian Alterman, Monday, April 15, 2013

Must-See Video: Global Wealth Inequality

An eye-opening - and very upsetting - graphic illustration of the "haves" and "have nots." This should be "must" viewing for every human with access to the Internet.
Posted by Ian Alterman, Sunday, April 14, 2013

NYT: Hacktivists as Gadflies

"For some reason, it seems that the government considers hackers who are out to line their pockets less of a threat than those who are trying to make a political point. Consider the case of Andrew Auernheimer, better known as 'Weev.' When Weev discovered in 2010 that AT&T had left private information about its customers vulnerable on the Internet, he and a colleague wrote a script to access it. Technically, he did not 'hack' anything; he merely executed a simple version of what Google Web crawlers do every second of every day — sequentially walk through public URLs and extract the content. When he got the information (the e-mail addresses of 114,000 iPad users, including Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Rahm Emanuel, then the White House chief of staff), Weev did not try to profit from it; he notified the blog Gawker of the security hole. For this service Weev might have asked for free dinners for life, but instead he was recently sentenced to 41 months in prison and ordered to pay a fine of more than $73,000 in damages to AT&T to cover the cost of notifying its customers of its own security failure. When the federal judge Susan Wigenton sentenced Weev on March 18, she described him with prose that could have been lifted from the prosecutor Meletus in Plato’s 'Apology.' 'You consider yourself a hero of sorts,' she said, and noted that Weev’s 'special skills' in computer coding called for a more draconian sentence."
Posted by Ian Alterman, Sunday, April 14, 2013

Hillary Speaks! (The Onion)

"How bad do I want it? Do I want it bad enough to waste years of my life—years I’ll never get back—meticulously crafting my public and private image to somehow appear relatable to a populace with 57 percent voter turnout? Do I want it bad enough to spend sleepless night after sleepless night dumbing down my deeply held political convictions into a pile of generic rhetorical slop that even the most dimwitted American can barely comprehend?"
Posted by Ian Alterman, Friday, April 12, 2013

OWS Settles “Book” Lawsuit

@$16/book, plus legal fees.
Posted by Ian Alterman, Wednesday, April 10, 2013

Harper’s: The Rise and Fall of Occupy Wall Street (Must-Read)

Not what you think. I found this article so compelling that I did not want to wait six to ten months for it to become available online. So I re-typed the entire thing.
Posted by Ian Alterman, Tuesday, March 19, 2013

NYT: Visions of Drones Swarming U.S. Skies Hit Bipartisan Nerve

Important posts by both MBs on Rand Paul's filibuster. But not included in either article was the impetus for it: not the use of drones to kill Americans here (though that came up), but their increasing use for surveillance. I disagree with RP on just about everything, and he did get a tad hyperbolic at times. But the importance of this issue cannot be exaggerated. We are going down a VERY slippery slope here, one that leads inexorably from "simple" surveillance uses to broader such uses - and, NOT so far-fetched an idea, to their use for more than just surveillance. As always, the MSM is dismissing the Cassandras as "conspiracy theorists," marginalizing concerned voices. We must NOT allow that!
Posted by Ian Alterman, Monday, March 11, 2013

NYT: What Price Water?

As anyone who knows me knows, I have been saying this for almost three decades: water - not oil, not food - is the most critical resource in the world. And it will soon be priced not solely as a bottled convenience, but as a "formal" commodity. It may well become the most powerful "weapon" on earth.
Posted by Ian Alterman, Thursday, February 28, 2013

NYT: The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food

How companies strive daily to addict you to their snacks.
Posted by Ian Alterman, Sunday, February 24, 2013

VIDEO: Tour of Int’l Space Station

Outgoing Commander Sunita Williams takes us on a fascinating guided tour of the International Space Station, and answers all those questions we all have. Commander Williams holds the record for the longest space flight time among female space travelers, the record for number of spacewalks for a female, and most spacewalk time for a female. She has just returned after more than six months on the station.
Posted by Ian Alterman, Tuesday, February 19, 2013

ARGUS: The Next Generation of Surveillance

With an astounding 1.8 gigapixel, long-range, wide-area camera, it is manifold times more accurate than the Predator.
Posted by Ian Alterman, Monday, February 18, 2013

NYT Public Editor: No More Drone Secrecy!

"When the government’s only chance of keeping an inconvenient truth out of the news media is to warn of a national security threat, it’s amazing how these threats pop up. This has turned out to be a powerfully effective tool. News organizations, after all, don’t want to endanger the nation’s safety, or be accused of doing so, so editors often listen to government officials when they make their case for not publishing. And, after listening, editors occasionally consent. But a countervailing force — people’s right to know what their government is doing and the news media’s responsibility to find out and tell them — ought to rule the day. Keeping the government’s secrets is not the news media’s role, unless there is a clear, direct and life-threatening reason to justify it. The classic example is revealing troop movements in wartime. Such a specific threat doesn’t exist now, and from all I can glean, it didn’t exist many months ago either."
Posted by Ian Alterman, Sunday, February 10, 2013

Video: “Black Money”

If you have never seen this Frontline video, it is worth watching. Corporate and political corruption and bribery at the highest levels.
Posted by Ian Alterman, Wednesday, January 30, 2013

Must-See! This is SCARY!!

It is not hard to imagine how this could be used in non-military (i.e., anti-civilian) ways.
Posted by Ian Alterman, Saturday, January 26, 2013

NYT: Those Naughty Bankers!

Of a $500 million CDO - nicknamed "Nuclear Holocaust" - over $415 million was worthless. And other "stupid banker tricks."
Posted by Ian Alterman, Wednesday, January 23, 2013

The Atlantic: Some Good Reads

"The Web's New Monopolists," "Awakening," "What's Inside America's Banks" (must-read), "The Real Cuban Missile Crisis"
Posted by Ian Alterman, Monday, January 21, 2013

Foreign Policy: Some Worthwhile Reads

Some good stuff here, including cover article ("10 Things Obama Can Do"), "Cursed With Plenty," "Think Again," "The Disappeared."
Posted by Ian Alterman, Monday, January 21, 2013

An Observation

Thoughts on a holiday billboard from American Atheists.
Posted by Ian Alterman, Tuesday, January 15, 2013

U.S. v. CA re Medical Marijuana

Outrageous!!
Posted by Ian Alterman, Monday, January 14, 2013

NYT: The Dawning of Domestic Drones

Adding to Blax's post from Naomi Wolf.
Posted by Ian Alterman, Tuesday, December 25, 2012

RIP Alexander Cockburn

A truly historic left-wing voice - and Hitchens' "sparring partner" - is dead at 71.
Posted by Ian Alterman, Saturday, July 21, 2012

Smirking Chimp: Recovered History: 7,000 May Day Protesters Herded Into D.C. Stadium Prison In 1971

The predecessor to OWS
Posted by Ian Alterman, Wednesday, May 2, 2012

NYT: Police Warrant Squads Were Used to Monitor Wall Street Protesters, Suspects Say

Yet more NYPD chicanery...
Posted by Ian Alterman, Wednesday, May 2, 2012

NYT: How Psychedelics Are Helping Terminal Patients

Why should this be a surprise?
Posted by Ian Alterman, Monday, April 23, 2012

Tarek Mehanna’s Statement

Forgive me if this has been posted before. If not, it is among the most eloquent, historically accurate and courageous statements I have ever read. And well worth your time. Peace.
Posted by Ian Alterman, Saturday, April 21, 2012