The Guardian: Snowden Reveals America and Britain Spied On G20 Members

Glenzilla hits the big time ..

Foreign politicians and officials who took part in two G20 summit meetings in London in 2009 had their computers monitored and their phone calls intercepted on the instructions of their British government hosts, according to documents seen by the Guardian/[Glenzilla]. Some delegates were tricked into using internet cafes which had been set up by British intelligence agencies to read their email traffic

.. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Monday, June 17, 2013

Democracy Now: Chris Pyle, Whistleblower on CIA Domestic Spying in 70s, Says Be Wary of Attacks on NSA’s Critics

.. read transcript
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Thursday, June 13, 2013

Corey Robin: David Brooks, The Last Stalinist

Robin ..

Snowden’s actions, Brooks says, are a betrayal of virtually every commitment and connection Snowden has ever made ... In the long history of state tyranny, it is often those who are bound by close ties of personal connection to family and friends that are most likely to cooperate with the government: that is, not to “betray” their oaths to a repressive regime, not to oppose or challenge authoritarian rule. Precisely because those ties are levers that the regime can pull in order to engineer an individual’s collaboration and consent. Take the Soviet Union under Stalin. Though there’s a venerable tradition in social thought that sees Soviet totalitarianism as the product of atomized individuals, one of the factors that made Stalinism possible was precisely that men and women were connected to each other, that they were in families and felt bound to protect each other. To protect each other by cooperating with rather than opposing Stalin

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Posted by Mike Blaxill, Wednesday, June 12, 2013

David Sirota: Rethinking American Exceptionalism

Sirota ..

America[] has an exceptional economy. GDP-wise, it is the largest in the world, making it the planet’s most powerful engine of technological innovation and wealth creation. At the same time, the economy is exceptional for creating the industrialized world’s most financially unequal society; producing one of the industrialized world’s highest rates of childhood poverty; and mandating the industrialized world’s least amount of off time (paid sick days, maternity leave, etc.)

.. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Tuesday, June 11, 2013

Glenn Greenwald: Edward Snowden, the whistleblower behind the NSA surveillance revelations

Glenzilla (who broke the NSA story) ..

The individual responsible for one of the most significant leaks in US political history is Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old former technical assistant for the CIA and current employee of the defence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. Snowden has been working at the National Security Agency for the last four years as an employee of various outside contractors, including Booz Allen and Dell. The Guardian, after several days of interviews, is revealing his identity at his request. From the moment he decided to disclose numerous top-secret documents to the public, he was determined not to opt for the protection of anonymity. "I have no intention of hiding who I am because I know I have done nothing wrong," he said. Snowden will go down in history as one of America's most consequential whistleblowers, alongside Daniel Ellsberg and Bradley Manning. He is responsible for handing over material from one of the world's most secretive organisations – the NSA.

.. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Monday, June 10, 2013

Democracy Now: Glenn Greenwald Exposes Massive NSA Program Collecting Calls, Emails

.. read transcript
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Friday, June 7, 2013

WSJ Editorial Board Member Furious With “All Powerful Bike Lobby”

via Firedoglake - my gripe re the bike share program is the Citibank corporate ownership, yet another corp logo to confront you everywhere you go .. why not make it a non-profit venture?? nonetheless, this WSJ video is frickin hilarious!
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Wednesday, June 5, 2013

Richard Eskow: The ‘Truman Show’ Economy

Eskow in Common Dreams ..

A Northern Ireland county made news this week when it literally created a false front of prosperity for dignitaries in town for the G8 conference. The Irish Times reports that County Fermanagh spent roughly £300,000 ($456,000 at today’s exchange rates) to conceal the shuttered storefronts and empty buildings left behind by economy-killing austerity cuts

words .. at a loss for words .. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Monday, June 3, 2013

Washingtonsblog: A Proxy War Is Raging In Syria

George ..

Right now inside Syria, Hezbollah terrorist fighters – backed by the Syrian government, Iran and Lebanon – are fighting Al Qaeda, Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood terrorist fighters – backed by the U.S., Israel, the Eurozone, Saudi Arabia and Qatar .. Not only did the U.S., Israel and Saudi Arabia largely create, sponsor and fund Al Qaeda, but also two other groups fighting on the side of the Syrian rebels: Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. This is a proxy war. [] the U.S., Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and their allies back the Sunni jihadists against Shia Muslims. Indeed, the U.S. is involved in a religious war – between the two factions of Islam (and is actually backing the most violent elements) – as part of a geopolitical strategy to exert control over the natural gas market

yeah you can pretty much boil the whole "War on Terra" down to Sunni v Shia .. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Friday, May 31, 2013

Democracy Now: Did Public Television Commit Self-Censorship to Appease Billionaire Funder David Koch?

Posted by Mike Blaxill, Thursday, May 30, 2013

Alexa O’Brien: A review of Alex Gibney’s ‘We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks’

O'Brien ..

The public needs an accurate accounting of the "facts" concerning the Manning's prosecution and the criminal probe into Julian Assange and WikiLeaks-- certainly more than we need Hollywood scripts by documentarians, like Gibney, or the former editors of major newspapers, like the Guardian and the New York Times, who haven't bothered to show up to the legal proceedings, which are underway for more than a year and a half-- proceedings, I might add, which are now the subject of their creative fancy and economic enterprise. If "We Steal Secrets" or the subsequent Q & A with director, Alex Gibney, revealed anything, it's that the filmmaker is quite uninformed about the trial of Bradley Manning. He can barely speak on the topic or on that of the largest criminal probe of a publisher and its source in history. Which begs the question: What was Gibney relying on for his costly 'string of pearls' reportage, beyond his hackneyed entourage of unexamined glory-boats, bearing witness on the silver screen to their privileged punditry-- that is, talking about themselves amongst themselves for their own benefit-- certainly not the public's-- or future generations?

.. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Sunday, May 26, 2013

Kevin Gosztola: ‘We Steal Secrets’ Documentary is a Wikileaks Hit Piece

Gosztola on FDL ...

Overall, the film makes the choice to be about the personalities of Assange and Manning rather than a film that truly explores what it has been like for those involved in the release of over a half million documents to be targeted by the most powerful country in the world. WikiLeaks forced state secrets revealing corruption, crimes, fraud, misconduct, etc, into the open for the world to see, but, rather than telling a lesser known story about the backlash led by the US government against the organization, Gibney opts to highlight Manning’s struggle with his gender identity and how Assange’s egotistical personal battles have been a drag on WikiLeaks, which have been covered extensively by establishment media

and in a related story, see "WikiLeaks Leaks Transcript of "Anti-WikiLeaks Documentary" @ Common Dreams - i haven't seen Gibney's other film "Taxi to the Dark Side" but can only imagine that among its tepid, hand-wringing criticism of torture that it narrows the debate with the typical "but Teh Terrorists attacked us" line of bullshittery .. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Saturday, May 25, 2013

Jon Stewart Tears Apart Obama, DOJ For Prosecuting Whistleblowers And Pot…

Posted by Mike Blaxill, Friday, May 24, 2013

Washingtonsblog: Is Modern Life Making Us Dumber?

George ..

There are several theories for why we are getting dumber, including [] women of high intelligence tend to have fewer children than do women of lower intelligence. [and]... “The reduction in human intelligence … would have begun at the time that genetic selection became more relaxed,” Dr. Gerald Crabtree, professor of pathology and developmental biology at Stanford University, told The Huffington Post in an email. “I projected this occurred as our ancestors began to live in more supportive high density societies (cities) and had access to a steady supply of food. Both of these might have resulted from the invention of agriculture, which occurred about 5,000 to 12,000 years ago.” .. [and] Exercise boosts intelligence … and our ancestors got a lot more exercise than we do! [etc etc]

.. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Thursday, May 23, 2013

Jane Mayer: A Word from Our Sponsor – Public television’s attempts to placate David Koch

Mayer in The New Yorker ..

Last fall, Alex Gibney, a documentary filmmaker who won an Academy Award in 2008 for an exposé of torture at a U.S. military base in Afghanistan, completed a film called “Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream.” It was scheduled to air on PBS on November 12th. The movie had been produced independently, in part with support from the Gates Foundation. “Park Avenue” is a pointed exploration of the growing economic inequality in America and a meditation on the often self-justifying mind-set of “the one per cent.” As a narrative device, Gibney focusses on one of the most expensive apartment buildings in Manhattan—740 Park Avenue—portraying it as an emblem of concentrated wealth and contrasting the lives of its inhabitants with those of poor people living at the other end of Park Avenue, in the Bronx. Among the wealthiest residents of 740 Park is David Koch

you know the rest of the story .. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Monday, May 20, 2013

Canadian Astronaut Chris Hadfield Does Space Oddity on the Space Station

Posted by Mike Blaxill, Sunday, May 19, 2013

Adbusters: Farewell and Good Luck, Zuck! Will his latest moves mark the beginning of the end of Facebook?

the mighty Adb ..

Zuckerberg, who turns 29 today [5/14], is using his Facebook fortune to create and promote advertisements for fracking companies, the Keystone XL tar-sands pipeline, and for oil companies that want to drill in such delicate places as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge! And of course, his success as an entrepreneur has always been contentious, since we know that he's stepped over a lot of people, including his friends, stealing ideas and playing hardball, to get where he is today – one of the world's youngest billionaires .. Zuckerberg is moving boldly into the political arena. The new lobbying group that he co-founded with other technology executives in the Silicon Valley is called FWD.US. "Their first moves," writes Steven Rosenfeld for AlterNet, mark a resurrection of "old-school libertarian values: [] trashing health care reform and backing the Keystone XL pipeline."

.. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Saturday, May 18, 2013

Emptywheel: Dzhokhar’s Sharpie Manifesto

wheel ..

[on Boston PD refusing to give up their cell phones to the FBI at the boat scene] there’s something funny about the story. Why would cell phone pictures of the manifesto matter if the FBI had properly documented photos taken immediately after the arrest when the chain of custody was intact? I mean, I could see worrying about tainting the jury pool, but the leaked content of the interrogations already said all this stuff anyway ... [and then this from the comments] "It’s like they’re testing public credulity: scenery-chewing ham actor[s]; victims stomping around with their clothes blown off like a Sid Ceasar skit; stories changing with laugh-out-loud contradictions. They're making it cornier and cornier, but the media is just too gullible for them. They should reveal that Osama bin Laden is alive, and he did it, and let him escape on a jetpack with his evil laughter enchoing triple-tracked over Faneuil Hall"

.. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Friday, May 17, 2013

Glenn Greenwald: The major sea change in media discussions of Obama and civil liberties

Glenzilla ..

it is remarkable how media reactions to civil liberties assaults are shaped almost entirely by who the victims are. For years, the Obama administration has been engaged in pervasive spying on American Muslim communities and dissident groups. It demanded a reform-free renewal of the Patriot Act and the Fisa Amendments Act of 2008, both of which codify immense powers of warrantless eavesdropping, including ones that can be used against journalists. It has prosecuted double the number of whistleblowers under espionage statutes as all previous administrations combined, threatened to criminalize WikiLeaks, and abused Bradley Manning to the point that a formal UN investigation denounced his treatment as "cruel and inhuman". But, with a few noble exceptions, most major media outlets said little about any of this, except in those cases when they supported it. It took a direct and blatant attack on them for them to really get worked up, denounce these assaults, and acknowledge this administration's true character

.. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Thursday, May 16, 2013

Markos Moulitsas: Tesla at War with Sleazy Car Dealers

Kos ..

My next car will be a Tesla. It'll be a while. They're really expensive, though a lower-cost mass-market sedan is in the company's longer-term plans. But who wouldn't want a car that dispenses with messy fossil fuels (especially if recharged with solar, as I would), cleaned up all the major 2012 automobile awards [], and got a near-perfect rating (99 out of 100) by Consumer Reports .. Of course, conservatives hate anything that helps the environment, even if it's good despite the fact it helps the environment. So naturally, they hate Tesla[]. But the company is now profitable, and supply is so constrained that the waiting list to receive a car is about eight months. But Tesla is fascinating for another reason—it is a disruptive technology, and we know how the fossil-fuel and auto industry have worked hard to squelch any challenge to their dominance. And there is certainly an entire national infrastructure in place that is dependent on dirty, gas-guzzling vehicles. And that infrastructure is a definite barrier to change

.. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Thursday, May 16, 2013

Glenn Greenwald: Justice Department’s pursuit of AP’s phone records is both extreme and dangerous

Glenzilla ..

What makes the DOJ's actions so stunning here is its breadth. It's the opposite of a narrowly tailored and limited scope. It's a massive, sweeping, boundless invasion which enables the US government to learn the identity of every person whom multiple AP journalists and editors have called for a two-month period. Some of the AP journalists involved in the Yemen/CIA story and whose phone records were presumably obtained - including Adam Goldman and Matt Apuzzo - are among the nation's best and most serious investigative journalists; those two won the Pulitzer Prize last year for their superb work exposing the NYPD's surveillance program aimed at American Muslim communities. For the DOJ to obtain all of their phone records and those of their editors for a period of two months is just staggering

.. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Wednesday, May 15, 2013

Patent filing claims solar energy ‘breakthrough’

via McClatchy ..

Inventor Ronald Ace said that his flat-panel “Solar Traps,” which can be mounted on rooftops or used in electric power plants, will shatter decades-old scientific and technological barriers that have stymied efforts to make solar energy a cheap, clean and reliable alternative .. Ace [says] “This invention can meet about 92 percent of the world’s energy needs.” .. If the trap even comes close to meeting his futuristic vision, its impact could be breathtaking: It could reorder the world’s energy landscape, end the global economic drag of soaring energy costs, and eventually curb greenhouse gas emissions that are blamed for climate change

even if it proves true its a sure bet the oil/coal/nat gas industry will fight fight fight for the next 30-40 years .. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Tuesday, May 14, 2013

Democracy Now: Are the FBI and IRS Secretly Reading Your Email Without a Warrant? [Um.. Yes]

.. read transcript at Democracy Now
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Sunday, May 12, 2013

Former Nixon aide Roger Stone claims he has evidence LBJ arranged JFK assassination in new book

as reported in the Daily Mail ..

Esteemed Republican strategist and lobbyist Roger Stone writes in his upcoming book that former president Lyndon B. Johnson set up John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Stone also writes that Richard Nixon and Johnson had a documented relationship with Jack Ruby, Lee Harvey Oswald’s killer, years before he shot Oswald in the basement of Dallas police headquarters in 1963. Stone, who worked for Richard Nixon’s Committee to Re-elect the President in 1972 and later served in the Nixon administration, writes that Johnson, a congressman at the time, instructed Richard Nixon, also a congressman at the time, to hire Ruby onto the House of Representatives payroll in 1947

should be noted that Stone is sort a wack job - but this is in addition to allegations made in Barr McClellan's book (father of Bush II press dude Scott McClellan) .. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Saturday, May 11, 2013

Firedoglake: Interview – Energy Investor Bill Powers Discusses Looming Shale Gas Bubble

Steve Horn at FDL interviews Powers ..

shale gas[], it’s importance has been vastly over-stated. We do not have a 100-year supply of shale gas. The increasing demand, which has been brought about by the low prices of the last few years, is going to lead to another 1970’s-style gas crisis. That will happen sometime between 2013 and 2015. [] While there’s been a lot of promotion of the 100-year supply myth – the facts simply just do not support it ... if we look at Canada right now, the biggest supplier of gas to the U.S. by a huge margin, the second is Trinidad and Tobago. Trinidad and Tobago has declining reserves and is also one of the biggest suppliers of LNG in the Western Hemisphere [who knew??] . So what you have is a very tight world LNG market. The world LNG market is about 11 trillion cubic feet a year. And that will go up with Australia, but that will be somewhat offset by Qatar already at maximum production. Indonesia is a top five producer, and they’re going down; Oman is a top ten producer and they’re going down. We’re seeing increasing demand in the Middle East and huge demand in Asia. I also think China will become an importer of LNG ... [China has] had a huge increase and they are going to suck up any available cargoes. And there’s a huge push for them to get away from coal because of the pollution we’re seeing in Beijing and Shanghai; it’s killing people and leading to social unrest. They’re not just going to wait for solar panels and other things, this is stuff they can do right now. These facilities are being built right now. The world LNG market is tight, and it’s going to be tight for a long time

.. read more
Posted by Mike Blaxill, Friday, May 10, 2013