Saturday Reads: Newtown Anniversary, Normalizing Gun Violence, and Other News
Posted: December 14, 2013 Filed under: Austerity, Barack Obama, Crime, Foreign Affairs, Gun Control, Iran, morning reads, Politics as Usual, Psychopaths in charge, U.S. Politics | Tags: CIA, gun violence, media, Newtown, polygamy and privacy, Robert Levinson, school shootings, second amendment, Sister Wives, snow, weather, winter storms 44 Comments
Good Morning!!
I spent yesterday preparing for Winter Storm Electra. I stopped by the hardware store to get ice melt crystals and then headed to the grocery store to drop off a prescription and a few things I’ll need in case I can’t get my car out of the driveway for a couple of days.
I had an appointment in the afternoon, and then I made a fruitless attempt to find a parking space in the giant Whole Foods parking lot in Cambridge. Then back to my regular grocery store to pick up my prescription and a few refrigerated items. The store was even more packed this time, so I was glad I had stopped earlier. Finally, I went home, to stash my purchases and scatter ice melt on the all the icy surfaces left over from Winter Storm Dion.
So now I’m in hibernation mode until Monday. I just hope I can handle the shoveling myself. The weather folks are predicting anything from 5 to 12 inches of snow for my area. It was 11 degrees here when I woke up and its only 12 degrees right now. It’s hard to believe it can even snow when it’s so cold. But the weather people say it’s going to snow. If it starts this afternoon, I plan to shovel before it gets dark–then there won’t be so much to do tomorrow. It’s way too early for this. It won’t even be officially winter until next week. Those of you in the Midwest are probably already getting the storm–how is it going there? Is it still cold down South? We can commiserate in the comments.
Now to the news. It’s hard to believe it’s been a year since Newtown, but today is the anniversary of that awful day. It still breaks my heart when I think about it. I can’t even begin to imagine the pain of the families who lost children. From CNN:
Horror struck Newtown, Connecticut, in such a disturbing way that the nation still struggles with its impact a year later.
The legacy of the second-deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history is so profound that it cannot hold just one meaning. It holds several. That’s because the crime itself conveys multiple issues in its summary:
A mentally ill 20-year-old recluse obsessed with school shootings enters Sandy Hook Elementary School after the morning bell and kills six adult women, 12 girls and eight boys in 11 minutes. The children were 6 or 7 years old. The heavily armed Adam Lanza, who first killed his mother before taking her car to the school, also killed himself, in a classroom.
On the anniversary of the December 14 slaughter — under the shadow of another school shooting, this time at Arapahoe High School in Centennial, Colorado — country and community alike pause and reflect on an event known simply as “Newtown” or “Sandy Hook” and what it says about America on the matters of guns, mental health, healing, and the human spirit.
A whole year after the slaughter of 20 first-graders and 6 adults, and our do-nothing Congress has done exactly nothing to control the purchase of weapons of war for everyday use. CBS News reports:
Not a single federal law curbing gun violence has passed in the year since a young man from Newtown, Conn. who’d long exhibited signs of mental instability got a hold of his mother’s AR-15-style Bushmaster rifle and two of her handguns and gunned down 20 first-graders and six of their educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School before taking his own life.
Capping a year that saw the most mass shootings in U.S. history, Newtown seemed to mark a turning point in national conversation about gun control. Within a month of the shooting, President Obama – promising to make the issue a hallmark of his second-term agenda – had signed several executive orders to make schools safer and gun purchases more transparent. But real reform, he said, would require bipartisan backing from lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
Six months after the Dec. 14, 2012 tragedy, Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., insisted the push for tougher gun laws and bolstered support for mental health in America was “still on the front burner.” But foundation for that statement was flimsy.
Manchin’s own amendment to strengthen background checks for gun purchases – co-sponsored by Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., and seen by many in Congress to be the most realistic hope for immediate reform to gun laws – had collapsed in the Senate two months earlier. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., had “hit pause” on debate over firearms altogether, pulling the legislation from the floor indefinitely.
The emotions surrounding Newtown, it seemed, were no longer driving the conversation about gun control.
Is anyone really surprised that something a huge majority of Americans support cannot get through Congress? Of course not. We can’t even get them to stop hurting the economy with their obsessive and idiotic push for unnecessary austerity. We should turn every one of them out of office–Democrats and Republicans and start from scratch.
And is anyone shocked that there was another school shooting the day before this horrible anniversary? Why should we be? Our so-called leaders don’t seem to care how many children die so they can keep getting donations from the NRA. A couple of stories on the shooting in Colorado.
Denver Post as of last night: Shooting at Arapahoe High School, 1 girl in critical condition, gunman dead.
A student carried a shotgun into Arapahoe High School, asked where to find a specific teacher and then opened fire on Friday, Arapahoe County Sheriff Grayson Robinson said. He shot a fellow student in the head before apparently killing himself.
A 15-year-old girl was reported in critical condition after undergoing surgery. Two other students were treated and released from a hospital for non-gunshot injuries.
The gunman, identified as 18-year-old Karl Pierson, was found dead inside a classroom from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound, Robinson said. Authorities believe he acted alone.
Robinson said authorities are investigating reports that Pierson may have been motivated by revenge against the teacher following a disagreement….Fellow classmates described the gunman as a bright student and a gifted debater whose family attended Bible study meetings.
The shootings — on the eve of the anniversary of the Newtown school massacre, in which 20 students and six staffers were murdered — sent scores of terrified students and staffers at Centennial’s Arapahoe High School scurrying at about 12:30 p.m. Police and other first responders quickly mobilized to surround the 2,220-student school.
A 15-year-old girl suffered a gunshot wound and was reported in critical condition at a Littleton hospital Friday evening.One other student suffered minor gunshot-related injuries and was released from the hospital hours later, authorities said. Arapahoe County Sheriff Grayson Robinson said Friday night that another girl taken to a hospital was covered in blood from the other student, but wasn’t injured….
The gunman also brought two Molotov cocktails inside the school and exploded one, KUSA-TV reported. The other was found and removed by the bomb squad.
The incident unfolded when the armed student entered the west side of the school from a student parking lot. He told other students he was interested in confronting a specific teacher. “Word got around immediately,” Robinson said.
The teacher, informed of the situation, fled the building unharmed, said Robinson, who noted that the teacher’s decision to flee helped limit the potential carnage.
Our children are dying violently in this country, in places in which they should be safe–their schools and their homes. Why aren’t we doing anything to protect them? At an age when they should be concentrating on learning, developing social skills, and just having fun, our children are threatened by gun violence on a daily basis. What kind of nation allows this kind of slaughter to continue in the name of “second amendment rights” and greed? A few more links from around the ‘net:
Reuters: Obama marks Newtown school shooting anniversary with call for gun control
Star-Tribune Nation: In Newtown, a year of wrenching reminders
Mother Jones: Portraits of the Hundreds of Children Killed by Guns Since Newtown
Matthew Lysiak at The Guardian: We can no longer allow sick individuals like Adam Lanza to go on untreated
New York Daily News: Another year of the gun
Gawker: What Kind of Monster Wants to Shoot Up His School? (highly recommended)
In other news,
Here’s a surprising story from Jonthan Turley’s blog: Federal Court Strikes Down Criminalization of Polygamy In Utah
It is with a great pleasure this evening to announce that decision of United States District Court judge Clarke Waddoups striking down key portions of the Utah polygamy law as unconstitutional. The Brown family and counsel have spent years in both the criminal phase of this case and then our challenge to the law itself in federal court. Despite the public statements of professors and experts that we could not prevail in this case, the court has shown that it is the rule of law that governs in this country. As I have previously written, plural families present the same privacy and due process concerns faced by gay and lesbian community over criminalization. With this decision, families like the Browns can now be both plural and legal in the state of Utah. The Court struck down the provision as violating both the free exercise clause of the first amendment as well as the due process clause. The court specifically struck down language criminalizing cohabitation — the provision that is used to prosecute polygamists. The opinion is over 90 pages and constitutes a major constitutional ruling in protection of individual rights.
I just don’t know what to say about this, because I associate polygamy with the abuse of women and children. Am I a bigot? A couple more links:
Salt Lake Tribune: Federal judge declares Utah polygamy law unconstitutional
The Telegraph: ‘Sister Wives’ reality star wins legal fight against Utah anti-polygamy law
I haven’t been following the Robert Levinson story, but I will be from now on. Levinson has been missing in Iran for 7 years and has just been outed as a CIA operative. Links:
NYT: A Disappearing Spy, and a Scandal at the C.I.A.
ABC News: Family of Robert Levinson, American Held In Iran, Says He Was Spying for the CIA
The Register-Guard: White House declines to discuss missing American Robert Levinson’s CIA ties
Gawker: ABC, NYT Repeatedly Lied About CIA Operative Robert Levinson
Liberty Voice: Robert Levinson: Used by CIA, Forgotten by USA, Burned by Media, Left in Iran
WaPo: Sen. Bill Nelson: I told AP not to run Robert Levinson story
Those are my offerings today. What stories are you following? Let us know in the comment thread, and have a great weekend!
Friday Reads: Friday the 13th and other Tales from the Fiscal Policy Crypt
Posted: December 13, 2013 Filed under: morning reads 34 Comments
Good Morning!
I thought I might do a few things on the economy this morning since the congress just passed a budget bill. So, averting another shut down appears to be more important than actually helping the economy. Is this what our policy makers have come to? I put this link to CNN in because it perfectly represents the mindset in today’s media. As long as a deal is bipartisan, it’s a big fucking deal! It doesn’t really matter that the deal really won’t do much other than avert a bigger disaster. It’s a bipartisan deal! Whoopie!!! Let’s talk awesomely destructive fiscal policy
As many people have noted, a strange thing has happened on the fiscal policy front. Intellectually, the case for austerity has pretty much collapsed, having been reduced at this point to the Three Stooges Theory: we’re supposed to consider austerity a success because it feels good when you stop, or at least let up. At the same time, however, austerity policies continue to be imposed, on both sides of the Atlantic.
And amid the punditizing over the latest budget deal, it’s worth considering just how unprecedented US austerity has been. Look at total government spending — federal, state, and local — and correct it for inflation, as measured by the core personal consumption expenditures deflator (the Fed’s preferred measure). (It doesn’t matter much which measure you use, but this one has less noise). Smooth it out by looking at three-year changes. Here’s what you get:
You can see that there was a brief, modest spurt in spending associated with the Obama stimulus — but it has long since been outweighed and swamped by a collapse in spending without precedent in the past half century. Taking it further back is tricky given data non-comparability, but as far as I can tell the recent austerity binge was bigger than the demobilization after the Korean War; you really have to go back to post-World-War-II demobilization to get anything similar.
And to do this when the private sector is still deleveraging and interest rates are at the zero lower bound is just awesomely destructive.
Welcome to Hooverville! We’ve implemented Hoover’s policy instead of FDR’s policy and now we have rotten unemployment stats, lower levels of folks in the labor force, and increasing poverty and income inequality. WTF happened to the US? The graph above is basically the result of Hoovernomics.
This one chart tells you much of what you need to know about the fiscal side of the US economy: we’re dealing with a recession/depression Herbert Hoover style — by cutting government spending just when we would have needed a strong counter-cyclical push from government.
Meanwhile, the pundits and Republicans continue to tell us that the federal government is expanding and that its debt is choking us. That is 
really not the case.
Figure 1: Log ratio of real Federal government consumption and investment plus transfers to real GDP (blue), and ratio to potential real GDP (red). NBER defined recession dates shaded gray. Real transfers calculated by dividing line 22, BEA NIPA Table 3.2 by PCE deflator. Potential GDP is measured in Ch.05$, and adjusted to Ch.09$ compatible with the latest GDP release by taking the ratio of 2011 GDP reported in the June 2013 and November 2013 releases. Source: BEA, CBO (Budget and Economic Outlook, February 2013), NBER, and author’s calculations.
As a share of GDP, the current level is below that recorded in 1982Q4 (under President Reagan); as a share of potential GDP (guesstimated), the current level is below that recorded in 1986Q3 (under President Reagan).
Part of the budget deal lets the long term unemployed fall into a deeper hell.
The budget deal announced last night by conference chairs Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) and Representative Paul Ryan (R-WI) is better than another government shutdown, but nicer words than this are hard to find to say about it.
By far the worst aspect of it is the failure to extend the Emergency Unemployment Compensation program (EUC) in 2014. Without these extensions, 1.3 million workers will have their benefits cut off at the end of 2013, and another 850,000 workers will exhaust normal UI benefits over the first quarter of 2014.
The share of long-term unemployed workers in the total labor force was 2.6 percent in November—double the share of June 2008, when President Bush first signed the UI extensions into law.
Besides cutting off a vital lifeline to millions of Americans, cutting these extensions also continues the disastrous march towards budget austerity; a march that has been by far the primary contributor to our failure to recover from the Great Recession. Cutting these UI extensions in 2014 will create a fiscal drag on the U.S. economy that will reduce job growth by more than 300,000 over the year.
A bizarre irony is that the cost of these extensions is nearly identical to the ten-year “deficit savings” achieved in the deal—between $20 and 25 billion. This amount of money is a rounding error in ten-year deficit projections (my back of the envelope calculations say that it’s well under one half of one percent of projected deficits between 2014 and 2023, under the CBO extended baseline). But Congress has chosen to save an amount of money that doesn’t even rise to the level of symbolic over a decade rather than provide real relief to millions of distressed Americans, as well as provide a mild boost to a still-weak job market.
The economy is clearly broken for most of us. The political system is clearly broken for most of us. The educational system is clearly broken for most of us. What’s an advocate of social justice to to do?
How does an economic system resolve conflicts and distribute benefits? A fancy derivative product may help a corporate treasurer solve her problem of managing her company’s risk, and it might make a banker rich, but it might also create a problem of greater systemic risk for the financial system as a whole. Likewise, eating a bacon cheeseburger may solve someone’s problem of satisfying unconscious desires programmed by millennia of evolution, but might also create new problems of clogged arteries and a society burdened with that person’s future health costs.
Overwhelming evidence from the fields of social psychology and behavioral economics shows us that people are not very good at managing these trade-offs, resolving conflicts, or recognizing interdependencies on their own. We overoptimistically believe that house prices will keep rising and that we can refinance when our low teaser rate expires. The corporate treasurer can’t really see how her decision to buy a derivative might boomerang back on her own company and contribute to the collapse of the financial system.
Understanding prosperity and growth in this new way allows us to make important distinctions between different kinds of economic activity. We can now see the difference between “empty” or even “harmful” economic activity and “useful” economic activity. It becomes obvious that an engineer earning $100,000 per year who creates a technology to ensure that those in serious auto accidents walk away unharmed is creating prosperity. It is much harder to make the same case for a hedge-fund manager making $500 million per year doing high-frequency trading to seize on information advantages over ordinary investors. And if that high-frequency trading also makes the global economy more fragile, then that implies something even more damning about this activity.
It can be a challenge, however, to distinguish between “problem-solving” and “problem-creating” economic activity. And who has the moral right to decide? In the traditional framework, it was simple—people vote with their pocketbooks, and if an activity is valued by the market, it must be good. But when an activity solves a problem for some but creates a problem for others—or even the same person later on, or for future generations—who should decide what is good economic activity versus bad, and how?
The usual answer has been that government regulators get to decide. But like markets, regulators create problems as well as solve them. So we also need mechanisms to regulate the regulators. Democracy is the best mechanism humans have come up with for navigating the trade-offs and weaknesses inherent in problem-solving capitalism. Democracies allow the inevitable conflicts of capitalism to be resolved in a way that maximizes fairness and legitimacy, and broadly reflects the views of society.
Although regulation in economies is necessary, the costs to society in terms of restricting the freedom to innovate, invent, and compete can sometimes be high, as conservatives correctly point out. But it also needs to be recognized that sometimes new economic activity actually creates more problems than it solves and needs to be limited. At other times, new economic activity merely threatens the old order and should be encouraged. Finding the balance between these competing demands is difficult. Democratic governments are the only institution with the legitimacy and accountability to make such trade-offs, and that is why the corrosion of our democratic institutions by growing crony capitalism is so threatening to our long-term prosperity. It also means that those who truly care about capitalism should be more concerned about the quality and effectiveness of regulation rather than simply its quantity
I guess Pelosi may have said this in the most realistic view of the budget deal. I do however hate it. Nancy Pelosi on deal: ‘Embrace the 
suck’.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi told Democratic House members at a meeting Thursday morning to “embrace the suck” and encouraged enough members to back the budget deal on the floor to allow passage, according to an attendee of the meeting.
“We need to get this off the table so we can go forward,” Pelosi told her members, according to someone inside the closed meeting of the caucus.
Pelosi pushed for including in the budget deal an extension of the unemployment benefits that are set to expire at the end of the month. While she expressed a continued unhappiness that there will be no vote on those benefits before the House heads home Friday, she said that it wasn’t worth holding up the deal.
Democrats expect that Republicans won’t be able to produce enough votes in their conference to pass the deal, requiring a sizable number of Democrats to vote with them in order to ensure passage. Pelosi, along with the rest of the House Democratic leadership, have withheld publicly backing the budget deal this week, with some waiting to see how much support from their caucus was going to be necessary.
So, this isn’t a great way to start a weekend,but we need to get real and discuss this budget deal.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Thursday Reads: That Sense of Surreality…
Posted: December 12, 2013 Filed under: #Occupy and We are the 99 percent!, Barack Obama, Foreign Affairs, morning reads, Republican politics, Surreality, The Media SUCKS, U.S. Politics, We are so F'd | Tags: Edward Snowden, fake interpreter, Glenn Greenwald, John Kerry, michelle obama, Nelson Mandela funeral, Paypal, Pierre Omidyar, Raul Castro, Sarah Harrison, selfie, Sibel Edmonds, Ukrainian protests, Wikileaks 40 Comments
Good Morning!!
I’m having another one of those mornings. Once again, I woke up with that feeling of surreality–the world can’t be as strange as it seems, can it?
Lots of allegedly intelligent, liberal Americans have been freaking out for months about revelations leaked by Edward Snowden that the NSA spies on foreign countries in order to protect U.S. national security. Snowden and his public relations handler Glenn Greenwald are heroes to these people despite the fact that Greenwald apparently sold Snowden’s remaining secrets to the highest bidder–a libertarian, pro-corporate billionaire named Pierre Omidyar. More on this story later.
None of us likes the idea of being spied upon, but at least the President of the U.S. must be getting the best security money can buy, right?
I’m afraid not. It’s still possible for a person suffering from schizophrenia to get onto a stage filled with world leaders and stand shoulder-to-shoulder with President Obama and wave his arms around in some kind of meaningless pantomime. From this morning’s Boston Globe: Interpreter for Mandela event: I was hallucinating.
JOHANNESBURG (AP) — The man accused of faking sign interpretation next to world leaders at Nelson Mandela’s memorial told a local newspaper that he was hallucinating and hearing voices.
Thamsanqa Jantjie did not describe his qualifications for being a sign language interpreter, but told The Star he works for an interpreting company that paid him $85 for interpreting Tuesday’s event. He told Radio 702 Thursday he’s receiving treatment for schizophrenia and had an episode while on stage.
Watch video of the performance at the link.
ABC News has more detail via AP:
The man accused of faking sign interpretation while standing alongside world leaders like U.S. President Barack Obama at Nelson Mandela’s memorial service said Thursday he hallucinated that angels were entering the stadium, suffers from schizophrenia and has been violent in the past.
Thamsanqa Jantjie said in a 45-minute interview with The Associated Press that his hallucinations began while he was interpreting and that he tried not to panic because there were “armed policemen around me.” He added that he was once hospitalized in a mental health facility for more than one year.
Jatjie knew he had to do his best to act normal, so he waved his arms around and pretended to be interpreting the speeches of numerous world leaders, including Obama.
“What happened that day, I see angels come to the stadium … I start realizing that the problem is here. And the problem, I don’t know the attack of this problem, how will it comes. Sometimes I react violent on that place. Sometimes I will see things that chase me,” Jantjie said.
“I was in a very difficult position,” he added. “And remember those people, the president and everyone, they were armed, there was armed police around me. If I start panicking I’ll start being a problem. I have to deal with this in a manner so that I mustn’t embarrass my country.”
Asked how often he had become violent, he said “a lot” while declining to provide details.
So exactly who hired Jantjie? It’s a mystery. BBC News reports: Owners of Mandela ‘fake’ interpreter firm ‘vanish’ The BBC is also using a different spelling for the schizophrenic interpreter’s name.
Hendrietta Bogopane-Zulu apologised to the deaf community for the poor quality of interpretation given by Thamsanqa Dyantyi from SA Interpreters.
“He is Xhosa speaking. The English was a bit too much for him,” she said.
What is this man’s real name? I don’t know, but–get this–Bogopane-Zulu “did not rule out hiring him again”!
During a press conference, Ms Bogopane-Zulu, the deputy minister for women, children and people with disabilities, admitted that a mistake had been made but said there was no reason for the country to be embarrassed.
“There are as many as a hundred sign language dialects,” she said, to explain the difficulties he faced.
“He started well and later he became tired. Guidelines say we must switch interpreters every 20 minutes.”
She did not rule out employing him in some circumstances again.
Except the company she hired him through has “vanished into thin air.” And why didn’t they switch to other interpreters? The article doesn’t say, but it does say the man has interpreted at important events in the past.
And then there’s the Republican outrage over Obama shaking hands with Raul Castro at Mandela’s funeral. WTF? From Time: Here’s 14 People Freaking Out On Twitter After Barack Obama and Raul Castro Shook Hands. What was Obama supposed to do–slap Castro across the face with a glove and challenge him to a duel? (Actually some of the tweeters were being sarcastic and Time apparently missed the point.) I think cartoonist Bill Day had the best response.
Seeing Red
And then there was the media freakout over Obama taking a “selfie” during Mandela’s funeral. Reliable Sources at the WaPo has the lowdown.
Was Michelle Obama annoyed when her husband took that selfie at Nelson Mandela’s memorial service? Roberto Schmidt, the Agence France-Presse photographer who snapped the photo of the president, British Prime Minister David Cameron and Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning Schmidt, says no.
“I later read on social media that Michelle Obama seemed to be rather peeved on seeing the Danish prime minister take the picture,” Schmidt wrote on AFP’s blog. “But photos can lie. In reality, just a few seconds earlier the first lady was herself joking with those around her, Cameron and Schmidt included. Her stern look was captured by chance.”
The photo, which immediately became an Internet sensation, is only one piece of the day’s story; the leaders had a variety of expressions during the service and were acting “like human beings, like me and you,” he wrote. “I doubt anyone could have remained totally stony faced for the duration of the ceremony, while tens of thousands of people were celebrating in the stadium.”
But none of that matters, because the corporate media has decided that whatever Obama does must be harshly criticized. CNN even brought on Donald Trump to opine about Obama’s perceived gaffes, unemployment, and Obamacare. If that isn’t surreal, what is?
Here’s more strangeness: Secretary of State John Kerry expressed “disgust” at the government of Ukraine for cracking down on protesters. Here’s the official statement:
The United States expresses its disgust with the decision of Ukrainian authorities to meet the peaceful protest in Kyiv’s Maidan Square with riot police, bulldozers, and batons, rather than with respect for democratic rights and human dignity. This response is neither acceptable nor does it befit a democracy.
Last week in Brussels and Moldova, I underscored publicly the importance of all sides avoiding violence and called on President Yanukovych to fulfill the aspirations of the Ukranian people. We put the government on notice about our concern.
As Vice President Biden made clear to President Yanukovych during their phone call yesterday, respect for democratic principles, including freedom of assembly, is fundamental to the United States’ approach to Ukraine. This is a universal value not just an American one. For weeks, we have called on President Yanukovych and his government to listen to the voices of his people who want peace, justice and a European future. Instead, Ukraine’s leaders appear tonight to have made a very different choice.
We call for utmost restraint. Human life must be protected. Ukrainian authorities bear full responsibility for the security of the Ukrainian people.
As church bells ring tonight amidst the smoke in the streets of Kyiv, the United States stands with the people of Ukraine. They deserve better.
Has Kerry forgotten how peaceful “Occupy” protesters were treated in the streets of multiple U.S. cities just a couple of years ago? Some reports on the crackdowns (from foreign sources):
The Guardian: Police crack down on ‘Occupy Wall Street’ protests.
AlJazeera: Fierce crackdown on ‘Occupy Oakland’ protest
Getting back to the Greenwald-Snowden-Omidyar story, the attacks on Greenwald have moved from the usual critics to previous members of the Greenwald-Snowden cheering section. First Sarah Harrison–who accompanied Snowden from Hong Kong to Russia and then stayed with him for months gave an interview on the subject to a German newspaper. The Guardian reports, WikiLeaks’ Sarah Harrison: ‘How can you take Pierre Omidyar seriously?’
The WikiLeaks staffer and Snowden collaborator Sarah Harrison has criticised Pierre Omidyar, the eBay founder who is setting up a new journalism venture with Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill, for his involvement in the 2010 financial blockade against WikiLeaks.
In her first interview since leaving Moscow for Berlin last month, Harrison told German news weekly Stern: “How can you take something seriously when the person behind this platform went along with the financial boycott against WikiLeaks?”
Harrison was referring to the decision in December 2010 by PayPal, which is owned by eBay, to suspend WikiLeaks’ donation account and freeze its assets after pressure from the US government. The company’s boycott, combined with similar action taken by Visa and Mastercard, left WikiLeaks facing a funding crisis.
As for Greenwald’s decision to sell out to Omidyar,
Referring to Omidyar’s plans to set up a new media organisation, in which the former Guardian writer Greenwald – who wrote a number of stories from the Snowden revelations – will play a central part, Harrison said: “If you set up a new media organisation which claims to do everything for press freedom, but you are part of a blockade against another media organisation, then that’s hard for us to take it seriously. But I hope that they stick to their promises”.
Next, Greenwald was hit with an even harsher attack on his journalistic ethics by former FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds: Checkbook Journalism & Leaking to the Highest Bidders. It’s a pretty powerful critique.
A government whistleblower obtains over 50,000 pages of documents that implicate the government in severely illegal and unconstitutional practices. This whistleblower risks everything, including fleeing the country, in order to leak these documents and let the public know how its government has been breaking the nation’s laws and violating their rights. So he goes to another country and then entrusts all this evidence to a few reporters and wanna-be journalists. Why does he do that? He does it so that these reporters will present all this information to the public: not only those in the United States, but everyone all over the world. Think about it. Why else would someone risk everything, including his own life, to obtain and leak such documents? Are you thinking? Because what would be the point to all this, to taking all these risks, if 99% of these documents remain secret and hidden from the public? Ludicrous, right?
Now, here is what happens next: The whistleblower hands over these documents, and goes through a surreal escape journey. So surreal that even Hollywood could not have matched it. Of the handful of reporters who were entrusted with 50,000 documents, a few do nothing. By that I mean absolutely nothing. A couple from this entrusted group does a little bit more. They meet with a few mainstream media outlets, they spend many hours around the table with their mega companies’ mega attorneys and U.S. government mega representatives (the same government that is implicated in these documents).
Edmonds notes that Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger has admitted that only 1% of the Snowden material has been published.
The main wanna-be reporter begins his relentless pursuit of high dollars in return for … for what? In return for exclusive interviews where he would discuss some of this material. In return for a very lucrative book deal where he would expose a few extra pages of these 50,000-page documents. In return for a partnership with and extremely high salary from a Mega Corporation (think 1%) where he would … hmmmm, well, it is not very clear: maybe in return for sitting on and never releasing some of these documents, or, releasing a few select pages?
That’s right. The culprit is able to use his role in the whistleblower case, and his de facto ownership of the whistleblower’s 50,000-page evidence, to gain huge sums of money, fame, a mega corporate position, book and movie deals … yet, making sure that the public would never see more than a few percent of the incriminating evidence.
There’s much more scathing commentary at the link to Edmonds’ blog. Of course, Greenwald used his twitter timeline to call Edmonds “stupid,” and at the same time failed to respond to any of her criticisms. Of course Glenn had already had a bad day after Time chose the Pope as “Person of the Year” instead of Snowden.
So those are some of the stories that gave me that feeling of surreality this morning. What are you hearing and reading today? Please post your links in the comment thread, and enjoy your Thursday!
Tuesday Reads
Posted: December 10, 2013 Filed under: Barack Obama, Foreign Affairs, morning reads | Tags: children killed by guns, climate models, gun violence, JRR Tolkien, Lord of the Rings, missing Nevada family, Mordor, Nelson Mandela, Newtown CT, South Africa, winter landscapes, winter storms 22 Comments
Good Morning!!
I hope everyone is keeping warm this morning, as the deep freeze continues across most of the U.S. We’re expecting a little more snow this afternoon and evening, as winter storm Dion moves up the east coast. We’re fortunately that New England has suffered very little from this storm. Not too far south of us, it’s a wintry mess.
Weather Underground has the details
Winter Storm Dion is not done with the East Coast yet. It’s delivering a parting shot of quick, heavy snow that will blanket the entire I-95 corridor Tuesday morning, snarling traffic and flights as snow falls at the rate of 1-2 inches an hour.
“Dion is barreling in like a freight train,” said The Weather Channel’s winter weather expert Tom Niziol. “The snow is going to come down so heavily. We’re looking at very quick accumulations of 3-5 inches of snow. It’s going to overwhelm the streets and make a rough commute.”
The federal government is closed for a second day for non-emergency workers. Other employees are expected to telecommute Tuesday. All Washington D.C. area schools are closed as well.
“It’s been 1,048 days since Reagan National Airport had a 2 inch snowfall, but that could change Tuesday morning,” said The Weather Channel meteorologist Mike Seidel, reporting from Leesburg, Va.
1,650 flights were canceled nationwide Monday. Hundreds more flights are already canceled Tuesday morning.
“The good news is it’s a very quick storm,” said Niziol. “Conditions are already deteriorating Tuesday morning in Washington D.C. Philadelphia is after that. By about 10 a.m. Tuesday morning the entire I-95 corridor is covered by falling snow. By mid-afternoon the Northeast will improve and by the evening commute, Dion will be past Boston.”
Read the rest for the “state-by-state impacts.”
In Nevada, a couple and four children are missing after they went to “play in the snow” in the mountains. From the NY Daily News:
Rescue teams are scouring the Seven Troughs mountain range for James Glanton, Christina MacIntee, their two children, a niece and a nephew after the six went to go “play in the snow” in the remo[t]e northwest region, authorities told NBC News.
The family was reported missing late Sunday night and police are racing against time as temperatures dip far below the freezing level, according to reports.
“The temperatures out here are very cold. We would like to bring a successful end to this,” Pershing County Sheriff Richard Machado told KTVN. “We would like to find them as soon as we can.”
The six were last seen in a silver Jeep cruising at a mining area roughly 20 miles from their home.
Driving into the mountains in the middle of a snowstorm is definitely not a good idea. I just hope these people can be found alive.
Rescue teams racing against the clock and the bitter cold worked into the night and were hoping to resume an aerial search Tuesday for a couple and four children who have been missing since Sunday when they went to play in the snow in the remote mountains of northwest Nevada.
“It’s got to be brutal out there,” said Mark Turney, a spokesman for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. “Let’s hope they are found quick.”
The temperature was expected to drop below zero again Tuesday after plunging to minus-16 degrees the day before in Lovelock, the rugged area where the group was believed to be, about 100 miles northeast of Reno….
The family has not had any communication with others since they went missing, according to Sheila Reitz of the sheriff’s office.
They went to the Seven Troughs area on isolated federal land about noon on Sunday in a silver Jeep with a black top, authorities said. It was unclear what supplies they might have been carrying.
“I’m hoping they all huddled together and stayed in the Jeep,” said Nevada Highway Patrol Trooper Chuck Allen, who added that the area has spotty cellular coverage. “That would be a best-case scenario.”
I have a bad feeling about this–but there’s always hope. I really really hope there will be a happy ending to this story.
When I woke up early this morning, NPR was broadcasting live from the funeral of Nelson Mandela in South Africa. Here’s a link to the NPR live blog of the events. The BBC reports on President Obama’s speech:
Mr Obama delivered his address to huge cheers. He said: “It is hard to eulogise any man… how much harder to do so for a giant of history, who moved a nation towards justice.”
He spoke of how the example of Nelson Mandela had “set me on an improbable journey that finds me here today”.
Mr Obama said: “We will never see the likes of Nelson Mandela again. While I will always fall short of Madiba (Mr Mandela’s clan name), he makes me want to be a better man.”
NPR reported there were also enthusiastic cheers for Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton.
Washington Post: South Africans, world leaders gather to mourn former president Nelson Mandela.
SOWETO, South Africa —Nelson Mandela was memorialized in a boisterous stadium ceremony here Tuesday as a teacher and a racial healer, a transcendent figure who changed history and touched hearts in his native country and around the world.
Scores of thousands of South Africans braved a pouring rain to join dozens of world leaders, including President Obama and many other heads of state, for a four-hour service filled with emotional tributes and joyous song.
“It took a man like Madiba to free not just the prisoner, but the jailor as well; to show that you must trust others so that they may trust you,” Obama said, using the Xhosa tribal name that Mandela preferred. “He changed laws, but also hearts.”
South Africans from all walks of life, businesspeople to nurses to the unemployed, danced and clapped and sang in the hours leading up to the memorial service, their voices echoing across the stadium as if they were cheering at a soccer match. The rich crowded together with the poor, children with the elderly, all there to remember Mandela, the former South African president and African National Congress leader who died Thursday at the age of 95.
The anniversary of the Newtown, CT massacre is this Saturday, Dec. 14, but the town has decided against holding a public memorial.
Residents of Newtown, Conn., have decided against a public commemoration to mark the first anniversary this coming Saturday of the shooting at the Sandy Hook Elementary School, which left 20 first graders and six educators dead.
Instead, the town is endorsing a “year of service” and is asking residents to put a candle in their window on Dec. 14, the day of the shooting, to show their commitment to the idea of service to each other.
Newtown families have also announced the creation of the website “My Sandy Hook Family,” where people can post their remembrances.
Newtown resident and psychiatrist John Woodall is an expert on resilience and a member of the committee that decided not to hold a town-wide event for the anniversary. He speaks with Here & Now’s Jeremy Hobson about the decision.
You can listen to the interview at the “Here and Now” link.
Mother Jones: At Least 194 Children Have Been Shot to Death Since Newtown.
A year after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Mother Jones has analyzed the subsequent deaths of 194 children ages 12 and under who were reported in news accounts to have died in gun accidents, homicides, and suicides. They are spread across 43 states, from inner cities to tiny rural towns.
Following Sandy Hook, the National Rifle Association and its allies argued that arming more adults is the solution to protecting children, be it from deranged mass shooters or from home invaders. But the data we collected stands as a stark rejoinder to that view:
- 127 of the children died from gunshots in their own homes, while dozens more died in the homes of friends, neighbors, and relatives.
- 72 of the young victims either pulled the trigger themselves or were shot dead by another kid.
- In those 72 cases, only 4 adults have been held criminally liable.
- At least 52 deaths involved a child handling a gun left unsecured.
Additional findings include:
- 60 children died at the hands of their own parents, 50 of them in homicides.
- The average age of the victims was 6 years old.
- More than two-thirds of the victims were boys, as were more than three-quarters of the kids who pulled the trigger.
- The problem was worst over the past year in the South, which saw at least 92 child gun deaths, followed by the Midwest (44), the West (38), and the East (20).
Our investigation drew on hundreds of local and national news reports. In some cases specific details remain unclear—often these tragedies are just a blip on the media’s radar.
This has turned out to be a sad post, although I didn’t plan it that way. I’ll end with something interesting and not sad. A group of British scientists has analyzed the environments described in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings as “an exercise in how climate models work” and to demonstrate their validity. From the University Herald: ‘Lord Of The Rings’ Landscapes Analyzed And Compared To Real Places In British Study.
Scientists at Britain’s Bristol University compared the climates of famous “Lord of the Rings” sites such as Mordor and The Shire to regions of the world, the San Jose Mercury News reported. They also generated computer simulations of various middle earth landscapes based on information given in the book (notorious for their vast amount of details not always directly related to the plot).
For example, Los Angeles, western Texas, and Alice Springs in Australia have climates closest to Mordor, the site of Sauron’s fortress.
As a whole, however, “the climate of Middle Earth has a similar distribution to that of Western Europe and North Africa,” according to the researchers, one of whom identified himself as Radagast the Brown after the wizard who lives among J.R.R. Tokien’s fictional nature.
The above finding isn’t too surprising, given that Tolkein was from England. His landscapes either resembled the places he knew best or the place he likely found most exotic (Africa). The Shire, home to hobbits Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, could have easily stood for Lincolnshire or Liecestershire, as researchers found environmental similarities between all three, according to the press release.
I’ll end there and turn the floor over to you. What stories are you focusing on today? Please post your links in the comment thread–and have a great day!
Monday Reads (and now for something completely different)
Posted: December 9, 2013 Filed under: morning reads | Tags: Atchafalaya Houseboat, Breaking the Faith, Carolyn Jessop, Escape, FLDS, Gwen Roland, History of Sleep, photographer Iain McKell, The New Gypsies, Warren Jeffs 45 Comments
Good Morning!
My mother used to complain that I was born never needing a nap. My restlessness was an issue during kindergarten rug time and preschool rest time too. By the time I was reading and could find a flashlight, I was under the covers with said light and a book. Mother had to check me several times a night and many a night I lost one or both of the tools of my craft. I got stitches in my forehead one night because I was peaking around the corner watching Emma Peel on “The Avengers” rather than being snug in my bed. I also used to do this so I could see “The Prisoner”. I had a real thing for 1960s spy shows as a kid. I slit my forehead on the door hardware trying to rush back before getting caught. That was my second set of stitches that year. I also had them on my chin because I was proving that I really could fly with PF flyers on my feet. Yes, I could run on very little sleep and run I did. It must run in the family though since years later Dr. Daughter was known as the kid who spent nap time giving the other children backrubs at her Montessori Preschool.
Needing lots of sleep seems to be the revenge of old age on me. Not only do I love a luxurious nap in the afternoon, I’m a late riser. I love to lounge around in the morning in jammies with cups of coffee organizing my day. The good thing about being able to teach graduate school is that MBA classes are always in the evening and academic graduate classes are generally in the afternoon. So, it’s with great relief that I find out that I’m just a traditional kinda person when it comes to my fondness for two periods of sleep. I like siestas found in the southern cultures that nap away the heat of the day then rise and shine for the cooler night. But, there’s more in history to multiple sleep periods than just heat avoiding Latins. It’s seems our pre-electric age ancestors usually had two sleep periods a day. (Thanks to Delphyne for finding this!)
Wow !!! BB! We’re just sleep traditionalists! Take heart!!
The existence of our sleeping twice per night was first uncovered by Roger Ekirch, professor of History at Virginia Tech.
His research found that we didn’t always sleep in one eight hour chunk. We used to sleep in two shorter periods, over a longer range of night. This range was about 12 hours long, and began with a sleep of three to four hours, wakefulness of two to three hours, then sleep again until morning.
References are scattered throughout literature, court documents, personal papers, and the ephemera of the past. What is surprising is not that people slept in two sessions, but that the concept was so incredibly common. Two-piece sleeping was the standard, accepted way to sleep.
“It’s not just the number of references – it is the way they refer to it, as if it was common knowledge,” Ekirch says.
An English doctor wrote, for example, that the ideal time for study and contemplation was between “first sleep” and “second sleep.” Chaucer tells of a character in the Canterbury Tales that goes to bed following her “firste sleep.” And, explaining the reason why working class conceived more children, a doctor from the 1500s reported that they typically had sex after their first sleep.
Ekirch’s book At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past is replete with such examples.
But just what did people do with these extra twilight hours? Pretty much what you might expect.
Most stayed in their beds and bedrooms, sometimes reading, and often they would use the time to pray. Religious manuals included special prayers to be said in the mid-sleep hours.
Others might smoke, talk with co-sleepers, or have sex. Some were more active and would leave to visit with neighbours.
As we know, this practice eventually died out. Ekirch attributes the change to the advent of street lighting and eventually electric indoor light, as well as the popularity of coffee houses.
Many folks long for ways of doing things based more on the rhythms of humanity than the needs of the greed-driven. A few 
years ago, I became fascinated with the Irish Traveler culture in the UK based on a show that documented their outrageous and huge weddings. There are many young people adopting a similar life style but it’s more in a rebirth of hippie or bohemian culture than being an Irish Gypsy.
Photographer Iain McKell, who has followed a small group of travellers for over 10 years, has published a stunning new photo book called ‘The New Gypsies’, published by Prestel Publishing, charting the changes in their life-style.
Taking the traditional gypsy lifestyle as their template many have now ditched their motor vehicles in favour of horse drawn caravans.
Mr McKell told anothermag.com: ‘It began in 1986 with the New Age motor vehicle travellers called The Peace Convoy and then when I returned to Stonehenge Summer Solstice in 2001.
‘To my surprise I found this new renegade tribe that had evolved to horse-drawn wagon but had all the modern technology as well – solar power, mobiles phones, laptop computers and off course facebook.
‘I loved this idea of the old and the new working well together and the open road.
Check out some of the terrific pictures and get a taste for McKell’s book.
Another fascinating read that you may want to check out is Gwen Roland’s “Atchafalaya Houseboat: My Years in the Louisiana Swamp“. I came across Roland’s life in an NPTV program that followed Roland back to review her hippy life in the Atchafalaya basin that was partially documented in a National Geographic magazine in the 1970s . Both the Traveler wedding show and the Atachafalaya Houseboat show were part of my 2:00 am in the morning channel wanderings. I’ve grown a bit away from sneaking down to the rec room door in my footie pajamas to catch a glimpse of Patrick McGoohan. I don’t always head out to the local haunts!
Here’s some NPR excerpts from the book, the National Geographic spread, and the program.
The biggest inconvenience to living so far out is going in. The impending trip casts its gloomy shadow over our normally unstructured days. The list, an innocent-looking sheet of typing paper, appears on the kitchen table where it assumes temporary control over our lives. It is divided into categories such as mail, camera store, feed store, welding supply store, hardware store, garden supply store, supermarket, library, people to see, eggs to deliver.
For the next several days our activities revolve around that silent taskmaster. We hunt up the ice chest for transporting cold foods on the long journey home. A crate is readied for a sick chicken headed for LSU’s poultry science department. A broken pump part is placed on top of the list so it won’t be forgotten. Mail that was picked up during the last trip must be answered before we leave home. Despite our good intentions mail is always neglected until the night before the trip. By lamplight we struggle to write legible letters, and we search with candles for lost addresses.
The dreaded day creeps over the horizon in a drizzle. What a waste of a fine rainy day! We usually greet such a morning with a second pot of coffee and a stack of old National Geographic magazines.
My new late time weirdness is a TLC reality show called ‘Breaking the Faith’. We’ve talked about the horrible treatment of women, young girls, and young men at FLDS compounds. It’s an amazing thing to watch and hear the young women who escaped–some more successfully than others at this point in the series–to a safe house with Carolyn Jessop who testified in the conviction of child rapist Warren Jeffs. One of the amazing scenes is when Jessop explains to the young women that having sex with a 12 year old ‘wife’ and participating in the process is a crime.
The women may have wanted to leave the compound, but were they ready? For one thing, they were scared of Carolyn, having been taught that she was a bad woman for leaving the church. Further, they didn’t believe her when she told them why Jeffs was in prison.
“When Carolyn starts telling me about Warren Jeffs and everything, I want to slap her, because she doesn’t know him,” one of the women, Angie, says. “She left 10 years ago.” Another woman, Connie, was struggling as well. “Carolyn Jessop is one of the worst apostates that there are. She is against everything that they teach us,” she said. “I don’t know what to think.” Carolyn told the girls that if they doubted her words — which they did — they were probably destined to return to the FLDS. They still believed that Warren Jeffs is the prophet.
While the show appears to be at least somewhat staged, the Christian Post calls it “groundbreaking” — most FLDS members who flee the church choose to live in hidingto avoid retaliation.
TLC is usually one of those channels that only captures my attention in the manner of 12 fire engines screaming down the street. Although, the Gypsy wedding program from the UK took me in, I usually surf by it before I lose more faith in humanity. Sister wives and Honey Boo B00 seriously alarm me. But, I actually think this particular series lets people know more about religious cults and the process of watching the various girls deal with being outside the compound is fascinating. Children go through a similar–albeit more subtle–process of cultural brainwashing daily. It’s interesting to see the ones with the gumption to question it.
You can read more about the process because Carolyn Jessop is the author of two book on growing up in the FLDS. Her first book is titled “Escape”. It’s been out for about 6 years.
In a favorite children’s game, called Apocalypse, kids act out the FLDS vision of the end of the world. According to FLDS lore, Native Americans who were mistreated and killed in pioneer days will be resurrected in the end times, when God will allow them to wreak vengeance on those who wronged them (the presumably also-resurrected settlers). In return for this indulgence, “resurrected Indians” will also be “required to take on the job of protecting God’s chosen people”—FLDS members—by killing FLDS enemies with invisible tomahawks that can sever a person’s heart in half. Very cowboys and Indians!
Maybe the Republican party can talk to Warren Jeffs about how to talk to women!!! They seem to want us all brainwashed!
So, I know this wasn’t exactly what you usually get from me, but I just felt I needed to go beyond politics for awhile. Hopefully, you can let us know what’s on your reading and blogging list and make up for my odd little trip into other things!!!
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