DRM is Dead, RIAA Says

by Ernesto

For years the RIAA has defended the use of DRM, much to the dislike of millions of honest customers who actually paid for their music. Now, in a shocking turnaround, the outfit seems to have come to the realization that DRM does more harm than good and has officially declared its death.

The digital music landscape is evolving continuously. Just two years ago RIAA chairman and CEO Mitch Bainwol defended the use of DRM on digital music because customers would benefit from it.

"DRM serves all sorts of pro-consumer purposes," he said at the time, without going into detail about the alleged benefits.

However, in the year that followed the numbers of consumers calling for DRM-free music increased and more labels and music services started to offer music without digital restrictions. Still, the RIAA was not convinced that there could be a future without it, and predicted a comeback for DRM last year.

Quite the opposite happened. Although DRM is still present in the majority of the legal music stores, most of the big players have decided to ditch it. Most importantly Apple announced in early 2009 that all music sold via the iTunes store would be free of DRM. This time even the RIAA doesn't believe that it can be resurrected.

Jonathan Lamy, chief spokesperson for the RIAA declared DRM dead, when he was asked about the RIAA's view on DRM for an upcoming SCMagazine article. "DRM is dead, isn't it?" Lamy said, referring to the DRM-less iTunes store and other online outfits that now offer music without restrictions.

When the most vocal forefighters of DRM say so, it must be for real.

http://torrentfreak.com/drm-is-dead-riaa-says-090719/

Content doesn't really want to be free...

The Dick Killers

Bush's Hit Teams

Despite the new controversy over whether a global CIA "hit team" ever went operational, there has been public evidence for years that the Bush administration approved "rules of engagement" that permitted executions and targeted killings of suspected insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan.

By Robert Parry

In effect, President George W. Bush transformed elite units of the U.S. military – including Special Forces and highly trained sniper teams – into "death squads" with a license to kill unarmed targets on suspicion that they might be a threat to American occupying forces.

In the recent public debate over whether Bush also authorized the CIA to assemble teams of assassins to roam the world hunting al-Qaeda suspects, the U.S. news media has cited the distinction between such face-to-face executions and the CIA's use of remote-controlled Predator drones firing missiles to kill groups of suspected insurgents in or near the war zones.

However, the evidence is that the Bush administration also permitted U.S. military units to engage in close-quarter executions when encountering alleged insurgents, even if they were unarmed and presented no immediate threat to American or allied troops.

This reality surfaced in 2007 with the attempted prosecutions of several U.S. soldiers whose defense attorneys cited "rules of engagement" that permitted killing suspected insurgents.

One case involved Army sniper Jorge G. Sandoval Jr., who was acquitted by a U.S. military court in Baghdad on Sept. 28, 2007, in the murders of two unarmed Iraqi men – one on April 27, 2007, and the other on May 11, 2007 – because the jury accepted defense arguments that the killings were within the approved rules. (Sandoval was convicted of lesser charges relating to planting evidence on a victim to obscure the facts of the homicide.)

The Sandoval case also revealed a classified program in which the Pentagon's Asymmetric Warfare Group encouraged U.S. military snipers in Iraq to drop "bait" – such as electrical cords and ammunition – and then shoot Iraqis who picked up the items, according to evidence in the Sandoval case. [Washington Post, Sept. 24, 2007]

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2009/071509.html

Out of step

Every Single Republican Congress Member Has Now Co-Sponsored Bill to Audit the Fed... Democrats, Its Up To You

Washington's Blog

Ron Paul announced today:

All 178 Republican members of the House have now signed on as cosponsors of [the] Federal Reserve Transparency Act, HR 1207.

With a total of 271 cosponsors, Democrats must put pressure on another 19 Democratic co-sponsors in order to bring it to the magic number of 290 ... so that it will be veto-proof by Obama.

Please call your Democratic and Independent representatives and urge them to co-sponsor H.R. 1207!

And everyone, please call your senator and ask them to support S. 604, the Federal Reserve Sunshine Act of 2009.

There is a huge campaign to keep the Fed's shenanigans hidden (and see this). It will take every single one of us calling congress to make it happen.

This is not a partisan issue - every single Democrat and Independent should support Fed transparency.

http://georgewashington2.blogspot.com/2009/07/every-single-republican-congress-member.html

The Recession Is Over! (Technically.)

 What America's best economic forecaster is saying.

By Daniel Gross

Could our long national nightmare be over? The economic contraction, this Great Recession, began in December 2007, and there's no apparent end in sight. As the unemployment rate has spiked, analysts have thrown cold water on Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke's March sighting of "green shoots." The stock market's spring rally has fizzled.

But in this season of doubt, I'm prepared to declare that the recession is really, most probably over. Why? Well, it's not because the economists surveyed by the Wall Street Journal believe it'll end in this quarter. (These guys wouldn't know an economic inflection point if it hit them upside the head. All through 2008, when the economy was contracting, they projected growth for the year.)

No, two of the best and most objective forecasters, who are not connected to investment banks or to the CNBC noise machine, have recently called the upturn. Macroeconomic Advisers, the St. Louis-based consulting firm that compiles a monthly GDP index, reported to its clients Monday that while second-quarter GDP was tracking at negative 0.1 percent (recession), the third quarter was tracking at 2.4 percent growth.

The folks at the Economic Cycles Research Institute agree enthusiastically. It's not because they've detected green pea shoots in Central Park. Rather, it's because we've seen the three P's, says Lakshman Achuthan, managing director at ECRI, which has been studying business cycles for decades and was one of the few outfits to call the last two recessions with any degree of accuracy.

The economic data that get the most play in the news— unemployment, retail sales—are coincident or lagging indicators and historically have not revealed much about directional changes in the economy. ECRI's proprietary methodology breaks down indicators into a long-leading index, a weekly leading index, and a short-leading index. "We watch for turning points in the leading indexes to anticipate turning points in the business cycle and the overall economy," says Achuthan. It's tough to recognize transitions objectively "because so often our hopes and fears can get in the way." To prevent exuberance and despair from clouding vision, ECRI looks for the three P's: a pronounced rise in the leading indicators; one that persists for at least three months; and one that's pervasive, meaning a majority of indicators are moving in the same direction.

The long-leading index—which goes back to the 1920s and doesn't include stock prices but does include measures related to credit, housing, productivity, and profits—hits bottom and starts to climb about six months before a recession ends. The weekly leading index calls directional shifts about three to four months in advance. And the short-leading index, which includes stock prices and jobless claims, is typically the last to turn up.

All three are now flashing green. According to Achuthan, the long-leading index growth rate has been recovering since November 2008, the weekly leading index has been recovering since last December, and the short-leading index growth rate bottomed in February 2009. In sequence, each turned up, "and by April the three Ps had all been satisfied." Sure, corporate profits continue to disappoint, and the unemployment rate is climbing. But for ECRI, which navigates by relying exclusively on its instruments, that's only a part of their picture. They're the Spocks of the economic forecasting crowd—unemotional, uninvested in anything but the logic of what history and their dashboard tell them. "From our vantage point, every week and every month our call is getting stronger, not weaker, including over the last few weeks," says Achuthan. "The recession is ending somewhere this summer." In fact, it may already be over.

http://www.slate.com/id/2222742/

Troy Jollimore on God's Evolution

The Evolution of God

by Robert Wright

 

A review by Troy Jollimore

The title of Robert Wright's new book -- The Evolution of God -- will surely put some people off; indeed it seems designed to do so. So many religious believers in the U.S. have so much antipathy toward the idea that evolution might explain anything, it seems highly unlikely that many of them will pick up a book whose title suggests that God, of all things, might have evolved -- let alone (dare I mention it?) a book containing a chapter titled "Survival of the Fittest Christianity."

But being provocative is clearly not something Wright fears. His acclaimed 1994 book The Moral Animal remains one of the most widely read books on evolutionary psychology, a topic that tends to breed controversy wherever it goes. In the work that has followed (notably 2000's Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny), the author has displayed an increasingly strong penchant for grand pronouncements and attempts to explain all human behavior, and perhaps all of human history, in terms of a combination of evolutionary psychology and rudimentary game theory.

The Evolution of God finds the author going over much of the same ground, this time with a specific focus on religion. The word evolution in the title refers most straightforwardly to the process by which humanity's idea of God has changed over time -- a process described at some length in Wright's book. The human race begins as a bunch of parochial pluralists, separate tribes each with its own group of deities. These deities are conceived, to start with, more as superheroes -- humanoid beings with human personalities endowed with special powers -- than as genuine divinities. Over time a few of the deities gain more prominence and become more widely accepted, as pressures toward intertribal cooperation and, eventually, globalization (as manifested in the dynamics of "non-zero-sum situations," a key concept in Wright's thinking) push societies toward directing their energies at one comprehensive, universalistic, all-powerful god. This god -- the God of Judaism, Christianity and Islam -- eventually becomes perceived as a just and loving father figure and is associated with modern ethical ideas like universal rights and the equality of all persons.

This is, in its way, a story of competition under selective pressure: God attains his ultimate position by defeating all competitors, not through brute power but by winning over the electorate, so to speak. And it is by serving various human purposes, and appealing to certain elements in human nature, that a more all-encompassing vision of God comes to take precedence over less universalistic versions. But, lest some readers be confused by the baggage inevitably attached to the word evolution (a confusion which Wright, to a certain degree, encourages), it is important to emphasize that this is no more a process of Darwinian natural selection than is television's American Idol. The process is a cultural one, and applies to a god that is clearly a cultural artifact in the strongest sense: an artifact that is the creation of human beings, the product of our beliefs, as Wright makes clear:

"The god I've been describing is a god in quotation marks, a god that exists in people's heads. When I said in chapter 5, for example, that Yahweh was strong yet compassionate, I just meant that his adherents thought of him as strong yet compassionate. There was no particular reason to believe that there was a god 'out there' that matched this internal conception. Similarly, when I say God shows moral progress, what I'm really saying is that people's conception of God moves in a morally progressive direction."

Passages like this will reinforce the believer's sense that The Evolution of God is, at the end of the day, nothing more than yet another evolution book whose aim is to explain how humans have evolved into the sort of creatures that believe in God, and in doing so to explain away any vestige of God's actual existence.

http://www.powells.com/review/2009_07_15.html

French sea-going 'vacuum cleaner' sucks up water pollution

An innovative new anti-pollution ship has hit the high seas off western France. The 'Catamar' can collect debris and more importantly help clean up oil pollution that destroys flora and fauna along the coastline.

Why Biofuels Are the Rainforest's Worst Enemy

 

Forget petroleum. The next planet-destroying fuel is already here.

 

By Heather Rogers

Nestled deep in the tropical rainforest on the island of Borneo, Pareh is a collection of about 60 weathered wooden houses perched on stilts and enfolded by coconut palms, banana trees, and the dappled green overhang of the towering forest. Pareh's inhabitants belong to the indigenous tribes of Borneo collectively identified as the Dayak. They have lived here for centuries, raising rubber trees, pumpkin, cassava, and rice, and harvesting wood for fuel and lumber.

In 2005, a group of village men went hunting in the forest several hours from Pareh and stumbled on a clearing in which the trees had recently been felled. That was how they discovered that Perseroan Terbatas Ledo Lestari, or ptll, a subsidiary of an Indonesian company named Duta Palma Nusantara, was seizing their ancestral land to establish a massive plantation of oil palms, a tree whose oil is rendered and refined into biodiesel. (One of Duta Palma's major customers is Wilmar International Ltd, a Singapore-based firm in which US agribusiness giant Archer Daniels Midland holds a 16 percent stake.)

Over the next two years ptll destroyed 15,000 acres, which the Dayak say amounts to three-quarters of their "customary forest"—land that's vital for their survival and to which they have certain rights under Indonesian law. The plantation also uprooted monkeys and wild boar, which began raiding the community's food supply. Because ptll replaced diverse forest with a monocrop, pests invaded Pareh's subsistence gardens. Rice crops failed. The Dayak filed complaints with regional and national officials; at one point they commandeered one of ptll's bulldozers (an offense for which Momonus, the village head, and Jamaluddin, an elder, served jail time—.pdf). The clearing went on.

Increasingly desperate, in 2007 the people of Pareh offered ptll a drastic compromise. The villagers would surrender every acre the plantation had illegally seized if the company agreed to take no more land. There was no response. Soon after, a villager obtained a ptll map showing the company's long-term plan: It aimed to clearcut 50,000 acres, more than three times as much land as it had already taken. On the map, both Pareh and its sister village, Semunying, were gone.

http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2009/03/why-biofuels-are-rainforests-worst-enemy

RNC Web site promoting anti-Semitic, anti-Latino, and pornographic literature

by John Aravosis

(UPDATE: I understand the Latino book is not anti-Latino, but in fact debunks anti-Latino prejudice. Fair enough. But I'm still looking forward to the RNC's explanation for including "bondage," "anal," and "clitoris." )

It's not very often the boys at AMERICAblog get to type the word "clitoris" in a political blog post, but thanks to Michael Steele and the headquarters of the Republican party, today is that special day.

Forget that copy of Playboy, kids, you don't need to go any further than your local RNC.com Web site. Of course, in all seriousness, it's far worse than that - the Web site of the Republican National Committee is also promoting literature that is overtly anti-Semitic and anti-Latino.

It all started when earlier this week the GOP started promoting it's new Web site, http://www.gop.com/obamacard/. The site is supposed to showcase how much money President Obama is supposedly spending by letting you, the visitor, spend money too on your new "Obama credit card."



Just what products does the RNC propose you buy with your new Obama credit card? Anti-semitic, anti-Latino, and overtly pornographic literature - with pictures to boot.

Basically, the RNC site is set up as a faux online business, like Amazon.com, where you can buy goods by doing word searches. Search for the word "car," for instance, and you get pictures of various cars and how much you can pay for them with your ObamaCard.



But don't stop there. Do a search for products dealing with the word "Jew" and the RNC suggests you buy the book "The Jews and Their Lies" (bottom left).



Type in "Latino" and get "The Latino Threat."



But the real fun starts when you type in the word "gay."

Gay, you see, is banned by the RNC (at least they haven't lost their sense of irony). "Homosexual," however, is a product you can buy at the RNC site, and oh what they showcase with that word (note the two men in the upper left corner - perhaps they're just very close friends, like Lindsey Graham and Aaron Schock).



A few other fun words you can search for on the RNC Web site...

Bondage:



Escorts:

http://www.americablog.com/2009/07/rnc-web-site-promoting-anti-semitic.html

Iraq's New Death Squad

By Shane Bauer

The light is fading from the dusty Baghdad sky as Hassan Mahsan re-enacts what happened to his family last summer. We're standing in the courtyard of his concrete-block house, his children are watching us quietly and his wife is twirling large circles of dough and slapping them against the inside walls of a roaring oven. He walks over to his three-foot-tall daughter and grabs her head like a melon. As she stands there, he gestures wildly behind her, pretending to tie up her hands, then pretending to point a rifle at her head. "They took the blindfold off me, pointed the gun at her head and cocked it, saying, 'Either you tell us where al-Zaydawi is, or we kill your daughter.'"

"They just marched into our house and took whatever they wanted," Hassan's mother says, peeking out the kitchen door. "I've never seen anyone act like this."

As Hassan tells it, it was a quiet night on June 10, 2008, in Sadr City, Baghdad's poor Shiite district of more than 2 million people, when the helicopter appeared over his house and the front door exploded, nearly burning his sleeping youngest son. Before Hassan knew it, he was on the ground, hands bound and a bag over his head, with eight men pointing rifles at him, locked and loaded.

At first he couldn't tell whether the men were Iraqis or Americans. He says he identified himself as a police sergeant, offering his ID before they took his pistol and knocked him to the ground. The men didn't move like any Iraqi forces he'd ever seen. They looked and spoke like his countrymen, but they were wearing American-style uniforms and carrying American weapons with night-vision scopes. They accused him of being a commander in the local militia, the Mahdi Army, before they dragged him off, telling his wife he was "finished." But before they left, they identified themselves. "We are the Special Forces. The dirty brigade," Hassan recalls them saying.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090622/bauer

Ace o’Science

by Tintin

"Now which way is north?"

---

Watching some of the high-traffic wingnuts "do" science is a guilty pleasure, particularly when "done" by folks like Ace o'Play-doh and Don Bob Surber, both of whose scientific backgrounds appear to have been mostly garnered from careful study of NCIS reruns. Usually, their pseudo-scientific expertise on climate change is applied to a news report that it snowed in Las Vegas, or a rare southern sighting of the abominable snowman in a shopping mall in Mobile, or melting polar icecaps on Mars where there are no SUVs. ("Explain that, libs!")

The latest bauble to catch the eye of Ace and Don Bob has the tantalizing title "Global Warming: Scientists' Best Predictions May Be Wrong." With undisguised glee, Ace quotes the opening paragraph of the Science Daily article he links:

No one knows exactly how much Earth's climate will warm due to carbon emissions, but a new study suggests scientists' best predictions about global warming might be incorrect.

This is, of course, an occassion for Ye Olde Ace to stop playing World of Warcraft long enough to watusi around his garden-level efficiency and decide to order in a Papa John's "The Meats" Pie for a celebratory mid-day snack. Hell, this would be reason for Ace o'Play-Doh to go buy a big honking H3 and live in it with the engine running 24/7, right?

Sadly, no!™

Here's an abstract of the study in question, and it pretty much confirms what the Science Daily article and this article said it said. The Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum was a period around 55 million years ago when global temperatures increased 5–9 °C within a few thousand years. What the scientists did was study sediment cores in seabeds around the world to estimate the amount of carbon released prior to the PETM, and they found that carbon dioxide levels increased 70% prior to the PETM.

Now, here's the money quote from the abstract:

At accepted values for the climate sensitivity to a doubling of the atmospheric CO2 concentration, this rise in CO2 can explain only between 1 and 3.5 °C of the warming inferred from proxy records. We conclude that in addition to direct CO2 forcing, other processes and/or feedbacks that are hitherto unknown must have caused a substantial portion of the warming during the Palaeocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum.

Translated into simple English (in the event that Ace or Don Bob Surber are moving their lips and scratching their foreheads while reading this post), the study doesn't say that carbon dioxide doesn't cause global warming. In fact, the study relied on "accepted" values for the correlation between atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and global warming. The entire point of the study was that smaller increases might result in more global warming than predicted, particularly if there is a "feedback" process involved. In other words, it's not a question of whether the planet is fucked, it's a question of whether it may be fucked worse than we thought.

http://www.sadlyno.com/archives/23247.html

Oh, thank goodness

AP pulls number out of ass

 

AP IGNORES CRITICISM.... Yesterday, the Associated Press reported that the House Democratic health care plan cost "$1.5 trillion." By the afternoon, the AP reporting didn't attribute the price tag to anyone; it just stated the figure as fact.

House Dems threw a fit, which was understandable -- the day before the AP blasted the $1.5 trillion figure to the world, the Congressional Budget Office pointed to a roughly $1 trillion cost over 10 years. The AP not only went with the much higher figure, it made no reference to the CBO score.

That, however, was yesterday. I'd hoped the AP would at least notice the criticism, and clarify the issue in the future. No such luck -- this AP report ran about a half-hour ago.

Votes were planned Thursday in the Education and Labor and Ways and Means committees on a $1.5 trillion plan that majority House Democrats presented this week.

No source, no reference to the CBO figure released Tuesday, and no mention of the fact that House Democrats reject the "$1.5 trillion" figure.

Naturally, others are picking up on the AP's reporting, and relaying the disputed figure. Time's Mark Halperin noted this morning that House committees are expected to vote today "on the Democrats' $1.5 trillion plan."

I don't mean to sound picky, but reporting like this not only misinforms news consumers, it also has the potential to adversely affect the larger policy debate. If the AP is intent on using the $1.5 trillion figure, it could at least add some language to reflect the concerns, such as "a number Democratic leaders dispute," or, "though the CBO puts the figure closer to $1 trillion." Something.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2009_07/019092.php

Humor In The Workplace

Humor In The Workplace

Solicitation Number: RFI-BPD-09-0028

Agency: Department of the Treasury
Office: Bureau of the Public Debt (BPD)
Location: Division of Procurement

Synopsis:

 

Added: Jul 09, 2009 11:28 am

This is a sources sought notice and not a request for quotations. The purpose of this announcement is to seek qualified contractors with the capability to provide presentations for The Department of Treasury, Bureau of the Public Debt (BPD), Management Meeting with experience in meeting the objectives as described herein.

The Contractor shall conduct two, 3-hour, Humor in the Workplace programs that will discuss the power of humor in the workplace, the close relationship between humor and stress, and why humor is one of the most important ways that we communicate in business and office life. Participants shall experience demonstrations of cartoons being created on the spot. The contractor shall have the ability to create cartoons on the spot about BPD jobs. The presenter shall refrain from using any foul language during the presentation. This is a business environment and we need the presenter to address a business audience.

Upon completion of the course, participants shall be able to:

• Understand the importance and power of humor in the workplace in a responsible manner
• How to use talents in a creative way that adds humor to everyday experiences
• Alleviate stress in home and the office
• Know how and why humor is important to communication
• Improve work-place relationships
• Prevent burn-out

Please provide the following information if you have performed similar presentation services:

1. The name and location of your company, contact information, and identify your business size (Large Business, Small Business, Disadvantaged Business, 8(a), Service disabled Veteran Owned Small Business, HubZone, etc.) based on NAICS Code 611430, size standard $7.0m.. Contact information shall include the name of the point of contact, email address, and telephone number should the Government have questions regarding individual responses.

2. A brief capabilities statement (not to exceed 5 pages) that includes a description of your company's standard line of business, as well as a list of customers your company has recently (within the last 3 years) provided these, or similar, services for. Include a point of contact information for the companies listed.

3. Contractors should provide their DUNS, if applicable.

Responses to this request must be submitted no later than 2:00 p.m. ET on July 6, 2009 and may be submitted electronically to PSB2@bpd.treas.gov to the attention of Angala Zoller.

What's funny about this? Responses must be submitted by July 6, but the solicitation was posted on July 9.

Your government at work.

https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=3014e950a92dbb0f7e066f9e088a301f&tab=core&tabmode=list&cck=1&au=&ck=

 

Mandela Day 2009: Two Hands

Looking ahead to the first-ever Mandela Day in NYC on July 18th.

Know your place, shut your face!

The Man Who Knew Cheney's Secret

Seymour Hersh was mocked in March when he referred to Dick Cheney's secret squad of CIA assassins. Now, he talks to The Daily Beast about the next shoe to drop.

by Benjamin Sarlin

Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh raised eyebrows back in March when he told an audience at the University of Minnesota that Dick Cheney ran a secret hit squad that he kept hidden from congressional oversight.

"Congress has no oversight of it. It's an executive assassination ring essentially, and it's been going on and on and on," Hersh said at the time. He added: "Under President Bush's authority, they've been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That's been going on, in the name of all of us."

Some observers accused him of rumor-mongering and a top former military official threw cold water on the story, but with the recent news that the CIA allegedly kept Congress in the dark on a covert program, Hersh's words suddenly look more and more prescient. Yesterday, The New York Times reported the hidden program in question was a death squad authorized by Dick Cheney without congressional approval.

Now, there are key differences between Hersh's reporting and the Times' latest piece. Hersh suggested that the assassination ring was conducted out of the Joint Special Operations Command rather than the CIA. Moreover, according to Hersh's sources, the program was operational, leaving a trail of bodies, while the Times cited officials saying that the CIA hit squad never actually carried out a mission. The Times and Hersh could conceivably be reporting two distinct squads.

The Daily Beast tracked down Hersh in South Asia, where he says he has not been able to read the New York Times piece but has received calls buzzing about the report. Asked about the officials quoted in the Times' report who claimed that Cheney's assassination ring never became operational, Hersh offered a skeptical response.

"I said what I said, they can always say what they say," Hersh told The Daily Beast. "The last time they said the government doesn't torture; this time it's the government doesn't assassinate."

Hersh said that his words in Minnesota were exaggerated in the press, because he had previously reported on covert operations that he alleged were out of Congress' view. In February 2005, he published a report that the president had authorized Donald Rumsfeld to organize special operations in South Asia and the Middle East without going through the CIA, and thus not having to report them to Congress. In July 2005, he wrote that the White House circumvented Nancy Pelosi to organize covert operations led by retired CIA officers and non-government personnel to influence the Iraqi elections.

"In my reporting for this story, one theme that emerged was the Bush administration's increasing tendency to turn to off-the-books covert actions to accomplish its goals," he wrote in the July 2005 piece. "This allowed the administration to avoid the kind of stumbling blocks it encountered in the debate about how to handle the elections: bureaucratic infighting, congressional second-guessing, complaints from outsiders."

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-07-14/the-man-who-knew-cheneys-secret/

Chart attack

 

THEY DO LOVE THEIR CHARTS.... Republican opponents of health care reform have a new, colorful talking point. It turns out, if you put reform plans into a chart, fiddle with box sizes, arrow colors, and creative fonts, you discover that health care reform is ... complicated.

After a brightly colored chart failed to kill the Waxman-Markey bill, House Republicans are scrapping doubling down on the idea. They've created a new one to demonstrate just how complicated the Democrats' health care reform bill is.

Just as in the case of the Waxman-Markey chart, though, this doesn't actually explain anything. And it ironically begs the question of whether Republicans secretly want a simpler, single payer system to replace more complex reform proposals.

There are a wide variety of arguments against reform, but this may be the most ridiculous. The chart apparently proves that the health care system will be complex. Well, yes, it is. It will involve a lot of people, money, government agencies, and private entities. Of course, I hate to break it to the House Republican caucus, but the health system is already complex, and features a lot of people, money, government agencies, and private entities.

Indeed, if I were to do a chart detailing the way John Boehner's car works, it would also show a complicated system, but I suspect he'd take it to work every morning. More to the point, if I were to show Boehner a chart about the various international elements that went into invading Iraq in 2003, I suspect he wouldn't be persuaded if I said, "See? It's just too darn complex to bother."

And that's the underlying point of the GOP pitch: we can't reform the system because the solution doesn't fit nicely on a chart. But that's not an argument. It's barely even a chart.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2009_07/019087.php

Healthcare: Change the Debate, Support a Real Public Option

By Dennis Kucinich

Take Action: Tell Congress "We Need Your Leadership for Healthcare Reform"

In mid-May, in an effort to reach consensus, President Obama secured a deal with the health insurance companies to trim 1.5% of their costs each year for ten years saving a total of $2 trillion dollars, which  would be reprogrammed into healthcare. Just two days after the announcement at the White House the insurance companies reneged on the deal which was designed to protect and increase their revenue at least 35%.  

The insurance companies reneged on the deal because they refuse any restraint on increasing premiums, copays and deductibles--core to their profits. No wonder a recent USA Today poll found that only four percent of Americans trust insurance companies. This is within the margin of error, which means it is possible that NO ONE TRUSTS insurance companies.

Then why does Congress trust the insurance companies? Yesterday HR 3200 "America's Affordable Health Choices Act," a 1000 page bill was delivered to members. The title of the bill raises a question: "Affordable" for whom?.

Of $2.4 trillion spent annually for health care in America, fully $800 billion goes for the activities of the for-profit insurer-based system. This means one of every three health care dollars is siphoned off for corporate profits, stock options, executive salaries, advertising, marketing and the cost of paper work, (which can be anywhere between 15 - 35% in the private sector as compared to Medicare, the single payer plan which has only 3% administrative costs).

50 million Americans are uninsured and another 50 million are under insured while for-profit insurance companies divert precious health care dollars to non-health care purposes. Eliminate the for-profit health care system and its extraordinary overhead, put the money into healthcare and everyone will be covered, everyone will be able to afford health care.

Today three committees will begin marking up and amending HR3200. In this, one of the most momentous public policy debates in the past 70 years, single payer, the only viable "public option," the one that makes sound business sense, controls costs and covers everyone was taken off the table.

In contrast to HR3200 ... HR676 calls for a universal single-payer health care system in the United States, Medicare for All. It has over 85 co-sponsors in Congress with the support of millions of Americans and countless physicians and nurses. How does HR-676 control costs and cover everyone? It cuts out the for-profit middle men and delivers care directly to consumers and Medicare acts as the single payer of bills. It also recognizes that under the current system for-profit insurance companies make money NOT providing health care.

This week is the time to break the hold which the insurance companies have on our political process. Tell Congress to stand up to the insurance companies. Ask members to sign on to the only real public option, HR 676, a single-payer healthcare system.

Hundreds of local labor unions, thousands of physicians and millions of Americans are standing behind us. With a draft of HR3200 now circulating, It is up to each and every one of us to organize and rally for the cause of single-payer healthcare. Change the debate. Now is the time.

The time to act is now!

http://pdamerica.org/articles/news/2009-07-15-11-20-26-news.php

Financial Times editor says most news websites will charge within a year

Building payment platforms is one of key challenges facing news organisations, says Financial Times editor Lionel Barber

by John Plunkett

 

The Financial Times editor, Lionel Barber, has predicted that "almost all" news organisations will be charging for online content within a year.

Barber said building online platforms that could charge readers on an article-by-article or subscription basis was one of the key challenges facing news organisations.

"How these online payment models work and how much revenue they can generate is still up in the air," Barber said in a speech at at a Media Standards Trust event at the British Academy last night.

"But I confidently predict that within the next 12 months, almost all news organisations will be charging for content."

Barber is the latest leading executive to suggest the newspaper industry has to radically overhaul its existing business model.

Rupert Murdoch said in May that he expected his News Corporation newspaper websites to start charging for access within a year. The News Corp chairman and chief executive said free newspaper websites were a "flawed" business model.

Murdoch's rival, the New York Times, could begin charging for online news within the next three to four weeks.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/jul/16/financial-times-lionel-barber

The amazing plant photographs which were ten years in the making and are filled with electricity

By Daily Mail Reporter

These extraordinary images reveal what happens when electrical surges pass through a metal board with a simple plant on top.

Photographer Robert Buelteman sends 80,000 volts through his flowery subjects and then literally paints photographs of the outcome.

In three awe-inspiring series, the 55-year-old uses roses, petunias, and even cannabis in mind-blowing detail to give an extraordinary view of ordinary plant-life.

Artist Robert Buelteman sends 80,000 volts through flowery subjects and then literally paints photographs of the outcome to create these amazing pictures

The process to capture these unique images is so complex it has taken him 10 years - and a gruelling average of 60 hours-per-week - to produce just 80 photos.

Working in complete darkness, he begins by placing his chosen plant onto a metal board which he then passes the electrical surge through.

He can even pinpoint areas where he wants to focus the charge using a wand and a simple car battery.

The artist uses roses, petunias, and even cannabis in his amazing works

As his subject lights up with the current, and emits radiation invisible to the naked eye, Mr Buelteman captures the moments by passing a fibre optic cable back-and-forth over the plant.

The cable emits a beam of white light which is just the size of a human hair and whatever the miniscule torch-beam touches, transfers the image onto film.

The captivating blue haze that surrounds every leaf, petal and stalk is actually gases ionising around them as the plant is electronically shocked.

To explain the baffling process, Buelteman, from Montara, California, USA, uses a trusted analogy.

This picture of Eucalyptus provides an amazing inside into plantlife

Buelteman spends an average of 60 hours-per-week - to produce just 80 photos

'You just have to imagine it like a painter creating a picture on canvass,' he said. 'The plant is the subject just like the painter's bowl of fruit or the person they are capturing.

'The electrified board I place the plants on is the canvass. The fibre optic cable emitting the light-beam is my paintbrush.

'Another way to try and understand it is like a normal photograph on a normal camera, except I am manually controlling the exposure by hand. In the same way the image I capture is simply burned onto film.' 

To give the pictures an added dazzling effect, Mr Buelteman's aluminium canvass actually floats in liquid silicone.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1199836/The-amazing-plant-photographs-years-making-filled-electricity.html#ixzz0LRBUqIQ4

Goldman's Back, and Why We Should Be Worried

by Robert Reich

Should we breath a sigh of relief that Goldman Sachs has posted record earnings as revenue from trading and stock underwriting reached all-time highs (second quarter net income was $3.44 billion) -- less than a year after the firm took $10 billion directly from taxpayers and $13 billion indirectly through AIG?

In some ways, yes. That Goldman is back signals that the worst of Wall Street's recent meltdown is over. And at least New York City's economy will again benefit from the trickle-down effects of the multi-million dollar bonuses of Goldman's executives and traders.

But in another respect, Goldman's resurgence should send shivers down the backs of every hardworking American who has lost a large chunk of retirement savings in this economic debacle, as well as the millions who have lost their jobs. Why? Because Goldman's high-risk business model hasn't changed one bit from what it was before the implosion of Wall Street. Goldman is still wagering its capital and fueling giant bets with lots of borrowed money. While its rivals have pared back risks, Goldman has increased them. And its renewed success at this old game will only encourage other big banks to go back into it.

"Our model really never changed, we've said very consistently that our business model remained the same," Goldman's chief financial officer tells Bloomberg News. Value-at-risk -- a statistical measure of how much the firm's trading operations could lose in a day -- rose to an average of $245 million in the second quarter from $240 million in the first quarter. In the second quarter of 2008, VaR averaged $184 million.

Meanwhile, Goldman is still depending on $28 billion in outstanding debt issued cheaply with the backing of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Which means you and I are still indirectly funding Goldman's high-risk operations.

 

http://robertreich.blogspot.com/2009/07/goldmans-back-and-why-we-should-be.html

Goldman Sachs in Talks to Acquire Treasury Department

Sister Entities to Share Employees, Money

In what some on Wall Street are calling the biggest blockbuster deal in the history of the financial sector, Goldman Sachs confirmed today that it was in talks to acquire the U.S. Department of the Treasury.

According to Goldman spokesperson Jonathan Hestron, the merger between Goldman and the Treasury Department is "a good fit" because "they're in the business of printing money and so are we."

The Goldman spokesman said that the merger would create efficiencies for both entities: "We already have so many employees and so much money flowing back and forth, this would just streamline things."

Mr. Hestron said the only challenge facing Goldman in completing the merger "is trying to figure out which parts of the Treasury Dept. we don't already own."

Goldman recently celebrated record earnings by roasting a suckling pig over a bonfire of hundred-dollar bills.

http://www.borowitzreport.com/

Empathy with their own kind

It only hurts when you don't laugh

 

by Ed Naha

Have you ever noticed how difficult it is for today's conservatives to be intentionally funny? Oh, sure, they can make you fall down laughing when they're dead serious about things but when it comes to honest-to-God observational humor? Their sense of "righteousness" gets in the way, their paranoia, their blinders-impaired worldview. It's tough to be intentionally funny when your basic premise is: you're either with me or with the enemy.

Good observational humor comes from the concept that the world is crazy but we can all be in on the joke. It not only speaks truth to power, but also tosses a banana cream pie at it for good measure.

Here's comedian Bill Hicks commenting on the rationale behind the first Iraq War. "People say 'Iraq had the fourth largest army in the world.' Yeah, maybe, but you know what, after the first 3 largest armies, there's a REAL big fucking drop-off. The Hare Krishnas are the 5th largest army in the world, and they've already got all our airports."

And here's Dennis Miller commenting on the current one: "Liberals should not overplay this weapons of mass destruction card, because you want me to tell you the truth? Most of us are not going to care if they don't find these weapons of mass destruction. It's enough for a lot of us to see those kids smiling on that street again."

Bill Hicks on the first war: "You know we armed Iraq. I wondered about that too, you know. During the Persian Gulf War, those intelligence reports would come out: 'Iraq: incredible weapons -- incredible weapons.' 'How do you know that?' 'Uh, well... we looked at the receipts. But as soon as that check clears, we're goin' in.'"

Dennis Miller on the current: "And finally, and most importantly, the next time we go to war, don't give a specific reason for the war that the left can seize upon and later flog us with it ad nauseam, just do it. Remember, the first rule of Fight Club is that you don't talk about Fight Club."

See the difference? (I mean, aside from the fact that Bill Hicks has been dead for fifteen years and Dennis Miller's career has been dead for less than ten.)

There's a certain clash between the conservative view and humor, in that humor is the great equalizer. Modern-day conservatism depends on the concept that there's only one way to view the world that is correct and, therefore, superior.

And, so, conservative "humorists" usually resort to fairly pre-pubescent "nyah-nyah" stuff that relies on racial and social stereotypes to swat back any belief system other than their own. When the French, for instance, refused to back Bush's Iraq invasion, Dennis Miller quipped "and after we had the good taste to chisel the armpit hair off the Statue of Liberty..."

He also tossed off the humorous, "Listen, I would call the French scum bags, but that, of course, would be a disservice to bags filled with scum."

In this realm of comedy, Italians are all cowards, the French don't bathe, the Irish are drunks, Scotsmen are thrifty, Poles are idiots and blacks are shiftless. In other words, it's second grade recess intellectualism at its finest. This type of humor shouldn't be dismissed because of PC reasons, but it should be acknowledged as being PJ - Pretty Juvenile.

Of course, conservative humorists don't see it that way. When Jackie Mason, who's gone from dwelling in the Borsht Belt to the Bile Belt in record time, referred onstage to Barack Obama as a "schvartze," he insisted he wasn't being racist and was offended that people would be offended, explaining "If it's a racist society the white people are the ones being persecuted because they have to defend themselves."

He told TMZ "Chris Rock has told a lot more jokes about whites than I have against Blacks. What about the demeaning words Blacks say about Jews?"

Yeah, remember Chris Rock's classic routines on Yids? Me, neither.

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/22808

Small Australian Town Stands Up for the Tap

Huw Kingston, the owner of Ye Olde Bicycle Shoppe and a leader of the "Bundy on Tap" campaign, said the ban did not begin as an environmental crusade. It started when a Sydney-based bottling company sought permission to extract millions of liters from the local aquifer.

By MERAIAH FOLEY

 

BUNDANOON, AUSTRALIA — When the residents of Bundanoon voted last week to stop selling bottled water in town, they never expected to be thrust into the global spotlight.

Locals in this tourist town touched off a worldwide debate about the social and environmental effects of bottled water that has put the beverage industry on the defensive.

With a nearly unanimous show of hands at a community meeting on July 8, locals in this tourist town touched off a worldwide debate about the social and environmental effects of bottled water that has put the beverage industry on the defensive.

State and local officials across the United States have been phasing out the use of bottled water at government workplaces in recent years, citing a range of concerns including the energy used to make and transport the bottles and an erosion of public trust in municipal water supplies. But as far as campaigners are aware, Bundanoon is the first town in the world to stop all sales of bottled water.

Set in the cool highlands southwest of Sydney, Bundanoon is a sleepy village of tidy gardens and quaint cottages surrounded by the weekend estates of wealthy urbanites. It is the sort of place where strangers strike up conversations on park benches along the picturesque main street and townsfolk leave fresh flowers on the local war memorial.

According to Huw Kingston, the owner of Ye Olde Bicycle Shoppe and a leader of the "Bundy on Tap" campaign, the ban did not begin as an environmental crusade. It started when a Sydney-based bottling company sought permission to extract millions of liters from the local aquifer.

At first, residents were upset at the prospect of tanker trucks rumbling through their quiet streets. But as opposition grew, Mr. Kingston said many began to question the "bizarre" notion of trucking water some 160 kilometers, or 100 miles, north to a plant in Sydney, only to transport it somewhere else — possibly even back to Bundanoon — for sale.

"We became aware, as a community, of what the bottled water industry was all about," said Mr. Kingston. "So the idea was floated that if we don't want an extraction plant in our town, maybe we shouldn't be selling the end product at all."

A dozen or so activists got together and called a community meeting. Of the 356 locals who turned out to vote by a show of hands, only one objected.

The ban is entirely voluntary. But with the support of the public, the town's six food retailers have agreed to pull bottled water from their shelves starting in September. They plan to recoup their losses by selling inexpensive, reusable bottles that can be filled at drinking fountains and filtered water dispensers to be placed around town.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/16/world/asia/16iht-water.html?_r=2&ref=global-home

Hunger is a great motivator

Flesh-Eating Robots Developed for Pentagon

by Tana Ganeva

Thanks to the Pentagon and a Maryland Robotics Company, the robots who inherit the Earth when humanity is wiped out will be able to survive by feasting on the flesh of human corpses!

Robotic Technology Inc. has been contracted by the Pentagon to build robots that use biomass fuel; organic material such as "grass, broken wood, furniture, dead bodies", according to Popular Science.

The Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot (EATR -- yes, EATR) is described thusly on the company's website:

The purpose of the Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot (EATR)™ (patent pending) project is to develop and demonstrate an autonomous robotic platform able to perform long-range, long-endurance missions without the need for manual or conventional re-fueling, which would otherwise preclude the ability of the robot to perform such missions. The system obtains its energy by foraging – engaging in biologically-inspired, organism-like, energy-harvesting behavior which is the equivalent of eating. It can find, ingest, and extract energy from biomass in the environment (and other organically-based energy sources), as well as use conventional and alternative fuels (such as gasoline, heavy fuel, kerosene, diesel, propane, coal, cooking oil, and solar) when suitable.

Doesn't sound that sinister, since dead bodies are artfully skirted around in the description. Then again, a presentation on the technology is accompanied by the picture on the right, which appears to show a giant robot calmly shooting the last rebel human aircraft out of the sky with its eyes ...

http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/141329/flesh-eating_robots_developed_for_pentagon/

US gun debate fires up as states allow weapons in bars

Changes in gun legislation in Arizona and Tennessee comes despite bloody rampages in recent months

by Ed Pilkington in New York

Up to 375,000 registered gun owners in Arizona and Tennessee were today given the right to carry concealed guns into bars and restaurants that serve alcohol, in the latest example of loosening gun laws in a country already renowned for its lax approach to firearms.

The change of the two states' gun laws marks a trend across the US towards increased rights for gun owners despite a spate of bloody rampages in recent months that have seen scores of Americans die. Advocates of the second amendment's right to bear arms argue that in the wake such shooting sprees, citizens should be able to defend themselves by carrying guns in public places.

But opponents say this is the logic of the mad house. Groups calling for greater regulation of gun ownership are opposing a move at the federal level to extend the right to carry concealed weapons to all 50 states.

Today, Tennessee granted its 250,000 citizens with gun licences the right to carry handguns into bars and restaurants that serve alcohol. Restaurant owners made a last-minute attempt to block the change, saying it was bad for business, but their appeal was rejected by the courts.

Randy Rayburn, one of the restaurant owner plaintiffs, told a local TV network: "I'm not worried about the 99% of gun owners who are permit holders. I'm worried about the 1 or 2% of would-be Dirty Harrys who are going to carry out their attempts at vigilante justice."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jul/14/arizona-tennessee-gun-law-debate

Satan

Mysterious Dem Majority Tales