Dilbert once again is skulking through the halls where I work:
I'm gone for a week, and I come back to this. There are a million things one could say, a million words one could write, but in end, it comes down to this:
Defund the NSA. And all its unknown counterparts. Raze the buildings, salt the earth of Ft. Meade, and send the unethical masses off to the U6 12% unemployment lines.
That's the moral, ethical, constitutional, and (should be, if the fourth amendment still had any meaning) legal stance.
The practical stance is that, they, along with the rest of the bloated, fascist security state of the US Government, PRISM, and all its late lamented predecessors (ECHELON, CARNIVORE, TIA) were unable to predict or prevent September 11, 2001. Or the fall of the Berlin Wall. Or Bengazi. Or McVeigh. Or the Unabomber. Or Boston. Or anything else going back to December 7, 1941. This isn't because they weren't doing enough of this – PRISMs predecessors were in place, and powerful enough. The answer isn't to do more, but to do less.
So throw it all out. It simply doesn't work.
In every instance, this system has not made anyone safer. It invites abuses. The powers that be are not concerned with terrorism, as any terrorist plot is unlikely to affect them, and in fact will increase their powers. They are concerned about politics, and will, and have, used this very system to spy on their enemies (anti-war activists) when they should have been looking for people they were warned were planning attacks (the Boston Bombers).
They'll make noises about all the mysterious attacks they've prevented, but of course they can't tell you about a single one. Secrecy. Methods. Sources. Must be protected, you see. When what's being protected is budgets, and asses.
The reason why is that they're hugely inefficient. It's not an apparatus for preventing anything. It's an apparatus for hanging someone after the fact. It's a huge, efficient Cardinal Richelieu machine. It's not to prevent 9/11. It's to hang Julian Assange. Bradley Manning. For making sure that no one else blows the whistle on the other stuff we don't know about.
Just you wait til the whispers start about Edward Snowden. They'll start using that huge apparatus on him soon enough.
But oddly enough, the apparatus wasn't able to prevent an Edward Snowden, an honorable man, with ethics and morals.
That’s the trick. HSBC launders money for the bad guys in the War on Some Drugs and Some People, and some members of the Axis of Evil, and pays a small fine relative to their profits, and the people in charge defer their bonuses for a short time. Not go to jail, not pay a fine, not lose their bonuses. Defer.
Liberty, on the other hand, does exactly the same kind of thing, but in this cases, charges have been filed, accounts frozen, subpoenas issued.
The only difference I can see is that HSBC has better lobbyists and a bigger brass ring. HSBC is a big bank; Liberty is a small one. HSBC is still around. Liberty is not.
Justice (for some), with a price tag.
Tagged OWSNew Personal Record: 17:37
Old PR: 17:45
That's with no angry ex-con pool boys. I made two fast lights, missed two, and got caught behind the bus into the entrance gate. Also cranked up the hill at 20 MPH for long sections. Now I think 17:15 might be possible if everything went right.
I was warm from having gone to the gym and running up the hill at the top of Lake with the pooches. 60 F. Probably didn't hurt.
17:52. Seven seconds off the PR. Could have made it if not for the pool boy first trying to kill me, then trying to stop me to get in a fight after I flipped him off (wait, you’re in so much of a hurry that you’re willing to kill me to save the seven seconds you’d have to wait to pass safely, but you have time to stop and try to kick my ass?). Admittedly highly dependent on lights and not getting caught by traffic, but still, 17:45 remains the record. Lots of 18:15 to 18:30. Very few less than 18:00.
No video as I forgot and left the cameras charging.
But currently it’s both. Art imitates life imitates art. I used to work at Initech, and I went to grad school to get away from it. But it’s universal. Apparently inescapable. Even managers who used to be techies who have watched the movie will still become Lumbergh because they can’t fucking think of anything better to do.
If you didn’t read anything else, the first two paragraphs should put to rest any inkling you might ever have that nations are like families, and budgets must be balanced.
[T]he economy is not like an individual family.
Families earn what they can, and spend as much as they think prudent; spending and earning opportunities are two different things. In the economy as a whole, however, income and spending are interdependent: my spending is your income, and your spending is my income. If both of us slash spending at the same time, both of our incomes will fall too.
[…]
[I]f you ask me, people talk too much about what went wrong during the boom years and not enough about what we should be doing now. For no matter how lurid the excesses of the past, there’s no good reason that we should pay for them with year after year of mass unemployment.
So what could we do to reduce unemployment? The answer is, this is a time for above-normal government spending, to sustain the economy until the private sector is willing to spend again. The crucial point is that under current conditions, the government is not, repeat not, in competition with the private sector. Government spending doesn’t divert resources away from private uses; it puts unemployed resources to work. Government borrowing doesn’t crowd out private investment; it mobilizes funds that would otherwise go unused.
Now, just to be clear, this is not a case for more government spending and larger budget deficits under all circumstances — and the claim that people like me always want bigger deficits is just false. For the economy isn’t always like this — in fact, situations like the one we’re in are fairly rare. By all means let’s try to reduce deficits and bring down government indebtedness once normal conditions return and the economy is no longer depressed. But right now we’re still dealing with the aftermath of a once-in-three-generations financial crisis. This is no time for austerity.
O.K., I’ve just given you a story, but why should you believe it? There are, after all, people who insist that the real problem is on the economy’s supply side: that workers lack the skills they need, or that unemployment insurance has destroyed the incentive to work, or that the looming menace of universal health care is preventing hiring, or whatever. How do we know that they’re wrong?
Well, I could go on at length on this topic, but just look at the predictions the two sides in this debate have made. People like me predicted right from the start that large budget deficits would have little effect on interest rates, that large-scale “money printing” by the Fed (not a good description of actual Fed policy, but never mind) wouldn’t be inflationary, that austerity policies would lead to terrible economic downturns. The other side jeered, insisting that interest rates would skyrocket and that austerity would actually lead to economic expansion. Ask bond traders, or the suffering populations of Spain, Portugal and so on, how it actually turned out.
h/t: BdL
Tagged OWSArcher makes me laugh uncontrollably. Every episode.
Atrios hits the nail on the head. Almost every time.
The US is deploying a $1B missile defense system, primarily to Alaska, which has at best a 50% success record (bad news if you’re missile with a huge radar generator attached heading from a known direction at a known time), to shoot down missiles from North Korea, which can’t reach the US and can’t possibly have missile-launchable nukes attached.
Those Star Wars Buck Turgidsons must have gotten an erection when KJU started rattling his empty saber again. The missiles won’t even be deployed til 2017, so even if they were effective, they wouldn’t be useful for this “crisis”.
But the missiles are very useful for deploying $1B of funds which might have otherwise been sequestered.
I like to sign other people up to play the NPR Sunday Puzzle on air.
It hasn’t happened yet, but imagine their surprise when they get the phone call.
Broad daylight
You think this guy's even going to notice when he sweeps me with his sprinkler pipe sticking out three feet on the right? Be awesome if we had a three foot rule, so thanks, Jerry and Arnold for vetoing that.
TumblrHu
Wait. Tumblr, which has no path to monetization other than clickthru ads, which were worth about a quarter per thousand last I heard, is worth $1.1B. Hulu, which has paying subscribers, ad revenue from major corporations, and the most important thing of all, access to content that people might want to pay for, is worth $0.8B?
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