text:
Tag Archives: gaol
Film Review: Ghosted
Do you think you could hack it behind bars? If you're a Daily Mail columnist you probably dispute the fact that prisons even have bars anymore. They've all been replaced you see, with tasty sticks of rock more in keeping with the dangerously liberal, comfortable satellite TV approach to treating filthy criminals. Being locked up is preferable to a five star hotel. Prisons are merely lavishly furnished warehouses for feral beasts that will be released back into the wilds of society unchanged. The fear factor has gone.
Bring back that shit yourself punishment and all of Britain's ills will be cured. All this claptrap about human rights and civil liberties has been diluting the taste of our justice system since the 60s, so that it's nothing more than a bitter sip of lemonade. Prisons should punish first and foremost, to act as a deterrent to the bad apples on the nation's tree. When they fall they need to be crushed into a pulp and left to rot as an example to others; so the argument roughly goes.
Of course films are not the place to look for a frank and faithful look at the realities of prison life. Just because I'm put off a casual mugging by the possibility of gang rapes such as those in The Shawshank Redemption, doesn't mean that actual perpetrators within the system encounter such things or that they are deterred by them. Cinema is a place for drama, tension and excitement. But a certain mould of gritty British drama always seems to capture something true about the cooped up existence of convicts, whatever the exaggerations.
In the case of Ghosted, the debut film of writer/director Craig Viveiros, the principal truth is that for many men, the haunting consequences of their crimes are punishment enough. There is also a heightened but believable look at the community of prison life, with its rival factions and dominating personalities pulling the strings. And much of the dialogue is insightful but understated, with main character Jack musing that, if nothing else, empty hours in a cell day after day give you plenty of time to think.
Jack (John Lynch) is a sensible prisoner, keeping his head down and away from trouble, serving his time. He is approaching the end of his sentence and desperate to get out to see his wife. But at the start of the film she fails to visit him and blanks him when he calls. Just as freedom is within sight his marriage collapses, destroying his hopes for a life on the outside. Gradually we find out more about Jack, eventually getting confirmation that his young son is dead. He burns most of his pictures of him because "sometimes the reminders are too hard in here".
With just months until Jack is free, a new inmate arrives in the shape of young Paul, played by Martin Compston of The Disappearance of Alice Creed fame. Paul is immediately welcomed by the manipulative Clay, who is described on the marketing material as a "wing overlord", which sounds like an all powerful evil super villain, but in reality just means a nicer cell, a mildly lucrative drugs racket and the odd fellow prisoner to bang. After the initial niceties Clay starts to use Paul, so Jack steps in and gets him moved to his cell.
This puts Jack in the firing line, resulting in some tense standoffs. The balance of the prison politics is disrupted and Clay is humiliated more than once, prompting him to get revenge. But despite the palpable sense of threat, the really interesting part of Ghosted is the relationship between Jack and Paul.
Jack is the heart of Ghosted and Lynch relished playing him, praising the creative talents of newcomer Viveiros: "It's been a long, long time since I read a script that's centred absolutely one hundred per cent on the characters". In return the director praises his cast who "pumped blood into the story". Both men are right.
Ghosted is well acted, with even the thugs coming across as something more than just two dimensional bad guys; they have their vulnerabilities too. But Ghosted is also well written and confidently directed so that it does not feel like a debut. Some of the scenes in which Jack and Paul open up to each other, often simply discussing old memories such as when Jack was in Brazil or when Paul was in care, are exemplary examples of characterisation rarely seen in today's commercial world of cinema.
Ghosted is released in cinemas on the 24th of June and will be available on DVD from the 27th. See it to support a quality British drama with an all star cast, which simultaneously pays tribute to classic prison stories and approaches the issue from a new angle. Try to spot the emotional hammer blow of a twist at the end.
Tagged action, Alice, art, BBC, blog, Britain, British, Cameron, character, cinema, cinematic, Coalition, columnist, Compston, consequences, Craig, Creed, crime, Daily Mail, date, David, death, debut, dialogue, director, Disappearance, DVD, Ed, Eddie, emotional, England, film, Flickering, football, funny, gaol, heartfelt, history, Holby City, jail, John, June, Labour, Liam, life, London, love, Lynch, Malik, Martin, movie, movies, Mrt'sblog, myth, narrative, new, newcomer, novel, opinion, overlord, plot, Politics, prison, punishment, purpose, Real, reform, release, Review, Rick, Schofield, screenplay, script, sentence, sex, story, style, The, The Living Daylights, thoughts, thug, tv, twist, Twitter, Verdict, Viveiros, writer, writing, youth
Macho Antidotes to the Royal Wedding – Part 3: Bargain DVDs – Trainspotting and The Wrestler
The big day is upon us. The masculine apocalypse is now. The horsemen will round the corner towards Westminster Abbey any moment, dragging their cargo of the merry middle class and nostalgic Eton boy politicians, right into our living rooms. Oh my god it's not long until we get to see Kate's dress!
Shoot me now. I am apprehensive, a little scared even, because I may have been advocating alternatives to the big day but I know I'm fighting an entity so vast that it will inevitably stray into my line of sight at some point. I won't be able to flee the hordes living and breathing the ceremony like it was their own. It wouldn't even do any good to flee abroad, if anything they're more marriage mad than the most devout British Royalist. So I definitely cannot outrun this and in addition I have another problem. I can't hide from it either, because I've already consumed the alternatives in order to point them out to all of you. Blokes, guys and lads everywhere, I hope you appreciate my sacrifice.
We've reached the final alternative step and its one I like to think of as the emergency measure. Thor at the cinema requires venturing out and United on iPlayer requires dangerous proximity to internet coverage, but these two films on DVD, available on the bargain shelves of any local high street, merely need a TV. I know, believe me I know, the wedding is on all the channels. But if you have an even more serious aversion to confetti and vows than me, just pull the aerial out and stick these two very manly films in to play, one after another.
Firstly then a film I've been meaning to see for a long while, the Scottish breakthrough piece for Danny Boyle, Trainspotting. Despite all the hype, from critics and friends alike, I really didn't know what to expect from this exactly. I knew there was drug taking, in all likelihood sex, and an awful lot of accented foul language. I knew it starred an emaciated Ewan McGregor. I knew it would have both fun and filth. I knew Boyle's playful style would scrawl a signature in every scene. I wasn't expecting it to be quite so hilarious and true to life as it was.
Much of the humour comes from the characters of McGregor's Mark Renton's "so called mates". Johnny Lee Miller, now starring fifteen years on in Boyle's critically acclaimed Frankenstein opposite Benedict Cumberbatch in the theatre, plays a Sean Connery obsessed, seemingly streetwise fellow crack addict. His assessments of Connery's performances as James Bond and his astonishing grasp of box office data, were particularly surreal for a fellow Bond fan like me, as he helped friends to inject heroin. He turns out to be far less clued up than he pretends to be though. Then there's Spud, a guy who is very plainly clueless from the start, who lands up throwing his shit all over his girlfriend's family at breakfast. Don't ask how. Slapstick perhaps, but I laughed for several minutes.
There's also Tommy, a guy McGregor's surprisingly appealing narration informs us has the fault of being honest and not addicted to any banned substance. I assume the visceral poetry of Renton's narration is so attractive because it is transplanted largely untouched from Irvine Walsh's novel, which is infamous for its use of Scottish dialect. A scene where Tommy and Spud discuss the pitfalls of their respective women at a club, and the girlfriends do likewise about the boys in the toilets, presumably also has its roots in the book. But it's wonderfully adapted by Boyle, with subtitles not quite necessary because of the noise and very capable comic acting depicting the darkly funny give and take realities of relationships.
Finally there's a young Kelly Macdonald, who has since appeared in No Country For Old Men, in her first film. Renton catches sight of her in a club as she's leaving, with his sex drive rapidly returning as he attempts to give up his habit. He follows her outside, as his narration tells us he's fallen in love, and tries it on with her. She confidently shoots him down, only to snog his face off in the taxi and subsequently shag him rampantly in her room. In the morning Renton discovers she's a schoolgirl, and the people he presumes to be flatmates are her parents. It's the sort of cheeky scene present throughout the film but it centres on deeper, more disturbing truths about youths trapped in a certain limited form of existence.
Renton is undoubtedly trapped by his addiction and his school girl lover is trapped by her age, a desire to break free and be independent. We all know what it's like to feel trapped; it's a very human feeling, despite our supposed freedom. Whether you're a nurse at a crowded hospital running a gauntlet of noses going off like shotguns of snot, a doctor watching patients with crash dummy heads and vacant eyes or one of thousands of the unemployed youths in this country retreading the same old paths, the same old trenches of memory through the earth, with no concept of a future. We can all get that feeling, and recognise it in others.
Ay na donne get all political pal? Keep it light! Ay?
Ah yes I forgot a character. Robert Carlyle plays Begbie, a moustachioed Scott whose job description reads thus: "playing pool and drinking at the bar, until a minor action by another customer causes him to lose his rag and beat everyone shitless". Begbie's probably trapped too, but to be honest his character never seemed much more than smashing entertainment. Literally.
The thing about Renton is that he thinks he's beaten the rest of us buggers trapped in the game of life, chasing after fat televisions and fancy cars. He thinks that by choosing drugs he's chosen nothingness and some sort of purer, pleasure filled existence. But like every revolutionary he comes to realise he is as trapped by the system as those embracing it. He needs money for his hits, friends for his sanity. Or maybe not friends, as you'll see if you watch the film.
Trainspotting is a damn good ride through the monotony of modern existence, with eccentric but hilarious and extremely likeable tour guides. It's more than your average tourist experience because at times it really gets you to think. And as an exploration of drug culture, Boyle's direction is suitably dirty, bizarre and haunting, but also responsible and not over the top. You'll flinch at some of the filth, the needles and most of all McGregor screaming his lungs out at a hallucination of a baby. Trainspotting is not simply a mash-up of visual clichés about getting high though, perhaps because it has such a strong grounding in character.
And so we come to The Wrestler, directed by Darren Aronofsky. Now Darren, as I like to call him, is someone I have a love/hate relationship with. First came the love, as I fell head over heels for the sensuality of Black Swan (https://mrtsblog.wordpress.com/2011/01/24/black-swan/) and then came the hate, when I followed this up with his earlier much praised work, Requiem for a Dream (https://mrtsblog.wordpress.com/2011/02/06/an-open-letter-to-darren-aronofsky/).
One of the reasons I found Trainspotting so refreshing was that whilst it dealt with drugs and it had its strange and psychedelic scenes of intoxication; it did not become the pretentious exercise in filmmaking that was Requiem for a Dream. I will probably be slated for saying it, and it may merely have been the context in which I first saw it (see link), but I really didn't like that film. I did not see the point to it. Trainspotting seemed to say something far truer about addiction, despite its tongue often being firmly in cheek.
I only bring this up because it all meant that I didn't know what I was going to get from The Wrestler; dazzling Darren or dopey Darren. The critical buzz around Mickey Rourke's resurrected corpse meant not a jot, because some of them hated Black Swan and some of them loved Requiem.
I would not go as far as the five star quotes plastered over the cover. I would not call it the "ultimate man film" as FHM did. But it's undoubtedly a film about a man and ageing, whereas Trainspotting, with hindsight, was a film for boys. Rourke's Randy "The Ram" Robinson is someone trapped by his past, the legacy of his prime, and the mistakes he made during that ripe period of life.
Perhaps Rourke put in such a praiseworthy performance because he could really inhabit his character. He has been there, more or less. Rather than playing a caricature or a gun toting gangster, Rourke is simply a person here; a human being in decline, or as he says in one moving speech "a broken down piece of meat". At first I didn't see what all the fuss about his performance was, but then after a few emotional scenes with a potential lover and ageing stripper (Marisa Tomei) and particularly some heartbreaking confrontations with his daughter (Evan Rachel Wood), Rourke brings Randy to life.
There's always the danger of melodramatic sentimentality, but the film manages to avoid it, primarily because of the masculine restraint of Rourke's portrayal. Aside from some brutal wrestling scenes and one careless fuck, this is rather pedestrian territory for Darren after the frenzied, frenetic highs of Requiem and the disorientating dash for beautiful perfection in Black Swan. The Wrestler certainly didn't grab me and it didn't inspire the extremes of emotion that Darren's two other efforts did. It has sporting parallels with Black Swan but lacks the wow factor of that film.
I don't think there's necessarily anything that wrong with The Wrestler. In some ways it is refreshing to see a film that shows so many sides of a man's ordinary life, making his escape from that routine via his passion all the more meaningful. There's no doubt that performing as a wrestler requires a certain level of very manly commitment to the drama. This film will offset any feminine activities like dusting icing sugar on cupcakes or fashioning paper chains with ease. But it's so realistic, so dreary and so grim, that this antidote might lead to a dangerous and depressing overdose.
If you watch these back to back, watch Trainspotting last. It's fun as well as not for the faint hearted. Either film is preferable to pointless precessions though, I'm sure you'll agree. Never mind God Save the Queen, God save male souls everywhere and best of luck!
Tagged 1989, 2000, 2001, 2009, 2010, A, Abbey, action, adaptation, addict, addiction, Amsterdam, Andress, antidotes, Aronofsky, article, attack, baby, back to back, bargain, BBC, beat, Benedict, Black, Blackman, blog, bloke, Blood, Blu-Ray, Bond, box, Boyle, boys, bridesmaids, Britain, British, Cameron, camping, cannabis, capitalist, car, castle, certain, characters, cigarettes, Clegg, CNN, Coalition, comeback, Comedy, Connery, crack, culture, Cumberbatch, Cuts, Danny, Darren, data, daughter, David, David Edwards, dead, decline, Diana, Dianne, die, director, Dr No, dream, dreary, dress, drug deal, drugs, DVD, DVDs, dying, Edinburgh, Empire, Ewan, Ewen, existence, Fake, feature, Festival, FHM, fight, football, for, Frankenstein, Fringe, Galore, gaol, Goldfinger, gothic, grim, Guy, Guys, hallucination, hash, heart, heroin, hilarious, history, HMV, Honor, horrible, house, Incredible Suit, inject, Irvine, ITV, jail, James, Johnny, lad, lads, Lee, Liam, life, limited, London, love, macho, mad, man, manly, Marisa, Mark, marriage, Mary, masculine, McGregor, media, men, Miller, mortgage, movie, myth, narcotics, narrative, NBC, need, needles, Nicholas, noses, Office, Part 3, plot, Politics, prison, Pussy, Renton, Requiem, retire, Review, revolution, roles, Royal, Royal Correspondent, Scotland, Scottish, Sean, sex, Shelley, shelves, Sherlock, smoke, sniff, snort, snot, spliff, Spud, style, surreal, Swan, system, television, Tesco, The, The Wrestler, Theatre, theme, thoughts, To, Tomei, Total Film, Trainspotting, trapped, UK, Ultra Culture, Ursula, Verdict, want, wedding, welsh, Westminster


All I Want For Christmas is Acid: DJ Pierre tickets are now available. Get ready for a wild EDM show and get your concert tickets for All I Want For Christmas is Acid: DJ Pierre concert for that electronic feel. Don�t miss the opportunity to see All I Want For Christmas is Acid: DJ Pierre put on a show in 2019!


The Bianco Toscana IGT is a white wine of Tuscany delicate and fresh. It is produced from grapes grown in the Florentine hills south of Florence . The grapes used to produce this wine are: Manzoni Bianco and Chardonnay.
The color is bright straw yellow . The scent is delicate due to the temperature-controlled fermentation. The taste is dry , soft cloth.
Serve in goblets of medium width at a temperature of 10 -12 °C. It is a good companion to all the dishes based on fish.


We make art and craft.
We grow food and make handcrafted food products.
We run farms and studios.
And we gather together to showcase the creative abundance of our valley home for locals and visitors alike.
ARE YOU AN ARTIST, ARTISAN, FARMER, FOOD PRODUCER OR CREATIVE BUSINESS IN THE METTOWEE VALLEY?
Join the Mettowee Makers and be part of the growing creative community in our beautiful valley. Click below to sign up now!


Once again it feels like everyone is getting pregnant. It's that time of the season I suppose. Today I want to share with everyone my wonder baby shower that mom threw for me when I was pregnant last year. And as you all know, I love to be hands on. My mom took my ideas and went with it. I don't have pictures from the time everyone got there, I wish I did, but no one was instructed to take photos for me. However, I did manage to snag some photos before everyone arrived.
P.S. This will be a long one!! Enjoy!
Because my shower was in February it was too cold to have it outside, but the ironic thing was Annabelle was born in the spring.
Here is a look at the table as my mom was beginning to set it up.
The idea was to have a little bit of everyone's grandma's house with the floral prints and lace to give that tea party feel.
The little umbrella's were a great find by my mom. The lace is pink and the structure is white. I ended up keeping them for Annabelle to play with once she got older, but I also plan on using them once again for her first birthday party that is coming up.
The diaper cake was the center piece to the table,(which was made by my mom).
Fresh spring flowers were placed in vases all around the house. I have no idea how she found them since it was still winter.
My mom pulled out her carnival glass, which added a great touch to the whole feel of the party. The punch bowl was so yummy too. She had to get diet everything for me because I had gestational diabetes. It was horrible but I did so good on my sugar intake so I could have a cupcake!
Every guest had their very own unique and large tea cups filled with the necessities to the games, also candy, and a package of flower seeds. She added pens for everyone to keep, because we all know how it can be a pain to hand out pencils or what not during the shower.
She ordered cupcakes from the local bakery. They were super yummy, however, me being the perfectionist that I am, I think I could of done a way better job decorating them on my own.
The raffle, was for all the flowers my mom put in vases. I believe there was a total of four of them. Was one of the popular game features.
My mom set up the living room so everyone would be able to see me. (I am the center of attention after all.. JK).
The flower rugs were a nice touch of decor. They were actually a part of my gift from my mom for Annabelle's Nursery. ( I will post pictures of her nursery at a later time, something to look forward too).
All the teacups and vases were found at either thrift stores or I believe even Ross, Michael's, or TJ MAX.
I kept the diaper cake up in Annabelle's Nursery for as long as I could. It had to be my favorite thing of the party.
So, the idea of the party was to send in the invitations a little message about everyone coming in their own garden hats, but the trick was to make them. The best one won a prize. This was mine. I made it actually the night before my husband and I had to hit the road to drive across two states to get there.
Just a few pictures of the present table.


Aadvanced Machinery, Inc. - Used Process Machinery and Process .
Aadvanced Machinery is the top resource for used process machinery and . attritors, ball mills and a wide array of process equipment to meet your needs!
Batch Attritors work ten times faster than ball mills, and are advantageous because . When a torque meter is added to a machine, a "T" is added to the model.
Attritor Ball Mill, Wholesale Various High Quality Attritor Ball Mill Products from . China supplier dolomite clay ball mill grinder small attritor mining equipment.
Different types of milling equipment are available . An attritor (a ball mill capable of generating higher . a SPEX milling machine and a Pulverisette 5, among.
Andrew Szegvari, inventor of Attritor particle size reduction equipment . Conventional ball milling methods in 1922 would have taken as long as a week to.
Jan 15, 2018 . Cryogenic Grinding & Attritors Presented by: .unionprocess; 2. . of an internally agitated ball mill, like an Attritor, can provide additional . AI and Machine Learning Demystified by Carol Smith at Midwest UX 2017.
The attritor mill is unique machine suitable for ball mill the machine is with high performance for wet and dry material grinding and blending with modern.
Paint Mixing Machinery, Attritor, Disperser, High Speed Stirer, Pug .
Manufacturer of Paint Mixing Machinery, Attritor, Disperser, High Speed Stirer, . Sand Mill, Ribbon Blender, Ball Mill, Liquid Filling Machine, Filling Machine,.
China Horizontal Ball Milling Machine and Attritor for Oil Ink Grinding .
China Horizontal Ball Milling Machine and Attritor for Oil Ink Grinding, Find details about China Grinding Mill, Milling Machine from Horizontal Ball Milling.
With the use of this machine the grinding time in Attritor is shortened as compared to the conventional Ball Mills. It has the total vessel capacity of 5 lts, 50 lts, 100.
The Attritor is often referred to as a agitated ball mill. . How an Attritor Works ? The operation of a batch attritor is simple and effective. The material to be ground.
The Attritor is often referred to as a agitated ball mill. The material to be ground is charged into a vertical tank filled with grinding media. Both the material and.
The area we have excelled in fabrication of machinery and equipments are wet and dry grinding mixing and . Attritors are also known as high power Ball Mill.
Attritor Mills| Attritor Mill Manufacturer from Delhi, India .
Find high quality Attritor Mills in Delhi India and get free price quotation, . with the grinding media either steatite balls or steel balls the machine is allowed to mix.
Unlike conventional vibratory mills with circular vibrations, this machine per- .. Attritors (attrition mills, stirred ball mills) consist of a cylindrical grinding cham-.
Used Attritor Mills from Phoenix Equipment. . 19 Attritor & Attritor Mills ... Attritors, or stirred ball mills, work by use of shear and impact on a given product by.
The EMS Energy Institute houses equipment for size reduction and . Szegari 1S Recirculating Attritor Mill (bench scale) . 2'x4' continuous ball mill (125 lb/h).
We have emerged as one of the leading manufacturers, exporters and suppliers of a wide range of Paint And Printing Ink Machinery. These are catering to the.
Attritor Machine - Buy Attrition Mills at best price of Rs 260000 /no from Dinesh Steel Fabricators. Also find here related product . Ball Mills in Ahmedabad.
Results 1 - 24 of 131 . Online shopping for Ball Machines - Court Equipment from a great selection at Sports & Outdoors Store.


Babbling Brooke: OPI Dutchya Just Love OPI?
This pretty purple is insane!! This is a seriously gorgeous shade. I didn't want to take it off!
Dutchya Just Love OPI is a deep, rich fabulous purple loaded with gold shimmer. It sparkles differently in every light. I just love it!
Thanks so much TikiBarbie and neelai!!


Neilmed NasaMist Extra Strength Hypertonic Saline Spray provides effective relief for sinus, nasal allergies and blocked nose. Buy this allergy medicine online here.
Neilmed NasaMist Extra Strength Hypertonic Saline Spray is a sterile natural saline spray. Applying a gentle fine mist in the nose is an excellent way to keep the nasal passages moist. Nasal sprays should not be mistaken for large volume irrigation systems like Sinus Rinse Nasal Wash. NasaMist Saline Spray helps alleviate •Nasal Allergies and Dryness •Sinusitis, Rhinitis •Allergic Asthma •Post Nasal Drip •Sinus Pressure & Nasal Congestion •Nasal Symptoms from Flu and Cold •Nasal Irritation from Occupational and House Dust, Fumes, Animal Dander, Grass, Pollen, Environmental Pollutants and Smoke.
Use only as directed. If symptoms persist see your doctor/healthcare professional. Always read the label.
•System designed for single user to reduce the risk of contamination. •Do not completely block or occlude nasal passage during use to avoid any pressure in the nose or ears. •Keep out of reach from children. •Contents under pressure, please do not puncture or incinerate. •Store between 41 °F (5 °C) & 131 °F (55 °C), out of sunlight & away from heat sources. Avoid freezing •Consult physician before use on children younger than six months.


text:
CONTACT US - contactanos
APPLY HERE - INSCRIBERSE AQUI
Faculty - Staff
Dual Language Immersion
Thank you for your interest in Saint Alphonsus Catholic Dual Language School where faith, excellence, language and culture meet in our unique Spanish-English dual language immersion school at the forefront of 21st Century academics! Saint Alphonsus has the only Catholic dual language program in the East Los Angeles. As student progresses through the grades our school will grow one grade level each year when we will reach full enrollment in grades TK-8. For school year 2021-2022 the program includes grades TK, K, 1, 2, 3 and 4. In 2022-2023, it will continue to 5th grade. Every year after that the program will grow until the entire school participates in Dual Language Immersion.
It's easy to apply! If you are ready to join Saint Alphonsus' terrific family, click here to fill out an application online
You can also print and complete this Application Form and mail or deliver it to our office:
Application Form (pdf)
E–Mail, mail or hand-deliver your application to:
St. Alphonsus School
552 Amalia Ave
We'll Follow Up!
As soon as St. Alphonsus' receives your application, we will invite you to meet with our team, and we will notify you about upcoming "Play Days" for your child to visit.
Learn More Right Away:
If you would like to learn more about St. Alphonsus right away, we enthusiastically invite you to:
Call for more information: (323) 268-5165
Schedule a school visit, or
Join one or more of the upcoming information events below
Join us on campus at the address above for any or all of the following upcoming group opportunities to learn more about Saint Alphonsus School in person:
VIRTUAL TOUR
Transitional Kindergarten (TK) applicants must be four (4) years old by September 1. Prospective Kindergarten students must be five (5) years of age by September 1 of the academic year. First graders ordinarily must be six (6) years of age by September 1.
In order for your child to be tested for the upcoming academic year, the following documents must be submitted:
• Application for admission
• Baptismal certificate (If Catholic)
• Immunization record
• Report card from current school (if applicable)
• Most recent standardized test scores
• $50 non-refundable testing fee
Note: A recommendation form may also be requested by the Principal.
Non-Discrimination Policy
The school, mindful of its mission to be a witness to the love of Christ for all, admits students regardless of race, color, national origin, and/or ethnic origin to all rights, privileges, programs, and activities generally accorded or made available to students at the school.
The school does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, disability, medical condition, sex, or national and/or ethnic origin in the administration of educational policies and practices, scholarship programs, and athletic and other school-administered programs, although certain athletic leagues and other programs may limit participation and some archdiocesan schools operate as single-sex schools.
While the school does not discriminate against students with special needs, a full range of services may not always be available to them. Decisions concerning the admission and continued enrollment of a student in the school are based upon the student's emotional, academic, and physical abilities and the resources available to the school in meeting the student's needs.
SAINT ALPHONSUS SCHOOL
Dual Language Immersion Catholic School in East LA
Escuela Católica de doble inmersión en el este de Los Angeles
Por Espanol, haga clic aquí
552 South Amalia Ave.
Los Angeles, 90022
MMunguiaSanchez@la-archdiocese.org

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Not a good idea for your first post to advertise a site.
oh pleaseeeee ip ban that idiot.
It does not help any to call people morons.
 If you have infection issues start here first..
Very handy Porthos, Shame I didn't read first this first when I had a problem.


44) A good place to start a more civil dialog would be for my Republican colleagues in the House to change the name of the bill they have introduced to repeal health care reform. The bill, titled the "Repeal the Job Killing Health Care Law Act," was set to come up for a vote this week, but in the wake of Gabby's shooting, it has been postponed at least until next week.
9) We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush's compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic. Uncontroversially, his crimes vastly exceed bin Laden's, and he is not a "suspect" but uncontroversially the "decider" who gave the orders to commit the "supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole" (quoting the Nuremberg Tribunal) for which Nazi criminals were hanged: the hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, destruction of much of the country, the bitter sectarian conflict that has now spread to the rest of the region.
7) You know, if a ballplayer threw a game and they get caught, they go to jail. Well, what are we going to do to the Republicans who are throwing the country?
"They're throwing our country, and they all should be put in jail for what they're doing, because they're destroying our country, because they said at the beginning our one mission is to get rid of President Obama. That was their mission. They don't care how much they destroy other people. They don't care whether you go to work. They don't care about anything.


If you are planning a baby shower and are looking for Baby Shower Decorating Ideas, we have a large selection of items to make your baby shower look great. Plain walls? We offer a large selection of baby shower wall art such banners and posters. Serving cupcakes? Take a look at our adorable cupcake wrappers for a fast and easy way to dress up these sweet treats.
Want to dress up your table? We have you covered with fun old fashioned paper straws in colors to match any theme and personalized table centerpieces to make any table look great!
Don't see what your looking for just let us know, we would love to help you!


It's the beginning of a new month. This means that all the new themes for food blogging challenges are announced. I love this time of month; I find it inspiring. What am I going to be challenged to make this month? Is it something new? The challenge hosts are becoming known names in my household, especially Dom and his Random Recipes. This month, for Random Recipes #28 Dom has challenged us to make bread.
The 1st of May was a cold, windy day with alternating bouts of bright sunshine and sleety showers: a perfect soup and bread sort of day. I probably didn't select this recipe as randomly as Dom would like. It was the first recipe I'd come across in the bread sections of my cookbooks which I had all the ingredients for, so I went with that one.
The original recipe for Goat's Cheese, Onion and Potato Bread with Thyme appears in Delia Smith's How to Cook: Book 1 (1998), which I picked up at our local charity shop last Thursday for £1. I didn't have enough goats cheese or any fresh thyme, but she also provides an alternative recipe using feta cheese, 1/4 diced red onion and rosemary, ingredients I did have on hand.
It's not technically a bread, I don't think, as it doesn't contain any yeast (but then neither do sourdough breads, and they are considered breads…. ponders) I would consider it to be a giant scone and the recipe is really quick to whip up, as scones generally are. I was skeptical that the feta cheese pressed into the top would burn after 45 minutes of cooking, but it didn't. It turned a delicious, appetising golden colour.
For some reason when I read the ingredient red potato I just assumed she meant sweet potato, and so I used one. It wasn't until afterwards, when I cut into the bread and realised my bread didn't look like the one in the photo, did I realise my error.
However, it works! I like the look of orange flecks throughout the bread, although my children thought it was carrot, didn't like the look of the bread at all and refused to even try it. I think the sweetness of the potato and the sharp saltiness of the feta cheese compliment each other very well, perhaps it's more for grown-up tastes. This bread would make an ideal picnic lunch and I might have to try it again the next time we head up the hill for an adventure.
This bread was served with a hearty Three Bean Vegetable Soup.
This looks amazing what a great sounding bread perfect to go with soup.
It looks like the cheese scones I make, that´s what I thought when I looked at the first pic. So tempting! I actually like that you used sweet potato, and I bet it tasted amazing! There´s something so interesting about breads without yeast.
Mmm cheese scones are lovely! Yes, I agree, it looks like a giant cheese scone!
Thank you. I love feta too, there's just something so fantastic about it!
this is my sort of bread – actually it reminds me of one I made ages ago and I wonder if it derived from the same source – I used purple potato in mine which was fun!
Purple potato sounds interesting! That would make a very lovely coloured bread, I'm sure.
Thank you! I've tried making bread using mashed potato before, which works well, but never just grating it directly into the flour. I was skeptical at first, but I'm a convert now.
Oh look at that bread, it looks wonderful!
Thank you 🙂 It was quite scrummy too, I thought!
Thanks, I thought so too! It helped that I photographed it during one of the few times the sun came out yesterday!
I love the look of that bread. It's beautifully rustic and must have been gorgeous dipped into soup. I would have thought that the sweet potato makes it even tastier than using regular potato. One to bookmark.


We are aiming for growth! As an account manager, you are a key player in realizing our ambitious goals. This is a place where you can have massive impact and really put your footprint on the future of WAES! Are you ready to overdeliver our targets and celebrate success? Welcome in our team!
Richelle, our 26-year-old creative sales lady who's specialty is to think out of the box in order to bring in new clients and grow exisiting business.
Martijn, our 31-year-old sales pro who will do whatever it takes to grow our business as long as he can justify it in front of his three children.
Stijn, our 33-year-old cross-fit fanatic who's heading our sales team and is responsible for ensuring that we have enough awesome projects for our consultants to work on.
You'll also work with Bob, our 31-year-old CEO and founder of WAES. He is to the point & creative, and likes to punch the boxing ball in our office.
As there is so much happening within WAES right now, you need to be a true team player. You will need a vast amount of entrepreneurism and instantly take ownership of your accounts. You are informal and to the point in your communication. You are an extravert with the right amount of self-confidence. You always see opportunities and chase them in all possible ways, but you always set the bar and stick to it when it comes to quality.
To be successful, you have at least a Bachelor Degree and over three years of experience in account management (consultative selling), preferably in secondment and/or consultancy. Obviously, you have great communication skills in both Dutch and English.
A unique opportunity to set your personal mark on the scale-up phase of WAES! All of this surrounded with driven, entrepreneurial colleagues who are willing to jump in when you need it. Your home base will be our office in the Innovation Powerhouse. An urban jungle in Eindhovens' hotspot Strijp-T, formerly in use as a power plant and now home of high-tech innovation companies.
Are we all positive? Then we invite you over at our brand new office in Eindhoven to meet you in person for a couple of interviews to assess your qualities as an account manager.


The Check Engine light might come on in your vehicle. It's an amber colored light that shows on your dashboard. In newer vehicles it might just be a problem with your gas cap not being screwed on tight enough (or a worn gas cap), causing the vehicle to fail the self-diagnostic evaporative emission test. All Somersworth drivers need to do is go to their gas cap and verify that it is tight. If that was the problem, the light will turn off and everything will be fine within one or two days.
At Central Park Garage, we advise Somersworth drivers to resist the temptation to have someone "clear" the codes to turn off your vehicle check engine light. This erases important diagnostic information that your friendly and knowledgeable Central Park Garage service advisor needs to diagnose the underlying problem for the Check Engine light – and any other pending problems that may be stored in the computer.
If the problem is still there - you still see the light - bring your vehicle in to Central Park Garage in Somersworth and have it checked out as soon as possible.


text:
Boeing Bags Massive U.S. Navy Drone Contract
Drones, drones, drones
Former Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen once called the F-35 "the last manned fighter" jet that the U.S. would ever build. The future of aerial warfare, meanwhile, is looking more and more likely to be a future dominated by drones -- and as we're increasingly seeing, this is a future that Boeing aims to dominate.
Consider the evidence. In 2018 Boeing beat out several rivals (Lockheed among them) to win an $805 million development contract to design a fleet of MQ-25A Stingray carrier-based drones for the U.S. Navy. A few months later we learned that Boeing was among three finalists in a U.S. Army project to find a replacement for the venerable RQ-7 Shadow drone (currently built by Textron). One month later Boeing unveiled a project to develop jet-powered "wingman" drones to fly alongside Air Force fighter jets on combat missions.
And just one week ago we learned that Boeing has won a $390 million Pentagon contract to supply 173 small unmanned aerial vehicles to the U.S. and foreign militaries.
The Pentagon announced Boeing's latest contract in its digest of defense contracts awarded on June 28. Technically awarded to Boeing drone subsidiary Insitu, the contract describes the sale of "up to 63 RQ-21A attrition air vehicles" (i.e. drones) to the U.S. Navy and U.S. Marine Corps, of 17 more RQ-21As to "foreign military sales ... customers ... including the governments of Canada, Poland and Oman," along with the sale of "up to 93 ScanEagle UASs in various configurations."
At an average cost of roughly $2.25 million per drone, each of these sales can be expected to generate something on the order of $155,000 of profit for Boeing at the 6.9% operating profit margin common within the company's defense division (according to data from S&P Global Market Intelligence).
These are not new customers for Boeing. The company's ScanEagles have been in service with the Marines since 2004, and with the Navy since 2005. The newer Blackjack has achieved "program of record" status with the Navy and Marines under their "Small Tactical Unmanned Aircraft System" program. Even so, this is a large increase in the deployment of these systems -- one of the largest "small" UAV contracts I've seen come out of the DoD in some while.
For context, Boeing's smaller rival AeroVironment (NASDAQ:AVAV) is generally considered the most popular manufacturer of small UAVs for the military -- but its contract wins tend to be on the order of just $10 million or $20 million in size.
What this means for AeroVironment
That being said, to allay concerns among AeroVironment investors, I wouldn't necessarily count Boeing's gain here as AeroVironment's loss.
With a 10-foot wingspan and weighing 40 points at takeoff (launched from a small catapult), the ScanEagle is classed as a "Group 2" (medium size) UAV under the Defense Department's drone classification system. The Blackjack is even larger. Its 16-foot wingspan and maximum takeoff weight of 135 pounds place it squarely within "Group 3" (large drones).
Both of the Boeing drones therefore dwarf AeroVironment's ubiquitous "Group 1" hand-launched Raven drone, which weighs in at just four pounds, three ounces with a three-foot wingspan. They're simply not in the same class, and don't compete with each other.
Long story short, there's more than enough room for both companies to succeed in this market. And with Boeing's share of the fighter jet market now sharply limited by Lockheed's success with the F-35, it really needs to succeed in drones if it's to have much of a future as a defense company.
Filter the News:


text:
Home Environment Scientists Call for Balancing Mining and Ecosystem Protection
Scientists Call for Balancing Mining and Ecosystem Protection
In a paper published this week in Science, researchers from the Center for Ocean Solutions and co-authors from leading institutions around the world propose a strategy for balancing commercial extraction of deep-sea resources with protection of diverse seabed habitats.
The paper is intended to inform upcoming discussions by the International Seabed Authority (ISA) that will set the groundwork for future deep-sea environmental protection and mining regulations.
"Our purpose is to point out that the ISA has an important opportunity to create networks of no-mining Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) as part of the regulatory framework they are considering at their July meeting," says lead author Lisa Wedding, an early career science fellow at the Center for Ocean Solutions. "The establishment of regional MPA networks in the deep sea could potentially benefit both mining and biodiversity interests by providing more economic certainty and ecosystem protection."
The ISA is charged with managing the seabed and its resources outside of national jurisdictions for the benefit of humankind. According to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), the deep seabed is legally a part of the "common heritage of mankind," meaning that it belongs to each and every human on the planet.
"The ISA is the only body with the legal standing and responsibility to manage mining beyond national jurisdiction," said Kristina Gjerde, an international high-seas lawyer and co-author on the Science paper.
Since 2001, the ISA has granted 26 mining exploration contracts covering more than one million square kilometers of seabed, with 18 of these contracts granted in the last four years. Researchers recommend that the ISA, as part of its strategic plans to protect deep-seabed habitats and manage mining impacts, take a precautionary approach and set up networks of MPAs before additional large claim areas are granted for deep seabed mining.
"Given our paltry understanding of deep-sea environments, regional networks of MPAs that designate significant portions of the deep seabed as off-limits to mining would provide key insurance against unanticipated environmental impacts," said co-author Steven Gaines, dean of the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
Mining impacts could affect important environmental benefits that the deep sea provides to human beings. For example, the deep sea is a key player in planet's carbon cycle, capturing a substantial amount of human-emitted carbon which impacts both weather and climate. Mining activities could disturb these deep-sea carbon sinks, releasing excess carbon back into the atmosphere. The deep sea also sustains economically important fisheries, and harbors microorganisms which have proven valuable in a number of pharmaceutical, medical and industrial applications, Center for Ocean Solutions wrote.
"Deep-sea areas targeted by mining claims frequently harbor high biodiversity and fragile habitats, and may have very slow rates of recovery from physical disturbance," said Craig Smith, a co-author and professor of oceanography at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Smith and a team of scientists, helped the ISA pioneer the deep sea's first regional environmental management plan in 2012. Located in an area of the Pacific Ocean known as the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ), the plan honored existing mining exploration claims while protecting delicate habitats by creating a network of MPAs. The CCZ serves as a model for how future deep-sea ecosystem management could unfold.
"This kind of precautionary approach achieves a balance of economic interests and conservation benefits," said Sarah Reiter, a co-author and former early career law and policy fellow at the Center for Ocean Solutions who now works as an ocean policy analyst at the Monterey Bay Aquarium.
The upcoming ISA session on July 15th represents a critical juncture for defining the future of deep-sea mining and protection.
"The time is now to protect this important part of the planet for current and future generations," saidLarry Crowder, a co-author and science director at the Center for Ocean Solutions and senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. "Decisions that affect us all will be made by the ISA this summer."
Previous article Pearl of diving medicine: Common heart ailment linked to deadly decompression sickness
Next article GE Software to Connect BP Wells to Industrial Internet


A Cross-Sectional Study of Preservice and Beginning Teachers' Attitudes and Feelings of Preparedness to work with Students with Disabilities.
Students with disabilities need properly trained educators. The capacity of teachers to affect student learning is contingent upon the preparation they receive. Attitudes and feelings of preparedness to work with students with disabilities expressed by teachers indicate that their training is inadequate.
The purpose of this cross-sectional study was to explore preservice and beginning teachers' attitudes and feelings of preparedness to work with students with disabilities. Participants included preservice teachers who were just beginning their teacher education program (Phase 1), student teachers (Phase 2), and practicing teachers (Phase 3) who had been enrolled in either undergraduate or graduate initial licensure teacher preparation programs at East Tennessee State University. A three-part survey containing both closed and open-ended items, including the Opinions Relative to the Integration of Students with Disabilities (ORI) scale, was used for data collection.
Quantitative findings in this study were mixed or inconclusive. Some significant differences were found in overall ORI scores and subscale scores based on 1) the phase of training for undergraduates, 2) program levels (undergraduates and graduates), 3) type of teacher certification, and 4) the existence of relationships with persons with disabilities. No differences in attitude were found for any program-related teaching experiences with persons with disabilities. When combined with qualitative analysis, the study revealed a collection of disconnects that provided insight into the preparation of teachers. Disconnects were noted between expressed attitudes and feelings of preparedness; feelings of preparedness and program benefit; teacher preparation and teacher practice; and expressed value and need for more field experiences and the impact of program-related teaching experiences on attitudes and feelings of preparedness. Themes involving personal relationships, the expectancy to collaborate and learn through ongoing experience, and the limited focus on students with disabilities throughout the teacher education programs provided clues to factors that might potentially impact feelings of preparedness to work with students with disabilities.


text:
FALLOUT: The Geopolitics of the Snowden Files
April 20, 2014 • By Adam Morris
ON JULY 2 LAST YEAR, the governments of Portugal, France, Italy, and Spain bowed to US orders and refused airspace to the plane carrying Bolivian president Evo Morales. He'd been traveling from Russia to South America until his presidential jet was forced to land in Vienna. Morales and his ministers were stranded there for 15 hours. Acting on bad intelligence or mere suspicions, the higher-ups in the Obama administration, and perhaps President Obama himself, decreed this embarrassing, unprecedented, and illegal detention of a foreign sovereign. The lies fed to Morales and his pilots in Vienna — that there were "technical" issues for the emergency landing — fooled no one: American authorities suspected that the Bolivians were helping NSA whistleblower Edward J. Snowden escape from Russia to South America.
The political fallout was immediate: a widespread allergic reaction to American imperial power comparable to the irritation Wiki:Leaks provoked in 2010, when it released thousands of secret US State Department diplomatic cables. Here was the great and powerful United States, so threatened and humiliated by a former NSA contractor that it would deny diplomatic immunity to a sitting chief of state. Seldom, if ever, has soft American power been so cynically abused.
Nowhere was the outrage more pronounced than in Latin America, where aversions to the United States are grounded in deep historical wounds — it is, after all, a continent that harder expressions of American power have long scarred. Learning of Morales's detention, Argentine president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner unleashed a barrage of tweets condemning such unacceptable "impunity." Over Twitter, Kirchner announced that Uruguay's José Mujica was as indignant as Ecuador's Rafael Correa, and that Peru's president Ollanta Humala had called a meeting of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) to address this obvious breach of international diplomatic accords.
That the bullying of a less powerful state failed to produce any significant blowback in the US is not a surprise: Americans are practically taught that it is their God-given right to police the world. The heedless 2003 plunge into Iraq and continuous spree of drone strikes in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen offer additional proof of this priggish doctrine.
The experience of "benevolent" US intervention south of the Rio Grande has little to do with benevolence at all: for Latin Americans, such rhetoric is all too often a subterfuge for imperial capitalism, and the violence it sows. Before America's obsession with the Middle East, it was Latin America that bore the brunt of American imperial ambition — first under the rationale of "protecting" Latin American nations from foreign aggression, and then extended under the rubric of containing communism and the "War on Drugs." The preferred theater for America's militaristic adventurism has simply been exchanged for another.
Particularly during the Cold War, but dating to the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, the United States regarded Latin America as its own unrivaled sphere of influence, and intervened accordingly. The list of US-backed authoritarian regimes that subverted democracy is long indeed: Augusto Pinochet's Chile; the Argentine and Brazilian military juntas; and José Efraín Ríos Montt's genocidal dictatorship in Guatemala are among the most notorious. The tacit approval and material support that the US lent these and other repressive and criminal regimes in Latin America does not figure prominently in the version of history taught in many high schools in the United States. Most Americans therefore have little knowledge of these campaigns, or how they traumatized Latin American citizens and stifled dissent.
The Snowden revelations don't exclusively concern North–South relations in the Western Hemisphere. But they are instructive about changes to this dymanic — subsequent events in the Snowden affair continue to turn on a North–South axis. Aside from Russia, for whom the American whistleblower was an "unwanted Christmas present" in the words of president Vladimir Putin, each of the four nations that have offered political asylum to Snowden — Bolivia, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Ecuador — are in Latin America. And though Brazil, a principal target of NSA espionage, has not formally offered asylum, senators from both the ruling party and the opposition have campaigned on his behalf. Nor has Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff ruled out granting asylum, cautiously observing that Snowden has not yet requested her country's aid. (Snowden's lawyers have advised him to drop his pursuit of asylum in other nations while he is hosted in Russia.)
Latin American asylum would have made the most sense for Snowden; his mistake may have been not going to Havana or Caracas in the first place, and then sorting out a final asylum arrangement from there. Especially considering the information Snowden possessed on US spying in Brazil, appealing to Brasília might have been his most expedient option.
Brazil is now the leading power of South America, a continent whose leftward drift has begun to pose problems for American imperial ambitions. Glenn Greenwald, the American journalist entrusted with an undisclosed number of the Snowden files, publishes from the safety of his home in Rio de Janeiro. Due to the Obama administration's unprecedented prosecution of whistleblowers and journalists, Greenwald's lawyers have advised him against traveling to the United States. Sadly, the prudence of this recommendation was borne out when UK authorities detained Greenwald's partner David Miranda, a Brazilian national suspected of relaying some of Snowden's files from Germany to Brazil, in Heathrow airport under the highly dubious auspices of Schedule 7 of the UK Terrorism Act. This clause permits British authorities to stop and search individuals suspected of involvement in terrorism. Miranda is obviously a journalist, not a terrorist. When Greenwald and the documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras flew to New York last week to accept the George Polk Award in Journalism for their work on the Snowden files, they did so without knowing whether they would be subpoenaed or detained.
Brazilians are proud to be hosting Greenwald, and the Brazilian media has followed the Snowden disclosures closely. Rousseff, despite last summer's widespread domestic unrest over the soaring cost of living in Brazilian cities, will likely cruise to reelection, in part due to the uncompromising posture she has maintained throughout the international imbroglio the Snowden files unleashed. After an initial pledge to improve relations with the US, which had faltered when her predecessor Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva invited Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Brazil in 2009, Rousseff is standing up to Obama: she has drawn a line in the sand regarding NSA spying. In September of last year, she canceled a state visit to the US scheduled for October, citing Brazil's dissatisfaction with US explanations for spying on Brazilian communications.
Earlier that summer, some of Snowden's leaked documents disclosed that Rousseff, along with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, was one of the principal targets of NSA espionage. Rousseff's personal communications were bugged, as were those of an undisclosed number of her "key advisers." Merkel was criticized for remaining unmoved by US spying on the German people until she learned that her personal "handie" was also tapped — Germany is, after all, too closely allied and economically engaged with the US and its spy partner Britain for Merkel, an incorrigible pragmatist, to have retaliated in a meaningful way. Rousseff, by contrast, opposed American disregard for international norms and human rights in no uncertain terms. She dedicated half of her speech at the opening of the 68th UN general assembly in September to a withering rebuke of US spying (full text of the speech is available here; translations from the Portuguese are my own).
"Never," Rousseff declared, "should the security of the citizens of one country be guaranteed through the violation of fundamental human and civil rights of the citizens of another country." The careful wording of her remarks — and her controlled, but seething delivery — made it easy to read them as a broader protest of American techno-military aggression: she may just as well have been speaking of President Obama's semi-secret drone program. Rousseff's choice of venue was, after all, intended to signal not only the international concern over the Snowden revelations. It was also calculated to emphasize the double standard by which the world's "policeman" measures human rights: Article 12 of the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights reads:
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
The US and Brazil both voted in favor in the UDHR when it was adopted in 1948, but neither country has had a stellar record of upholding it. Case in point: from 1964 to 1985, Brazilians endured a repressive military dictatorship that staged elections between official parties; imprisoned, tortured and assassinated its opponents; and served the interests of the wealthy supporters of the coup, both domestic and foreign, at the expense of perpetuating extreme social inequality. American warships stood by off the coast of Brazil when the Brazilian military took power, and Lyndon Johnson sent a telegram to congratulate General Castelo Branco just four hours after the military had seized power. The Brazilian dictatorship also took part in Operation Condor, the clandestine campaign through which right-wing Latin American dictatorships in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, and Paraguay collectively engaged in persecuting political dissidents, with US collaboration. Condor entailed spying on suspected "subversives" and sharing information about them with the secret police of neighboring dictatorships, ensuring that any political opponents who escaped across national borders would not be safe in most adjacent countries, either. Among those caught in this net of transnational state espionage and terror was Dilma Rousseff.
Thus, Rousseff's appearance before the UN marked a reversal of fortunes: here was the president of Brazil, standing in New York before the assembled dignitaries and heads of state from the world over, denouncing America's mass surveillance of her people as an abuse of human rights. The Brazilian president knows of what she speaks. Like the presidents of neighboring Chile and Uruguay, Rousseff herself was imprisoned and tortured for political dissidence — in her case involvement in a Marxist guerrilla cell — and is therefore well acquainted with the price of the human right to privacy and the freedom of expression. "Like many other Latin Americans," she continued in her speech,
I struggled against authoritarianism and censorship and I will not cease in my intransigent defense of the individual right to privacy and of the sovereignty of my country. Without this — the right to privacy — there is not true freedom of expression or opinion, and therefore, there is not effective democracy. Without respecting sovereignty, there is no basis for the relations between nations.
Mr. President, we have before us a serious case of the violation of human rights and of civil liberties; the invasion and capture of secret information relating to business activities and, above all, the disrespect of my country's national sovereignty.
The problem, however, transcends the bilateral relationship between two countries. It affects the international community, from which it now demands a response. Telecommunications information technology cannot be a new battlefield between states. This is the moment to create for ourselves conditions for preventing cybernetic space from becoming a new weapon of war, whether through espionage, sabotage, or attacks on the systems and infrastructures of other countries.
It is highly unusual for a nominal ally of the United States to make it the subject of such stark condemnation. But Rousseff was unambiguous: the days of Rooseveltian "Big Stick diplomacy" are over. Her speech provoked widespread public debate in Europe and South America, but gained little traction in the American press.
Rousseff's UN address is noteworthy beyond just her remarks on the US surveillance program. With scarcely a transition, she then reminded the assembled delegates about Brazil's rapid strides to improve social equality. In just the most recent two years, Brazil has lifted 22 million people from poverty. This is due, she explained, to her government's investment in its people through the Brazil Without Misery Plan, an expansion of the far-reaching and highly effective anti-poverty programs initiated under her predecessor and political mentor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
These remarks were a subtle, but powerful, comparison between Brazil and its nosy North American "ally." Rousseff and her ministers weren't the only victims of NSA surveillance: Petrobras, the mammoth Brazilian petroleum company, was a principal target of the program. For Brazilians, this economic espionage was tantamount to sabotaging their social gains. The Brazilian government holds a 64 percent stake in Petrobras, and devotes 75 percent of the petroleum royalties it receives to education and 25 percent to public health. The Workers' Party (PT), in power since 2003, has achieved great economic and electoral success with these expansive social programs. Unlike Europe and North America, whose economies stagnate in the clutches of austerity hawks, Brazil has managed to increase its investment in what the PT calls "capital humano." What was once one of the most economically unequal societies in the world has now implemented hugely popular policies and institutions to reverse course: the last 10 years have seen the largest reduction in inequality in Brazil in over half a century. Meanwhile, the poverty rate in the US has slipped back to pre-1993 levels, and the estimated number of Americans living in poverty has for the first time hit the 50-million mark. Near-record rates of income inequality are destroying the middle class and have divided the nation.
Although neither Edward Snowden, nor Dilma Rousseff, nor Petrobras is mentioned in The NSA Report (which mentions Brazil only once), a careful reader will detect their presence.
The NSA Report — commissioned by the White House in August, published on its website in December, and now available in print via Princeton University Press— was authored by the President's Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies. As suggested by its official title, "Liberty and Security in a Changing World," the Report was intended to advise President Obama on how to reform the data collection practices of the Intelligence Community (IC), in particular the NSA. Its authors include such veterans of the US security sector as Richard A. Clarke, Michael J. Morrell, and Peter Swire. This insiders' perspective, in theory, is balanced by the addition to the group of constitutional lawyers Geoffrey R. Stone and Cass Sunstein. The unofficial purpose of the Report, however, was the Obama administration's attempt to put a lid on the NSA scandal by pretending to be interested in reform. As Luke Harding points out in The Snowden Files, the Review Group was working out of the offices of the Director of National Intelligence, currently occupied by the felonious General James Clapper, who knowingly lied in Congressional testimony about the bulk collection of Americans' communication data.
Though it makes frequent recourse to the first-person plural, the "we" of the Report is not convincingly univocal. The constitutional lawyers seem absent from the militaristic language that divides the world into "nations with whom we share fundamental values and interests" (whose leaders and people the NSA should only surveil after very careful consideration) and those with whom we do not (whose leaders we do not trust and who thus deserve to be monitored at all times).
Events like the Morales plane-grounding demonstrate that the United States — while understanding it must respect some countries' sovereignty for geopolitical strategic reasons — feels untrammeled when it comes to violating the sovereignty of others, such as Germany and Bolivia. This psychology leads the Review Group to make some unwise and myopic recommendations. The Group recommends, for example that "with a small number of closely allied governments, the US Government should explore understandings or arrangements regarding intelligence collection guidelines and practices with respect to each other's citizens." Harmless wording at first blush — but such thinking has historically formed the basis for programs long decried for their intelligence abuses and political oppression, such as Operation Condor.
The anodyne language of these and other recommendations signals the imperial agenda out of which they are born: The NSA Report is obsessed with framing the debate over surveillance around the neopositivist vocabulary of "risk management," but we know from history that political liberty will always suffer when a dominant regime deems a nation, its leadership or its population a "national security threat" — just ask Dilma Rousseff.
Perhaps more to the point, consider the way data collection is already used against the populations of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen. Although the Obama administration recently scaled back the CIA's use of "signature" drone strikes — those in which, unlike "personality" strikes, the unidentified victim is not known to be an al-Qaeda operative, but merely is a "military aged male" whose "suspicious" behavior has been recorded by surveillance drones — this is only because it more heavily relies on surveillance of cellphone metadata to orient drone strikes. First outlined by the Washington Post in July, the NSA's Geo Cell program identifies the targets of drone strikes based on cell phone use and location. According to the Post, the internal catchphrase "We Track 'Em, You Whack 'Em" was used to describe how Geo Cell functioned.
More recent reporting by Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill explains how Geo Cell uses "industrial level" NSA surveillance to target SIM cards, not people. This has led to the killing of innocent recipients of borrowed and sold phones. After all, victims of these supposedly "targeted" strikes are not always militants. Despite government estimates to the contrary, the impact of drones on the civilian populations in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Yemen is significant. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism estimates that drones assassinated between 2562 and 3325 people over an eight-year period in Pakistan alone. An estimated 474-881 of these victims were civilians; the defense community has routinely lied about these civilian casualties. Bystanders, family members, and neighbors are likely the most frequent civilian victims, since Geo Cell targeting is accurate within 30 feet of a targeted SIM card. Medical responders are also sometimes killed in "double tap" strikes separated by a few minutes. The NYU–Stanford "Living Under Drones" project has documented the ordeal that rural and tribal communities face: along with the sudden loss of family members, friends, and community elders, the omnipresent but unpredictable threat of bombings inflicts constant terror and psychological stress on local civilian populations. Clearly, this campaign of state-sponsored terror amounts to nothing less than shameful human rights violations, if not outright war crimes.
Automated warfare condenses the relation between drones and mass surveillance, and makes evident the ethical danger inherent to them both. No matter what sorts of "good practices," "guidelines," or legal justifications are implemented to govern unmanned drones and mass surveillance, they are unacceptably dangerous inflations of executive and militaristic power. To recapitulate Rousseff's words, "Never should the security of the citizens of one country be guaranteed through the violation of fundamental human and civil rights of the citizens of another country." Unfortunately, the American public is largely shielded from knowing about these programs, which have been underway for years in their name.
The magnitude of such executive and militaristic overreach is not lost on the lawyers among the Review Group. The Report rightfully frets over the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution, the one that NSA surveillance most cavalierly violates. It also acknowledges that First Amedment rights to free expression are implicitly limited as a consequence of disregarding the Fourth through unwarranted surveillance.
The text of the Fourth is short, and worth considering in its entirety:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
A 1967 court ruling, Katz v. United States, reaffirmed the right to "reasonable expectations of privacy" with regard to telephone wiretapping. But it is behind the word "reasonable" that the bad-faith legal positivism of both the Bush and Obama administrations festers. Though telephony and electronic metadata could be considered under protection of the Fourth as personal "effects," the text of the amendment obviously says nothing about email, telephone, or electronic metadata. Herein lies the problem.
The committee thus asks itself: even admitting the risks the United States faces from terrorists and foreign governments, is it "reasonable" to expect that the NSA collect information on virtually all electronic and telecommunications originating in, terminating in, or crossing the United States or its closest ally, the UK? Is it reasonable for the NSA to have hacked into the servers of Google and Yahoo to harvest their traffic? Or to compel tech and telecom firms to disclose the records of ordinary Americans by using secret subpoenas intended for investigating matters of national security, all without the demonstration of probable cause? Is it reasonable to expect Americans to encrypt all of their personal emails and telephone calls, to use onion-routing to surf the internet, and to use discardable "burner" phones to avoid unnecessary government snooping?
The authors of The NSA Report agree that no, this massive dragnet is not at all reasonable, not even from a practical standpoint. Many of their recommendations ought to be considered welcome and prudent first steps toward closing the legal loopholes used to legitimate the NSA's vast domestic spying program. The Group acknowledges the legal murkiness of NSA data collection straightaway in their Preface, stating unequivocally that "all parts of the government, including those that protect our national security, must be subject to the rule of law." The illegality of certain NSA surveillance activities, such as spying on Petrobras, is the clear implication of many of the panel's recommendations. Surveillance, they write, "must not be directed at illicit or illegitimate ends, such as the theft of trade secrets or obtaining commercial gain for domestic industries."
Although its authors ultimately hew to the assertion that NSA was only ever acting in the interest of national security, the Report details how the Agency blew off the 1975 Church Committee recommendation that NSA "should not monitor domestic communications, even for foreign intelligence purposes." The Church Committee — which investigated the Johnson and Nixon administrations for illegally spying on suspected American "subversives" — found that these abuses "were due in large measure to the fact that the system of checks and balances — created in our Constitution to limit abuse of governmental power — was seldom applied to the intelligence community," and that the agencies concealed "improper activities from their superiors in the executive branch and from Congress."
The NSA Report cites these passages of the Church Report as it reviews the recent abuses, which similarly occurred through deceiving Congress and evading oversight. In particular, it tells how after whistleblower Thomas Tamm blew the cover on Stellar Wind — the NSA's program to collect and store Americans' telephony data — DOJ and NSA lawyers pried open legal loopholes for even more ambitious data-gathering schemes that showed total indifference to the requirement of probable cause. Their duplicitous readings of FISA, a law nominally concerned with the privacy of Americans, and the Patriot Act (which was not), were designed to thwart Congressional and legal oversight whenever possible. This occurred through several mechanisms, among them the extensive invocation of section 215 of the Patriot Act. Section 215 permits the collection of material "relevant" to "national security," allowing intelligence agencies to circumvent the specificities of "reasonableness" and "probable cause" the Fourth Amendment and subsequent court rulings require. The PATRIOT Act thus allowed FBI and NSA to obtain secret court orders, rather than subpoenas, to acquire bulk metadata from telecoms and retain it for five years. These 215 authorizations continued on a rolling basis of 90-day increments that were repeatedly reauthorized in the secret proceedings of the FISA court. Whenever the FISC resisted, the FBI would issue a National Security Letter, an order which only required approval from one of the 56 FBI field offices, to obtain the same records: telephone logs, email subscriber information, and banking and credit card transactions. The NSA Report observes that 21,000 NSLs were issued in fiscal year 2012. Approximately 97 percent of NSLs were also subject to non-disclosure or "gag" orders that prohibited recipients from telling their customers and subscribers that information had been collected.
All of this was conducted in secret, of course. Snowden's leaked documents make it clear why the public was kept unaware: not because knowledge of the programs' existence would tip off would-be terrorists that their communications might be monitored (the terrorists that orchestrated 9/11 understood they might be wiretapped, and Osama bin Laden knew better than to use email or a conventional telephone) — but because they would never have agreed to these abuses of their privacy.
Despite the feigned indignation of officials at Facebook, Apple, Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, Snowden's documents show corporate complicity in the NSA surveillance programs. Telecoms complied with Stellar Wind, and were handsomely paid for it: as Luke Harding recalls, "the NSA-telecoms partnership was highly lucrative. In return for access to 81 per cent of international telephone calls, Washington pays the private telecom giants many hundreds of millions of dollars a year." Tech giants followed with Prism, one of the NSA's programs for collecting internet data. Though there is no evidence that tech firms were paid for their collaboration with the NSA, they did not adequately protest. In the Greenwald–Poitras interview conducted in his Hong Kong hotel room, Snowden speaks about "Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft" "getting together" with the NSA to "provide the NSA direct access to back ends" of their systems so that the corporations themselves wouldn't be held liable for what NSA does with this access.
Yet in the wake of the Snowden revelations, Facebook et. al. have sought to paint themselves as equally aggrieved victims of government intrusion to avoid the wrath of consumers. Although it is true that the NSA engaged in other, more aggressive hacking efforts than Prism — such as using fake Facebook pages to launch spyware into users' machines under program Quantumhand — leaks that followed the Prism disclosures show that Big Tech's claims of ignorance are specious.
Tech firms are nevertheless still desperate to cover their tracks with disingenuous public outrage. Though his company is one of the most flagrant abusers of consumer privacy in the first place, Mark Zuckerberg called President Obama after the QUANTUMHAND revelations to complain about the damage NSA spying has done to Americans' trust in business and government. Although Facebook and the other tech firms have disavowed any knowledge of PRISM, the NSA's chief counsel recently testified before Congress that such a denial is only rhetorical positioning: the firms were aware of the program, just not its internal NSA codename. So there is no reason to believe his call to Obama was anything but another cynical PR stunt.
To blunt criticism from all sides, The NSA Report repeatedly states the need for greater oversight and accountability of NSA spying. It recommends, among many other things:
that the director of the NSA be a civilian, and that he or she be subject to Senate confirmation
that this director not also be the head of the military's US Cyber Command (as is currently the case)
the increased transparency of the activities of the FISA court (FISC)
the appointment of a Public Interest Advocate permitted to represent the interests of civil liberties and privacy groups during classified hearings of the FISC
enhanced oversight of National Security Letters and section 215 orders (used to compel businesses — like tech firms, telecoms, and banks—to hand over their records)
restriction of non-disclosure orders
and the creation of a new Civil Liberties and Privacy Protection Board, tasked with ongoing review of the impact of government surveillance activities on civil liberties, and of reviewing whistleblowers' accusations of waste, abuse, and fraud.
Importantly, the Group also recommends that Congress enact legislation "that terminates the storage of bulk telephony metadata" by the government and transition to a system where that information is held by a third party. Eager to get out ahead of Congress, President Obama has proposed a version of this last reform himself. His proposal would leave the metadata in the hands of telephone companies, and would only require phone companies to retain the data for 18 months. But this reform addresses only a fraction of extant privacy concerns, especially if the Patriot Act is not also amended or repealed.
All the new oversight the Report suggests is welcome. But would it be enforced? The executive branch has time and again subverted any checks that Congress attempts to impose on the intelligence community, whether through executive orders, bogus legal reasoning, or outright lies. Congress certainly hasn't done itself any favors by continually reauthorizing the Patriot Act, amending FISA, and otherwise providing legal cover for much of the IC's extralegal activity. However, the current showdown between Senator Dianne Feinstein and the CIA over the Agency's alleged spying on and attempted sabotage of a Senate Intelligence Committee investigation of the CIA's rendition and torture program suggests that the legislature is waking from its torpor, and beginning to reassert its constitutional authorities over the Executive. Snowden's disclosures, though condemned by Feinstein and other members of Congress, may have indirectly spurred the Chairwoman into action by focusing so much attention on the IC's contempt for the Constitution.
Despite its calls for transparency, the Review Group also appears to understand the need for the IC to circle the wagons and tighten its own mechanisms of secrecy and internal surveillance. It suggests a number of steps to reduce "insider threats" — a reference to the McCarthyite Insider Threat Program the Obama administration created, a program that encourages federal employees to tattle on suspicious colleagues. "Employees with high-level security clearances," the Report continues, "should be subject to a Personnel Continuous Monitoring Program." Why not just force them all to wear Google Glass?
Without naming him, the Report refers indirectly to Snowden. "Security clearance levels should be further differentiated," they write, in reference to the systems administrator status that evidently allowed Snowden near-universal access to NSA files. But as Harding points out in The Snowden Files, among the curiosities of the Snowden affair is that some of the most crucial files became accessible to Snowden only after his federal employment at the CIA and NSA. In March 2013, Snowden joined Booz Allen Hamilton, a $6 billion defense contractor separated from the Pentagon by a quickly revolving door. Both Clapper and former CIA director James Woolsey, among others, have enjoyed lucrative positions at Booz Allen. As David Sirota wrote for Salon, these same security contractors are also at the Congressional back door, greasing its hinges by bankrolling the campaigns of the NSA's biggest defenders on the Hill. Ironically, had it not been for the neoliberal craze for outsourcing even the most sensitive government activities to contractors like Booz Allen, perhaps Snowden would never have gained access to some of the most damning files.
Snowden's life before becoming "the world's most wanted man" is not terribly interesting. The first pages of The Snowden Files offer readers the patched narrative of available details. The author, a Guardian journalist who worked on the Snowden stories, did not have access to Snowden while writing it. He relies instead on second-hand accounts of the former NSA contractor. Thus, a repetition of what we already knew: before becoming a highly-paid systems administrator, Snowden was somewhat of a failure. He was a high-school dropout and an inept solider, discharged after basic training. The gun-owning libertarian managed to flex his former-military credentials into a security job at the CIA that later led to his promotion into a series of tech support jobs with the Agency in Geneva and Tokyo, followed by stints at the NSA in Maryland and Hawaii. This self-reliance, the story goes, explains his support of libertarian Republican Ron Paul in the 2012 election.
Somewhere along the way, a political awakening occurs. All we know of Snowden's current politics is what can be gleaned from the Greenwald–Poitras interview. Amid his persecution by the US government, which has indicted him on espionage charges that carry a sentence upwards of 30 years in prison, or possibly the death penalty, Snowden has continued to deflect attention away from himself. Though he has recently begun to accept online public speaking engagements — including an address to Austin's SXSW Festival, and more recently at the TED convention in Vancouver — Snowden has made it clear that he does not want the coverage around the leaks to be about Edward Snowden, but about the misdeeds of a military–surveillance complex run amok. His self-effacement is meant to run counter to the widely documented egotism of Julian Assange, itself the subject of a lengthy essay by Assange's would-be ghostwriter Andrew O'Hagan in a recent issue of the London Review of Books.
Indeed, Harding suggests that Assange was jealous of Snowden's trove of documents, which comprised a larger and more sensational scoop than anything WikiLeaks ever handled, including Cablegate. O'Hagan's LRB article describes Assange's regard of Snowden as one of "irritable admiration." In either case, ever since his forced internment in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, Assange has found it difficult to maintain his relevance. Harding indicates that WikiLeaks' self-publicized assistance in orchestrating Snowden's flight from Hong Kong to Russia was Assange's attempt to claim credit for involvement in the Snowden's leaks and thus regain the spotlight. O'Hagan confirms this, reporting that Assange asked for his help writing a big-screen thriller about how he helped Snowden escape Hong Kong. However, Snowden had considered, but ultimately rejected handing over the NSA documents to Assange and WikiLeaks. He had observed the way Cablegate's unfiltered dump of classified cables estranged Assange from many of his supporters, and preferred instead to work with journalists experienced in handling classified information in ways that would not put American lives in danger.
This is where Harding makes his contribution, recounting the heady days of the Snowden leaks from a journalistic perspective. He spends a lot of time defending his employer, the Guardian, as well as ridiculing the British government's ironic incomprehension of the technical aspects of the leak: GCHQ, the British analog to NSA, sent a goon squad to the paper's offices to destroy computers used to examine the Snowden files. Elsewhere, Harding has claimed that paragraphs of his book, which is critical of the NSA, would self-delete as he was writing it offline, suggesting that NSA or GCHQ had hacked his computer and was attempting to intimidate him. In his book, Harding is mostly concerned with the personalities of Snowden and the Guardian journalists involved in the publication of the files. Of Snowden's three Hong Kong contacts, Glenn Greenwald comes across as a scattered but bold crusader, documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras is cast as an unsung and persecuted truth-teller, and the Guardian's Ewen MacAskill appears as the paper's chummy but shrewd senior reporter, sent to vet Snowden's authenticity.
The most interesting among the book's cast of journalists is Janine Gibson, the spunky editor of the lean and fierce US arm of the Guardian. Acting to protect the paper from accusations of irresponsible publication like the ones that alienated WikiLeaks, Gibson and Spencer Ackerman liaised with officials in the Obama administration before publishing the initial stories based on Snowden's leaks: the Verizon and Prism disclosures. Publication of the Snowden revelations was Gibson's call, and she refused to back down in the face of intimidation by Obama administration officials Sean M. Joyce (FBI deputy director), Chris Inglis (NSA deputy directory), and PRISM cheerleader Robert S. Litt (legal counsel to the Office of Director of National Intelligence, headed by James Clapper), who comprised the team of "heavyweights" dispatched by the White House to discourage the Guardian from publishing. Such a tactic had already worked on The New York Times, which had been sitting on the Verizon story for over a year. But Gibson didn't yield.
Lacking much new material on Snowden himself, Harding continues to bait with the media hook of Snowden's improbable youth, given the magnitude of his actions. Last summer, those hostile to Snowden — from talking heads on cable TV to President Obama — referred to him as a "kid" in order to tar his act of courage as an act of adolescent impulsivity. He was called worse, of course — everything from hasty to "traitor" and "Russian/Chinese spy." But a consistent feature of his disparagement by those who attempted to malign him was commentary on his age and appearance, despite how irrelevant both are to his actions. It is annoying that Harding continues this meme, quoting the surprise Poitras and Greenwald expressed when they discovered their "Deep Throat" was not a grizzled curmudgeon, but a 29-year-old nerd. In this way he plays into the mainstream media's depiction of Snowden as an irresponsible "kid" whose disclosures were acts of adolescent rebellion rather than the principled position he articulately defines in the Greenwald–Poitras interview.
Snowden's youthful naïveté, as the man himself admits, was to have swallowed the narrative Americans were fed about the purpose of US involvement in the Middle East: "We were actually involved in misleading the public, and misleading all publics, not just the American public," he says of his work in the intelligence community. He has cited the "litany of lies from senior officials [of the IC] to Congress" — naming Clapper's lie in particular — as his motivation for going public with the exfiltrated documents. "The public needs to decide whether these programs and policies are right or wrong," he says. This is an appeal to ethics that you won't find anywhere in the IC.
Even the old boys of The NSA Report admit that sometimes, what is strategic and efficient is simply not right. But since it was not asked to do so, the Review Group does not recommend legal proceedings against any individuals. Indeed, punishment for the masterminds of the NSA's huge affront to the Constitution is, unfortunately, not very likely.
However, there remains one obvious way for Congress to assert leadership: James Clapper lied to Congress about the NSA's domestic spying activities. Lying in Congressional testimony falls under the rubric of obstructing the business of Congress — in this case its duty to oversee executive agencies like the NSA — and is considered contempt of Congress. The Senate is empowered to find Clapper in contempt of Congress, and to refer to the matter to the US Attorney for Washington DC, whom it may then compel to assemble a grand jury to decide whether to pursue criminal proceedings against him.
Let us not forget that all of this malfeasance began or expanded after Obama took office in 2008, pledging the most transparent administration in American history. Moreover, despite "welcoming the debate" that Snowden and the Guardian began, Obama has done almost nothing to rein in the NSA or encourage criminal investigation of the Agency's alleged violations of Americans' constitutional rights. He has ignored most of the recommendations contained in The NSA Report. He has not even dismissed James Clapper.
Snowden cites his disillusionment with Obama's failure to investigate the unlawful activities of the Bush administration as the experience that "hardened" his resolve to act on what he knew. It is easy to understand why: official channels would have blocked his complaint. Far from immature and self-serving, Edward Snowden then took a principled stand and made a tremendous sacrifice for his country. As time passes, both he and Chelsea Manning will be regarded as heroes and champions of freedom. Barack Obama will not. Unless, perhaps, he pardons them.
Adam Morris contributes regularly to the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Adam Morris is a writer and translator living in San Francisco. Recent essays and translations have appeared in BOMB, n+1, The Point, and The Believer. He is author of American Messiahs: False Prophets of a Damned Nation (Liveright, 2019).
Enactments Through a Different Lens: Allan deSouza - An Artist Profile
All photographs courtesy of Allan deSouza. IT SEEMS ONLY FITTING here, on a site devoted to literary discussion, to situate my photographic work in relation to writing. Nothing new in this: Henri Cartier-Bresson's "decisive moment" makes better sense when ...
Disobedience & Miseducation: Occupy and the Academy
Can protest and civil disobedience still change an entrenched American way of life? Academics are looking to the Occupy movement for answers....
Democracy – What Is It Good For?: David Graeber and Gar Alperovitz
Triptych image: Occupy Wall St., Brazil, July 11, 2013 IN HIS NEW BOOK The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement, David Graeber rejects the notion that "democracy" means the freedom to cast a desultory vote for ...
Fair Warning: Julian Assange's "Cypherpunks"
Adam Morris on Julian Assange's "Cypherpunks."...
Drone Warfare: Tiqqun, the Young-Girl and the Imperialism of the Trivial
Claire Fontaine, The Weeping Wall Inside Us All, 2009 Neon "TIQQUN" IS A WORD that references the Jewish messianic tradition. It derives from "tikkun olam," a Hebrew phrase that has been interpreted to mean "reparation," "restitution," "healing of the world" and "...