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Women on 20s
Monday April 25th, 2016 at 10:17 AM 7 Comments and 24 Shares To be fair, Jackson is on the $20 because he hated paper currency and the treasury has been trolling him about it since 1928. I never found out why Jackson was put on the $20, replacing Grover Cleveland, but apparently the treasury dept doesn't know either https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/03/06/why-is-andrew-jackson-on-the-20-bill-the-answer-may-be-lost-to-history/ 5 public comments Bien resume Because it's just so dumb. Truth is dumber than fiction. I think it's xenophobic that we only have American figures on our bills.
Moses Lake, WA I get that there are security reasons for the schedule, but this is like the ONE problem we have where the right answer is both easy and straightforward. If we can't figure it out, maybe we should just give up and just replace all the portraits on the bills with that weird pyramid eye thing.

Sunday January 24th, 2016 at 3:13 AM Ben and Luke's Excellent Adventures Episode 006: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

Posted on January 24, 2016


Ben and Luke discuss a movie about two criminals in the not-so-old west and their inability to adapt to the modern era. Star Trek actors and the guy from his spaghetti sauce jar are noticed by Ben.

How you can watch Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid:
Watch on Amazon Prime
Buy on DVD/Bluray

Back to Episode List Tooting my own horn! 
#1135; Throw Back the Dead Manâs Coin by David Malki
Friday June 26th, 2015 at 8:52 AM 4 Comments and 23 Shares 4 public comments Ha! Awesome
Astoria NY No but really get rid of student and medical debt and close the loophole on trusts tho 
The Sunday Timesâ Snowden Story is Journalism at its Worst â and Filled with Falsehoods by Glenn Greenwald
Sunday June 14th, 2015 at 3:29 PM (updated below)

Western journalists claim that the big lesson they learned from their key role in selling the Iraq War to the public is that itâs hideous, corrupt and often dangerous journalism to give anonymity to government officials to let them propagandize the public, then uncritically acceptÂ those anonymously voiced claims as Truth. But theyâve learned no such lesson. That tactic continues to be the staple of how major US and British media outlets âreport,â especially in the national security area. And journalists who read such reportsÂ continue to treat self-serving decrees by unnamed, unseen officials â laundered through their media â as gospel, no matter how dubious are the claims or factually false is the reporting. We now have one of the purest examples of this dynamic. Last night, the Murdoch-ownedÂ Sunday Times published their lead front-page Sunday article, headlined âBritish Spies Betrayed to Russians and Chinese.â Just as the conventional media narrative was shifting to pro-Snowden sentiment in the wake of a key court ruling and a new surveillance law, the articleÂ (behind a paywall: full text here) claims in the first paragraph that these two adversariesÂ âhave cracked the top-secret cache of files stolen by the fugitive US whistleblower Edward Snowden, forcing MI6 to pull agents out of live operations in hostile countries, according to senior officials in Downing Street, the Home Office and the security services.â It continues:

Western intelligence agencies say they have been forced into the rescue operations after Moscow gained access to more than 1m classified files held by the former American security contractor, who fled to seek protection from Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, after mounting one of the largest leaks in US history.

Senior government sources confirmed that China had also cracked the encrypted documents, which contain details of secret intelligence techniques and information that could allow British and American spies to be identified.

One senior Home Office official accused Snowden of having âblood on his handsâ, although Downing Street said there was âno evidence of anyone being harmedâ.

Aside from the serious retraction-worthy fabrications on which this articleÂ depends â more on those in a minute â the entire reportÂ is a self-negating joke. It reads like a parody I might quicklyÂ whip upÂ in order to illustrate the core sickness of western journalism.

Unless he cooked an extra-juicy steak, how does Snowden âhave blood on his handsâ if there is âno evidence of anyone being harmed?â As one observer put it last night in describing the government instructions these Sunday Times journalists appear to have obeyed:Â âThereâs no evidence anyoneâs been harmed but weâd like the phrase âblood on his handsâ somewhere in the piece.â

The whole articleÂ does literally nothing other thanÂ quote anonymous British officials. It gives voice to banal but inflammatory accusationsÂ that are made about every whistleblower from Daniel Ellsberg to Chelsea Manning. It offers zero evidence or confirmation for any of its claims. The âjournalistsâ who wrote itÂ neither questioned any of the official assertions nor even quoted anyone who denies them. Itâs pure stenography of the worst kind: some government officials whispered these inflammatoryÂ claims in our ears and told us to print them, but not reveal who they are, and weâre obeying. Breaking!

Stephen Colbert captured this exact pathologyÂ with untoppableÂ precision in his 2006 White House Correspondents speech, when he mockedÂ American journalism to the faces of those who practice it:

But, listen, letâs review the rules. Hereâs how it works.The President makes decisions. Heâs the decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put âem through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration? You know, fiction!

The Sunday Times article is even worse because it protectsÂ the officials theyâre serving with anonymity.Â The beauty of this tactic is that the accusations canât be challenged. The official accusers are being hidden by the journalists so nobody can confrontÂ them or hold them accountable when it turns out to be false. The evidence canât be analyzed or dissected because there literally is none: they just make the accusation and, because theyâre state officials,Â their media-servants will publish it with no evidence needed. And as is always true, there is no way to prove the negative. Itâs like being smeared by a ghost with a substance that you canât touch.

This is the very opposite of journalism. Ponder how dumb someone has to be at this point to read an anonymous government accusation, made with zero evidence, and accept it as true.

But it works. Other news agencies mindlessly repeatedthe Sunday Times claims far and wide.Â  I watched last night as American and British journalists of all kinds reacted to the report on Twitter: by questioning none of it. They did the opposite: they immediately assumed it to be true, then spent hours engaged in somber, self-serious discussions with one anotherÂ over what the geopolitical implications are, how the breach happened, what it means for Snowden, etc. This is the formula thatÂ shapesÂ their brains: anonymous self-serving government assertions = Truth.Â

By definition, authoritarians reflexively believe official claims â no matter how dubious or obviously self-serving, even when made whileÂ hiding behind anonymityâ because thatâs how their submission functions. Journalists who practice this sort of primitiveÂ reporting â I uncritically print what government officials tell me, and give them anonymity so they have no accountability for any it âÂ do so out of a similar authoritarianism, or uber-nationalism, or laziness, or careerism. Whatever the motives, the results are the same: government officials know they can propagandize the public at any time because subservient journalists will give them anonymity to do so and will uncritically disseminate and accept their claims.

At this point, itâs hard to avoid the conclusion that journalists want it this way. Itâs impossible that they donât know better. The exact kinds of accusations laundered in the Sunday Timestoday are made â and then disproven â in every case where someone leaks unflattering information about government officials. In the early 1970s,Â Nixon officials such as John Ehrlichman and Henry Kissinger planted accusationsÂ in the U.S. media that Daniel Ellsberg had secretly given the Pentagon Papers and other key documents to the Soviet Union; everyone now knows this was a lie, but at the time, American journalists repeated it constantly, helping to smear Ellsberg. Thatâs why Ellsberg has constantly defended Snowden and Chelsea Manning from the start: because the same tactics were used to smear him. The same thing happened with Chelsea Manning. WhenÂ WikiLeaks first began publishing the Afghan War logs, U.S. officials screamed that they â all together now â had âblood on their hands.â But when some journalists decided to scrutinize rather than mindlessly repeat the official accusation (i.e., some decided to do journalism), theyÂ found it was a fabrication. Writing under the headline âUS officials privately say WikiLeaks damage limited,â Reutersâ Mark Hosenball reported that âinternal U.S. government reviews have determined that a mass leak of diplomatic cables caused only limited damage to U.S. interests abroad, despite the Obama administrationâs public statements to the contrary.â An AP reportwas headlined âAP review finds no WikiLeaks sources threatened,â and explained that âan Associated Press review of those sourcesraises doubts about the scope of the danger posed by WikiLeaksâ disclosures and the Obama administrationâs angry claims, going back more than a year, that the revelations are life-threatening.â Months earlier, McClatchyâs Nancy YoussefÂ wrote an article headlined âOfficials may beÂ overstating the dangers from WikiLeaks,â and she noted that âdespite similar warnings ahead of the previous two massive releases of classified U.S. intelligence reports by the website, U.S. officials concede that they have no evidence to date that the documents led to anyoneâs death.â

Now we haveÂ exactlyÂ the same thing here. Thereâs an anonymously made claim that Russia and ChinaÂ âcracked the top-secret cache of filesâÂ fromÂ Snowdenâs, but there is literally zero evidence for that claim. These hidden officials also claim that American and British agents were unmasked and had to be rescued, butÂ not a single one is identified.There is speculationthat Russia and China learned things from obtaining the Snowden files, but how could these officials possibly know that, particularly since other government officials are constantly accusing both countries of successfully hacking sensitive government databases?

What kind of person would read evidence-free accusations of this sort from anonymous government officialsÂ â designed to smear a whistleblower they hate âÂ and believe them? Thatâs a particularly compelling question given that Viceâs Jason Leopold just last week obtained and published previously secret documents revealing a coordinated smear campaign in Washington to malign Snowden. Describing those documents, he reported: âA bipartisan group of WashingtonÂ lawmakers solicited details from Pentagon officials that they could useÂ to âdamageâ formerÂ NSA contractor Edward Snowdenâs âcredibility in the press and the court of public opinion.'â

Manifestly then, the âjournalismâ in thisSunday Times articles is as shoddy and unreliable as it gets. Worse, its key accusations depend on retraction-level lies.

The government accusers behind this story have a big obstacle to overcome: namely, Snowden has said unequivocally that when he left Hong Kong, he took no files with him, having given them to the journalists with whom he worked, and then destroying his copy precisely so that it wouldnât be vulnerable as he traveled. How, then, could Russia have obtainedÂ SnowdenâsÂ files as the story claims â âhis documents were encrypted but they werenât completely secure â â if he did not even have physical possession of them?

The only way this smear works is if they claim Snowden lied, and that he did in fact have files with him after he left Hong Kong. TheÂ Sunday Times journalists thus include a paragraph that is designed to prove Snowden lied about this, that he did possess these files while living in Moscow:

It is not clear whether Russia and China stole Snowdenâs data, or whether he voluntarily handed over his secret documents in order to remain at liberty in Hong Kong and Moscow.

David Miranda, the boyfriend of the Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald,was seized at Heathrow in 2013 in possession of 58,000 âhighly classifiedâ intelligence documents after visiting Snowden in Moscow.

Whatâs the problem with that Sunday TimesÂ passage? Itâs an utter lie. David did not visit Snowden in Moscow before being detained. As of the time he was detained in Heathrow, David had never been to Moscow and had never met Snowden. The only cityÂ David visited on that trip before being detained was Berlin, where he stayed in the apartment of Laura Poitras.

TheÂ Sunday Times âjournalistsâ printedÂ an outright fabrication in order toÂ supportÂ their key point: that Snowden had files with him in Moscow. This is the only âfactâ included in their story that suggests Snowden had files with him when he left Hong Kong, and itâs completely, demonstrably false (and just by the way: itâs 2015, not 1971, so referring to gay men in a 10-year spousal relationship with the belittling term âboyfriendsâ is just gross).

Then thereâs the Sunday Timesclaim that âSnowden, a former contractor at the CIA and National Security Agency (NSA), downloaded 1.7m secret documents from western intelligence agencies in 2013.â Even the NSA admits this claim is a lie. The NSA has repeatedly said that it has no idea how many documents Snowden downloaded and has no way to find out. As the NSA itself admits, the 1.7 million numberÂ is not the number the NSA claims Snowden downloadedâ they admit they donât and canât know that number â but merely the amount of documents he interacted with in his years of working at NSA. Hereâs then-NSA chief Keith Alexander explaining exactly that in a 2014 interview with theÂ Australian Financial Review:

AFR:Â Can you now quantify the number of documents [Snowden] stole?

Gen. Alexander: Well, I donât think anybody really knows what he actually took with him, because the way he did it, we donât have an accurate way of counting. What we do have an accurate way of counting is what he touched, what he may have downloaded, and that was more than a million documents.

Letâs repeat that: âI donât think anybody really knows what he actually took with him, because the way he did it, we donât have an accurate way of counting.âÂ Yet someone whispered toÂ the Sunday Timesreporters that Snowden downloaded 1.7 million documents, so like the liars and propagandists that they are, they mindlessly printed it as fact. Thatâs what this whole article is.

Then thereâs the claim that the Russian and Chinese governments learned the names of covert agents by cracking the Snowden file, âforcing MI6 to pull agents out of live operations in hostile countries.â This appears quite clearly to be a fabrication by the Sunday Times for purposes of sensationalism, because if you read the actual anonymous quotes they include, not even the anonymous officialsÂ claim that Russia and China hacked the entire archive, instead offering only vague assertions that Russian and China âhave information.â

Beyond that, how could these hidden British officials possibly know that China and Russia learned things from the Snowden files as opposed to all the other hacking and spying those countries do?Â Moreover, as pointed out last night by my colleague Ryan GallagherÂ â who has worked for well over a year with the full Snowden archive â âIâve reviewed the Snowden documents and Iâve never seen anything in there naming active MI6 agents.â He also said: âIâve seen nothing in the region of 1m documents in the Snowden archive, so I donât know where that number has come from.â

Finally, none of whatâs inÂ the Sunday Times is remotely new. US and UK government officials and their favorite journalists have tried for two years to smearÂ Snowden with these same claims. In June, 2013,Â the New York Times gave anonymity toâtwo Western intelligence experts, who worked for major government spy agenciesâ whoÂ âsaid they believed that the Chinese government had managed to drain the contents of the four laptops that Mr. Snowden said he brought to Hong Kong.â The NYTâs Public Editor chided the paper for printing that garbage, andÂ as I reported in my book,Â then-editor-in-chief Jill Abramson toldÂ the Guardianâs Janine Gibson that they should not have printed that, calling it âirresponsible.â (And thatâs to say nothing of the woefully ignorant notion that Snowden â or anyone else these days â stores massive amounts of data on âfour laptopsâ as opposed to tiny thumb drives).

The GOPâs right-wing extremist Congressman Mike Rogers constantly did the same thing. He once announced with no evidence that âSnowden is working with Russiaâ â a claim even former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell denies â and also argued thatÂ Snowden should âbe charged with murderâ for causing unknown deaths. My personal favorite example of this genre of reckless, desperate smears is the Op-Ed which theÂ Wall Street Journal published in May, 2014, by neocon Edward Jay Epstein, which had thisÂ still-hilariousÂ paragraph:

A former member of President Obamaâs cabinet went even further, suggesting to me off the record in March this year that there are only three possible explanations for the Snowden heist: 1) It was a Russian espionage operation; 2) It was a Chinese espionage operation, or 3) It was a joint Sino-Russian operation.

It must be one of those, an anonymous official told me! It must be! Either Russia did it. Or China did it. Or they did it together!Â That is American journalism.

TheÂ Sunday Timestoday merelyÂ recycled the same evidence-free smears that have been used by government officials for years â not only against Snowden, but all whistleblowers â and added a dose of sensationalism and then baked it with demonstrable lies. Thatâs just how western journalism works, and itâs the opposite of surprising. But what is surprising, and grotesque, is how many people (including other journalists) continue to be so plagued by some combination of stupidity and gullibility, so that no matter how many times this trick is revealed, they keep falling forÂ it.Â If some anonymous government officials said it, and journalists repeat it while hiding who they are, I guess it must be true.Â

UPDATE: The Sunday TimesÂ has now quietly deleted one of the central, glaring lies in its story: that David Miranda had just met with Snowden in Moscow when he was detained at Heathrow carrying classified documents. By âquietly deleted,â I mean just that: they just removed it from their story without any indication or note to their readers that theyâve done so (though it remains in the print edition and thus requires a retraction). Thatâs indicative ofÂ the standard of âjournalismâ for the article itself. Multiple other falsehoods, and all sorts of shoddy journalistic practices, remain thus far unchanged.

Photo:Â Sean Gallup/Getty Images

The post The Sunday Timesâ Snowden Story is Journalism at its Worst â and Filled with Falsehoods appeared first on The Intercept.
 
â Edward Snowden statue secretly installed in Brooklyn park
Monday April 6th, 2015 at 8:24 PM I love that people did this to honor a great patriot of our country, and I’m neither surprised nor offended that it was removed. I can’t fault the city staffers for doing their jobs.

But the truly Orwellian part that just gives me the chills and makes me ashamed to live in New York was that the city employees covered it with a tarp for a while before it could be removed.

What were they so afraid of? People being reminded of Edward Snowden’s existence? That’s truly cowardly and un-American. Or at least, it’s against the ideals that I thought America held dearly, which it keeps proving me wrong about.

∞ Permalink
 
Tuesday February 10th, 2015 at 9:21 AM 2 Comments and 5 Shares The worst cold I’ve had in a decade is beginning its third week. I knew we were screwed as soon as I dropped my kid off at preschool and saw one of his classmates visibly very sick. Fortunately, my kid and wife get over viruses quickly, so they were fine in less than a week.

I started thinking, in my miserable feel-like-I-have-a-fever-but-I-don’t state tonight (during which I probably shouldn’t be blogging, but oh well), what a shame it is that people build up immunities to viruses throughout their entire lives, but when they die, all of that progress is lost, and every new person needs to start all that work from scratch. How incredible would it be if we could somehow capture and recreate those immunities so future generations wouldn’t get these viruses?

It only took a few more seconds before my cold-impaired mind realized that it had just invented vaccines, they already exist, and they’re amazing. Because even though we haven’t found a vaccine for colds yet (and probably won’t), the common cold is mostly a minor inconvenience. Vaccines for much more deadly viruses have existed for decades, most work extremely well with effectively zero risk, and they have saved millions of lives.

Vaccines are truly one of humanity’s greatest and most important accomplishments.

It’s tragic, dangerous, and incredibly destructive that society is needlessly regressing on this front. I’m sadly confident that anti-intellectualism and shunning of widely proven scientific data, selfishly and shamelessly encouraged by entertainers and politicians to advance their careers, will prove to be the most damaging and deadly regression of developed society in my lifetime.

We’ve made vaccination a “personal choice” because anything else is too expensive, politically. Parents refusing vaccines are so numerous now that we can’t protect ourselves from them. We can’t know if the next visit to the doctor or the next day at school will expose us to a dangerous disease that was nearly eradicated a few years ago but is now, tragically and stupidly, on the rise.

A harmless “personal choice” doesn’t damage others. The color of your pants is a personal choice. Vaccine denial isn’t — it’s a severe risk to the public’s health and safety. Not just to the deniers — to everyone.

Refusing vaccines isn’t new, but it used to be very rare and unheard of. Deniers used to vaguely cite religion (another “personal choice” that often damages innocent bystanders in practice), and nobody really questioned it because religious justification is the ultimate conversation-ender, immune to almost any common-sense challenges or legal restrictions.

But now, being anti-vaccine is just another societally acceptable difference of opinion, a pants color, a team you’re on, an option to tick on your Facebook page. The most scary and dangerous thing about anti-vaxxers today isn’t that they exist — they always have, and always will — it’s that their “personal choice” brings almost no consequences or restrictions (unless their children contract a preventable disease, which I wouldn’t wish on anyone), so they’ll only keep getting more numerous.

I don’t know how to fix this. Government-required vaccines are impractical, invasive, politically impossible, and probably wouldn’t actually be effective — there would certainly be a “religious” exemption, so anti-vaxxers would just go back to conjuring vague religious justifications like they used to.

We can’t make people vaccinate themselves and their children. But we can make that a more expensive proposition for them, and a less dangerous proposition for the rest of us, by speaking out and making unnecessary anti-vax choices less societally acceptable.

Even if that means an occasional tense conversation, even if that means my kid can’t go over to certain friends’ houses, and even if that means schools and doctor’s offices need to start turning people away who make that “personal choice”, we need to push back.

Because next time, it might not be a cold.
 2 public comments "and even if that means schools and doctorâs offices need to start turning people away who make that 'personal choice'"...

Proud to say my kids' pediatrician already does this. One of their first questions: "will you be having your kids vaccinated? Because if not, we have a list of alternative doctors for you." "religious justification is the ultimate conversation-ender, immune to almost any common-sense challenges or legal restrictions" â I will be quoting that. I hear that. As a religious person who *isn't* a denier of reason, these softball lobs at straw men religion kind of irk me. Still, I agree with the overall point of the post. Anti-Vax people are looney. Unfortunately where I live in NC the reasonable religious people are as rare as Bigfoot. Used to not be the case but I've been yelled at for celebrating Halloween. Vaccines didn't come up until obama said they were good oddly enough. Oh dear, that sounds awful. I'll pray for you ;-)