Month: May 2014

Indiscriminate Soup: separating the moochers from the parasites


by digby

If there’s one thing we’ve learned from the whining of the plutocrats in recent years it’s that these wealthy elites truly believe they not only work harder than the rest of us but that they are actually better people with higher moral values. How else can one explain the fact that they have so much money?

I have written about this many times, most recently in this piece discussing how the aristocratic concept of noblesse oblige is making a big comeback. But until today, I hadn’t realized that it is literally being reinstituted under the leadership of Paul Ryan. This major piece by Arthur Delaney goes deep into Ryan’s new “poverty” tour. This little excerpt speaks to my point:

“If you’re driving from the suburb to the sports arena downtown by these blighted neighborhoods, you can’t just say, ‘I’m paying my taxes, government’s got to fix that.’ You need to get involved,” Ryan said on the radio show. “You need to get involved yourself, whether through a good mentor program, or some religious charity, whatever it is to make a difference. And that’s how we help resuscitate our culture.”

Ryan’s comment could have come straight from the late 1800s, an era of rapid industrialization, robber barons and unrest known as the Gilded Age.

The financial panic of 1873 triggered a worldwide depression. Bank failures led to widespread layoffs, and welfare historians have documented increasing demands for private and public poor relief at the local level. Concern rose about tramps roaming from city to city to soak up whatever charity they could find. Welfare reformers at the time fought to stop the handouts, which they said only exacerbated tramping.

“Next to alcohol, and perhaps alongside it, the most pernicious fluid is indiscriminate soup,” one reformer said in the late 1870s, according to historian Walter I. Trattner’s 1974 book, “From Poor Law to Welfare State.” Another said, “It is not bread the poor need, it is soul; it is not soup, it is spirit.”

Ryan channeled the spirit and the language of these reformers when he told the Conservative Political Action Conference in March, “What the Left is offering people is a full stomach and an empty soul.”

In the 19th century, local governments worked alongside private charities to provide an ad-hoc patchwork of poor relief. Poorhouses, or “indoor relief,” served as the main alternative to handouts. The institutions varied greatly over time, but in general poorhouse inmates received food and shelter in exchange for control of their lives.

As tramp fears escalated, a “scientific charity” movement arose to coordinate and stifle “outdoor relief,” the nickname for assistance not given within poorhouse walls. Hundreds of charity organizing societies sprang up across the country, and government-funded relief ended in more than a dozen cities.

Instead of handing out cash, members of these societies, calling themselves “friendly visitors,” would go into poor people’s houses and investigate their claims of destitution. Often the wives of wealthy businessmen, they sought to help fill the souls of the poor.

This reminds me of someone I knew who used to give a hundred bucks a month to his father to help with expenses. And every time he visited he would go through the house, including the refrigerator and cupboards, searching for items he thought were luxuries and then berating his poor dad for spending money not his own on things this man disapproved of. He would see beer in the fridge or some Chinese take-out in the garbage and instruct his father that he was not allowed to buy those. (Money being fungible and all, he claimed that it was his hundred dollars that went toward these wasteful vices.) There was, needless to say, no question that the old fellow could not get a new TV set or a computer. As long as his son was giving him this pittance, he was required to live without any kind of entertainment.

This is the real point of noblesse oblige: control. You give up your agency when you take money from these individuals — you live at the pleasure of and by the grace of your “betters.”

The irony of all this is that it’s the allegedly liberty-loving right that’s proposing privatized paternalism as the answer for poverty. Sure, they say, there are some people who probably deserve some government help — the disabled, for instance.

[O]thers, Woodson argued, have calculated that low-wage work will compensate barely better than welfare. And then there are the people who constantly make terrible life decisions.

“Giving no-strings assistance to this group enables them to continue their self-destructive lifestyles and injures with the helping hand,” Woodson said. This category of poor people, he believes, needs a more paternalistic type of intervention.

Gilded Age charity organizers similarly obsessed over the dichotomy between the deserving and the undeserving poor. Some kept meticulous records of their findings, which were based on the field work of friendly visitors.

In 1883 for instance, almost 900 volunteers for Boston’s Associated Charities visited 2,000 families, ultimately finding 18 percent of all applicants “worthy of continuous relief” and 23 percent “worthy of temporary relief.” One third were referred to employment bureaus, and the rest were deemed unworthy of aid, either because they had relatives who could help or because they were thought to be lazy. They might have refused the “work test” — chopping wood for men, sewing for women.

Wealthy people will determine if you are “deserving” of — food and shelter. And how do you prove that you are? By being subservient and doing whatever they tell you to do. (If it’s a church delivering the service be prepared to pray just the way they like it too…)

The gilded age poverty reformers finally realized that laziness wasn’t the cause of poverty but rather low wages and inadequate job offerings. Many moved on to work in the labor movement. (Presumably the fine ladies who liked to deliver foodstuffs and lecture the poor on their slovenliness and sloth went back to their tatting and laudanum habits.) But as Delaney shows, the idea stayed alive, much of it informed by racist attitudes but not entirely, just waiting for the next time the conservatives feel compelled to address the issue in some way or look too much like the cold-hearted jerks they really are.

Enter the man who has to distance himself from Rand: Paul Ryan. I’m sure that after a lot of reflection and soul searching he’s truly found that unlike his idol Ayn, he cares about the poor. They just need a manly John Galt to separate the moochers from the parasites. That’s where he comes in.

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The United States of Secrets

by digby

I sincerely hope that everyone who is skeptical about the value and necessity of NSA whistleblowing will watch the PBS Frontline program called The United States of Secrets. You won’t have to be offended by Glenn Greenwald’s passion (although he does appear toward the end briefly) or reflexively defend the Obama administration because it’s mostly the programs that Dick Cheney and his deranged lieutenant David Addington energetically pushed and defended as Michael Hayden and the NSA willingly carried it out. This is the whole story told in linear fashion, with recollections from players like Alberto Gonzales (who admits that all he tried to do was “protect the president” when he signed the legal authorization when Jack Goldsmith refused.) You’ll see, probably for the first time, the first person accounts of righteous patriots who tried to blow the whistle from the very beginning.

The details are all fascinating and the story is well told. But I think it’s vitally important for liberals who are ambivalent about whether this program required whistleblower with proof to watch it to understand how it was protected and advanced by Vice President Cheney and his counsel Addington through lies and obfuscation and finally just plain thuggish political power. (And yes, how despite the fact that President Obama ran for president explicitly against such abuse of power, he did nothing to challenge it. That’s on him.)

You can read interviews with various players including those who were intimidated and tossed out of government over the years for challenging the government over these programs. You’ll be particularly impressed, I’m sure, with the story of Bill Keller and the New York Times which decided not to run with the story after being strong armed by the White House (and which also stood by like a bunch of potted plants when both their reporters and their sources were harassed by the government.)If you ever wondered why Edward Snowden didn’t go through channels or take his story to the elite press, this program shows just how much better he understood the dynamics after watching the experience of the parade of whistleblowers before him.

There will be a live chat with Spencer Ackerman, producer and writer Mike Wiser and NSA whistleblower Kirk Wiebe to day at 2EST/11PST here.

It’s a great program, to be continued next week with the story of the commercial interests involved in all this.

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Conservatives would rather say the military is stupid than accept that climate change is real

by David Atkins

We already know that the Pentagon has considered climate change a serious threat for years. Now another military report confirms the same:

The accelerating rate of climate change poses a severe risk to national security and acts as a catalyst for global political conflict, a report published Tuesday by a leading government-funded military research organization concluded.

The Center for Naval Analyses Military Advisory Board found that climate change-induced drought in the Middle East and Africa is leading to conflicts over food and water and escalating longstanding regional and ethnic tensions into violent clashes. The report also found that rising sea levels are putting people and food supplies in vulnerable coastal regions like eastern India, Bangladesh and the Mekong Delta in Vietnam at risk and could lead to a new wave of refugees.

In addition, the report predicted that an increase in catastrophic weather events around the world will create more demand for American troops, even as flooding and extreme weather events at home could damage naval ports and military bases.

In an interview, Secretary of State John Kerry signaled that the report’s findings would influence American foreign policy.

“Tribes are killing each other over water today,” Mr. Kerry said. “Think of what happens if you have massive dislocation, or the drying up of the waters of the Nile, of the major rivers in China and India. The intelligence community takes it seriously, and it’s translated into action.”

But that won’t change anything for the conservative base. The politics of climate change have become completely tribalized.

One reason for that is that Republicans are hugely dependent on fossil fuel money, including and especially from the Koch brothers.

Another potentially larger reason is that climate change is a problem that cannot be solved by free markets, which are inherently reactive rather than proactive in dealing with problems. Insofar as markets do self-regulate, they do so by companies causing damage, then consumers and lawsuits punishing those companies. There are all sorts of reasons that society cannot be run by that model, but in the case of climate change the problem is simply that by the time consumers and lawsuits start reacting adequately to the problem, it will be entirely too late to fix.

That in turn creates an existential threat to conservative dogma. It’s not just that government regulation threatens fossil fuel profits. It’s that the very existence of climate change, and its gigantic importance to the fate of humanity, entirely negates the validity of the libertarian economic worldview.

The military, of course, has to deal with strategic threats. And climate change is potentially the greatest strategic threat we face.

What we’ve learned from conservatives and Republicans is that as much as they worship the military, they worship Ayn Rand more. They would rather insult the intelligence and priorities of the military than call into question their radical economic beliefs.

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Big Ideas from the wingnut fringe

by digby

Here’s Gun Owners of America’s Larry Pratt with some excellent advice for a law abiding public:

“Hopefully, [the Federal Government is] not going to be able to recover from this, because if there is anything at all similar, be it cows or a mine or cutting trees or anything of that sort where, typically in the West, those are the kind of situations where the feds think they got it all,” he said. “It is time that, hopefully Bundy is going to be the encouragement — or maybe from the feds view the match in the gasoline — that redirects the way the federal government has been handling its unauthorized, unconstitutional, very poor stewardship of so much of the West.”

Pratt and Mack also proposed a solution to the drought in California. Sheriffs should force utilities to divert water to farmers in arid regions in the state, they said.

“You mentioned mining and logging,” Mack remarked. “The other one was actual farming, where the federal government has turned off the water to the San Joaquin Valley in California, where we get 50 percent of our fruits, vegetables, and nuts for this entire country.”

“You know, we need a sheriff there that is just going to walk into the water facility and turn it back on,” Pratt replied.

But Mack said one sheriff wasn’t enough. He suggested 25 sheriffs were needed.

“Take 25 California sheriffs, walk up to that facility, and say, ‘Guess what boys, we got a court order. Turn on the water, and if you don’t, we will,’” Mack explained. “That is exactly what it is going to take.”

Apparently they think the issue isn’t that we have a drought it’s that the Gummint is hoarding the water for … drinking? Well that will not stand! Let’s just go git it!!

If you want a little preview of what climate change is going to look like in a wingnut hellhole, there you go. Morons with guns taking what they want.

If you’re interested in the realities of the California drought, the problem is that we have lots of people, lots of farmland, lots of natural resources and not enough water. Gun-toting neanderthals can’t solve that problem.

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John Oliver delivers the climate change debate

by digby

In case you were wondering …

Apropos of nothing, I’m sitting in Santa Monica in the middle of May and it’s 90 degrees. This is highly unusual. Or, at least, it used to be …

The GOP still has an incredibly fragile glass jaw on income inequality

by David Atkins

Via Greg Sargent, Danny Vinik has an intriguing piece at New Republic on the increasing Republican awareness that income inequality is a problem, and their utter lack of even deceptive “solutions” to fix it:

Most Americans believe that income inequality is a problem. A Gallup poll in January found that 67 percent of Americans are dissatisfied with the current income and wealth distribution. Nonetheless, conservatives often insist that the real problem is economic mobility. But in San Antonio on Monday, liberals earned an unlikely ally in their fight to reduce income inequality: John Boehner.

“We do have an issue of income inequality in America,” the House speaker told Texas Tribune editor-in-chief Evan Smith in a one-on-one interview. “The president’s policies are making that problem worse… The top third of America are doing pretty good. The bottom two-thirds are really being squeezed. And I really do believe the president’s policies are driving this in the wrong direction.”

Those comments may seem rote for a Republican, but they are in fact pretty unusual. For instance, in the Republican response to the State of the Union, House Republican Conference Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers said, “The President talks a lot about income inequality. But the real gap we face today is one of opportunity inequality.” Republicans like Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor have repeatedly tried to pivot from income inequality to mobility in recent months.

If Boehner’s Republican colleagues come around to his beliefs, that would represent major shift in the party’s policy agenda. And once Democrats and Republicans agree that rising income inequality is a problem, then they can debate what to do about it. In Texas, Boehner argued against raising the minimum wage, but was short on specific policy prescriptions for closing the gap between the rich and poor. So I visited the House GOP website for more information.

There wasn’t much. The site didn’t have a section on income inequality, but under “Middle Class Squeeze” I found a page titled “Increasing Wages and Take Home Pay,” which contained only two paragraphs about the “job-killing” effect of Obamacare’s employer mandate. Under the health-care reform law, employers with more than 50 workers must offer insurance to any employees who work more than 30 hours a week, or pay a penalty of $2,000 per employee. Republicans want to repeal the mandate because employers may cut their workers’ hours to avoid the mandate. It’s a legitimate fear, but the mandate was delayed until 2015. In a recent report, the Congressional Budget Office found no signs that the employer mandate was leading to a cut in worker hours.

Repealing the employer mandate doesn’t constitute a plan to reduce income inequality. And that’s House Republicans’ only proposal, far as I could find, to increase wages and take-home pay. On different pages for jobs and growth, they argue for deregulating the energy industry and a few job-training bills. As I’ve written many times, that doesn’t constitute a jobs plan.

The GOP’s entire supply side theory is that if you reduce regulations and taxes on employers, they’ll make more money and be able to hire more people. But even if that were true–and it isn’t–it doesn’t follow that any potential jobs they might create would actually be good jobs. In fact, most of the jobs that have been created since the Great Recession are low wage work. Most voters are smart enough to realize that.

The GOP could, in theory, blame immigration for driving down wages, and go the hardcore xenophobe populist direction of much of the European right. But that would almost certainly permanently lose them the Hispanic vote in a big way almost permanently, which would be electoral suicide.

But there aren’t many other places to go for the GOP on inequality. One local Republican candidate for Assembly said at a recent debate that government regulations were constraining business, and that if we got rid of wage controls then wages would go up. That’s literally how boxed in and nonsensical their position is.

If Democrats want to win, this is the issue they’ll push. The GOP is in a tailspin on it, and they don’t have other good messages in the till. Their ACA opposition is fraying at the seams, and their response has been to keep chanting about Benghazi in the hope of tarnishing just one Democrat for 2016.

The GOP gloves have been dropped somewhat for 2014 to prepare for Hillary 2016, and there’s no reason not to deliver a solid uppercut to their big glass inequality jaw over the following months.

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Misunderestimating brain damage

by digby

John Amato dissects the Karl Rove “Hillary has brain damage” ratfuck strategy in this post, laying out in detail how this is designed to create questions about her age. That’s right. The man who backed Ronald Reagan, Bob Dole and John McCain (in 2008) is saying that Hillary Clinton is too old to be president.

But I think people aren’t giving Rove the credit he deserves. After all, he’s been around someone who is obviously impaired for many years. Of course that person served as president for 8 years:

1. “Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.”—Washington, D.C., Aug. 5, 2004

2. “I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family.”—Greater Nashua, N.H., Chamber of Commerce, Jan. 27, 2000

3. “Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?”—Florence, S.C., Jan. 11, 2000

4. “Too many good docs are getting out of the business. Too many OB/GYNs aren’t able to practice their love with women all across the country.”—Poplar Bluff, Mo., Sept. 6, 2004

5. “Neither in French nor in English nor in Mexican.”—declining to answer reporters’ questions at the Summit of the Americas, Quebec City, Canada, April 21, 2001

6. “You teach a child to read, and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test.”—Townsend, Tenn., Feb. 21, 2001

7. “I’m the decider, and I decide what is best. And what’s best is for Don Rumsfeld to remain as the secretary of defense.”—Washington, D.C., April 18, 2006

8. “See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda.”—Greece, N.Y., May 24, 2005

9. “I’ve heard he’s been called Bush’s poodle. He’s bigger than that.”—discussing former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, as quoted by the Sun newspaper, June 27, 2007

10. “And so, General, I want to thank you for your service. And I appreciate the fact that you really snatched defeat out of the jaws of those who are trying to defeat us in Iraq.”—meeting with Army Gen. Ray Odierno, Washington, D.C., March 3, 2008

11. “We ought to make the pie higher.”—South Carolina Republican debate, Feb. 15, 2000

12. “There’s an old saying in Tennessee—I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee—that says, fool me once, shame on—shame on you. Fool me—you can’t get fooled again.”—Nashville, Tenn., Sept. 17, 2002

13. “And there is distrust in Washington. I am surprised, frankly, at the amount of distrust that exists in this town. And I’m sorry it’s the case, and I’ll work hard to try to elevate it.”—speaking on National Public Radio, Jan. 29, 2007

14. “We’ll let our friends be the peacekeepers and the great country called America will be the pacemakers.”—Houston, Sept. 6, 2000

15. “It’s important for us to explain to our nation that life is important. It’s not only life of babies, but it’s life of children living in, you know, the dark dungeons of the Internet.”—Arlington Heights, Ill., Oct. 24, 2000

16. “One of the great things about books is sometimes there are some fantastic pictures.”—U.S. News & World Report, Jan. 3, 2000

17. “People say, ‘How can I help on this war against terror? How can I fight evil?’ You can do so by mentoring a child; by going into a shut-in’s house and say I love you.”—Washington, D.C., Sept. 19, 2002

18. “Well, I think if you say you’re going to do something and don’t do it, that’s trustworthiness.”—CNN online chat, Aug. 30, 2000

19. “I’m looking forward to a good night’s sleep on the soil of a friend.”—on the prospect of visiting Denmark, Washington, D.C., June 29, 2005

20. “I think it’s really important for this great state of baseball to reach out to people of all walks of life to make sure that the sport is inclusive. The best way to do it is to convince little kids how to—the beauty of playing baseball.”—Washington, D.C., Feb. 13, 2006

21. “Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream.”—LaCrosse, Wis., Oct. 18, 2000

22. “You know, when I campaigned here in 2000, I said, I want to be a war president. No president wants to be a war president, but I am one.”—Des Moines, Iowa, Oct. 26, 2006

23. “There’s a huge trust. I see it all the time when people come up to me and say, ‘I don’t want you to let me down again.’ “—Boston, Oct. 3, 2000

24. “They misunderestimated me.”—Bentonville, Ark., Nov. 6, 2000

25. “I’ll be long gone before some smart person ever figures out what happened inside this Oval Office.”—Washington, D.C., May 12, 2008

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Con$ervati$m Inc

by digby

It’s not that the conservative movement professionals don’t believe the same things the grassroots activists believe. It’s just that they need to make a profit at it.

My piece for Salon today:

According to the New York Times the Tea Party is very upset. I know. Stop the presses, right? They are always yelling at someone to get off their lawns. But this time, they seem to be upset at … themselves. Or more precisely, the modern conservative movement, which rebranded itself as the Tea Party in the wake of George W. Bush’s epic failure of a presidency. For instance, in Nebraska they don’t seem to know whether they’re coming or going:

Mr. Osborn, who has the support of activists in the state, secured a major endorsement last November from FreedomWorks, the organization that helped vault the Tea Party to prominence. Mr. Osborn, the group said, stood “with the grass-roots uprising before it was cool.” But in March, FreedomWorks rescinded its support of Mr. Osborn and backed Mr. Sasse.

Ever since, Nebraska’s Tea Party members have been battling national Tea Party donor groups.

“We are not million-dollar Washington, D.C., special interest groups with strong ties to Capitol Hill. We are simply Nebraskans who are fed up,” a group of 52 activists wrote in an open letter protesting FreedomWorks’ about-face, adding, “We were not consulted, polled, or contacted by these Washington, D.C., groups.”

Evidently, some of the activists on the ground took the notion that the Tea Party was a true bottom up grass-roots movement seriously. (Bless their hearts.) And come to find out there are a whole bunch of big D.C.-based professionals who don’t care much what they think about anything. Turns out the town hall-crashing, tricorn hat-wearing, Gadsden flag-waving patriots were just a convenient means to an end.

read on …

Casualties of secrecy

by digby

There are lots of excerpts of Greenwald’s new book out there along with the usual reviews, critiques and character assassinations. You can find them if you’re interested. I thought I’d just feature this one little bit here on the blog:

The NSA’s treatment of Anonymous, as well as the vague category of people known as “hacktivists”, is especially troubling and extreme. That’s because Anonymous is not actually a structured group but a loosely organised affiliation of people around an idea: someone becomes affiliated with Anonymous by virtue of the positions they hold. Worse still, the category “hacktivists” has no fixed meaning: it can mean the use of programming skills to undermine the security and functioning of the internet but can also refer to anyone who uses online tools to promote political ideals. That the NSA targets such broad categories of people is tantamount to allowing it to spy on anyone anywhere, including in the US, whose ideas the government finds threatening.

Gabriella Coleman, a specialist on Anonymous at McGill University, said that the group “is not a defined” entity but rather “an idea that mobilises activists to take collective action and voice political discontent. It is a broad-based global social movement with no centralised or official organised leadership structure. Some have rallied around the name to engage in digital civil disobedience, but nothing remotely resembling terrorism.”

Yet Anonymous has been targeted by a unit of GCHQ that employs some of the most controversial and radical tactics known to spycraft: “false flag operations”, “honeytraps”, viruses and other attacks, strategies of deception and “info ops to damage reputations”.

One PowerPoint slide presented by GCHQ surveillance officials at the 2012 SigDev conference describes two forms of attack: “information ops (influence or disruption)” and “technical disruption”. GCHQ refers to these measures as “Online Covert Action”, which is intended to achieve what the document calls “The 4 Ds: Deny/Disrupt/Degrade/Deceive”.

Another slide describes the tactics used to “discredit a target”. These include “set up a honeytrap”, “change their photos on social networking sites”, “write a blog purporting to be one of their victims” and “email/text their colleagues, neighbours, friends, etc”. In accompanying notes, GCHQ explains that the “honeytrap” – an old cold war tactic involving using attractive women to lure male targets into compromising, discrediting situations – has been updated for the digital age: now a target is lured to a compromising site or online encounter. The comment added: “a great option. Very successful when it works.” Similarly, traditional methods of group infiltration are now accomplished online.

Another technique involves stopping “someone from communicating”. To do that, the agency will “bombard their phone with text messages”, “bombard their phone with calls”, “delete their online presence,” and “block up their fax machine”.

GCHQ also likes to use “disruption” techniques in lieu of what it calls “traditional law enforcement” such as evidence-gathering, courts and prosecutions. In a document entitled Cyber Offensive Session: Pushing the Boundaries and Action Against Hacktivism, GCHQ discusses its targeting of “hacktivists” with, ironically, “denial of service” attacks, a tactic commonly associated with hackers.

The British surveillance agency also uses a team of social scientists, including psychologists, to develop techniques of “online HUMINT” (human intelligence) and “strategic influence disruption”. The document The Art of Deception: Training for a New Generation of Online Covert Operations is devoted to these tactics. Prepared by the agency’s HSOC (Human Science Operation Cell), the paper claims to draw on sociology, psychology, anthropology, neuroscience and biology, among other fields, to maximize GCHQ’s online deception skills.

The document then lays out what it calls the “Disruption Operational Playbook”. This includes “infiltration operation”, “ruse operation”, “false flag operation”, and “sting operation”. It vows a “full roll out” of the disruption programme “by early 2013” as “150+ staff [are] fully trained”.

Under the title Magic Techniques & Experiment, the document references “Legitimisation of violence”, “Constructing experience in mind of targets which should be accepted so they don’t realise”, and “Optimising deception channels”.

Such government plans to monitor and influence internet communications and disseminate false information online have long been a source of speculation. The GCHQ documents show for the first time that these controversial techniques have moved from the proposal stage to implementation.

All of the evidence highlights the implicit bargain that is offered to citizens: pose no challenge and you have nothing to worry about. Mind your own business, and support or at least tolerate what we do, and you’ll be fine. Put differently, you must refrain from provoking the authority that wields surveillance powers if you wish to be deemed free of wrongdoing.

This is a deal that invites passivity, obedience and conformity. The safest course, the way to ensure being “left alone”, is to remain quiet, unthreatening and compliant.

In my mind, this is the stuff that poses the most immediate threat from these surveillance programs. (I should say non-Muslim citizens — Muslims have far more to worry about than this.) The idea is that these government entities are taking it upon themselves, in secret, to use their power to ruin the lives and reputations of people they determine (again, in secret)  to be threats. A threat being also very loosely defined.

In secret.

It’s the sort of thing that sends a shiver down my back. As someone who writes critical things on the internet and is one degree of separation away from some people who have been deemed to be traitors by important members of the government, I can’t say that this hasn’t crossed my mind. After all, I have no institutional support, no lawyers, no money.

What’s scary about this is not that people have anything to hide although I suppose we all have some things we’d prefer to keep private. But this particular case isn’t about privacy, it’s about the government laying plans to frame people they see as a threat. And let’s not forget they have made the case that they are allowed hide their tracks without revealing it to other authorities — as if protecting their surveillance is the same as protecting a human informant. So that’s no protection. Neither is the fact that some of this was done by GCHQ, the British service rather than the NSA. They both very conveniently farm out certain unpleasantries to each other in order to avoid flagrantly violating their own laws. It’s what makes our relationship so very, very “special” these days. (And when it comes to internet surveillance borders aren’t really relevant are they?)

Regardless of how you feel about hacktivists or dissidents being foolish and perhaps even threatening, it cannot be ok for a government to plant false evidence or seek to discredit someone and destroy their reputations with lies in lieu of due process. In fact, the very reason the US constitution exists is to prevent such things from happening.

The government has dealt with dissent in a variety of heavy handed ways over the years, from taping Martin Luther King to Cointelpro to more recently the handling of Aaron Swartz and Occupy activist Cecily McMillan. They are capable of doing this sort of thing.

Do you feel good about that? If you do then none of this will bother you and you can carry on. I just hope that you don’t ever decide to say or do anything that might be considered a “threat.” If fact, you probably shouldn’t read political blogs. Who knows what some people in a secret meeting at a secret agency might secretly make of that. Best stick to sports and shopping. And church.

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The world as we know it is ending

by David Atkins

Writing about climate change is exhausting. Not in the sense that it’s so hard that you need a nap after writing about it, but in the sense that every post basically comes down to the same thing. We’re doomed.

Without getting into the messy details, climate change is already affecting us, creating more extreme weather like droughts and floods, and extincting species by the thousands.

Large, dangerous effects are guaranteed at this point even if we stopped burning all fossil fuels right now. At this point, barring some incredibly dangerous sci-fi geoengineering breakthrough (and we’re unlikely to get one), we can’t stop global temperatures from rising by 4 degrees celsius. Yes–on average, everywhere will get about 8 degrees Fahrenheit hotter. Guaranteed.

If we don’t do something major to decrease emissions very soon, we’ll be guaranteed 12 degrees Fahrenheit increases. If we don’t do something very big within the next 20 years, we may well be guaranteed 20 degrees or more Fahrenheit increases.

Think about what that means. That is the end of the world as we know it, and the death of nearly everything in it. Sure, mass catastrophic extinction events have happened before. But this time we’ll be responsible for it, and while most species on earth with die, new ones will eventually survive and evolve over the next few million years. But our civilization almost certainly will not.

The end has already begun:

A slow-motion and irreversible collapse of a massive cluster of glaciers in Antarctica has begun, and could cause sea levels to rise across the planet by another 4 feet within 200 years, scientists concluded in two studies released Monday.

Researchers had previously estimated that the cluster in the Amundsen Sea region of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet would last for thousands of years despite global climate change. But the new studies found that the loss is underway now as warming ocean water melts away the base of the ice shelf, and is occurring far more rapidly than scientists expected.

The warming water is tied to several environmental phenomena, including a warming of the planet driven by emissions from human activity and depleted ozone that has changed wind patterns in the area, the studies found.

“There is no red button to stop this,” said Eric Rignot, a UC Irvine professor of Earth system science and the lead author of one of the studies, conducted with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and scheduled for publication in a journal of the American Geophysical Union.

The six glaciers have passed “the point of no return,” Rignot said, which means that total collapse — the melted retreat of the glaciers — cannot be prevented. “The only question is how fast it’s going to go.”

Antarctica, surrounding the South Pole, is the largest mass of ice on the planet, containing an estimated 80% of the world’s fresh water. Its scale is difficult to fathom. One environmental foundation said that if you loaded the ice onto cargo ships and started counting the vessels, one per second, it would take 860 years before you were finished counting.

The loss of even a portion of that ice would have consequences across the globe. Scientists have surmised its possibility for decades, and have braced for confirmation, which in effect arrived Monday.

The only hope for saving ourselves would be dramatic proactive action. The problem, of course, is that both democracies and free markets are notoriously reactive. That’s good in the sense that it achieves a level of stability.

But in the case of climate change, reactive stability is a guarantee of death and civilization collapse.

But what does that matter when the asset values of our wealthy elites are at stake?

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