Ray McGovern and the Sam Adams party have presented the Sam Adams award to Edward Snowden. I am delighted. This from Ray’s account of the event:
In brief remarks from his visitors, Snowden was reassured — first and foremost — that he need no longer be worried that nothing significant would happen as a result of his decision to risk his future by revealing documentary proof that the U.S. government was playing fast and loose with the Constitutional rights of Americans.
Even amid the government shutdown, Establishment Washington and the normally docile “mainstream media” have not been able to deflect attention from the intrusive eavesdropping that makes a mockery of the Fourth Amendment. Even Congress is showing signs of awaking from its torpor.
In the somnolent Senate, a few hardy souls have gone so far as to express displeasure at having been lied to by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and NSA Director Keith Alexander — Clapper having formally apologized for telling the Senate Intelligence Committee eavesdropping-related things that were, in his words, “clearly erroneous” and Alexander having told now-discredited whoppers about the effectiveness of NSA’s intrusive and unconstitutional methods in combating terrorism.
Coleen Rowley, the first winner of the Sam Adams Award (2002), cited some little-known history to remind Snowden that he is in good company as a whistleblower — and not only because of previous Sam Adams honorees. She noted that in 1773, Benjamin Franklin leaked confidential information by releasing letters written by then-Lt. Governor of Massachusetts Thomas Hutchinson to Thomas Whatley, an assistant to the British Prime Minister.
The letters suggested that it was impossible for the colonists to enjoy the same rights as subjects living in England and that “an abridgement of what are called English liberties” might be necessary. The content of the letters was so damaging to the British government that Benjamin Franklin was dismissed as colonial Postmaster General and had to endure an hour-long censure from British Solicitor General Alexander Wedderburn.
There has been a determined attempt by government to justify the need to intercept everybody’s communications, all the time. We have, yet again, had MI5 claim there are many thousand violent Islamic terrorists running around the UK, (yet somehow not managing to kill anybody). The cry of “paedophiles” is raised, as always. I can imagine them suggesting the entire population be shot dead, and justifying it as making sure they get the paedophiles. The tabloids would go with that.
There still had not been a single credible claim by the mainstream media that any named individual has died, despite that contingency being trotted out all the time as the reason Snowden and Manning should not have revealed state crimes and abuse of power. I am hopeful that, with the internet still largely free to the dissemination of information, out next massive whistleblower is only weeks away.
Jemand. 1 49pm
When it comes to the grand scheme of things dying oceans are probably the more crucial of the two issues, but, for those of us who crawl on the earth like me, fracking is still a major concern.
So ”…who cares?”
Well I do, and millions of my fellow humans who take the trouble to examine what it involves and what its effects will be on their homeplaces.
http://ca.news.yahoo.com/fracking-protesters-meeting-sunday-refocus-121331548.html
Multiply this by however many landscapes are threatened to find who else cares.
And here’s some info about the practice itself,
http://dangersoffracking.com/
Technicolour & Sofia,
Fracking basically pollutes ground water (if it is near fracking) that is not directly part of ecosystems. It’s when we pump up that water for irrigation and drinking that we then pollute the environment, destroying arable land etc. The problem is certainly worthy of aggressive investigation and protest where it is a problem. I’m just confounded that small(er) ticket issues bump the bigger ones off the front page.
At the heart of so many of these problems is runaway population growth that drives demand for more and more and more and more and more and more and more .. You get the idea.
I would have thought that the more relevant issue re fracking is not the leaking/pollution aspect – because it is not that it doesn’t exist with other forms of fossil fuels and I suspect that there are methods by which it can be limited – but that it just allows a continuation/expansion of the use of fossil fuels rather than others which don’t contribute as much to global warming and further acidification of the ocean (I have already looked at the debate about whether global warming is man made of not – so don’t bother rehashing for my benefit). Fracking will also draw investment resources away from alternative energy sources and conservation – the investment pot isn’t unlimited – just look at what happens to the efficiency of car engines when the cost of fossil fuels is increased if you don’t believe that this effect is unimportant.
Jemand
The best way of reducing population growth is to get the living standard of the world’s poor up quickly – that and getting religious and political leaders to take a more enlightened view about contraception.
I’m not sure it is population growth, you know. At least, as far as resources go. We currently throw away a third of food grown globally, according to the UN (the US throws away 40 percent). And, in the words of the late great Mr Hicks (Bill); if we stopped spending billions on arms and wars, we could provide clean water and health care for everyone on the planet.
I think it’s about the kind of growth which is being pushed on us by corporations forced to make more and more money: from clogging our oceans with plastic, which lasts for centuries, but is being used disposably, to built in redundancy. If we had growth in geothermal, say, or wind-power which is well designed and implemented (as opposed to the knock off schemes currently being imposed by equally greedy developers) – that would be OK, I think.
ESLO: well put, thanks.
Jemand: “I’m just confounded that small(er) ticket issues bump the bigger ones off the front page” – I always think of Eliot and “humankind/ cannot bear very much reality”. But I think the luxury of hiding from most of this is increasingly becoming an impossible one.
Looks like the Co-op Bank is about to be stolen from its members and handed to hedge funds and private investors. Given that the private model of banking has failed in recent times and has to be bailed out – Ed Miliband (and all those Labour Co-op MPs) really should be saying something now about how he will mutualise any Co-op shares after the election to put the kibosh on the matter. Lets remember what happened to all the building societies that were demutualised under Thatcher/Major and the price we had to pay as a result.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-24605864
I think the best way of dealing with population ESLO, is massive investment in developing a sophisticated form of reliably switchable fertility control for both males and females, but more importantly for females, that satisfies several important medical, economic and social criteria.
Poor people in developing countries see children as a form of social security – and correctly so in my personal experience. Without a decent welfare system for the elderly, their only alternative is children, with one or two more as insurance.
One of the most irritating justifications for rapid population growth in Oz is “the ageing population”. So the solution to the costs associated with providing a welfare system for the elderly is a Ponzi Scheme wherein we have a much LARGER ageing population in the future that requires exponential population growth to attend to its welfare needs. Zonk!
How can they steal the Co-op?
Jemand.
Of course population is a huge issue.
There’s the question of the relative importance of overpopulation versus overconsumption.
A comparatively small percentage of the world’s people in wealthy nations (you and me included) deplete natural capital at a far greater rate than the impoverished majority so those of us with the privilege of wealth and flexible options have a greater responsibility to find how to meet human needs without degrading our environment.
While of course they impact the environment too, we can’t expect majority, whose decisions are necessarily more focused on day to day survival,to bail us out on this issue.
Here’s some food for thought,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture
Which brings us back to fracking “… the value of land must, in the future, be assessed on its yield of potable water.” Bill Mollison
AA; Rum Diary was a bit disappointing but there was this gem;
The Rum Diary, Ch. 18 (1993)
Like most of the others, I was a seeker, a mover, a malcontent, and at times a stupid hell-raiser. I was never idle long enough to do much thinking, but I felt somehow that my instincts were right. I shared a vagrant optimism that some of us were making real progress, that we had taken an honest road, and that the best of us would inevitably make it over the top. At the same time, I shared a dark suspicion that the life we were leading was a lost cause, that we were all actors, kidding ourselves along on a senseless odyssey. It was the tension between these two poles — a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other — that kept me going.
Technicolour
Read Peston’s articles – but broadly speaking the hedge funds concerned have come in and purchased the Co-ops debt from its existing debt holders at a hefty discount – and rather than accepting a discount in the debts redemption value they are insisting on shares in return – knowing full well that value of the Co-op Bank is likely to recover in due course.
One of the hedge funds Silver Point specialises in dealing in distressed companies – in normal speak this usually means asset stripping. The other Aurelius is a known “hold out” investor – which they did with Argentinian debt – in more common speak this is known as “blackmail”.
Free marketeers will of course just see this as the normal healthy working of the market.
“There are a lot of ways to practice the art of journalism, and one of them is to use your art like a hammer to destroy the right people — who are almost always your enemies, for one reason or another, and who usually deserve to be crippled, because they are wrong. This is a dangerous notion, and very few professional journalists will endorse it — calling it “vengeful” and “primitive” and “perverse” regardless of how often they might do the same thing themselves. “That kind of stuff is opinion,” they say, “and the reader is cheated if it’s not labelled as opinion.” Well, maybe so. Maybe Tom Paine cheated his readers and Mark Twain was a devious fraud with no morals at all who used journalism for his own foul ends. And maybe H. L. Mencken should have been locked up for trying to pass off his opinions on gullible readers and normal “objective journalism.” Mencken understood that politics — as used in journalism — was the art of controlling his environment, and he made no apologies for it. In my case, using what politely might be called “advocacy journalism,” I’ve used reporting as a weapon to affect political situations that bear down on my environment.”
ESLO,
Raising the living standards of the poor sounds good, until you realise that the Earth cannot sustain Western standards of living for all seven billion people (rising fast). You would be looking at an enormous growth in resource exploitation and its attendant ill-effects, like fracking, pollution etc.
Our natural instinct is to reproduce and that has infiltrated our culture in a way that is hard to reverse. And people need confidence that having fewer children is good for them, their extended families, their community, their religious cults and their national ambitions. The Vatican is, I suspect, quite disingenuous about its real objection to contraception. I believe that they saw, and still see, that population growth was a way of gaining a demographic advantage over Protestants and, these days, Muslims. It’s a kind of demographic war that Muslims and Catholics are engaged in.
Anyway, population, population growth and destruction of our biosphere is related.
This is one of many websites that explains how global population multiplied by high standard of living equals destruction –
http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/gfn/page/world_footprint/
Jemand
I didn’t say Western standards of living – just improved standards of living not the same thing – as well as the religious reasons there are other economic reasons why the poor have large families e.g. many considered them as a form of pension scheme. I also have my doubts as to the effectiveness or desirability of force as a constraint on population growth.
AA;
Toward the end, HST was in constant physical and spiritual pain. It was the insult, added that made him focus on his new antagonist, replacing Nixon, and culminating in his shotshell meal just after Bush was elected again.
=======================
Is it possible that he has already abandoned all hope of getting re-elected? Or does he plan to cancel the Election altogether by declaring a national military emergency with terrorists closing in from all sides, leaving him with no choice but to launch a huge bomb immediately?. . . Desperate men do desperate things, and stupid men do stupid things. We are in for a desperately stupid summer.
“Bush’s Disturbing Sleeping Disorder” (18 February 2004)
For myself, I would much prefer to be stuck with Kentucky in the NCAA Tournament, than stuck with George Bush in the White House. It is the difference between losing your wallet at a cock fight and losing all your credit cards forever, along with your job and your house and your ability to earn enough money to pay off your sports-gambling debts or even a six-pack on game day. . .
“What’s Better Than the Tournament?’ (18 March 2004)
The 2004 presidential election will be a matter of life or death for the whole nation. We are sick today, and we will be even sicker tomorrow if this wretched half-bright swine of a president gets re-elected in November.
“The Big Finale Was a Big Disappointment” (6 April 2004)
Not even the foulest atrocities of Adolf Hitler ever shocked me so badly as these Abu Ghraib photographs did.
“Let’s Go to the Olympics!” (18 May 2004)
(Later edited to read “These horrifying digital snapshots of the American dream in action on foreign soil are worse than anything even I could have expected.”) Drudge Report (24 May 2004)
These horrifying digital snapshots of the American dream in action on foreign soil are worse than anything even I could have expected. I have been in this business a long time and I have seen many staggering things, but this one is over the line. Now I am really ashamed to carry an American passport.
“Let’s Go to the Olympics!” (18 May 2004)
There was no time for scholarly details, and, besides, I have always believed that a man can fairly be judged by the standards and taste of his choices in matters of high-level plagiarism.
“Prisoner of Denver”, in Vanity Fair (June 2004)
Bush is a natural-born loser with a filthy-rich daddy who pimped his son out to rich oil-mongers. He hates music, football and sex, in no particular order, and he is no fun at all.
“Fear and Loathing, Campaign 2004” (20 October 2004)
Today, the Panzer-like Bush machine controls all three branches of our federal government, the first time that has happened since Calvin Coolidge was in the White House. And that makes it just about impossible to mount any kind of Congressional investigation of a firmly-entrenched president like George Bush. The time has come to get deeply into football. It is the only thing we have left that ain’t fixed.
“The pain of losing” Hey Rube, HST’s ESPN column (9 November 2004)
Hey Rube: Blood Sport, the Bush Doctrine, and the Downward Spiral of Dumbness (2004)
If you’re going to be crazy, you have to get paid for it or else you’re going to be locked up.
BankRate.com Interview (1 November 2004)
Walk tall, kick ass, learn to speak Arabic, love music and never forget you come from a long line of truth seekers, lovers and warriors.
Crikey: we really are all in this together.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2469738/Scientists-issue-safety-warning-GM-food-Government-pushes-public-acceptance-controversial-crop.html#ixzz2iLTM8f1w
I first read HST in 1967 when I found his book Hells Angels in a drugstore book rack. I bought it because I was interested in the motorcycle gang, not HST, but that was gonna change.
““A man who has blown all his options can’t afford the luxury of changing his ways. He has to capitalize on whatever he has left, and he can’t afford to admit — no matter how often he’s reminded of it — that every day of his life takes him farther and farther down a blind alley…”
Sofia KN,
I’m aware of permaculture and agree with that. My point is – if people want a very high standard of living, then they’re going to have to accept the population limits that the Earth’s resources imposes on us.
There’s no way that I’m going to accept a plan that provides for 30 billion useless (lentl) eaters plodding around the Earth in loin cloths talking about how benevolent the gods have been to their useless existence. That’s not the kind of planet I want to leave behind.
There are so many political dynamics to relative populations and growth rates, as I alluded to with my Catholic vs Muslim example, that I really think that maybe the only thing that might save our biosphere from catastrophic destruction is A CATASTROPHIC event that culls our species into humility. Bird flu, asteroid impact, small nuclear war.. I think bird flu would be good because there would be less collateral damage to other species.
If memory serves, it was a BSA Lightning, which to the Angels was a prissy ‘Limey bike’.
“Indeed … but no sand this time, so the lever goes up into fourth, and now there’s no sound except wind. Screw
it all the way over, reach through the handlebars to raise the headlight beam, the needle leans down on a hundred, and wind-burned eyeballs strain to see down the centerline, trying to provide a margin for the reflexes.
But with the throttle screwed on there is only the barest margin, and no room at all for mistakes. It has to be done right … and that’s when the strange music starts, when you stretch your luck so far that fear becomes exhilaration and vibrates along your arms. You can barely see at a hundred; the tears blow back so fast that they vaporize before they get to your ears. The only sounds are wind and a dull roar floating back from the mufflers. You watch the white line and try to lean with it … howling through a turn to the right, then to the left and down the long hill to Pacifica … letting off now, watching for cops, but only until the next dark stretch and another few seconds on the edge … The Edge … There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. The others — the living — are those who pushed their control as far as they felt they could handle it, and then pulled back, or slowed down, or did whatever they had to when it came time to choose between Now and Later.
But the edge is still Out there. Or maybe it’s In. The association of motorcycles with LSD is no accident of publicity. They are both a means to an end, to the place of definitions.”
“motorcyclists wearing chains, shades and greasy Levis roll out from damp garages, all-night diners and cast-off one-night pads in Fricso, Hollywood, Berdoo and East Oakland, heading for the Monterey peninsula, north of Big Sur…The Menace is loose again, the Hell’s Angels, the hundred-carat headline, running fast and loud on the early morning freeway, low in the saddle, nobody smiles, jamming crazy through traffic and ninety miles an hour down the center stripe, missing by inches…like Genghis Khan on an iron horse, a monster steed with a fiery anus, flat out through the eye of a beer can and up your daughter’s leg with no quarter asked and non given; show the squares some class, give em a whiff of those kicks they’ll never know…Ah, these righteous dudes, they love to screw it on…Little Jesus, the Gimp, Chocolate George, Buzzard, Zorro, Hambone, Clean Cut, Tiny, Terry the Tramp, Frenchy, Mouldy Marvin, Mother Miles, Dirty Ed, Chuck the Duck, Fat Freddy, Filthy Phil, Charger Charley the Child Molester, Crazy Cross, Puff, Magoo, Animal and at least a hundred more…tense for the action, long hair in the wind, beards and bandanas flapping, earrings, armpits, chain whips, swastikas and stripped-down Harleys flashing chrome as traffic on 101 moves over, nervous, to let the formation pass like a burst of dirty thunder…”
ESLO,
1. Yes, children as a form of pension scheme, that’s what I was talking about.
2. No force to apply fertility control program. Use incentives, provide free services.
3. Even minimal improvements to the standard of living for eg Indian people, will require sudden spikes in energy consumption and production of pollutants. Clever solutions are possible but take time to develop and/or be accepted and rolled out. Dirty and dumb solutions are ready to go off the shelf with bribery built into their business models to ensure that they prevail. Actually, India will solve its own population problem with a massive die-off resulting from all those MDR organisms they are cultivating in their open sewers.
Anyway, I think some of us agree that population is a factor in the sustainable living equation.
“Walk tall, kick ass, learn to speak Arabic, love music and never forget you come from a long line of truth seekers, lovers and warriors”
thankx
Jemand. 3 58pm
“…maybe the only thing that might save our biosphere from catastrophic destruction is A CATASTROPHIC event that culls our species into humility.”
You may be right. Sadly, given our seeming inability to course-correct or maybe the planets’s rare, but proven, impact events, we seem to be heading for one of many such scenarios.
I think we need to be careful though with the notion of “…useless (lentl) eaters plodding around the Earth in loin cloths talking about how benevolent the gods have been to their useless existence.”
After all, didn’t the original inhabitants of your country manage to inhabit the place for 40,000yrs without screwing it up until useless over-eaters conquered it and managed to degrade large areas in just a few short years?
We’ve taken charge so we have the responsibility to seek solutions whether or not catastrophe overtakes us.
We might also have the humility to learn a thing or two from the loincloth-wearers of the world.
Anecdotally, I believe the expression ‘putting lipstick on a pig’ is derived from this incident.
=======================
“There is a huge pig’s head in Lloyd Good’s toilet tonight. I put it there about three hours ago, just before he walked home from the bar. The snout is poking straight up out of the family toilet and the pig’s lips are glistening with Ruby Red lipstick and the eyes are propped open and the toilet bowl is filled with red commercial catsup.
The first time anybody in that house goes into the bathroom and turns the light on, I am going to have to be very alert. We will have serious action. Hysteria, wild rage. I have seen a lot of hideous things in my time, but the sight of that eerie-white pig’s head in the white toilet bowl with its mouth covered with lipstick and its dead gray eyes looking straight up at me – or anyone else that comes near that toilet – will live in my memory forever as one of the most genuinely hideous things I’ve ever seen. The idea of waking up half drunk in the middle of the night and wandering into your own bathroom and pissing distractedly into your own toilet and realizing after not many seconds that there is something basically wrong with the noise that normally happens when you piss into a bowl full of water in the middle of the night, and feeling the splash of warm urine on your own knees because it is bouncing off the lipstick-smeared snout of a dead pig’s head that is clogging up your toilet… that is a bad thing to see when you’re drunk.
***
Indeed. I am preparing to flee, even now. I told him that pig was going to be very expensive. He and his boys put it in my bed the other night, tied up and drugged and half hidden under the covers so that when I sat down on the bed right next to the beast and began talking seriously on the telephone to my accountant, who was not amused when the thing suddenly started moving and I said, “I’m sorry, I’ll have to call you back, there’s a pig in my bed”
– Songs of the Doomed: Gonzo Papers, Volume 3 – More notes of the death of the American dream, Hunter S Thompson, pgs 232 and 234.
Jemand: “That’s not the kind of planet I want to leave behind”. What kind of planet would you like to leave behind – v interested in that vision?
In the Gonzo tradition I hope Greenwald and Co. construct an edifice that has some spunk like the old Ramparts magazine, or Rolling Stone/Scanlan’s Monthly.
http://www.npr.org/2013/10/20/238136423/what-glenn-greenwald-could-gain-from-new-media-venture
“”There are critics of Greenwald who say that he remains the crusading advocate he ever was,” Folkenflik adds. “At the same time, you know, he really is trying to apply what he says are analytical tools to the documents that he’s obtained, to figure out what’s newsworthy. That’s, in a sense, a different role than a pure advocate would play.
“Certainly, in the new shop, it’ll be very interesting to see how they create editors and colleagues around him to help guide the force of his reporting,” Folkenflik says. “I think we really have yet to see how that’s going to play out.”
Heating up….
http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/content/syrian-warplanes-strike-near-damascus
Sofia NK,
Our Aboriginal people did not all have a happy existence prior to European arrival. Life was, and still is, tough out there in the Oz wilderness. 50’C in the shade, crocodiles to cuddle at night, millions of mosquitoes to tickle you while you sleep. Certainly their survival skills have been appreciated and used by settlers in latter times and we may have to relearn those skills for the next phase of human existence – in decline. But those skills are mostly obsolete in the present.
But that’s not the sort of life you want to live, is it? A broken leg is as a good as a death sentence in the forest. Every step you take could be your last. Certainly an interesting way of life but you would have no time for science and philosophy – that doesn’t feed the tribe during a drought. Romanticising our primitive ancestory is an indulgence of the modern age.
No thanks. I want to leave a planet that has its house in order and with the wherwithal for our decendents to explore every explorable avenue of nature and human conciousness. You can’t do that in a loin cloth.
“You can’t do that in a loin cloth.” Not sure that’s true. Native Americans were our aboriginals, and like their Oz counterparts have a tradition of respect for Nature. More than respect, there is a reverence for the Earth and it’s systems.
Sometimes going backward is the proper direction.