H/t AS at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.
Author: Matthew G. Saroff
Tweet of the Millennium So Far………
Say what you will about George W Bush, but he wouldn’t have stood for Russian aggression in Ukraine. He’d have invaded New Zealand by now.
— Donal O’Keeffe (@Donal_OKeeffe) March 1, 2014
Brilliant!!!
Comcast Doesn’t Give a F%$#
I cannot add anything to this:
OK, I Don’t Have Any Special Insights, But Here are My Unspecial Insights On the Ukraine
First, as in Georgia, the Russian operation was well considered and well executed. This was a tougher job than was done in Georgia, because as I noted at the time of that invasion, there was months of Georgian preparation for their attack on Sough Ossetia, and the Georgian military had been completely penetrated by the Russians, so the Russian forces had months to prepare.
In this case, it was all pulled together in about 1½ weeks:
At first, it wasn’t clear who exactly the armed men were—spotted at airports in Sevastopol and Simferopol overnight on Feb. 28. But on March 1, the Russian senate unanimously approved a request from Pres. Vladimir Putin to use the military “on the territory of Ukraine pending the normalization of the social and political situation in that country.”
The operation was already underway. Russian forces had launched a coordinated takeover of key sites, including airports, government offices, television stations and the two land routes connecting Crimea to the rest of Ukraine.
Someone sabotaged Ukrtelecom, which provides phone and Internet service to the peninsula.
Well executed, and John Kerry, aka the Clown Prince of Foreign Policy, has a response that is jaw dropping in its hypocrisy:
Secretary of State John Kerry made the round of Sunday shows this morning to condemn Russia’s “incredible act of aggression” in Ukraine, warning Prime Minister Vladimir Putin that the country faces harsh economic sanctions from the international community.
“It is really a stunning, willful choice by President Putin to invade another country,” Kerry said on Face the Nation.
But in the seriousness of the situation, the irony of Kerry’s next comments may have gone missed. ”You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped up pretext,” he said.
Yes, that WAS his talking point of the day.
Meanwhile, the Ukranians are mobilizing their military, and a member of their interim government, and a member of the right-wing Svoboda party, Mikhail Golovko, is suggesting that the Ukraine will restore its nuclear arsenal.
Needless to say, this is a complete mess, and there are not a lot of lessons learned at this point.
The only one that immediately comes to mind is that the EU’s hasty moves toward expansion work against its viability and continued existence. (The start of this crisis was the rejection of an EU deal intended to lead toward Ukrainian accession)
I Take One F%$#ing Day off From Blogging………
And Putin occupies the Crimea. The news gods mock me.
Seriously, I’ll have more on the the turmoil around the Black Sea later, but because my kids were in a play, Once Upon a Mattress (Natalie was the Nightingale of Samarkand, and Charlie was in the pit orchestra) over the last two days, I’ve not blogged.
It was a nice production of a rather indestructible play.
Asacia, who played the female lead Winnifred, cracked some ribs on Thursday, but she could go on, and so could the show.
Catch Phrases XV
Do not make the Torah into a crown with which to aggrandize yourself, and don’t use it as a spade with which to dig into them.
*Full disclosure, my great grandfather, Harry Goldman, and her grandfather, Sam Goldman were brothers.
The Joys of Mass Transit
I’m taking the bus and Metro to work today.
I’m doing out to see how it goes.
If this works for me, our will save some money, along with some wear and tear in my psyche.
There its a guy in the Metro car with me, and I cannot tell if he is having a conversation via a bluetooth equipped cell phone, our if he is mentally ill.
The joys of modem technology, neh?
[on edit]
No loss of signal underground, and the conversation continues, so, to paraphrase Cheap Trick, it’s those men inside his brain.
Posted via mobile.
Why the NSA is a Bigger Danger to Our Way of Life than is Al-Qaeda
We already have a part of our state security apparatus with a history of blackmail for their own benefit, specifically Hoover’s FBI, and now we discover that the NSA has collaborated with their British counterparts to intercept webcam pictures from millions of people:
Britain’s surveillance agency GCHQ, with aid from the US National Security Agency, intercepted and stored the webcam images of millions of internet users not suspected of wrongdoing, secret documents reveal.
GCHQ files dating between 2008 and 2010 explicitly state that a surveillance program codenamed Optic Nerve collected still images of Yahoo webcam chats in bulk and saved them to agency databases, regardless of whether individual users were an intelligence target or not.
In one six-month period in 2008 alone, the agency collected webcam imagery – including substantial quantities of sexually explicit communications – from more than 1.8 million Yahoo user accounts globally.
Yahoo reacted furiously to the webcam interception when approached by the Guardian. The company denied any prior knowledge of the program, accusing the agencies of “a whole new level of violation of our users’ privacy”.
If you don’t think this sort of stuff cannot be used against you, what happens if they decide that they to shut you up, and your little is stupid enough to sext their boy friend.
Something like 10% of the millions of documents are images of body parts that could get an FCC sanction.
And you wonder why former counter-terrorism Czar Richard Clarke is worrying that NSA actions might presage the establishment of a police state:
Revelations about NSA monitoring activities over the last year show the potential for a police state mechanism, according to the former U.S. cybersecurity czar, but there is still time to avoid the dire consequences.
At the 2014 Cloud Security Alliance Summit, unofficial RSA Conference opener Richard Clarke, chairman of Washington, D.C.-based Good Harbor Consulting LLC, spoke to a packed audience. The former cybersecurity advisor to President Barack Obama discussed his involvement in the December 2013 report reviewing the data collection and monitoring capabilities at the National Security Agency, Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Clarke said that the reaction to leaks by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden has perhaps been overblown, because he described the employees at the three-letter agencies as “incredibly intelligent people” who are focused on combating terrorism and punishing violations of human rights. As part of the review process, Clarke and his group were given what he called carte blanche security clearances to review all of the agencies’ intelligence-gathering capabilities.
Those employees are not currently listening to random phone calls and reading email, Clarke said, but that doesn’t mean U.S. citizens should ignore the agencies’ growing capabilities.
“In terms of collecting intelligence, they are very good. Far better than you could imagine,” Clarke said. “But they have created, with the growth of technologies, the potential for a police state.”
Clarke said such concerns are hardly new, pointing to the government committee headed by Sen. Frank Church in the 1970s. Church warned at the time that the technologies at intelligence agencies were developing at such an alarming rate that, if they were all turned on, the U.S. would never be able to turn them off, effectively creating a permanent police state in which the entire popular would be under constant surveillance.
Though such warnings seem dire, Clarke noted that the seemingly endless scope of current government surveillance activities stemmed largely from a lack of strict guidance from policy makers. He said a major aspect of the report to the White House was simply prompting the questions that were previously unasked: What are our intelligence agencies collecting? What should they be collecting? If we should be collecting data, how do we safeguard it? If we’re collecting data, how do we stay consistent with U.S. traditions of privacy and government oversight?
This is also why security expert Bruce Schneier is suggesting that the National Security Agency be broken up:
The NSA has become too big and too powerful. What was supposed to be a single agency with a dual mission — protecting the security of U.S. communications and eavesdropping on the communications of our enemies — has become unbalanced in the post-Cold War, all-terrorism-all-the-time era.
Putting the U.S. Cyber Command, the military’s cyberwar wing, in the same location and under the same commander, expanded the NSA’s power. The result is an agency that prioritizes intelligence gathering over security, and that’s increasingly putting us all at risk. It’s time we thought about breaking up the National Security Agency.
Broadly speaking, three types of NSA surveillance programs were exposed by the documents released by Edward Snowden. And while the media tends to lump them together, understanding their differences is critical to understanding how to divide up the NSA’s missions.
The organization is out of control, and its actions do not properly serve our security needs, and it increasingly sees its mission as simply expanding its reach and power.
The Supreme Court is to Take Up Software Patents
I messed this in December, when the Supreme Court agreed to rule on the validity of software patents:
Renewing its recent fascination with the kinds of inventions that can be patented, the Supreme Court on Friday agreed to clarify when an analytical method implemented by a computer or by a link on the Internet is eligible for monopoly protection. This was the only new case granted. The Court will be reviewing a widely splintered decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, in the case of Alice Corporation Pty. Ltd. v. CLS Bank International (docket 13-298). The en banc Federal Circuit found the method at issue ineligible for a patent, but a majority could not agree on a standard for making such decisions.
The case will provide a new test of the Patent Act’s most basic provision — Section 101, which broadly outlines what kinds of inventions are patentable. One of the long-standing exceptions to the types of inventions mentioned in that section is that an abstract idea can never be patented. That issue arises frequently these days, especially with rapidly developing technology in computer software. The Justices have dealt with that issue several times in recent years.
Alice International, an Australian company that is half-owned by the National Australia Bank Ltd., obtained patent protection on a method invented by its founder, Ian Shepherd, for exchanging financial instruments, with the aim of assuring that, when two parties have agreed to an exchange of currency or other financial goods, they actually deliver on the deal. Because such agreements are often delayed at least a few days in implementation, there is a risk that one side won’t live up to the agreement. The invented program works out a settlement arrangement to determine which side is obliged to deliver. It generates instructions to the institutions involved to carry out their agreement.
Hopefully, this means that the Supreme Court is willing to overrule the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, aka “The Patent Court”, which has ignored Supreme Court precedent for years:
This spring, the Supreme Court will weigh in on the patentability of software for the first time in a generation. In the 1970s, the high court placed strict rules on software-related patents. But since then, a lower court has effectively overruled the Supreme Court’s precedents, allowing hundreds of thousands of legally dubious software patents to be approved.
The arguments in the software patent debate have barely changed since the 1970s, but the players in the debate have changed radically. In 1972, IBM was a leading software patent opponent. Today, Big Blue has become one of the concept’s biggest supporters. In 1991, Bill Gates warned that patents could bring the software industry to a “standstill.” Today, Microsoft is fighting to protect the tens of thousands of software patents in its portfolio.
………
During the 1970s, patent law was shaped by a Supreme Court that was skeptical of patents on software. Even its 1981 decision [which allowed for a computer controlled method of curing rubber involving a computer to constantly monitor temperature] emphasized that there were limits on software-related patents. In 1982, Congress made a seemingly innocuous change to the structure of the court system that had a profound impact on the legal status of software patents.
Most areas of the law are handled by generalist judges organized into a dozen geographically based appellate courts. But Congress, concerned that patent law had become too complex for generalist judges, created a new court called the Federal Circuit Appeals Court. The Federal Circuit was given jurisdiction over all patent appeals. And perhaps because its judges spend so much time rubbing elbows with patent attorneys, the new court would prove to have a strong pro-patent bias.
An important turning point came in a 1994 ruling involving a computer graphics technique called anti-aliasing. ………
Anti-aliasing was a technique which had been known for decades, but the patent court ignored precedent, and allowed the patent, and opened up the floodgates, which later extended to business models and financial constructs.
I think that it is likely that SCOTUS will issue significant restrictions, because, ever since the Blackberry case, pretty the only time that they take up a case like this, it is to slap down the maniacs in the Patent Court.
They need to come down on this bullsh%$ hard, because the jokers in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit are arrogant clueless extremists.
This is a Fabulous F%$# You to the Homophobes
The mayors of Boston and New York are boycotting their respective St. Patrick’s Day Parades because of the organizer’s homophobic policies:
Boston Mayor Martin Walsh is threatening to boycott the St. Patrick’s Day parade unless organizers allow a group of gay military veterans to march, joining New York’s mayor in protesting parade policies on gay groups.
Walsh, the son of Irish immigrants, said Thursday he’s been trying to broker a deal with the city’s parade organizers to allow a gay veterans group sponsored by MassEquality to march in this year’s parade. He said allowing gay groups to participate is long overdue.
“It’s 2014 — it’s far beyond the time where we should be even having this discussion because they’re veterans who fought for this country just like any other veteran,” Walsh said.
“I made a commitment during the campaign … that I would fight for equality and that’s what this is all about.”
But parade planners appeared unwilling to budge.
Lead parade organizer Philip Wuschke Jr. said gay people are not prohibited from marching with other groups. But he said organizers do not want the parade to turn into a demonstration for a particular group.
“The theme of the parade is St. Patrick’s Day. It is not a sexually oriented parade,” he said. “All we want to do is have a happy parade. The parade is a day of celebration, not demonstration.”
In New York, Mayor Bill de Blasio said he will skip the nation’s largest St. Patrick’s Day parade in Manhattan because participants are not allowed to carry signs or banners identifying themselves as gay.
“I will be participating in a number of other events to honor the Irish heritage of this city,” de Blasio said during a press conference earlier this month. “But I simply disagree with the organizers of that parade.”
Let the bigots stew in their own hate alone.
Somewhere Out There, J. Edgar Hoover is Laughing
Last night, Rachel Maddow had an update on the suspicious shooting of unarmed Ibragim Todashev in his own apartment while questioning him about his relationship with alleged Boston bombers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
The FBI is still sitting on their report.
They are still forbidding the coroner from releasing his report.
They have detained, deported, or otherwise excluded everyone who knew Todashev, as Maddow details below.
The FBI is clearly engaged in an aggressive coverup, and the only thing that I can think of that they would feel necessary to cover up was that the Tsarnaev brothers were a part of a botched anti-terrorism sting that went very, very bad.
I guess that I am wearing my tinfoil hat today.
Fabulous!!!!!
Just saw on Maddow that Jan Brewer vetoed the “Arizona Encourages Religious Descrimination” bill.
Kewl.
A Correction:
While still feel that the the government transition in the Ukraine will likely lead to an upsurge in anti-semitism.
The Ukraine has a long and inglorious tradition of virulent Jew hatred, and periods of social unrest lead to an upsurge in bigotry of all kinds.
That being said, Mark Ames, former editor in chief of the eXile, a former Moscow based English language tabloid, knows a LOT more about the former Soviet Union than I do.
One of the things that he knew was that Rabbi Moshe Reuven Azman, whom I quoted as advising that Jews leave Kiev, is a Chabad rabbi, and Chabad is really tight with the Kremlin.
So, I have to question the reliability of Reb Azman’s pronouncements.
Ames’ thesis is basically that the sh%$ is f%$#ed up and sh%$, and that teasing out alliances and philosophies is simply not a productivity, or as he sums up, “Everything you know about Ukraine is wrong“:
………
Everyone looking for a proxy side to support or oppose in the Ukraine political dynamic will be disappointed. Ukraine politics go by their own rules. Today’s neoliberal ultranationalist could be tomorrow’s Kremlin ally, and visa-versa. Just look at what happened to the Orange Revolution—nothing. To wit:
a) One Orange Revolution leader, Yulia Tymoshenko, wound up turning against her partner Viktor Yushchenko and allying with Yanukovych to strip Yushchenko of presidential powers; later, Tymoshenko allied with the Kremlin against Yushchenko; now she’s free from jail and the presumptive leader of the anti-Yanukovych forces.
b) The other Orange leader—the pro-EU, anti-Kremlin Viktor Yushchenko—wound up allying with pro-Kremlin Yanukovych to jail Yulia Tymoshenko.
c) John McCain has been the big driving force for regime change against Yanukovych, but McCain’s 2008 campaign chief’s lobby firm, Davis Manafort, managed Yanukovych’s political campaigns and his lobbying efforts in the US.
d) Anthony Podesta, brother of President Obama’s senior advisor John Podesta, is another Yanukovych lobbyist; John Podesta was the chief of Obama’s 2008 transition team.
4. Yanukovych was not fighting neoliberalism, the World Bank, or oligarchy — nor was he merely a tool of the Kremlin.There’s another false meme going around that because the World Bank and IMF are moving in to “reform” Ukraine’s economy — for the umpteenth time — that somehow this means that this was a fight between pro-neoliberal and anti-neoliberal forces. It wasn’t.
Yanukovych enthusiastically cooperated with the IMF and pledged to adhere to their demands. Six months after Yanukovych was elected president, the headline read “International Monetary Fund approves $15 billion loan to Ukraine”. ………
………
The point is this: Ukraine is not Venezuela. This is not a profoundly political or class fight, as it is in Venezuela. Yanukovych represents one faction of oligarchs; the opposition, unwittingly or otherwise, ultimately fronts for other factions. Many of those oligarchs have close business ties with Russia, but assets and bank accounts—and mansions—in Europe. Both forces are happy to work with the neoliberal global institutions.
In Ukraine, there is no populist left politics, even though the country’s deepest problem is inequality and oligarchy. Memories of the Soviet Union play a big role in turning people off to populist-left politics there, for understandable reasons.
So Mark Ames thesis is that the political culture of the Ukraine is largely one of corrupt politicians and oligarchs grasping for advantage.
This does not mean that Jews in the Ukraine are not likely to see harassment, because (as Ames notes) the ultra-nationalist parties were at the lead of the most recent protests, and because the history of that part of the world.
I Wish that This Was True
In response to Georgia’s issuing a vanity plate featuring the Klu Klux Klan Confederate Battle Flag, John Perr comes up with a parody that is pure genius.
The only thing that could make this better would be if this were true:
The state of Georgia this week began offering a new version of its vehicle license plate featuring the Confederate battle flag. Sponsored by the Georgia division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans (to whom a portion of the purchase price and annual registration fees will go), the revised design has many people inside the state and out howling mad.
In response to the outcry, Georgia SCV commander Jack Bridwell asked, “What’s the big deal?” Echoing Bridwell’s explanation that “the design is just people trying to show who they are and trying to be proud of their heritage,” Sons of Confederate Veterans spokesman Ray McBerry invited other groups to do the same:“We believe that all people ought to be able to celebrate their history and their heritage, and that includes Southerners. We did anticipate that there could be some folks who would not like that, but we encourage them to go and make application for their own specialty plates.”
Now, a little known organization is taking him up on the offer. The group, calling itself The American People, is sponsoring a license plate to mark the 150th anniversary of Union General William Tecumseh Sherman’s March to the Sea.
After capturing the South’s vital manufacturing center and rail hub at Atlanta, Sherman’s troops marched southeast to Savannah leaving a swath of ruin in their wake. Between November 15th and December 21st, 1864, Sherman more than accomplished his objective to “create havoc and destruction of all resources that would be beneficial to the enemy.” Sherman’s brilliant campaign (or what the Sons of Confederate Veterans brand “atrocities and war crimes“) hastened the end of the Confederacy and with it the enslavement of four million Americans.
Read the rest, it’s brilliant, and if you know anyone in Georgia, have them petition for a vanity plate.
This is f%$3ing brilliant!
I Don’t Think that I’ve Ever Seen Jon Stewart Angrier
John Stewart and Larry Wilmore tear into professional bigot Fox News Legal analyst Andrew Napolitano for rolling out standard grossly KKK/Sons of the Confederacy lies.
Notice that they are both smiling.
They are f5$#ing outraged, and the smiles never leave their faces, and Wilmore draws blood when he compares Napolitano’s differing attitudes on the Civil War and the Revolutionary war, “You know, there’s something not right when you feel the only black thing worth fighting for is tea,” but he drives a much deserved stake through the anti-tax libertarianism espoused by Napolitano, and Fox, when he says, “You think it’s immoral for the government to reach into your pocket, rip your money away from its warm home and claim it as its own property, money that used to enjoy unfettered freedom is now conscripted to do whatever its new owner tells it to. Now, I know this is going to be a leap, but you know that sadness and rage you feel about your money? Well, that’s the way some of us feel about people.”
It’s frightening that such a contemptible human being as Napolitano was once a judge.
Just watch.
The War on Drugs Goes from Dishonesty to Parody in Annapolis
The Annapolis police chief testified about the 37 people who died of marijuana overdoses on the first day of legalization in Colorado.
There is a small problem with this testimony, it never happened. In fact the source of the story was the satirical website the Daily Current:
Testifying against bills proposed in Maryland to legalize and decriminalize marijuana, Annapolis Police Chief Michael Pristoop cited a hoax story that claimed 37 people died the first day marijuana was legalized in Colorado.
“The first day of legalization, that’s when Colorado experienced 37 deaths that day from overdose on marijuana,” Pristoop said in testimony at Tuesday’s Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee hearing. “I remember the first day it was decriminalized there were 37 deaths.”
But Sen. Jamie Raskin, D-Montgomery, who has proposed a bill that would legalize, regulate and tax the drug, immediately fact-checked Pristoop.
“Unless you have some other source for this, I’m afraid I’ve got to spoil the party here,” Raskin said. “Your assertion that 37 people died of a marijuana overdose in Colorado was a hoax on the DailyCurrant and the Comedy Central website.”
Our drug penal/enforcement industry is a waste of resources, and people like Michael Pristoop should find honest productive work.
And Ukraine Returns to Form………
I am not surprised that a prominent Ukrainian rabbi has called for Jews to flee Kiev.
He is that there have been credible threats against the Jewish community:
Ukrainian Rabbi Moshe Reuven Azman, called on Kiev’s Jews to leave the city and even the country if possible, fearing that the city’s Jews will be victimized in the chaos, Israeli daily Maariv reported Friday.
“I told my congregation to leave the city center or the city all together and if possible the country too,” Rabbi Azman told Maariv. “I don’t want to tempt fate,” he added, “but there are constant warnings concerning intentions to attack Jewish institutions.”
According to the paper’s report Azman closed the Jewish community’s schools but still holds three daily prayers. He said the Israeli embassy told members of the Jewish community to avoid leaving their homes.
It’s a fact that a significant number of of the protesters had ties to right wing nationalists, most notably the Svoboda party.
What’s more the history of the Ukraine, and Kiev in particular has been extremely antisemitic Even By the Standards of the Russian Empire and the Republics of the Former Soviet Union.
Seriously, the 200,000 or so Jews living in the Ukraine need to make arrangements for a quick exit.
I expect to see synagogues to burn.
No, This is Not the Onion
Jack Burkman, a long time right wing lobbyist is writing legislation to ban gays from the NFL:
“Imagine your son being forced to shower with a gay man,” Burkman said in a statement. “That’s a horrifying prospect for every mom in the country. What in the world has this nation come to?”
Of course, your son is already showering with gay men in gym class, at the health club, in the US military, in the NFL, and in the US Congress. The only difference is that in some of those places, your son is simply not aware of who the gay guy is. The NFL being more welcoming to gays won’t change the simple fact that just because you don’t know who’s gay, doesn’t mean the gay men aren’t already there.
Normally, I would say that kicker to this story is that his brother James is gay and out, and thinks that Jack is an asshole:
But this is not the kicker to this story.
The kicker to the story was that he was on the DC Madame’s phone list.
So, Jack was a ……… John. (He denies it ……… Yeah ……… Sure)
Goodbye Moe Green
A comedic genius who preferred to be on the other side of the camera.
Best Comment Ever on the Comcast/Time Warner Cable Merger, With Taiwanese News Video
Telco Maven, and fellow medieval recreation afficianado, Harold Feld, gives us the best comment ever on the merger:
OH MY GOD!! YOU COMCAST PEOPLE HAVE NO LIMITS! YOU’RE LIKE SOME GIANT, COAX-TENTACLED CTHULHU-BEAST THAT KEEPS PROMISING TO DEVOUR US ALL BETWEEN 8 A.M. AND NOON BUT DOESN’T ACTUALLY GET AROUND TO DEVOURING US UNTIL AFTER 3 P.M. BECAUSE YOU GOT ‘STUCK IN TRAFFIC’ AND A PREVIOUS DEVOURING RAN LONGER THAN EXPECTED . . . .
Not only that, he raises one of the famous (infamous?) Taiwanese CGI news animations.
Mr. Feld, you are a f%$#ing genius.