FINALLY

JPMorgan Chase & Co, the Biggest U.S. Bank by Assets Being Investigated By DOJ Over Mortgages

Documents: U.S. mining data from 9 leading Internet firms; companies deny knowledge

From the Washington Post:

The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track foreign targets, according to a top-secret document obtained by The Washington Post.

Via elioguevara.blogspot.com

To paraphrase Matt Taibbi, the NSA and the F.B.I. working their slithery tongues deep into the dirty orifices of these companies are rampant vampire squid sucklings wrapped around our most intimate activities, relentlessly jamming their blood funneling tongues all up in everybody's business. The Rubicon is crossed. For your convenience and entertainment I've compiled a list of the companies named in the documents, their corporate slogans, and my commentary:

Google "Don't be evil"
when They get all up in your servers

Facebook "Connect with friends and the world around you"
and have your privacy violated by law enforcement 

Apple "Think Different"
about illegal and unconstitutional invasions of privacy

Yahoo! "Do you...Yahoo!?"
'cause if you do...THEY ARE RIGHT ON YER ASS

Microsoft "Be What's Next"
across the Rubicon without a paddle

Skype "Take a Deep Breath"
and don't cry over spilt secrets

PalTalk "More than video chat"
also unconstitutional surveillance

AOL "It's on!"
and goes straight to law enforcement

YouTube "Broadcast Yourself"
Oh don't bother, They already know

Disappointed, Disillusioned & Disgusted (Though Not Entirely Surprised)

NSA Whistleblowers: "All U.S. Citizens" [are] Targeted by Surveillance Program, Not Just Verizon Customers - Democracy Now

A leaked court order has revealed the Obama administration is conducting a massive domestic surveillance program by collecting telephone records of millions of Verizon customers. The Guardian newspaper published a classified order issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court directing Verizon’s Business Network Services to give the National Security Agency electronic data, including all calling records on an "ongoing, daily basis." 

Introducing Barack W. Bush (or George Hussein Obama)

Our first African American POTUS won an historic election in 2008, but then he went all fucking J. Edgar Hoover on us. Compare this paragraph about Hoover:

Hoover's critics accused him of exceeding the jurisdiction of the FBI.[1] He used the FBI to harass political dissenters and activists, to amass secret files on political leaders,[2] and to collect evidence using illegal methods.[3]  Hoover transformed the FBI into his private secret police force; Truman stated that "we want no Gestapo or secret police. FBI is tending in that direction. They are dabbling in sex-life scandals and plain blackmail... all customers, along with location and routing data, and with the duration and frequency of the calls...via Wikipedia

to the same one bracket-edited ala Barack Obama:

[His critics] have accused him of exceeding the jurisdiction of [his office]. He used [his office] to harass political dissenters and activists, to amass secret files on political leaders,[2] and to collect evidence using illegal methods.[3] [Obama] transformed [the powers of his office] into his private secret police force; [Critics] stated that "we want no Gestapo or secret police...[this presidency] is tending in that direction. They are dabbling in ...life scandals and plain blackmail...all customers, along with location and routing data, and with the duration and frequency of the calls..."

I find it, actually, horrifying.

Explosions at the Boston Marathon Finish Line

Explosions at the Boston Marathon finish line have killed 2 people, sent more than 100 people to area hospitals, and bummed out elite runners all over the world. A hellish scene, apparently. More here, at the Boston Globe. 1-800-494-TIPS.

via TMZ

Reports of Marathon Runners that crossed finish line and continued to run to Mass General Hospital to give blood to victims — NBC Sports Network (@NBCSN)

Henry Kissinger, War Criminal

Long believed, now confirmed, but so awful it is hard to feel vindicated:

"Before the Freedom of Information Act, I used to say at meetings, "The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer." [laughter] But since the Freedom of Information Act, I'm afraid to say things like that." - Former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Monday, March 10, 1975 via Public Library of US Diplomacy

Many thanks to Tom Parker for the belief and Julian Assange for the confirmation.

Knock That OFF, Internets

Some of you may be aware of the propensity of victim-blaming in our culture particularly in such matters as rape and other sexual assault UNDERFUCKINGSTATEMENT, particularly when the victim is female. The rhetoric from politicians about what is or isn't legitimate I mean come on WTF? rape that rose to a crescendo during the recent election cycle continues in bills being considered that severely limit access to not just abortion and birth control including the morning-after pill, but also to basic sex education in our schools.

In the wake of two recent high profile events: the media coverage of the Steubenville verdict bemoaning the lost opportunities of the perpetrators just determined guilty, and the recent #donglegate nightmare involving Adria Richards wherein at a tech conference she challenged and publicized the ubiquity of double entendres* in the tech world resulting in an absolute shitstorm of hate directed at her and the loss of her job, have given those of us paying attention to such things a(nother) wake-up call.

The wake-up call is this: we do not live in a world that is safe for women. And it's not just in India or Afghanistan where women are not safe. It is right here in the U.S. in Silicon Valley, Steubenville, Ohio, and seems like pretty much everywhere else. For me it hits particularly hard to see the ugly confluence of misogyny, patriarchy, slut-shaming, gender bias, sexual harassment, and sheer bigotry emerging from a community near and dear to me, that is, the tech world.

I spent a decade in Silicon Valley having some of the best professional experiences of my life, working with engineers, programmers, graphic designers, writers, UI developers, hacktivists, math geniuses, artists, AI developers, etc. Currently my tech posse consists of the random online communities where I actively participate, most of which are also comprised of engineers, programmers, graphic designers, writers, UI developers, hacktivists, math geniuses, artists, AI developers, etc. (although not usually the same ones).

For better or worse, most of my waking hours are on the Intertubes either working or trolling for information of general interest; the opportunities to encounter sexist, heterosexist, racist, classist, and/or whateverthefuckist are myriad, and have been as long as I've been on the Intertubes, that is, going on 20 years now (yes, I'm an Old). But these last two incidents have just chapped my hide far beyond the usual and I have been wrestling with how to deal with it, how to salvage this as a teaching/learning moment for myself and the women and men in my life rather than just a rage moment for me.

Then I stumbled on this Twitter feed and after laughing/crying til my stomach hurt, I think it's time to share: #SafetyTipsforLadies is a Twitter feed started by hilaroar at tumblr.com/ where humor is used to blaze a path forward from this very dark age we are (apparently) still in and is well worth the read (and a forward to a friend) if you are so inclined. It satirizes classic "anti-rape" advice so beautifully and well with such darkly bitter humor; it is very hard to avoid the crazy. Here are some examples (I particularly like the last one):

* #donglegate is a perfect example of why double entendre is a problem in the workplace.  "A double entendre is a figure of speech in which a spoken phrase is devised to be understood in either of two ways. Typically one of the interpretations is rather obvious whereas the other is more subtle. The more subtle of the interpretations may have a humorous, ironic, or risqué purpose. It may also convey a message that would be socially awkward, or even offensive, to state directly. (The Oxford English Dictionary describes a double entendre as being used to "convey an indelicate meaning".)" - From Wikipedia

** See Daily Dot for plenty of excellent coverage.

More Business as Usual

Financial Snake Pit Rife with Greed, Conflicts of Interest, and Wrongdoing

Our economic collapse was...

"hardly a fluke occurrence, the meltdown was the product of a deeply corrupt financial system, one fueled by profit-hungry banks that deceived their clients, and overseen by lax regulators who were complicit in the firms' chronic abuse of the most fundamental rules of the game" - Carl Levin, chair of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations

Read the report here.

Lawmakers Spend Much Of Their Time Just Taunting One Another

HA HA HA HA!!!!  At last! Quantitative evidence! According to a recent study directed by Professor Gary King, Director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University:

"[M]odern members of Congress spend about 27 percent of the time just taunting each other.


“It’s jarring and surprising,” said Prof. Gary King, an expert in using computers to find patterns in large amounts of data. And, King said, probably counterproductive if we want Congress’s members to trust one another enough to make deals.


“The entire government may go bankrupt, I guess. This week, right?” King said in a telephone interview. “We probably want our representatives to be listening to each other rather than calling each other names.”


To come up with this insight, King and two graduate students analyzed 64,033 press releases sent out by all U.S. senators from 2005 to 2007."

And the biggest taunters are the ones in the safest districts - they don't HAVE to play nice, so they don't.  Kinda like a ... hmm... what's the word? Oh right - kinda like a bully!


It's all fun and games until the government grinds to a halt, further threatening the not-really-recovering global economy...

Nuclear Regulators Privately Had Doubts - And Lied About Their Doubts to the Public

While none of the specifics published in this report are specific to Diablo Canyon - the particular situation that I am personally interested in - I nevertheless have the temerity to suggest that if U.S. regulators and industry officials are willing to gloss over the truth about these particular locations, they are likely to have no qualms about doing the same vis a vis other locations:

U.S. regulators privately have expressed doubts that some of the nation's nuclear power plants are prepared for a Fukushima-scale disaster, undercutting their public confidence since Japan's nuclear crisis began...


Those concerns seem to contrast with the confidence U.S. regulators and industry officials have publicly expressed after the world's worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl began to unfold on March 11, UCS officials said on Wednesday.


"While the NRC and the nuclear industry have been reassuring Americans that there is nothing to worry about -- that we can do a better job dealing with a nuclear disaster like the one that just happened in Japan -- it turns out that privately NRC senior analysts are not so sure," said Edwin Lyman, a UCS nuclear expert.


The e-mails in question are part of an NRC review of how the operators of nuclear plants in Delta, Pennsylvania, and Surry County, Virginia, would cope with a prolonged power outage that knocked cooling systems offline, as occurred at the Tokyo Electric Power Co-operated Fukushima plant.


In a July 28, 2010, e-mail, one NRC staffer said that contingency plans for Exelon Corp's Peach Bottom nuclear plant in Delta "have really not been reviewed to ensure that they will work to mitigate severe accidents."


Another document, undated, said backup plans included just having equipment on the plant grounds that could be useful "when used by knowledgeable operators if post-event conditions allow." - Reuters

Why lie? Why not tell the public the truth?  


...


Oh right. I forgot. FOLLOW THE MONEY. 

Show You the Money

Here's a calculator you can use to see how many of your $$ went to pay for the three wars we are now conducting: I.O.U.

Are you not enraged?

$75 Million as of This Morning

...is what our government has spent to have 50 fighter jets and nearly 40 support aircraft operating in Libya.

According to HuffPo, The total U.S. costs for the Libya air campaign as of March 28 were $550 million, not counting normal deployment spending.


ARE YOU F**KING KIDDING? In light of the current budget stalemate in Washington, D.C.?? Really?? Wow! That's not just greed - that is f**king psychopathology!


How else is one to explain the utter disregard for those of us who supply those funds? GAWD.


Here's the latest budget proposal:

Over the next decade, [They] want to cut $389 billion from Medicare, the public health insurance program for seniors. Over the same period, [Their] budget puts $735 billion less toward Medicaid, which benefits Americans too poor to afford private insurance. Discretionary spending on domestic programs is also reduced by $923 billion. - HuffPo

To quote a commenter on HuffPo,

"...As teachers are fired, collective bargaining rights stripped, and countless American towns and cities [see: Detroit] transformed into third-world ghost towns, we lend Gaddafi and company billions at near-zero interest rates. "Sorry if you can't feed, clothe, or shelter your kids, but we just ain't got no money." Uh, right.


The most important thing we must all keep in mind is the following premise; this is intentional. You don't "accidentally" turn your back on the nation's homeowners and then lend billions/trillions to foreign dictators, corporations, and hedge funds ...You do this intentionally. As a matter of policy. You intentionally shower the already-rich with more riches, and suck the life out of the lifeless.


Before I turn this into an unreadable ramble, I'll say just on more thing. If you want to see the future of America, look to the nations who have already received the Washington-imposed IMF/World Bank treatment. They received the treatment at gunpoint, we are receiving it slightly more gradually due to that darn Constitution and that silly necessity to abide by (at least, appear to abide by) the rule of law. A handful of mega-billionaires, crumbling infrastructure, degraded public institutions, a militarized and increasingly brutal police force, and an oppressed people."

Really, I want to bite people - and not in a fun way.

Business As Usual

And it is so very DISAPPOINTING. From Matt Taibbi at Rollingstone.com:

"The fact that Boehner supported TARP and No Child Left Behind and mega-handouts to the pharmaceutical industry and a range of other federal subsidies is hardly surprising, for this is what mainstream Washington politicians of both parties do — they take great buttloads of money from giant transnational companies, play golf with the CEOs of those same companies ("If someone I've gotten to know on the golf course comes into my office with a good argument," Boehner once said, "I tend to want to listen"), and deliver taxpayer money back to their buddies when the need arises, or sometimes even when the need doesn't arise. 

...Boehner, in short, has for most of his career been ... a corporate schmoozer and a remorseless spender of taxpayer money for whom the notion of small government is just something to say when the cameras are on, or when the public money in question might go to poor people or immigrants or other such unlikely golfers. This was a fine way to be during the 2000s, back when America was still unfucked enough to enjoy a phony real estate boom and launch recreational wars of conquest in the Middle East — but in this new decade, post-Bush and post-crash, there is serious doubt on the Hill that a reflexive favor-churner like Boehner will be able to keep delivering Republican votes to lavish taxpayer money on his industry pals. Money is simply too tight now, and people are too pissed off." 

Operation Earnest Voice: Software Designed to Create and Control False Online Personas

"The US military is developing software that will let it secretly manipulate social media using fake online personas designed to influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda." - The Guardian

Not that different from lowlifes who co-opt dead soldier's identities and use them to scam people, in my opinion.


Major WTF moment.

AOL & Huffington Post: My Fondest Fantasy

...is that Arianna Huffington will fire Michael Arrington of Tech Crunch.

My Thought Every Time Sarah Palin Opens Her Mouth

There's a Serial Litter Bug on the Loose in Princeton, MA!

The Fahm is situated on a truly lovely road in the middle of some truly lovely countryside.

Our road is shared with a handful of other people, and is mercifully not a heavy commute artery.  This is also mercifully a low crime area, with one glaring exception.  An individual - as yet unknown - who regularly drives our road also regularly dumps articles of trash on the road.

  

The trash contained in the deposits each time are remarkably similar in one aspect: each litter drop includes at least one large Bud Lite beer can.  

Often an empty bag of chips is also involved although that is not always the case.

I suspect The Princeton Litter Bug is a regular on our road, either a local who uses it like any other back road to get from point A to point B, or (gasp!) one of our neighbors. I try not to take it personally that so very many of the Bud Lite cans end up between our place and Ball Hill Rd.; I prefer to think of it as coincidence, and not as someone showing their displeasure at our presence in the neighborhood.


Being the Great Detective that I am not I've even thought about taking the trash down to the Princeton police and ask them to take fingerprints off the can since littering isn't just ANNOYING, it is also ILLEGAL.  Oh yeah, stand back, I'm about to get all C.S.I. on this crime wave.

I'm done picking up somebody else's garbage, and even though I find it hard to believe that anyone who drives this road regularly would also deliberately befoul it, that is indeed the case.  Pack it in, pack it OUT, 'bro. I'm tired of seeing your SCAT.

Facebook & Privacy ... HA HA HA!

Here's one reason to aggressively manage your Facebook privacy settings and to limit the information you do post to that which you actually intend the world to see and exploit.  "Ah!" you say, "No worries HERE - I've never sent naked pictures to anyone."  Before you get too comfy in illusions of having your privacy intact, ask yourself if there is anything in your e-mail "Sent" folder that you would prefer be kept private?  Say...a message to a lover?  Or your lawyer?  Hmm...that makes it a whoooole different story, don't you think?

[Name Redacted] Used Facebook To Hack Women's Emails*

* [Name Redacted] in this instance is not the same [Name Redacted] as the one mentioned here, here, and here.

Because of This Guy...

I went OUT OF MY WAY to try to do yoga today...but when I couldn't find our cassette player for my favorite yoga tape I had to do Tai Chi instead because R. Albert Mohler, Jr., a Southern Baptist preacher, had to go open his big mouth and say that yoga is an anti-Christian practice.

*sigh*

This is (apparently) the post in which I "out" myself as a Christian (I know, scary, don't be afraid), albeit a Progressive Christian, the type of Christian to whom this sort of RIDICULOUSNESS is not only embarrassing but also incomprehensible. Some of my richest spiritual experiences have taken place on a yoga mat and for some uptight freak of a White Guy...

...to say this violates tenants of Christian belief...well, I think he's grasping at straws and likely afraid of something, like maybe losing some measure of control over his flock due to reasons beyond not only his control but also beyond his (in)ability to grasp complexities, subtleties, and nuances.

Jesus in heaven - among others - is writhing in embarrassment and rolling His eyes at you right now, R. Albert. Geez dude, STAND THE F**K DOWN. And SHUT THE F**K UP.

Our Black-Eyed Susan

...planted in honor of my grandmother's 99th birthday, was BEHEADED by some vile creature of the night!!

In retaliatory defense, I moved Our Black-Eyed Susan from the corner of the backyard to the inside of our vegetable garden fence.  Perhaps now some blossoms will make it to fruition. Stay tuned for developments.