Robert.mccowen

Aaron works at a web design and development company in Houston where he the water cooler is chronically empty. Writes Aaron: “Other notes have been written in the past, but this time I feel the javascript developers are being specifically targeted.”

related: But…changing the water cooler bottle is hard!

Some of these environmental predictions are starting to scare me:

The apocalypse has a new date: 2048.

That’s when the world’s oceans will be empty of fish, predicts an international team of ecologists and economists. The cause: the disappearance of species due to overfishing, pollution, habitat loss, and climate change.

The big wired Internet providers are swearing up and down that yesterday’s net neutrality ruling, which threw out an Obama Administration rule requiring wired providers to treat all network traffic equally, won’t change the way they do business. That ruling was in an appeals court, which means the Supremes will either take the case or the ruling will stand.

Those providers, who are almost all cable companies, are full of shit, because with their lagging TV business, they’re all scrambling to find ways to (a) kill off Netflix and substitute their own streaming offering and (b) charge hefty usage-based pricing for their internet service, which has roughly 95% profit margins already. Here’s how they’ll do it:

1. The coming of “4K” streaming, which is a super high definition stream on next generation TVs, will use 3-4 times the amount of bandwidth that today’s high definition streams use. 4K users will blow out the caps that providers like Comcast have in place, opening the door for the cable boys to charge premium premium for users who have 4K TVs.
2. The streaming services of the cable providers will be exempt from the bandwidth caps, so users who don’t want to pay more for bandwidth will have an incentive to switch to Comcast’s version of Netflix.
3. Streaming providers who want to sell video to customers without busting the caps will be allowed to provide what AT&T Wireless calls “Sponsored Data”. This means that the streaming company will pay the cable company for the bandwidth their subscriber uses. The streaming company will pass on that cost to the consumer. (Note that AT&T can provide “Sponsored Data” without regulatory issues because wireless is exempt from net neutrality regulation.)

That’s the plan, they’re executing it slowly but with grinding efficiency, and the roadblocks the Obama Administration are throwing up in their path are getting overruled. And, by the way, they won’t be investing in their aging infrastructure, except in places where Google or some other fiber optic provider starts competing with them. This is how corporatism will make slowly but surely leave us in the dust behind countries that make Internet access a national priority.

A survey question is only as good as its choices. Sometimes an important choice has been left off the menu.  I was Gallup polled once, long ago. I’ve always felt that they didn’t get my real opinion.

“What’d they ask?” said my brother when I mentioned it to him.

“You know, they asked whether I approved of the way the President was doing his job.”  Nixon – this was in 1969.
“What’d you say?”

“I said I disapproved of his entire existential being.”

I was exaggerating my opinion, and I didn’t actually say that to the pollster.  But even if I had, my opinion would have been coded as “disapprove.”

For many years the American National Election Study has asked:

How much of the time do you think you can trust the government in Washington to do what is right – just about always, most of the time or only some of the time?

The trouble with these choices at that they exclude the truly disaffected. The worst you can say about the federal government is that it can be trusted “only some of the time.”  A few ornery souls say they don’t trust the federal at all. But because that view is a write-in candidate, it usually gets only one or two percent of the vote.

This year the study included “never” in the options read to respondents.  Putting “no-way, no-how” right there on the ballot makes a big difference. And as you’d expect, there were party differences:

Over half of Republicans say that the federal government can NEVER be trusted.

The graph appears in this Monkey Cage post by Marc Hetherington and Thomas Rudolph. Of course, some of those “never” Republicans don’t really mean “never ever.”  If a Republican becomes president, they’ll become more trusting, and the “never-trust” Democrat tide will rise.  Here’s the Hetherington-Rudolph graph tracking changes in the percent of people who do trust Washington during different administrations.

This one seems to show three things:

1. Trust took a dive in the 1960s and 70s and never really recovered.
2. Republican trust is much more volatile, with greater fluctuations depending on which party is in the White House.
3. Republicans really, really hate President Obama.

Cross-posted at Montclair SocioBlog.

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

Pete Seeger has died. He was 94.

I have only a very fragmentary sense of how the revival of American folk music in the 1950s and 1960s played a role in the politics of the time, but apparently it did (Has there ever been a good right-wing protest song?). I do remember singing “We Shall Overcome” and “Turn Turn Turn” as a little kid in music class in the Ann Arbor public schools in the late 1960s, which I suppose proves just how invidious these forms of propaganda can be.

Also, this is a pretty good story, and none the worse for being confabulated:

Along with many elders of the protest-song movement, Mr. Seeger felt betrayed when Bob Dylan appeared at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival with a loud electric blues band. Reports emerged that Mr. Seeger had tried to cut the power cable with an ax, but witnesses including the producer George Wein and the festival’s production manager, Joe Boyd (later a leading folk-rock record producer), said he did not go that far. (An ax was available, however. A group of prisoners had used it while singing a logging song.)

This story is fantastic in every possible way:

A ghost ship carrying nothing but disease-ridden rats could be about to make land on Britain’s shore, experts have warned. 

The Lyubov Orlova cruise liner has been drifting across the north Atlantic for the better part of a year, and salvage hunters say there is a strong chance it is heading this way….

Experts say the ship, which is likely to still contain hundreds of rats that have been eating each other to survive, must still be out there somewhere because not all of its lifeboat emergency beacons have been set off.

Two signals were picked up on the 12 and 23 March last year, presumably from lifeboats which fell away and hit the water, showing the vessel had made it two-thirds of the way across the Atlantic and was heading east.

A week later, an unidentified object of about the right size was spotted on radar just off the coast of Scotland – but search planes never verified the find.

Pim de Rhoodes, a Belgian salvage hunter who is among a number looking for the Lyubov Orlova off the UK coastline, told The Sun: “She is floating around out there somewhere.”

If this doesn’t end in some sort of horrific tornado of cannibalistic zombie-rats overwhelming Great Britain–erm, sorry, Brockington–would someone please develop a film in which it does?

DB: According to the local paper down here, if I play my cards right I could land a walk on part in the film. I’ll keep you posted. Could be the best thing to happen to this town since the blitz.

From our Food Goddess, TaMara:

Last year I did a recipe exchange on meatballs (here) but was surprised to see I had never done one specifically on sauces. Now sauces can be risky and start a great debate, because every family has their version. So hit the comments with your favorite pasta sauce recipe, and for that matter, pastas, because there are so many choices. Like many things, I’m not all that concerned about the right pasta for the right sauce, I say, use what you enjoy and ignore the purists.

Food should be fun. For that matter, so should wine, beer and scotch.

So let’s start out with JeffreyW’s Awesome Sauce (here) because, well, it’s awesome.

Want something a little simpler and quicker? How about his San Marzano Sauce, here.

And his Shrimp & Pasta Formaggio (here) is quick and easy, also.

When everything is in season, I like to make my sauce with fresh ingredients, so I have a Garden Fresh Pasta Sauce (recipe here) that’s lighter and fresher than tonight’s featured recipe.

When it comes to pastas, I favor two options, a nice spiral (fusilli or rotini) or a quick cooking Angel Hair (capellini), but if I can get it fresh from the farmer’s market, I’ll take what I can get, which is usually a linguine. It’s all tasty.

For the featured recipe, I went with my traditional family sauce, the one I grew up with, but with a few tweaks. Now, even in my family, half of which are Italian, even the most basic sauce has as many different variations as there are cooks, so this is just a place to start, add your own touches to make it your family tradition. This is a hearty sauce and my go-to in the colder months when fresh ingredients are not readily available. I always double this and freeze half for a later dinner.

Spaghetti w/Meat Sauce

9 – 12 oz pasta of choice (I like angel hair for this recipe)
1 tbsp olive oil
1 green pepper, chopped
1 small onion, chopped
3 tsp. crushed garlic
1 lb lean ground beef (or 1/2 beef and 1/2 spicy Italian sausage)
6 oz tomato paste
3 tomatoes, diced (or 14 oz can diced tomatoes)
15 oz can tomato sauce
3 tsp dried basil, crushed*
2 tsp dried oregano, crushed
1 tsp rosemary, crushed
1 carrot, finely grated or 1/2 tsp sugar (these reduce the acidity of the sauce and bring out the spices – trust me on this one – I prefer the carrot, myself.)
Salt & pepper to taste
red pepper flakes (opt) to taste
grated Parmesan cheese
2 saucepans and large skillet

In skillet, heat oil, sauté pepper, onion, garlic. Add hamburger and cook thoroughly. Add tomato paste and 1 tsp ea of crushed basil, oregano and rosemary, mix well. In saucepan, add remaining ingredients and bring to a low boil, reduce heat, add meat mixture and let simmer, covered, for 30 minutes.

Cook pasta according to directions, drain well and serve with sauce and Parmesan cheese.

*CRUSHING Spices – when using dry spices, to get the best flavor, you should crush them, either by rubbing them in your hand or using a mortar and pestle before adding them to a recipe.

That’s it for this week. I know I still owe you a recipe to go with this delicious looking Cream of Chicken Soup I made this week. And if you missed it, here is the Dinner Menu and Shopping list for the week, Pasticcio and Salata Meze. – TaMara

Drum leads us to this map of outbreaks of preventable disease.

Why the big uptick in cases of whooping cough, mumps, measles and other old-timey diseases in the United States? People not getting their kids vaccinated of course thanks to Jenny McCarthy and other crackpots who think they are consumers of medicine and thus can go online, read a bunch of stuff by whoever, and accept or reject whatever health guidelines doctors give them.

One of the perks of working at home is that you can play a musical instrument for relaxation when you take a break. I am a very bad ukulele player, but playing relaxes me.

Unless a fucking lizard leaps up out of the sound hole, that is; then, it’s not relaxing at all but actually terrifying for the millisecond it takes to realize that the organic life form that has just hurled itself from the interior to the surface of the instrument you’re cradling isn’t something scary like a snake or tarantula but just a small lizard, but shit, now that you’ve bellowed like a ruptured cow in fright, the dogs are racing to see what’s wrong, and they’ll eat the poor lizard, so damn, you’ve got to find a way to expel the intruder before they notice it, so maybe if you just sprint to the door holding the uke straight out, the lizard will stay where it is until you get on the porch, but fuck no, of course it runs up the neck of the uke and jumps onto your torso as if you were a tree trunk, but goddamnit, at least now you’re outside, so you can attempt to shake it off as it runs from your shoulder to your boob to your side then onto your back, presumably, since you can’t see it anymore, so you just jump around on the front porch while flailing your limbs (still clutching the uke in one hand) and pray to jeebus that no one happens to drive by and see you having an apparent seizure while holding a ukulele.

Then it’s not relaxing at all. Especially when you get back inside and prop the instrument against the wall – your practice session now irretrievably interrupted – and the fucking lizard comes back out of the sound hole. Or perhaps that’s its mate or one of an entire colony of goddamn lizards who have taken up residence in your ukulele. Fuck.

As always, thanks for using my Amazon Affiliate links (US, UK, Canada).

http://www.oknd.uscourts.gov/

The Northern District of Oklahoma sits in Tulsa, OK and is in the 10th US Circuit Court of Appeals.  That’s two current rulings for marriage equality in the 10th circuit at this time.  As I understand it (IANAL) the 10th Ct. denied Utah’s request for a stay of the Judge’s ruling.  Now Utah has appealed to US Supreme Court.  I don’t know how this stuff works, and I assume one of our legal eagles can clue us in, but would this ruling, stayed by the Court itself, be bundled with the Utah case at  USSC, or merely wait until the ruling from the Supreme Court?

http://www.hrc.org/blog/entry/u.s.-district-judge-rules-oklahoma-ban-on-marriage-equality-unconstitutiona

Today U.S. District Judge Terence Kern ruled that Oklahoma’s ban on marriage equality is unconstitutional.  His ruling is stayed pending appeal, meaning marriages will not occur immediately in the Sooner State.

HRC President Chad Griffin issued the following statement:

“Judge Kern has come to the conclusion that so many have before him – that the fundamental equality of lesbian and gay couples is guaranteed by the United States Constitution.  With last year’s historic victories at the Supreme Court guiding the way, it is clear that we are on a path to full and equal citizenship for all lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans.  Equality is not just for the coasts anymore, and today’s news from Oklahoma shows that time has come for fairness and dignity to reach every American in all 50 states.”

Two plaintiff couples, Mary Bishop and Sharon Baldwin and Gay Phillips and Susan Barton, filed their case, Bishop v. Oklahoma, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Oklahoma in November 2004.  Lead counsel in the case are Don Holladay and James Warner of the Oklahoma City law firm Holladay & Chilton PLLC.

Link to ruling (PDF) here.

Thanks to Commenter Shortstop, here is a list of current Marriage Equality lawsuits and their various statuses.  Here is another one that may be more up to date.

Open thread, and we now return you to your regular programming

Something you really need to read:

I was 12 hours into a summer vacation in Palm Springs when my phone hummed to life, buzzing twice next to me in the dark of my hotel room. I squinted at the screen. It was 5:30 a.m., and a friend was texting me from the opposite coast. “Amanda, this twitter account. Freaking out over here,” she wrote. “There is a twitter account that seems to have been set up for the purpose of making death threats to you.”

I dragged myself out of bed and opened my laptop. A few hours earlier, someone going by the username “headlessfemalepig” had sent me seven tweets. “I see you are physically not very attractive. Figured,” the first said. Then: “You suck a lot of drunk and drug fucked guys cocks.” As a female journalist who writes about sex (among other things), none of this feedback was particularly out of the ordinary. But this guy took it to another level: “I am 36 years old, I did 12 years for ‘manslaughter’, I killed a woman, like you, who decided to make fun of guys cocks.” And then: “Happy to say we live in the same state. Im looking you up, and when I find you, im going to rape you and remove your head.” There was more, but the final tweet summed it up: “You are going to die and I am the one who is going to kill you. I promise you this.”

June 1, 2012

Vanderbilt head football coach James Franklin said Wednesday that he makes hiring decisions based on what the wives look like.

“I’ve been saying it for a long time, I will not hire an assistant coach until I’ve seen his wife,” Franklin said on 104.5 The Zone in in Nashville. “If she looks the part, and she’s a D-1 recruit, then you got a chance to get hired. That’s part of the deal.

“There’s a very strong correlation between having the confidence, going up and talking to a woman, and being quick on your feet and having some personality and confidence and being fun and articulate, than it is walking into a high school and recruiting a kid and selling him.”

September 18, 2013

Vanderbilt University on Tuesday dismissed wide receiver Chris Boyd from the football team and athletic program four days after he pleaded guilty to helping cover up an alleged on-campus gang rape.

The star athlete accepted a yearlong probation sentence and agreed to testify against four men accused directly in the crime.

Vanderbilt’s athletic administration conducted a review of the case, including information disclosed at Friday’s hearing.

“The review concluded that Mr. Boyd’s admitted actions are clearly inconsistent with the high standards of behavior expected of our student-athletes,” a vice chancellor said in a statement.

After prosecutors laid out the case against him, Boyd pleaded guilty to one count of being an accessory after the fact. As part of his plea deal, Boyd said he will willingly pay court costs, face 11 months and 29 days of unsupervised probation and “testify truthfully” against the men he helped in June.

Friday’s court hearing revealed information about the prosecutors’ case against the four former Commodores players charged with rape.

Davidson County Deputy District Attorney Tom Thurman alleged in court that early on June 23, Brandon Vandenburg took an unconscious Vanderbilt student into a building on campus. Thurman said he was joined in his dorm room by three others also charged with rape — Cory Batey, Brandon Banks and Jaborian McKenzie.

“Different individuals” then sexually assaulted the young woman, the prosecutor said, as captured by CNN affiliate WSMV. Vandenburg texted the 21-year-old Boyd a picture of her, which Boyd promptly erased so his girlfriend wouldn’t see it, Thurman said.

Soon after that text, Vandenburg called Boyd, “saying the victim had been messed with in the hall and sexually assaulted in the room, and he needed Mr. Boyd to come over,” Thurman said.

Boyd went over and, with two other people, moved the woman — who was lying in the hall unconscious, partially clothed — to a room, put her on a bed and then left, Thurman said.

Subsequently, Boyd exchanged texts with Vandenburg and Batey, Thurman said. In one, Boyd said, “Tell the boys to delete that sh**. I’m looking out for your a**.” Boyd also texted his girlfiend that he “got everything cleared up” and “deleted everything,” Thurman said.

More texts followed the next day, including one in which Boyd detailed how he had helped move the young woman and said “she doesn’t know anything that happened.” Boyd also talked about it with Vandenburg, Batey, Banks and McKenzie at a Popeyes restaurant, Thurman said.

October 28, 2013

Penn State announced Monday it will pay $59.7 million to settle claims by 26 young men who said they were sexually abused by former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky, capping a year of negotiations.

News of some of the settlements has been trickling out in recent months. The university said six claims are still outstanding. It has rejected some of them and is in talks to settle the others.

“We hope this is another step forward in the healing process for those hurt by Mr. Sandusky, and another step forward for Penn State,” University President Rodney Erickson said in a statement.

“We cannot undo what has been done, but we can and must do everything possible to learn from this and ensure it never happens again at Penn State.”

Sandusky, 69, is serving 30 to 60 years in prison after being convicted of 45 counts of child sexual abuse last year.

November 13, 2013

Court filing in Vandy rape case seeks text messages from coaches

NASHVILLE, Tenn. – A new court filing in the case against four former Vanderbilt University football players charged with rape seeks evidence of text messages sent by “coaches” that lawyers for one of the ex-players think could shed light on what happened.

The filing by attorneys for one of the players offers the first suggestion in court proceedings that members of the Vanderbilt football staff might have had some level of involvement in the incident that would be relevant to the criminal investigation.

California-based defense attorneys for former player Brandon Vandenburg said in their motion that a “large amount” of evidence has not been provided to them by Davidson County authorities as it should have been under the rules of discovery in criminal cases.

January 9, 2014

Reporter: USC Passed On James Franklin Due To Vanderbilt Players’ Ongoing Rape Case

Unlike many other reporters, Wolken took a look at some of the downsides to hiring Franklin, including the pending rape case against several of his players at Vanderbilt . . .

“I know for a fact that that is the reason that he was not in the mix at Southern Cal. They took a look at that situation, they knew about that situation, and he was not in the mix at all for that job primarily because of that.”

January 10, 2014

Penn State offered Vanderbilt’s James Franklin its head-coaching position on Wednesday after a long meeting with the search committee in Florida, according to the Scranton Times-Tribune.

Franklin, 41, is expected to decide Thursday, according to the report.

There have been many conflicting reports regarding the Nittany Lions’ coaching position. The Penn State beat writer for the Centre Daily Times tweeted after the Times-Tribune story that a high-ranking PSU official said nobody had been offered the job.

Franklin, a Pennsylvania native, has become one of the hottest coaching names with his success with the Commodores, winning 24 games over the past three seasons.

I now see why the Republicans passed the bill to gut Superfund. It’s clearly unnecessary, what with a company actually named Freedom Industries taking care of the good people of West Virginia.

Schools and restaurants closed, grocery stores sold out of bottled water, and state legislators who had just started their session canceled the day’s business after a chemical spill in the Elk River in Charleston shut down much of the city and surrounding counties even as the cause and extent of the incident remained unclear.

The federal government joined the state early Friday in declaring a disaster, and the West Virginia National Guard planned to distribute bottled drinking water to emergency services agencies in the nine affected counties. About 100,000 water customers, or 300,000 people total, were affected, state officials said they reported in requesting the federal declaration.

Shortly after the Thursday spill from Freedom Industries hit the river and a nearby treatment plant, a licorice-like smell enveloped parts of the city, and Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin issued an order to customer of West Virginia American Water: Do not drink, bathe, cook or wash clothes with tap water.

The chemical, a foaming agent used in the coal preparation process, leaked from a tank at Freedom Industries and overran a containment area. Officials from Freedom, a manufacturer of chemicals for the mining, steel, and cement industries, hadn’t commented since the spill, but a woman who answered the phone at the company said it would issue a statement later Friday.

Now that’s some clean coal! Freedom indeed!!!

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before….An article proposes some doable progressive goals — guaranteed jobs, universal basic incomes, sovereign wealth funds, state banks, and a land tax. A bunch of libertarians — Radley Balko, Charles W. Cooke (never heard of him before but he seems to be big on twitter), and Nicky G — lampoon the goals as the impossible dreams of dirty hippies.

Turns out Sarah Palin’s Alaska has a big sovereign wealth fund:

In 1976, Republican Governor Jay Hammond started Alaska’s sovereign wealth fund (SWF), which has come to be called the Alaska Permanent Fund. The way it works is Alaska has a big pile of money that it uses to buy up the means of production (sometimes called stocks and bonds). Those investments yield returns and revenue for the state. Right now, Alaska plows that revenue into its universal basic income (UBI) program, which is called the Permanent Fund Dividend. The way it works is the state sends a check to every single Alaskan each year. Last year, it was $900, but in better years, it has been as high as $2000. For a family of four, that’s a $3,600 and $8,000 income boost respectively.

The Alaska communist story gets more interesting than that though. The way Alaska builds the principal of the fund is in line with another of Myerson’s proposals: take back the land. You see, the oil wealth in Alaska happened to reside underneath public land. Instead of doing the red-blooded American thing and just giving all of that natural wealth that nobody creates away to oil companies, Alaska held on to its ownership and collects royalties from the oil. Those royalties are plowed into its SWF. So what you have in Alaska is a state that is leveraging publicly-owned natural resources to build a SWF that pays out a UBI. Or as conservatives on twitter call it: a communist hellscape.

The reasonoids and WaPo editorial board types can scream like stuck pigs all they want, the simple fact is that many left-wing populist economic policies are both popular and possible. Not liking the policies is one thing, everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but it’s a lie to pretend they can’t be done or that REAL AMERICANS hate them.

Via the Washington Post. Apparently skydiving was one of the pleasures it was assumed Ms. Giffords would never again enjoy. Jumping out of a perfectly good airplane may not be my idea of a good time, but kudos to her for not letting a sadsack with a gun stop her. Yesterday, in the NYTimes:

…[T]hree years ago, dispatched to an almost certain death by an assassin’s bullet, I was allowed the opportunity for a new life. I had planned to spend my 40s continuing my public service and starting a family. I thought that by fighting for the people I cared about and loving those close to me, I could leave the world a better place. And that would be enough.

Instead, I’ve spent the past three years learning how to talk again, how to walk again. I had to learn to sign my name with my left hand. It’s gritty, painful, frustrating work, every day. Rehab is endlessly repetitive. And it’s never easy, because once you’ve mastered some movement or action or word, no matter how small, you move on to the next. You never rest.

I asked myself, if simply completing a normal day requires so much work, how would I ever be able to fulfill a larger purpose? The killing of children at the school in Sandy Hook a little over a year ago gave me my answer. It shocked me, it motivated me, and frankly, it showed me a path. After that day, my husband and I pledged to make it our mission to change laws and reduce gun violence in a way that was consistent with our moderate beliefs and our identities as proud gun owners. We knew it wouldn’t be easy, that special interests were arrayed against us, that congressional dysfunction was an enemy…

We will seize on consensus where it exists, on solutions big or small. We will fight for every inch, because that means saving lives. I’ve seen grit overcome paralysis. My resolution today is that Congress achieve the same. How? Step by step: Enhance enforcement by passing a law making gun trafficking a serious crime with stiff penalties. Make it illegal for all stalkers and all domestic abusers to buy guns. Extend mental health resources into schools and communities, so the dangerously mentally ill find it easier to receive treatment than to buy firearms. And even as we lay the groundwork for expanding background checks, pass strong incentives for states to ensure the background-check system contains the records of the most dangerous and violent among us…

Sure, it’ll never give Mark Halperin a glow in his tire-swing neurons (unlike watching a Repub yell at teachers or throw his subordinates under the bus), but who would you rather have on your side?

Very interesting thirteen-minute ‘Retro Report’ video over at the NYTimes. From the appended article:

… [O]n a night nearly 43 years ago, while Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier bludgeoned each other over 15 rounds in a televised title bout viewed by millions around the world, burglars took a lock pick and a crowbar and broke into a Federal Bureau of Investigation office in a suburb of Philadelphia, making off with nearly every document inside.

They were never caught, and the stolen documents that they mailed anonymously to newspaper reporters were the first trickle of what would become a flood of revelations about extensive spying and dirty-tricks operations by the F.B.I. against dissident groups…

“When you talked to people outside the movement about what the F.B.I. was doing, nobody wanted to believe it,” said one of the burglars, Keith Forsyth, who is finally going public about his involvement. “There was only one way to convince people that it was true, and that was to get it in their handwriting.”

Mr. Forsyth, now 63, and other members of the group can no longer be prosecuted for what happened that night, and they agreed to be interviewed before the release this week of a book written by one of the first journalists to receive the stolen documents. The author, Betty Medsger, a former reporter for The Washington Post, spent years sifting through the F.B.I.’s voluminous case file on the episode and persuaded five of the eight men and women who participated in the break-in to end their silence…

Ms. Medsger’s [original 1971] article cited what was perhaps the most damning document from the cache, a 1970 memorandum that offered a glimpse into Hoover’s obsession with snuffing out dissent. The document urged agents to step up their interviews of antiwar activists and members of dissident student groups.

“It will enhance the paranoia endemic in these circles and will further serve to get the point across there is an F.B.I. agent behind every mailbox,” the message from F.B.I. headquarters said. Another document, signed by Hoover himself, revealed widespread F.B.I. surveillance of black student groups on college campuses.

But the document that would have the biggest impact on reining in the F.B.I.’s domestic spying activities was an internal routing slip, dated 1968, bearing a mysterious word: Cointelpro…

Since 1956, the F.B.I. had carried out an expansive campaign to spy on civil rights leaders, political organizers and suspected Communists, and had tried to sow distrust among protest groups. Among the grim litany of revelations was a blackmail letter F.B.I. agents had sent anonymously to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., threatening to expose his extramarital affairs if he did not commit suicide.

“It wasn’t just spying on Americans,” said Loch K. Johnson, a professor of public and international affairs at the University of Georgia who was an aide to Senator Frank Church, Democrat of Idaho. “The intent of Cointelpro was to destroy lives and ruin reputations.” …

A sweet and uplifting message from the Cold War for your Sunday morning.

From commentor MB:

One of my personal boycotts is against blog posts that are listicles or that are entitled “Why…” The listicle “thing” has gotten seriously out of control and I am sick to death of posts that purport to give a final explaination of some great (or not-so-great) truth (Ezra Klein, I’m looking at you.) With that in mind, here are A Bunch of Reasons Why I Love Aquaponics and So Should You.

First a thumbnail sketch of aquaponics (AQ) in general and as practiced in the above pictured greenhouse. AQ is the process of growing plants in water like hydroponics but the fertilizer is (mostly) provided by fish who live in the water used to flood the plants. It is, at it’s heart, a symbiotic relationship wherein the plants feed from the fishes’ effluent which cleans the water that is returned to the fish who then, frankly, shit in it again. Fish gotta do what fish gotta do. The good news is that fish poo is just about the best poo you can use for plant food.

My AQ setup is housed in a 12×40 greenhouse and is comprised of a 600 gallon fish tank containing ~200 fish, four 4×7 gravel planting beds and a sump which runs most of the length of the greenhouse. I use one pump to pump water into the fish tank and the dirty water from the tank runs by gravity to the four planting beds. You have to have at least a 1:1 ratio between the volume of your fish tank and the total volume of all planting beds. You can support up to a 1:2 ratio. I have a 1:1.33 ratio. I have a total of about 1200 gallons in the whole system. The water is used over and over again and only lost to the system through evaporation and plant use. It it generally thought that AQ uses 1/10th the water needed for traditional gardening. This was a big selling point for me as I hate paying water bills and watering plants.

The water enters the bed relatively slowly but exits quickly through the use of a siphon (shown above) similar to the siphon used to evacuate your toilet bowl. The orange arrows in the above picture indicate the direction the water flows. When it reaches the top of that pvc gooseneck and begins to drain over, it kicks off the siphon. It takes nearly 30 minutes to fill the bed but less than 5 to empty it. This is important because it sucks oxygen into the root zone. This also helps clean the water as the gravel “polishes” it removing all solids which remain in the bed available to the plants. A lot of aquaponists use the bell siphon system but I found it to be very, very temperamental whereas the loop siphon works pretty consistently. The pvc piece in the upper right hand corner helps the siphon stop when the water level is low enough to suck air into the siphon.

Fish poo is unusual relative to other animal waste in that it is immediately suitable for use by plants without composting. Worms also like it and will populate any AQ bed and that serves to further break down any solids. Finally, of course, the system depends on the nitrogen cycle to clean the water of dangerous nitrites that would harm the fish. In fact, the first step in the setup of an AQ system is to get the nitrogen cycle started, usually using ammonia, before fish are introduced.

The cleaned water dumps into the sump where it is pumped back into the tank through a venturi nozzle that infuses the water with oxygen – good for fish and great for the plants. From the fishes’ perspective, the AQ system is a giant filter and the principles involved would be familiar to anyone who has ever kept an aquarium or done water gardening. However, the “filter” is overdesigned specifically so you can overcrowd your tank without endangering the health of the fish. You need a large number of fish in order to make enough fertilizer for heavy feeders like cabbage and tomatoes. If you use game fish in the system, they will mature and you can eat them. However, AQ should not be considered a way to raise fish for food because it will never supply enough fish to be more than a meal now and again.

I have a mix of catfish, goldfish and a few bream. If it were up to me, I’d only have goldfish. They are very tough fish where most game fish are more sensitive to water conditions. Also I like the pretty colors. The experts will tell you not to buy feeders because feeders aren’t well-bred. On the contrary, I have had very good results with feeders and they have 2 real benefits going for them:

they are cheap as hell – just about the cheapest fish you can buy; and

if you don’t buy them they’re going to end up as some other critters lunch. Probably some pampered 1%er living in some rich kid’s bedroom. (Occupy the fish bowl!) So I figure I’m getting some good karma off this and striking a blow for the oppressed.

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That is pretty much the basics. There is, of course, much more to it and it is an ongoing learning experience for me. I’ve had fish in the system now for about a year and a half. The first year is really a shake down cruise though I did see some results and was generally pleased with the production.

Some plants do very well in the system, others not so well. Green, leafy things generally do very well and it is not unusual to see plants get really large really fast. I have an eggplant that is still producing that is over 6 feet tall. Tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, and eggplant all do well. Okra, not so much. Above right is a picture of a cabbage currently growing in the AQ bed. On the left is a cabbage planted about the same time outside in my raised bed (outside cabbages are being fertilized with chicken poo – so it’s the battle of the poos, chicken v. fish.) The AQ cabbage is easily twice as big though the head is not nearly as compact. I really can’t get over how huge the leaves are on the AQ cabbages and I’m looking forward to eating this one on New Years with some black eyed peas, etc.

Finally, what Balloon Juice post would be complete without a pet picture? This is Vidalia, a 12 year old (11 in this picture) longhaired miniature dachsund, my constant companion and the sweetest dog that ever drew breath. Honestly, I don’t think she cares a whit about aquaponics, but she tolerates my obsessions and gives me a reason to get up in the morning.

If anyone has any questions about AQ or my project in particular, I’ll do my best to give a coherent answer or help direct you toward more information.

According to Christian tradition, January 1 marks the eighth day of Jesus’ life. Among other things, it is the day on which — following Jewish custom — the Son of Man would have been circumcised. And while the rest of his body would presumably have ascended to heaven on the third day after his gruesome execution, early followers believed it quite possible that he had neglected to retrieve his long-excised foreskin before taking a seat at his father’s right hand.

For medieval and early modern Christians, Jesus’ foreskin remained an object of peculiar veneration, with as many as eighteen different reliquary nubs of flesh competing for attention and honor. Charlemagne allegedly offered one to Pope Leo III as a gesture of gratitude for being crowned emperor in 800. Another, purchased from a vendor in Jerusalem at the end of the 11th century, was brought back to Antwerp as a souvenir from the first Crusade.

Nearly 300 years later, St. Catherine of Siena purported to wear the foreskin as a ring, while the 13th century Austrian mystic Agnes Blannbekin had an even more unusual relationship with the sacred relic. By Agnes’ own account, she tasted the carne vera sancta — the “true and holy meat” — numerous times during communion. As she revealed to an anonymous Franciscan scribe, she had long pondered the whereabouts of Christ’s foreskin until she experienced a revelation one year on the Feast of the Circumcision.

And behold, soon she felt with the greatest sweetness on her tongue a little piece of skin alike the skin in an egg, which she swallowed. After she had swallowed it, she again felt the little skin on her tongue with sweetness as before, and again she swallowed it. And this happened to her about a hundred times . . . . And so great was the sweetness of tasting that little skin that she felt in all limbs and parts of the limbs a sweet transformation. 

Similarly graphic, often erotic accounts helped assure that Agnes’ Life and Revelations would remain unpublished until the 20th century.

Like most Catholic relics, the Holy Prepuce was believed to possess extraordinary powers, including (not surprisingly) the enhancement of fertility and sexuality. And so in 1421, the English King Henry V retrieved one of the rumored foreskins from the French village of Coulombs to aid his wife, Catherine of Valois, in the delivery of their first son. Alas, while the relic may have helped bring the future King Henry VI into the world, it did his father little enduring good. The king died less than a year later, felled by dysentery.

The Reformation helped to undermine Catholic traditions of all kinds, including its centuries of speculation on the provenance and status of Christ’s foreskin. In 1900, the Church issued an edict than any discussion of the Holy Prepuce would result in excommunication and shunning; since the Vatican II reforms of the 1960s, Roman Catholics have not officially recognized the Feast of the Circumcision, though it continues to be observed in some Anglican and most Lutheran churches. The last public appearance of one of Jesus’ alleged foreskins took place in the Italian village of Calcata, which had hosted the tip of the Redeemer’s penis since 1557. Residents of Calcata and Catholic pilgrims continued to celebrate the Feast of the Circumcision until 1983, when thieves absconded with the foreskin and the jewel-encrusted box that contained it. Neither it nor any other alleged foreskins have ever turned up.

This is still excellent news:

Pamela Karlan, a noted voting-rights expert and professor at Stanford Law School, will join the Obama Administration shortly as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in charge of the voting-rights section. Karlan, a favorite of many liberals in the legal world, will join the department as it begins a strong counter-offensive on voting rights following the Supreme Court’s limiting of the Voting Rights Act in a decision earlier this year.

Karlan’s post, which does not require Senate confirmation, will likely be at the center of a major legal controversy in the President’s second term—the attempt to salvage federal oversight of voting rights following the Supreme Court’s decision, last term, in Shelby County v. Holder. Karlan will be responsible for the Justice Department’s high-profile legal challenges to voting restrictions, including photo-I.D. requirements, in North Carolina and Texas.

Excellent! Admittedly, Eisenhower appointed Brennan so I’m sure that in today’s similar partisan context Romney might have done the same thing.

Kristin Hohenadel, at Slate:

… The Lucerne-based Sipho Mabona folded his first paper airplane at age 5 and has since made a career producing stunning origami animals, roses, human figures and insects, among other more abstract creations. He has shown his work and taught origami workshops around the world.

Now the 33-year-old artist is appealing to Indiegogo’s crowdfunding angels to help him realize his ambition of folding a life-size elephant out of a single sheet of 50 x 50 meter (164 x 164 foot) paper. (So far he’s raised $13,843 of his $24,000 goal with 3 weeks to go.) Mabona says his aim is to show what a single sheet of paper can do by using it to create a replica of one of the world’s most imposing land-dwelling creatures.

Mabona told me by phone that he developed the pattern for the elephant in about a month, a process that was sped up by having already worked out how to make patterns for origami tigers, bears and rhinos. He said that his process is a combination of precise geometry and artistic intuition. To make a work of origami, he makes all the folds in the paper before refolding along the creaselines to assemble a finished 3D object. The beauty of a piece of paper with intricate creaselines has also inspired him to produce crease patterns as wall art and ceramic plates…

I’ve been fascinated by origami since before the American Museum of Natural History started their annual Origami Holiday Tree (even though I never got beyond the basic folds). This project just tickles me, which is, of course, the intention of its creators.

I’ve always found the old maps with imagined sea monsters in unexplored places particularly fascinating. Marina Warner has a long essay in the New York Review of Books about them. The ocean is so interesting because it’s so close yet so impossible to explore, especially before advancements in technology during the 20th century allowed for underwater exploration. The occasional creatures the ocean spits up onto the shore, the glimpses of whales, the sheer terror of the ocean, all of these things contribute to an amazing mythology and power around what covers 70% of the globe.

Personally, I think the greatest value such sea monsters have today is to describe the northern wasteland known in mythology as “Canada” to Americans.

Ads by Project Wonderful! Your ad could be here, right now.

It is HOLIDAY TIMES which means you should buy some QC merchandise now if you want it in time for the holidays!

I might have you trumped.

The West has reinvigorated its war on wolves and the Obama Administration has sadly capitulated to Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming, in what is yet another example of its poor policy toward public lands that originated with the Salazar appointment to Interior and has not improved at all. This is been one of the weakest performances for progressives in the entire administration (along with education policy) and an area where the administration has almost total control to set policy (unlike say, closing GITMO which we can say is disappointing but where the president is highly constrained by Congress).

Wyoming classifies wolves as predatory animals that can be killed by any means and without limit in more than 80 percent of the state, and in parts of Idaho, there are no limits for when or how many wolves can be killed. Not to be outmatched, Montana nearly doubled the bag limit on wolves this year, extended the hunt season to allow killing of pregnant females and refused to listen to pleas by park biologists to create a safety buffer just outside the park’s boundaries to protect straying research animals.

These hunts are a throwback to the not-so-distant days when wolves were ruthlessly persecuted and nearly wiped out from the entirety of the lower 48.

Today wolves live in only about 5 percent of their historic range and have less than 1 percent of their former numbers.

Despite these dismal figures, the Obama administration has proposed to remove protections for wolves across most of the country. With numbers going down from hunts and protections gone, wolf recovery that is broadly supported by a strong majority of the American public, has cost taxpayers millions, benefits ecosystems, and is a tremendous Endangered Species Act success story will be flushed down the drain.

Awful. But this hasn’t received much political pushback, which is another piece of evidence to me of the decline of the environmental movement, which today is as weak as it’s been politically since the 1950s.

Hey, just a reminder that any holiday gifts purchased through my Amazon Affiliate links (US, UK, Canada) would, in theory, throw a little money my way without costing you a dime extra! Just Sayin'.

Annie Lowrey’s story on American unemployment is essential, if very depressing, reading:

“I’ve been turned down from McDonald’s because I was told I was too articulate,” she says. “I got denied a job scrubbing toilets because I didn’t speak Spanish and turned away from a laundromat because I was ‘too pretty.’ I’ve also been told point-blank to my face, ‘We don’t hire the unemployed.’ And the two times I got real interest from a prospective employer, the credit check ended it immediately.”

For Ms. Barrington-Ward, joblessness itself has become a trap, an impediment to finding a job. Economists see it the same way, concerned that joblessness lasting more than six months is a major factor preventing people from getting rehired, with potentially grave consequences for tens of millions of Americans.

The long-term jobless, after all, tend to be in poorer health, and to have higher rates of suicide and strained family relations. Even the children of the long-term unemployed see lower earnings down the road.

The consequences are grave for the country, too: lost production, increased social spending, decreased tax revenue and slower growth. Policy makers and academics are now asking whether an improving economy might absorb those workers in time to prevent long-term economic damage.

Plainly, we can all agree that the size of the deficit 30 years from now is the biggest problem facing the country.

Tom Scocca’s defense of snark as a justified response to smarm is, you know, brilliant, necessary, stuff like that there. A teaser:

Over the past year or two, on the way to writing this essay, I’ve accumulated dozens of emails and IM conversations from friends and colleagues. They send links to articles, essays, Tumblr posts, online comments, tweets—the shared attitude transcending any platform or format or subject matter.

What is this defining feature of our times? What is snark reacting to?

It is reacting to smarm.

What is smarm, exactly? Smarm is a kind of performance—an assumption of the forms of seriousness, of virtue, of constructiveness, without the substance. Smarm is concerned with appropriateness and with tone. Smarm disapproves.

Smarm would rather talk about anything other than smarm. Why, smarm asks, can’t everyone just be nicer?

And, crucially, in response to David Eggers’s silly proposition that you can’t criticize any work of art before you’ve created one of the same kind yourself:

Here we have the major themes or attitudes of smarm: the scolding, the gestures at inclusiveness, the appeal to virtue and maturity. Eggers used to be a critic, but he has grown out of childish things. Eggers has done the work—the book publishing, the Hollywood deal-making—that makes his opinions (unlike those of his audience) earned and valid opinions.

It is no accident that he is addressing undergraduates here; he tells the Advocate that before he sent back his reply to its questions, he had already delivered a version of the text as a speech at Yale. He is explicitly performing, for an audience of his inferiors. (“The rant is directed to myself, age 20, as much as it is to you, so remember that if you ever want to take much offense.”)

It is also no accident that Eggers is full of shit. He is so passionate, and his passion has such rhetorical momentum, that it is almost possible to overlook the fact that the literal proposition he’s putting forward, in the name of large-heartedness and honesty, is bogus and insulting. Do not dismiss … a movie? Unless you have made one? Any movie? The Internship? The Lone Ranger? Kirk Cameron’s Unstoppable? Movie criticism, Eggers is saying, should be reserved for those wise and discerning souls who have access to a few tens of millions of dollars of entertainment-industry capital. One or two hundred million, if you wish to have an opinion about the works of Michael Bay.

As Pauline Kael used to say, you don’t need to be able to lay eggs to know that an omelet tastes good. That a movement based on that obvious logical fallacy has become more and more influential would be remarkable if a lot of people didn’t stand to make money from critics acting as publicists instead.  Anyway, really, read the whole etc.