Bewarethewumpus

I get it. The show is impenetrable, watching the whole thing takes 178 hours. It's also extremely silly — nearly every episode has a moment when grown men in pajamas throw themselves around in their chairs

But I want to make the case Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG) is important and worth your time in 2015, and I want to suggest about 40 hours of Star Trek viewing that will cover all of the great episodes.

Author : Rollin T Gentry

In the lift, Lieutenant Andrews asked herself how she, of the two hundred telepaths in the fleet, had been so unlucky as to be assigned to the Vulcan’s Anvil, a third rate science vessel with an idiot for a Captain. She wondered what his latest discovery was. What had he dragged out of the nebula this time?

Stepping into the lab, Andrews could see the Captain, and the Chief Science Officer huddled over something emitting a bright, red-orange glow. As she approached, she saw a metallic box, the contents of which looked like lava throwing a temper tantrum. The stuff rocked back and forth as if it were trying to escape its container. She stepped closer and felt the most intense rage she had ever encountered.

“Eject it now,” she said. “I haven’t attempted to make contact yet, and I feel pure evil radiating from that box.”

“So it is sentient,” the Captain said eagerly, nudging the Chief Science Officer who, like a giddy schoolgirl, chimed in, “The box is made of an element that isn’t even on our periodic table.”

“Scan it, Andrews,” the Captain said. “That’s an order.”

So she reached out and touched it. The white hot rage reached into her mind, and as she lost consciousness, she let out a blood-curdling scream.

Andrews opened her eyes inside a bulbous body covered with a layer of slime. She paced the floor atop a multitude of tentacles, waving other tentacles in the air. She spoke angry words from a flap on her face set below numerous eyes. She/he was the ruler of this world. “Tell me again how you found the Queen with this commoner.”

“There is nothing more to tell, my Lord. What will you have me do with them?”

“Her lover goes to the dungeon. Rip off his tentacles and gouge out his eyes and take your time about it. As for the Queen, have her bound and delivered to our bedchamber. I will discipline her myself.”

Lieutenant Andrews tried to close her eyes, but they were not her eyes to close. She lived out the fast-forwarded life of a despot from a race that humans had yet to encounter.

When he laid waste to the temples of their ancient religion, the commoners finally rebelled. Andrews felt his surprise and disgust as he stood before the three priests, resting their upper tentacles on a slab of white marble, looking down on him. “According to the old ways,” they said, “we do not kill. Repent, and we will heal your mind.”

“Repent!” he laughed. “Heal me?” he mocked. “Of what? My rage is justified, and one day I will rise again.”

“So be it,” they said. The small, metal box sat on the floor. The tentacles of the priests began to glow. Andrews felt herself melting and materializing inside the sealed box.

For a long time he was in darkness, but after years of ruminating and rocking back and forth, he glowed red and yellow and black molten with rage. Memories and hatred were his only companions. Until one day.

The creatures had two eyes and two upper tentacles, and as he gazed up at them he thought, “I will kill every last one of you.”

Andrews opened her eyes in the infirmary. “Did they eject the box?”

“No,” the Doctor said, “we’re taking it back to Science Central.” He injected something into her IV.

“No!” Andrews said. “It wants to kill…” she whispered, as she fell back into a sedated slumber.

Author : Elijah Goering

The light from the unstable star took four hours to reach the scientific survey ship that was orbiting it. Consequently, it was four hours after the warning was sent before the ship’s one man crew reacted to it. The star was now too unstable, and the jump gate would have to be closed.

The jump gate, requiring rather a lot of energy to operate, orbited the star at a distance of just one light second. Although the warning was weeks in advance of the closing of the jump gate, it still felt a little late to the lone researcher billions of kilometers from the jump gate.

For nine and a half hours the man lay in his bed sustained by the ship’s machinery as his ship accelerated toward the star at three standard gravities, using up a little over two thirds of his fuel. The remainder was reserved for slowing down once he had passed through the jump gate. The ship would never be retrieved, but at least if he slowed down enough he could be saved.

After the acceleration came free fall. The man floated around his ship for weeks and watched the evacuation of the solar system. The private ships of the wealthy went through first. Then the massive government transports carrying the population of the system’s inhabited planet. The people from the moons of the gas giants came behind them. Then the colonized asteroids, outfitted with powerful engines, fell from their orbits in precise spirals. One by one they passed through the jump gate. Research vessels from around the system went through at all stages, but none had been nearly as far as the deep space explorer four point three billion kilometers out. He could only watch as they all went through.

The last ship through the jump gate was the enormous space station which had anchored the space elevator above the planet. It had disconnected from the elevator at precisely the right moment and been flung toward the sun and right into the jump gate.

At last the man was left alone, light years from the nearest human being. He spent long hours each day staring at the jump gate, his only remaining link with his species. There was no way to tell whether or not it had been deactivated. It was pure black, absorbing all light that hit it. The station that encircled and housed it appeared black as well, silhouetted against the dying star behind it. If it was still active he would pass through it and find himself flying away from another star light years away. If not, it would do nothing to stop him from plunging into the dying star at a thousand kilometers per second.

It was seven weeks after he had received the message when the day, the hour, and the minute arrived. The computer needed no adjustments after it had set its course forty nine days before. It was only in the last second that the jump gate finally came close enough for the man to see it with his own naked eyes.

Babies have it rough in the Multiverse. Please, think of the poor baby geniuses next time you’re praying to the Mayonnaise Demon.

Hey! You know what’s great? The SFAM Purchaseables Store! Check it out, why not?

A message of defiance against religious terrorism inspired by René Magritte’s The Treachery of Images (1929).

Powerful, unaccountable, and operating far in the shadows, the Lords of Secrecy, as author Scott Horton calls them, are real, and they are in charge of our national security state.

Horton, a lawyer, journalist and human rights advocate, makes the case in his book, Lords of Secrecy: The National Security Elite and America’s Stealth Foreign Policy, that because the public is allowed to know so little, it has effectively been cut out of national security decisionmaking.

I had a chance to ask Horton some questions earlier this week. Here is an edited transcript:

Who are the Lords of Secrecy? Name me three.

The Lords of Secrecy are the heads of the national security and intelligence agencies who exercise the power to create secrets.

But I think we have to designate, as the dark overlord of the Lords of Secrecy, Richard Bruce Cheney. I don’t think there’s anybody else who even comes close. The man who invented stamps with his own special security classifications. He is a cult figure for the Lords of Secrecy.

But I would say it’s the heads of the NSA, CIA and various other agencies.

Speaking of the CIA director, I was really struck, watching John Brennan at his press conference in early December, after the Senate Intelligence Committee released a redacted executive summary of its report on CIA torture. He spoke with such incredible confidence and certitude. It wasn’t just that he looked unscathed, he actually looked emboldened. Is he untouchable now?

Yes. You’re asking what is the question: Are the people at the CIA who implemented and oversaw the dark sites and torture program untouchable? And the answer appears to be yes. Brennan, of course, has consistently denied that he was involved in this program. He’s claimed that he was critical of it–but I can’t find a single person at the agency who is capable of bearing witness to that, so I’m skeptical. But he has been an aggressive defender of those who implemented the program. He has supported their advancement ahead of their peers within the agency.

That is one of the most striking facts that this report uncovers. It’s figures like Robert Eatinger, who clearly is the key figure who misled the Justice Department in securing the legal opinions, and who used his position as acting general counsel to try and block the publication of the report, to slow it down, and to intimidate staffers who were involved in it.

And Alfreda Bikowsky, the queen of torture, who was involved in a breathtakingly lengthy string of screw-ups of the utmost gravity — and not only has she never suffered any negative repercussions from that, it actually seems to have accelerated her career trajectory.

In an excerpt from your book that we are publishing next week, you make a persuasive argument that bureaucrats love secrets, and that if left unchecked, they use secrecy to hide their failures and missteps, and in that way make themselves unaccountable. And that as a result, the most secretive and corrupt steadily climb to the top of the heap. But how is that different from any other organizational structure?

(Laughs)

The same may be true in many other areas of human endeavor, but it’s particularly true in the national security sector and with respect to government bureaucracies, because they have a much more vigorous power to create secrets.

So a businessmen can say: ‘Hey, that’s my secret.’ He can threaten to dismiss employees who disclose his secrets. But he doesn’t have anything like the palette of powers that the state bureaucracy has, especially the national security bureaucracy, which can threaten to arrest and lock away someone who betrays secrets, who can destroy their lives, seize their homes, cancel their pensions. They have much greater power to enforce their secrecy.

And I think the secrets to some extent are of greater import because they go to matters of public trust. Questions of national security are questions for the people. to a large extent.

In the book, you raise some essential, fundamental questions that we simply don’t hear in the modern political discourse. Like, why would U.S. drone strikes be secret? Similarly, what argument is there to keep anything about torture secret anymore–including the names of non-covert officials who took part in it? And that’s not to mention surveillance or cybersecurity. It’s like they took all the issues of national security and just declared them off limits. How did we come to this?

One thing that just amazes me about the Beltway culture in Washington is the way these claims of secrecy are just accepted. There doesn’t seem to be any will or spirit to fight back and challenge that. And that’s true for most of the press that covers it.

When you look back and ask: Why are they trying to keep this secret? What’s the rationale for it? What we find–and I think the drone program is an excellent example–are the shallowest pretexts for secrecy.

There’s no consideration given to how this subverts the democratic process of the United States. This question of running a 10-year war in Pakistan should have been the subject of deliberation, discussion and decisions taken through our democratic process, which involves a public articulation of the basis of the action by the executive, and a discussion and voting up or down of the proposal by the Congress, with the public being informed about it.

Now I would say that it’s entirely legitimate for the CIA to run a covert tactical operation that involves striking Mujahadeen leader X at a certain time and a certain place, and this is something that doesn’t have to go through all these processes. I’ll accept that, no problem.

But let’s assume that this is going on for 10 years, involves 700 strikes, kills 4,000 people. That is a war, by any real definition. Can you say that qualifies as covert action? That’s not what the term covert action means. And that they could do this without challenge in Washington is to me just mind boggling.

What explains the elite media’s tolerance for this kind of secrecy? It would seem to violate their core principles. And yet they play along, respecting unwarranted secrecy. They collaborate with it.

They collaborate with it, I think that’s right. The media is a big part of the problem. I think we have to say, of course, that there are really excellent topnotch reporters out there who risk their careers and do terrific work. But increasingly we have a corporate media culture that does not encourage or meaningfully support such journalists. And instead it tends to cultivate and support a different kind of journalist: not the watchdog but the lapdog.

And I think the role of lapdog journalism is highlighted in the Senate Select Committee report, where we see evidence of cases in which the CIA is feeding “leaks” to selected journalists with whom they have developed a good rapport information–they’re not really leaks, they’re “pleaks,” they’re planted leaks. And the leak is “super-secret information we’re giving you a scoop on” that actually happens to be false, to advance their propaganda game. And the journalist laps it up without any critical testing of the data, running it as a scoop or as a leak.

A leak, by definition has got to be something that someone is releasing to the media against the will of the established order, not in furtherance of it. They don’t seem to be able to make this really fundamental distinction.

And of course what’s going on is they want to advance their careers. I think we’ve got a lot of people covering the national security sector who are eager to build a career and they think the best way to do that is to have a trusted relationship with key sources within the CIA. And by the way, that’s what a professional journalist does, I have no problem with that. But what they are missing is that organizations like the CIA understand that process.

They changed the equation, in terms of what reporters get in return for what they give.

They’ve changed the dynamic of it. I know my own sources within the CIA repeatedly describe to me how the agency has picked its cooperating journalists. They’ve also described to me how they have placed their people with broadcasters. And these are people who usually have just left the intelligence community. Have “retired”–but of course you never actually retire, you merely change the tenor of your relationship somewhat.

They get clearance for this. It’s done, it’s understood. They get clearance in order to try to manipulate and influence these media organizations. And to me it’s rather amazing that the broadcast media don’t get it–or they claim not to get it.

Let me ask you about the NSA and surveillance. Here we are, more than a year and a half after the Snowden revelations started to emerge, and there’s been no legislative response at all. It seems to have turned out very well for the Lords of Secrecy. Why is that?

I think the public’s attitude toward these programs is very critical. But that appears to have no consequence inside the Washington Beltway. None.

And I think this is an area where when you compare to other democracies–Germany, for instance, and some Scandinavian countries– when the public says we don’t want that, the government reacts. That doesn’t happen in Washington.

And that’s because the Lords of Secrecy are oblivious to public opinion. They could care less.

They understand that they control the political decision-making process. And I would say that within the U.S. Congress, the one consideration that’s turned out to be absolutely dispositive on predicting how a congressman will vote on efforts to pare back the powers of the NSA is this: How much money did they take from the intelligence and defense contractors?

So I take it your hopes for the upcoming era of GOP congressional oversight are not high?

Well, certainly not in the next Congress. I think the next Congress is a bought-and-paid-for Congress. Even if they pass something, it will appear to limit the NSA, but will not actually do it.

The better sources of pressure are going to be our allies–the Europeans, NATO allies in particular–and potentially the courts saying that some of these procedures are illegal.

I won’t rule out the possibility of a change in Congress in the future. I think public opinion may grind fine and may grind slowly, but ultimately it will have some effect. It’s just not able to have an immediate effect because of the change in the nature of American democracy. Our democracy just isn’t much of a democracy anymore. I don’t think the people really have much meaningful input in national-security decision-making.

To the extent that Obama, initially at least, had any real interest in reining in the intelligence community, where did he go wrong? How early was he owned by the intelligence community? And how thoroughly?

Speaking with people inside the White House, what I’ve heard consistently is that these issues were dominated from the first months of the administration by John O. Brennan, and that Brennan built a network of close allies within the White House that included [former chief of staff] Rahm Emanuel and [former senior adviser] David Plouffe and also included [now chief of staff] Denis McDonough. McDonough’s been a key ally within the White House staff since the beginning.

What they did is they excluded liberal critics and civil libertarians from the dialogue. I’ve been told repeatedly that when discussions occurred on these critical issues, the intelligent, well-informed, balanced, liberal national security voices to whom Obama had once turned were simply not in the room.

So I think one of the big questions is: In his last two years, is he going to do something to change that? I think it’s unlikely, but he’s facing a lot of criticism from his own camp right now, and he may want to do something to address that criticism before he leaves.

This is the indicator I would look to: Does John O. Brennan remain as director of the CIA. As long as he’s there, I wouldn’t expect any progress on these issues.

When Obama chose Brennan, did he know what he was getting into?

Remember that Brennan’s name originally, during the transition period, was floated to be director of the CIA and there were three people who very aggressively objected to him, and that was Glenn Greenwald, Andrew Sullivan and me.

I think we claimed a win on that. But he got, as a door prize, the appointment as adviser at the White House, which did not require confirmation of any sort. And he was able to use that to develop a very powerful psychological relationship with the president. The people I’ve spoken with have consistently told me that people on the outside didn’t sufficiently understand or value this relationship that Brennan had cultivated with Obama. And by the way, Brennan used it to fill Obama’s ear with unadulterated bullshit.

Any question I haven’t asked you that I should have?

What should happen to the CIA? Seriously, I think that’s one of the big questions. If the Senate report proved anything it was that Harry Truman was absolutely right in his fundamental analysis of the proper role of the CIA. Truman said you really cannot have the same operation handling intelligence analysis and covert activities. The people who run the covert activities will dominate and they will always want to claim that whatever complete numbskull thing they did in their covert operations was a success. Which means they completely adulterate their analysis.

You may have to have covert operations, you certainly have to have intelligence analysis, but having both of those operations under the same roof is really stupid.

Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty Images

The post Q&A: On the Untouchable ‘Lords of Secrecy’ appeared first on The Intercept.

Defending free speech and free press rights, which typically means defending the right to disseminate the very ideas society finds most repellent, has been one of my principal passions for the last 20 years: previously as a lawyer and now as a journalist. So I consider it positive when large numbers of people loudly invoke this principle, as has been happening over the last 48 hours in response to the horrific attack on Charlie Hebdo in Paris.

Usually, defending free speech rights is much more of a lonely task. For instance, the day before the Paris murders, I wrote an article about multiple cases where Muslims are being prosecuted and even imprisoned by western governments for their online political speech – assaults that have provoked relatively little protest, including from those free speech champions who have been so vocal this week.

I’ve previously covered cases where Muslims were imprisoned for many years in the U.S. for things like translating and posting “extremist” videos to the internet, writing scholarly articles in defense of Palestinian groups and expressing harsh criticism of Israel, and even including a Hezbollah channel in a cable package. That’s all well beyond the numerous cases of jobs being lost or careers destroyed for expressing criticism of Israel or (much more dangerously and rarely) Judaism. I’m hoping this week’s celebration of free speech values will generate widespread opposition to all of these long-standing and growing infringements of core political rights in the west, not just some.

Central to free speech activism has always been the distinction between defending the right to disseminate Idea X and agreeing with Idea X, one which only the most simple-minded among us are incapable of comprehending. One defends the right to express repellent ideas while being able to condemn the idea itself. There is no remote contradiction in that: the ACLU vigorously defends the right of neo-Nazis to march through a community filled with Holocaust survivors in Skokie, Illinois, but does not join the march; they instead vocally condemn the targeted ideas as grotesque while defending the right to express them.

But this week’s defense of free speech rights was so spirited that it gave rise to a brand new principle: to defend free speech, one not only defends the right to disseminate the speech, but embraces the content of the speech itself. Numerous writers thus demanded: to show “solidarity” with the murdered cartoonists, one should not merely condemn the attacks and defend the right of the cartoonists to publish, but should publish and even celebrate those cartoons. “The best response to Charlie Hebdo attack,” announced Slate’s editor Jacob Weisberg, “is to escalate blasphemous satire.”

Some of the cartoons published by Charlie Hebdo were not just offensive but bigoted, such as the one mocking the African sex slaves of Boko Haram as welfare queens (left). Others went far beyond maligning violence by extremists acting in the name of Islam, or even merely depicting Mohammed with degrading imagery (above, right), and instead contained a stream of mockery toward Muslims generally, who in France are not remotely powerful but are largely a marginalized and targeted immigrant population.

But no matter. Their cartoons were noble and should be celebrated – not just on free speech grounds but for their content. In a column entitled “The Blasphemy We Need,” The New York Times‘ Ross Douthat argued that “the right to blaspheme (and otherwise give offense) is essential to the liberal order” and “that kind of blasphemy [that provokes violence] is precisely the kind that needs to be defended, because it’s the kind that clearly serves a free society’s greater good.” New York Magazine‘s Jonathan Chait actually proclaimed that “one cannot defend the right [to blaspheme] without defending the practice.” Vox’s Matt Yglesias had a much more nuanced view but nonetheless concluded that “to blaspheme the Prophet transforms the publication of these cartoons from a pointless act to a courageous and even necessary one, while the observation that the world would do well without such provocations becomes a form of appeasement.”

To comport with this new principle for how one shows solidarity with free speech rights and a vibrant free press, we’re publishing some blasphemous and otherwise offensive cartoons about religion and their adherents:

And here are some not-remotely-blasphemous-or-bigoted yet very pointed and relevant cartoons by the brilliantly provocative Brazilian cartoonist Carlos Latuff (reprinted with permission):

Is it time for me to be celebrated for my brave and noble defense of free speech rights? Have I struck a potent blow for political liberty and demonstrated solidarity with free journalism by publishing blasphemous cartoons? If, as Salman Rushdie said, it’s vital that all religions be subjected to “fearless disrespect,” have I done my part to uphold western values?

When I first began to see these demands to publish these anti-Muslim cartoons, the cynic in me thought perhaps this was really just about sanctioning some types of offensive speech against some religions and their adherents, while shielding more favored groups. In particular, the west has spent years bombing, invading and occupying Muslim countries and killing, torturing and lawlessly imprisoning innocent Muslims, and anti-Muslim speech has been a vital driver in sustaining support for those policies.

So it’s the opposite of surprising to see large numbers of westerners celebrating anti-Muslim cartoons - not on free speech grounds but due to approval of the content. Defending free speech is always easy when you like the content of the ideas being targeted, or aren’t part of (or actively dislike) the group being maligned.

Indeed, it is self-evident that if a writer who specialized in overtly anti-black or anti-Semitic screeds had been murdered for their ideas, there would be no widespread calls to republish their trash in “solidarity” with their free speech rights. In fact, Douthat, Chait and Yglesias all took pains to expressly note that they were only calling for publication of such offensive ideas in the limited case where violence is threatened or perpetrated in response (by which they meant in practice, so far as I can tell: anti-Islam speech). Douthat even used italics to emphasize how limited his defense of blasphemy was: “that kind of blasphemy is precisely the kind that needs to be defended.”

One should acknowledge a valid point contained within the Douthat/Chait/Yglesias argument: when media outlets refrain from publishing material out of fear (rather than a desire to avoid publishing gratuitously offensive material), as several of the west’s leading outlets admitted doing with these cartoons, that is genuinely troubling, an actual threat to a free press. But there are all kinds of pernicious taboos in the west that result in self-censorship or compelled suppression of political ideas, from prosecution and imprisonment to career destruction: why is violence by Muslims the most menacing one? (I’m not here talking about the question of whether media outlets should publish the cartoons because they’re newsworthy; my focus is on the demand they be published positively, with approval, as “solidarity”).

When we originally discussed publishing this article to make these points, our intention was to commission two or three cartoonists to create cartoons that mock Judaism and malign sacred figures to Jews the way Charlie Hebdo did to Muslims. But that idea was thwarted by the fact that no mainstream western cartoonist would dare put their name on an anti-Jewish cartoon, even if done for satire purposes, because doing so would instantly and permanently destroy their career, at least. Anti-Islam and anti-Muslim commentary (and cartoons) are a dime a dozen in western media outlets; the taboo that is at least as strong, if not more so, are anti-Jewish images and words. Why aren’t Douthat, Chait, Yglesias and their like-minded free speech crusaders calling for publication of anti-Semitic material in solidarity, or as a means of standing up to this repression? Yes, it’s true that outlets like The New York Times will in rare instances publish such depictions, but only to document hateful bigotry and condemn it – not to publish it in “solidarity” or because it deserves a serious and respectful airing.

With all due respect to the great cartoonist Ann Telnaes, it is simply not the case that Charlie Hebdo “were equal opportunity offenders.” Like Bill Maher, Sam Harris and other anti-Islam obsessives, mocking Judaism, Jews and/or Israel is something they will rarely (if ever) do. If forced, they can point to rare and isolated cases where they uttered some criticism of Judaism or Jews, but the vast bulk of their attacks are reserved for Islam and Muslims, not Judaism and Jews. Parody, free speech and secular atheism are the pretexts; anti-Muslim messaging is the primary goal and the outcome. And this messaging – this special affection for offensive anti-Islam speech – just so happens to coincide with, to feed, the militaristic foreign policy agenda of their governments and culture.

To see how true that is, consider the fact that Charlie Hebdo – the “equal opportunity” offenders and defenders of all types of offensive speech - fired one of their writers in 2009 for writing a sentence some said was anti-Semitic (the writer was then charged with a hate crime offense, and won a judgment against the magazine for unfair termination). Does that sound like “equal opportunity” offending?

Nor is it the case that threatening violence in response to offensive ideas is the exclusive province of extremists claiming to act in the name of Islam. Terrence McNally’s 1998 play “Corpus Christi,” depicting Jesus as gay, was repeatedly cancelled by theaters due to bomb threats. Larry Flynt was paralyzed by an evangelical white supremacist who objected to Hustler‘s pornographic depiction of inter-racial couples. The Dixie Chicks were deluged with death threats and needed massive security after they publicly criticized George Bush for the Iraq War, which finally forced them to apologize out of fear. Violence spurred by Jewish and Christian fanaticism is legion, from abortion doctors being murdered to gay bars being bombed to a 45-year-old brutal occupation of the West Bank and Gaza due in part to the religious belief (common in both the U.S. and Israel) that God decreed they shall own all the land. And that’s all independent of the systematic state violence in the west sustained, at least in part, by religious sectarianism.

The New York Times‘ David Brooks today claims that anti-Christian bias is so widespread in America – which has never elected a non-Christian president – that “the University of Illinois fired a professor who taught the Roman Catholic view on homosexuality.” He forgot to mention that the very same university just terminated its tenure contract with Professor Steven Salaita over tweets he posted during the Israeli attack on Gaza that the university judged to be excessively vituperative of Jewish leaders, and that the journalist Chris Hedges was just disinvited to speak at the University of Pennsylvania for the Thought Crime of drawing similarities between Israel and ISIS.

That is a real taboo – a repressed idea – as powerful and absolute as any in the United States, so much so that Brooks won’t even acknowledge its existence. It’s certainly more of a taboo in the U.S. than criticizing Muslims and Islam, criticism which is so frequently heard in mainstream circles – including the U.S. Congress – that one barely notices it any more.

This underscores the key point: there are all sorts of ways ideas and viewpoints are suppressed in the west. When those demanding publication of these anti-Islam cartoons start demanding the affirmative publication of those ideas as well, I’ll believe the sincerity of their very selective application of free speech principles. One can defend free speech without having to publish, let alone embrace, the offensive ideas being targeted. But if that’s not the case, let’s have equal application of this new principle.

Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images; additional research was provided by Andrew Fishman

 

The post In Solidarity With a Free Press: Some More Blasphemous Cartoons appeared first on The Intercept.

National Security Agency data and technical analysis assisted in the U.S. government’s attribution of the Sony cyber attack to North Korea, Admiral Michael Rogers said on Thursday.

“We partner with the Department of Homeland Security and FBI in various areas and this is one such area,” Rogers, the NSA director, said in response to a question from a reporter with The Daily Beast about the agency’s role, if any, in the attribution of the Sony attack to North Korea.

“We specifically did—we were asked to provide our technical expertise. We were asked to take a look at the malware, we were asked to take a look at not just the data that was being generated from Sony but also what data could we bring to the table—here’s other activity and patterns leading up to it, what is this act really about?” Rogers said at the FBI’s International Conference on Cyber Security at Fordham University.

“We were part of a broad interagency effort, not in the lead role–the Federal Bureau of Investigation was the overall lead. Yes, we were part of a broad government attempt to understand exactly what happened.”

This is the first time the agency has made any public statements about its involvement in the Sony hack investigation.

Earlier in the day, Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) hinted that NSA could have been involved by referencing the “shocking amount of swagger” among industry professionals questioning the government’s attribution to North Korea. But those outside experts lack knowledge of the “huge capability of the NSA, FBI and CIA to some degree,” he said.

Rogers, the NSA director, discussed the Sony hack at numerous points throughout his talk, prior to the question and answer period.

“I have very high confidence—I remain very confident—that this was North Korea,” he said, echoing FBI Director James Comey the day before. He said this was the first time a nation-state has carried out an act to “stop the release of a film with a particular viewpoint and characterization of a leader.”

Comey sought to end growing skepticism by informational security professionals that have said they question North Korea’s involvement in the Sony hack. Many in the industry had called on the FBI to offer proof of ties to North Korea. Comey Wednesday provided new details about the FBI’s investigation.

He told the standing-room-only packed room that the hackers got sloppy and sometimes failed to mask their identity when sending email threats to Sony employees, pointing to networks used “exclusively by North Koreans.” And he said he was trying to get the emails declassified to disclose to the public.

The NSA chief—like Justice Department and FBI officials—applauded Sony for notifying the government within hours of learning they’d been hit with a cyber attack. Naming North Korea and announcing economic sanctions was critical for deterrence of future nation-state or other types of cyber attack, Rogers argued.

“The entire world is watching how we as a nation are going to respond to this,” he said.

 Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The post NSA Played Key Role Linking North Korea to Sony Hack appeared first on The Intercept.

Recommended article: Chomsky: We Are All – Fill in the Blank.
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It’s haaaaappening, it’s finally haaaaaappening! After teasing fans of Back to the Future II first with a limited run of replica Air MAGs that it auctioned off for charity, followed by an apparently licensed pair that lit up but didn’t lace up automatically or hover, Nike has confirmed that it’ll be releasing Marty McFly’s Air MAG sneakers with Power Laces sometime this year.

Yes, they’re going to lace up, said Nike’s Vice President for Design and Special Projects and the designer of the original shoes in the movie, Tinker Hatfield during the Agenda Trade Show in Long Beach, CA this week, according to shoe blog Nice Kicks.

The people wanted to know, and Hatfield was willing to talk, saying that his team is working as hard as possible to bring the shoes to the market this year. However, he pointed out, we still have “11 and two-thirds months left in 2015.”

That means there’s no set date, but who’s willing to bet on Oct. 21, 2015? It is, after all, the date Marty travels in time to in the movie to save his progeny from ruination. Just saying, convenient timing.

You can also check out the patent for the Power Laces via Nice Kicks as well.

TINKER TALKS NIKE MAG 2015 RELEASE WITH POWER LACES AT #AGENDAEMERGE [Nice Kicks]

UPDATE: The dogs have been found and returned to the family. FedEx says the driver, a contract employee, will not be working for the company pending the outcome of an investigation.

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Between FedEx, UPS, USPS and the numerous other delivery services out there, we thought we’d heard just about everything possible that a driver could do wrong. But then we heard about this story.

According to a post by a woman named Erica on Facebook, her home security footage caught a FedEx driver walking away from her home with two of her pooches in his possession.

Making things even more bizarre, she alleges that the driver wasn’t even making a delivery to her home but just came with the sole intent of snatching her dogs.

We’ve contacted FedEx, where a rep said the company is aware of the story and will provide us with an official statement later today.

Now we have no idea if the person is indeed a FedEx driver, so this could be a matter of just an a-hole dog thief caught on camera. Either way, the family is now missing two puppies, which is decidedly not cool.

[via Reddit]

Not unlike a mummy, the reanimated corpse of a bad bill that just doesn’t know when to stay dead is once again coming to the floor of a Congress near you this week. Tomorrow, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act — better known as CISPA — is once again going to be introduced before the House of Representatives.

The Hill confirmed the report that Maryland Representative Dutch Ruppersberger will (re- re-) introduce the bill tomorrow.

The new version is likely to be basically the same as the old, which “directs the federal government to conduct cybersecurity activities to provide shared situational awareness enabling integrated operational actions to protect, prevent, mitigate, respond to, and recover from cyber incidents.”

In other words, CISPA makes it easier for intelligence agencies to share everyone’s digital information amongst themselves, with the stated goal of preventing cyberterrorism and other hacks. But while security in the digital world is indeed rapidly proving to be at least as important as security in the physical world, the bill’s good intentions are matched by deep problems.

Specifically, lawmakers, advocates, and others have expressed concerns that as written, CISPA would allow the government to infringe (even more) on citizens’ privacy and would allow the government to demand access personal information, like emails and Internet history, without first getting search warrants or having to follow other legal procedures.

CISPA is one of those bills that just won’t stay dead. The first go at it came up for a vote in the spring of 2012. The legislation passed in the House in a 248-168 vote, but then didn’t make it in the Senate.

A year later, in 2013, CISPA came up yet again. The House once again supported it, voting 288-127 in favor, but the Senate didn’t even bother to give it a look, and there it died once more.

But with the new year comes a new Congress. Any old pending business was basically swept away when the 114th session of our august legislative body was sworn in on Tuesday, and now CISPA gets a chance to be resurrected and shamble once more before lawmakers.

Rep. Ruppersberger told The Hill, ““The reason I’m putting bill in now is I want to keep the momentum going on what’s happening out there in the world,” referring to the current zeitgeist around cybersecurity and internet espionage surrounding the Sony hack.

But Sony isn’t the only chatter flitting through the air. Revelations over the past two years about the depth and breadth of NSA snooping have given rise to a tide of talks about privacy rights.

That, too, might change some of the feeling behind CISPA this time around, even with a different party in charge of the Senate.

House Dem revives major cyber bill [The Hill]

There’s the kind of food experimentation that is based on aligning subtle flavor profiles and combining textures in complementary ways, and then there’s the “I wonder what X would taste like with a whole bunch of expensive stuff on top of it” experience. The latter is often just so much more fun than the former.

Such is the case for the dude at DudeFoods, Nick (he of the McEverything), who found himself with a cool $250 in gift card money to spend at William Sonoma, and no desire to buy any “overpriced” kitchen tools, “even with a gift card.”

Instead, his eye caught truffles for sale, and he joked with a friend about getting an ounce of white Italian truffles for $200 and just blow them all on one dish.

Going with the tack of combining luxury with economy, Nick and his pal decided to pair the truffles with a White Castle slider. From there, he says the idea to make the most expensive White Castle slider ever assembled “sort of just spiraled out of control from there” with the addition of “every other insanely expensive food I could think off.”

He included two pricy Wisconsin cheddars, “white Italian truffles, a couple ounces of prosciutto and then a slice of some duck foie gras and port wine pate bullshit thing that I picked up at a market near my work. Finishing off the slider was an ounce of Russian caviar and a fried quail egg. Oh, and I also sprinkled 24K gold flakes all over the entire thing just so it looked extra fancy. The only hipster food item that this thing was missing was morel mushrooms.”

The entire cost of the slider came out to exactly $400.

So what does all that money buy you? A mouthful of disgusting and the ruination of a perfectly good slider, Nick says, acknowledging that the included ingredients aren’t really meant to go together.

“In fact, the only thing that really made it any better were the two Wisconsin cheeses that I added to it,” he said, stating the obvious importance of cheese in all things. “Everything else just took away from the deliciousness that is the White Castle slider.”

When all is said and done, the thing was a “gigantic waste of money,” Nick admits, though it’s clear he enjoyed the effort overall.

“In retrospect though I probably should have just spent the $400 on 20 Crave Cases from White Castle, or in other words, 600 sliders,” he admits. “With how much I love White Castle that many sliders could have fed me for at least four or five days!”

Six hundred sliders in five days? Sounds like a challenge.

Comcast is reigning Worst Company in America champion for a reason: we’ve seen story after story after story where consumers have struggled just to get basic service from the company. But Comcast cable head Neil Smit was confident (or delusional) when he told a panel at the International CES that customer service would soon be the best product to come from the company.

Smit told the audience at a “Fast Innovation” panel Wednesday afternoon that Comcast is on the way to a complete customer service turnaround.

“We do need to transform our customer experience, and I think we have a lot of work to do,” Smit said, in what might be the understatement of the century. “It will take time, but we’ll get it done.”

Customer satisfaction surveys have consistently found Comcast lagging behind pretty much everyone. The most recent customer satisfaction surveys, released at the end of December, found Comcast scoring well below average in “overall satisfaction” in every area. In the 2014 American Customer Satisfaction Index, Comcast doesn’t just score in the bottom for pay-TV and broadband companies, but lowest among all companies, beaten only by their acquisition target Time Warner Cable.

To address customer satisfaction issues, Smit said, the company has already been hard at work by moving their “top product person” and putting him in charge of customer service. He was referring to senior vice president of customer experience Charlie Herrin, who the company promised in September would be on hand to fix customers’ cable experiences.

“We expect that customer service will soon be one of our best products,” Smit concluded optimistically, while we all rolled our eyes.

Per popular demand from the fans, YouTuber Eric95, the creator of Super Mario-themed cult hit parody games like “Supra Mayro Bross” (Super Mario Bros.) and “Mayro Kratt” (Mario Kart), brings the first teaser trailer for the next title in the Mayro franchise: Supra Mayro 64.

A group of travelers somewhere in the rural countryside of Russia encounter a long and winding road, quite literally.

You have probably played Tetris. You have probably watched people play Tetris. You have almost surely not watched people play Tetris like this.

During the Awesome Games Done Quick speedrun marathon this week, a group of puzzle masterminds tore through various versions of Tetris: The Grandmaster, pulling out all sorts of tricks to show off what they can do with the classic block game. The full run, which goes for about an hour and a half, is full of crazy challenges and moments, but it all peaks when player KevinDDR unlocks an easter egg that lets him play an invisible round of Tetris during the end credits, starting around 1:10:53 here:

It's really, really incredible. Be warned: you will never be able to consider yourself "good" at Tetris again after watching any of this.

Another highlight from this run: turning Tetris into fine art.

In this sequence, you can watch player Kitaru use his Tetris pieces to create a tricky diagonal pattern. As explained by the commentators, players would do this sort of thing for fun back in the 80s, when they were bored with the game and trying to come up with new challenges for themselves. That segment begins at 59:45:

Of course, if you have a spare 96 minutes, you should really watch the whole thing. It's remarkable.

You can reach the author of this post at jason@kotaku.com or on Twitter at @jasonschreier.

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You may be asking yourself “why would I want to watch a video of a gas station bathroom?” and that’s what we first thought too.

Last month master pianist/composer Sonya Belousova charmed us with on the spot arrangements of classic Nintendo themes, many of which she had only just heard for the first time. I was hesitant to post her follow-up, but then I heard her version of "The Scars of Time" from Chrono Cross.

I'm currently in the middle of my eighth or ninth replay of Chrono Cross, so Sonya's valiant attempt at replicating the mournful wind instruments of "Scars" with a massive custom string instrument arrived at just about the perfect time. Her version of "Aerith/s Theme" from Final Fantasy VII isn't bad either, especially considering the music doesn't evoke the emotional reaction in her that it would someone who'd played through the game.

She also beats the hell out of the poor piano while playing the main theme from Skyrim, replicates the Halo choir with keys and recalls a past BioShock performance.

You can check out more of Sonya's work at the official PlayerPiano YouTube channel, including music from Street Fighter, Tetris and Akira. They've also recently announced a full album of Nintendo themes for anyone who donates at least $10 to their Indigogo campaign.

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Since its inception, Netflix has been trying to personalize content recommendations for users, but it’s remained relatively neutral about which devices you should actually watch this content on. But today the company announced the launch of a “Recommended TV” program that will single out certain brands and models of smart TVs that Netflix believes offer the best options for viewers.

The program was announced in conjunction with the LG press conference at International CES in Las Vegas this morning.

““We’’ve created the Netflix Recommended TV program to help consumers identify smart TVs that offer better performance, easier menu navigation and new features that improve the experience for Internet TV services,’’” said Neil Hunt, chief product officer at Netflix. ““When you see a TV with the Netflix Recommended TV logo, it means that TV will provide an excellent Netflix experience, based on criteria our members tell us matter most.’’”

While the launch was announced at the LG conference, Netflix says that the first line-up of Recommended sets will include multiple manufacturers, like Sony, Sharp and VIZIO. It will also include the Roku TVs that were introduced at CES in 2014.

A decade of not standing in fires. Dark Legacy Comics, who have been around for almost the same amount of time as WoW, and their latest comic strip are a summary of all the guild and community drama we've all witnessed over the years.

And if you check below, the comic might suggest that early years of raiding were all full of love and fun. It's just not true. Raiding was brutal. 2011 though is spot on.

And what's about 2015? For me both the love and the hate side would be "sitting in the garrison."

To contact the author of this post, write to: gergovas@kotaku.com

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(comic by owlturdcomix)