The Thing About That Edward Snowden Thing

I'm really glad I'm not the only one thinking this whole fish stinks.

Some passing observations:
1) When everybody's in on the secret, there are no secrets
The number of people with Top Secret Clearance was 850,000 two years ago.

2) It's not what you know or who you know that counts; it's what you know about who you know.
And also too, Little Eddie got his cool job at Booz Allen by being a National Security Legacy Puke (imho) - a kid with a GED and the absolute minimum "experience" just kinda waltzes in?  Either the recruitment standards are total crap or Mommy and Daddy's pals greased the skids; with a side order of paranoia about "anybody from the outside".

3) And all of that generally points to a system where very few people are all that interested in learning any real truth about much of anything because everybody's way more interested in having good compliant little go-bots working diligently to make sure they gather the info necessary to confirm the foregone conclusions of management.

No soul and no honor.  But I'll give Snowden this much:  I think he came to understand that what he was doing wasn't accomplishing anything he was constantly being told it was accomplishing - his recent comment about how he could bring down the entire CIA Field Ops structure makes me think the guy really bought into it, and he's just now trying to come out of it - so "blowing the whistle" is his way of saying he got to the point where he could recognize it as bullshit, and now he's calling it bullshit.  Which is really why he poses such a threat; which in turn is why we get two basic reactions from the power centers in Washington - they either sniff and wave him off as an insignificant little bug, or he's Benedict Arnold times infinity squared.

Leave it to Crooks & Liars to come up with a good one that manages to look past the veil:

It should be self-evident that recent NSA revelations bring up some grave concerns about civil liberties. But they also raise other profound and troubling questions - about the privatization of our military, our culture's inflated expectations for digital technology, and the increasingly cozy relationship between Big Corporations (including Wall Street) and Big Defense.

Are these corporations perverting our political process? The campaign war chest for Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who today said NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden committed "treason," is heavily subsidized by defense and intelligence contractors that include General Dynamics, General Atomic, BAE Systems, Northrop Grumman, and Bechtel.

One might argue that a politician with that kind of backing is in no moral position to lecture others about "treason."

But Feinstein's funders are decidedly old-school Military/Industrial Complex types. What about the new crowd? This confluence of forces hasn't been named yet, so for the time being we'll use a cumbersome label: the "Security/Digital Complex."

Today's Pix

Ya Heard It Here First

Everybody's favorite media creation and the latest in a long and ingloriously prideful tradition of Heisman Trophy Failbots, Timmy Tebow the JesusBro, signed on with the Patriots the other day.

Here's Press Poodle Dan Shanoff at USAToday to polish the godly knob for us:

Today’s Big Winner: Tim Tebow
Six weeks ago, I said that New England was the most likely destination for Tim Tebow.

After nearly eight years of obsessively covering the Tebow phenomenon, it was not hard to trace his Belichick-approved success at Florida through Josh McDaniels making him a first-round draft pick through Rex Ryan’s bungling to Belichick’s status as the only coach who is smart enough, secure enough and dismissive enough of his critics to bring him in to put Tebow in Foxboro.
Needless to say, I’m on a roll, so let’s keep it going with 10 predictions (entirely sincere!) for the Tebow Era in New England, under the general “first principle” of Tebowmania — just when you think it can’t get any crazier, it does:

(1) He will get jersey No. 5 (from back-up punter David Ruffer).
(2) His Pats jersey sales will lead the league.
(3) He will score a TD in Week 1 versus the Bills.
(4) He will score 2 TDs in Week 2 versus the Jets.
(5) The Pats-Jets game on Sept. 12 will be the most-watched Thursday night game in the history of the NFL.
(6) He will get designated as an RB in fantasy and be owned in no less than 50% of the leagues.
(7) The Pats-Broncos game on Sunday night in Week 12 will be the most-watched Sunday night game in NFL history.
(8) He will finish the season with 9 TDs — and 6 two-point conversions.
(9) The Patriots will get to the Super Bowl, and Tebow will score a touchdown.
(10) Tim Tebow will win a Super Bowl ring in New England.

Is there a chance that things might not work in New England and I could be 100% wrong on all of these? Sure.

But given the history of Tebow, the bigger mistake is to scoff at the mania.

In case you missed it up there at the top, Dan - that was me scoffing at the media you.

Yeesh

I guess we file this one under:

• First World Problems 
• White Girl, Spoiled Little
• Stoopidly Opportunistic
• Something-For-Nothing
• Racist Vindictive Cunt
• Social Media Backfire

hat tip = Addicting Info

My Man, Charlie

This reads like poetry.

Please, if it's not too damn much trouble, can you tell me what's being done in my name?

That has been the essential plea of the citizen of a democratic political commonwealth for going on 70 years now, since the war powers and their attendant influence detached themselves from -- or were abandoned entirely by -- the constitutional authority in which they were supposed to reside. That was the plea that was answered, officially, by the incredibly brave Frank Church and his committee, and by the House Committee on Assassinations (the case of the murder of a president in broad daylight is still open, by the way). That was the plea that has been answered, unofficially, by Ron Ridenhour about My Lai, and by Sy Hersh about a lot of the things the Church committee opened up, and by those guys in Lebanon with the mimeograph machine concerning Iran-Contra, and by Bob Parry and so many others during the era of Reagan triumphalism, and by people like the invaluable Charlie Savage and Jane Mayer and others when the country lost its mind after 9/11, and, yes, by Jeremy Scahill and whoever he talks to, and, yes, by Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden, too.

Just tell me what is being done in my name. 

Today's Eternal Sadness

Not a day goes by.  The big story over the weekend, of course, was the shooting spree in Santa Monica.  That's what got all the coverage because of the requisite body-count; and since the shooter was dark-skinned with a Muslim-sounding name, we can get our TerrorPorn with a double shot of Anti-Immigration Adrenaline jolt for the day.

We're also required now to jump into the speculation that the shooter "suffered from emotional and psychological problems" because that's become the over-arching theme of the NRA's campaign to keep us comfortably numb.  If we're not properly distracted and/or sedated, we might start to notice a few connectable dots:

PRESCOTT VALLEY, Ariz. (AP) — Police aren't expected to seek charges in the death of an Arizona man who was accidentally shot by his 4-year-old son, authorities said.

Justin Stanfield Thomas, 35, was fatally shot Friday after he and his son traveled from Phoenix to a friend's home 90 miles away in the northern Arizona community of Prescott Valley for a surprise visit.

The boy found the loaded gun in the home within minutes of arrival, asked a question about it and pulled the trigger, Prescott Valley Police spokesman Brandon Bonney said.

Thomas later died at a hospital.

The child has been with his mother since the day the shooting occurred.
Bonney said the gun should have been locked away, but that Thomas' friend, whose identity hasn't been released, was caught off guard by the unannounced visit. No children lived in the house.

"They're processing everything to see where they stand with the interviews and the crime scene investigation and see if everything is matching up," Bonney told The Prescott Daily Courier.

The paper described Thomas as an Army special forces veteran who served in Iraq.

I can imagine that kid growing up with some pretty heavy issues that he'll have to deal with at some point. (btw: can we have any reasonable expectation that he won't "deal with his hangups" by shooting up a school with an AR-15, or do we have to settle for blind hope on that one?)

So I have to wonder about Wayne Lapierre's recent conversion to the gospel of Mental Health in America.  Why do I get the feeling that it's just a good way for the gun makers to abdicate any and all responsibility?  Why is it I think they're trying to get the taxpayers to pick up the tab for their shit?  Why am I thinking "Hey, I know - the Libruls love gettin' all squishy about their feelings and crap, so let's give 'em a nice rag to chew on and maybe they'll leave us alone for a while."

It's a great way for the NRA to deflect criticism by getting us talking about any-damn-thing other than the simple fact that in a very obvious and important way the guns themselves are the fucking problem.

Support PBS

Cuz this is a tiny little taste of what they can do.



Go ahead - try to feel shitty about something right now.

And btw - it's good to reflect and to try to recapture some small element of the simple joys of being alive; the unencumbered soaring spirit of youth.

But let's be smart about it - and let's try not to get too carried away, OK?

Two Guitars

hat tip = Little Green Footballs

Today's Eternal Sadness

(lifted wholesale from Balloon Juice):

You can have my metadata, but you will pry the projectile fired by my [firearm of choice] out of my cold, dead partner.

Not to mention this.

This is not to diminish the implications of Osama Bin Laden’s victory — his ability to terrify the US into surrendering willingly what we have long said was worth fighting for. That’s been coming a long time –see this ProPublica timeline (h/t TPM) for a quick overview of just how we’ve done it to ourselves over the last four decades. But, I can’t cease getting heart sick at each new anecdote, each new framing of the rolling massacre that takes Americans by the dozens every damn day of the year…every year.

So, for those who declare the 2nd amendment the one sure bulwark against tyranny, I have a question:
Where were you when the surveillance state was forming? What are you going to do about it now? What tree, exactly, has been watered by the blood of all the men, women, and children lost to suicide, to partner-murder, to bad luck, to whatever.

Feh.

Update: On tweeting this post I got a message from Chris Clarke, who made this chart and posted it to his Facebook pagealmost exactly a year ago. I’m glad to be able to make the acknowledgement here.

Today's Dismal-ness

For all the time we spend blathering on about how rotten the schools are; and for all the inked up dead trees that eventually serve no purpose except to keep our Christmas decorations safe - for all of that over-stated and under-informed rhetoric, we still seem not to have any good ideas about what we might do to keep 'our precious youth' from rising up and slaughtering us in our beds one night when they finally get hip to how bad we're fuckin' 'em over.

From Salon, by David Sirota (hat tip = Facebook friend DC):

Before getting to the big news, let’s review the dominant fairy tale: As embodied by New York City’s major education announcement this weekend, the “reform” fantasy pretends that a lack of teacher “accountability” is the major education problem and somehow wholly writes family economics out of the story (amazingly, this fantasy persists even in a place like the Big Apple where economic inequality is particularly crushing). That key — and deliberate — omission serves myriad political interests.

For education, technology and charter school companies and the Wall Streeters who back them, it lets them cite troubled public schools to argue that the current public education system is flawed, and to then argue that education can be improved if taxpayer money is funneled away from the public school system’s priorities (hiring teachers, training teachers, reducing class size, etc.) and into the private sector (replacing teachers with computers, replacing public schools with privately run charter schools, etc.). Likewise, for conservative politicians and activist-profiteers disproportionately bankrolled by these and other monied interests, the “reform” argument gives them a way to both talk about fixing education and to bash organized labor, all without having to mention an economic status quo that monied interests benefit from and thus do not want changed.

It's a big hot gnarly mess that doesn't get any better any time soon if we just continue to beat a starving mule, and while there is no solution for a big hot gnarly mess that fits neatly on a bumper sticker, this one thing is certain: you can't fix the schools if you don't fix the neighborhoods.