Welcome! "What's Happenin'?" is a casual community diary (a daily series, 8:30 AM Eastern on weekdays, 10 AM on weekends and holidays) where we hang out and talk about the goings on here and everywhere.
We chat about our lives, our health, our families, our social circles, our pets, etc. We welcome links to your writings here on dkos or elsewhere, posts of pictures, music, etc.
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Good Morning!
Longwood Gardens. March, 2012. Photo credit: joanneleon
Talking isn't doing. It is a kind of good deed to say well; and yet words are not deeds.
-- William Shakespeare
News
Harvard professor and former assistant U.S. Sec. of Defense makes one of the new popular arguments among the powers that be, creating an equivalence between groups like Anonymous and the 9/11 attackers. Expect to see a lot more of this. Money for cyber defense/warfare is flying and everybody wants some. Hacktivists are the new enemy. Maybe activists in general are the new enemy. Who knows?
Cyber war and peace
If one treats so-called "hacktivism" by ideological groups as mostly a disruptive nuisance at this stage, there remain four major categories of cyber threats to national security, each with a different time horizon: cyber war and economic espionage are largely associated with states, and cyber crime and cyber terrorism are mostly associated with non-state actors. For the US, the highest costs currently stem from espionage and crime, but over the next decade or so, war and terrorism could become greater threats than they are today.
Moreover, as alliances and tactics evolve, the categories may increasingly overlap. In the view of Admiral Mike McConnell, the US former director of national intelligence: "Sooner or later, terror groups will achieve cyber-sophistication. It's like nuclear proliferation, only far easier."
The world is only just beginning to see glimpses of cyber war - in the denial-of-service attacks that accompanied the conventional war in Georgia in 2008, or the recent sabotage of Iranian centrifuges. States have the greatest capabilities, but non-state actors are more likely to initiate a catastrophic attack. A "cyber 9/11" may be more likely than the often-mentioned "cyber Pearl Harbour". It is time for states to sit down and discuss how to limit this threat to world peace.
In Presidential Race’s Give-and-Take, Hope for a Fiscal Compromise
The optimists include leading stakeholders in Washington’s oft-spurned centrist boutique, which may be especially vulnerable to wishful analysis. But two looming events — an automatic $1.2 trillion budget “sequester” hitting defense and domestic spending, and the expiration of all of President George W. Bush’s tax cuts — will create pressure for the two parties to strike a compromise.
[ ... ]
Steve Bell, a longtime Senate Republican budget aide now at the Bipartisan Policy Center, said the White House and Congress “will not allow the sequester to occur and all the Bush tax cuts to expire. They’re going to be looking at each other on Nov. 20 and saying, ‘Well, what do you want to do?’ ”
[ ... ]
Mr. Obama, Speaker John A. Boehner of the House and a bipartisan group of six senators sought unsuccessfully to strike such a deal in 2011. But Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia, one of those six, said that he was more optimistic now about action in a lame duck session of Congress, the opening months of the new Congress in 2013, or both.
Mr. Warner cited praise for parts of the Simpson-Bowles plan from Mr. Obama and Mitt Romney, the likely Republican presidential nominee, and signs of weakening Republican opposition to tax increases.
A Dodd-Frank Regulatory Exemption Grows by 7,900%
Federal regulators made their first proposal in 2010, saying that only small players that trade less than $100 million a year would be exempt from rules requiring them to hold more capital and report more information on their trades. [ ... ] five large banks—JPMorgan Chase (JPM), Bank of America (BAC), Citigroup (C), Morgan Stanley (MS), and Goldman Sachs (GS)—hold almost 96 percent of the notional value of all derivatives contracts. The smaller players, the argument goes, shouldn’t be burdened with extra requirements that would ultimately drive up costs for consumers.
This week, the regulators finally settled the issue, and generally the industry won out. Regulators expanded the exemption to include companies that do less than $8 billion in swaps a year—80 times more than the initial proposal. By one estimate, that means 60 percent of swap dealers will now be exempt. Those companies, ranging from banks to energy and agricultural firms, can breathe easier now that they’re exempt. As for what the new rules mean for risk in the market, regulators say they’ll reevaluate in five years, when the threshold defaults down to $3 billion.
Protesters attempt to re-occupy Portland parks
PORTLAND – Dozens of protesters attempted to occupy two downtown Portland parks Saturday night, but police told them staying overnight would result in jail time.
Occupy Portland demonstrators gathered on the paved areas in Lownsdale and Chapman Square Parks, where the grassy areas were still fenced off after the damage caused during similar protests last fall.
The protesters stayed past midnight, which is when the parks close. Soon afterward later Portland police officers showed up and asked them to leave.
Occupy the Farm Activists Reclaim Prime Urban Agricultural Land in SF Bay Area
(Albany, Calif.), April 22, 2012 – Occupy the Farm, a coalition of local residents, farmers, students, researchers, and activists are planting over 15,000 seedlings at the Gill Tract, the last remaining 10 acres of Class I agricultural soil in the urbanized East Bay area. The Gill Tract is public land administered by the University of California, which plans to sell it to private developers.
For decades the UC has thwarted attempts by community members to transform the site for urban sustainable agriculture and hands-on education. With deliberate disregard for public interest, the University administrators plan to pave over this prime agricultural soil for commercial retail space, a Whole Foods, and a parking lot.
Tainted evidence aside, did Ted Stevens do it?
Walsh has doubts that Stevens would have been acquitted even if Department of Justice prosecutors had turned over to the defense all the evidence that they should have.
“Most of the information they seem to have held back was about the witnesses, which we were already told as a jury not to rate as highly as the actual evidence, the physical evidence,” she said in a recent interview. “When we were discussing everything, we said, ‘Let’s look at the actual evidence we have.’ We had boxes full of paper evidence. That’s how we formed our decision.”
“We were going by the physical evidence: We see this bill. Was it paid? No,” Walsh said
Supreme Court to hear Arizona immigration case this week
WASHINGTON — Immigration politics will hit the Supreme Court this week as justices weigh how much border-control clout the states can deploy.
In their latest highly charged faceoff, the justices must decide whether Arizona went too far with a crackdown that includes ordering police to routinely check the legal residency status of people they stop. The court’s final answer this election year could ignite Capitol Hill, other states and, not least, Hispanic voters.
“This is a huge case, of great importance,” said Andrew I. Schoenholtz, a visiting professor of law at the Georgetown University Law Center.
Why the Euro Isn't Worth Saving
If you've been following the biggest economic debate the past half century, you might think this question is besides the point. Haven't we learned that monetary policy, not fiscal policy, is the best way to manage the economy -- with the possible exception of when short-term rates are at zero? We have. But the irony of Europe is that a defective currency union reverses this logic. When one central bank sets interest rates for different countries with different economic needs and different budgets, it's fiscal policy that matters most. There's no other way to stabilize the economy.
Welcome to life in a suboptimal currency area. After all, countries that share a currency also share monetary policy. If they don't share fiscal policy too -- that is, there is no centralized treasury -- they can get into trouble. Just ask Europe. But as Christian Odendahl at The Economist points out, this also means that each individual country's fiscal policy becomes a much, much more important economic tool than it would otherwise be. Let's think about why this is, and what it says about the future of the euro.
State crime and street crime: Two sides of one coin?
When society is this corrupt, are the poor entitled to rise up and take what is 'theirs'?
Cairo, Egypt - The revolutionary process that erupted in this country on January 25, 2011, is an uprising against crime. This crime was structural and legalised - made legal by the political leadership of Egypt and their friends and business partners that practice it.
Various criminal forces - the police, the secret police, the state security - exist in large part to protect these criminals' interests, with authority to enforce the ruling classes' "law" without judicial liability. These forces were the first line of defence of the ruling system and this is why, in the first days of revolution, the population targeted them and broke the chains of their control.
I will argue that unless these conditions that allowed for organised structural crime do not change, street-level crime will only increase. With the government structure lacking the basic measures to provide for the widest portion of the Egyptian public, it comes as no surprise that many of those whom the rulers exploit and neglect are taking back what they think is theirs.
Evening the Odds
Is there a politics of inequality?
The most striking change in American society in the past generation—roughly since Ronald Reagan was elected President—has been the increase in the inequality of income and wealth. Timothy Noah’s “The Great Divergence: America’s Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It” (Bloomsbury), a good general guide to the subject, tells us that in 1979 members of the much discussed “one per cent” got nine per cent of all personal income. Now they get a quarter of it. The gains have increased the farther up you go. The top tenth of one per cent get about ten per cent of income, and the top hundredth of one per cent about five per cent. While the Great Recession was felt most severely by those at the bottom, the recovery has hardly benefitted them. In 2010, ninety-three per cent of the year’s gains went to the top one per cent.
Since rich people are poorer in votes than they are in dollars, you’d think that, in an election year, the ninety-nine per cent would look to politics to get back some of what they’ve lost, and that inequality would be a big issue. So far, it hasn’t been. Occupy Wall Street and its companion movements briefly spurred President Obama to become more populist in his rhetoric, but there’s no sign that Occupy is going to turn into the kind of political force that the Tea Party movement has been. There was a period during the Republican primary campaign when Romney rivals like Newt Gingrich tried to take votes from the front-runner by bashing Wall Street and private equity, but that didn’t last long, either. Politics does feel sour and contentious in ways that seem to flow from the country’s economic distress. Yet much of the ambient discontent is directed toward government—the government that kept the recession from turning into a depression. Why isn’t politics about what you’d expect it to be about?
Scenes from Coachella
The Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival began the weekend of April 13-15 in Indio, Calif. Among the bands playing to crowds in the desert heat were Radiohead, The Black Keys, Arctic Monkeys, M83 and Pulp.
Freedom and Art
We do not learn language by reading a dictionary, and we do not think or speak in terms of dictionary definitions. Meaning is always more fluid. Nevertheless, we are hemmed in, even trapped, by common usage. Senses we wish to evade entrap us. The greatest escape route is not only humor, but poetry, or art in general. Art does not, of course, liberate us completely from meaning, but it gives a certain measure of freedom, provides elbow room. Schiller claimed in the Letters on Aesthetic Education that art makes you free; he understood that the conventions of language and of society are in principle arbitrary—that is, imposed by will. They prevent the natural development of the individual. The clash between the imposition of meaning and freedom has given rise to controversy in ways that Schiller could not have predicted.
'They're killing us': world's most endangered tribe cries for help
Logging companies keen to exploit Brazil's rainforest have been accused by human rights organisations of using gunmen to wipe out the Awá, a tribe of just 355. Survival International, with backing from Colin Firth, is campaigning to stop what a judge referred to as 'genocide'
Earth Day means nothing if We Don’t Limit Carbon Emissions
Given the magnitude of the challenges the earth now faces, provoked by man-made global climate change as a result of our spewing massive amounts of carbon dioxide and soot into the atmosphere, the problems that were on our minds in 1970 seem in retrospect miniscule. Moreover, the idea that individuals could resolve this problem by taking individual action is a non-starter. It is a collective and infrastructural problem and we have to band together and do something about it through the instrumentality of the government. Unfortunately, our government has mostly been bought by Big Oil, so that the crisis of the environment is also the crisis of American democracy.
I guess flexing his muscles against Libya did not have the intended effect for Sarkozy.
Sarkozy in need of miracle: UK press
The Guardian said Hollande was riding the "crest of a leftwing wave", but that Le Pen's "stunning" figures had dampened enthusiasm.
"The left's confidence that the presidency was, after 17 long years, finally within its grasp was tempered by the stunning success of Marine Le Pen," said the paper's editorial, under the headline "bittersweet victory for the left".
The paper said Sarkozy "needed a miracle" in the second round to keep his job as results proved that France "had had enough of its president".
"It was also about social justice, accountability for the banking crisis and the wish to see an alternative to a decade of austerity," it added.
Egypt reportedly cuts natural gas supply to Israel
Ampal, an Israeli partner in the East Mediterranean Gas (EMG) joint venture that operated the pipeline between the two countries, announced Sunday night that Egyptian suppliers notified EMG that they were terminating the gas supply. A spokesman for EMG could not be reached, and the company refused to confirm that it had it had ended its contract.
Israel’s Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz expressed “great worry” about reports of the Egyptian termination. His office added that the move set a “dangerous precedent that darkens the peace treaties and the atmosphere of peace between Israel and Egypt”. One Israeli official, speaking on condition of anonymity to McClatchy, said the move would be the “final bit that breaks the camel’s back” in the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt.
“The peace deal between us and Egypt has been on very shaky ground and now the final earthquake has happened. It appears the new Egyptian government is giving all the signals that it is no longer interested in the partnership and agreements it has established with Israel,” he said. The official, who has served in several diplomatic missions to Egypt, said, “Even though Israel and Egypt would like to keep peace on a military level, their governments may not let them … I’m not saying it will come to blows soon, but it is clear that Israel can no longer lean and rely on Egypt in a significant way.”
Iran 'building copy' of captured US drone
Tehran says experts have learned how to rebuild and extract data from the unmanned spy plane it captured in December.
[ ... ]
Media reports claimed this week that Russia and China have asked Tehran to provide them with information on the drone but Iran's defense ministry denied this.
General Amir Ali Hajizadeh, chief of the aerospace division of the powerful Revolutionary Guards, related on Sunday what he said were details of the aircraft's operational history to prove his claim that Tehran's military experts had extracted data from the US RQ-170 Sentinel captured in December in eastern Iran.
Among the drone's past missions, he said, was surveillance of the compound in northwest Pakistan in which Osama bin Laden lived and was killed.
Yes, MEMRI, there is a Fatwa from Khamenei forbidding Nukes
I’m told that MEMRI, which has its origins in Israeli military intelligence, has put out a statement doubting that Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei ever issued a fatwa forbidding nuclear weapons. (MEMRI claims to be a 501(c)3 non-profit but is actually an effort to cherry-pick Middle Eastern news to present the most negative face of the Arab world to Americans so as to prejudice them in favor of Israel; in this case it is just doing propaganda).
A Reddit.com contributor has effectively answered this piece of disinformation. This posting points out that the official IRNA news agency said in 2005,
“The Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has issued the Fatwa that the production, stockpiling and use of nuclear weapons are forbidden under Islam and that the Islamic Republic of Iran shall never acquire these weapons.”
Sudan launches major attack on South Sudan
BENTIU, South Sudan — Sudanese forces launched a major attack along the border with South Sudan after the South Sudanese army withdrew from a disputed oil field on Friday, signaling that the recent border war between the two countries is not yet over and might be entering a new phase.
Game of cat and mouse in Iraq
The official spokesman of Iraqi Kurdistan's Ministry of Peshmerga (Kurdish armed forces), Jabbar Yawar, was more forthright: "In spite of all outstanding differences between Kurdistan and the federal government, we will not use force to solve problems. However, we are ready to cut off the hands of anyone who attacks our territory, even if it is the Iraqi army."
With such near war-mongering postures tensions have remained high between Iraqi Kurds and Al Maliki, a Shiite. The two biggest bones of contention remain the distribution of the nation's oil wealth and the festering bad blood over the Kurdish decision to give shelter to the fugitive Iraqi Vice-President Tareq Al Hashemi, a Sunni, accused of running a death squad. He initially went to Kurdistan after fleeing his own government's base, Baghdad, in December.
India’s Mahindra Plans Unmanned Sea Surveillance Vessels
Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd. (MM), India’s biggest sport-utility vehicle maker, plans to build unmanned coastal surveillance vessels as the nation boosts security along its coastline following the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attack.
The company’s newly formed joint venture with Israel’s Rafael Advanced Defense Systems Ltd. will assemble the vessel at a facility in Pune, western India, “in a phased manner” after initially importing models from its partner, K.A. Hai, chief executive officer of Mahindra’s defense unit, said in an e-mail reply to Bloomberg questions. He didn’t give a timeframe.
“Unmanned patrol vessels will be needed in large numbers to protect from infiltration by terrorists, protect our offshore assets and patrol vital coastal assets such as nuclear plants,” Hai said April 18.