Welcome! "The Evening Blues" is a casual community diary (published Monday - Friday, 8:00 PM Eastern) where we hang out, share and talk about news, music, photography and other things of interest to the community.
Just about anything goes, but attacks and pie fights are not welcome here. This is a community diary and a friendly, peaceful, supportive place for people to interact.
Everyone who wants to join in peaceful interaction is very welcome here.
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Hey! Good Evening!
This evening's music features the recently departed J.J. Cale, a musician who wove elements of blues, country, rockabilly and rock and roll together into his own unique style. With the exception of the top video all of the music selections and commentary are the contribution of tonight's guest deejay, Keith930. Enjoy! And thanks, Keith!
JJ Cale, Eric Clapton - After Midnight & Call me the Breeze
“Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.”
-- Adam Smith
News and Opinion
Revealed: NSA program collects 'nearly everything a user does on the internet'
• XKeyscore gives 'widest-reaching' collection of online data
• NSA analysts require no prior authorization for searches
• Sweeps up emails, social media activity and browsing history
A top secret National Security Agency program allows analysts to search with no prior authorization through vast databases containing emails, online chats and the browsing histories of millions of individuals, according to documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden.
The NSA boasts in training materials that the program, called XKeyscore, is its "widest reaching" system for developing intelligence from the internet. ...
The purpose of XKeyscore is to allow analysts to search the metadata as well as the content of emails and other internet activity, such as browser history, even when there is no known email account (a "selector" in NSA parlance) associated with the individual being targeted.
Analysts can also search by name, telephone number, IP address, keywords, the language in which the internet activity was conducted or the type of browser used.
More semaphore and wild gesticulations from Ron Wyden, who is gagged by law and custom:
Wyden: Intel violations more ‘troubling’ than government is letting on
Sen. Ron Wyden said Tuesday that U.S. intelligence agencies’ violations of court orders on surveillance of Americans is worse than the government is letting on.
Wyden (D-Ore.), as a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, is privy to classified briefings on the government’s surveillance. On Tuesday, he told Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC that all he could say is that the violations are worse than being made public.
“We had a big development last Friday when Gen. [James] Clapper, the head of the intelligence agencies, admitted that the community had violated these court orders on phone record collection, and I’ll tell your viewers that those violations are significantly more troubling than the government has stated,” Wyden said.
NSA Lies and Distortions Unravel in Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing
The bipartisan leaders of a powerful Senate committee questioned the truthfulness of the US intelligence community in a heated Wednesday morning hearing as officials conceded that their controversial bulk phone records collection of millions of Americans was not "the most important tool" – contradicting statements they previously gave to Congress. ...
Just before the hearing began, the US director of national intelligence declassified and released documents shedding more light on how the bulk surveillance occurs. Senator Al Franken, a Minnesota Democrat, denounced the move as "ad hoc transparency."
Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat and chairman of the Senate judiciary committee, said: "We need straightforward answers, and I'm concerned we're not getting them."
Leahy, joined by ranking Republican Chuck Grassley of Iowa, criticised director of national intelligence James Clapper for making untruthful statements to Congress in March about the bulk phone records collection on Americans, and NSA director Keith Alexander for overstating the usefulness of that collection for stopping terrorist attacks. ...
Leahy pressed the intelligence and law enforcement officials to detail how many terrorist plots the bulk phone records collection on millions of Americans, first disclosed by the Guardian thanks to whistleblower Edward Snowden, had disrupted. "That's a very difficult question to answer," Inglis testified. "That's not how these programs work."
Yet two of the three documents declassified by Clapper on Wednesday claim the phone records database was critical to stopping terrorist attacks. The documents, four-page summaries of the bulk collection programmes provided to Congress in 2009 and 2011 before key votes on surveillance laws, state that the bulk phone records collection and a separate internet communications collection effort "significantly strengthen the intelligence community's early warning system for the detection of terrorists and discovery of plots against the homeland."
Franken will 'force government' to reveal how many Americans had data collected
Democratic senator Al Franken will submit a bill on Thursday to address the “critical lack of transparency” around NSA surveillance programmes, reports the Guardian's Washington correspondent Paul Lewis from inside the hearing.
Franken said the bill has the support of Democratic senator Patrick Leahy, the chair of the influential judiciary committee.
“Tomorrow I am submitting a bill that would force the government to disclose how many Americans have had their information collected under key authorities under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act,” Franken said.
The proposed legislation would also “force the government” to disclose how many people have had their information “actually reviewed by federal agents” and allow private companies to released “aggregate figures” for the number of FISA court orders they are receiving, and the number of their users affected.
“The American public has no idea if we are getting the balance right,” he said “I think that is bad for democracy.”
Did US Help New Zealand Spy on War Crimes Reporter?
McClatchy newspapers wants to know if NSA turned its "metadata" collection capabilities on investigative journalist looking into torture in Afghanistan
Did the US government or one of its intelligence agencies assist New Zealand in tracking and secretly monitoring a journalist trying to uncover the possibility of war crimes by US and New Zealand military personnel that took place in Afghanistan? ...
In a sharply worded letter to the NSA director James Clapper on Tuesday, executives and lawyers with the US-based news agency asked about the veracity of a report that appeared in the Sunday Star Times of Auckland earlier this week which said journalist Jon Stephenson, who worked for McClatchy in Afghanistan, had been the target of US surveillance. ...
Stephenson subsequently explained to McClatchy that he believes any tracking by intelligence agencies stemmed from investigative stories he’d written mostly between 2009 and 2011 about New Zealand special forces in 2002 turning over to U.S. troops and Afghan security personnel 55 “ghost detainees” who were “harmed and tortured.”
The prisoners were called "ghost detainees" because no records of their names or identities were kept.
Oakland prepares to build and turn the panopticon on its citizens:
Oakland OK's Homeland Security Surveillance Center Tools of Creeping Fascism
The Oakland City Council voted unanimously early Wednesday to move ahead with a controversial surveillance center that could eventually allow police and city officials to continuously monitor video cameras, gunshot detectors and license plate readers. ...
The decision to accept a $2.2 million federal grant to help pay for the surveillance center infuriated protesters who crowded into the council's chambers for an hours-long meeting. Chants of "Shame! Shame! Shame!" rattled the chambers for nearly two minutes after the vote.
At issue was the Domain Awareness Center, a proposed city and port surveillance center that would link dozens of traffic and surveillance cameras with police and fire dispatch systems, Twitter feeds, crime maps, gunshot-detecting microphones and alarm programs.
Manning Verdict: Slow Death for Democracy
Recently, Eric Holder had to promise Russia that if Edward Snowden is returned to the United States, he will not face execution or torture. Snowden’s fear is well-founded, not just because of Abu Ghraib, but because of Bradley Manning, who suffered months of torture, defended by Obama. There was a time in the not too distant past when the treatment Manning suffered through would have led to dismissal of the charges against him and condemnation of the prosecution by the courts and media. Now, it appears, the United States no longer has any shame and is more than willing to sacrifice what it proclaims to be our fundamental principles at the altar of security. ...
There are two ways in which any government can seek to control security leaks. The first is by honesty and transparency, by allowing the public to know enough to make democratic decisions about how far is too far. That is the path that the United States, and this president, claims to follow. The second is by threatening draconian consequences to anyone who exposes questionable policies and practices to the light of day. That is the path the United States, and this administration, has chosen with the prosecution of Bradley Manning and others. No amount of sophistry can hide that truth, try as the administration might. The result, for Bradley Manning, is many years in prison. The result for democracy is a slow death.
"Bradley Manning Has Become a Martyr" – WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange on Guilty Verdict
The Bradley Manning verdict is still bad news for the press
The American journalism trade is breathing a collective – but premature and, in many cases, grossly hypocritical – sigh of relief today. A military judge has found Bradley Manning guilty of many crimes, but "aiding the enemy" isn't one of them.
Had the judge found Manning guilty of aiding the enemy, she would have set a terrible precedent. For the first time, an American court – albeit a military court – would have said it was a potentially capital crime simply to give information to a news organization, because in the internet era an enemy would ultimately have been able to read what was leaked. ...
The Manning verdict had plenty of bad news for the press. By finding Manning guilty of five counts of espionage, the judge endorsed the government's other radical theories, and left the journalism organization that initially passed along the leaks to the public, Wikileaks, no less vulnerable than it had been before the case started. ... The public needs to awaken to the threat to its own freedoms from the Obama crackdown on leaks and, by extension, journalism and free speech itself. We are, more and more, a society where unaccountable people can commit unspeakable acts with impunity. They are creating a surveillance state that makes not just dissent, but knowledge itself, more and more dangerous. What we know about this is entirely due to leakers and their outlets. Ignorance is only bliss for the unaccountable.
Glenn Greenwald Destroys CNN's Jeff Toobin Over Bradley Manning and Snowden
Snowden's father says FBI asked him to fly to Moscow
The father of the whistleblower Edward Snowden has said the FBI tried to persuade him to fly to Moscow so that he could encourage his son to return to the United States.
"I said: 'I want to be able to speak with my son … Can you set up communications?' and it was 'Well, we are not sure,'" Lon Snowden told the Washington Post. "I said: 'Wait a minute, folks, I'm not going to sit on the tarmac to be an emotional tool for you.'" ...
"If he comes back to the United States, he is going to be treated horribly. He is going to be thrown into a hole. He is not going to be allowed to speak." The 52-year-old said he had been as "surprised as the rest of America" when his son, who worked for a contractor, was revealed as the source of the leaks about surveillance by the National Security Agency to the Guardian. "As a father it pains me what he did," Snowden said. "I wish my son could simply have sat in Hawaii and taken the big paycheck, lived with his beautiful girlfriend and enjoyed paradise. But as an American citizen, I am absolutely thankful for what he did."
MIT has released its long-awaited
report about its handling of the Aaron Swartz prosecution. Larry Lessig has an interesting comment
here. Also, see the blog posts of interest section for more material that excerpting would fail to do justice to.
Shockingly, MIT Report Says MIT Isn’t Responsible for Aaron Swartz’s Prosecution and Suicide
MIT President L. Rafael Reif convened an independent panel to examine the university’s role in the sequence of events that may have led to Swartz’s death. The three-member panel was chaired by Hal Abelson, an MIT professor who sits on the boards of Creative Commons and the Free Software Foundation, and a man favorably disposed toward many of the concepts Swartz believed in.
Last week, the panel submitted its final report. It is not the scathing indictment that many were hoping to see—Swartz’s girlfriend, Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, has called the report a “whitewash.” I don’t think it’s a whitewash. The report is comprehensive, and I don't get the sense that anything has been elided to make the school look better.
That said, I don’t agree with the report’s overall sentiment. While it does not entirely exonerate MIT, it ultimately accepts the university’s decision to remain neutral on the matter of Swartz’s prosecution. I think that MIT could have fulfilled its institutional priorities—among them “respecting its contractual agreements with licensors” and “maintaining the integrity of its network”—while still signaling that a felony prosecution in the Swartz case was inappropriate. By acting as Switzerland, MIT didn’t do itself, Aaron Swartz, or anyone else any favors.
Aaron Swartz’s Father Blasts MIT Report, Says School Wasn’t Neutral
MIT has come under intense criticism for its handling of the Swartz affair. Two days after Swartz’s death, MIT president L. Rafael Reif asked Hal Abelson, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, to conduct an investigation into MIT’s actions leading up to Swartz’s suicide. Abelson’s 182-page report, which was released Tuesday, asserts that MIT remained neutral throughout the Swartz investigation, and did not publicly advocate on Swartz’s behalf because to do so “might make circumstances worse” for Swartz.
In an interview with TIME, Robert Swartz, Aaron’s father, praised Abelson for assembling the facts, but said that a clear reading of those facts shows that MIT was not neutral in Aaron’s case. “The report is a contradiction because it says that MIT was neutral, and yet it makes very clear that MIT was actually not neutral,” Robert Swartz said. “MIT called in the police and then violated the law by providing the government with information and material from Aaron’s computer without a court order. Then they lied to me about those facts.” ...
The Abelson report notes, however, that “MIT did not say it was actually opposed to jail time,” nor did the university ask the government to drop the prosecution. “MIT wasn’t neutral,” said Robert Swartz. “They cooperated with the government and worked very closely with the prosecutor in the case. In an interview with TIME in May, he said: “It’s everyone’s responsibility to fight the government when the government is doing something unjust. MIT failed.” ...
“One of the great failures on MIT’s part was a failure of compassion,” Robert Swartz told TIME. “Aaron was dealing with a cruel and vindictive prosecutor, and MIT should have put a stop to it. MIT had a moral obligation to advocate on Aaron’s behalf. MIT’s hyper-legal defense of its actions shows that MIT still doesn’t have compassion for how it destroyed Aaron’s life, and the effect that had on Aaron’s family.”
Aaron Swartz' partner, Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman releases statement on MIT report
"MIT’s behavior throughout the case was reprehensible, and this report is quite frankly a whitewash.
Here are the facts: This report claims that MIT was “neutral” — but MIT’s lawyers gave prosecutors total access to witnesses and evidence, while refusing access to Aaron’s lawyers to the exact same witnesses and evidence. That’s not neutral. The fact is that all MIT had to do was say publicly, “We don’t want this prosecution to go forward” – and Steve Heymann and Carmen Ortiz would have had no case. We have an institution to contrast MIT with – JSTOR, who came out immediately and publicly against the prosecution. Aaron would be alive today if MIT had acted as JSTOR did. MIT had a moral imperative to do so.
And even now, MIT is still stonewalling. Wired reporter Kevin Poulsen FOIA’d the Secret Service’s files on Aaron’s case, and judge ordered them to be released. The only reason they haven’t been is because MIT has filed an objection. If MIT is at all serious about implementing any reforms to stop this kind of tragedy from happening again, it must stop objecting to the release of information about the case."
More Obama Big Lies: Touting Sweatshop Amazon Warehouse Jobs as “Middle Class”
Obama needed a visual to show that, no, really, truly, jobs really are being created somewhere in America for yet another one of his exercises in trying to pretend that he’s on the side of ordinary Americans. But it’s hard finding any really good success stories in an economy with 12.2 million counted as unemployed and over 28 million as “disemployed” which is the number of people out of work relative to normal labor force participation rates when the economy is in good shape. So Obama chose as his backdrop an American success story, Amazon, which is opening a new a warehouse in Chattanooga and hiring 7,000 people.
But Obama in trying to tout this as a success story revealed either that he’s completely out of touch or that he’s conditioning American to regard a state of peonage as middle class. Not all that long ago, “middle class” meant you could after a few years of work and savings, buy a house in the suburbs, afford to have children and have a reasonably comfortable family life, and send those kids to college. “Middle class” also generally meant college educated, white collar employment plus the higher-skilled, better paid blue collar jobs. ...
The message from Obama is clear: Americans are now expected to celebrate when companies are willing to pay at or not much above a living wage. As long as you pay enough that the workers don’t wind up having to seek public assistance in the form of food stamps or emergency rooms for medical care, you’ll now be promoted as creating better conditions for Americans. That’s true as long as you remember that the Americans that benefit from this grinding down of ordinary citizens are Obama’s backers and other members of the elite.
Incredible! Apparently you can win prestigious awards for your service in scrubbing the horrendous human rights legacy of the US from the public mind. Way to go, Ira Glass! More often than ever these days, George Orwell's words come to mind, “He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.”
National Propaganda Radio (NPR) Whitewashes US Role in Guatemalan Atrocities
National Public Radio’s This American Life received the industry’s oldest and perhaps most prestigious accolade. The 16-member Peabody Board, consisting of “television critics, industry practitioners and experts in culture and the arts,” had selected a particular This American Life episode—“What Happened at Dos Erres”—as one of the winners of its 72nd annual awards on the basis of “only one criterion: excellence.” ...
But in his hour-long treatment of a savage period of Guatemalan history, Glass and his producers edited out essential lines of inquiry and concealed a key aspect of the bloodshed and its import for U.S. listeners: Washington’s continuous support of Guatemalan security forces—including the Kaibiles at Dos Erres—as they killed tens of thousands of largely indigenous civilians in 1982 alone. Moreover, by distorting the historical record, Glass performed an impressive feat of propaganda—he sensitively related Guatemalan victims’ harrowing personal stories while implying that the only fault of the United States was that it had simply not done enough to help them. ...
During his brief 17-month rule from 1982-83, Guatemalan military dictator Efraín Rios Montt escalated to its grim apogee the state terror regularly employed during a decades-long attack on leftist insurgents, suspected sympathizers, and Mayan communities. This American Life correctly described the directives of the Army High Command’s scorched-earth campaign, in which soldiers burned farmland and homes, slaughtered animals, raped and mutilated women and children, and exterminated entire communities like the hamlet of Dos Erres. Glass concluded that state-led massacres “happened in over 600 villages” and added that an overall accounting of the larger conflict by “a truth commission found that the number of Guatemalans killed or disappeared by their own government was over 180,000.”
Glass did not mention, however, that the very same UN-sponsored truth commission also concluded in its 1999 report that the “government of the United States, through various agencies including the CIA, provided direct and indirect support for some state operations” involved in atrocities like Dos Erres. (Both The Washington Post and PBS reported this particular finding at the time.)
The Evening Greens
Mississippi, Alabama Ask Canada for Tar Sands Advice
The governors of Mississippi and Alabama have forged an agreement to explore the development of tar sands mining within their states, revealing their desire to follow Alberta, Canada's example as they hope to bring exploitation of the "dirtiest fuel" on the planet to the US south.
Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant and Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley announced Saturday the signing of a "memorandum of understanding" to commission the assessment of tar sands resources in an area known as the Hartselle Sandstone, which stretches from north-central and northwest Alabama into northeastern Mississippi.
Studies of the region estimate 7.5 billion barrels of oil are located in the reserves.
The governors say they will be looking to Canada for guidance on "best practices" regarding tar sands extraction, despite the legacy of toxic wastewater lakes and massive mining scars left behind in Alberta's Athabasca River region.
Halliburton Admits Guilt in Gulf Oil Spill Case, But Why is This Good News for BP?
The Mystery of Bee Colony Collapse
What's tipping honeybee populations into huge annual die-offs? For years, a growing body of evidence has pointed to a group of insecticides called neonicotinoids, widely used on corn, soy, and other US crops, as a possible cause of what has become known as colony collapse disorder (CCD). ...
But according to a new peer-reviewed paper, neonicotinoids aren't the only pesticides that might be undermining bee health. The study, published in PLOS One and co-authored by a team including US Department of Agriculture bee scientist Jeff Pettis and University of Maryland entomologist Dennis vanEngelsdorp, found that a pair of widely used fungicides are showing up prominently in bee pollen—and appear to be making bees significantly more likely to succumb to a fungal pathogen, called Nosema ceranae, that has been closely linked to CCD. The finding is notable, the authors state, because fungicides have so far been "typically seen as fairly safe for honey bees." ...
Overall, study co-author vanEngelsdorp told me in a phone interview, bees fed with fungicide-laced pollen were "two times more likely to come down with an infection" than control bees. One particular fungicide, pyraclostrobin, was found to make bees three times as susceptible to Nosema.
Interestingly, the other set of chemicals that had a similar effect were miticides—chemicals applied to hives by beekeepers in an attempt to control yet another threat, the Varroa mite. In waging chemical warfare on behalf of bees to control mites, beekeepers appear to be unwittingly helping another menace, Nosema, gain a foothold.
Blog Posts of Interest
Here are diaries and selected blog posts of interest on DailyKos and other blogs.
What's Happenin'
The four lamest excuses in MIT’s report on Aaron Swartz
Read this. Just do it:
Bombshell: Plutocrats Brazenly Collude to Hurt State Economies and Screw Working People
Manning verdict, 4 big issues remain untouched
Hannah Arendt and Dirty Wars: The Banality of Evil
Palm Center awarded $1.35 million grant to study transgender military service
A Little Night Music
I found a pretty amazing 80 minute set recorded live at Leon Russell's Paradise Studio, with Leon playing along. It's sweet stuff, and showcases Cale's guitar playing as best as anything else I've found. So the set is complete.
I will try and cut and paste what I've put together and send it to you below...but let me know if the links don't come through, and we'll try another avenue.
From the first JJ Cale album I ever bought...perhaps the perfect song to showcase his laid back vocal style and tasteful picking:
J.J. Cale - Crazy Mama
This is one of favorite Cale tunes...another laconic rocker that always made me grin while listening to it:
JJ Cale - Bringing it Back
JJ Cale - Travelling Light
This is hypnotically good...I can't tell you how many times I grooved to this song while smoking a J late at night.
J.J. Cale - Ride me high
Very mellow...very JJ Cale:
J.J. Cale - Magnolia
Now, settle back and enjoy a live recording, 80 minutes, with JJ Cale and Leon Russell at Leon's LA recording studio, Paradise:
It's National Pie Day!
The election is over, it's a new year and it's time to work on real change in new ways... and it's National Pie Day. This seemed like the perfect opportunity to tell you a little more about our new site and to start getting people signed up.
Come on over and sign up so that we can send you announcements about the site, the launch, and information about participating in our public beta testing.
Why is National Pie Day the perfect opportunity to tell you more about us? Well you'll see why very soon. So what are you waiting for?! Head on over now and be one of the first!
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