AdamSmith

Etc.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=hpwP-lT2Dac

P.S. Very final scene of the TV series ... in Parallel Time 1841 so nobody is who they should be, but this is DS after all ... http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=G0ENpD9B_gQ

About the Reuters articleThe latest effort to distract attention from the NSA revelations is more absurd than most Glenn Greenwald guardian.co.uk, Saturday 13 July 2013 15.53 EDT (updated below - Update II) When you give many interviews in different countries and say essentially the same thing over and over, as I do, media outlets often attempt to re-package what you've said to make their interview seem new and newsworthy, even when it isn't. Such is the case with this Reuters article today, that purports to summarize an interview I gave to the daily newspaper La Nacion of Argentina. Like everything in the matter of these NSA leaks, this interview is being wildly distorted to attract attention away from the revelations themselves. It's particularly being seized on to attack Edward Snowden and, secondarily, me, for supposedly "blackmailing" and "threatening" the US government. That is just absurd. That Snowden has created some sort of "dead man's switch" - whereby documents get released in the event that he is killed by the US government - was previously reported weeks ago, and Snowden himself has strongly implied much the same thing. That doesn't mean he thinks the US government is attempting to kill him - he doesn't - just that he's taken precautions against all eventualities, including that one (just incidentally, the notion that a government that has spent the last decade invading, bombing, torturing, rendering, kidnapping, imprisoning without charges, droning, partnering with the worst dictators and murderers, and targeting its own citizens for assassination would be above such conduct is charmingly quaint). I made three points in this La Nacion interview, all of which are true and none of which has anything remotely to do with threats: 1) The oft-repeated claim that Snowden's intent is to harm the US is completely negated by the reality that he has all sorts of documents that could quickly and seriously harm the US if disclosed, yet he has published none of those. When he gave us the documents he provided, he repeatedly insisted that we exercise rigorous journalistic judgment in deciding which documents should be published in the public interest and which ones should be concealed on the ground that the harm of publication outweighs the public value. If his intent were to harm the US, he could have sold all the documents he had for a great deal of money, or indiscriminately published them, or passed them to a foreign adversary. He did none of that. He carefully vetted every document he gave us, and then on top of that, asked that we only publish those which ought to be disclosed and would not cause gratuitous harm: the same analytical judgment that all media outlets and whistleblowers make all the time. The overwhelming majority of his disclosures were to blow the whistle on US government deceit and radical, hidden domestic surveillance. My point in this interview was clear, one I've repeated over and over: had he wanted to harm the US government, he easily could have, but hasn't, as evidenced by the fact that - as I said - he has all sorts of documents that could inflict serious harm to the US government's programs. That demonstrates how irrational is the claim that his intent is to harm the US. His intent is to shine a light on these programs so they can be democratically debated. That's why none of the disclosures we've published can be remotely described as harming US national security: all they've harmed are the reputation and credibility of US officials who did these things and then lied about them. 2) The US government has acted with wild irrationality. The current criticism of Snowden is that he's in Russia. But the reason he's in Russia isn't that he chose to be there. It's because the US blocked him from leaving: first by revoking his passport (with no due process or trial), then by pressuring its allies to deny airspace rights to any plane they thought might be carrying him to asylum (even one carrying the democratically elected president of a sovereign state), then by bullying small countries out of letting him land for re-fueling. Given the extraordinary amount of documents he has and their sensitivity, I pointed out in the interview that it is incredibly foolish for the US government to force him to remain in Russia. From the perspective of the US government and the purported concerns about him being in Russia, that makes zero sense given the documents he has. 3) I was asked whether I thought the US government would take physical action against him if he tried to go to Latin America or even force his plane down. That's when I said that doing so would be completely counter-productive given that - as has been reported before - such an attack could easily result in far more disclosures than allowing us as journalists to vet and responsibly report them, as we've doing. As a result of the documents he has, I said in the interview, the US government should be praying for his safety, not threatening or harming it. That has nothing to do with me: I don't have access to those "insurance" documents and have no role in whatever dead man switch he's arranged. I'm reporting what documents he says he has and what precautions he says he has taken to protect himself from what he perceives to be the threat to his well-being. That's not a threat. Those are facts. I'm sorry if some people find them to be unpleasant. But they're still facts. Before Snowden's identity was revealed as the whistleblower here, I wrote: "Ever since the Nixon administration broke into the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychoanalyst's office, the tactic of the US government has been to attack and demonize whistleblowers as a means of distracting attention from their own exposed wrongdoing and destroying the credibility of the messenger so that everyone tunes out the message. That attempt will undoubtedly be made here." That's what all of this is. And it's all it is: an ongoing effort to distract attention away from the substance of the revelations. (This morning, MSNBC show host Melissa Harris-Parry blamed Snowden for the fact that there is so much media attention on him and so little on the NSA revelations: as though she doesn't have a twice-weekly TV show where she's free to focus as much as she wants on the NSA revelations she claims to find so important). Compare the attention paid to Snowden's asylum drama and alleged personality traits to the attention paid to the disclosures about mass, indiscriminate NSA spying. Or compare the media calls that Snowden (and others who worked to expose mass NSA surveillance) be treated like a criminal to the virtually non-existent calls that Director of National Intelligence James Clapper be treated like a criminal for lying to Congress. This "threat" fiction is just today's concoction to focus on anything but the revelations about US government lying to Congress and constitutionally and legally dubious NSA spying. Yesterday, it was something else, and tomorrow it will be something else again. As I said in an interview with Falguni Sheth published today by Salon, this only happens in the US: everywhere else, the media attention and political focus is on NSA surveillance, while US media figures are singularly obsessed with focusing on everything but that. There are all sorts of ways that Snowden could have chosen to make these documents be public. He chose the most responsible way possible: coming to media outlets and journalists he trusted and asking that they be reported on responsibly. The effort to depict him as some sort of malicious traitor is completely negated by the facts. That was the point of the interview. If you're looking for people who have actually harmed the US with criminal behavior, look here and here and here - not to those who took risks to blow the whistle on all of that. As always, none of this will detain us even for a moment in continuing to report on the many NSA stories that remain. UPDATEThe original La Nacion interview which Reuters claimed to summarize is now online; the rough English translation is here. Here's the context for my quote about what documents he possesses: "Q: Beyond the revelations about the spying system performance in general, what extra information has Snowden? "A: Snowden has enough information to cause more damage to the US government in a minute alone than anyone else has ever had in the history of the United States. But that's not his goal. [His] objective is to expose software that people around the world use without knowing what they are exposing themselves without consciously agreeing to surrender their rights to privacy. [He] has a huge number of documents that would be very harmful to the US government if they were made public." And exactly as I said, the answer about the dead man's switch came in response to my being asked: "Are you afraid that someone will try to kill him?" That's when I explained that I thought it was so unlikely because his claimed dead man's switch meant that it would produce more harm than good from the perspective of the US government. The only people who would claim any of this was a "threat" or "blackmail" are people with serious problems of reading comprehension or honesty, or both. UPDATE IIFor those who say that they wish there was more attention paid to the substance of the NSA stories than Snowden: here is the list of the NSA revelations we've published over the last month. Feel free to focus on them any time. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jul/13/reuters-article-dead-man-s-switch

Without envisioning the possibility of having more than one wink one will merely observe that you sometimes decline to use powers that you have.

A break from the generally grim news of the world today... CASTING SHADOWS: A DOCUMENTARY PRODUCED BY A PBS AFFILIATE AS AN INTRODUCTION TO THE 1987 RE-BROADCAST EPISODES

Even if we use contraception?!

Thank God for the many uses of silicone!

Must be menopause. Should be all honey again in a year or so.

Yeah -- "Attention all ancient relics, take cover now!"

Hah! Trust those Edwardians to hide a hetero dirty joke inside a homo one, instead of the other way around. And we think we're oh so liberal and sophisto.

Wand Erection

I love his piece.

P.S. This is what I was envisioning 'tool guy' would mean...

Aha! I knew I had left a key trigger-word out of the hito drinking game. I know what the corresponding spirit should be, but it would be too much of a giveaway.

Today's random history excursus... Lloyd George Knew My Father is a 20th Century English schoolboy folk song. The simple lyrics consist of the phrase "Lloyd George knew my father / Father knew Lloyd George"[1][2] sung to the tune of Onward, Christian Soldiers.[3] The two-line lyric is repeated incessantly, typically by groups of schoolboys on a bus or similar setting,[3] until boredom sets in.[4] The origin of the song is not known[5] but there are several theories, one that it began as a music hall song making an oblique reference to Lloyd George's supposed womanizing proclivities[5][6] (with the right timing and intonation and a well-placed wink, "father" could be taken to actually mean "mother"). The Oxford Dictionary of Political Quotations attributes the song to Tommy Rhys Roberts QC, the son of a former law partner of Lloyd George.[5] According to David Owen, it was a World War I marching song.[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lloyd_George_Knew_My_Father_%28song%29 Lloyd George knew my father....but what's the origin of the famous song?January 31, 2009 2:16 PM David Lloyd George...with the fathers of some of the people who knew him Everyone has sung the lines "Lloyd George knew my, father knew Lloyd George" to the tune of Onward Christian Soldiers. It's a school bus, camp fire, Glee Club favourite. But a recent enquiry to the Liberal Democrat History Group queried the origins of the song and the Society wondered if readers could help with a definitive answer. There are a number of ideas. A likely explanation is that it was a 20th century music hall creation which celebrated the womanising of LG (the Goat). Lloyd George knew my mother was of course more appropriate but that would surely have offended the period's sensibilities too much. "Lloyd George WAS my father, father WAS Lloyd George" might have been truer still but it's even more explicit. Another theory relates to the the scandal about the sale of honours. That comes explicitly from the William Douglas Home play of the same name and the title of the chapter in Matthew Paris' book "Great Parliamentary Scandals" (although they both seem ta have borrowed their own titles from the song). One historian of Wales, Geraint Jenkins, in his book "A Concise History of Wales" published in 2007 does attribute a connection to honours along with LG's presidential style and his amorality. Garrard and Newell also associate the ditty with the honours scandal in their 2006 book, "Scandals in Past and Contemporary Politics", so it is quite possible there was at least a portion of the origin attributable to the honours affair. Another reference, in the "Oxford Book of Political Quotations" mentions that the song title was invented by Tommy Rhys Roberts QC, the son of Arthur Rhys Roberts the solicitor with whom LG set up practice in London in 1897. Tommy Roberts was apparently born in 1910, so by the time he was old enough to coin the lyric and popularise the song it would be a lot later than the great music hall era. The reference in A J P Taylor's "English History, 1914-1945" seems to place the phrase at an earlier position in the LG time line, during the First World War (i.e. before the honours scandal really blew up). In his memoirs "Time to Declare" Dr David Owen one of the founders of the SDP, says it was a First World War marching song. So does anyone know for sure; or have different theories? If you think you do, please let the Society know. Use one of the email addresses on our Contacts page. http://lloydgeorgesociety.org.uk/en/article/2009/130391/lloyd-george-knew-my-father-but-what-s-the-origin-of-the-famous-song

Tiny Utah-based ISP makes a name for itself by rebuffing government snoopsMeet Xmission, the internet service provider embracing transparency as it shields customers from warrantless authorities Rory Carroll in Salt Lake City guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 9 July 2013 11.49 EDT The new NSA data centre is not far from Pete Ashdown's privacy-centric internet service provider. The irony is not lost on him. Photograph: Rick Bowmer/AP Silicon Valley's role in US government surveillance has triggered public anxiety about the internet, but it turns out there is at least one tech company you can trust with your data. The only problem: it's a relative minnow in the field, operating from offices in Utah. Xmission, Utah's first independent and oldest internet service provider, has spent the past 15 years resolutely shielding customers' privacy from government snoops in a way that larger rivals appear to have not. The company, a comparative midget with just 30,000 subscribers, cited the Fourth Amendment in rebuffing warrantless requests from local, state and federal authorities, showing it was possible to resist official pressure. "I would tell them I didn't need to respond if they didn't have a warrant, that (to do so) wouldn't be constitutional," the founder and chief executive, Pete Ashdown, said in an interview at his Salt Lake City headquarters. Since 1998 he rejected dozens of law enforcement requests, including Department of Justice subpoenas, on the grounds they violated the US constitution and state law. "I would tell them, please send us a warrant, and then they'd just drop it." Ashdown, 46, assented just once, on his lawyer's advice, to a 2010 FBI request backed by a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. "I believe under the fourth amendment digital data is protected. I'm not an unpaid branch of government or law enforcement." Ashdown was wary about Silicon Valley's carefully worded insistence that the government had no direct access to servers. Access to networks, not servers, was the key, he said. Pete Ashdown has rejected dozens of law enforcement requests, citing user privacy laws. The state attorney general alleged XMission was soft on crime but the company, with a staff of 45 and turnover of $7m, suffered no official retaliation, said Ashdown. "I didn't feel that I was in danger, or that my business suffered." In the wake of revelations over National Security Agency surveillance and ties to Silicon Valley he has published a report detailing official information requests, and the company's response, over the past three years. The Electronic Freedom Foundation called it a model for the industry. "XMission's transparency report is one of the most transparent we've seen," said Nate Cardozo, a lawyer for the San Francisco-based advocacy group. EFF has lobbied big service providers – in vain – to publish individual government requests and their responses to the requests. Google and other giants would need a different format for scale but could emulate the Utah minnow's spirit, said Cardozo. "The major service providers should demonstrate their commitment to their users and take XMission's transparency report as a model." EFF's most recent Who Has Your Back report – an annual ranking of privacy protection by big tech companies – gave Twitter the maximum of six stars and just one each to Apple and Yahoo. Utah is an unlikely home for an internet privacy champion. The state's conservative politicians cheered the Bush-era Patriot Act and welcomed the NSA's new 1m sq ft data centre at Bluffdale, outside Salt Lake City. Ashdown, who toured the facility with a group of local data centre operators, said he had not received NSA information requests but saw irony in it siting its data behemoth in his backyard. The agency's online snooping betrayed public trust, he said. "Post 9/11 paranoia has turned this into a surveillance state. It's not healthy." The only solution to internet snooping was encryption, he said, a point he repeated on a blog. Ashdown, 46, attributes part of his wariness of authority to his mother, who saw the Nazis overrun Denmark. He ran as the Democratic candidate for the US senate in 2006, promising to bring technology savvy to Washington, but lost to the Republican incumbent, Orrin Hatch. He ran again in 2012, but lost in the primary. An additional disappointment was the discovery that many if not most ordinary people – at least until the NSA scandal – cared little about privacy when selecting internet providers. "Unfortunately it's not what people think about. They put name recognition and cost ahead of privacy. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/09/xmission-isp-customers-privacy-nsa

Makeup will have been sure to secure his toupee with Super Glue before the wind scenes.

Didn't the judge say yesterday that by law and case precedent the lesser charge is automatically present in the greater charge?