AdamSmith

Obama Administration Releases Nation’s Phone Records To Public ‘We Are Making Every Effort To Be Transparent,’ Says President News in Brief • Politics • politicians • barack obama • ISSUE 49•23 • Jun 6, 2013 WASHINGTON—On the heels of reports that the National Security Agency has secretly been amassing the private telephone records of Verizon’s more than 120 million customers, President Barack Obama announced Thursday that his administration is releasing the entire country’s phone records to the public in an effort to handle the situation with complete transparency. “Honesty and openness have always been the hallmarks of my presidency, which is why I believe that everybody should have free access to this essential information,” the president said at a press conference, encouraging the public to visit a newly created online database containing the time, duration, and location of every wireless and landline phone call made by all 315 million Americans. “We—all of us—are laying our cards on the table here. Now, everyone in the country will know who’s calling whom, and when, and how often, and for how long. My administration doesn’t have any secrets, and from now on, neither will you.” Obama noted that, for the sake of national security, personal emails, consumer reports, and medical histories will remain the exclusive property of the federal government. http://www.theonion.com/articles/obama-administration-releases-nations-phone-record,32712/

Apropos of nothing, really... The 10 Strangest Drugs in Fiction The real world's got nothing on the invented substances found in the trippiest works of literature, like A Clockwork Orange, The Lord of the Rings and Infinite Jest. By Samuel Reaves Slaton 03/20/13 With such a real-world pharmacopoeia available to authors casting about for a mind-altering substance for their fiction, you’d think no one would ever need to invent a brand-new drug. But literature—especially sci-fi, fantasy, and dystopian novels—yields a host of weird and wonderful made-up substances, from memory-wiping waters in an ancient epic poem to a mysterious club drug (or is it an antidepressant?) in a 2001 Oprah’s Book Club winner. Here are 10 of the most compelling hardcover highs. Soma—Brave New World (Aldous Huxley) In London, in the year 632 AF (“After [Henry] Ford”), the World State provides soma to its citizens to give them a warm and fuzzy way to escape daily life. It’s meant to be the perfect drug; as the book says, soma boasts “all the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects.” In the real world, soma is to fictional drugs what Kleenex is to tissue—which is fitting, given that Huxley, who also penned the classic tripping tome The Doors of Perception, was one of the most committed drug-using men of letters. On his deathbed, he even dropped a crazy amount of LSD. Melange, aka spice—Dune (Frank Herbert) Meth’s got nothing on melange when it comes to side effects. Everyone knows that smoking crystal will leave you looking like a cadaver years before your time—but taking spice will turn you into a gigantic stoned spermatic homunculus floating in a dirty fish tank filled with orange gas. On the upside, you get to fly a heighliner through foldspace, which has gotta be pretty cool. But that’s a lot of spice down the line. In small doses, the drug—which tastes like “bitter cinnamon”—will make you live longer (and better), and increase awareness. But again, like meth, it’s hard and dangerous to procure: For a little pile of sweet, sweet spice, you might have to fight a 1,300-foot-long crystal-toothed alien worm. Pick your battles wisely. DMZ, aka Madame Psychosis—Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace) David Foster Wallace’s 1998 magnum opus is positively awash in substances, from one-hitters of weed and real-life narcotics like Dilaudid—former drug of choice for halfway house employee Don Gately—to made-up stuff like the titular addictive “entertainment.” But the most mysterious is undoubtedly DMZ, an “incredibly potent” and extremely rare hallucinogen derived from “an obscure mold that only grows on other molds,” and which tennis academy punk Michael Pemulis squirrels away for a big tournament—and maybe doses his best friend Hal Incandenza with. Its effects are “almost ontological,” and users’ descriptions of the high tend to be “vague and inelegant and more like mystical in the Tibetan-Dead-Book vein than rigorous and referentially clear.” Substance D, aka Slow Death—A Scanner Darkly (Philip K. Dick) Philip K. Dick did enough drugs in his lifetime to easily fill his seminal 1977 sci-fi novel with plenty of real-life highs. But instead of merely enumerating the myriad tabs, pills and hits on offer during his druggy California heyday, Dick invented the highly addictive Substance D, where the “D” stands for “Dumbness and Despair and Desertion, the desertion of your friends from you, you from them, everyone from everyone, isolation and loneliness and hating and suspecting each other”—in other words, a stand-in for all the terrible things drugs can do to people. Extended abuse will cause each side of the user’s brain to stop communicating with the other, so that in extreme cases “dopers” can simultaneously believe two opposing things. In the final stages, “D” means “Death.” Water of the River Lethe—Aeneid (Virgil) The Latin epic poem the Aeneid, composed circa 29–19 BCE, tells the story of the wanderings of Aeneas, including the Trojan War and the origin of the Roman people—and in it we encounter probably literature’s oldest fake drug: water from the River Lethe. Bordering the Elysian Fields in the Greek underworld, the Lethe granted complete forgetfulness to those who lapped its waters. Why would you want to do that? Because only after forgetting your earthly existence could you be reincarnated. It’s worth noting that humanity’s obsession with erasing memories is as strong as it ever was—see for instance Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting or Michel Gondry’s film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Black Meat—Naked Lunch (William S. Burroughs) It’s unsurprising that Burroughs, who struggled with a lifelong heroin addiction, is the creator of the most revolting made-up drug ever, which consists of “the flesh of the giant black centipede” and tastes “like a tainted cheese.” But that’s not all! It is so “overpoweringly delicious and nauseating” that the “Meat Eaters” spend their miserable lives frantically gorging themselves on it, barfing, and gorging themselves again and again, “until they fall exhausted.” In that sense, it’s not really a fictional drug at all, given how much it sounds like the junkie’s plight with smack. Pipe-weed, aka Old Toby—The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) Leave it to Tolkien to come up with the coziest and most English of all invented drugs. In The Lord of the Rings, hobbits and wizards alike are fiends for “the art of smoking the genuine weed.” Tobold Hornblower of Longbottom ran the first “true” grow operation in his Shire garden, and some of the best strains still carry a whiff of their progenitor in their names (e.g., Longbottom Leaf or Old Toby). Although pipe-weed is never explicitly described as psychoactive, you can’t help but suspect it contains something more potent than nicotine—after all, “folk in the Shire” were known to have toked on all manner of “various herbs, some fouler, some sweeter.” Sounds like schwag and skunk to us. Aslan—The Corrections (Jonathan Franzen) Franzen isn’t the most creative when it comes to inventing drugs for his fiction—but, then again, exotic intoxicants wouldn’t really fit in the Midwestern domestic drama The Corrections. But an anxiety-canceling mood enhancer named after the Christ-like lion in C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books? Now that’s just what the doctor ordered to lend a little color to the somber palette of St. Jude and it’s vaguely depressed native sons and daughters. Chip Lambert takes the MDMA-like antidepressant and proceeds to basically chop down his life in one fell swoop of a drug-fueled weekend sexcapade with one of his undergraduate students, while Chip’s mom, Enid, gets her fix the legal way. But it’s Enid’s daughter, Denise, who finally diagnoses the drug for what it is: Mexican A. “Club drug,” she says. “Very young person.” Moloko Plus, aka Knifey Moloko—A Clockwork Orange (Anthony Burgess) Like PinkBerry and its clones—where you pull a lever till the pile of your chosen frozen yogurt base reaches a desirable level, then spoon topping after topping onto it—in Burgess’s still-shocking cult classic, you and your fellow droogs dispense standard cow’s milk from your breast of choice at the Korova Milkbar, then add everything from synthetic mescaline to “drencrom” (aka adrenochrome, a product of the breakdown of adrenaline) to the opiate “vellocet” to get you really pumped for some good old ultraviolence. What it actually feels like to be “on” Moloko Plus is hazy—but, as protagonist Alex relates, it’s like “a nice quiet horrorshow fifteen minutes admiring Bog And All His Holy Angels and Saints in your left shoe with lights bursting all over your mozg.” Dylar—White Noise (Don DeLillo) DeLillo wins for the most existentially disturbing fake drug: Dylar, “a super experimental and top-secret” remedy for the fear of death. But, naturally, it’s got some totally horrifying side effects. Taking it could kill your brain but leave your body alive; or destroy just one side of your brain and leave the opposite side of your body similarly useless; or leave you only able to walk sideways. One character is warned that Dylar may take away her ability to “distinguish words from things, so that if someone said ‘speeding bullet,’ I would fall to the floor and take cover.” That’s a high price to pay to snuff out the fear of death—but perhaps no higher than the adverse effects of the real-life drugs people ingest daily. http://www.thefix.com/content/10-strangest-drugs-in-fiction00404

That there Google thing is the secret. Also that most of my work is sitting at the computer researching and writing, so I can slack off only too easily whenever the muse starts playing hard to get.

Verizon court order: telephone call metadata and what it can showThe US insists call data is not private information, but critics say it allows government to build detailed picture of individuals' lives James Ball guardian.co.uk, Thursday 6 June 2013 10.12 EDT The US government has long argued that 'metadata' isn't private or personal: it's the equivalent of looking at the envelope of a letter. Photograph: Manu Fernandez/AP When does mass data collection get personal? When it comes to the contents of our communications – what we say on the phone, or in emails – most people agree that's private information, and so does US law and the constitution. But when it comes to who we speak to, and where we were when we did it, matters get far hazier. That clash has been highlighted by a top secret court order obtained by the Guardian, which reveals the large-scale collection by the NSA of the call records of millions of Verizon customers, daily, since April. The court order doesn't allow the NSA to collect any information whatsoever on the contents of phone calls, or even to obtain any names or addresses of customers. What's covered instead is known as "metadata": the phone number of every caller and recipient; the unique serial number of the phones involved; the time and duration of each phone call; and potentially the location of each of the participants when the call happened. All of this information is being collected on millions of calls every day – every conversation taking place within the US, or between the US and a foreign country is collected. The government has long argued that this information isn't private or personal. It is, they say, the equivalent of looking at the envelope of a letter: what's written on the outside is simple, functional information that's essentially already public. That forms the basis of collection: because it's not personal information, but rather "transactional" or "business" data, there's no need to show probable cause to collect it. Collection is also helped by the fact this information is already disclosed by callers to their carriers – because your phone number is shared with your provider, you're not treating it as private. But that is not a view shared by privacy advocates. Groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation say that by knowing who an individual speaks to, and when, and for how long, intelligence agencies can build up a detailed picture of that person, their social network, and more. Collecting information on where people are during the calls colours in that picture even further. One recent case that highlights this tension is the recent subpoenas of the call records of Associated Press journalists, which led to clashes between the media and the White House over what was widely seen as intrusion into a free press. The information collected on the AP was telephony metadata: precisely what the court order against Verizon shows is being collected by the NSA on millions of Americans every day. Gary Pruitt, the president of the Associated Press, set forth how monitoring even these "envelopes" could become a serious intrusion: "These records potentially reveal communications with confidential sources across all of the newsgathering activities undertaken by the AP during a two-month period, provide a road map to AP's newsgathering operations, and disclose information about AP's activities and operations that the government has no conceivable right to know." The view on whether such "transactional" data is personal, and how intrusive it can be, is also being tested in the appellate courts, and the supreme court is likely to see more cases on the issue in the near future. Discussing the use of GPS data collected from mobile phones, an appellate court noted that even location information on its own could reveal a person's secrets: "A person who knows all of another's travels can deduce whether he is a weekly churchgoer, a heavy drinker, a regular at the gym, an unfaithful husband, an outpatient receiving medical treatment, an associate of particular individuals or political groups," it read, "and not just one such fact about a person, but all such facts." The primary purpose of large-scale databases such as the NSA's call records is generally said to be data-mining: rather than examining individuals, algorithms are used to find patterns of unusual activity that may mark terrorism or criminal conspiracies. However, collection and storage of this information gives government a power it's previously lacked: easy and retroactive surveillance. If authorities become interested in an individual at a later stage, and obtain their number, officials can look back through the data and gather their movements, social network, and more – possibly for several years (although the secret court order only allows for three months of data collection). In essence, you're being watched; the government just doesn't know your name while it's doing it. Until now, such actions have been kept a tightly guarded and classified secret, speculated upon, suspected, and occasionally disclosed by sources, but never proven by documents. Now the confirmation is in the open, the American public have the opportunity to decide which definition of private information they prefer: that of the privacy advocates, or that of the NSA and White House. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/phone-call-metadata-information-authorities

The justification tango begins. Obama administration defends NSA collection of Verizon phone recordsWhite House upholds 'critical tool in protecting the nation from terrorist threats' as senior politicians condemn surveillance • Revealed: NSA collecting phone records of millions of Verizon customers daily Dan Roberts and Spencer Ackerman in Washington guardian.co.uk, Thursday 6 June 2013 11.54 EDT Obama administration said the practice was 'a critical tool in protecting the nation'. Photograph: Rex Features The White House has sought to justify its surveillance of millions of Americans' phone records as anger grows over revelations that a secret court order gives the National Security Agency blanket authority to collect call data from a major phone carrier. Politicians and civil liberties campaigners described the disclosures, revealed by the Guardian on Wednesday, as the most sweeping intrusion into private data they had ever seen by the US government. But the Obama administration, while declining to comment on the specific order, said the practice was "a critical tool in protecting the nation from terrorist threats to the United States". The secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (Fisa) granted the order to the FBI on April 25, giving the government unlimited authority to obtain the data for a specified three-month period ending on July 19. Under the terms of the blanket order, the numbers of both parties on a call are handed over, as is location data, call duration, unique identifiers, and the time and duration of all calls. The contents of the conversation itself are not covered. The disclosure has reignited longstanding debates in the US over the proper extent of the government's domestic spying powers. Under the Bush administration, officials in security agencies had disclosed to reporters the large-scale collection of call records data by the NSA, but this is the first time significant and top-secret documents have revealed the continuation of the practice under President Obama. The White House stressed that orders such as the one disclosed by the Guardian would only cover data about the calls rather than their content. A senior administration official said: "Information of the sort described in the Guardian article has been a critical tool in protecting the nation from terrorist threats to the United States, as it allows counter-terrorism personnel to discover whether known or suspected terrorists have been in contact with other persons who may be engaged in terrorist activities, particularly people located inside the United States. "As we have publicly stated before, all three branches of government are involved in reviewing and authorising intelligence collection under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Congress passed that act and is regularly and fully briefed on how it is used, and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court authorises such collection. There is a robust legal regime in place governing all activities conducted pursuant to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act." The administration stressed that the court order obtained by the Guardian relates to call data, and does not allow the government to listen in to anyone's calls. This point was also made by the chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, Dianne Feinstein. "This is just meta data. There is no content involved," she told reporters on Capitol Hill. "In other words, no content of a communication. … The records can only be accessed under heightened standards." Senators Dianne Feinstein, chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, and Saxby Chambliss, the vice chairman, speak to reporters about the NSA cull of phone records. Photograph: Alex Wong/Getty Images However, in 2013, such metadata can provide authorities with vast knowledge about a caller's identity. Particularly when cross-checked against other public records, the metadata can reveal someone's name, address, driver's licence, credit history, social security number and more. Government analysts would be able to work out whether the relationship between two people was ongoing, occasional or a one-off. "From a civil liberties perspective, the program could hardly be any more alarming. It's a program in which some untold number of innocent people have been put under the constant surveillance of government agents," said Jameel Jaffer, American Civil Liberties Union deputy legal director. "It is beyond Orwellian, and it provides further evidence of the extent to which basic democratic rights are being surrendered in secret to the demands of unaccountable intelligence agencies." The order names Verizon Business Services, a division of Verizon Communications. In its first-quarter earnings report, published in April, Verizon Communications listed about 10 million commercial lines out of a total of 121 million customers. The court order does not specify what type of lines are being tracked. It is not clear whether any additional orders exist to cover Verizon's wireless and residential customers, or those of other phone carriers. Fisa court orders typically direct the production of records pertaining to a specific, named target suspected of being an agent of a terrorist group or foreign state, or a finite set of individually named targets. The unlimited nature of the records being handed over to the NSA is extremely unusual. The Verizon order expressly bars the company from disclosing to the public either the existence of the FBI's request for its customers' records, or the court order itself. "We decline comment," said Ed McFadden, a Washington-based Verizon spokesman said on Wednesday. 'Secret blanket surveillance'Feinstein said she believed the order had been in place for some time. She said: "As far as I know this is the exact three-month renewal of what has been the case for the past seven years. This renewal is carried out by the [foreign intelligence surveillance] court under the business records section of the Patriot Act. Therefore it is lawful. It has been briefed to Congress." News of the order brought swift condemnation from senior US politicians. Former vice-president Al Gore described the "secret blanket surveillance" as "obscenely outrageous". "In [the] digital era, privacy must be a priority," he said. The court order appears to explain the numerous cryptic public warnings by two US senators, Mark Udall and Ron Wyden, about the scope of the Obama administration's surveillance activities. For about two years, the two Democrats have been stridently advising the public that the US government is relying on "secret legal interpretations" to claim surveillance powers so broad that the American public would be "stunned" to learn of the kind of domestic spying being conducted. Udall, a member of the Senate intelligence committee, said on Wednesday night: "While I cannot corroborate the details of this particular report, this sort of widescale surveillance should concern all of us and is the kind of government overreach I've said Americans would find shocking." Russell Tice, a retired National Security Agency intelligence analyst and whistleblower, said: "What is going on is much larger and more systemic than anything anyone has ever suspected or imagined." Although an anonymous senior Obama administration official said that "on its face" the court order revealed by the Guardian did not authorise the government to listen in on people's phone calls, Tice now believes the NSA has constructed such a capability. "I figured it would probably be about 2015" before the NSA had "the computer capacity ... to collect all digital communications word for word," Tice said. "But I think I'm wrong. I think they have it right now." The Center for Constitutional Rights said in a statement that the secret court order was unprecedented. "As far as we know this order from the Fisa court is the broadest surveillance order to ever have been issued: it requires no level of suspicion and applies to all Verizon [business services] subscribers anywhere in the US. "The Patriot Act's incredibly broad surveillance provision purportedly authorizes an order of this sort, though its constitutionality is in question and several senators have complained about it." Mark Rumold, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said: "This is confirmation of what we've long feared, that the NSA has been tracking the calling patterns of the entire country. We hope more than anything else that the government will allow a judge to decide whether this is constitutional, and we can finally put an end to this practice." Howard Wolfson, a deputy mayor of New York, described the revelations as "a shocking report that really exploded overnight". "A lot of people are waking up now and I think they will be horrified," he said. "It is not just the civil libertarian wings of the Republican and Democratic parties; I think most Americans will be really surprised that their government is having access to all of the phone calls they make." "I don't think the administration's response [so far] is anywhere near adequate. I think you will see a lot of questions being asked in the coming days." Oregon senator Jeff Merkley said: "This type of secret bulk data collection is an outrageous breach of Americans' privacy. Can the FBI or the NSA really claim that they need data scooped up on tens of millions of Americans?" http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/obama-administration-nsa-verizon-records?guni=Network%20front:network-front%20main-2%20Special%20trail:Network%20front%20-%20special%20trail:Position1

Apparently so! Tried and Tested: the salmon facial plus gypsy mask http://www.thenational.ae/lifestyle/tried-and-tested-the-salmon-facial-plus-gypsy-mask

For our resident aviator...

One analysis of how Russia got this way, and what may come next. After Putin: How Russia’s liberalism might be revived Autumn 2008 by Boris Kapustin The Russian liberal intelligentsia fell victim to its own idealism, says Boris Kapustin of the Russian Academy of Sciences. But to challenge Vladimir Putin’s “regime of authoritarian capitalism” he advises taking a leaf from Vaclav Havel’s book of 20 years ago that headed the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia Russian liberalism is not just in crisis, politically speaking it has ceased to exist. It is not represented in the parliament, it has disappeared as a focus of public debates, even among intellectuals, and its claims to be a credible and politically attractive ideology now seem vain if not preposterous. I use the term “Russian liberalism” as an umbrella concept embracing the political practices and agencies, both of the neoliberal and social liberal types, which identified the Russian “exit from Communism” with the establishment of the rule of law, political and ideological pluralism, the market economy and “openness to the West”, if not its imitation. Neither the repressive nature of the present regime nor the innate hostility of the Russian “cultural tradition” towards liberalism can explain this calamity. These are pseudo-explanations that serve Russian liberals as pretexts for their own self-exculpation. If liberalism is to be reborn in Russia, one must understand the political causes of its demise. Liberalism failed as an ideology in Russia in the wake of communism’s collapse. Now Russian liberals must free themselves from the burden of the Boris Yeltsin legacy – its unabashed neoliberalism – and confront the type of capitalism expressed by the present Russian regime’s “authoritarian capitalism.” MATTERS OF OPINION No free market, please, we’re Russian! According to a recent Gallup poll, more Russians say that a market economy would be wrong for their country’s future than those who think it to be the right direction. The difference between the two camps has somewhat narrowed in recent years though. In 2007, 41% said that the creation of a market economy largely free from state control would not be right for Russia, down from 44% in 2006. This compared to 35% who said the opposite, up from 32% the previous year. Fear of voicing political views rises in ex-Soviet republics Gallup polls in 14 former Soviet states show that, almost across the board, people are increasingly afraid to speak their mind on political issues. In seven of the states, a majority now say that their fellow citizens are afraid to openly express political opinions. The most dramatic increases were in Georgia and the EU member state Lithuania, where at least twice as many people in 2007, compared to 2006, said that “many” or “most” of their fellow citizens were afraid to express their political views. In Tajikistan and Armenia, seven out of 10 of those surveyed in 2007 expressed this view, compared to about half in 2006. http://www.gallupworldpoll.com/ The mass anti-communist movement at the end of Russia’s perestroika era was liberal in spirit. Liberty and human rights, equality and justice, non-violence and the rejection of economic and political dirigisme made up the “nodal points” of its alternative to the status quo. Unfortunately, self-proclaimed “democrats” opted for sequencing reforms according to a formula of market first, democracy next. Suffice to say that, at least in the specific circumstances of Russia, such sequencing resulted in a distorted and socially harmful free market presided over by a bunch of warring oligarchs. Instead of promoting a transition from Communism to the “blessed plateau” of democratic capitalism, it allowed the undemocratic misdeeds of Yeltsin’s regime and the appalling depravity of the huge portions of the population of Russia. But instead of showing outrage, many liberals considered this as a reasonable price that Russia had to pay for being pulled out from communism. Liberals continued to trumpet their values of human rights and private property, voicing few reservations about “Yeltsin’s policy” in the name of liberty and justice for all, including the millions of downtrodden. This is what determined the moral and political bankruptcy of post-communist Russian liberalism. Having sided with the new masters of Russia as the only force capable of implementing a Western path to democratic capitalism, Russian liberals forsook their independent popular base and became dependent on the goodwill of those who wielded power. This dependence blinded them to the shocking lawlessness of Yeltsin’s bloody coup d’état in October 1993, to the rigged results of the referendum on the new Constitution, and thence to the massive manipulations of the disgraceful elections of 1996, and to the significance of the financial collapse of 1998. Up to the end of the 1990s, the regime of authoritarian capitalism had not been consolidated. The future autocrats still needed the Russian liberal intelligentsia as one of their props. So when Vladimir Putin took over as Russia’s President he was careful to preserve the semblance of the liberals’ participation in politics, even co-opting certain of them as “advisors”, “experts” and functionaries of the regime. Those who were determined to put their liberal beliefs into practice were later ejected from their positions and the rest were assimilated into the rising and solidifying bureaucracy of authoritarian capitalism. The liberals’ “moment of truth” arrived with the new century, when the regime realised that it could henceforth perpetuate itself without recourse to the liberal intelligentsia. The liberals were found politically redundant and the regime abandoned rather than persecuted them. On their own, the liberals could not survive politically. This is what predetermined the electoral failures in 2003 of parties like Yabloko and the Union of the Rightist Forces. It could charitably be said that the Russian liberal intelligentsia suffered from its own excessive idealism, and that its somewhat naïve dedication to ideals lacked practical executioners. This faith made too many of them misread the rise of authoritarian capitalism as no more than the zigzags and temporary setbacks of Russia’s transition to democracy. More soberly, however, the liberal intelligentsia, or at least its upper layers, should be viewed as one of the main benefactors of the Yeltsin epoch. They capitalised lucratively on this role, emerging as the main recipients of countless Western grants and honoraria; they were the “patricians of democracy” whose credentials were certified by their positions in respectable and often affluent Western NGOs and charitable foundations. They seemed the spiritual mediators of newly booming trade between Russia and the West. The same liberals today castigate the regime, and with good reason. The absence of an independent judiciary, severe limitations of the freedom of the mass media, rampant corruption in all branches of bureaucracy and the systematic harassment of nearly all opposition are genuine ills. It is one thing, though, to articulate all these grievances and quite another to set out an attractive and politically mobilising ideology. Russia’s liberals have to send forth a message that resonates with the broader public. The resonance can’t just be some sort of rehearsal of the “superstitions” of the people; it means coming up with a compelling alternative. The opposition’s platform is by and large not to recognise the legitimacy of the present regime. True, the parliamentary and presidential elections of 2007 and 2008 were unfair, but can their unfairness be realistically equated to a usurpation of power? A historically unprecedented number of Russians, well over 50%, now express themselves as satisfied with the status quo, and that’s something that can’t be ignored. A majority of Russian people feel no anger at the loss of what we might term Yeltsin’s democracy which they perceive as having been a plaything in the hands of unscrupulous elites that had no actual value for the people. The burial of Yeltsin’s democracy may have passed generally unnoticed, but the benefits the people have received from the Putin epoch are clearly visible. They can’t be measured exclusively in terms of material advantage, but no less important is the fact that social life in Russia has ceased to be chaotic, and political life is no longer insultingly grotesque, even though it has become boring. Order has appeared as a buzzword of the day – with all its conservative overtones. Order is by no means an ultimate political good, but it is an indispensable pre-requisite of all political progress and is appreciated as such. But it is doubtful that in the eyes of many Russians Putin’s regime – or, to update things, Putin’s and Medvedev’s regime – has any intrinsic value. For them, it is nevertheless better than the terror of unpredictability, buffoonery and free-riding that was so typical of the Yeltsin epoch. This rational preference can’t be ignored or misinterpreted, but it condemns Russian liberals to a state of political non-existence. Russians will only stand up in support of a different kind of democracy providing it offers a tangible social content and has a bearing on their everyday lives. It would also be unfair to the Putin epoch to turn a blind eye to the continuity it brought with what preceded it. This continuity saw a maturing of the type of capitalism introduced back in 1992. During the Putin epoch it has rid itself of the extravagances and irregularities of its early years, when it was the people who were the most painfully affected, but it has for all that retained its oppressive, corporatist, oligarchic and profoundly unjust characteristics. The gap between Russia’s rich and the poor has increased during the Putin years and is now indecently wide. So although there is continuity, it is a continuity that has preserved the symbiosis of property and power even though its institutional format has changed. Under Yeltsin, it saw the privatisation of political power by several oligopolies, which in its purest form manifested itself in the “regime of seven banks” (semibankirtschina in Russian) that ensured the president’s re-election in 1996 on condition that he should forfeit his “sovereign” power. Under Putin, this bargain was reversed: the several clans that man the upper echelons of the state acquired control over the main economic resources. The political-economic nature of the symbiosis as a private phenomenon has not been changed by this, but its institutional-legal construction, the ideological modus operandi and the undisputed winners have all altered. For the mass of Russians, these changes have proved to be important. State-based authority tends to be more sensitive to their sufferings than do the private sector’s capitalist oligarchs. Russia’s skyrocketing oil and gas revenues since the turn of the century have made policies for sharing out the country’s newly-acquired wealth financially possible. The regime has thus been able to reinforce its power. If the opposition liberals want to escape from their confinement to the political salons of Moscow and St. Petersburg, they must come to grips with Russia’s new political and economic realities. They must reveal to public opinion the present system’s inherent tensions, and they must address actual grievances by proposing feasible and popular political courses of action. It is not enough to recycle the mantra of human rights violations because it is grass roots actions that are required. Russia’s liberals might find it worthwhile to begin with what Vaclav Havel, when discussing how communism in the Soviet bloc could be resisted, dubbed small-scale work. It was a strategy of very concrete small deeds which although seemingly unambitious politically enhanced an alternative public morality, promoted independent networks of cooperation and steeped the reform movement’s would-be leaders in a realistic and non-elitist democratic culture. In today’s Russia, the likelihood of such a development would seem meager unless a severe economic crisis were to undercut the stability of Putin’s authoritarian capitalism. But do not human dedication, fortitude and tenacity occasionally change the flow of history? After all, before 1989 very few people took Vaclav Havel for a clairvoyant. http://www.europesworld.org/NewEnglish/Home_old/Article/tabid/191/ArticleType/articleview/ArticleID/21238/language/en-US/Default.aspx

The oldest profession thrived even inside the gates of Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project, according to Richard Rhodes's The Making of the Atomic Bomb. One of the women's dorms became known as a place where unmarried men on the project could find satisfaction, for a price. The Army looked the other way until disease reared its head, then moved to crack down and expel the women in question. But a general protest by the project's rank and file, especially the to-be-deprived clientele, convinced the officials to back off, and merely offer proper medical care to anyone involved. Thus the enterprise carried on.

At some business conference I attended where Colin Powell was the celeb keynote speaker, some time after leaving office, he gave several anecdotes to illustrate that other countries fairly often take the U.S.'s ideals, and its position as global defender of them, more seriously than we ourselves tend to, of late.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/gallery/2013/jun/06/second-world-war-sexual-health-pictures?guni=Network%20front:network-front%20main-4%20Pixies:Pixies:Position5#/?picture=410173396&index=9

Boggles belief. NSA collecting phone records of millions of Verizon customers daily Exclusive: Top secret court order requiring Verizon to hand over all call data shows scale of domestic surveillance under Obama Glenn Greenwald The Guardian, Wednesday 5 June 2013 • Read the Verizon court order in full here Under the terms of the order, the numbers of both parties on a call are handed over, as is location data and the time and duration of all calls. Photograph: Matt Rourke/AP The National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America's largest telecoms providers, under a top secret court order issued in April. The order, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, requires Verizon on an "ongoing, daily basis" to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries. The document shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of US citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk – regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing. The secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (Fisa) granted the order to the FBI on April 25, giving the government unlimited authority to obtain the data for a specified three-month period ending on July 19. Under the terms of the blanket order, the numbers of both parties on a call are handed over, as is location data, call duration, unique identifiers, and the time and duration of all calls. The contents of the conversation itself are not covered. The disclosure is likely to reignite longstanding debates in the US over the proper extent of the government's domestic spying powers. Under the Bush administration, officials in security agencies had disclosed to reporters the large-scale collection of call records data by the NSA, but this is the first time significant and top-secret documents have revealed the continuation of the practice on a massive scale under President Obama. The unlimited nature of the records being handed over to the NSA is extremely unusual. Fisa court orders typically direct the production of records pertaining to a specific named target who is suspected of being an agent of a terrorist group or foreign state, or a finite set of individually named targets. The Guardian approached the National Security Agency, the White House and the Department of Justice for comment in advance of publication on Wednesday. All declined. The agencies were also offered the opportunity to raise specific security concerns regarding the publication of the court order. The court order expressly bars Verizon from disclosing to the public either the existence of the FBI's request for its customers' records, or the court order itself. "We decline comment," said Ed McFadden, a Washington-based Verizon spokesman. The order, signed by Judge Roger Vinson, compels Verizon to produce to the NSA electronic copies of "all call detail records or 'telephony metadata' created by Verizon for communications between the United States and abroad" or "wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls". The order directs Verizon to "continue production on an ongoing daily basis thereafter for the duration of this order". It specifies that the records to be produced include "session identifying information", such as "originating and terminating number", the duration of each call, telephone calling card numbers, trunk identifiers, International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) number, and "comprehensive communication routing information". The information is classed as "metadata", or transactional information, rather than communications, and so does not require individual warrants to access. The document also specifies that such "metadata" is not limited to the aforementioned items. A 2005 court ruling judged that cell site location data – the nearest cell tower a phone was connected to – was also transactional data, and so could potentially fall under the scope of the order. While the order itself does not include either the contents of messages or the personal information of the subscriber of any particular cell number, its collection would allow the NSA to build easily a comprehensive picture of who any individual contacted, how and when, and possibly from where, retrospectively. It is not known whether Verizon is the only cell-phone provider to be targeted with such an order, although previous reporting has suggested the NSA has collected cell records from all major mobile networks. It is also unclear from the leaked document whether the three-month order was a one-off, or the latest in a series of similar orders. The court order appears to explain the numerous cryptic public warnings by two US senators, Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, about the scope of the Obama administration's surveillance activities. For roughly two years, the two Democrats have been stridently advising the public that the US government is relying on "secret legal interpretations" to claim surveillance powers so broad that the American public would be "stunned" to learn of the kind of domestic spying being conducted. Because those activities are classified, the senators, both members of the Senate intelligence committee, have been prevented from specifying which domestic surveillance programs they find so alarming. But the information they have been able to disclose in their public warnings perfectly tracks both the specific law cited by the April 25 court order as well as the vast scope of record-gathering it authorized. Julian Sanchez, a surveillance expert with the Cato Institute, explained: "We've certainly seen the government increasingly strain the bounds of 'relevance' to collect large numbers of records at once — everyone at one or two degrees of separation from a target — but vacuuming all metadata up indiscriminately would be an extraordinary repudiation of any pretence of constraint or particularized suspicion." The April order requested by the FBI and NSA does precisely that. The law on which the order explicitly relies is the so-called "business records" provision of the Patriot Act, 50 USC section 1861. That is the provision which Wyden and Udall have repeatedly cited when warning the public of what they believe is the Obama administration's extreme interpretation of the law to engage in excessive domestic surveillance. In a letter to attorney general Eric Holder last year, they argued that "there is now a significant gap between what most Americans think the law allows and what the government secretly claims the law allows." "We believe," they wrote, "that most Americans would be stunned to learn the details of how these secret court opinions have interpreted" the "business records" provision of the Patriot Act. Privacy advocates have long warned that allowing the government to collect and store unlimited "metadata" is a highly invasive form of surveillance of citizens' communications activities. Those records enable the government to know the identity of every person with whom an individual communicates electronically, how long they spoke, and their location at the time of the communication. Such metadata is what the US government has long attempted to obtain in order to discover an individual's network of associations and communication patterns. The request for the bulk collection of all Verizon domestic telephone records indicates that the agency is continuing some version of the data-mining program begun by the Bush administration in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attack. The NSA, as part of a program secretly authorized by President Bush on 4 October 2001, implemented a bulk collection program of domestic telephone, internet and email records. A furore erupted in 2006 when USA Today reported that the NSA had "been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth" and was "using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity." Until now, there has been no indication that the Obama administration implemented a similar program. These recent events reflect how profoundly the NSA's mission has transformed from an agency exclusively devoted to foreign intelligence gathering, into one that focuses increasingly on domestic communications. A 30-year employee of the NSA, William Binney, resigned from the agency shortly after 9/11 in protest at the agency's focus on domestic activities. In the mid-1970s, Congress, for the first time, investigated the surveillance activities of the US government. Back then, the mandate of the NSA was that it would never direct its surveillance apparatus domestically. At the conclusion of that investigation, Frank Church, the Democratic senator from Idaho who chaired the investigative committee, warned: "The NSA's capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter." Additional reporting by Ewen MacAskill and Spencer Ackerman http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-records-verizon-court-order

LOL Very polarizing, at least.

You are diverting my new thread from its entirely serious and focused aims.

Yes!! However... (That word is how trembling corporate subordinates in Japan, after having agreed to the nines, signal their boss that they are about to contradict him -- "Keredomo" ) one must ask: Even 'Boston Legal'? I mean, any show that has whatsisname make out with Shatner...!

The lively thread on Best Written TV Series, especially ihpguy's post about Maude and M.A.S.H. being overrated, got me thinking on how some series we loved first time around just get better with age, while others dwindle. Genre pairings (I mean 2 shows of same type) seem to make the contrast sharp. E.g., All in the Family holds me today, whereas like ihp notes Maude gets pretty shrill over not that much. Of course Bea Arthur saves anything she is in, but the show itself ... eh. But again to the point, Golden Girls to me remains a delight by comparison with Maude. Anyone else noticed pairings, of any kind, of shows that on rerun live vs. die?

LOL I'm bought!

You know the term "wet nurse."

LOL Very droll!

Well, you really think the cure was free? I know I will get sick one day. I had a lot rather be rich when it happens. At least the private nurse will not be stingy with the morphine.

If I certified myself, would that be a form of Grelling's Paradox? http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GrellingNelson_paradox