There is no limit to what’s available on YouTube…
(still can’t find a version of Tom Paxton’s “Attica”, though).
Anne Laurie has been a Balloon Juice writer since 2009.
This post is in: Music, Open Threads
There is no limit to what’s available on YouTube…
(still can’t find a version of Tom Paxton’s “Attica”, though).
This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Open Threads, Religious Nuts 2, Republican Venality
Ed Kilgore, looking for the lighter side, links to a National Review report on a 2008 book by E.W. Jackson, now running for lieutenant governor in Virginia on the GOP ticket:
“We live in the most interesting times in human history. These are the days spoken of in Scripture, the days of fulfillment. This is therefore an era of unprecedented spiritual activity on both sides as the conflict races to a head. Those who are in Christ are on the winning side. Part of what must happen during this period of great harvest for the kingdom of God is a massive wealth transfer. It is not going to happen by theft or governmental policy. It is going to happen supernaturally. Those invested in God’s market are going to reap a windfall. Make up your mind now to buy in.”
Insert your own joke here, about vampire squid banksters and the Repubs who worship them…
Open Thread: “Supernatural” Wealth TransferPost + Comments (212)
This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Open Threads, War on Terror aka GSAVE®, Security Theatre
(Ted Rall’s blog)
Gail Collins, at the NYTimes:
… Does the N.S.A. really need all the stuff it’s collecting? Ever since the attack on the World Trade Center, the agency has been exploding. It has an enormous operation outside of Washington, and it is building another million-square-foot complex in the Utah desert. It collects an estimated 1.7 billion pieces of communication a day.
“When you have the ability to get more and more data, the natural inclination is to get as much as possible,” said Representative Henry Waxman, the former chairman of the House oversight committee.
Those of us who have seen the show “Hoarders” know that more is not always better, and “as much as possible” is sometimes covering up a pile of dead cats. After all, the government didn’t fail to stop the attack on the World Trade Center because of a lack of data. It had lots of information about Al Qaeda and its plan to stage an attack on America. The problem was with follow-up.
And the N.S.A. has been known to go overboard. During the administration of George W. Bush, it decided to drop a modest in-house plan for data analysis in favor of a gargantuan program called Trailblazer, which funneled more than $1 billion to private consultants and turned out to have the additional liability of not working. The official who fought most vigorously against it was rewarded in 2010 by being charged with violating the Espionage Act when he released information to a reporter.
That was only one incident, but we do seem to have an ominous combination: an agency with a bad record on thriftiness, and practically everything it spends money on is secret. “It’s a tough balancing act,” an Obama administration official told me. “It’s incumbent on us and Congress to do the job of scrutinizing the budget, both in terms of cost and efficacy.”…
Apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln, what’s on the agenda for another Saturday night?
Open Thread: Info Wants to Be Free, But How Expensive Is Collecting It?Post + Comments (171)
This post is in: Food, Daydream Believers
No Recipe Exchange this week, alas, so on a related topic, here’s hopeful news about an initiative to improve food safety by improving conditions for the workers who pick our crops:
MOSS LANDING, Calif. — With piles of fresh strawberries beckoning consumers at markets and stores this season, an alliance of a major retailer, fruit growers and farm workers has begun a program to promote healthy produce and improve working conditions.
The initiative, unfolding along neatly planted rows of berries at the Andrew & Williamson Fresh Produce’s Sierra Farm here, is an effort to prevent the types of bacterial outbreaks of salmonella, listeria or E.coli that have sickened consumers who ate contaminated cantaloupes, spinach or other produce.
One of the workers, Valentin Esteban, is on the front lines of the new effort, having gone through a training program that helps him avoid practices that lead to possible bacterial contamination that could undermine the safety and quality of the strawberries he picks.
In exchange, Andrew & Williamson is providing Mr. Esteban better pay and working conditions than many migrant farmworkers receive, a base pay of $9.05 an hour versus the $8 average in the area.
“Sure, the money is important, but I also feel good because I am helping to improve quality and safety,” Mr. Esteban said. “Those things are important to my family, too.”
Last summer, more than 250 people in 24 states were sickened and three died after eating cantaloupes contaminated with salmonella. A year earlier, cantaloupe tainted with listeria killed 33 people.
The Food and Drug Administration laid the blame on conditions like stagnant pools of water and dirty surfaces in packing areas, problems that farm workers could help prevent.
“In those cases, the workers weren’t trained to address it or even recognize that those conditions might be problematic,” said Peter O’Driscoll, project director of Oxfam America’s Equitable Food Initiative. “Farm workers can be the eyes and ears of the farm, helping to improve food safety and pest contamination.” …
The tough part — as you cynics are sure to point out — is getting consumers to pay an extra few cents for their strawberries. The existence of a Starbucks outlet on every other corner convinces me this can be done, with the proper sales techniques. And for the pious purists on the other side of the aisle, yes, it’s a terrible thing that so many Americans can’t afford strawberries at all, but I still think paying the pickers something closer to a living wage is an improvement.
Food Safety: Good for Workers, Good for ConsumersPost + Comments (28)
This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Open Threads, Republican Stupidity, Assholes, Romney of the Uncanny Valley
Willard Romney & Sons, GOP multi-taskers! Jason Horowitz, in the Washington Post:
PARK CITY, Utah — John Schoenfeld came to an exclusive resort here to do business with Mitt Romney. But he stayed for the politics.
Schoenfeld spent most of Wednesday in a downstairs conference room of the Stein Eriksen Lodge assessing the investments of Solamere Capital, the firm co-founded by Romney’s son Tagg and increasingly managed by Romney himself. Then he learned that several potential GOP presidential candidates would be attending a separate Romney conference at the same exclusive lodge.
“I’m going to stretch my clothes another day,” the Chicago-based lawyer said after moving upstairs to join hundreds of Romney’s top donors to kick off the former Republican presidential nominee’s Experts and Enthusiasts 2013 conference. Schoenfeld said he became enthusiastic about the prospect of spending Friday morning driving golf balls with Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), breaking bread with New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie or shooting skeet with Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), Romney’s running mate in 2012. “That looked like fun.”…
The former Romney campaign aides who haunted the old alpine hotel played down the overlap between the two conferences, arguing that they had planned the ideas conference for the following weekend but moved it up for logistical reasons.
Romney himself made no mention of Solamere as he spoke onstage about “great challenges for America.” Former adviser Ron Kaufman shrugged about Solamere’s sponsorship of the event: “Someone has to pay for it.”
Instead they characterized the three-day event as Romney’s own Aspen Ideas Festival, a significant step in his return to public relevance and proof of his political clout. But the retreat also highlights the enduring flaws that helped sink Romney’s candidacy.
His ideas conference, much like his campaign, had no specific agenda and would define itself over time, aides said. The off-the-record sessions, the cigar rooms and the vanilla homogeneity of the exclusive event evoked the elitism of his disastrous speech to donors about the “47 percent.”…
The Experts and Enthusiasts (E2) event featured serious policy chats about education, the economy, disease and foreign policy. It also included a horseback riding session with Romney and a hike early Thursday morning with Hewlett Packard CEO, failed gubernatorial candidate and Solamere investor Meg Whitman. (“I got a tear in my muscle but I still hiked the mountain,” Ann Romney announced as she limped down some stairs.)
In addition to panel discussions Friday with the Republican hopefuls for 2016, there were other featured speakers, including former Clinton administration insider Erskine Bowles, longtime Obama adviser David Axelrod and Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. Organizers said they had also reached out to potential Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Rodham Clinton and Andrew Cuomo, though spokesmen for both said they had no knowledge of an invitation.
On Wednesday afternoon, fleets of black Mercedes sedans and luxury SUVs dropped off men in suits in front of the lodge’s facsimile of the Olympic flame. Blond ushers directed them to either turn left at the stone fireplace for the “Solamere Capital Founders Fund Update,” or to hang a right and register for the “E2 summit.” The blue canvas E2 swag bags came with Solamere-branded jackets, shirts and hats.
Attendees mingled on a veranda overlooking ski slopes spotted with patches of snow, and said things to each other like, “Why are you protecting your downside? This is a billion-dollar opportunity.”…
This post is in: Open Threads, Popular Culture, Science & Technology
At last, a piece of news that doesn’t entirely suck. From the Washington Post:
Fresh off of the unveiling of their largest model ever — a Star Wars X-wing Starfighter — LEGO is now teaming up with the real-life space explorers, NASA, for a new design competition.
The “NASA’s Missions: Imagine and Build” challenge will allow individuals 13 and older to (using LEGOs, of course) design and build their own “aircraft of the future“ based on actual NASA engineers’ designs and real-life challenges, such as reducing the environmental footprint of the craft and increasing fuel economy. And that’s just part of the competition category dubbed “Inventing our Future of Flight.”…
The second category, “Imagine our Future Beyond Earth,” is for participants 16 years and older, calling on them to design a futuristic craft — space or air, it doesn’t matter — of some kind. Basically, if you can build it with LEGOs and make it look cool, go for it, albeit within this none-too-short list of rules and regulations. That list includes, but is not limited to, giving LEGO and NASA the right to refuse any military or weapons models, models containing “defamatory or degrading elements,” and those including toy parts not made by LEGO. So, leave your Erector Set and Lincoln Logs out….
More information at the link.
Late Night Open Thread: To Infinity, With Legos!Post + Comments (30)
This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Food, Republican Venality, Assholes
Mark Bittman, in the NYTimes, highlights a rising star:
… The current versions of the Farm Bill in the Senate (as usual, not as horrible as the House) and the House (as usual, terrifying) could hardly be more frustrating. The House is proposing $20 billion in cuts to SNAP — equivalent, says Beckmann, to “almost half of all the charitable food assistance that food banks and food charities provide to people in need.”
Deficit reduction is the sacred excuse for such cruelty, but the first could be achieved without the second. Two of the most expensive programs are food stamps, the cost of which has justifiably soared since the beginning of the Great Recession, and direct subsidy payments.
This pits the ability of poor people to eat — not well, but sort of enough — against the production of agricultural commodities. That would be a difficult choice if the subsidies were going to farmers who could be crushed by failure, but in reality most direct payments go to those who need them least.
Among them is Congressman Stephen Fincher, Republican of Tennessee, who justifies SNAP cuts by quoting 2 Thessalonians 3:10: “For even when we were with you, we gave you this command: Anyone unwilling to work should not eat.” …
This would be just another amusing/depressing example of an elected official ignoring a huge part of his constituency (about one in seven Americans rely on food stamps, though it’s one in five in Tennessee, the second highest rate in the South), were not Fincher himself a hypocrite.
For the God-fearing Fincher is one of the largest recipients of U.S.D.A. farm subsidies in Tennessee history; he raked in $3.48 million in taxpayer cash from 1999 to 2012, $70,574 last year alone. The average SNAP recipient in Tennessee gets $132.20 in food aid a month; Fincher received $193 a day. (You can eat pretty well on that.)
Fincher is not alone in disgrace, even among his Congressional colleagues, but he makes a lovely poster boy for a policy that steals taxpayer money from the poor and so-called middle class to pay the rich, while propping up a form of agriculture that’s unsustainable and poisonous….
As a person of faith, this is why I pray to the Trickster God that every “pious” person gets the religious desserts of the creed they profess in life. Because, from my readings, I think that Jesus guy would most certainly have some creative rebuttal waiting when Rep. Fincher shows up at those pearly gates — say, for instance, requiring Fincher to pack every cent of that three-point-five-mil, in Sacajawea dollars, into the bodily orifice of his choice.
Open Thread: New Candidate for ‘Worst Person in the World’Post + Comments (125)