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Friday, January 31, 2014

"...the development of self-thinking individuals."


"Warner Bros. has just announced that Jesse Eisenberg will play Lex Luthor and Jeremy Irons will play Alfred in Batman vs. Superman."
TSA, still useless. - TSA Agent Confession - POLITICO Magazine: 
"I hated it from the beginning. It was a job that had me patting down the crotches of children, the elderly and even infants as part of the post-9/11 airport security show. I confiscated jars of homemade apple butter on the pretense that they could pose threats to national security. I was even required to confiscate nail clippers from airline pilots—the implied logic being that pilots could use the nail clippers to hijack the very planes they were flying.

Once, in 2008, I had to confiscate a bottle of alcohol from a group of Marines coming home from Afghanistan. It was celebration champagne intended for one of the men in the group—a young, decorated soldier. He was in a wheelchair, both legs lost to an I.E.D., and it fell to me to tell this kid who would never walk again that his homecoming champagne had to be taken away in the name of national security. There I was, an aspiring satire writer, earnestly acting on orders straight out of Catch-22...

In private, most TSA officers I talked to told me they felt the agency’s day-to-day operations represented an abuse of public trust and funds.

...all TSA officers worked with a secret list printed on small slips of paper that many of us taped to the back of our TSA badges for easy reference: the Selectee Passport List...  The selectee list was purely political, of course, with diplomacy playing its role as always: There was no Saudi Arabia or Pakistan on a list of states historically known to harbor, aid and abet terrorists...

We knew the full-body scanners didn’t work before they were even installed. Not long after the Underwear Bomber incident, all TSA officers at O’Hare were informed that training for the Rapiscan Systems full-body scanners would soon begin. The machines cost about $150,000 a pop. Our instructor was a balding middle-aged man who shrugged his shoulders after everything he said, as though in apology. At the conclusion of our crash course, one of the officers in our class asked him to tell us, off the record, what he really thought about the machines. “They’re shit,” he said, shrugging. He said we wouldn’t be able to distinguish plastic explosives from body fat and that guns were practically invisible if they were turned sideways in a pocket."

 
 

"Obama: Well, first of all, what is and isn't a Schedule I narcotic is a job for Congress. 
Tapper: I think it's the DEA that decides that. 
Obama: It's not something by ourselves that we start changing. No, there are laws undergirding those determinations. 

...notice that Obama at first denied that the executive branch has the power to reschedule drugs, saying "what is and isn't a Schedule I narcotic is a job for Congress." As Tapper pointed out, that's not true. While Congress can amend the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) to increase or reduce restrictions on particular drugs, the statute also gives that power to the attorney general, who has delegated it to the Drug Enforcement Administration (a division of the Justice Department). In fact, the DEA has repeatedly rejected petitions to reschedule marijuana, most recently in 2011. I forget: Who was president then?

...Apparently Obama forgot too. Obama often speaks as if he is an outside observer of his own administration—condemning excessively long prison sentences while hardly ever using his clemency power to shorten them, sounding the alarm about his own abuses of executive power in the name of fighting terrorism, worrying about the threat to privacy posed by surveillance programs he authorized. Now here he is, trying to distance himself from his own administration's refusal to reclassify marijuana."


‘The Simpsons’ Already Predicted Who’ll Win Super Bowl 48 in 2005—Back - BroBible.com: 

"Dating sites exist to make a profit, and that means by necessity and in accord with the nature of their market and consumer sentiment they must push a silo full of pretty lies. If they were to come out and say “ugly, fat and older women and boring, poor and loser men need not apply”, that would cut into revenues. "



  

 *BREAKING NEWS*




Omaha cop, fired for beating suspect, then raiding house of citizen who recorded him, is back on the job - Boing Boing: 
"Omaha police officer Bradley D Canterbury was fired after he beat up a suspect and then participated in a brutal, illegal retaliatory raid on the home of a citizen who'd video-recorded the incident. Canterbury was one of over 30 Omaha police officers who broke into a family home without a warrant intending to destroy mobile phone video evidence of his violent actions, and was one of six officers from that cohort who were fired for the beating. Now he's got his job back."


Utah’s police reform movement confronts political realities: 
"Courts and policymakers typically talk about these raids in terms of “no-knock” and “knock and announce.” There’s long legal and common-law history behind the requirement that police knock and announce before entering a residence. So court rulings have naturally focused on hashing out when that requirement can and can’t be discarded. But in the real world, the difference between the two is negligible. If the police are serving a warrant on your home at 3 a.m., whether they immediately batter down your door or they knock, announce themselves, and wait 10 seconds before commencing with the battering ram is of little consequence to you. If you’re asleep in a back bedroom, you probably aren’t going to hear them. When you wake up, you’re going to be terrified, confused, and disoriented, especially since these raids are designed to confuse, disorient, and overwhelm the occupants of the house."



"1. Tools and methods
2. Overseas USG locations from which operations are undertaken
3. Foreign officials and systems that NSA has targeted
4. Encryption that NSA has broken
5. Identity of ISPs and platforms that NSA has penetrated or attempted to penetrate
6. Identities of cooperating companies and governments
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