April 2011 archive

Gaius Publius’ account of Michigan State Police downloading the entire contents of your cell phone didn’t exactly escape my attention, but was hardly the focus of my earlier piece (which is that it can happen at all and is happening right now).

Police in Michigan have been, apparently illegally, snooping through the mobile phones of anyone they wish at traffic stops. (Yes, traffic stops.) They have a high-tech snooping device that can download everything in 1.5 minutes, including hidden files. The device can also reportedly defeat password-protection.

There have been subsequent developments.

Sen. Franken calls for investigation of Apple iPhone spying

by Gaius Publius on 4/21/2011 05:49:00 PM

Not all that breathlessly noteworthy in my opinion, what would you expect Al to say (unless he has the common Hollywood Apple blindness)?

On the other hand there are some potentially interesting aspects to this-

MI State Police: We have nothing to hide, that is why we have been stonewalling ACLU for 3 years

by John Aravosis (DC) on 4/21/2011 07:30:00 PM

(T)here are reports that the Michigan State Police are downloading the entire cell phone contents, included deleted records (such as text messages and emails), of people stopped for simply traffic violations. The ACLU, three years ago, filed a FOIA request to determine exactly what the Michigan State Police were up to. The State Police stonewalled, for three years. Now because the news has gone national, suddenly they’re talking, and sent Gaius a statement, published below. But they still haven’t complied with the ACLU’s FOIA request, which would prove whether the Police are violating people’s privacy or not.

Well worth a read.

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

April 22 is the 112th day of the year (113th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 253 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1978, The Blues Brothers make their world premiere on Saturday Night Live.

It was Marshall Checker, of the legendary Checker brothers, who first discovered them in the gritty blues clubs of Chicago’s South Side in 1969 and handed them their big break nine years later with an introduction to music-industry heavyweight and host of television’s Rock Concert, Don Kirshner. Actually, none of that is true, but it’s the story that Saturday Night Live’s Paul Shaffer told on April 22, 1978 as he announced the worldwide television debut of that night’s musical guest, the Blues Brothers-the not-quite-real, not-quite-fake musical creation of SNL cast members Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi.

Origins

The genesis of the Blues Brothers was a January 17, 1976, Saturday Night Live sketch. In it, “Howard Shore and his All-Bee Band” play the Slim Harpo song “I’m a King Bee”, with Belushi singing and Aykroyd playing harmonica, dressed in the bee costumes they wore for the “Killer Bees” sketch.

Following tapings of SNL, it was popular among cast members and the weekly hosts to attend Aykroyd’s Holland Tunnel Blues bar, which he had rented not long after joining the cast. Dan and John filled a jukebox with songs from many different artists such as Sam and Dave and punk band The Viletones. John bought an amplifier and they kept some musical instruments there for anyone who wanted to jam. It was here that Dan and Ron Gwynne wrote and developed the original story which Dan turned into the initial story draft of the Blues Brothers movie, better known as the “tome” because it contained so many pages.

It was also at the bar that Aykroyd introduced Belushi to the blues. An interest soon became a fascination and it was not long before the two began singing with local blues bands. Jokingly, SNL band leader Howard Shore suggested they call themselves “The Blues Brothers.” In an April 1988 interview in the Chicago Sun-Times, Aykroyd said the Blues Brothers act borrowed from Sam & Dave and others: “Well, obviously the duo thing and the dancing, but the hats came from John Lee Hooker. The suits came from the concept that when you were a jazz player in the 40’s, 50’s 60’s, to look straight, you had to wear a suit.”

The band was also modeled in part on Aykroyd’s experience with the Downchild Blues Band, one of the first professional blues bands in Canada, with whom Aykroyd continues to play on occasion. Aykroyd first encountered the band in the early 1970s, at or around the time of his attendance at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada and where his initial interest in the blues developed through attending and occasionally performing at Ottawa’s Le Hibou Coffee House.

Earth Day’s 41st anniversary celebrated by Google

Earth Day, credited with launching modern environmental movement in US, appears as Google doodle again



If you open Google’s homepage you will be greeted by an Eden-like scene of diverse wild animals in their natural habitats.

This Google doodle, built around the search giant’s logo, is its latest celebration of Earth Day, started 41 years ago to raise awareness of and appreciation for the natural world.

The interactive scene features two pandas, one of which shocks the other with a sneeze when you place your mouse on it, a nod to this YouTube video.

Evening Edition is an Open Thread

1 New Haiti president calls for ‘collaboration’

by Andrew Gully, AFP

1 hr 56 mins ago

Full Lyrics

(h/t emptywheel)

I am not a prophet, but sometimes I have prophetic dreams, like the one where I was at a garden party.

Excuse me. Everyone, I have a brief announcement to make. Jesus was black, Ronald Reagan was the Devil, and the government is lying about 9/11. Thank you for your time and good night.

Mmm-hmm! You were havin’ that dream where you made the white people riot, weren’t you?

But I was telling the truth!

How many times have I told you, you better not even dream about tellin’ white folk the truth! You understand me? Shoot! Makin’ White people riot! You better learn how to lie like me! I’m gonna find me a white man and lie to him right now!

McClatchy Points Out Key FBI Failure in Amerithrax Investigation

By: Jim White Thursday April 21, 2011 5:58 am

In an article published Wednesday evening on their website, McClatchy points out yet another failing in the FBI’s Amerithrax investigation of the 2001 anthrax attacks that killed five people. The article focuses on the fact that the FBI was able to get a clear genetic fingerprint of a bacterial contaminant that was found in the attack material mailed to the New York Post and to Tom Brokaw (but not to either Senator Daschle or Senator Leahy). This contaminant, Bacillus subtilis, is used in some cases by weapons laboratories as an anthrax simulant, because its behavior in culture and in drying the spores is very similar to Bacillus anthracis but it is easier to handle because it is not pathogenic.  I covered the FBI’s failure to link this B. subtilis contaminant to Ivins in this diary in February of 2010.

…

Buried in the McClatchy article is an admission from a source close to the investigation that seems to shed some light on why the FBI continues to insist that Ivins was the sole attacker, even going so far as to concoct an after-the-fact “forensic psychiatric profile” in an effort to bolster their case:

“If they ever had any doubts, once he committed suicide, they had to unite,” this person said. “Otherwise, you’ve driven an innocent man to suicide. And that’s a terrible thing.”

Yes, driving a man to suicide is a terrible thing. But is it any less terrible to continue to insist on the guilt of a man who cannot conclusively be proven to have carried out these horrendous attacks ten years ago?

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”

New York Times Editorial: How Not to Plan for the Future

The agreement between Congress and the White House to virtually eliminate money for high-speed rail is harebrained. France, China, Brazil, even Russia, understand that high-speed rail is central to future development. Not Washington.

The budget package eliminated about $1 billion that President Obama had wanted to add to the current budget, and it rescinded $400 million of $2.4 billion that was already designated for high-speed rail this year.

Laura Flanders; US Lack of Investment Is Destabilizing the World

Here in the United States all we seem to hear about is deficits and debt. Yet even the countries that hold a lot of our debt are concerned for our lack of investment at home.

China’s pension fund head recently said that the US government needs to reduce not just its fiscal deficit but its trade gap, in order to maintain the dollar’s stability. US average levels need to be closer to those of developing nations and emerging markets, the manager of China’s Sovereign Wealth fund advised.

The Management Myth

By Matthew Stewart, The Atlantic

June, 2006

After I left the consulting business, in a reversal of the usual order of things, I decided to check out the management literature. Partly, I wanted to “process” my own experience and find out what I had missed in skipping business school. Partly, I had a lot of time on my hands. As I plowed through tomes on competitive strategy, business process re-engineering, and the like, not once did I catch myself thinking, Damn! If only I had known this sooner! Instead, I found myself thinking things I never thought I’d think, like, I’d rather be reading Heidegger! It was a disturbing experience. It thickened the mystery around the question that had nagged me from the start of my business career: Why does management education exist?

Management theory came to life in 1899 with a simple question: “How many tons of pig iron bars can a worker load onto a rail car in the course of a working day?” The man behind this question was Frederick Winslow Taylor, the author of The Principles of Scientific Management and, by most accounts, the founding father of the whole management business.

Taylor was forty-three years old and on contract with the Bethlehem Steel Company when the pig iron question hit him. Staring out over an industrial yard that covered several square miles of the Pennsylvania landscape, he watched as laborers loaded ninety-two-pound bars onto rail cars. There were 80,000 tons’ worth of iron bars, which were to be carted off as fast as possible to meet new demand sparked by the Spanish-American War. Taylor narrowed his eyes: there was waste there, he was certain. After hastily reviewing the books at company headquarters, he estimated that the men were currently loading iron at the rate of twelve and a half tons per man per day.

Taylor stormed down to the yard with his assistants (“college men,” he called them) and rounded up a group of top-notch lifters (“first-class men”), who in this case happened to be ten “large, powerful Hungarians.” He offered to double the workers’ wages in exchange for their participation in an experiment. The Hungarians, eager to impress their apparent benefactor, put on a spirited show. Huffing up and down the rail car ramps, they loaded sixteen and a half tons in something under fourteen minutes. Taylor did the math: over a ten-hour day, it worked out to seventy-five tons per day per man. Naturally, he had to allow time for bathroom breaks, lunch, and rest periods, so he adjusted the figure approximately 40 percent downward. Henceforth, each laborer in the yard was assigned to load forty-seven and a half pig tons per day, with bonus pay for reaching the target and penalties for failing.

When the Hungarians realized that they were being asked to quadruple their previous daily workload, they howled and refused to work. So Taylor found a “high-priced man,” a lean Pennsylvania Dutchman whose intelligence he compared to that of an ox. Lured by the promise of a 60 percent increase in wages, from $1.15 to a whopping $1.85 a day, Taylor’s high-priced man loaded forty-five and three-quarters tons over the course of a grueling day-close enough, in Taylor’s mind, to count as the first victory for the methods of modern management.

Of course, at the end of the song John Henry dies (h/t Avedon @ Eschaton).