The Breakfast Club (1812)

Did I tell you I spent a summer at Boston University ‘studying’ Journalism?

Perhaps that’s too strong a word though my professor was an actual practicing Journalist and I learned a lot from him, maybe more than he realized at the time since I was by all outward appearances a slacker who spent my days playing Dungeons and Dragons and my nights at Franken’Furters drinking every beer known in the world alphabetically and watching silent movies.

It was there I picked up my first stalker, a guy who had a 500 page manuscript of the Doctor meeting every other science fictional character ever which he would shove under my door in under door shovable installments with a yellow post-it that had a crudely drawn cartoon bomb pasted on top.

I was nice to him, once…, well actually continuously, because I’d really read them and then return them sans post-it by leaving them stuck to my dorm room door while I was in fact about as far away as the T would take me.

Unlike my stalker I had friends, wierd friends, but friends and on a day that was not the 4th of July we went down to the Esplanade to watch the Pops do a recycle.

I suppose it was the weather but our evening was hardly better.  We were able to park ourselves in the front row and could barely see the Shell.  The fireworks mere thumps and splashes of light in the fog.  It wasn’t actually raining but we were happy enough to duck into a pizza joint near Copley where I heard this song for the first time and knew that Disco was dead Jim dead.

Oh, 1812.  Well Journalism is just the first draft of History and I was never an English major, no market for it.

I still have somewhere in my dusty vault Antal Doráti’s 1954 Mercury recording with the overdubbed West Point cannon and satanically reversed Yale Carillon.  Other than the thumps it’s hard to point out why it’s a 4th of July staple.  The piece is even internally inconsistent, La Marseillaise was banned in 1805 (for those of you who consider time stamps important) and there was no ‘official’ Russian anthem until 1815.  This is the kind of trivia that makes you a Cliff Clavin Jeopardy wiz so pay attention.

It was personally conducted by Tchaikovsky in 1891 at the opening of Carnegie Hall in New York City.

So this is how sausage is made-

Wars on the other hand…

Asia is huge and to think you can take out a whole people by merely conquering a few cities is folly.

They live here.  Eventually you will go away,

Napoleon wasted his entire Army and Empire on that.  I was a History Major and those who do not remember are condemned to repeat.

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

Requiem for a Nun Act 1, scene 3

Obligatories and news below.

Obligatories

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

I would never make fun of LaEscapee or blame PhilJD.  And I am highly organized.

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.

–Julius Caesar (I, ii, 140-141)

This Day in History

News

German Man Arrested as Spy Implicates U.S.

By ALISON SMALE, The New York Times

JULY 4, 2014

In the latest turn in the yearlong tensions with Germany over American spying, a German man was arrested this week on suspicion of passing secret documents to a foreign power, believed to be the United States. The American ambassador, John B. Emerson, was summoned to the Foreign Office here and urged to help with what German officials called a swift clarification of the case.

…

After the Snowden disclosures, Mr. Obama ordered a complete review of spying on allies and partners. In an interview last week, the new director of the N.S.A., Adm. Michael S. Rogers, said that review had resulted in the termination of a number of spying operations, not because they were illegal, but because they were unwise.

But in conversations with German officials over the past year, the Obama administration has made it clear that its commitment extends only to Ms. Merkel herself, and not other German officials. That was one of many sources of tension as the two countries, which traditionally share intelligence on terrorism suspects and nuclear proliferation, struggled and failed to reach a new accord.

But in conversations with German officials over the past year, the Obama administration has made it clear that its commitment extends only to Ms. Merkel herself, and not other German officials.

Facebook denies emotion contagion study had government and military ties

Samuel Gibbs, The Guardian

Friday 4 July 2014 06.28 EDT

Several publications alleged that because one of the key academic researchers on the study, Professor Jeffrey Hancock at Cornell, previously had ties with the Minerva Initiative that the Facebook “emotion contagion” work could have been in service of the US military.

The Minerva initiative was launched in 2008, the year of the global banking crisis, and was established to allow the department to partner with universities “to improve DoD’s basic understanding of the social, cultural, behavioural, and political forces that shape regions of the world of strategic importance to the US”.

…

The project aims to determine “the critical mass (tipping point)” of social contagions by studying their “digital traces” in the cases of “the 2011 Egyptian revolution, the 2011 Russian Duma elections, the 2012 Nigerian fuel subsidy crisis and the 2013 Gazi park protests in Turkey.”

Yeah… right…

With Democrats split on inequality issues, Obama shifts talk away from income gap

By Zachary A. Goldfarb, Washington Post

July 4 at 6:37 PM

After making fighting income inequality an early focus of his second term, President Obama has largely abandoned talk of the subject this election year in a move that highlights the emerging debate within the Democratic Party over economic populism and its limits.

During the first half of this year, Obama shifted from income inequality to the more politically palatable theme of lifting the middle class, focusing on issues such as the minimum wage and the gender pay gap that are thought to resonate with a broader group of voters.

The pivot is striking for a president who identified inequality as one of his top concerns after his reelection, calling it “a fundamental threat to the American Dream, our way of life and what we stand for around the globe.”

The shift also underscores the ongoing dispute between the Democratic Party’s liberal and moderate wings over how to address inequality issues. Whereas the left takes a more combative tone, seeking to focus on the income gap and what it views as the harmful influence of big business and Wall Street, more centrist forces in the party favor an emphasis on less-divisive issues.

Umm… make that Conservative Democratic and Republican-lite wings.

The Voice of the Versailles Villagers-

For Obama, loss of the Senate could be freeing

Dana Milbank, Washington Post

July 4 at 3:21 PM

There would be no more excuses for Republicans’ failure to put forward their own health-care plan, immigration proposals, specific cuts to popular government programs, and pet causes involving abortion, birth control and gay rights. This would set up real clashes with Obama – who could employ the veto pen he hasn’t used a single time since Republicans gained control of the House in 2010 – and sharp contrasts that would put him on the winning side of public opinion.

…

Of course, there is a third scenario, in which a Republican Senate majority only makes Obama miserable. Norm Ornstein , Congress watcher nonpareil, predicts Republicans would halt executive-branch confirmations, leaving the administration weak and understaffed. Remaining staffers would be hamstrung as they try to comply with a new wave of congressional subpoenas. And Republicans may content themselves simply to keep the legislative process shut. “Luring them into a further layer of craziness has advantages,” Ornstein said, but “the danger for Obama is what resonates with the public is he’s the president: Why the hell can’t he get it done?”

A unified Republican Congress could also force Obama to accept rollbacks of Obamacare and other Democratic achievements by attaching the rollbacks to must-pass legislation. Michael Tomasky argued in the Daily Beast that a Republican majority would “take as many bites as it can out of what Obama has accomplished in the last six years.”

USS Constitution Ventures Out for July 4th Turnaround

By Jon Palmer, Boston Globe

July 4, 2014 8:11 PM

The USS Constitution, the oldest commissioned warship still afloat, went out for her annual Independence Day tour Friday-but the ship will not take part in the ceremony again until 2018, as it is scheduled for res(t)oration work beginning early next year.

Pentagon grounds all F35’s over engine problems, runway fire

By James Rosen, McClatchy

July 4, 2014

While the Pentagon said the root cause of the fire in the plane’s rear is still under investigation, air-worthiness officials with the Air Force and the Navy ordered additional inspections of F-35 engines.

…

Different military services have their own versions of the F-35. The Air Force grounded its planes last week within days of the June 23 fire. The Pentagon decision Thursday removes the Navy and Marine Corps versions of the jet from service.

…

Already the costliest weapons system in U.S. history with a projected price tag of almost $400 billion for 2,443 aircraft planned for production, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter has been plagued by a series of software and hardware problems, including bulkhead cracks, since manufacturing began in 2006. The cost has risen 70 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars since design started in 2001.

…

NATO members and other U.S. allies have paid for some of the F-35’s development costs. Six countries, all members of the Western military alliance, have ordered from two to 72 of the aircraft, but only Britain’s Royal Air Force has any in use, with three also in testing phase. Israel, Canada, Japan and South Korea have announced plans to purchase between 40 and 75 of the jets.

The Pentagon said it will decide next week whether the F-35 can participate as scheduled in two international airshows in the United Kingdom later this month.

Taliban insurgents set oil tankers ablaze in Afghanistan

Reuters

Sat Jul 5, 2014 8:48am EDT

Taliban insurgents set fire on Saturday to about 200 oil tanker trucks supplying fuel for NATO forces in an attack just outside the Afghan capital Kabul, police said.

Television footage showed black smoke billowing above the site of the attack, with the charred wreckage of dozens of trucks scattered around a vast parking space.

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack, saying the trucks carried fuel intended for U.S.-led NATO forces.

The BBC Doesn’t Want to Be Forgotten by Google

By Joshua Brustein, Business Week

July 03, 2014

The 2007 article in question, “Merrill’s mess,”  discusses Merrill Lynch’s (BAC) huge losses on securities backed by subprime mortgages. Today it reads as a minor but prescient piece of historical color, foreshadowing major losses by financial institutions and a credit crunch creating difficulties for weaker borrowers.

Peston says that Google sent the BBC a notification on Wednesday: “Notice of removal from Google Search,” it read, according to an article Peston posted to the BBC’s website. “We regret to inform you that we are no longer able to show the following pages from your website in response to certain searches on European versions of Google.” Following was the URL to the 2007 article. This doesn’t mean that the article disappears from the Internet, only that people typing a particular combination of words into Google’s search engine will no longer see it.

…

BBC isn’t the only European media outlet complaining about Google’s action. The Guardian says that six of its articles have disappeared from searches, including three about Dougie McDonald, a Scottish soccer referee who was forced to resign after lying about why he granted a controversial penalty kick in a professional match. “There will likely be many more as the rich and powerful look to scrub up their online images, doubtless with the help of a new wave of ‘reputation management’ firms,” the newspaper writes.

After BNP, U.S. targets range of firms in crackdown on illicit money flows

By Aruna Viswanatha, Reuters

Tue Jul 1, 2014 5:31pm EDT

At the heart of this effort is a 12-prosecutor Money Laundering and Bank Integrity Unit within the Justice Department that was created in 2010. It handled the investigation into BNP for U.S. sanction law violations, primarily involving Sudan deals, as well as large money laundering and sanctions cases in recent years against HSBC Holdings Plc, ING Bank N.V. and others.

Leslie Caldwell, who leads the criminal division at Justice Department, said in an interview that the unit has its sights set on a range of firms potentially involved in illicit money flows.

…

The shift has put the financial industry on watch, after prosecutors failed to land high-profile criminal cases stemming from the financial crisis and turned their attention to other types of criminal activity within the financial industry. Banks have responded by hiring thousands of new compliance experts and spending millions of dollars to improve their programs.

“I would put the investigation of financial institutions for laundering proceeds of official corruption pretty high on the list of risks,” said Michael Dawson, who coordinates the global compliance practice at the consulting firm Promontory Financial Group. “After you look at the sanctions cases, official corruption looms large as a risk on the horizon.”

…

Sources said the unit is increasingly investigating actors across the two dozen types of companies covered by the Bank Secrecy Act. Among the sectors covered by the act are broker-dealers, jewelry and auto dealers, casinos, insurance companies, and shipping companies.

The Justice Department has already gone after a handful of such institutions, including check cashers in Brooklyn, Philadelphia and Los Angeles that assisted healthcare fraudsters by failing to report $50 million in transactions, and money transfer company MoneyGram whose agents were allegedly involved in $100 million in fraud schemes targeting the elderly. MoneyGram agreed to forfeit $100 million and enter a deferred prosecution agreement over the conduct in November 2012. It said at that time that it takes compliance seriously and had created a new anti-fraud program.

Virtual currencies have also emerged as a major focus, in the wake of the unit’s 2013 indictment of digital currency exchange Liberty Reserve, its founders and other employees who allegedly helped criminals launder more than $6 billion in proceeds.

Attorneys from the Justice Department’s asset forfeiture and money laundering section, which oversees the mlbiu unit, have also worked closely with a new FBI unit to help trace the assets of corrupt foreign leaders, traveling to Ukraine to help recover assets allegedly stolen by former President Viktor Yanukovich’s government.

Those efforts could also unearth information about which banks may have looked the other way to move proceeds of corruption, or may not have had required procedures in place, sources said.

Blogs

• ‘Opie And Anthony’ Host Fired By SiriusXM After This Brutally Racist Tirade On Twitter By Judd Legum, Think Progress
• One-Percent Authors Want To End Destructive Conflict, Bring Order to the Galaxy by Barry Eisler, Tech Dirt
• Fracking Company Offers Pennsylvania Residents $50,000 In Hush Money If They Promise Not to Sue By Naveena Sadasivam, Alternet
• [Sen. Leahy: Real NSA Reform or Kill the Bill Sen. Leahy: Real NSA Reform or Kill the Bill
  
  By: Zach Tomanelli, Firedog Lake
• Oil-By-Rail: A Battle Between “Right to Know” & “Need to Know”
  
  By: Steve Horn, Firedog Lake
• Facebook Mood Manipulation Experiment Connected To Department Of Defense
  
  By: DSWright, Firedog Lake
• NSA Whistleblowers Testify on ‘Totalitarian Mentality’ of NSA at German Parliamentary Committee Hearing
  
  By: Kevin Gosztola, Firedog Lake

The Big Wind Up

Hard against my next deadline and it’s the 4th, cut me some slack jack.  Catch you next week with more culture and edumacation.