The Breakfast Club (Animals)

Almost everyone is familiar with today’s featured piece as it’s very popular and frequently performed, especially at Young People’s Concerts which were one of my favorites on CBS back in the day.  Hard to imagine a network doing something like that now.

But I was always weird, listened to WQXR before I picked up News Radio 88 (with traffic and weather together on the eights at 8, 18, 28, 38, 48, and 58 minutes past the hour).

The themes are used in many movies and commercials and it’s very, very short (for those with limited attention spans).

To Camille Saint-Saëns it was an elaborate musical joke, intended for private performances with his friends.  He’d just finished a Smell the Glove like tour of Germany and was pretty fed up with the music scene as you can tell by the titles of some of the sections (Wild Asses, Personages with Long Ears, Pianists, Fossils, c’mon)

Today’s clip is an abridged version, which I don’t normally do, a full version is below along with some other ‘long haired’ music.

“The Turtle”, “The Mule”, “The Cuckoo” and “The Swan” are omitted, a brief version of “The Pianists” is heard in the end credits, and the verse for “The Mule” is tacked onto the verse for “The Jackass.”

Also below- Obligatories and News.

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

Strong quake off Japan injures 3, triggers small tsunami

BNO News

7/12/14

A strong earthquake struck off northeastern Japan on early Saturday morning, injuring three people and triggering a small tsunami that caused no damage, Japanese officials said. Hundreds of people were evacuated after a tsunami advisory was issued.

The 6.8-magnitude earthquake at 4:22 a.m. local time (1922 GMT Friday) was centered about 129 kilometers (80 miles) east-southeast of Namie, a coastal town in Fukushima Prefecture that was devastated by the 2011 earthquake-tsunami disaster and the resulting nuclear crisis. Saturday’s earthquake struck at a depth of just 10 kilometers (6.2 miles).

…

Officials at Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) said there were no reports of irregularities at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Fukushima Prefecture.

Fukushima nuclear professionals quit in droves

By Yuri Kageyama, The Associated Press

July 11, 2014

Engineers and other employees at TEPCO, or Tokyo Electric Power Co., were once typical of Japan’s corporate culture famous for prizing loyalty to a single company and lifetime employment with it. But the March 2011 tsunami that swamped the coastal Fukushima Dai-ichi plant, sending three reactors into meltdown, changed that.

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Only 134 people quit TEPCO the year before the disaster. The departures ballooned to 465 in 2011, another 712 in 2012 and 488 last year. Seventy per cent of those leaving were younger than 40. When the company offered voluntary retirement for the first time earlier this year, some 1,151 workers applied for the 1,000 available redundancy packages.

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The Fukushima stigma is such that some employees hide the fact they work at the plant. They even worry they will be turned away at restaurants or that their children will be bullied at school after a government report documented dozens of cases of discrimination. While TEPCO is out of favour with the public, the skills and experience of its employees that span the gamut of engineers, project managers, maintenance workers and construction and financial professionals, are not.

Germany demands public promise from US to end spying

Dan Roberts, The Guardian

Friday 11 July 2014 18.32 EDT

Germany is determined to extract a public commitment from the US over future spying activity during talks with John Kerry this weekend, despite a White House preference to try to mend their battered diplomatic relationship behind closed doors.

…

During its first substantive comments on the allegations earlier in the day, the White House appeared to accuse German officials of feigning naivety over the affair and questioned why they could not make their complaints in private.

“Countries with sophisticated intelligence agencies like both the United States and Germany understand what intelligence activities and relationships entail,” said Obama’s spokesman Josh Earnest. “When concerns arise, there are benefits to resolving those differences in private secure channels”.

But German officials believe that a domestic political audience already rocked by Edward Snowden’s revelations of bulk data collection and surveillance of chancellor Merkel’s mobile phone will not be satisfied by anything less than a public commitment from the Americans to curtail future espionage activity in Germany.

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Anger is running so high in Berlin that several earlier overtures by the US have this week been rejected by Berlin, which instead asked the CIA’s station chief to leave the country.

The Guardian has confirmed that CIA director John Brennan previously offered to come to Germany to discuss its concerns but has so far been rebuffed by officials in Berlin, who believe he must commit to something more substantive before they agree to meet.

And Bloomberg News reported on Friday that US ambassador John Emerson even offered to strike an intelligence-sharing agreement similar to the so-called “five eyes” deal between the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, but saw his offer spurned by Merkel.

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(D)omestic anti-surveillance laws prevent Germany from offering the same level of shared intelligence as English-speaking allies do.

Instead, the German government is seeking an “informal agreement” or “common understanding” over future US intelligence activity in the country, ideally one that does not commit Germany to carrying out yet more surveillance itself in return.

Germany defends CIA chief’s expulsion as ‘necessary’

Derek Scally, The Irish Times

Sat, Jul 12, 2014, 01:00

In advance of a meeting in Vienna today with his US colleague John Kerry, on the fringes of a conference, Mr Steinmeier struck a more conciliatory tone and described Berlin’s partnership with Washington as “without alternative”.

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“It would be an illusion to think it would be possible to succeed in defusing conflicts and finding political solutions . . . without close co-operation with the US,” said Mr Steinmeier. “This partnership should not just be based on trust but also mutual respect.”

His Social Democrat (SPD) colleague Heiko Maas, the federal justice minister, struck a more strident note and called on the US to assist Berlin in investigations into double agents inside the government. “We need clarity about possible further espionage cases, of of which we are not yet aware,” said he said.

NSA surveillance data: UK access to information faces legal challenge

Patrick Wintour and Rowena Mason, The Guardian

Friday 11 July 2014 15.18 EDT

The case is being brought by an alliance of privacy groups in front of the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, a security services oversight body that normally deliberates in private, but will hear legal arguments in public over five days next week. Some of the arguments are likely to cover the legal basis by which the UK intelligence agencies can intercept the data of foreign phone and internet companies. The case has been in preparation since last August, and part of it will revolve on the right of agencies to access material communicated between two people in Britain that is routed through a foreign server.

The emergency data retention and investigatory powers bill, unveiled this week by David Cameron, will impose for the first time a duty on foreign-based internet companies with subsidiaries in the UK to cooperate with surveillance requests by UK agencies. The new laws have also been prompted by the European court of justice in April striking down an EU directive on which the UK security services relied to access data.

The home secretary, Theresa May, will be cross-examined by the home affairs select committee on Monday, with the Commons due to pass the bill in one day on Tuesday and the Lords on Wednesday and Thursday. MPs including Labour’s Tom Watson and the Conservatives’ David Davis, have raised concerns that the legislation is being brought in too fast to allow proper scrutiny by parliament.

The ultimate goal of the NSA is total population control

Antony Loewenstein, The Guardian

Thursday 10 July 2014 19.54 EDT

William Binney is one of the highest-level whistleblowers to ever emerge from the NSA. He was a leading code-breaker against the Soviet Union during the Cold War but resigned soon after September 11, disgusted by Washington’s move towards mass surveillance.

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“At least 80% of fibre-optic cables globally go via the US”, Binney said. “This is no accident and allows the US to view all communication coming in. At least 80% of all audio calls, not just metadata, are recorded and stored in the US. The NSA lies about what it stores.”

The NSA will soon be able to collect 966 exabytes a year, the total of internet traffic annually. Former Google head Eric Schmidt once argued that the entire amount of knowledge from the beginning of humankind until 2003 amount to only five exabytes.

Binney, who featured in a 2012 short film by Oscar-nominated US film-maker Laura Poitras, described a future where surveillance is ubiquitous and government intrusion unlimited.

“The ultimate goal of the NSA is total population control”, Binney said, “but I’m a little optimistic with some recent Supreme Court decisions, such as law enforcement mostly now needing a warrant before searching a smartphone.”

…

“The Fisa court has only the government’s point of view”, he argued. “There are no other views for the judges to consider. There have been at least 15-20 trillion constitutional violations for US domestic audiences and you can double that globally.”

A Fisa court in 2010 allowed the NSA to spy on 193 countries around the world, plus the World Bank, though there’s evidence that even the nations the US isn’t supposed to monitor – Five Eyes allies Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand – aren’t immune from being spied on. It’s why encryption is today so essential to transmit information safely.

Binney recently told the German NSA inquiry committee that his former employer had a “totalitarian mentality” that was the “greatest threat” to US society since that country’s US Civil War in the 19th century. Despite this remarkable power, Binney still mocked the NSA’s failures, including missing this year’s Russian intervention in Ukraine and the Islamic State’s take-over of Iraq.

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It’s not just internet experts warning about the internet’s colonisation by state and corporate power. One of Europe’s leading web creators, Lena Thiele, presented her stunning series Netwars in London on the threat of cyber warfare. She showed how easy it is for governments and corporations to capture our personal information without us even realising.

Thiele said that the US budget for cyber security was US$67 billion in 2013 and will double by 2016. Much of this money is wasted and doesn’t protect online infrastructure. This fact doesn’t worry the multinationals making a killing from the gross exaggeration of fear that permeates the public domain.

Chinese man charged with hacking into US fighter jet plans

Associated Press

Friday 11 July 2014 22.55 EDT

The three hackers targeted fighter jets such as the F-22 and the F-35 as well as Boeing’s C-17 military cargo aircraft programme, according to a criminal complaint filed in US district court in Los Angeles that was unsealed on Thursday.

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It was reported on Wednesday that Chinese hackers broke into the computer networks of the Office of Personnel Management earlier in 2014 with the intention of accessing the files of tens of thousands of federal employees who had applied for top-secret security clearances. Senior US officials say the hackers gained access to some of the agency’s databases in March before the threat was detected and blocked.

Iraq Kurds claim oilfields as bombings kill 28

by Muhammad Iqbal, Business Recorder

Saturday, 12 July 2014 02:31

The escalating row between Baghdad and the Kurds and the blasts in disputed Kirkuk province, which killed mostly refugees from fighting elsewhere, came just two days before a planned parliamentary session to revive flagging efforts to form a new government.

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“Production at the new fields under Kurdish control will be used primarily to fill the shortage of refined products in the domestic market,” it said, adding that staff from the federal North Oil Company could either cooperate with new management or leave.

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Control over Kirkuk and its oil wealth would be the realisation of a long-held Kurdish dream, and Barzani’s announcement this month that a referendum on independence was in the works has infuriated the Shiite Arab premier.

The escalating war of words between Maliki and the Kurds has already cast a pall over the parliamentary session slated for Sunday, and Kurdish ministers said Maliki’s stance “only served the enemies of Iraq and the terrorists” and announced they were boycotting cabinet sessions.

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As the Baghdad-Kurdish row deepened, Sunni militants captured multiple areas west of Anbar provincial capital Ramadi in fighting that began Thursday afternoon, killing 11 police, bombing a police station and capturing another, an officer and a doctor said.

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The fall of Ramadi, where anti-government fighters have held shifting areas since early this year, would be a major advance for the jihadist-led militants who have overrun large areas of five provinces, including parts of Anbar, since June 9.

It could increase the threat to the capital by solidifying militant positions in Anbar and breaking the isolation of insurgent-held Fallujah, only a short drive west of Baghdad.

Kerry Pushes for Solution to Afghanistan Election Crisis

By MATTHEW ROSENBERG and CARLOTTA GALL, The New York Times

JULY 11, 2014

The Obama administration had hoped that after years of frustration with President Hamid Karzai, a successful election in Afghanistan would finally produce a leader who could stabilize the country while working with the United States to allow an orderly withdrawal of American troops and end its longest war.

Yet nearly a month after a runoff election to choose Afghanistan’s next president, Secretary of State John Kerry arrived here on Friday for a hastily arranged visit aimed at resolving a crisis that began with allegations of widespread vote rigging. It now threatens to fracture Afghanistan’s fragile government as American-led combat troops are preparing to complete their withdrawal.

Both candidates, Abdullah Abdullah and Ashraf Ghani, have acknowledged that fraud marred the election, and yet each campaign has claimed victory, with Mr. Abdullah this week threatening to declare himself president, raising the specter of an ethnically and regionally divided Afghanistan.

“If Abdullah goes for it and declares himself president, forget it, this is over,” said a former Afghan official who remains close to many of Afghanistan’s top security officials. “Fighting the Taliban won’t even be an issue because who is going to do it? The army will be split. So will the police.”

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After years of watching American officials fold after being rebuffed by Mr. Karzai, few here give much credence to American threats to pull out troops and cut aid. And each successive crisis over election fraud – this year’s is the third in five years, including the parliamentary elections in 2010 – has diminished the faith of many Afghans in the government erected by the United States.

C.D.C. Closes Anthrax and Flu Labs After Accidents

By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr., The New York Times

JULY 11, 2014

In one episode last month, at least 62 C.D.C. employees may have been exposed to live anthrax bacteria after potentially infectious samples were sent to laboratories unequipped to handle them. Employees not wearing protective gear worked with bacteria that were supposed to have been killed but may not have been. All were offered a vaccine and antibiotics, and the agency said it believed no one was in danger.

In a second accident, disclosed Friday, a C.D.C. lab accidentally contaminated a relatively benign flu sample with a dangerous H5N1 bird flu strain that has killed 386 people since 2003. Fortunately, a United States Agriculture Department laboratory realized that the strain was more dangerous than expected and alerted the C.D.C.

In addition to those mistakes, Dr. Frieden also announced Friday that two of six vials of smallpox recently found stored in a National Institutes of Health laboratory since 1954 contained live virus capable of infecting people.

This is what happened when I drove my Mercedes to pick up food stamps

By Darlena Cunha, Washington Post

July 8

I grew up in a white, affluent suburb, where failure seemed harder than success. In college, I studied biology and journalism. I worked for good money at a local hospital, which afforded me the opportunity to network at journalism conferences. That’s how I landed my first news job as an associate producer in Hartford, Conn. I climbed the ladder quickly, free to work any hours in any location for any pay. I moved from market to market, always achieving a better title, a better salary. Succeeding.

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The weeks flew by. My boyfriend proposed, and we bought a house. Then, just three weeks after we closed, the market crashed. The house we’d paid $240,000 for was suddenly worth $150,000. It was okay, though – we were still making enough money to cover the exorbitant mortgage payments. Then we weren’t.

…

Two weeks before my children were born, my future husband found himself staring at a pink slip. The days of unemployment turned into weeks, months, and, eventually, years.

Then my kids were born, six weeks early. They were just three pounds each at birth, barely the length of my shoe. We fed them through a little tube we attached to our pinky fingers because their mouths weren’t strong enough to suckle. We spent 10 days in the hospital waiting for them to increase in size. They never did. Try as I might, I couldn’t get my babies to put on weight. With their lives at risk, I switched from breast milk to formula, at about $15 a can. We went through dozens a week.

In just two months, we’d gone from making a combined $120,000 a year to making just $25,000 and leeching out funds to a mortgage we couldn’t afford. Our savings dwindled, then disappeared.

So I did what I had to do. I signed up for Medicaid and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children.

It’s not easy. To qualify, you must be pregnant or up to six months postpartum. I had to fill out at least six forms and furnish my Social Security card, birth certificate and marriage license. I sat through exams, meetings and screenings. They had a lot of questions about the house: Wasn’t it an asset? Hadn’t we just bought it? They questioned every last cent we’d ever made. Did we have stock options or pensions? Did we have savings? I had to send them my three most recent check stubs to prove I was making as little as I said I was.

On top of this, I had to get my vitals checked and blood work taken to determine whether I was at risk of improper nourishment without the program. It’s very bourgeois. Not. But I did it.

Blogs

• Animal Rights Activists Who Freed Minks Are Indicted on Federal Terrorism Charges By: Kevin Gosztola, Firedog Lake
• The Massive Gap Between What Young People Wanted From Health Care Reform and What They Got By: Jon Walker, Firedog Lake
• PapaDick and BabyDick Try to Sustain the Terror Industry By emptywheel
• If TPP Is So Important, Why Are Those It’s Supposed To ‘Help’ Fighting Against It? by Mike Masnick, TechDirt
• My advice, whether you want it or not- 1 by riverdaughter, The Confluence
• MERS Loses Major Case in Pennsylvania by Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism
• Maine Supreme Court Hands Major Defeat to MERS Mortgage Registry by Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism
• France Has Hissy Fit Over BNP Paribas Fine and Dollar Dominance by Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism
• Opinion: Punish bankers not banks for crimes By Yves Smith, Special to CNN
• Survey of Bankers Unintentionally Documents their Depravity By William K. Black, New Economic Perspectives

(h/t TMC)

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More ‘Long Hair’ Music