August 2014 archive

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. Everyone’s welcome here, no special handshake required. Just check your meta at the door.

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.

This Day in History

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.

Click on images to enlarge

August 4 is the 216th day of the year (217th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 149 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1964, the remains of three civil rights workers whose disappearance on June 21 garnered national attention are found buried in an earthen dam near Philadelphia, Mississippi. Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, both white New Yorkers, had traveled to heavily segregated Mississippi in 1964 to help organize civil rights efforts on behalf of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). The third man, James Chaney, was a local African American man who had joined CORE in 1963. The disappearance of the three young men led to a massive FBI investigation that was code-named MIBURN, for “Mississippi Burning.”

On Junr 20, Schwerner returned from a civil rights training session in Ohio with 21-year-old James Chaney and 20-year-old Andrew Goodman, a new recruit to CORE. The next day–June 21–the three went to investigate the burning of the church in Neshoba. While attempting to drive back to Meridian, they were stopped by Neshoba County Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price just inside the city limits of Philadelphia, the county seat. Price, a member of the KKK who had been looking out for Schwerner or other civil rights workers, threw them in the Neshoba County jail, allegedly under suspicion for church arson.

After seven hours in jail, during which the men were not allowed to make a phone call, Price released them on bail. After escorting them out of town, the deputy returned to Philadelphia to drop off an accompanying Philadelphia police officer. As soon as he was alone, he raced down the highway in pursuit of the three civil rights workers. He caught the men just inside county limits and loaded them into his car. Two other cars pulled up filled with Klansmen who had been alerted by Price of the capture of the CORE workers, and the three cars drove down an unmarked dirt road called Rock Cut Road. Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney were shot to death and their bodies buried in an earthen dam a few miles from the Mt. Zion Methodist Church.

As noted this week at The Overhead Wire:

There has been a lot of chatter recently on the issue of fast vs slow transit.  This week is the perfect time for this discussion as two major United States transit projects of differing stripes opened up; the Metro Silver Line in Washington DC and the Tucson Streetcar.

On the one hand you have neoliberal Matthew Yglesias as the neoliberal “let us explain to you why There Are No Alternatives (TINA)” site Vox saying:

Without a dedicated lane, a streetcar can’t really run much faster than a bus under ideal conditions. And since unlike a bus, a streetcar can’t shift out of its lane to avoid an obstacle, in real-world circumstances it’s likely to move slower than a bus. There are some objectives related to real estate development and tourism that this kind of project can serve, but they’re nearly useless in terms of transportation.

And on the other hand you have the piece by Robert Steuteville at Better Cities and Towns, Place Mobility: Sometimes good transportation is slow, which observes:

The Portland streetcar has been a catalyst for $4 billion-plus investment and up to 10,000 housing units in the Pearl District and other neighborhoods close to downtown. All of these people and businesses have Place Mobility. They use the streetcar for quick trips and to make connections – it doesn’t matter that it moves very slowly because they don’t have to go far. But the new people and businesses in the Pearl and downtown are not the only beneficiaries. All of the existing businesses and residences also benefit from rising Place Mobility.

When a streetcar — or other catalyst — creates a compact, dynamic place, other kinds of mobility become possible. The densest concentrations of bike-share and car-share stations in Portland are located in the area served by the streetcar. That’s no coincidence. You can literally get anywhere without a car.

Of course, much of the “debate” falls into the logical fallacy of the false dichotomy, as if there is a choice between either having slow transit or having fast transit, when the reality is that we not only need both, but that improving either one improves the utility of the other.

I believe that you have crossed a line, Mr. Obama. At your recent press conference you very casually stated that “we tortured some folks” :

With respect to the larger point of the RDI report itself, even before I came into office I was very clear that in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 we did some things that were wrong.  We did a whole lot of things that were right, but we tortured some folks.  We did some things that were contrary to our values.

How long is the “immediate aftermath of 9/11” (of 2001)?  Is it hours, weeks, months, years – how long?

I only ask because it seems that now, almost 13 years later, you are still presiding over the administration of torture on people allegedly connected with 9/11/01.

When will you cease and desist “torturing folks?”

You go on to state:

I understand why it happened.  I think it’s important when we look back to recall how afraid people were after the Twin Towers fell and the Pentagon had been hit and the plane in Pennsylvania had fallen, and people did not know whether more attacks were imminent, and there was enormous pressure on our law enforcement and our national security teams to try to deal with this. And it’s important for us not to feel too sanctimonious in retrospect about the tough job that those folks had.

So, some “folks” tortured some other “folks,” but “we” shouldn’t be too “sanctimonious” because the “folks” who ordered and performed the torturing in extreme secrecy for the past 13 years had tough jobs?

Who the hell is this “we” of whom you speak when you say that, “it’s important for us not to feel too sanctimonious in retrospect.”

When were “us” consulted about this?  When did “us” demand that “folks” get tortured?  Didn’t “us” have some, um, laws about torture?

It seems to me that “us” weren’t in the loop. I don’t remember at any time a movement of “us” demanding that the US withdraw from the UN Convention on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.

Sanctimonious? Eat my shorts! Some of us “folks” are just asking you to do your job. Binding U.S. law requires prosecutions for those who authorize torture.

So, let’s continue with your statement.

And my hope is, is that this report reminds us once again that the character of our country has to be measured in part not by what we do when things are easy, but what we do when things are hard.  And when we engaged in some of these enhanced interrogation techniques, techniques that I believe and I think any fair-minded person would believe were torture, we crossed a line.

President Obama, this is where you have crossed a line.  You have determined that a horrendous crime has been committed. However, in contradiction of the constitutional requirement of your office to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed,” you have opted not to enforce the law and “look forward.” Your desire for political expedience has trumped justice for far too long.

You say that you understand why “folks” committed torture and that “it’s important for us not to feel too sanctimonious” about it, however, while I am not a constitutional scholar, it seems pretty obvious that it is explicitly not your job to let these “folks” who ordered and committed these crimes escape prosecution.

Frankly sir, if you are going to let “folks” off the hook for torture, I can’t think of any crime that “folks” should be accountable for. “We” may as well open up the prisons and let all the “folks” out. Even murder is arguably not as bad as torture where sadists kill a person’s spirit and then day after day, year after year brutalize the remains of the person’s body and mind, for no damned good reason.

You continue:

And that needs to be — that needs to be understood and accepted.  And we have to, as a country, take responsibility for that so that, hopefully, we don’t do it again in the future.

You want “us” to take responsibility for this?  Seriously sir, no stinking way.

The best way for “us” as a country to “take responsibility” for this disgusting episode is for “us” to refer this to the courts. Under our constitution, they are the finders of facts and the means for “us” to decide whether mitigating circumstances should be taken into consideration in determining accountability. As president you have the power to issue pardons, but those come after a judgement and sentence have been issued.

Frankly sir, you have been getting away with acting as judge, jury and executioner for far too long.

It is time for “us” to have a say in this matter, regardless of whether you think that “we” are a bunch of “sanctimonious purists.”

Thank you for your attention. I hope to see you at The Hague.

Hello again-

I don’t spend all my time serenely listening to long hair music outside in the sun or even the moonlight, vast vistas of land scenically stretched before my gaze as the wind whispers my flowing locks and I stride purposefully toward my destiny.

In fact mostly I’m locked up in a dusty dungeon of my own making, tangled by wires and the past, bound like Sisyphus by chronic deceitfulness and pride to keep the tides of entropy at bay.  Oh sure, it’s fun for the first thousand years or so, but then it kinda gets… old.

Thank goodness for excitement, even of the bad kind.  At least it’s a change.

My excitement was that on Friday I had a power surge.  Inexplicable, random.  Took out the common circuit I share with most of my office floor AND the separate one my air conditioning is on, didn’t touch the rest of the house (I can tell because of the clocks).

Lasted like 2 seconds and at the end everything re-booted except my main computer which gave me the totally redundant message, “Hey, you had a power surge” and then went into an electronic funk.

I must admit I was kind of sanguine about it, I have 3 surge protectors before the motherboard and I’ve survived Hurricanes and Transformer explosions (those are fun, there’s a big bang and then power goes down for a day as the guys in the Hazmat clean up the PCBs before they replace the unit), and the computer behaved as Windows computers typically do when you’ve corrupted the virtual memory swap file- it re-boots once or twice and then goes chug-chug-chug as it attempts to repair the damage.

So you wait and you wait but I’m very impatient and after a couple of hours I hit the reset button and try a few technician’s tricks to no avail.

Now let me brag on my departed and defunct system, Asus M4A88T-V Evo/USB3, 6 Core Athlon II 3.7 Ghz, 16 GB RAM, 3x 2 Tb Seagates- each with a bootable OS installed.

Normally to cure a corrupted Swap File you boot to a good OS, run a chkdsk to fix up the crosslinks (almost always the problem) and then you unconfuse things (chug-chug-chug).  In this case NONE of my bootable partitions umm… booted.

Ok, time for strong Juju.  So I turn everthing off except for a brand new, never been touched hard drive, memory, motherboard, and CPU (all of which test fine in the BIOS), and my genuine non-evaluation copy of Windows 7, and proceed to attempt a fresh install which has the additional benefit of being a strong hardware test.

Pfft.

Well, that’s about enough frustration for one day so I called up TMC and got her to cover.  Thank you.

Today the goal has been to get functional again.  I’m fortunate enough to have generous patrons and I’m in possesion of an HP 6475b laptop.  The notable features of this particular platform are that it has a 2.5 Ghz AMD Dual Core, 16 Gb RAM, and (absolutely critical for a laptop as far as I’m concerned) a PCI card slot and a USB 3.0 port.  It has a usable (if crappy) keyboard and 15″ display and an intolerable touchpad (hate ’em).

Of course I’ve pimped it out.  Maxed the memory for starters.  Had a dual USB 3.0 PCI card so now I have 4 ports base and 2 are hooked up to 4 port hubs for 10 total (for now).  My USB 2.0 port is for my real wireless keyboard and mouse.

I struggled a bit with the display which is a miserable 1320×768 (only 1280×1024 is acceptable) but while my old Princton VF723 is still clunking along, it’s pretty old and washed out.  My Vizio TV is a mere 720p but my BenQ GW2250 main monitor is 1920×1080.  The problem with both the latter solutions is that the HP only has a DisplayPort and VGA out and VGA is inferior to the DVI (BenQ) and HDMI (Vizio) channels.  So I bought some cables.

Frankly, my intended purpose was to use the laptop for traveling emergency communications and as a video server for Netflix and it was in this primitive condition I had left it.

Whoa, emergency!  And I am as stranded in my own office as I would be in any Starbucks.

The first step is to robust the software so my Bookmarks and Passwords and Cookies are all restored and the next to fish the wires so that all the parts connect up and as you can see there are many pieces that move.

The final step is to try an salvage the data on my impressive 6 Terabytes to a 500 Gb Drive.

Hmm… NSA capabilities without the ambition.

The truth is you can write a whole lot without filling up a floppy.  I’m not parading this in front of you to incite envy, to me it’s the most normal business in the world because each repair starts with a backup of the system in the state that it’s in before you screw it up any more than it already is.  I have a tool (2 actually) called a ‘Universal Drive Adapter’ that allows me to take just about any drive, plug it into any computer with a USB port and rip the contents onto another drive.  The reason to have 2 is so you don’t overflow your host machine.  You record directly to a target drive using your host as an intermediary.

Easy peasy.

And it’s not about money either.  I seldom spend more than $200 for any particular part and most are in the $50 to $100 range.  My base laptop (a fine machine and worth every penny) was about $500.  Add $100 for the RAM.  The keyboard and mouse $25.  The monitor $120.  I mention the keyboard and monitor first because, outside of the software, those are the most critical components to your computing experience.  I paid a premium on the computer for the PCI card slot which are getting rare nowdays as are Optical Drives, the card itself was $50.  The USB 3.0 Hubs were $40 a piece, the drive adapters the same.  I have 368 Gb of 3.0 Flash Drives, all under $100.  My 2 Tb Hard Drives?  $100 per.  I have 2x 1 Tbs that are $70 each.  My departed Motherboard?  The one I’m so proud of?  $150 with CPU + $100 for RAM.

You can see why I mourn.  I’m convinced it is toasted and it’s about the most expensive part of my setup.

But change is good, I’ve been putting off moving to 7 as long as I could keep XP-64 creeping along and a quick survey of motherboards (which have not evolved much in the last 3 years) seems to indicate I can re-use most of my parts (that work) and indeed ultimately build a system with twice the speed, twice the memory, and a whopping 32 Tb of drive. and in the mean time I can try and convince myself that my little blind slab with it’s rat’s nest of “enhancements” is good enough for now and has the additional virtue of being more “portable” than my 30″x20″x6″ box.

Next week I shall attempt to sing in tune and on tempo, but for now you get Obligatories, News, and Blogs, and late at that because while I pretend I have a magic wand that erases the limitations of space-time it’s actually a back scratcher and I do like my naps when I can get them.

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.

Click on images to enlarge

August 3 is the 215th day of the year (216th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 150 days remaining until the end of the year.

On August 3, 1958, the U.S. nuclear submarine Nautilus accomplishes the first undersea voyage to the geographic North Pole. The world’s first nuclear submarine, the Nautilus  dived at Point Barrow, Alaska, and traveled nearly 1,000 miles under the Arctic ice cap to reach the top of the world. It then steamed on to Iceland, pioneering a new and shorter route from the Pacific to the Atlantic and Europe.

The USS Nautilus was constructed under the direction of U.S. Navy Captain Hyman G. Rickover, a brilliant Russian-born engineer who joined the U.S. atomic program in 1946. In 1947, he was put in charge of the navy’s nuclear-propulsion program and began work on an atomic submarine. Regarded as a fanatic by his detractors, Rickover succeeded in developing and delivering the world’s first nuclear submarine years ahead of schedule. In 1952, the Nautilus’ keel was laid by President Harry S. Truman, and on January 21, 1954, first lady Mamie Eisenhower broke a bottle of champagne across its bow as it was launched into the Thames River at Groton, Connecticut. Commissioned on September 30, 1954, it first ran under nuclear power on the morning of January 17, 1955.

USS Nautilus (SSN-571) was the world’s first operational nuclear-powered submarine. She was also the first vessel to complete a submerged transit across the North Pole.

Named for the submarine in Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Nautilus was authorized in 1951 and launched in 1954. Because her nuclear propulsion allowed her to remain submerged for far longer than diesel-electric submarines, she broke many records in her first years of operation and was able to travel to locations previously beyond the limits of submarines. In operation, she revealed a number of limitations in her design and construction; this information was used to improve subsequent submarines.

The Nautilus was decommissioned in 1980 and designated a National Historic Landmark in 1982. She has been preserved as a museum of submarine history in New London, Connecticut, where she receives some 250,000 visitors a year.

“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”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

The Sunday Talking Heads:

This Week with George Stephanopolis: The guests on Sunday’s “This Week” are:  White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer; Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC);  Centers for Disease Control Director Dr. Tom Frieden; and an exclusive interview with legendary baseball announcer Vin Scully.

Sitting at the roundtable are: Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-TX); Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol; New Yorker editor David Remnick;, and Fox News anchor Greta Van Susteren.

Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer: Mr. Schieffer’s guests this Sunday are CBS News chief medical correspondent Dr. Jon LaPook; Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to President Barack Obama; former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg; Pierre Krahenbuhl, Commissioner General for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency; Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA); and John Dean, a key Nixon administration figure from the Watergate scandal.

Joining his panel discussion are David Ignatius of the Washington Post and CBS correspondent Margaret Brennan, who covers the State Department.

Meet the Press with David Gregory: Sunday’s guests on “MTP” are:  Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ), chairman, Senate Foreign Relations Committee; Sen. John Thune (R-SD): Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN); Ambassador Riyad Mansour, Palestinian representative to the United Nations; and Tom Frieden, director, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

State of the Union with Candy Crowley: Ms. Crowley’s guests are Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R); Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI), chairman, House Intelligence Committee; Journalist Carl Bernstein and former CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather.

Her panel guests are Newt Gingrich, Ana Navarro, Marc Lamont Hill, and Erikka Knuti.

Health crisis looms over Gaza’s death and destruction

 August 3, 2014 – 4:22PM

 Ruth Pollard

Middle East Correspondent

Gaza City: Mohamed Badran is just 10 years old but already he has lost more than most people will in a lifetime.

He is the only surviving member of his immediate family of 10 following an Israeli air strike on his home in the crowded Nuseirat Camp in central Gaza on July 30.

And now he is blind, rendered sightless in the attack that stole his family from him, in one of dozens of “mass family deaths” at the hands of the Israel Defence Forces since this latest round of hostilities began on July 8.

Digital-age robber epically owned by analog granny at convenience store in Fukuoka

  Krista Rogers  

What started off as a basic robbery attempt turned into a mortifying experience for one wannabe robber in Fukuoka Prefecture. Seriously, either the konbini gods were conspiring against him or he met his ultimate match in an old woman, but either way, his attempt at crime was completely foiled thanks to an unusual series of events.

According to AOL New Japan and other reports, on July 29 at a little past 4pm, an approximately 170-cm-tall man (that’s 5’10” for those of you in the US) wearing a black knitted hat and white face mask walked into an undisclosed convenience store in Kawasaki, Fukuoka Prefecture. He went up to the register and held out his smartphone to the nearest staff member, on which was written, “I am a robber,” along with several other lines of small text.