“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.
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Trevor Timm: Homeland Security was built to fend off terrorists. Why’s it so busy arming cops to fight average Americans?
From Ferguson’s military police to loaning drones and tracking your every move, the agency’s expensive, violent sinkhole of bureaucracy needs reform – now
For three weeks and counting, America has raged against the appalling behavior of the local police in Ferguson, Missouri, and for good reason: automatic rifles pointed at protesters, tank-like armored trucks blocking marches, the teargassing and arresting of reporters, tactics unfit even for war zones – it was all enough to make you wonder whether this was America at all. But as Congress returns to Washington this week, the ire of a nation should also be focused on the federal government agency that has enabled the rise of military police, and so much more: the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
The 240,000-employee, Bush-invented bureaucratic behemoth that didn’t even exist 15 years ago has been the primary arms dealer for out-of-control local cops in Ferguson and beyond, handing out tens of billions of dollars in grants for military equipment in the last decade with little to no oversight and even less training on how use it. “From an oversight perspective, DHS grant programs are pretty much a mess,”
Amy Goodman: Get Ready for the ‘Internet Slowdown’
Next Wednesday, Sept. 10, if your favorite website seems to load slowly, take a closer look: You might be experiencing the Battle for the Net’s “Internet Slowdown,” a global day of grass-roots action. Protesters won’t actually slow the Internet down, but will place on their websites animated “Loading” graphics (which organizers call “the proverbial ‘spinning wheel of death'”) to symbolize what the Internet might soon look like. As that wheel spins, the rules about how the internet works are being redrawn. Large Internet service providers, or ISPs, like Comcast, Time Warner, AT&T and Verizon are trying to change the rules that govern your online life.
The fight over these rules is being waged now. These corporate ISPs want to create a two-tiered Internet, where some websites or content providers pay to get preferred access to the public. Large content providers like Netflix, the online streaming movie giant, would pay extra to ensure that their content traveled on the fast lane. But let’s say a startup tried to compete with Netflix. If it couldn’t afford to pay the large ISPs their fees for the fast lane, their service would suffer, and people wouldn’t subscribe.
Starving, spiking and smoothing are short-term fixes that guarantee long-term problems
From coast to coast, Democrats and Republicans appear united in devastating what remains of traditional pensions in America.
Through three basic strategies – smoothing, spiking and starving – politicians can burnish their images as public benefactors today, but only by inflating future costs and risks that will slam society after their careers are over.
Voters, workers and taxpayers whose time horizon is more than the next election cycle need to police their politicians now, or they and their progeny will bear a terrible burden later.
Juan Cole: What Hackers Did to Celebs? The NSA’s Been Doing That to All of the U.S. Instead of Predicting ISIL
There has been a lot of justifiable outrage about the invasion of privacy of celebrities and the posting of their private, nude photos at 4Chan by hackers who apparently got into their cloud accounts.
It seems odd to me that the discussion of this issue has been completely unconnected to the Snowden revelations that the U.S. government has been assiduously spying on everyone’s cloud. It has been massively recording who we call, when we called them, and where we were when we called them on on our smart phones. You can tell a lot from that information (it could be used for insider trading where it came from financiers like Warren Buffett). The NSA has been sweeping up terabytes of data and storing them (some of this in conjunction with British intelligence). Barack Obama’s glib assurances that they haven’t been recording our emails notwithstanding, they’ve been recording our emails (they can actually read them in real time), as well as sweeping up the content of phone calls as data files. NSA personnel routinely passed around nude photos of people captured from the internet, Snowden has revealed, calling it a perk of the job. Some NSA personnel misused their position to spy on ex-girlfriends. There has been a lot of justifiable outrage about the invasion of privacy of celebrities and the posting of their private, nude photos at 4Chan by hackers who apparently got into their cloud accounts.
It seems odd to me that the discussion of this issue has been completely unconnected to the Snowden revelations that the U.S. government has been assiduously spying on everyone’s cloud. It has been massively recording who we call, when we called them, and where we were when we called them on on our smart phones. You can tell a lot from that information (it could be used for insider trading where it came from financiers like Warren Buffett). The NSA has been sweeping up terabytes of data and storing them (some of this in conjunction with British intelligence). Barack Obama’s glib assurances that they haven’t been recording our emails notwithstanding, they’ve been recording our emails (they can actually read them in real time), as well as sweeping up the content of phone calls as data files. NSA personnel routinely passed around nude photos of people captured from the internet, Snowden has revealed, calling it a perk of the job. Some NSA personnel misused their position to spy on ex-girlfriends.
Oliver Burkeman: To recline your seat or not? Stop arguing. Capitalism already won this stupid war
Airlines, Apple and more corporations are pitting us against each other. It’s time to start changing the terms of debate
The Great Airplane Seat Recliner Wars of 2014 have now caused at least three flights to be diverted, following passenger altercations, while providing much-needed ammunition for professional opinion-havers on the internet. Is it acceptable to use a Knee Defender to prevent the person in front of you from reclining, or monstrous? Should you pay me if you don’t want me to recline, or is it “simple decency towards your fellow humans” to refrain to spread out? Is reclining a right or a privilege?
To this professional opinion-haver, though, the debate has become immensely frustrating, because the answer is that we shouldn’t need to be having the debate at all. There is no right answer because there simply isn’t enough space on airplanes; it’s perfectly reasonable to want to claim a bit more room by reclining, and perfectly reasonable to object to someone else reducing yours. What’s not reasonable is the number of seats crammed into the plane.
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