Won’t be around much for this one, places to go, things to do and really, who cares?  The Panthers are going to crush the Cardinals like bugs.  I wish it were different, the Cardinals are an original NFL team (1898) and match up better against the Seahawks who are otherwise going to have home field against the Packers, but they’ve lost 4 of their last 6 and are playing their 3rd string Quarterback.

The Panthers have won 4 straight (3 in the woeful NFC South, which is why they advance with a losing record and home field advantage).

If the Cardinals can stop the scramble they might win, but I’m not expecting much.

Game @ 4:35 on ESPN.  This is an open thread.

So Thomas Piketty has turned down the Légion d’Honneur.

Piketty’s snub

The Economist

Jan 2nd, 2015

With a popularity rating below 20%, France’s Socialist president, François Hollande, is no stranger to criticism. But the decision on January 1st by Thomas Piketty, a French economist and bestselling author of “Capital in the 21st Century“, to refuse the award of the Légion d’Honneur was a cruel snub. Close to the Socialist Party, Mr Piketty backed Mr Hollande for election in 2012. Now he says that his government “would do better to concentrate on reviving growth in France and Europe” rather than handing out honours.

…

(H)e has in the past voiced two broad criticisms of Mr Hollande, whose presidency he recently called a “disaster”.

First is Mr Hollande’s failure to press his case in the euro zone for less austerity and more pro-growth policies. During his election campaign, Mr Hollande promised to put an end to austerity in the currency area. In office, he then tried to rally a “club Med” group of Mediterranean euro-zone countries in an effort to force the hand of Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel. But it came to little, and Mr Hollande’s political weakness now is such that he has constantly been defeated by German intransigence.

Mr Piketty’s second criticism touches on Mr Hollande’s tax policy. For years the French economist has argued for a more progressive tax system, which would merge both income tax, currently paid by only half of French households, and the “contribution sociale généralisée“, a non-progressive social charge paid by all. This too was one of Mr Hollande’s campaign promises. Yet the president has shelved any plans to overhaul the tax structure, preferring instead simply to increase taxes on the middle-classes and the rich.

Paradoxically, the one measure brought in by Mr Hollande that Mr Piketty did approve of was a top income-tax rate of 75%. An advocate of a global wealth tax, Mr Piketty once said approvingly of this flagship campaign proposal that “lots of other countries will inevitably follow this route.” Instead, the French government quietly let the 75% tax die on December 31st 2014.

As it turns out he has a lot of company.

French economist Thomas Piketty turns down the Legion of Honor

By Martina Stewart, Washington Post

January 2 at 3:47 AM

In April, New York Times columnist and liberal economist Paul Krugman called the book “a bona fide phenomenon.” And Krugman observed that the book “demolishes that most cherished of conservative myths, the insistence that we’re living in a meritocracy in which great wealth is earned and deserved.”

The Legion of Honor is France’s “premier award,” according to the French Embassy in the United States. It was created by Napolean Bonaparte “to recognize eminent accomplishments of service to France.” It “is made up of three ranks – chevalier, officier, commandeur – and two high offices – grand officier and grand croix.” The Legion of Honor has an Order of Academic Palms that recognizes accomplishments in the areas of teaching, scholarship and research.

…

In turning down the award, Piketty was in good company. Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Georges Brassens and Pierre Curie all turned down the honor, as did Maurice Ravel, according to the New York Times.

Piketty’s animosity towards the award appears to stem in part from differences with the administration of French President Francois Hollande. “There is a degree of improvisation in Francois Hollande’s economic policy that is appalling,” he said in June, according to Reuters.

Which will bring us back to Doh, Doh, Doh, Doh and Maurice Ravel (these pieces are about Art Music, News is merely bait and pandering).

Now most United States audiences will recognize Ravel as the composer of Bolero which gentlemen of a certain age have been using to time their climaxes (anywhere between 10 and 20 minutes, depending on the enthusiasm of the conductor) without resorting to Baseball statistics, the homoeroticism of Throwball (’tis the season of accepting the casual butt slap, the between the legs center snap, the gang shower towel snap, and having your team mate stick their penis in your ear while shouting “YOU KNOW YOU WANT SOME OF THIS, MAN!”), or unfavorably comparing their current partner to Bo Derek or Marge Simpson.

Yes ladies, I know I’m no Gene Kelly either.  As my Sainted Aunty Mame said- that’s why they invented lights.

Surprisingly enough very little is known of Ravel’s romantic life which has led some to speculate he was an extremely closeted homosexual.  Considering that Cosmopolitan Europe in general and Paris in particular was amazingly tolerant, while I admit the possibility I have no difficulty at all accepting his own explanation, which was that he was married to his work.  This is the way I feel about things and one of the reasons I score so high on the Sherlock scale (though I’m a polymath and not a specialist) and don’t have problems working with women as colleagues or superiors.

Harry: What I’m saying is – and this is not a come-on in any way, shape or form – is that men and women can’t be friends because the sex part always gets in the way.

Sally: That’s not true. I have a number of men friends and there is no sex involved.

Harry: No you don’t.

Sally: Yes I do.

Harry: You only think you do.

Sally: You say I’m having sex with these men without my knowledge?

Harry: No, what I’m saying is they all WANT to have sex with you.

Sally: How do you know?

Harry: Because no man can be friends with a woman that he finds attractive. He always wants to have sex with her.

Sally: So, you’re saying that a man can be friends with a woman he finds unattractive?

Harry: No. You pretty much want to nail ’em too.

Have I mentioned Harry is a pretty big asshole?  I’m telling you without pervasive cultural brainwashing and Rom-Com (what’s so damn romantic about it anyway?) people like him would never, ever get laid which would go far in improving the gene pool.

So, was it good for you?

Back to the Cheese Shop-

What a senseless waste of human life.

If you think your companion an enthusiast of the Terpsichorean muse, take them dancing.  Dancing is all about sex.  It makes the mid-back and shoulder erogenous zones, the touch of the hand an electric zap, the scent of pheromones an exotic perfume.

Ballet on the other hand is an esoteric intellectual enterprise, a soulless display of Athleticsm and Art deliberately stylized to remove any icky feelings other than pity.  Feigning an appreciation for it is the preening of a peacock.  If you’re not staring at the company considering who can crush you with their thighs, you’re probably surreptitiously checking your iPhone for the latest scores and longing for the sweet release of Death.

My suggestion is that you close your eyes and tell your companion that you’re trying to appreciate the music (some of which is not so bad) and if you fall asleep pray that you don’t snore or drool on yourself too much.

Today’s case in point- Daphnis et Chloé.

Ravel called it a “symphonie choréographique” (choreographic symphony) and it was commissioned by Diaghilev, unlike most Ballets (and Operas) it has a happy ending.

The intervention of Pan is manifest. The old shepherd Lammon explains that, if Pan has saved Chloe, it is in memory of the nymph Syrinx, whom the god once loved. Daphnis and Chloe mime the tale of Pan and Syrinx. Chloe plays the young nymph wandering in the meadow. Daphnis as Pan appears and declares his love. The nymph rebuffs him. The god becomes more insistent. She disappears into the reeds. In despair, he picks several stalks to form a flute and plays a melancholy air. Chloe reappears and interprets in her dance the accents of the flute. The dance becomes more and more animated and, in a mad whirling, Chloe falls into Daphnis’s arms. Before the altar of the Nymphs, he pledges his love, offering two sheep. A group of girls enters dressed as bacchantes, shaking tambourines. Daphnis and Chloe embrace tenderly. A group of youths rushes onstage. There is joyful commotion.

A joyful commotion, what’s not to like?  Unless you’re an unlucky sheep of course.

I’m sure I’ve told you about grandfather’s old ram.

You see, Sile Hawkins was-no, it warn’t Sile Hawkins, after all-it was a galoot by the name of Filkins-I disremember his first name; but he was a stump-come into pra’r meeting drunk, one night, hooraying for Nixon, becuzhe thought it was a primary; and old deacon Ferguson up and scooted him through the window and he lit on old Miss Jefferson’s head, poor old filly. She was a good soul-had a glass eye and used to lend it to old Miss Wagner, that hadn’t any, to receive company in; it warn’t big enough, and when Miss Wagner warn’t noticing, it would get twisted around in the socket, and look up, maybe, or out to one side, and every which way, while t’other one was looking as straight ahead as a spyglass. Grown people didn’t mind it, but it most always made the children cry, it was so sort of scary. She tried packing it in raw cotton, but it wouldn’t work, somehow-the cotton would get loose and stick out and look so kind of awful that the children couldn’t stand it no way. She was always dropping it out, and turning up her old dead-light on the company empty, and making them oncomfortable, becuz she never could tell when it hopped out, being blind on that side, you see. So somebody would have to hunch her and say, ‘Your game eye has fetched loose, Miss Wagner dear’-and then all of them would have to sit and wait till she jammed it in again-wrong side before, as a general thing, and green as a bird’s egg, being a bashful cretur and easy sot back before company. But being wrong side before warn’t much difference, anyway, becuz her own eye was sky-blue and the glass one was yeller on the front side, so whichever way she turned it it didn’t match nohow.

Oh, yeah.  So here’s grandfather’s old ram Daphnis et Chloé in a 9 part playlist performed by the Royal Ballet.

Obligatories, News and Blogs below.

William Bratton is the two time Commissioner of the NYPD and if he seems enlightened at all it’s simply by comparison with his predecessor- convicted felon Bernard Kerik (“In 2009 Kerik pleaded guilty before U.S. federal prosecutors to 8 charges including criminal conspiracy, tax fraud, and lying under oath. Kerik was sentenced to four years in federal prison on February 18, 2010.”).

While not the first person to espouse the “Broken Windows” doctrine of policing (strict enforcement of minor “quality of life” regulations will reduce major crimes) he is certainly closely associated with the movement and is one of its most public advocates.

Like Neo-Liberal Economics and Charter Schools what we find in this real life experiment that has ruined millions of lives is that it’s hardly effective at all, provides myriad opportunities for graft and corruption, and is mostly merely thinly veiled racism.

The NYPD’s ‘Work Stoppage’ Is Surreal

By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone

December 31, 2014

Furious at embattled mayor Bill de Blasio, and at what Police Benevolent Association chief Patrick Lynch calls a “hostile anti-police environment in the city,” the local officers are simply refusing to arrest or ticket people for minor offenses – such arrests have dropped off a staggering 94 percent, with overall arrests plunging 66 percent.

If you’re wondering exactly what that means, the Post is reporting that the protesting police have decided to make arrests “only when they have to.” (Let that sink in for a moment. Seriously, take 10 or 15 seconds).

Substantively that mostly means a steep drop-off in parking tickets, but also a major drop in tickets for quality-of-life offenses like carrying open containers of alcohol or public urination.

…

I don’t know any police officer anywhere who would refuse to arrest a truly dangerous criminal as part of a PBA-led political gambit. So the essence of this protest seems now to be about trying to hit de Blasio where it hurts, i.e. in the budget, without actually endangering the public.

So this police protest, unwittingly, is leading to the exposure of the very policies that anger so many different constituencies about modern law-enforcement tactics.

First, it shines a light on the use of police officers to make up for tax shortfalls using ticket and citation revenue. Then there’s the related (and significantly more important) issue of forcing police to make thousands of arrests and issue hundreds of thousands of summonses when they don’t “have to.”

It’s incredibly ironic that the police have chosen to abandon quality-of-life actions like public urination tickets and open-container violations, because it’s precisely these types of interactions that are at the heart of the Broken Windows polices that so infuriate residents of so-called “hot spot” neighborhoods.

…

It would be amazing if this NYPD protest somehow brought parties on all sides to a place where we could all agree that policing should just go back to a policy of officers arresting people “when they have to.”

Because it’s wrong to put law enforcement in the position of having to make up for budget shortfalls with parking tickets, and it’s even more wrong to ask its officers to soak already cash-strapped residents of hot spot neighborhoods with mountains of summonses as part of a some stats-based crime-reduction strategy.

Both policies make people pissed off at police for the most basic and understandable of reasons: if you’re running into one, there’s a pretty good chance you’re going to end up opening your wallet.

Your average summons for a QOL offense costs more than an ordinary working person makes in a day driving a bus, waiting tables, or sweeping floors. So every time you nail somebody, you’re literally ruining their whole day.

If I were a police officer, I’d hate to be taking money from people all day long, too. Christ, that’s worse than being a dentist. So under normal circumstances, this slowdown wouldn’t just make sense, it would be heroic.

Unfortunately, this protest is not about police refusing to shake people down for money on principle.

You may recognize this “revenue extraction policing” from Ferguson, Missouri.

Police Reportedly Say They Aren’t Making Arrests After Cop Killings

By Simon McCormack, The Huffington Post

12/30/2014 10:00 pm EST

But the drop in arrests could be worse news for NYPD Chief Bill Bratton than it is for those protesting police misconduct.

Bratton helped pioneer the “broken windows” approach of policing. Proponents of the broken windows theory believe that law enforcement cracking down on low-level offenses leads to a drop in more serious crimes.

The theory is controversial and its effectiveness has been repeatedly cast into doubt.

Even criminologist James Q. Wilson, one of the originators of the broken windows theory, describes it as “a speculation.”

“I still to this day do not know if improving order will or will not reduce crime,” Wilson said in 2004.

Those who have protested the recent deaths of Eric Garner and other African-Americans at the hands of police have explicitly criticized broken windows policing.

It was an attempt to arrest Eric Garner for the low-level offense of allegedly selling untaxed cigarettes that, a coroner’s report said, led to his death.

At a rally earlier this month, the chant, “Broken windows, broken lives,” could be heard echoing in the streets.

The Benefits of Fewer NYPD Arrests

Matt Ford, The Atlantic

Dec 31 2014, 9:21 AM ET

But the police union’s phrasing-officers shouldn’t make arrests “unless absolutely necessary”-begs the question: How many unnecessary arrests was the NYPD making before now?

Policing quality doesn’t necessarily increase with policing quantity, as New York’s experience with stop-and-frisk demonstrated. Former Mayor Michael Bloomberg asserted that the controversial tactic of warrantless street searches “keeps New York City safe.” De Blasio ended the program soon after succeeding him, citing its discriminatory impact on black and Hispanic residents. Stop-and-frisk incidents plunged from 685,724 stops in 2011 to just 38,456 in the first three-quarters of 2014 as a result. If stop-and-frisk had caused the ongoing decline in New York’s crime rate, its near-absence would logically halt or even reverse that trend. But the city seems to be doing just fine without it: Crime rates are currently at two-decade lows, with homicide down 7 percent and robberies down 14 percent since 2013.

The slowdown also challenges the fundamental tenets of broken-windows policing, a controversial strategy championed by NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton. According to the theory, which first came to prominence in a 1982 article in The Atlantic, “quality-of-life” crimes like vandalism and vagrancy help normalize criminal behavior in neighborhoods and precede more violent offenses. Tackling these low-level offenses therefore helps prevent future ones. The theory’s critics dispute its effectiveness and contend that broken-windows policing simply criminalizes the young, the poor, and the homeless.

Public drinking and urination may be unseemly, but they’re hardly threats to life, liberty, or public order. (The Post also noted a decline in drug arrests, but their comparison of 2013 and 2014 rates is misleading. The mayor’s office announced in November that police would stop making arrests for low-level marijuana possession and issue tickets instead. Even before the slowdown began, marijuana-related arrests had declined by 61 percent.) If the NYPD can safely cut arrests by two-thirds, why haven’t they done it before?

The human implications of this question are immense. Fewer arrests for minor crimes logically means fewer people behind bars for minor crimes. Poorer would-be defendants benefit the most; three-quarters of those sitting in New York jails are only there because they can’t afford bail. Fewer New Yorkers will also be sent to Rikers Island, where endemic brutality against inmates has led to resignations, arrests, and an imminent federal civil-rights intervention over the past six months. A brush with the American criminal-justice system can be toxic for someone’s socioeconomic and physical health.

The NYPD might benefit from fewer unnecessary arrests, too. Tensions between the mayor and the police unions originally intensified after a grand jury failed to indict a NYPD officer for the chokehold death of Eric Garner during an arrest earlier this year. Garner’s arrest wasn’t for murder or arson or bank robbery, but on suspicion of selling untaxed cigarettes-hardly the most serious of crimes. Maybe the NYPD’s new “absolutely necessary” standard for arrests would have produced a less tragic outcome for Garner then. Maybe it will for future Eric Garners too.

Oh, and speaking of false economies, New York City spends some Tens of Millions each year in private settlements of Police Brutality cases to place the abused victims under gag orders and ensure Police are not prosecuted.

“Broken Windows Policing”, like the rest of the Neo-Liberal agenda, is a complete, utter, and proven failure.  As I said yesterday–

After 10 years you should know me better.  The class war is raging all around you, naked in tooth and claw.  Our elite overlords are just as corrupt, stupid, and evil as the Ancien Régime and deserve the same contempt.  Each year I make only one resolution-

To be even more obnoxious.

Happy New Year!

Matt Taibbi and “The $9 Billion Witness” Who Exposed How JPMorgan Chase Helped Wreck the Economy

Who Goes to Jail? Matt Taibbi on “The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap”

READ: Matt Taibbi on “The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap”

As is our customary start to the New Year, we give you coverage of the Tournament of Roses Parade.

We start this year’s report with sadness and regret.  It seems the Mummer’s Parade, a Philadelphia institution celebrated since the mid 1600s and the oldest folk festival in the United States has fallen on hard times.

So what has happened to this tradition, honored by our first President George Washington himself during his 7 year tenure at President’s House (or did you forget that Philadelphia was our second capital under the Constitution after New York City, starting in 1790 and lasting until 1800 when somewhat prematurely John Adams occupied the District of Columbia in the hopes of winning enough Southern electoral votes to defeat Thomas Jefferson?)?

Well, it’s a phenomena I know all too thoroughly from my years as a community organizer.  Participation has become excessively expensive and potential new members are less interested in participating.

Being a Mummer is a commitment of both time and money.  The routines take all year to practice, at least once a week for about 5 or 6 hours for the casual groups that don’t care about winning prizes (yes, until recently there were cash prizes for each division, Comics, Fancies, String Bands, and Fancy Brigades) and more for the elite “New Years Associations”.

And they are expensive with members being responsible for their own costumes which can weigh 100 pounds and cost 5 to 6 figures in addition to annual dues of the same magnitude.

It was not that long ago that the parade involved tens of thousands of participants and lasted 11 hours, making it the longest parade (in terms of time) in the United States.  In 2010 the City of Philadelphia (because of austerity) withdrew their annual $1 Million contribution ($750,000 of which was Police and Sanitation overtime pay) which parade organizers have been scrambling to replace.  Participants have become older and the parade route has been shortened from 3 miles to 1 with drill judging moved from the the end to the beginning.  Except for certain die hard units the parade will totally miss “Two Street” where most of the Associations are based.

Higher costs, fewer Mummers force parade changes

Associated Press

Sunday, December 28, 2014, 4:24 pm

Declining membership, soaring costs and more elaborate productions have forced big changes in the Mummers Parade, a colorful New Year’s celebration often called Philadelphia’s Mardi Gras.

…

Many clubs are having fundraising issues, leading some to become nonprofits and pursue grant money since the city stopped offering cash prizes at the parade. And the younger generation isn’t pursuing Mummery the way their older relatives did.

Overall, participation has declined from 12,000 performers in 2001 to about 8,000 this year, said Mummers Association president Bob Shannon.

Under the gaiety, Mummers are in grim fight to survive

By Maria Panaritis The Philadelphia Inquirer

Sunday, December 28, 2014, 10:08 pm

The Original Trilby String Band, a troupe that has strummed and strutted annually on New Year’s Day since 1898, will not march in this year’s Mummers Parade because of a shortage of cash, members and miracles.

“I don’t even have words,” said Kaminski, 48, who as club captain told members this month he was pulling the plug. There was no chance, he concluded, of mounting a show with unfinished music, no costumes, too few musicians, and but a few props.

“It was,” said Kaminski, his voice cracking, “the worst decision of my life.”

Trilby may be down on its luck, but the club is no outlier in Mummersland. The same pressures kicking Trilby to the curb are behind a much-shortened parade route this year that eliminates a 2-mile stretch through South Philadelphia, where the working-class parade was born.

Declining membership and soaring costs are building a story line of stress within Mummery that goes something like this: If only Dem Golden Slippers could be melted down and sold for cash, the feathered folk tradition might feel more secure.

“They are the oldest name in string bands,” Tom Loomis, president of the Philadelphia String Band Association, said of Trilby, whose disappearance on South Broad Street is, for now, only temporary.

“That name will not disappear,” Loomis vowed. “We will find a way to get them back onto the street next year.”

…

“We’ve gone from six fancy clubs down to one,” Shannon said. “We’ve gone from four or five big comic clubs to three. We went from [27] string bands, now we’re down to 16.”

In the words of 70-year-old comic division President Rick Porco, whose Good Timers, Murray and Landi comic clubs account for about a third of this year’s parade participants: “It’s challenging, trying to raise money to participate in this parade.”

…

In recent years, many neighborhoods long dominated by Mummery have gentrified as older families have moved to the suburbs. Membership is no sure thing.

Those who still march shell out more money than ever as costumes have become more expensive, musical arrangements are outsourced, and a pot of prize money historically given out by City Hall is no longer on the table.

“There’s some bands spending $80,000 to $100,000 on costumes alone,” Shannon said.

…

Also falling on hard times: the string bands’ annual fundraiser, the Show of Shows.

For years, the showcase of Mummery thrived at the Civic Center in University City, routinely selling out of tickets. It moved to the Spectrum when the Civic Center was demolished, and, later, to Atlantic City’s Boardwalk Hall. This year, it was canceled, Loomis said. Drawing crowds to the Shore in February was just too hard.

Now you may easily point out that the history of the Mummer’s Parade is, well, checkered.  Until the Civil Rights revolution in the 50s and 60s performances in Blackface were common and accepted.  Women could not participate until the 70s (even today most female roles are given to men in drag).  Associations are segregated by color and ethnicity and the whole festival is based on the concept of a riot of rowdy costumed gunfiring wassailers carousing drunkenly through the streets demanding drinks from hungover homeowners.

Sounds like good clean fun to me, but it was a simpler time.

And it’s not as if the West Coast Equestrian Equivalent doesn’t have it’s own, ahem, baggage.

A Reason to Watch the Sexist, Racist, Militarist, Corporate Rose Parade

By Sonali Kolhatkar, Truthdig

Posted on Dec 31, 2014

The Rose Parade has its origins in exclusivity and elitism. In 1890, when Pasadena was a magnet for wealthy East Coast Americans looking for temperate climates to vacation in during the winters, the Valley Hunt Club organized the first parade to show off the city. The hunting and fishing club, which continues to be featured in the parade for historical reasons, has had a problematic history of not admitting people of color.

Today the Rose Parade continues to remain ensconced within Pasadena’s well-to-do neighborhoods in the South of the city. Its annual route avoids by a wide berth poor and working-class communities of color, whose homes are concentrated in Northwest Pasadena.

One of the most nausea-inducing aspects of the annual Rose Parade is its homage to sexism (and royalty) as embodied in the tradition of the Rose Queen. Each year, thousands of young women apply to be the Rose Queen, putting themselves through the demeaning rigors standard to beauty pageants like the widely ridiculed Miss America contests. Requirements for the Rose Queen and the members of her absurdly named “Royal Court” are strict: She must be between the ages of 17 and 21, unmarried, childless, and enrolled in school. The usual promises of scholarship money are used to justify the sexist pageantry that culminates in a tawdry display of the chosen Rose Queen and Princesses dressed in ball gowns and tiaras, riding atop a float as the Parade’s ultimate pieces of live decoration.

…

Not only is the Parade’s Rose Queen a sexist abomination, it also has, unsurprisingly, a racist past. It was more than ninety years after the first parade that a non-white Rose Queen was first selected: Asian American Leslie Kawai. A few years later, in 1984, the first African-American Rose Queen was chosen. Since then, there have been only three others, including this year’s 17-year-old Madison Triplett. Only a handful of Latinas have ever been crowned Rose Queen, most in just the past decade.

For a good part of the Rose Parade’s existence, African-Americans were not even allowed to be part of it. In 1957, Joan Williams, a black city employee, was chosen to ride one of the floats, but she was disallowed at the last minute purely because of her race. Even though the Rose Parade has become a more racially diversified institution today, Williams, who will finally ride in the 2015 parade as a consolation prize 60 years later, has never received an official apology from the city of Pasadena.

If these are not reasons enough to disavow the parade, the annual New Year’s Day spectacle has also become a display of militarism. For years now, B-2 Stealth bombers pass over the city. We Americans may have the luxury of watching in awe and from positions of safety as the bomber jets flying over us, but the only context in which people outside the U.S. see them is when they are being bombed by our military, as the people of Afghanistan were during the Operation Enduring Freedom. Sadly, many parade attendees thrill in the display of U.S. military might. As this newspaper reader defended the flyover, he claimed to, “thank the lord for the protection and vigilance the U.S. military provides for our nation and its freedom.”

In 2014, a new display of F-16 fighter jets was added to the Parade. The U.S. Air Force’s participation in the Rose Parade was lauded by one online magazine as a tribute to, “the everyday, hard-working Airmen voluntarily serving America and defending freedom.” On the ground level of the parade, the U.S. Marines also regularly make an appearance, as part of the Equestrian contingent.

Two years ago, the Pentagon formally participated in the Rose Parade, even entering its float for the first time, smugly (and threateningly?) entitled, “Freedom is not Free.” The Defense Department spent $247,000 of taxpayer money to advertise itself in the name of Korean War veterans.

And finally, the Rose Parade has evolved into an institution by and for corporations. Some of the major corporations on the Parade’s list of sponsors include luxury jeweler Tiffany & Co, weapons manufacturer Parsons, automaker Honda, food giant Dole, Princess Cruises, one of the world’s largest cruise companies, and even Nike, Disneyland, Hallmark, Trader Joes, and Amazon’s Zappos.com.

For the past three years, the post-parade showcase of the floats has been sponsored by Miracle-Gro, a brand of the notorious Monsanto corporation. Disgustingly, this year’s theme is “urban revitalization,” which is meant to promote community gardens and green spaces. But of course Monsanto has been fighting small farmers and organic growers for decades, favoring industrial agriculture infused with pesticides and GMOs-values antithetical to community gardens.

While many of the parade’s floats are by non-profit entities (and sometimes cities that are battling bankruptcy), the majority of the parade is bought and paid for by corporate money. The corporate floats are simply branding for private companies whose greatest motive is profit. What better way to harvest eyeballs for corporate brands than to decorate giant versions of their logos with flowers, many of which are carefully applied by volunteer hands?

…

It is the unsanctioned political statements that make the Rose Parade slightly tolerable. A few groups have attempted to use the revered parade as a platform, with actions such as the China-themed float made by human rights activists, an Occupy Wall Street float, and animal rights activism against Sea World.

Promisingly, 2014’s biggest political issue-police violence against communities of color-is the inspiration for an organized disruption of the 2015 Rose Parade. Pasadena-based activist Jasmine Richards with #BlackLivesMatter said, “I used to go to the Rose Parade as a little kid, but then it became so whitewashed that it was clear we weren’t even wanted there. So now we’re taking the streets back. This is the way the year is going to start. This is the way the year is going to end.” With that, it appears as though I finally have a good reason to attend the Rose Parade.

Gee ek, it’s just a damn parade.

After 10 years you should know me better.  The class war is raging all around you, naked in tooth and claw.  Our elite overlords are just as corrupt, stupid, and evil as the Ancien Régime and deserve the same contempt.  Each year I make only one resolution-

To be even more obnoxious.

Happy New Year!

(The 126th Tournament of Roses Parade is on NBC and ABC from 11 am to 1 pm)

Yep.  Once again too damn lazy and busy with family/holiday stuff to come up with a clever topic.  It has also been a slow news week unless you like “Ten of … 2014” stories (I only include one of them).  As always I invite the study of Eddington’s Observation-

The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations – then so much the worse for Maxwell’s equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation – well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.

–Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (1927)

NASA team hacks Opportunity to treat Mars rover’s amnesia

By Amina Khan, Los Angeles Times

12/31/14

The episodes of amnesia stem from faulty flash memory – the kind of memory in your digital camera that allows your pictures to stay saved even after your device is turned off.

But flash memory doesn’t last forever – and the seventh, final bank in the flash memory appears to be malfunctioning.

“Flash memory has a limited lifetime,” Callas said. “It only allows so many read-write cycles before it starts to wear out some of the cells. And after 11 years of operation on Mars, we now suspect we’re seeing a wear-out of some of those cells.”

…

That’s an annoying, but manageable, issue, Callas said. The second snag is that the flash memory issue also causes the rover to reboot – and when it reboots, it stops the long-term activities the team had planned for the rover and simply waits for further instructions on the ground. On weekends and over the holiday season, when people are out of the office, these unexpected hang-ups can put the team days behind schedule, Callas said.

…

The researchers do have a clever little fix, Callas added. They plan on modifying the software so that the rover thinks it only has six banks’ worth of flash memory – which should make it skip faulty bank No. 7, since that’s at the very end.

…

Opportunity was never meant to last this long, and it’s picked up a number of scars along the way. It’s been described as arthritic, with a gimpy elbow and a somewhat disabled front wheel, but that hasn’t kept the robot from logging roughly 26 miles on the Red Planet.

NASA Spacecraft Approaching Dwarf Planet Ceres

by Mike Wall, Space.com

December 30, 2014 07:00am ET

Dawn should enter orbit around Ceres – the largest object in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter – on March 6, 2015. When that happens, the spacecraft will become the first ever to orbit two different unexplored solar system bodies. (Dawn circled the protoplanet Vesta, the asteroid belt’s second-largest object, from July 2011 through September 2012.)

…

“Ceres is almost a complete mystery to us,” Dawn principal investigator Christopher Russell, of UCLA, said in a statement. “Ceres, unlike Vesta, has no meteorites linked to it to help reveal its secrets. All we can predict with confidence is that we will be surprised.”

While Ceres and Vesta reside in the same general neighborhood, they appear to be quite different from each other. For example, the 325-mile-wide (525 km) Vesta is thought to be a dry body, while Ceres possesses an icy mantle and might even harbor a subsurface ocean of liquid water. (Indeed, Ceres might be capable of supporting life as we know it, some researchers say.)

This difference may result from slightly different formation times. Scientists think Vesta came together a bit earlier than Ceres did, when radioactive material was more abundant in the solar system. Vesta’s interior therefore likely incorporated more radioactive stuff, which generated more heat and drove away more water, NASA officials said.

The $466 million Dawn mission does not rely on tradititional chemical thrusters but rather employs a super-efficient ion propulsion system, in which ionized xenon gas is accelerated out the back of the spacecraft to generate thrust.

“Orbiting both Vesta and Ceres would be truly impossible with conventional propulsion. Thanks to ion propulsion, we’re about to make history as the first spaceship ever to orbit two unexplored alien worlds,” Dawn chief engineer and mission director Marc Rayman, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said in the same statement.

Venus May Have Once Been Awash With CO2 Oceans

by Charles Q. Choi, SPACE.com

Dec 29, 2014 05:20 PM ET

Venus is often described as Earth’s twin planet because it is the world closest to Earth in size, mass, distance and chemical makeup. However, whereas Earth is a haven for life, Venusis typically described as hellish, with a crushing atmosphere and clouds of corrosive sulfuric acid floating over a rocky desert surface hot enough to melt lead.

Although Venus is currently unbearably hot and dry, it might have once had oceans like Earth. Prior research suggested that Venus possessed enough water in its atmosphere in the past to cover the entire planet in an ocean about 80 feet deep (25 meters) – if all that water could somehow fall down as rain. But the planet was probably too warm for such water to cool down and precipitate, even if the planet did have enough moisture.

Instead of seas of water, then, scientists now suggest that Venus might have once possessed bizarre oceans of carbon dioxide fluid.

…

Most familiar on Earth as a greenhouse gas that traps heat, helping warm the planet, carbon dioxide is exhaled by animals and used by plants in photosynthesis. While the substance can exist as a solid, liquid and gas, past a critical point of combined temperature and pressure, carbon dioxide can enter a “supercritical” state. Such a supercritical fluid can have properties of both liquids and gases. For example, it can dissolve materials like a liquid, but flow like a gas.

…

The atmospheric pressure on the surface of Venus is currently more than 90 times that of Earth, but in the early days of the planet, Venus’ surface pressure could have been dozens of times greater. This could have lasted over a relatively long time period of 100 million to 200 million years. Under such conditions, supercritical carbon dioxide with liquidlike behavior might have formed, Bolmatov said.

“This in turn makes it plausible that geological features on Venus like rift valleys, riverlike beds, and plains are the fingerprints of near-surface activity of liquidlike supercritical carbon dioxide,” Bolmatov told Space.com.

A Former Ground Zero Goes to Court Against the World’s Nuclear Arsenals

By MARLISE SIMONS, New York Times

DEC. 27, 2014

Tony de Brum was 9 years old in 1954 when he saw the sky light up and heard the terrifying rumbles of “Castle Bravo.” It was the most powerful of 67 nuclear tests detonated by the United States in the Marshall Islands, the remote Pacific atolls he calls home.

Six decades later, with Mr. de Brum now his country’s foreign minister, the memory of those thundering skies has driven him to a near-Quixotic venture: His tiny country is hauling the world’s eight declared nuclear powers and Israel before the International Court of Justice. He wants the court to order the start of long-promised talks for a convention to ban atomic arsenals, much like the treaties that already prohibit chemical, biological and other weapons of mass destruction.

Mr. de Brum says the initiative is not about seeking redress for the enduring contamination and the waves of illness and birth defects attributed to radiation. Rather, by turning to the world’s highest tribunal, a civil court that addresses disputes between nations, he wants to use his own land’s painful history to rekindle global concern about the nuclear arms race.

…

One of the key questions that the court’s 15-judge bench is likely to consider is whether modernizing existing arsenals amounts to a new arms race forbidden under existing agreements. The United States and Russia, which control most of the world’s nuclear weapons, have cut old stockpiles and agreed to further reductions under a 2010 bilateral accord. But both countries, along with China, are now engaged in major upgrading of their missile systems. Pakistan and India have been in an arms race for more than 15 years.

The court is also being asked to establish a new disarmament calendar. The Marshall Islands’ suit asks that the nuclear powers begin negotiations on a disarmament treaty one year after the court’s ruling. But, as John Burroughs, director of the New York-based Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy, noted: “There have never even been any multilateral negotiations to eliminate nuclear weapons since the 1968 nonproliferation treaty.”

Have A Private New Year

by: ek hornbeck, The Stars Hollow Gazette, DocuDharma

Wed Dec 31, 2014

One of the key components of a secure and private Internet connection is The Onion Relay Project, commonly known as Tor after its browser, a variation of the popular open source Firefox.

Recently the FBI announced that it had arrested 17 people and brought down over 400 sites including the infamous “Silk Road 2.0”.

Does that mean Tor is broken?  Not so much apparently.

…

Having used Tor on an experimental basis I’ll tell you the experience is very much like moving from 98 SE to XP 64 in that it’s mostly notable for the many things you used to do and programs that used to work that simply don’t anymore because they’re insecure.  Now this is either an insurmountable hardship for you or it isn’t.  I’ve found that as time progresses I have less and less use for my old stuff which I still have available anyway on my dusty machines that worked until I turned them off.

Nix That: 5 Top Retracted Science Papers of 2014

by Christopher Wanjek, Live Science

December 27, 2014 09:23am ET

A study published in 2013 in the journal PLOS ONE found that retractions are on the rise, although the researchers couldn’t determine why. The phenomenon may be due to a lower barrier to publishing; for example, so-called “predatory” online journals guarantee publication regardless of quality – for a price. But still, many recent retractions stem from fraudulent, rather than sloppy, science.

…

5. D’oh! The authors are cartoon characters

…

Alex Smolyanitsky of the National Institute of Standards and Technology was the one who actually penned the articles, and he did so to highlight the ease with which scientists can publish their research, for a fee, in predatory journals. These journals spam scientists and offer to publish their work, regardless of the quality, without legitimate peer review.

Smolyanitsky in fact wrote the paper with a random-text generator. The abstract, in its entirety, reads: “The Ethernet must work. In this paper, we confirm the improvement of e-commerce. WEKAU, our new methodology for forward-error correction, is the solution to all of these challenges.”

Earlier this year, the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology accepted a paper submitted by an Australian computer scientist that was far easier to understand, titled “Get Me Off Your F… Mailing List.” The paper comprised this seven-word sentence, without the “… ,” printed over and over for 10 pages), complete with a flowchart and graph with the same message.

The “mailing list” paper has since been pulled. But the Aperito Journal of Nanoscience Technology still lists the paper by Simpson et al. as being in press, as of December 2014.

…

4. Windpipe surgery nothing but wind?

…

In November 2014, The New York Times reported that Macchiarini’s paper about these surgeries in the medical journal The Lancet is also being investigated. The complaint is that Macchiarini didn’t divulge any major complications the patients experienced in the five months following the surgery, yet according to the investigation, one patient (who ultimately died) required a stent to be placed in the artificial windpipe to keep it open.

The investigation is expected to be complete in January 2015. Macchiarini, who hails from Italy, is now performing his surgery in Krasnodar, Russia, and insists that accusations of fraud and malpractice are unfounded.

…

3. Coffee bean weight-loss study a little too green

…

Dr. Mehmet Oz thought green coffee extract was miraculous. Indeed, the celebrity doctor had no qualms promoting the weight-loss potion as “magic” on his afternoon television show in 2012.

…

But here’s what Oz said on his show back in 2012: “You may think magic is make-believe, but this little bean has scientists saying they found a magic weight-loss cure for every body type. … This is very exciting, and it’s breaking news.”

Yes, breaking news, as in published by paid researchers in an obscure journal and announced on an afternoon talk show. Fortunately for Oz, he hasn’t been embarrassed by other retractions concerning the dubious information he relays about weight loss, anti-aging and miracle cures. Then again, most of that stuff hasn’t been published.

…

2. Vaccines still don’t cause autism

…

With these new revelations, the anti-vaccine crowd once again thought they had proof that vaccines cause autism. But by the end of August, Translational Neurodegeneration removed the paper from its Web site, citing “serious concerns about the validity of its conclusions.” By October the journal retracted the paper in full, citing “undeclared competing interests on the part of the author” and “concerns about the validity of the methods and statistical analysis.”

In other words, the journal editors thought that whatever Thomson found wasn’t statistically valid and he may have had some kind of point to prove.

The incident may sound similar to the infamous article in The Lancet by Andrew Wakefield, which started the whole vaccines-causes-autism scare. But Wakefield’s paper, also now retracted, was found to be based on falsified data, not simply weak statistics.

…

1. The STAP that wouldn’t stop

…

But the highest-profile retraction in 2014 has been the dual studies published in January in Nature on a technique called STAP (stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency), which is a proposed method for creating multipurpose stem cells from ordinary cells. Although lead scientist Haruko Obokata claimed it was a simple technique – placing mouse blood cells in a mildly acidic solution – no one could reproduce the work … not even Obokata herself.

One by one, the co-authors began to question Obokata’s lead as allegations rose about data manipulation. Nature retracted the papers in July, and the fallout has been intense. The institute where Obokata works, the prestigious RIKEN in Japan, was internationally disgraced. RIKEN deputy director and Nature co-author Yoshiki Sasai committed suicide. Obokata, meanwhile, continues to believe her method works, although she has been found guilty of research misconduct.

New Study May Add to Skepticism Among Security Experts That North Korea Was Behind Sony Hack

By Nicole Perlroth, The New York Times

December 24, 2014 5:17 pm

Fueling their suspicions is the fact that the government based its findings, in large part, on evidence that it will not release, citing the “need to protect sensitive sources and methods.” The government has never publicly acknowledged doing so, but the National Security Agency has begun a major effort to penetrate North Korean computer networks.

…

“Essentially, we are being left in a position where we are expected to just take agency promises at face value,” Marc Rogers, a security researcher at CloudFlare, the cloud security company, wrote in a post Wednesday. “In the current climate, that is a big ask.”

…

The simpler explanation is that it was an angry “insider,” Mr. Rogers wrote. “Combine that with the details of several layoffs that Sony was planning, and you don’t have to stretch the imagination too far to consider that a disgruntled Sony employee might be at the heart of it all.”

…

But without more proof, skeptics are unlikely to simply demur to F.B.I. claims. “In the post-Watergate post-Snowden world, the USG can no longer simply say ‘trust us’,” Paul Rosenzweig, the Department of Homeland Security’s former deputy assistant secretary for policy, wrote on the Lawfare blog Wednesday. “Not with the U.S. public and not with other countries. Though the skepticism may not be warranted, it is real.”

Pope Francis’s edict on climate change will anger deniers and US churches

John Vidal, The Guardian

Saturday 27 December 2014 16.06 EST

In 2015, the pope will issue a lengthy message on the subject to the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics, give an address to the UN general assembly and call a summit of the world’s main religions.

…

In recent months, the pope has argued for a radical new financial and economic system to avoid human inequality and ecological devastation. In October he told a meeting of Latin American and Asian landless peasants and other social movements: “An economic system centred on the god of money needs to plunder nature to sustain the frenetic rhythm of consumption that is inherent to it.

“The system continues unchanged, since what dominates are the dynamics of an economy and a finance that are lacking in ethics. It is no longer man who commands, but money. Cash commands.

“The monopolising of lands, deforestation, the appropriation of water, inadequate agro-toxics are some of the evils that tear man from the land of his birth. Climate change, the loss of biodiversity and deforestation are already showing their devastating effects in the great cataclysms we witness,” he said.

…

According to Neil Thorns, head of advocacy at Cafod, said: “The anticipation around Pope Francis’s forthcoming encyclical is unprecedented. We have seen thousands of our supporters commit to making sure their MPs know climate change is affecting the poorest communities.”

…

Dan Misleh, director of the Catholic climate covenant, said: “There will always be 5-10% of people who will take offence. They are very vocal and have political clout. This encyclical will threaten some people and bring joy to others. The arguments are around economics and science rather than morality.

“A papal encyclical is rare. It is among the highest levels of a pope’s authority. It will be 50 to 60 pages long; it’s a big deal. But there is a contingent of Catholics here who say he should not be getting involved in political issues, that he is outside his expertise.”

Francis will also be opposed by the powerful US evangelical movement, said Calvin Beisner, spokesman for the conservative Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, which has declared the US environmental movement to be “un-biblical” and a false religion.

“The pope should back off,” he said. “The Catholic church is correct on the ethical principles but has been misled on the science. It follows that the policies the Vatican is promoting are incorrect. Our position reflects the views of millions of evangelical Christians in the US.”

NSA has VPNs in Vulcan death grip-no, really, that’s what they call it

by Sean Gallagher, Ars Technica

Dec 30 2014, 12:45pm EST

The National Security Agency’s Office of Target Pursuit (OTP) maintains a team of engineers dedicated to cracking the encrypted traffic of virtual private networks (VPNs) and has developed tools that could potentially uncloak the traffic in the majority of VPNs used to secure traffic passing over the Internet today, according to documents published this week by the German news magazine Der Speigel.

…

While some VPN technologies-specifically, those based on the Point-to-Point Protocol (PPTP)-have previously been identified as being vulnerable because of the way they exchange keys at the beginning of a VPN session, others have generally been assumed to be safer from scrutiny. But in 2010, the NSA had already developed tools to attack the most commonly used VPN encryption schemes: Secure Shell (SSH), Internet Protocol Security (IPSec), and Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encryption.

…

But for those that aren’t successfully cracked, the VPN Exploit Team’s presentation noted, the team works to “turn that frown upside down” by doing more data collection-trying to capture IPSec Internet Key Exchange (IKE) and Encapsulating Security Payload (ESP) traffic during VPN handshakes to help build better attacks. In cases where the keys just can’t be recovered, the VPN Exploit Team will “contact our friends for help”- gathering more information on the systems of interest from other data collection sites or doing an end-run by calling on Tailored Access Operations to “create access points” through exploits of one of the endpoints of the VPN connection.

Newly published NSA documents show agency could grab all Skype traffic

by Sean Gallagher, Ars Technica

Dec 30 2014, 11:38am EST

A National Security Agency document published this week by the German news magazine Der Spiegel from the trove provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden shows that the agency had full access to voice, video, text messaging, and file sharing from targeted individuals over Microsoft’s Skype service. The access, mandated by a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court warrant, was part of the NSA’s PRISM program and allowed “sustained Skype collection” in real time from specific users identified by their Skype user names.

…

The NSA was then able to “task” any Skype traffic that passed over networks it monitored or by exploitation of a targeted user’s system. “NSA receives Skype collection via prism when one of the peers is a (FISA Amendments Act Section 702) tasked target,” the Skype collection guide stated. Because Skype has no central servers, the guide explained, for multiparty calls, “Skype creates a mesh-network, where users are connected together through multiple peer-to-peer links. Instant Messages sent to this group of meshed participants can be routed through any participant.” If any participant in a chat was monitored, the NSA could capture all of the IM traffic in the shared chat.

Science Oriented Video!

This Day in History

One of the key components of a secure and private Internet connection is The Onion Relay Project, commonly known as Tor after its browser, a variation of the popular open source Firefox.

Recently the FBI announced that it had arrested 17 people and brought down over 400 sites including the infamous “Silk Road 2.0”.

Does that mean Tor is broken?  Not so much apparently.

Did the FBI Break Tor?

By Naomi Gingold, Slate

Dec. 8 2014 8:49 AM

This past July Tor announced it had shut down a five-month-long combined “Sybil” and “traffic confirmation attack,” allegedly carried out by researchers at CERT, a computer security research institute at Carnegie Mellon University.

…

A traffic confirmation attack is one of the most well-known ways to assault Tor. To carry it out, you need to be able to control the first and last relays of Tor circuits. Once in control, you secretly tag data packets when they enter the network and check those tags when they exit. This way you can figure out who is talking to whom.

A common way to gain control of those relays is through a “Sybil attack,” where you flood the system with your own relays, so that you can dominate parts of the network. (Recent research shows that it’s not that expensive to do this; after all, there are only 6,000-plus relays currently on Tor.) This Sybil attack exploits an inherit vulnerability of Tor’s design: its reliance on volunteers to create the network.

As it turns out the FBI was able to make these cases through traditional police methods (finding a weak link in the organization and threatening and lying to them in order to get them to implicate others).  However another group, the Lizard Squad (best known for hacking game servers and consoles), has also been attempting to compromise Tor security using a Sybil attack.

The Attack on the Hidden Internet

Marc Rogers, The Daily Beast

12/29/14

Most recently, it’s Tor’s ability to provide websites with a private “onion” address that has been hitting the headlines. “Onion” addresses are private addresses that can only be reached after connecting through Tor’s layers of anonymity. Ordinary Web browsers can’t see the site, in other words-protecting it from government censors. Seen both as a way to make websites used by activists accessible in countries governed by hostile regimes and as a way to host websites carrying illegal products and services, this part of the Tor network is now known as a central component of the “darknet” or “deep web.”

…

Over the space of a few hours on Friday, Lizard Squad registered a little more than 3,000 Tor relays. Relays are special computers that Tor uses to anonymously transmit traffic across the Internet. Comprised entirely of volunteered machines, the larger and more distributed this network of relays is, the better for the network and its users. So it’s understandable that the Tor folks wanted to make it as easy as possible to add new relays to the network, allowing it to grow. However, it appears it is this very open nature that the Lizard Squad is attempting to exploit.

…

Networks like Tor have long been considered to be vulnerable to an attack known as a “Sybil” attack, named after the famous 1973 book about the woman suffering from multiple personality disorder. The attack relies on flooding the network with fake nodes, or identities, until enough of them are present that the operator of those fake nodes can use them to influence or control the network. It’s like poisoning a party by overloading it with assholes.

Just how many fake nodes would be needed in order to pull off a successful Sybil attack against Tor is not known. Luckily, Tor was prepared for this sort of assault, and has built-in defenses to protect against it.

Tor’s administrators have to allow new nodes to connect and play a trusted role in the network. So to enable this while protecting the network, it has a system of evaluation that cycles the new node through several distinct phases before loading it up with traffic. This means that for the first few days the node essentially sees no traffic until the network is confident about it and its reliability.

As a result, while the 3,021 nodes added by Lizard Squad looked like a significant chunk of Tor’s more than 6,000-node network, they actually carried less than 1 percent of Tor’s traffic. Most importantly, they were all deleted long before that percentage could rise any higher. So, while Lizard Squad’s latest attack against the Internet’s most important anonymity network is troublesome, it was also completely harmless-this time. There is a lot of residual concern that Lizard Squad was able to get even this far. One of the biggest concerns is that if they had been more patient and subtler about how they executed this attack, it’s possible that they could have added relays slowly, across a wide range of networks, in such a way that they became trusted integral parts of the Tor network. At that point, who knows what they could have been capable of.

Even so the Tor browser when properly used and end-to-end encryption are the best way to protect yourself against casual snooping, including by Government Agencies.  How do we know this?  Der Spiegel has just published a piece based on the Snowden Papers showing the “threat” (meaning difficulty in illegally spying on you) the NSA considers various practices and programs.

Prying Eyes: Inside the NSA’s War on Internet Security

By Jacob Appelbaum, Aaron Gibson, Christian Grothoff, Andy Müller-Maguhn, Laura Poitras, Michael Sontheimer and Christian Stöcker, Der Spiegel

12/28/14

For the NSA, encrypted communication — or what all other Internet users would call secure communication — is “a threat”. In one internal training document viewed by SPIEGEL, an NSA employee asks: “Did you know that ubiquitous encryption on the Internet is a major threat to NSA’s ability to prosecute digital-network intelligence (DNI) traffic or defeat adversary malware?”

…

The Snowden documents reveal the encryption programs the NSA has succeeded in cracking, but, importantly, also the ones that are still likely to be secure. Although the documents are around two years old, experts consider it unlikely the agency’s digital spies have made much progress in cracking these technologies. “Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on,” Snowden said in June 2013, after fleeing to Hong Kong.

…

As one document from the Snowden archive shows, the NSA had been unsuccessful in attempts to decrypt several communications protocols, at least as of 2012. An NSA presentation for a conference that took place that year lists the encryption programs the Americans failed to crack. In the process, the NSA cryptologists divided their targets into five levels corresponding to the degree of the difficulty of the attack and the outcome, ranging from “trivial” to “catastrophic.”

…

Things first become troublesome at the fourth level. The presentation states that the NSA encounters “major” problems in its attempts to decrypt messages sent through heavily encrypted email service providers like Zoho or in monitoring users of the Tor network*, which was developed for surfing the web anonymously. Tor, otherwise known as The Onion Router, is free and open source software that allows users to surf the web through a network of more than 6,000 linked volunteer computers. The software automatically encrypts data in a way that ensures that no single computer in the network has all of a user’s information. For surveillance experts, it becomes very difficult to trace the whereabouts of a person who visits a particular website or to attack a specific person while they are using Tor to surf the Web.

The NSA also has “major” problems with Truecrypt, a program for encrypting files on computers. Truecrypt’s developers stopped their work on the program last May, prompting speculation about pressures from government agencies. A protocol called Off-the-Record (OTR) for encrypting instant messaging in an end-to-end encryption process also seems to cause the NSA major problems. Both are programs whose source code can be viewed, modified, shared and used by anyone. Experts agree it is far more difficult for intelligence agencies to manipulate open source software programs than many of the closed systems developed by companies like Apple and Microsoft. Since anyone can view free and open source software, it becomes difficult to insert secret back doors without it being noticed. Transcripts of intercepted chats using OTR encryption handed over to the intelligence agency by a partner in Prism — an NSA program that accesses data from at least nine American internet companies such as Google, Facebook and Apple — show that the NSA’s efforts appear to have been thwarted in these cases: “No decrypt available for this OTR message.” This shows that OTR at least sometimes makes communications impossible to read for the NSA.

Things become “catastrophic” for the NSA at level five – when, for example, a subject uses a combination of Tor, another anonymization service, the instant messaging system CSpace and a system for Internet telephony (voice over IP) called ZRTP. This type of combination results in a “near-total loss/lack of insight to target communications, presence,” the NSA document states.

ZRTP, which is used to securely encrypt conversations and text chats on mobile phones, is used in free and open source programs like RedPhone and Signal. “It’s satisfying to know that the NSA considers encrypted communication from our apps to be truly opaque,” says RedPhone developer Moxie Marlinspike.

Also, the “Z” in ZRTP stands for one of its developers, Phil Zimmermann, the same man who created Pretty Good Privacy, which is still the most common encryption program for emails and documents in use today. PGP is more than 20 years old, but apparently it remains too robust for the NSA spies to crack. “No decrypt available for this PGP encrypted message,” a further document viewed by SPIEGEL states of emails the NSA obtained from Yahoo.

Phil Zimmermann wrote PGP in 1991. The American nuclear weapons freeze activist wanted to create an encryption program that would enable him to securely exchange information with other like-minded individuals. His system quickly became very popular among dissidents around the world. Given its use outside the United States, the US government launched an investigation into Zimmermann during the 1990s for allegedly violating the Arms Export Control Act. Prosecutors argued that making encryption software of such complexity available abroad was illegal. Zimmermann responded by publishing the source code as a book, an act that was constitutionally protected as free speech.

PGP continues to be developed and various versions are available today. The most widely used is GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG), a program developed by German programmer Werner Koch. One document shows that the Five Eyes intelligence services sometimes use PGP themselves. The fact is that hackers obsessed with privacy and the US authorities have a lot more in common than one might initially believe. The Tor Project, was originally developed with the support of the US Naval Research Laboratory.

Today, NSA spies and their allies do their best to subvert the system their own military helped conceive, as a number of documents show. Tor deanonymization is obviously high on the list of NSA priorities, but the success achieved here seems limited. One GCHQ document from 2011 even mentions trying to decrypt the agencies’ own use of Tor — as a test case.

To a certain extent, the Snowden documents should provide some level of relief to people who thought nothing could stop the NSA in its unquenchable thirst to collect data. It appears secure channels still exist for communication. Nevertheless, the documents also underscore just how far the intelligence agencies already go in their digital surveillance activities.

Having used Tor on an experimental basis I’ll tell you the experience is very much like moving from 98 SE to XP 64 in that it’s mostly notable for the many things you used to do and programs that used to work that simply don’t anymore because they’re insecure.  Now this is either an insurmountable hardship for you or it isn’t.  I’ve found that as time progresses I have less and less use for my old stuff which I still have available anyway on my dusty machines that worked until I turned them off.

Weaponizing Health Workers: How Medical Professionals Were a Top Instrument in U.S. Torture Program

Ex-Bush Official: U.S. Tortured Prisoners to Produce False Intel that Built Case for Iraq War

Bush & Cheney Should Be Charged with War Crimes Says Col. Wilkerson, Former Aide to Colin Powell

Bridgeport’s favorite son, Phineas T., is generally regarded as a fool, charlatan, and mountebank.  A hopped up midway barker skimming pennies from shill goaded rubes in transparent scams.

Well, yeah, he did that, but he wasn’t foolish at all.

He was the epitome of a Gilded Age entrepreneur, perhaps the first person to truly grasp the power of mass marketing and if we remember him today as a mere traveling showman we are underestimating the complexity of the task and the popularity of the medium before the rise of mechanical performance reproductions.

Before the phonograph and the movie there was only live performance and if you travel in certain parts of the country you’ll find many wide spots in the road that sport an Opera House, Concert Hall, or Theater, mostly crumbling or re-purposed now but once thriving oases of culture.

Traveling companies produced plays and burlesques.  Visiting orchestras presented Art Music both Classic and Contemporary.  Famous authors (including one Samuel Clemens, a former Mississippi steam boat pilot who happened to settle in Hartford) would read selections from their books.

I’m going to stop here a moment and recall a particular performance.  At one reading Clemens stood to the lectern and plopped down a weighty and dusty tome with many clearly visible bookmarks and a sheaf of foolscap notes.  He opened the book, perused it, consulted his notes, perused the book again, shuffled the papers and made as if to speak…

And then shook his head and opened the book to another mark and repeated the act.

So it went for 45 minutes or an hour when with a flourish and great dignity he gathered his notes, closed the book and exited (probably stage right as that’s usually the one closest to the street door), without ever having said a word.  I’m not usually one for mime, but I think this probably the most brilliant comedy routine of the 19th Century.

Now consider the current nature of the music industry.  With a glut of digital material flooding the market (interestingly enough, CDs were introduced because the profit margins on Vinyl were deemed insufficent and so they introduced a new medium that was easily duplicated and virtually indestructible because they thought they could charge a premium) RIAA mega-corps are reduced to squeezing pennies from “pirates” (arrgh) and plotting and scheming to seize some of Google’s zillions in corrupt courts where they will simply be out-bid (an honest politician? one that stays bought).

Nope, the only way to actually make money, at least for the musician, is a live performance tour.

There are incredible logistics that go into producing that spectacle, the Gaffers and Grips, the Lighting and Sound, the Pyro Technicians, Caterers, Bookers, and Travel Agents.

P.T.’s Circus Train was an idea perfect for the time, and the Circus Parade as the Tents went up a master stroke of marketing.  Nor was it unique, indeed Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show was kind of the benchmark to which P.T. aspired.

The show business has all phases and grades of dignity, from the exhibition of a monkey to the exposition of that highest art in music or the drama which secures for the gifted artists a world-wide fame princes well might envy.- P. T. Barnum

It’s not that Phineas didn’t aspire to a more erudite audience.  After all he introduced Jenny Lind and bought and expanded the American Museum

Barnum opened his museum on January 1, 1842 to create a place where families could go for wholesome, affordable entertainment, but his success drew from the fact that he knew how to entice an audience. Its attractions made it a combination zoo, museum, lecture hall, wax museum, theater and freak show, that was, at the same time, a central site in the development of American popular culture. Barnum filled the American Museum with dioramas, panoramas, “cosmoramas,” scientific instruments, modern appliances, a flea circus, a loom run by a dog, the trunk of a tree under which Jesus’ disciples sat, a hat worn by Ulysses S. Grant, an oyster bar, a rifle range, waxworks, glass blowers, taxidermists, phrenologists, pretty-baby contests, Ned the learned seal, the Feejee Mermaid (a mummified monkey’s torso with a fish’s tail), midgets, Chang and Eng the Siamese twins, a menagerie of exotic animals that included beluga whales in an aquarium, giants, Grizzly Adams’s trained bears and performances ranging from magicians, ventriloquists and blackface minstrels to adaptations of biblical tales and “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”

At its peak, the museum was open fifteen hours a day and had as many as 15,000 visitors a day. Some 38 million customers paid the 25 cents admission to attend the museum between 1841 and 1865. The total population of the United States in 1860 was under 32 million.

This way to the Egress

In some ways the circus has always been an egalitarian institution, in Roman times it was one of the few entertainments not segregated by sex and to those who claim Astley the founder of this particular entertainment, fancy horse tricks, freaks, and trained animal acts have an ancient lineage indeed.

Traveling troupes of Troubadores, Actors, and other performers were quite common in Medieval Europe.  Lenin wanted “the circus to become ‘the people’s art-form’, with facilities and status on a par with theatre, opera and ballet.”

Mel Brooks says-

If it wasn’t for Jews, fags, and gypsies, there would be no theater.

In European Circus there’s a little more attention to overall structure and narrative than mere displays of athleticsm and while the setting of Pétrouchka is supposedly a Shrovetide Fair the atmosphere conveyed by Michel Fokine and the Ballets Russes has a decidedly ‘circus-like’ feel from the Midway, Carousel, and Ferris Wheel, down to the dancing Bears (Bears!  Godless killing machines!).

Punch is not a sympathetic character, “Whatever his name, he is a trickster, a rebel, and a wife beater. He enforces moral justice with a slap stick, speaks in a high-pitched, squeaky voice, and argues with the devil. His plays were formulaic and subversive. They repeated key scenes from one play to another. The plays usually ended with a dog, a policeman, or the devil dragging him away.”

Pétrouchka lusts after the Ballerina and resents the Charlatan who is always pulling his (ahem) strings.  He interrupts the Ballerina seducing the Moor (women in theater being nothing but whores all too willing to have sex with brown people) who chases him and eventually splits open his head, showing the sawdust and rags with which it is filled (he’s a puppet after all).  The Charlatan exposes this to the audience who feel no empathy for the real performer and the ghost of Pétrouchka appears to thumb his nose from the roof at him.  The Charlatan flees with the angry (stage) audience in hot pursuit leaving you, the (real?) audience wondering-

And I paid $150 for that?  Not including dinner, drinks, and transit?  What was I thinking?

Of course if you’re in exile in Moscow like Snowden you can pay in devalued Rubles to watch the Bolshoi-

Today’s edition is offered strictly for entertainment value, post holiday ennui has left me, uninspired-

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