Le Torrent, etc

photo: ZDNet/CBS News

(Sarko likes my title, but I stole it. Evidently stealing's swell, 'cept when it isn't.)

Zack Whittaker, ZDNet:

12.18:
Everybody pirates: RIAA, Homeland Security caught downloading torrents

12.19 French presidential officials caught illegally downloading music


Truthdig.com, "30 Companies Paid Lobbyists More Than the IRS"


Roy Edroso, Village Voice:"Running Scared"
(via BDR)


"James Kirchick, who chronicled the hair-raising statements from Paul's newsletters in the New Republic four years ago, returned in the most recent edition of conservative magazine The Weekly Standard to amplify on them.
[...]
"...the Wall Street Journal's Kimberley Strassel, who, after some blahblah about Paul being "in many ways, the ideal candidate for a conservative electorate hungry for a principled GOP nominee" and "the 'intellectual godfather' of the tea party movement," disqualified Paul on the grounds that he "fundamentally denies American exceptionalism and refuses to allow for decisive action to protect the U.S. homeland."


Naked Capitalism, Philip Mirowski: The Seekers, or How Mainstream Economists Have Defended Their Discipline Since 2008 – Part I

(I think the video below may be the one Mirowski is referring to. The link he supplies doesn't work, although this snippet(from 2009) isn't particularly illuminating one way or another.)


Inside Look - How Did Paul Krugman Get It So Wrong?


Uploaded by Bloomberg on Sep 20, 2009. Interview with University of Chicago Finance Professor John Cochrane (Bloomberg News)


Leslie Thatcher's December 5th interview with Mike Lofgren is well worth reading, even if the title is something of a misnomer. He only discusses Democrats beating Republicans in passing, but it suggests to the casual reader that it's another one of those tedious messaging and strategy pieces when in fact it's a broader discussion of US political trends over the past 20 plus years. If you missed Lofgren's article from the summer, it's also worth reading.

"I Know How to Beat Republicans": Interview With Former GOP Staffer Mike Lofgren

Some highlights:

"...the crystallizing event for me was the 2002 State of the Union speech identifying the axis of evil as Iraq and Iran - which had fought a long and devastating war and hated each other - and North Korea, which might as well have been on the dark side of the moon from the point of view of the other two countries. At that point, I thought, "This guy is going to war forever. There are no adults in charge." All subsequent events were merely confirmations of that intuition.
[...]
Establishment liberals just don't understand what's happening and are too often supercilious, condescending and off-topic.

Maybe I'll create a vocabulary primer. For example, take "empower." "Empower means "cut 'em off; you're on your own." Empowering seniors by cutting off social security means they're going to be mopping the floor at McDonald's.

The problem is that, for years, liberals coasted on the coattails of FDR, got very complacent and generated no new ideas. So, when the GOP came to the waterhole and stole their clothes, they didn't know what to do; they thought they had hegemony. Group one retreated to the ivory tower: effete crybabies, they became useless politically. Group two, the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), became GOP-lite and a pure fundraising operation.
[...]
And somehow all this nonsense about how he is a Muslim and not a US citizen is perfect cover for how he slid in as a center-right president who pretty much followed George Bush in everything."

Eat more Kale, corpse fuel and the Keiser Report

(But not in that order...)

25 Nov. Keiser Report: Corruptify! (E214)
(via Skeptical eye)

This week Max Keiser and co-host, Stacy Herbert, discuss taxpayers in the West being pepper-sprayed with toxic debts while in China fraudsters receive five fingers of death. In the second half of the show, Max talks to Gregor Macdonald about Warren Buffett's investment in Japan and the cost benefit analysis of the energy policy of invading resource rich nations in order to liberate their oil.

www.gregor.us



Yahoo/AP: Vt. artist: I'll fight Chick-fil-A for my kale(also here and here)

Vt. folk artist says he'll fight Chick-fil-A giant for rights to phrase 'eat more kale'
Wilson Ring, Associated Press | MONTPELIER, Vt. (AP) -- A folk artist expanding his home business built around the words "eat more kale" says he's ready to fight root-to-feather to protect his phrase from what he sees as an assault by Chick-fil-A, which holds the trademark to the phrase "eat mor chikin."

Bo Muller-Moore uses a hand silkscreen machine to apply his phrase, which he calls an expression of the benefits of local agriculture, on T-shirts and sweatshirts. But his effort to protect his business from copycats drew the attention of Chick-fil-A, the Atlanta-based fast-food chain that uses ads with images of cows that can't spell displaying their own phrase on message boards.

Sidney Morning Herald,"How corpses could power a television to save on energy"

Two from Polling Report:

Ronald Brownstein 11/22
Public Opposes Sequestration
With the congressional deficit-reduction super committee collapsing into stalemate, a solid majority of Americans say that Congress should block the automatic spending cuts established as a fallback if the panel deadlocked....

Thomas B. Edsall 11/22
The White Party
... With less than a year to go until the election, poll data suggest that the Republican "white" strategy has a chance of working. Since 2008, the Republican Party's biggest gains, and Obama's sharpest declines, have been among white voters. ...

[Sometimes when I can't think of a title, especially when I'm posting a grab bag o' links, I will just post the date. But today a title and an alternate, courtesy of Max Keiser: "Capitalism without bankruptcy is like Christianity without Hell."(6:30-6:55)]




...

25 November 2011

above:Global Recession Looms as Euro Crisis Deepens

Nov 23rd: Costas Lapavitsas: Regulation is not enough, the public must take over the financial system.

Ian Welsh, "What's happening in Europe is what matters: rules of the financial rich"

from WikiNews:

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan apologizes on behalf of the state for the 1937–38 Dersim Massacre.

The interim government of Egypt resigns amid violent protests in which at least 30 people have been killed and more than 1,500 wounded.


Two from Pink Scare, a new(to me) blog which reads like it is written by an academic, but accessibly so:

Nov 2nd: Is the Problem the 1% or the System?


Nov 16th: Chicago's Democrat Machine Votes Unanimously For Austerity

This is a declaration of war by the 1% against the 99% right here in Chicago. The bill cuts over $400 million out of city services: It shuts down 6 of 12 Chicago Dept of Public Health clinics, it cuts $63 million from Family and Support services (which has already eliminated 63 full-time jobs this year alone), slashes full-time public library staff by 32% (on top of the 10% cuts last year) laying off more than 300 librarians, reduces hours for libraries, makes cuts to firefighter pay and closes fire-stations, etc. Meanwhile Rahm is pushing hard for big tax breaks (e.g. $23 million for the Chicago Mercantile Exchange) for the wealthy as well as public transit fare hikes.

Charles E. Lindblom, "Muddling Through" [PDF link; I'd never heard of Lindblom before reading Pink Scare. He looks like an interesting thinker.]

Healthcare Now, "Sponsor a Single-Payer Activist"


Blue Nile: 'High-end market is the healthiest'

Blue Nile CEO Mark Vadon discusses Black Friday sales for the online jeweler, and says the 'healthiest part of the market is the very high-end.'

MSN Money: "Over 55 and desperate for work"(via Fiscal Times)

Florida assistant principal calls police on kissing 12-year-olds

Chicago Tribune,"Competitive Shopping" Cited in Wal-Mart Pepper Spray Attack

Talking Points Memo, Gov. Brownback's Complaint About Student Tweet Lands Kansas Teenager In Principal’s Office

Helle yeah

Photo: Mogens Engelund



This is from Friday's Wikipedia news feed:

Helle Thorning-Schmidt (pictured) is designated to become the first female Prime Minister of Denmark after a centre-left opposition coalition wins the Danish parliamentary election.

At the US Open tennis tournament, Novak Djokovic wins the men's singles and Samantha Stosur wins the women's singles.

The Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant, the first civilian nuclear power facility in the Middle East, officially begins operating in Iran.

Please forgive the punny title, but now it's out of my system and I feel better. I know next to nothing about Mrs Thorning-Schmidt, although this Reuters item is tentatively encouraging about her views. In the US we've become accustomed to our prettier distaff politicians espousing all sorts of irresponsible varmintry, so I hope the Danes will be luckier both in her words and her deeds.


...

Monday, 7 June 2010

Asia Times, "We are all Gazans Now", Pepe Escobar


BBC[text and video link] "21 Miles Off The Coast of Palestine" (about 43 minutes)

Adam Curtis links to an early 70s documentary about the 1947 passage of the Exodus, which was also intercepted outside territorial waters. The Exodus, carrying Jewish refugees from a port in Marseilles, was intercepted by the British who were enforcing an immigration limit on Palestine. No, this is not the Hollywood film with Paul Newman.


CBS News(AP) "Many Gulf Federal Judges Have Oil Links"

More than half of the federal judges in districts where the bulk of Gulf oil spill-related lawsuits are pending have financial connections to the oil and gas industry, complicating the task of finding judges without conflicts to hear the cases, an Associated Press analysis of judicial financial disclosure reports shows.

Katyn, yesterday and today

Added On April 8, 2010
Russia joins Poland to mark the 70th anniversary of the Katyn massacre. CNN's Atika Shubert reports.

* Death toll rises in Kyrgyzstan unrest; state of emergency declared





Added On April 8, 2010
CNN's Errol Barnett interviews a blogger in Bishkek via webcam to see the extent of unrest and damage in Kyrgyzstan.

* Kyrgyz president says he won't resign


Before last week I had never heard of the Katyn massacre, in which Russian troops killed over twenty thousand Poles at the beginning of WW2, simply to consolidate the planned Soviet satellite state that communist Poland became after the war. It took another tragedy, in which Poland's president and wife and over 90 others were killed in a plane crash the day after the above videos were posted, to make many people aware of what happened at Katyn in 1940, myself included. (They were on their way to a ceremony in remembrance of the 70th anniversary of the massacre.)

By the way, did you know that Lech Kaczyński, the recently deceased Polish president, had two PhDs and was a member of Solidarity? He was also shipped off to an internment camp by the government for a while in the early 80s, when the communists enacted a period of martial law. Part of me wants to deify him, as liberals are wont to do, but I remind myself that Poland has co-operated with the US government this past decade in the CIA black sites programs, and that gives me pause. But he still sounds like a more admirable character than either our current leader, or his smirky predecessor.

the real news: Matt Welch discusses European style healthcare

My computer at home is acting up and for once I don't seem to be able to fix it without outside help. As always I am grateful for Rob Payne for more than holding up his end of the horse, as it were. the above is an interview that Paul Jay did recently with Matt Welch of Reason magazine.