Author Archives: BrandiNic

Gates Says Obama Gave Up On Afghanistan Three Years Ago

by BrandiNic Posted on January 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates has published a memoir of his time in government. He served in Obama’s cabinet for two years:

Mr. Gates says that by 2011, Mr. Obama began expressing his own criticism of the way his strategy in Afghanistan was playing out.

At a pivotal meeting in the situation room in March 2011, Mr. Gates said, Mr. Obama opened with a blast of frustration over his Afghan policy — expressing doubts about Gen. David H. Petraeus, the commander he had chosen, and questioning whether he could do business with the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai.

“As I sat there, I thought: The president doesn’t trust his commander, can’t stand Karzai, doesn’t believe in his own strategy and doesn’t consider the war to be his,” Mr. Gates writes. “For him, it’s all about getting out.”

Gates was frustrated about this, and I don’t blame him. And needless to say, conservatives are going to have a field day with it.

But it’s pretty frustrating for those of us on the other side of the fence as well. Apparently, we’ve spent the past three years fighting a war that the White House no longer believes in. There’s been essentially no hope of victory, or even of doing much good, and yet we gutted it out anyway. What a waste.

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Gates Says Obama Gave Up On Afghanistan Three Years Ago

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Movies, Movies Everywhere, But Not a Drop to Watch

by BrandiNic Posted on January 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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Netflix has developed an awesomely sophisticated stockpile of data about what kind of movies people want to watch. This sounds like a huge advantage for them—and it is—but Felix Salmon argues that it’s also a sign of weakness. Netflix has to mine this information because its streaming service has such a paltry collection of titles:

If you give Netflix a list of all the movies you want to watch, the proportion available for streaming is going to be so embarrassingly low that the company decided not to even give you that option any more….So Netflix has been forced to attempt a distant second-best: scouring its own limited library for the films it thinks you’ll like, rather than simply looking for the specific movies which it knows (because you told it) that you definitely want to watch. This, from a consumer perspective, is not an improvement.

I figure there are two basic kinds of customers here. The first has specific movies she wants to watch, and tries to find them. The second just wants to watch something decent, and will browse around looking for something that fits the bill. I gave up on Netflix streaming years ago because I’m the first kind of person, and I almost always came up blank when I searched for something specific. Netflix, as Salmon says, has pretty much gone all-in on the second type:

The original Netflix prediction algorithm — the one which guessed how much you’d like a movie based on your ratings of other movies — was an amazing piece of computer technology, precisely because it managed to find things you didn’t know that you’d love. More than once I would order a movie based on a high predicted rating, and despite the fact that I would never normally think to watch it — and every time it turned out to be great. The next generation of Netflix personalization, by contrast, ratchets the sophistication down a few dozen notches: at this point, it’s just saying “well, you watched one of these Period Pieces About Royalty Based on Real Life, here’s a bunch more”.

Netflix, then, no longer wants to show me the things I want to watch, and it doesn’t even particularly want to show me the stuff I didn’t know I’d love. Instead, it just wants to feed me more and more and more of the same, drawing mainly from a library of second-tier movies and TV shows.

Yep. What I wonder is what happens when Netflix eventually drops the disc-by-mail service that gave it its start. That’s inevitable, isn’t it? And when it happens, it will mean there’s really no place left to find a large selection of older movies to watch. The old brick-and-mortar stores will be gone, driven out of business by Netflix, and thanks to licensing wars, no streaming service will be available with a broad selection. People like me will actually be worse off than we were a decade ago.

Eventually that will change. I hope. But in the meantime, it’s slim pickings.

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Movies, Movies Everywhere, But Not a Drop to Watch

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Snowden Update: Father Trying to Broker Deal to Return to US

by BrandiNic Posted on June 29, 2013

Mother Jones

The latest on Edward Snowden:

He is a hero on Russian television programs, “which were almost certainly produced under Kremlin orders and have a powerful effect on public opinion.”

Ecuador is in a tizzy. They don’t want to be seen as knuckling under to the United States, but they also don’t want to be seen as a pawn of Julian Assange, who has championed Snowden’s case:

Mr. Assange’s role has raised hackles among Ecuadorean officials. In one of the internal correspondences, Ecuador’s ambassador to the U.S., Nathalie Cely, appeared to tell presidential spokesman Fernando Alvarado that communications should be handled better. “I suggest talking to Assange to better control the communications,” read a note addressed from Ms. Cely. “From outside…Assange appears to be ‘running the show.’ “

Snowden’s father is trying to broker a deal to bring him back to the United States:

In a letter to the Justice Department, Lonnie Snowden said through his attorney that his son wanted “ironclad assurances” he would not be held in jail before trial or subjected to a gag order, and would be allowed to choose where he would be tried on federal espionage charges….”We believe you share our objective of securing Edward’s voluntary return to the United States to face trial,” Washington attorney Bruce Fein wrote to Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. on behalf of Snowden’s father.

Stay tuned. I’m off to get my weekly dose of exercise.

Original source – 

Snowden Update: Father Trying to Broker Deal to Return to US

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The Green Roots of Turkey’s Urban Unrest

by BrandiNic Posted on June 6, 2013

green4us

The Art of Raising a Puppy (Revised Edition) – Monks of New Skete

For more than thirty years the Monks of New Skete have been among America’s most trusted authorities on dog training, canine behavior, and the animal/human bond. In their two now-classic bestsellers, How to be Your Dog’s Best Friend and The Art of Raising a Puppy, the Monks draw on their experience as long-time breeders of German shepherds and as t […]

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Codex: Eldar – Games Workshop

Codex: Eldar is your comprehensive guide to wielding the deadly warhosts of the Craftworld Eldar upon the battlefields of the 41 st Millennium. This volume details the craftworlds of the Eldar, and the different types of army they field. The Eldar embody excellence in the arts of war, from their psychic might to their deadly aircraft, and their ranks co […]

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Iyanden – A Codex: Eldar Supplement – Games Workshop

For thousands of years, the Eldar of Iyanden have sailed through the sea of stars, defending the galaxy’s eastern rim from the threat of Chaos. They have won great victories, but have known terrible tragedy also; what was once the most populous of craftworlds is now but a shadow of its former glory. This supplement to Codex: Eldar allows you to ta […]

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The Honest Life – Jessica Alba

As a new mom, Jessica Alba wanted to create the safest, healthiest environment for her family. But she was frustrated by the lack of trustworthy information on how to live healthier and cleaner—delivered in a way that a busy mom could act on without going to extremes. In 2012, with serial entrepreneur Brian Lee and environmental advocate Christopher Gavigan, […]

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Inside of a Dog – Alexandra Horowitz

The bestselling book that asks what dogs know and how they think, now in paperback. The answers will surprise and delight you as Alexandra Horowitz, a cognitive scientist, explains how dogs perceive their daily worlds, each other, and that other quirky animal, the human. Horowitz introduces the reader to dogs’ perceptual and cognitive abilities and then draw […]

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Warhammer 40,000 Altar of War: Eldar – Games Workshop

Altar of War missions provide all the information required to play games inspired by the battlefield tactics of the different Warhammer 40,000 armies. This book contains six brand-new missions which you can use instead of the Eternal War missions in the Warhammer 40,000 rulebook if you or your opponent has an Eldar army. These battles sho […]

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How to Raise the Perfect Dog – Cesar Millan & Melissa Jo Peltier

From the bestselling author and star of National Geographic Channel’s Dog Whisperer , the only resource you’ll need for raising a happy, healthy dog. For the millions of people every year who consider bringing a puppy into their lives–as well as those who have already brought a dog home–Cesar Millan, the preeminent dog behavior expert, says, “Yes, […]

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Trident K9 Warriors – Michael Ritland & Gary Brozek

As Seen on “60 Minutes”! As a Navy SEAL during a combat deployment in Iraq, Mike Ritland saw a military working dog in action and instantly knew he’d found his true calling. Ritland started his own company training and supplying dogs for the SEAL teams, U.S. Government, and Department of Defense. He knew that fewer than 1 percent of […]

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How to Paint Citadel Miniatures: Eldar – Games Workshop

The deadly skimmers, skilled Aspect Warriors and valiant Guardians of the Eldar craftworlds fight a constant battle for the survival of their very species. In this Army Workshop, the talented Studio army painters demonstrate how to paint a varied selection of Eldar miniatures using the Citadel paint range. Example miniatures featured in this extensive painti […]

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Paracord Fusion Ties – Volume 1 – J.D. Lenzen

J.D. Lenzen is the creator of the highly acclaimed YouTube channel “Tying It All Together”, and the producer of over 200 instructional videos. He’s been formally recognized by the International Guild of Knot Tyers (IGKT) for his contributions to knotting, and is the originator of fusion knotting-innovative knots created through the merging of […]

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The Green Roots of Turkey’s Urban Unrest

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5 Green Ways To Show Your Graduate Some Love

by BrandiNic Posted on May 20, 2013

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5 Green Ways To Show Your Graduate Some Love

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One nuke plant in Wisconsin will shutter, another in California might not be switched back on

by BrandiNic Posted on May 6, 2013

One nuke plant in Wisconsin will shutter, another in California might not be switched back on

By John Upton

Shutterstock

/ Julius FeketeSan Onofre Nuclear Generating Station.

Americans worried by the threat of a nuclear meltdown could soon have two fewer reasons to fret.

A nuclear power plant in Wisconsin will be powered down on Tuesday and the owner of a trouble-plagued plant in California is considering shutting it down for good.

From the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

Kewaunee [Power Station] owner Dominion Resources Inc. has announced it will shut the plant on May 7, a move that is expected to result in the loss of hundreds of jobs.

The reactor is closing because the Wisconsin utilities that had purchased its electricity declined to continue buying it, citing the low price of natural gas. Dominion put the power plant up for sale in 2011, but no buyer emerged.

So in a few short weeks, the mission of those who work at Kewaunee will change from generating power to cleaning up the power plant site.

Meanwhile, stubborn maintenance problems at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station between San Diego and Los Angeles might finally achieve what decades of anti-nuclear activism has failed to do: permanently shutter the facility, which operates along the Pacific shoreline in a seismically active region.

San Onofre is one of two nuke plants operating in California. The 2,200-megawatt, double-reactor facility has been powered down since new tubes leaked radioactive water into the sea in January 2012. New troubles continue to emerge and repair costs keep on mounting. (Those would be the costs for real repairs. Not like the jerry-rigged repairs we told you about last week, in which workers at the facility patched together a leaking pipe using plastic, masking tape, and broomsticks.)

The facility’s owner has decided that if it can’t be at least partially fired up this year, then it may never be fired up again. From the AP:

Costs tied to the long-running shutdown of California’s San Onofre nuclear power plant have soared to $553 million, while the majority owner raised the possibility [last month] of retiring the plant if it can’t get one reactor running later this year. …

[Southern California Edison] has asked federal regulators for permission to restart the Unit 2 reactor and run it at reduced power for a five-month test period, in hopes of stopping vibration blamed for tube damage. Without that approval, Chairman Ted Craver told Wall Street analysts in a conference call that a decision on whether to retire one or both reactors might be made this year.

Whenever activists have pushed to shutter the plant in the past, they’ve been told that Californians would run out of electricity and endure blackouts without their biggest single source of power. That hasn’t happened during the facility’s 15-month outage. The recent wind-turbine building spree in the state has helped fill the gap; windy weather led to wind producing more than 4,000 megawatts of electricity at one point last month.

Of course, it isn’t easy to kill a nuclear power plant – they’re like zombies, wreaking havoc even after their vital organs have stopped functioning. The nuclear waste lives on after the generators have been switched off, and that waste must be continuously kept cool to prevent a meltdown. Just look at the never-ending debacle in Fukushima. The shutdown and cleanup at the Kewaunee nuke plant in Wisconsin, which hasn’t even melted down, is expected to cost nearly $1 billion and take until the 2070s to complete.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration is doling out financial support to help industry build new nuclear power plants, part of its “all of the above” energy policy.

John Upton is a science aficionado and green news junkie who

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One nuke plant in Wisconsin will shutter, another in California might not be switched back on

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Cap-and-Trade in Europe is Working Just Fine

by BrandiNic Posted on April 26, 2013

Mother Jones

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Several years ago Europe instituted a continent-wide cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions called ETS. It was decidedly imperfect, and has gone through several revisions since it started. Recently, however, energy demand has declined, which has left Europe awash in carbon permits. As a result, the price of carbon permits has dropped off a cliff, and they’re now so cheap that they’re having virtually no effect. So does this mean the whole program is a failure? David Roberts asks everyone to calm down:

First off, the ETS is not a mess/broken/dying, it’s working like it’s supposed to. The goal of a cap-and-trade system is not to create a high price on carbon, or a low price on carbon, or any particular price on carbon. It is to reduce carbon emissions along a pathway specified by a series of targets (17 percent by 2020, etc.). The EU is on that pathway. Emissions are expected to come in under the cap, which means the cap-and-trade program is working.

Now, as it happens, the recession is what did most of the work to put the EU on that pathway. Complementary clean-energy policies (renewable energy mandates, feed-in tariffs) also played a big role. That just didn’t leave much work for a carbon price to do. The EU doesn’t need a high price on carbon to stay on the emissions-cutting pathway, at least in the short term, so the short-term price on carbon is low. Presumably, when the EU economy picks back up, there will be more work for a carbon price to do. If so, the price will go up. Cap-and-trade programs are designed to be responsive to circumstances.

Lemme just emphasize: Insofar as you are happy with the carbon pathway your cap-and-trade system prescribes, the fact that carbon is cheap is good news. Who wants high prices for high prices’ sake?

Everyone has always known about the basic tradeoff between a carbon tax and a cap-and-trade system. The virtue of a tax is that it’s predictable: everyone knows both the current and future tax rates and can make investments based on them. The downside is that you have to take a guess at what tax rate will produce the level of carbon emissions you want, and you might guess wrong.

Cap-and-trade is exactly the opposite. Its virtue is that it will unquestionably keep you below your carbon cap. The downside is that carbon prices will jump up and down depending both on energy demand and on technology advances. This makes business planning tricky.

I’ve always preferred cap-and-trade because I think the virtue of targeting the thing we actually care about—the amount of carbon emitted—is more important than guaranteeing businesses a known tax level decades into the future. Businesses already put up with large changes in the price of energy itself, and I suspect they can handle price changes in carbon permits too.

But I’ll add one more virtue that David doesn’t mention: cap-and-trade is countercyclical. During a recession, demand for permits will go down and therefore so will permit prices. This is good, because it has a stimulative effect on the economy. Conversely, during economic expansions, demand for permits will go up and so will permit prices. This is also good, because it will tend to cool down the economy a bit. In neither case will the effect be huge, but it’s still a net positive.

I’ve got no problem with a carbon tax. The arguments between a tax and a permit trading plan strike me as pretty finely balanced. Nonetheless, the fact that permit prices have fallen during a recession isn’t evidence that cap-and-trade doesn’t work. On the contrary, it’s evidence that it’s working exactly the way it should.

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Cap-and-Trade in Europe is Working Just Fine

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Living with No Future in Today’s Iraq

by BrandiNic Posted on March 26, 2013

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

Back then, everybody was writing about Iraq, but it’s surprising how few Americans, including reporters, paid much attention to the suffering of Iraqis. Today, Iraq is in the news again. The words, the memorials, the retrospectives are pouring out, and again the suffering of Iraqis isn’t what’s on anyone’s mind. This was why I returned to that country before the recent 10th anniversary of the Bush administration’s invasion and why I feel compelled to write a few grim words about Iraqis today.

But let’s start with then. It’s April 8, 2004, to be exact, and I’m inside a makeshift medical center in the heart of Fallujah while that predominantly Sunni city is under siege by American forces. I’m alternating between scribbling brief observations in my notebook and taking photographs of the wounded and dying women and children being brought into the clinic.

A woman suddenly arrives, slapping her chest and face in grief, wailing hysterically as her husband carries in the limp body of their little boy. Blood is trickling down one of his dangling arms. In a few minutes, he’ll be dead. This sort of thing happens again and again.

Over and over, I watch speeding cars hop the curb in front of this dirty clinic with next to no medical resources and screech to a halt. Grief-stricken family members pour out, carrying bloodied relatives—women and children—gunned down by American snipers.

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Living with No Future in Today’s Iraq

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Protesters target firms angling for a piece of pipeline profits

by BrandiNic Posted on March 15, 2013

Protesters target firms angling for a piece of pipeline profits

By Susie Cagle

Tomorrow marks the start of a week of actions and information sessions nationwide aimed at throwing a monkey wrench into the Keystone XL pipeline construction. There are 24 planned events across 20 cities.

Tar Sands Blockade

Want to march and chant? Want to dance? Want to learn how best to lie limp in front of a bulldozer or U-lock your neck to a piece of heavy machinery? (Protip: A little Maalox and water will wash that pepper-spray out right quick.) Rallies, protests, flash mobs, trainings, and Idle No More round dances will take place from Seattle to Washington D.C., rain or shine. The whole effort is spearheaded by the tireless folks at Deep Green Resistance and the Tar Sands Blockade.

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This week of protest is coming together just as new data bolsters a longstanding critique of the pipeline-to-be: That we’re not even going to use the oil it’s carrying here anyway. The Wall Street Journal reports that “much” of the tar sands oil that would be pumped through the pipeline from Canada to the Gulf would not contribute to U.S. energy independence — it would be exported.

Oil Change International, a nonprofit advocacy group that opposes the pipeline, presented new data Thursday showing how Gulf Coast refineries, especially those in Texas, have in recent years become major exporters of refined products.

The group says the Texas Gulf Coast refiners that would be the main recipients of Keystone-shipped crude already exported more than 60% of the gasoline they produced, 40% of their diesel output and 95% of their petroleum coke in 2012. It based its numbers on U.S. Census Bureau data. …

Refiners agree figures show the Gulf area exports a lot of its output, but say that is no reason to shun Keystone XL. “The Gulf Coast is long on refining capacity and short on demand. Exports will continue with or without Keystone XL,” said Bill Day, a spokesman for Valero Energy Corp. …

Shawn Howard, a TransCanada spokesman, said the company doesn’t refine or market the oil it ships and can’t control what might happen with exports.

Shorter TransCanada: “It’s not our fault that we’re profiting off this toxic stuff, that’s just what we do! We can’t control it.” Shocking, I know.

Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for

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Protesters target firms angling for a piece of pipeline profits

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