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Friday catblogging is, of course, a core tradition around these parts. And as the blog welcomes new names and faces while Kevin concentrates on getting better, who said they all have be human? The door’s always open for Hilbert and Hopper to drop in, but we’re going to round out the feline mix with a smattering of cats who are blessed to have a Mother Jones staff member as their human companion.
First up? The Oakland-based menagerie of creative director Ivylise Simones, who oversees all of MoJo‘s lovely art and photography.
On the right is seven-year-old Inspector Picklejuice, a shelter acquisition picked up by Ivylise when she was living in Brooklyn. On the left you’ll find Frankie the Cat. This affectionate two-year-old also came from a shelter, joining the Simones household in 2014.
I’m told these two get along splendidly. Sure looks like it!
If you recognize Picklejuice’s handsome features, it may be from his widely acclaimed Instagram feed, or perhaps from his star turn in our September/October 2014 issue: click through to see him—he’s the looker playing in the box on the far right. (How’d he end up in a magazine illustration? I’ll just say that it helps to have friends in the right places.)
Here’s another of the good Inspector, keeping a close eye on happenings from a favored perch high in the loft. It’s an ideal spot to partake in two of his favorite hobbies: sleeping, and sitting around while awake.
It takes a good five foot vertical hop over open space to get up there. Impressive!
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Mother Jones
This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.
Albert Einstein is rumored to have said that one cannot solve a problem with the same thinking that led to it. Yet this is precisely what we are now trying to do with climate change policy. The Obama administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, many environmental groups, and the oil and gas industry all tell us that the way to solve the problem created by fossil fuels is with more fossils fuels. We can do this, they claim, by using more natural gas, which is touted as a “clean” fuel—even a “green” fuel.
Like most misleading arguments, this one starts from a kernel of truth.
That truth is basic chemistry: when you burn natural gas, the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) produced is, other things being equal, much less than when you burn an equivalent amount of coal or oil. It can be as much as 50% less compared with coal, and 20% to 30% less compared with diesel fuel, gasoline, or home heating oil. When it comes to a greenhouse gas (GHG) heading for the atmosphere, that’s a substantial difference. It means that if you replace oil or coal with gas without otherwise increasing your energy usage, you can significantly reduce your short-term carbon footprint.
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Mother Jones
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On Thursday, the Senate intelligence committee took a step forward toward officially authorizing some of the National Security Agency’s more controversial surveillance practices, which have recently come to light thanks to leaks from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The panel passed out of committee a bill allowing broad phone surveillance to continue under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Backed by the committee chair, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the FISA Improvements Act leaves untouched the NSA’s internet surveillance dragnet, PRISM, and does little to improve oversight of the government’s surveillance powers. Feinstein’s bill will face off against legislation introduced earlier this week by Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) and Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) that would significantly curb the government’s ability to sweep up the private information of Americans.
Privacy experts say that the FISA Improvements Act, which passed 11-4, codifies current surveillance practices instead of fixing the law to protect the privacy and civil liberties of Americans: “This was an opportunity for Congress to really recalibrate the statute, and it’s very disappointing that they’ve used this opportunity to cement domestic spying programs instead,” says Michelle Richardson, legislative counsel for the ACLU.
The primary focus of the bill is Section 215 of FISA. This is the part of the law that provides the legal justification for the bulk collection of the telephone metadata of Americans, including phone numbers and the date and duration of calls (but not the content of those conversations). While the bill’s language amends the statute to prevent the NSA from hoovering up phone metadata en masse, it provides gaping loopholes that could allow the agency to continue with its bulk collection practices as usual, such as if there’s a “reasonable articulable suspicion” that an investigation is related to international terrorism. The legislation also makes it legal for the government to collect and search records that are three “hops” from a target who is suspected of terrorism—in other words, a suspect, all of that suspect’s contacts, and all of their contacts. The bill makes only surface fixes and “absolutely allows for the kind of collection that is already happening right now,” according to Amie Stepanovich, the director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center’s (EPIC) Domestic Surveillance Project.
Also worrisome to privacy experts is the fact that the bill expands the NSA’s powers, by allowing the agency to track cellphone’s of non-Americans believed to be located abroad for 72 hours after they enter the United States. The bill additionally levies a penalty of up to 10 years in prison on anyone who accesses NSA information without authorization, like Snowden did.
“The call-records program is legal and subject to extensive congressional and judicial oversight, and I believe it contributes to our national security,” Feinstein said in a statement. “But more can and should be done to increase transparency and build public support for privacy protections in place.”
Feinstein’s modest reforms include limiting the amount of time the government can store the information it collects to five years, with the approval of the attorney general required to search records that are older than three years. And it requires regular reporting to Congress on all FISA violations. The bill also requires the NSA to disclose to the public annually the number of times the agency searched its telephone metadata database.
Feinstein’s surveillance bill will now go head to head with Sensenbrenner and Leahy’s legislation. They introduced companion bills in the House and Senate that would end the bulk collection of phone metadata and put strict limits on the section of FISA that has been used to justify PRISM (so that if the online information of an Americans is accidentally collected, it cannot be searched). The USA FREEDOM Act has been referred to committee.
Unlike the bills introduced by Sensenbrenner and Leahy, Feinstein’s legislation was only made public after it was passed out of committee. EPIC’s Stepanovich notes that the secrecy with the which the Feinstein bill was crafted does not bode well for real reform. “This is the problem with all of these programs,” she says. “You don’t find out about them until it’s far too late, and you have secret collection approved by a secret court, that’s now being reformed by a law that’s kept secret. It is unclear to what substantive ‘improvements’ the title of the bill refers to.”
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