Tag Archives: people

Senate Torture Report Starts to Leak

by EnriqueBarrier Posted on April 11, 2014

Mother Jones

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In an entirely unsurprising development, it appears that the Senate report on CIA torture is starting to get leaked. Today, McClatchy reports the complete list of findings from the report, including these:

The CIA’s use of enhanced interrogation techniques did not effectively assist the agency in acquiring intelligence or in gaining cooperation from detainees.
The CIA inaccurately characterized the effectiveness of the enhanced interrogation techniques to justify their use.
The CIA’s use of enhanced interrogation techniques was brutal and far worse than the agency communicated to policymakers.
The CIA impeded effective White House oversight and decision-making. The CIA has actively avoided or impeded congressional oversight of the program. The CIA impeded oversight by the CIA’s Office of Inspector General.
The CIA manipulated the media by coordinating the release of classified information, which inaccurately portrayed the effectiveness of the agency’s enhanced interrogation techniques.

The whole story is here, along with the complete list of findings. I expect more like this in the future unless the CIA stops slow rolling its declassification process and allows the report to be substantially released.

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Senate Torture Report Starts to Leak

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Two French Unions Ban Work Email After 6 pm

by FilomenaBrother Posted on April 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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Huh. A couple of white-collar unions in France have signed a new labor agreement:

The legally binding deal, signed by employers’ federations and unions representing almost one million workers in the digital and consultancy sectors, stipulates that employees should be left alone when they are out of the office.

Staff will be ordered to switch off their professional phones and avoid looking at work-related emails or documents on their tablets and computers. Businesses will be required to ensure that workers are under no pressure to check their messages.

The ban takes effect at 6 pm each night. Remarkable.

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Two French Unions Ban Work Email After 6 pm

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Can Anyone Win the 2016 Republican Nomination?

by XavierT89k Posted on April 9, 2014

Mother Jones

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Ben Smith pours cold water on the idea of Jeb Bush running for president:

The notion that Jeb Bush is going to be the Republican presidential nominee is a fantasy nourished by the people who used to run the Republican Party. Bush has been out of a game that changed radically during the 12 years(!) since he last ran for office. He missed the transformation of his brother from Republican savior to squish; the rise of the tea party; the molding of his peer Mitt Romney into a movement conservative; and the ascendancy of a new generation of politicians — Marco Rubio, Paul Ryan, Scott Walker, Ted Cruz, among them — who have been fully shaped by and trained in that new dynamic. Those men occasionally, carefully, respectfully break with the movement. Scorning today’s Republican Party is, by contrast, the core of Jeb’s political identity.

There’s more, and Smith makes a good case without even bothering to mention Bush fatigue.

But I have to say that I’m mystified right now. In 2012, from the very start, I thought Mitt Romney would win the nomination. Basically, the whole contest boiled down to Mitt and the Seven Dwarves, and eventually I figured Mitt would stomp each dwarf and then, battered and bruised, win the nomination.

But this time around, it’s just dwarves. Like Smith, I have a hard time seeing Jeb Bush making a serious run. Chris Christie still seems terminally damaged by Bridgegate, though I suppose that’s still up in the air depending on what future investigations reveal. Beyond that, I guess Scott Walker is still a possibility—though, in the immortal words of Ann Widdecombe, it’s always seemed as if there’s a bit of the night about him. And Paul Ryan, of course, though it sure doesn’t seem like he’s seriously interested in running.

Beyond that, it’s just the usual clown show of nutballs and C-list wannabes. You can make a great case for why none of them can possibly win. And yet, someone has to win. It’s a mystery.

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Can Anyone Win the 2016 Republican Nomination?

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Guess What? Greece Is Finally Starting to Recover

by LibbyHammqmm Posted on April 9, 2014

Mother Jones

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Apropos of nothing in particular, I want to highlight this column from Hugo Dixon that I found at Counterparties yesterday:

Greece is undergoing an astonishing financial rebound. Two years ago, the country looked like it was set for a messy default and exit from the euro. Now it is on the verge of returning to the bond market with the issue of 2 billion euros of five-year paper.

There are still political risks, and the real economy is only now starting to turn. But the financial recovery is impressive. The 10-year bond yield, which hit 30 percent after the debt restructuring of two years ago, is now 6.2 percent….The changed mood in the markets is mainly down to external factors: the European Central Bank’s promise to “do whatever it takes” to save the euro two years ago; and the more recent end of investors’ love affair with emerging markets, meaning the liquidity sloshing around the global economy has been hunting for bargains in other places such as Greece.

That said, the centre-right government of Antonis Samaras has surprised observers at home and abroad by its ability to continue with the fiscal and structural reforms started by his predecessors. The most important successes have been reform of the labour market, which has restored Greece’s competiveness, and the achievement last year of a “primary” budgetary surplus before interest payments.

I don’t have anything to say about this, but once a narrative takes hold we sometimes don’t realize it when things change. If you had asked me last week how Greece was doing, I would have answered, “Oh, they’re still screwed.” But apparently they’re doing better. Not out of the woods yet, but doing better. Update your priors.

POSTSCRIPT: If this keeps up—and that’s still a big if—it also might be a lesson in the virtue of kicking the can down the road. Back in 2012, lots of commenters, including me, believed that the eurozone had deep structural problems that couldn’t be solved by running fire drills every six months or so and then hoping against hope that things would get better. But maybe they will! This probably still wasn’t the best way of forging a recovery of the eurozone, but so far, it seems to have worked at least a little better than the pessimists imagined. Maybe sometimes kicking the can is a good idea after all.

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Guess What? Greece Is Finally Starting to Recover

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Fox News Confuses NAACP and NCAA 2 Days After SNL Joked About It

by Charlie Smith Posted on April 8, 2014

Mother Jones

On Tuesday morning, Fox & Friends First host Heather Childers referred to the UConn Huskies as “NAACP national champs.” This is funny, because what she meant was “NCAA national champs.” The NAACP is the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which, among other things, mounted anti-lynching campaigns in the United States. The NCAA is the National Collegiate Athletic Association, which didn’t.

So we all had a brief chuckle at Childers‘ expense, and were ready to move on—until we noticed that her on-air mix-up was predicted by a Saturday Night Live sketch that aired just last weekend.

In SNL‘s latest lampooning of Fox & Friends, the cohosts start by blasting the Obamacare enrollment numbers. “It’s tough to sign up for things, I’ve tried for years to join the NAACP,” Brian Kilmeade (played by Bobby Moynihan) says. “Brian, why would you do that?” Elisabeth Hasselbeck (Vanessa Bayer) responds. “Well, I just loved college basketball,” Brian says.

The SNL writers room is full of time travelers. Watch the sketch here:

(H/t Ben Dimiero)

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Fox News Confuses NAACP and NCAA 2 Days After SNL Joked About It

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This Weekend, Yet Another "60 Minutes" Screw-Up

by DaniloBeet Posted on April 1, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Sunday I watched 60 Minutes and caught their segment about the Tesla Model S. They had some footage of the car zipping along the road, and I was surprised by the throaty rumble it made while it was accelerating. It’s an electric car, after all. It shouldn’t sound like a Corvette.

Please note: I am, at best, a minor league car guy. I know very little about cars. But the sound of the Tesla S immediately drew my attention. Yesterday, 60 Minutes said it was all a mistake:

Our video editor made an audio editing error in our report about Elon Musk and Tesla last night. We regret the error and it is being corrected online.

This is not really believable. If I noticed this, then a minimum of dozens of people who worked on this segment would have noticed it. Besides, where did the V8-audio come from? Did the video editor just “accidentally” pull some off the shelf and mix it in? Repeatedly?

WTF is going on with 60 Minutes these days?

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This Weekend, Yet Another "60 Minutes" Screw-Up

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Here Is Some Pretty Great Advice About How to Respond to a Bully, Courtesy of Wil Wheaton

by HattieCoode Posted on March 31, 2014

Mother Jones

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Growing up is hard. Children are generally awful to each other. The world is filled with unhappy kids taking out their unhappiness on even less happy kids who then take that unhappiness out on still less happy kids. This cycle is often punctuated by tragedy.

People do this at every age, obviously, but one of the best parts of becoming an adult is realizing the shallow sophistry of bullying itself—that it has nothing to do with the bullied and everything to do with the bully’s sick psychology. But when you’re a kid and you already feel like you are alone and someone who appears to be popular and well-liked says something cruel to you, it can be hard not to think that they just may well have a point.

If time machines existed we could go and warn ourselves. “Look, young me, kids are going to say mean things to you but only because they’re from a broken home and their father didn’t go to their baseball game and they’re beginning to suspect that maybe they aren’t very bright and they have very little self-worth and they’re trying to make themselves feel better about their own mediocrity by putting you in a position that allows them to think ‘well at least I don’t have it as bad as him!'” Then—poof!—we’d vanish in a puff of smoke and our young selves’ would ride off to grade school with armor optimized for adolescence.

Sadly, time machines do not exist, but YouTube does! So, if you have a child, show them this video of Wil Wheaton explaining to a young girl how to respond to kids who may call her a “nerd.”

It was taken at the 2013 Denver Comic-Con which was a year ago but Wheaton didn’t post about it until today. It’s pretty great evergreen advice, so enjoy. Happy Sunday!

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Here Is Some Pretty Great Advice About How to Respond to a Bully, Courtesy of Wil Wheaton

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People Who Know the Koch Brothers Sure Don’t Like Them Much

by Celestinej5a Posted on March 25, 2014

Mother Jones

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This is apropos of nothing in particular, but Dave Weigel draws my attention today to a new GWU/Battleground poll that gives us approval/disapproval ratings for an eclectic bunch of people that happens to include the Koch brothers. It turns out that they’re more unpopular than anyone on the list. Weigel comments on what this means for the Democrats’ anti-Koch offensive:

I generally agree that the Koch focus (Kochus?) is a poor substitute for a positive Democratic agenda, if such a thing is possible, but I don’t see anything in the poll that contradicts the Democratic strategy. Charles and David Koch never, ever do TV interviews, choosing to exercise their influence behind the scenes of political groups, and they’re known by two out of five Americans?

Given their low profile, you’d hardly expect the Kochs to be a household name. And yet, nearly half of all American have heard of them, and among those who are in the know they’re very unpopular. So maybe the Democratic strategy of personalizing the robber-baron right by demonizing the Kochs is paying off. Give it another few months and maybe the Kochs will be a household name.

On the other hand, keep in mind how unreliable these polls are. It’s possible that half the people who claim to have heard of the Koch brothers think they’re the rap duo who performed at the Grammys a few weeks ago. Maybe if Macklemore and Ryan Lewis were less annoying, the Kochs would have done better in this poll.

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People Who Know the Koch Brothers Sure Don’t Like Them Much

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Who Gets Special Access to Comcast’s Customers? Who Decides?

by DieterSkillern Posted on March 24, 2014

Mother Jones

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Things that make you go “hmmm”:

Apple Inc. is in talks with Comcast Corp. about teaming up for a streaming-television service that would use an Apple set-top box and get special treatment on Comcast’s cables to ensure it bypasses congestion on the Web, people familiar with the matter say.

….Under the plan Apple proposed to Comcast, Apple’s video streams would be treated as a “managed service” traveling in Internet protocol format—similar to cable video-on-demand or phone service. Those services travel on a special portion of the cable pipe that is separate from the more congested portion reserved for public Internet access.

People familiar with the matter said that while Apple would like a separate “flow” for its video traffic, it isn’t asking for its traffic to be prioritized over other Internet-based services.

Making video-on-demand operate properly requires careful engineering. It doesn’t work if you just dump it out on the public internet and call it a day. However, that careful engineering costs money, and it’s not unfair for companies to demand reasonable compensation of some sort if they’re the ones who bear the costs.

But who decides what’s reasonable and what isn’t? In a competitive market, the market eventually decides. Price signals and competition do the heavy lifting with only light government regulation to set a level playing field and police the worst abuses. But when companies like Comcast have effective monopoly control over internet access in their territories, who decides then? There are no market forces to rely on. So, for example, when Netflix finally agrees to pay a fee to Comcast for delivery of its video content, the quality of Netflix transmissions miraculously goes up almost instantly. Apparently there were no infrastructure issues at all and no special buildout costs. It was just a matter of Comcast extorting some extra revenue from Netflix.

The Apple case is different in the details, but it raises the same basic principle: Who decides? Who gets special access to Comcast’s customer base? Who gets shut out? The market can’t provide any guidance because Comcast has little genuine competition in this space.

So who decides?

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Who Gets Special Access to Comcast’s Customers? Who Decides?

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America’s Worst Prison Closed 51 Years Ago Today. Except It Didn’t.

by Seymour89E Posted on March 21, 2014

Mother Jones

Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary was conceived as a place to put the worst of the worst. The prisoners that kept starting problems at the other prisons. Put them all together, the thinking went. It wasn’t a place for rehabilitation. It was a place to isolate the infection. Over the 29 years it operated, starting in 1934, “Hellcatraz” earned a reputation so fearsome, it has a powerful hold on the American imagination to this day.

Alcatraz was finally shuttered, 51 years ago today, not because it was brutal, though it was, or because living conditions were inhumane, though they were. It simply cost too much.

This isn’t a secret. But it’s easy to forget. Because people tend to know three things about Alcatraz: 1) It was brutal 2) No one escaped and lived to tell about it, and 3) It’s closed. Lost along the way was “very inefficient from a budgetary standpoint.”

You could be forgiven for assuming that one morning in the spring of 1963, everyone woke up and said, “hey, wait a minute, let’s treat our prisoners better!” Maybe JFK was there and the wind was blowing in his hair and he smiled, and Bobby was there too, and he looked very serious and maybe one of them quoted Dostoyevsky’s line that “the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons” and then they shut the prison and went sailing and Jackie was there and everyone was happy. But that didn’t happen. Everyone was fine with the prisoners being treated the way they were.

And 51 years later, so are we, really. The United States operate 1,800 prisons and 3,000 jails. Like Alcatraz, they aren’t about rehabilitation. They’re about punishment. 80,000 people are held in solitary confinement every year. As many as half of all sexual assaults in prisons are carried out by prison guards. One fourth of the people incarcerated on Earth are incarcerated in the United States. We have 2.3 million Americans behind bars. They aren’t held on an island off San Francisco, they’re held at ADX Florence, or Pelican Bay, and Rikers Island, where an inmate recently baked to death in his cell.

Baked to death.

Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary—the one that Clint Eastwood broke out of and Nicolas Cage broke into—may be dead. But what we mean when we talk about Alcatraz is very much alive.

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America’s Worst Prison Closed 51 Years Ago Today. Except It Didn’t.

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