Blackwater Founder On Security

Blackwater Founder Erik Prince: War on Terror Has Become Too Big:

In an interview Monday, Prince said the national security state he once served has grown too large.

“America is way too quick to trade freedom for the illusion of security,” he told The Daily Beast. “Whether it’s allowing the NSA to go way too far in what it intercepts of our personal data, to our government monitoring of everything domestically and spending way more than we should. I don’t know if I want to live in a country where lone wolf and random terror attacks are impossible ‘cause that country would look more like North Korea than America...”

Rumbles In Tiananmen

Tiananmen Square attack sows terror in spiritual heart of China - latimes.com:

It could hardly have been a more audacious attack or one that was aimed more directly at the bull's-eye that is the spiritual heart of China.

At 12:05 p.m. Monday, a white sport utility vehicle entered a sidewalk and drove nearly 500 yards, plowing through tourists and police, until it stopped near the iconic portrait of Mao Tse-tung that hangs over the main gate in front of Tiananmen Square...

She Was Out Of Her Car

... and no longer in command of a "deadly weapon."

Rampaging driver shot dead on Capitol Hill: Did cops do the right thing? - CSMonitor.com:

...The deadly shot came after Ms. Carey, with her one-year-old daughter in the back of her black Infinity coupe, crashed into White House barricades, sideswiped at least two police cars, crashed into gates at the Capitol, and then stepped out of her car...

Shutting Off Comments

Why We're Shutting Off Our Comments | Popular Science:

Comments can be bad for science. That's why, here at PopularScience.com, we're shutting them off...

And I don't blame them.

Modern Slave Labor

Will Work for Free: How Unpaid Internships Cheapen Workers of All Ages | The Business Desk with Paul Solman | PBS NewsHour | PBS:

...But increasingly, what interns face now is that there are no jobs, and no prospects of a job waiting at the end, no matter how well they do. Indeed, they're going to have to do multiple internships, become serial interns, and even at the end of that, they may be in a very precarious position. So it's really something that sounds good for a lot of people but increasingly is not working out. Since 2008, rising college tuition, record levels of student debt and high levels of youth unemployment have exacerbated the dismal prospects for unpaid internships. Unpaid internships have become a straw that breaks the camel's back for many people....

One of the reasons I got out of the degree-earning business and one of the reasons I discourage undergraduate students from seeking advanced degrees. Several good undergraduate programs have ruined their recruitment prospects via internships and "clinical" hours.

A Reporting Celebrity Visit

I wonder if he heard the banjos...

The Joys of North Carolina - Dan Rather's Official Website:

Finished a reporting and interviewing trip to Charlotte, Asheville, Franklin and a few other places in North Carolina. Is there a friendlier place in the country than the Smoky Mountain area? Doubt it. Texas is the only place I can think of that might--just might--edge it. But if so, only by a tad. The Smoky Mountain region is well known for its beauty, and rightly so. But anyone who goes there and doesn't recognize the just plain decency and exceptionally warm friendliness of the folks has to be either not paying attention or brain-dead...

Who's Where On ACA

The Morning Plum: Ted Cruz’s stance on Obamacare is the GOP’s stance on Obamacare:

...* Eighty percent of Americans, including 82 percent of independents and 75 percent of Republicans, say threatening a government shutdown is not an acceptable way to negotiate.

* Americans say overwhelmingly that Republicans are not trying to work with Obama by 70-23. By contrast, 51 percent say Obama is trying to work with Republicans...

GOPers Continue Extortion

House Republicans open two-front war on ObamaCare | Fox News:

House Republicans are poised to open a two-front war on ObamaCare, pushing for a vote this weekend on a bill that would delay the health care law in exchange for raising the debt ceiling -- a week after handing the Senate a separate bill that would defund the law...

The Daily Flashback: Iran Hostage Edition

October Surprise News Coverage(House of Representatives - February 05, 1992):

Suspicions about a deal between the Reagan campaign and Iran over the hostages have circulated since the day of President Reagan's inaugural, when Iran agreed to release the 52 American hostages exactly five minutes after Mr. Reagan took the oath of office. Later, as it became known that arms started to flow to Iran via Israel only a few days after the inauguration, suspicions deepened that a secret arms-for-hostages deal had been concluded.

Five years later, when the Iran-contra affair revealed what seemed to be a similar swap of hostages for arms delivered through Israel, questions were revived about the 1980 election. In a nice, ironic twist, the phrase `October surprise,' which Vice Presidential candidate George Bush had coined to warn of possible political manipulation of the hostages by Jimmy Carter, began to be applied to the suspected secret activities of the 1980 Reagan-Bush campaign...

The Double Fake Secession

It's a Great Media Stunt to Try to Secede from Colorado | Jason Salzman:
...But don't take it seriously, except as a novel way right-wingers are manipulating the media to promote their unpopular attacks on common-sense gun-safety, clean-energy laws, and other progressive legislation at the state level.

Murderers Targets Non-Muslims

Al-Shabab: Foreigners in Kenya were a 'legitimate target':

Al-Shabab, the armed Somali Islamic extremist group that attacked a shopping mall in Kenya, said Wednesday that foreigners were a "legitimate target" and confirmed witness accounts that gunmen tried to let Muslims go free while killing or taking the others captive.

In an email exchange Wednesday with The Associated Press, al-Shabab said the jihadis "carried out a meticulous vetting process" so the Muslims would not be harmed. According to published accounts, witnesses have said the gunmen rounded up people, asked questions about Islam that a Muslim would know and told the Muslims to leave the mall...

The Management Underbelly

Some people will make much of this as a failing in education, but these two nabods were not in education, though that's what their paycheck says. They were in management. I have observed that when you hire a teacher you are going to get one of two kinds of people: those who will have their markers pried from their cold, dead fingers, and those who discover that teaching is work and immediately start scheming to escape the classroom by getting into management. Don't by surprised when these frustrated 1%ers turnout to be bullies, liars, and hypocrites

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A school official’s unbelievably racist texts - Salon.com:

...There is so much that’s contemptible about the exchanges between Como and Donato – the simmering, near constant anger they display, the grotesque, dehumanizing way they view pretty much anybody who isn’t a white man (to their credit, though, I didn’t notice any gay slurs in the lot) and the jaw-dropping amount of arrogance and privilege it takes to speak that hatefully, that freely. But what stinks most is the betrayal it represents, the lie that their jobs were. The disgust they had for their own kids. “They were friendly to our faces,” Zhaqweyza Armstrong, a 16 year-old Coatesville High junior, told the Inquirer Monday, “and then they talked about us behind our backs.”

Right on cue to back me up, Salon posts another essay on teaching:

GOPers Groping Toward Budget

U.S. Senate Republicans start closing ranks on spending bill | Reuters:

U.S. Senate Republicans on Tuesday appeared to fall in line with their leaders who want to pass an emergency spending bill by September 30 and avoid government shutdowns, even if it means failing in a drive to destroy "Obamacare..."

Bengahzi Will Never Die!

Darrell Issa’s pathetic, error-laden obsession continues - Salon.com:

...So far, the hearing seems to be answering one question I’ve had about Issa’s crusade: Why did he wait so long to interview Pickering and Mullen in public? Back in May, both men volunteered to give public testimony to the committee about the ARB process. But Issa declined; he insisted they testify privately. From their private testimony, the GOP majority produced the myth- and error-ridden report they leaked earlier this week. Now, so far in public testimony, Issa has been embarrassed twice – and it’s still early. No wonder he hoped to take his first crack at Pickering and Mullen out of camera range.

The ranking Democrat on the committee, Elijah Cummings, produced a counterreport that documented the distortion of Mullen’s testimony about Cheryl Mills and other such factual errors and leaps of illogic in Issa’s IRB review. (It’s here.) Among Cummings’ findings: There was no “stand down” order to the military; Clinton did not personally sign a cable authorizing security reductions to the temporary facility; in fact, officials have been removed from their posts for bad judgment on Benghazi security...

Iran Says No To Nukes

Nightly News: Iran’s president vows to never develop nuclear weapons:

In an exclusive interview with NBC’s Ann Curry, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said his country is asking for peace, stability and the elimination of all weapons of mass destruction...

The Truth On Syria

I found Cannon's post very persuasive. Cannonfire: "The "Trojan" trick: You can't understand what's going on now unless you know what happened in 1986"

Real Evil Skates Free

Bradley Manning Headed To Prison, While Those Who Authorized Torture Go Free:

Bradley Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison on Wednesday for releasing 700,000 documents about the United States' worldwide diplomacy and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Manning was a 25-year-old Army private first class at the time of his arrest. He saw himself as an idealist acting to end the wars, and said in online chats with hacker Adrian Lamo that he was particularly concerned about the abuse of detainees in Iraq. No political or military higher-ups have ever been prosecuted for detainee abuse or torture in Iraq, Afghanistan or at Guantanamo Bay...

Tea Party Mystics

Yes, this quote has something to do with politics. Go forth unto the link to figure.

The Tea Party’s paranoid aesthetic - Salon.com:

...For my money, the supreme expression of paranoid narcissism in recent popular culture is “The X-Files,” the science-fiction series that ran on FOX television from 1993 until 2002. For those of you who spent the ‘90s in suspended animation, the series follows two FBI agents, Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson), as they slowly unravel a multilayered conspiracy in which elements of the intelligence community work with rapacious industrialists to turn over the planet to even more rapacious aliens. (At least, I think that’s the conspiracy; it had grown so incredibly baroque by the series’ end that I can’t be entirely sure.)In the final episode of the first season (“The Erlenmeyer Flask”), there is a scene that perfectly embodies the combination of nearly infantile self-obsession with barely suppressed panic that constitutes paranoid narcissism. Agent Mulder has devoted himself to exposing the conspiracy, largely because he blames it for certain tragedies in his personal life (the disappearance of his sister, the collapse of his parents’ marriage). He receives information that leads him to a decrepit warehouse on a bleak industrial boulevard. (Wonderfully, the warehouse is “Zeus Storage,” the boulevard is “Pandora.”) He makes his way inside, wanders down a dark corridor, then enters what appears to be an equally dark chamber. But as he moves forward, the gloom and silence give way to the green glow of instrument panels and the soft gurgling of water. He stops and stares at the scene before him: neatly organized rows of glass tanks, each of which contains a fully submerged, apparently human body, sound asleep and breathing effortlessly in its liquid bed...

Useful Leakers

In Defense of Leakers: Snowden and Manning : The New Yorker:

On the day that Edward Snowden finally left Moscow’s airport in a taxi to take up Russia’s offer of temporary asylum and the sentencing portion of Bradley Manning’s trial continued, it is worth restating what should be obvious. Leaking classified information is a crime, and it can be damaging to the national interest; but, in some circumstances, it can also be a patriotic and useful act that helps bring about necessary reforms...

Suitcase Nukes Not Real

Experts close the lid on 'suitcase nukes' - USATODAY.com:

...Nuclear bombs cleverly concealed in suitcases don't exist in real life. Even so, they have long been a popular Hollywood plot point...