August 7, 2013

I think Florida should be commended for seeing its own future and embracing that reality

A summer camp in Florida offers kids the chance to participate in a real-life version of the Hunger Games and "fight to the death"




The first day of camp brought girls with lunchbags and suntans and swimsuit strings hanging down the backs of their shirts. They smiled and jumped up and down, excited to see each other; many were classmates at Country Day School, the host of the summer camp. It was this friendship that made Rylee Miller, 12, feel a little conflicted. "I don't want to kill you," she told Julianna Pettey. Julianna, also 12, looked her in the eye. "I will probably kill you first," she said. She put her hands on Rylee's shoulders. "I might stab you."

The boys had gathered away from the girls, across the room. Eli Hunter cocked an elbow and pointed the fingers on his other hand, explaining that he was a sniper in a tree. He gunned down Liam Cadzow, a tiny blond boy in a bucket hat.

"What are we going to do first?" shouted 14-year-old Sidney Martenfeld. "Are we going to kill each other first?"

"No! No violence this week," the camp's head counselor was busy telling the children. But keeping the kids from talk of murder would prove difficult. That was, after all, the driving plot point of The Hunger Games — and this was Hunger Games camp.

the rest, plus video (oh boy!):
http://www.tampabay.com/news/humaninterest/at-hunger-games-camp-children-want-to-fight-to-the-death/2134621

August 7, 2013

IT’S TIME TO MOVE THE OLYMPICS by George Takei

IT’S TIME TO MOVE THE OLYMPICS
Why Russia Should Not Be Permitted To Host the 2014 Winter Olympics In Sochi, and Why They Should Instead Be Moved To Another Host City



By George Takei

way more:
http://www.allegiancemusical.com/blog-entry/its-time-move-olympics

August 6, 2013

The Amazon founder Jeff Bezoz is building a clock that will last for 1,000 decades. Wait, what?

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/06/10000-year-clock/all/


FORTUNE -- As any Amazon (AMZN) investor will tell you, Jeff Bezos believes in long-term thinking. Make that really, really long-term thinking. So long, in fact, that he's spending at least $42 million to build a giant clock that will tick for 10,000 years deep inside a mountain in West Texas.

The clock is being constructed by the Long Now Foundation, which aims to promote a more patient, far-sighted mindset in an increasingly fast-paced world. The clock will play a new tune every year, century, and millennium, and will not repeat a melody throughout its entire lifespan. It doesn't have a practical purpose, per se, and it certainly won't make money. It's more of a conceptual art piece designed to encourage people to be good stewards of humanity's distant future. Journalists can only hope that Bezos's purchase of the profit-challenged Washington Post will be similarly philosophically driven.

http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2013/08/06/about-jeff-bezos-10000-year-clock/

August 6, 2013

Clinton Comments On Weiner: ‘We Are A Hundred Miles From That Race’

Former President Bill Clinton finally addressed Anthony Weiner's tumultuous New York City mayoral campaign, telling CNN in an interview posted Tuesday that he and his wife Hillary Clinton have maintained a healthy distance from the race.

"We are a hundred miles from that race and everyone understands that we are not going to be involved, as long as our personal friends and people who we feel obligations are involved," Clinton said in Kigali, Rwanda, where he is doing work for The Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation.

Weiner's wife, Huma Abedin, has served as a close confidant to Hillary Clinton, prompting many to wonder about the former first family's reaction to the latest sexting revelations involving the mayoral hopeful. But the former president said they deliberately avoided getting involved in a race that includes many past supporters.

"Neither Hillary or I was ever involved in the political campaign, and they understood that from the beginning," Clinton said. "There are too many people running for mayor who have been my supporters, who supported her for senator, her for president."

http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entry/clinton-comments-on-weiner-we-are-hundred-miles?ref=fpb

August 6, 2013

Murdering Dreams: Apparatus of hopelessness-designed to squelch any sense of alternative future...

It’s as if American forces in Iraq were ultimately defeated by the ghost of Abbie Hoffman.

A Practical Utopian’s Guide to the Coming Collapse
DAVID GRAEBER

......................................



How did they pull it off? The preemptive attitude toward social movements is clearly a part of it; under no conditions can alternatives, or anyone proposing alternatives, be seen to experience success. This helps explain the almost unimaginable investment in “security systems” of one sort or another: the fact that the United States, which lacks any major rival, spends more on its military and intelligence than it did during the Cold War, along with the almost dazzling accumulation of private security agencies, intelligence agencies, militarized police, guards, and mercenaries. Then there are the propaganda organs, including a massive media industry that did not even exist before the sixties, celebrating police. Mostly these systems do not so much attack dissidents directly as contribute to a pervasive climate of fear, jingoistic conformity, life insecurity, and simple despair that makes any thought of changing the world seem an idle fantasy. Yet these security systems are also extremely expensive. Some economists estimate that a quarter of the American population is now engaged in “guard labor” of one sort or another—defending property, supervising work, or otherwise keeping their fellow Americans in line. Economically, most of this disciplinary apparatus is pure deadweight.

In fact, most of the economic innovations of the last thirty years make more sense politically than economically. Eliminating guaranteed life employment for precarious contracts doesn’t really create a more effective workforce, but it is extraordinarily effective in destroying unions and otherwise depoliticizing labor. The same can be said of endlessly increasing working hours. No one has much time for political activity if they’re working sixty-hour weeks.

It does often seem that, whenever there is a choice between one option that makes capitalism seem the only possible economic system, and another that would actually make capitalism a more viable economic system, neoliberalism means always choosing the former. The combined result is a relentless campaign against the human imagination. Or, to be more precise: imagination, desire, individual creativity, all those things that were to be liberated in the last great world revolution, were to be contained strictly in the domain of consumerism, or perhaps in the virtual realities of the Internet. In all other realms they were to be strictly banished. We are talking about the murdering of dreams, the imposition of an apparatus of hopelessness, designed to squelch any sense of an alternative future. Yet as a result of putting virtually all their efforts in one political basket, we are left in the bizarre situation of watching the capitalist system crumbling before our very eyes, at just the moment everyone had finally concluded no other system would be possible.

http://www.thebaffler.com/past/practical_utopians_guide

August 6, 2013

Google (et al) = an arm of the NSA/Pentagon

Looking back on the NSA revelations, starting with the PRISM program, I’ve found a lot of slide-analysis that makes a number of good points.

But one slide keeps jumping out at me — very much a not-in-the-weeds slide, which makes a not-in-the-weeds point.

It’s this one. See if you can figure out why I think it’s remarkable. And see if you can guess where this discussion is going.

Remember, NSA = the Pentagon. It’s not some free-floating agency within the Executive Branch (like the staff of the National Security Advisor or something). It’s the Pentagon pure and simple, the military.





The part I find remarkable about all these slides is the header. Every PRISM slide has this at the top:



So when this X-Keyscore slide appears …



… with this text description …

… the source of the data being queried has to be the information collected and stored by these companies (once more, for your viewing pleasure):



MORE:
http://americablog.com/2013/08/is-google-arm-of-nsa.html

August 6, 2013

Former GOP official arrested for sexting minor after mocking Anthony Weiner

Scott Hounsell apparently didn't get the message about throwing stones in glass houses.

On Friday, the former executive director of the Republican Party of Los Angeles County was arrested for allegedly sending sexual explicit material to a 16-year-old over social media. Authorities came to his house with a warrant following an investigation by the LAPD's Internet Crimes Against Children Unit. He was charged with a misdemeanor and later released on $40,000 bail.

While Hounsell, 30, had resigned from his role in the county GOP in June for an unrelated reason, a party spokesman told KABC, it turns out that he had recently thrown a number of partisan jabs at Democrats facing questions for indiscretions of their own.

Addicting Info first took a glance at his Twitter profile and found the messages.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/06/scott-hounsell-arrested_n_3712596.html?ncid=edlinkusaolp00000003

August 6, 2013

Liz Cheney IMPROPERLY Received State Resident Fishing Licence Based On INCORRECT INFO

Senate candidate Liz Cheney improperly received a state resident fishing license based on an application with incorrect information, according to Wyoming Game and Fish Department records.

Cheney, who last month announced she will challenge Sen. Mike Enzi in the 2014 Republican primary, received her resident license just 72 days after closing on her Wilson house in May 2012. State law requires residents live in the state 365 consecutive days before they can receive a resident hunting or fishing license, which are cheaper than out-of-state licenses.

Cheney’s application also lists her as a 10-year resident of Wyoming.

The Game and Fish records are incorrect, Cheney told the Star-Tribune.

“The clerk must have made a mistake,” she said. “I never claimed to be a 10-year resident.”


MORE:
http://trib.com/news/state-and-regional/govt-and-politics/liz-cheney-listed-as--year-wyomingite-gets-resident-fishing/article_d764ebbc-7d00-5358-88f2-8029198beff7.html



application form available online:
http://wgfd.wyo.gov/web2011/Departments/Hunting/pdfs/RESLIFETIME_LICSTAMP_APP0001471.pdf

August 6, 2013

No Surprise - Perry doesn't KNOW what state he is in

Exchange of the Day

The Dallas Morning News traveled with Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) for a speech to a group of conservative bloggers.

Said Perry: "There are many other states that embrace those conservative values, the approach we've taken over the years. I'm in one today -- Florida."

"We're in Louisiana," someone shouted.

http://trailblazersblog.dallasnews.com/2013/08/rick-perry-shows-up-in-new-glasses-at-redstate-gathering.html/

http://politicalwire.com/archives/2013/08/05/exchange_of_the_day.html

August 6, 2013

FRANK RICH: List of Dem politicians fiercely opposed to existing order=1 & only 1 - Elizabeth Warren

The Stench of the Potomac
Washington may be a dysfunctional place to govern, but it’s working better than ever as a marketplace for cashing in. And that’s thanks, more than anything, to the Democratic Establishment.

By Frank Rich

Among Democrats, the list of national politicians fiercely opposed to the existing order begins and ends with Elizabeth Warren.

................

“When I am president,” Obama had said in 2008, “I will start by closing the revolving door in the White House that’s allowed people to use their administration job as a stepping-stone to further their lobbying careers.” Puzzling over how so many colleagues have strayed from this credo, the former press secretary Robert Gibbs has theorized that either “somehow we have all changed” or, alternatively, “maybe Washington changed us.” Whatever the explanation, it’s clear that the president himself has been either passive or ineffectual when it comes to exerting any moral authority over the White House alumni who’ve been streaming through the revolving door.

..............

Among Democrats, the list of national politicians fiercely opposed to the existing order begins and ends with Elizabeth Warren. Even now Obama is toying with appointing Larry Summers as Fed chair, despite his past in Rubinomics during the Clinton era and his present as a paid consultant to Citigroup. The two most likely Democratic prospects to succeed Obama in the White House, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, both came of political age in the revolving-door Washington of This Town; many of the most successful fixers in the book are one degree of separation from one or both of them. Sometimes these alumni are one degree of separation from ethical conflict, too. The ubiquitous Clinton fund-raiser Terry McAuliffe, as inescapable as canapés in Leibovich’s narrative, is currently running for governor of Virginia even as a Department of Homeland Security investigation into a disputed visa has ensnared a company with ties to both him and Hillary Clinton’s brother, Anthony Rodham. Clinton’s longtime aide Huma Abedin, best known now for her marital martyrdom, was discovered by Politico in May to have taken on other clients, including Teneo, a business and banking “global advisory firm” co-founded by the Bill Clinton majordomo Doug Band, in her final months in the taxpayers’ employ as a part-time consultant at the State Department.

This crowd is as intractable as it is incorrigible. There are no term limits, because Washington amnesia perennially wipes the slate clean. No one seems to remember anymore the furor kicked off by a 1998 Post “Style”-section piece in which Beltway grandees like David Broder and Cokie Roberts vented to Sally Quinn about how the impeached president had trashed their pristine city. “Regardless of whether his fortunes improve,” Quinn concluded, “Bill Clinton has essentially lost the Washington Establishment for good.” Well, that was then, and this is now. As This Town makes clear, these days Clinton alumni are the Washington Establishment, whether in the Obama administration or on K Street, and they can hardly wait for the greater dividends that will accrue should the former First Couple be restored to the White House in 2016. If that happens, Leibovich will not have to write a sequel, because it is already writing itself.


MORE:
http://nymag.com/news/frank-rich/this-town-washington-lobbyists-2013-8/index3.html