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THE CD AND THE DAMAGE DONE an editorial by Neil Young (c. 1992)

I'm a huge Neil Young fan, but sometimes he has some ...interesting ideas.

(emphasis blow is mine)

We're living in the darkest age of musical
sound. When they started capturing music on
records a long time ago-on 78's--the sound was
pretty shaky.Then it got a little better, and from
that point on, right up to the beginning of digital recording,
  everything that was done was better than the digital recordings
that are being made today. Digital is completely wrong. It's a farce.

They've improved digital technology to the
point where you can at least say,"Hey, that's music."
But your brain and your heart are starved for
a challenge, and there's no challenge, there are
no possibilities, there's no imagination. You're
hearing simulated music. Your brain is capable of
taking in an incredible amount of information,
and the beauty of music should be like water
washing over you. But digitally recorded music is
like ice cubes washing over you. It's not the same.

My album Everyone Knows This Is Nowhere is
now available on CD, but it's not as good as the
original, which came out in 1969. Listening to
a CD islike looking through a screen window If
you get right up next to a screen window, you can
see all kinds of different colors through each
hole. Well, imagine if all that color had to be
reduced to only one color per hole-that's what
digital recording does to sound. All that gets
recorded is what's dominant at each moment. I
would like to hear guitars again, with the warmth,
the highs, the lows, the air, the electricity, the
vibrancy of something that's real, instead of just
a duplication of the dominant factors. It's an insult
to the brain and heart and feelings to have
to listen to this and think it's music.

There's a certain emptiness in the air these
days.Youthink that it might be today'smusic, because
  it just isn't as heartfelt as yesterday's.
  Everybody says, "Well, business came in and took
over, and they ruined music," but that's just an
excuse. The real reason istechnical. It's not that
people don't have souls anymore. All these bands
have got huge souls and can't wait to play; they
just can't figure out why their albums don't sound
as good as some of the things they used to hear.

I've been making records for twenty-six years,
and I'm telling you: from the early 1980s up till
now, and probably for another ten or fifteen
years to come-this is the darkest time ever for
recorded music. We'll come out the other end
and it'll be okay, but we'll look back and go,
"Wow, that was the digital age. I wonder what
that music really sounded like. We got so carried
away that we never even really recorded it. We
just made digital records of it." That's what people will say-mark my words.

And then he started selling Ponos. I'm not a big enough of a Neil Young fan to buy one though.

I doubt it's going to work out for them, especially considering that the UK has been more than willing to bring in new immigrants that are quite happy to work five days a week. Maybe a few of the highly skilled trades could demand this, but I suspect that people will just start finding ways to switch to non-union labor. Even if they manage to force something into law, they'll quickly find that people will gladly outsource wherever possible. That's obviously a lot harder to do if you need plumbing work, but not all jobs are immune from being done somewhere else.

This notion of shorter work weeks is hardly new. Bertrand Russel opined about it almost a century ago. While it's certainly true that productivity has massively increased over the years, including even more from the time he wrote this piece, his conclusion that this would mean a reduction in the amount of time a laborer works has turned out to be wrong. Instead, what tends to happen is that when productivity doubles (and demand remains fixed) is that half of the laborers will be let go and the remaining half will use their improved productivity to produce the same amount as before.

There are also many people who already work 4 days a week. They just work 10 hour shifts.

At the time, I was writing a book about the politics of drug prohibition. I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away. “You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

Dan Baum, Harper's Magazine

Per the above, the Nixon administration did not have such...conspiratorially scientific scheming behind the war on drugs. Simply raw political calculus and an identifiable enemy.

It's funny how left-wing name calling is the only name calling that gets old. Right wingers have been calling "communist" and "satanic" nonstop since the 50s to today, but "Nazi" and "racist' are the only epithets that people claim go out of style.

Oh, by the way:

At the time, I was writing a book about the politics of drug prohibition. I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away. “You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

Dan Baum, Harper Magazine, April 2016
Full Article Link

But please, cry more about liberals not being civil anymore.

The first step is to criminalize enough normal, common behavior that everyone becomes a criminal. The second step is to selectively arrest dissidents and people with inconvenient ideas not for opposing the people in power, but for breaking the "legitimate" and "reasonable" laws.

For example, the United States has been a police state since at least the Nixon administration. Here's a quote from Nixon's former aide, John Ehrlichman, illustrating the point:

"You want to know what this [the passage of the Controlled Substances Act and the "War on Drugs"] was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

Why am I reminded of http://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-american-politics/? And why does that seem to be such a peculiarly American thing?

You have two representations of fact that I have not seen elsewhere. One is that his mother threw his items in the trash.

From the Harper's article at http://harpers.org/archive/199... P "David’s mother, alerted by Ken and Kathy and petrified that the government would take her home away as a result of her son’s experiments, had ransacked the shed and discarded most of what she found, including his neutron gun, the radium, pellets of thorium that were far more radioactive than what the health officials found, and several quarts of radioactive powder. “The funny thing is,” David now says, “they only got the garbage, and the garbage got all the good stuff.”"

The other that he used stolen detectors.

From the same article: "Another year, David was expelled from camp when—while most of his friends were sneaking into the nearby Girl Scouts’ camp—he stole a number of smoke detectors to disassemble for parts he required for his experiments. “Our summer vacation was screwed up when we got a call telling us to pick David up early from camp,” his stepmother recalls with a sigh.

As well, he was arrested in 2007 for stealing smoke detectors.

As I have seen the story presented, he may have committed fraud in order to acquire the detectors mainly to mask his age, but he did not steal them. The other is you assertion that his mother threw out "most" of his items. The story as presented is that he was pulled over by a policeman and some items were found that led to the complete excavation of the family's yard. Now perhaps his mother threw out items prior to the discovery by authorities.

Sometimes we are presented with innacurate stories.

They don't lean "left", though -- they lean pro-establishment-"left". See this piece by Thomas Frank:

My project in the pages that follow is to review the media’s attitude toward yet a third politician, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who ran for the Democratic presidential nomination earlier this year. By examining this recent history, much of it already forgotten, I hope to rescue a number of worthwhile facts about the press’s attitude toward Sanders. Just as crucially, however, I intend to raise some larger questions about the politics of the media in this time of difficulty and transition (or, depending on your panic threshold, industry-wide apocalypse) for newspapers.

So she was following the example of Bush who didn't preserve millions of emails as the law requires so he could hide his illegal activities from FOIA requests.

Got it.

I'm a digital pack rat. I collect just about anything that raises my eyebrows in my personal wiki. It's a crazy thing, like people who build entire houses out of used beer cans, but for me, at least, it pleasantly passes the time.

I strongly prefer insight over outrage, so I was awfully slow off the mark in finally creating an "asshole" page (subpage "corporate asshole"), but having done so about six months ago, what a boon it has become.

Welcome Marvel.

Welcome DC Comics.

Allow me to make some introductions. On your left is Comcast, Marriott, General Mills, and Sony. You probably know most of those already. On your right there's FIFA, IOC, NCAA, and Voltage Pictures. Another cluster top heavy in the usual suspects. Across the room, there's Gawker Media and the IAB conferring in what appears to be an almost romantic tete-a-tete.

Be sure to pull up a chair while you have the opportunity. Word on the street is that we soon might need to suspend the fire code.

What's that, you say? Where's General Hayden?

Company Men: Torture, treachery, and the CIA

The Panetta Review had reached the same conclusions, on the basis of the same documents, that the Senate report later did. In other words, the CIA's own analysis of its records refuted all the cheerleading claims currently being trotted out by its team of publicists. Had the agency, in obstructing the report and spying on Senate investigators, finally overplayed its hand? "Nothing could be further from the truth," Brennan insisted, following in the footsteps of Michael Hayden, whom the report depicts as a kind of unflappable Pinocchio, fibbing under oath at every opportunity.

Yes, I understand why you might be puzzled not to find him here. The situation concerning Hayden is complicated. Innocent until proven guilty, and all that rot. His was a complex mandate. Many good minds suspect he's rather too full of himself in a bad way, but other perspectives remain credible.

It's not like you can simply go to Wikipedia and read the following:

The word 'superhero' dates to at least 1917. Antecedents of the archetype include such folkloric heroes as Robin Hood, who adventured in distinctive clothing. The 1903 play The Scarlet Pimpernel and its spinoffs popularized the idea of a masked avenger and the superhero trope of a secret identity. Shortly afterward, masked and costumed pulp-fiction characters such as Zorro (1919) and comic strip heroes such as the Phantom (1936) began appearing, as did non-costumed characters with super strength, including Patoruzu (1928), the comic-strip character Popeye (1929) and novelist Philip Wylie's protagonist Hugo Danner (1930).

Feel free to mingle among the assembled company of like minds.

[...] the very next thing that would happen is that China et al will ask for the same solution.

I think this is actually backwards compared to how it may actually play out. This month's *Harper's Magazine* has an interesting essay about American businesses operating in China. (*Harper's* is paywalled, but you get a few free views per month.) The essay can be found here:

"The New China Syndrome: American business meets its new master"

The gist of the essay is that China's authoritarian government strong-arms American businesses, using all of the tools at its command, including outright arrest of business executives, and that this is only going to get worse, to the point where China will be setting U.S. policy by proxy, via business lobbying. After reading that essay yesterday, my guess is that China may someday soon pressure businesses for a backdoor, be granted that backdoor, and that the U.S. government may then get its wish based on China's precedent.

Wasn't there, don't know he people involved, so who knows what the situation was. What I don't like is the fact that Ahmed Mohamed didn't accomplish anything worth of presidential attention, yet he was invited to the White House. There are children who do far more interesting things. Let's not forget David Hahn. I think it can be said Hahn set the bar quite high for teenage science projects.

Wrong, zombies were real with a few documented cases. Of course, real zombies are basically orthogonal with the pop culture myth pretty much in the same way that the historical Vlad the Impaler became Dracula.

I didn't see the 60 minutes story, but Harper's ran an interesting story in June 2011 called "Life in the Zone." http://harpers.org/archive/201...

It touched on two researchers and their conflicting views on what the long term effects of the radiation has been on the surrounding ecosystem. Don't know of a convenient place to access the article however.

Aw come on! How many of us haven't dreamed of building our own breeder reactor in the back yard during our youth to earn a Boy Scout merit badge.

... from 1932 echos part of your point: http://harpers.org/archive/193...
"First of all: what is work? Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earthâ(TM)s surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid. The second kind is capable of indefinite extension: there are not only those who give orders but those who give advice as to what orders should be given. Usually two opposite kinds of advice are given simultaneously by two different bodies of men; this is called politics. The skill required for this kind of work is not knowledge of the subjects as to which advice is given, but knowledge of the art of persuasive speaking and writing, i.e. of advertising. Throughout Europe, though not in America, there is a third class of men, more respected than either of the classes of workers. These are men who, through ownership of land, are able to make others pay for the privilege of being allowed to exist and to work. These landowners are idle, and I might, therefore, be expected to praise them. Unfortunately, their idleness is rendered possible only by the industry of others; indeed their desire for comfortable idleness is historically the source of the whole gospel of work. The last thing they have ever wished is that others should follow their example."

The key part agreeing with you being: "The second kind is capable of indefinite extension: there are not only those who give orders but those who give advice as to what orders should be given."

You make another interesting point on equal distribution of material wealth in the USA essentially in terms of mass. To support your point, it's true that a lot of "money" controlled by the wealthiest 0.1% is now in the "casino economy" of the stock market and so on (FIRE sector) and so unavailable for use by most people to signal demand for material goods.

Still, I can doubt your point on equal distribution of goods and services is true overall, even if it is no doubt true for, say, beverages. I'd be curious to see more substantiation of that point.

It seems to me in the USA that wealthy people own a lot of land (and control corporations and politics, see: http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesa... ), they have in general better quality products and services (including education and food), as families they have more potential free time and self-determination, they have better access to medical care, and they face less financial precarity in their day-to-day lives. In general, they are not forced to take on risks that poorer people are (unsafe cars, unsafe neighborhoods, unsafe food, unsafe jobs, etc.). Those are enormous benefits towards a happier life. Still, as you point out, by strictly material standards, most people in the USA are better off than even the wealthy of 100 years ago. That is an important point. However, there is more to life that material goods. Things like face-to-face community, craftsmanship, general literacy, time spent by mothers with their young children, and time spent in nature and in sunshine seem to have declined per capita in the USA -- as have birth rates. A whole bunch of illnesses, including mental illness, seem to be on the rise.

There is a deeper issue here if we put aside the controversial issue that robots and AIs could do most jobs soon (and in a way, robots etc. just crank up a trend that has been going on for decades) . The fact is, most human labor is already not needed for use to live near to our current standard of living. Bertrand Russel pointed this out in that 1932 essay: "Modern technic has made it possible to diminish enormously the amount of labor necessary to produce the necessaries of life for every one. This was made obvious during the War. At that time all the men in the armed forces, all the men and women engaged in the produc

Harper’s (not to be confused with Harper’s Bazaar, which is an especially boring fashion magazine,) The Believer, and The Baffler all have good literary and art coverage as well as long-form lefty political journalism. The New Yorker is good too, and not as New York City centric as you might think, aside from the theater/music/event listings, but it’s weekly, so kinda expensive and easy to fall behind on. There’s some good stuff in Rolling Stone and Playboy from time to time but I wouldn’t keep either one on the coffee table where people could see them.

The "conference call" story was bullshit. http://harpers.org/blog/2013/08/anatomy-of-an-al-qaeda-conference-call/

Quelle surprise.

I learned about the HeLa cell line recently, because I've begun working with them. In the field, they are a sort of de-facto standard. It's amazing that the culture of her tumor has lived this long –– far longer than it took to kill its host –– in fact for decades more. Henrietta Lacks deserves respect and remembrance for her unwitting gift to humankind, which arose from her own personal tragedy.

Fun fact: There are cancers that one can "catch" from another infected individual. If you are a Tasmanian devil, Syrian hamster, or sexually promiscuous dog, that is.

See the Wiki or Harper's mag for details. http://harpers.org/archive/2008/04/contagious-cancer/ –– Don't like pay-walls? Go to your local library!

It's worse than that. Joseph Nacchio at Qwest did resist and is now in prison. Given the secrecy and that Qwest is the only company to have publicly resisted, he certainly looks like a political prisoner, visibly targetted pour encourager les autres. Key evidence was suppressed on "national security" grounds. This was even before the "patriot" act. A couple of links:

• http://harpers.org/blog/2007/10/qwest-another-political-prosecution/
• https://mailman.stanford.edu/pipermail/liberationtech/2013-June/008815.html

I am happy to pay for these publications because they are well written, well edited, and have content that is not easily available elsewhere.

Sure, except that they're all available online or in a digital format (e.g. eBook).

The Economist's
National Geographic
Harper's
Paris Review
The New York Review of Books
Granta
Foreign Affairs

Granta and The Paris Review appear to only have digital versions available, but the rest provide logins and a means to access the full content of each article online, from what I can gather. And, honestly, if you're interested in supporting these magazines, shouldn't you be reading them on a screen anyway, since the printing and distribution account for some of their largest costs?

I do believe something is lost in the experience when we switch to screens from paper, but I also believe that it is largely outweighed by the convenience of easier access, the availability of more content at any given moment, and the lower costs for content creators. And for someone like you, who seems to believe that content is king, I'm surprised you wouldn't agree.

You haven't really been following this story, have you?

The defense attorneys aren't military and some of them are quite outspoken against their client's treatment.

Not only the defense lawyers... http://harpers.org/blog/2008/02/the-great-guantanamo-puppet-theater/

"Davis submitted his resignation on October 4, 2007..."

"Colonel Davis is not just any JAG officer. He was an up-and-comer widely viewed in his peer group as someone in line for a star, and ultimately perhaps, to be the Air Force’s Judge Advocate General. He is also no whining civil libertarian, but rather a no-nonsense conservative, whose prior scraps with civilians in the Pentagon came over the restraints they put on his ability to charge forward and prosecute cases."

Scott Horton has been writing about this. http://harpers.org/blog/2013/04/a-final-act-for-the-guantanamo-theater-of-the-absurd/
Does the CIA call for secrecy to protect our freedom or to cover its incompetence?

kansas city gives it up for google...., provides the first, third, and last paragraph of six paragraphs on what Kansas City gave up to Google printed in a Harper's Magazine article of the same title. The online article is only available to magazine subscribers.

In the second paragraph there's this:
"According to its contract, Kansas City must give Google access to its underground conduits, fiber, poles, rack space, nodes, buildings, facilities, and available land. It cannot charge the company for 'access to, or use of any city facilities...nor will it impose any permit and inspection fees.' And what does the city get in return? It has no say in the pricing of Google's services, nor can it ensure that Google will deliver fiber-optic service to all of the city's residents. Google's offices, meeting spaces, and showrooms are provided free of charge, and the city pays the company's electric bill. The major, moreover, is barred from commenting on Google's activities without the express permission of Google."

The Harper's page linked to does have this correction, "The space the company maintains in city-owned buildings is indeed free; its other local facilities are privately rented." Otherwise it appears Google is getting more than Kansas City is getting in return. And that does not count all the marketing data Google gains with all the eyeballs of surfers.

Falcon

The only open question is about the frequency.

You could always ask Kenneth.

This was the book that inspired David Hahn, aka "The Radioactive Boy Scout." For those of you who aren't familiar with his story, he basically taught himself chemistry, partially from The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments, and ended up attempting to create a breeder reactor in a shed in his family's back yard. The site was ultimately shut down by the EPA. The original Harper's Weekly story on this is here, and the author of that story also expanded it into a full-length book.

(Among other things, incidentally, The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments teaches you to make chlorine gas. Fun for the entire neighborhood!)

First, if you're interested in magazines, find a good newspaper/magazine shop, as bookstores — even those with seemingly largish "magazine sections" — can't compare in terms of either selection or knowledge.

As far as subscribing to foreign magazines, have you tried contacting the publisher? If they can't help you, then you're unlikely to find a significantly better price than the news shop.

With few exceptions, widely distributed US technology magazines tend to be very "advertiser friendly," and, consequently, even non-review feature articles in US technology magazines tend to be overwhelmingly "slanted" towards tools and technologies over, e.g., techniques and non-product-related news. As this has basically turned me off the genre, it's nice to hear that the situation might be better elsewhere.

Even outside technology, there seems to be a similar negative correlation between "commercialism" and quality in the magazine industry. Off the top of my head, examples of generally interesting and "not unabashedly commercial" magazines include Harpers , Foreign Affairs , and the Skeptical Inquirer .

Below are some other recommended magazines for depth. These are worth supporting much more than your average newspaper.

The New Yorker
The Atlantic
Harper's
Lapham's Quarterly (not news coverage, exactly, but still great)
(Canadian) The Walrus
(Australian) The Monthly
(Australian) Quarterly Essay
(UK) Standpoint
(UK) Prospect
(India) The Caravan
(Spain) Catalan International View

No whisking needed.

LINK

Scott Horton finds middle ground:

There is no reason why they need to be made public today, this month, or even this year. But the materials should be preserved carefully and passed to an archive. In good time they should be available to those who chronicle these events, so they can do so with a keen and impartial eye. The death of bin Laden marks the end of an era. This should not be marked with lies and secrecy; it should be marked with a strengthened commitment to acknowledge the truth, unpleasant as it may be in certain details. The passage of some time may be necessary, but in the end a democracy is nourished, not demoralized, when it looks the truth unflinchingly in the face.

http://harpers.org/archive/2007/01/0081345

... when the CIA kidnapped him, disappeared him to Afghanistan, and they tortured him.

So please, mock my rogue nation all you want. But don't forget to boycott it, too.

Renouncing your US citizenship isn't as straightforward or as easy has you make it sound. You usually must first become a citizen of another country before the US will allow you to renounce your citizenship and that can take years or decades. During that time, assuming you find a country that will let you stay while you await citizenship, you're obligated to pay taxes to the US and you new home country. No country likes to give up give up a source of revenue.

Electing to leave: A reader's guide to expatriating on November 3
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2004/10/0080240

What's pretty disturbing is that the government is so gullible over such a lie that's ridiculous on its face. Really, secret messages from Al Qaeda in Al Jazeera? Why not hidden messages from Al Qaeda on MTV or CNN? That would be just as plausible.

I'm still mystified by how much neocons despise the channel. No wonder Bush planned to bomb Al Jazeera, he was so quick to jump onto the false notion. Never mind that Al Qaeda hates Al Jazeera and has done so for years (AQ supporters call it "Al-Khinzeera," which means The Pig)

As for the Phoenix example, I fully believe the outcome is the result of mismanagement. This is Arizona we're talking about. Read Ken Silverstein's article in Harper's for a full exploration of the many mind-boggling choices that state's legislature has made in recent years.

http://harpers.org/archive/2008/04/0081988

Excerpt:

Cancer and evolution have traditionally been considered separately by different scientists with different interests using different methods. You could graduate from medical school, you could follow that with a Ph.D. in cell biology or molecular genetics, you could become a respected oncologist or a well-funded cancer researcher, without ever having read Darwin. You could do it, in fact, without having studied much evolutionary biology at all. Many cell and molecular biologists tended even to scorn evolutionary biology as a “merely descriptive” enterprise, lacking the rigor, quantifiability, and explanatory power of their disciplines. There were exceptions to this disconnect, cancer scientists who even during the early days thought in evolutionary terms, but those scientists had little influence.

In recent decades, however, the situation has changed, as molecular genetics and evolutionary biology have converged on some shared questions. One signal act of synthesis occurred in 1976 when a leukemia researcher named Peter Nowell published a theoretical paper in Science titled “The Clonal Evolution of Tumor Cell Populations.” Nowell proposed what was then a novel idea: that the biological events occurring when cells progress from normal to pre-cancerous to cancerous represent a form of evolution by natural selection. As with the evolution of species, he suggested, the evolution of malignant tumors requires two conditions: genetic diversity among the individuals of a population and competition among those individuals for limited resources. Genetic diversity within one mass of pre-cancerous cells comes from mutations—copying errors and other forms of change—that yield variants as the cells reproduce. That is, in the very act of replicating themselves (sometimes inaccurately), the cells diversify into a population encompassing some small genetic differences between one cell and another. Each variant cell then replicates itself true to type, constituting a clonal lineage (a lineage of accurate copies), until the next mutation creates a new variant. The fittest variants survive and proliferate. By this means, the genetic character of the cell population gradually changes, and with such change comes adaptation, a better fit to environmental circumstances. What constitutes “the fittest” among clonal lineages within a pre-cancerous growth? Those that can reproduce fastest. Those that can resist chemotherapy. Those that can metastasize and therefore escape the surgeon’s knife.

Nowell’s hypothesis about tumor evolution became widely known and accepted within certain circles of cancer research. (Among other researchers, it wasn’t adamantly disputed but merely ignored.) Those circles have more recently produced a lot of rich theorizing, and a smaller amount of empirical work, supporting Nowell and carrying his idea forward. A culmination of sorts occurred in 2000, when the cancer geneticist Robert Weinberg, discoverer of the first human oncogene and the first tumor suppressor gene, published a concise paper titled “The Hallmarks of Cancer.” Weinberg and his coauthor, Doug las Hanahan, described six “acquired capabilities,” such as endless self-replication, the ignoring of antigrowth signals, the invasion of neighboring tissues, and the refusal to die, that collectively characterize cancer cells. How are those capabilities acquired? By mutations and other genetic changes, giving cells with one such trait or another competitive advantage over normal cells. Hanahan and Weinberg added that “tumor development proceeds via a process formally analogous to Darwinian evolution.” With this cautious phrasing, they gave authoritative endorsement to the idea that Peter Nowell had proposed: Cancers, like species, evolve.

They are not pointing out specific wrong doings

They are, in fact, pointing out wrong doings.

(1) the U.S. military formally adopted a policy of turning a blind eye to systematic, pervasive torture and other abuses by Iraqi forces;

(2)theState Department threatened Germany not to criminally investigate the CIA's kidnapping of one of its citizens who turned out to be completely innocent;

(3) the StateDepartment under Bush andObama applied continuous pressure on the Spanish Government to suppress investigations of the CIA's torture of its citizens and the 2003 killing of a Spanish photojournalist when the U.S. military fired on the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad (see ThePhiladelphia Inquirer's WillBunch today about this:"The day BarackObama Lied to me");

(4) the British Government privately promised to shield Bush officials from embarrassment as part of its Iraq War "investigation";

(5) there were at least 15,000 people killed in Iraq that were previously uncounted;

(6) "American leaders lied, knowingly, to the American public, to American troops, and to the world" about the Iraq war as it was prosecuted, a conclusion the Post's own former Baghdad Bureau Chief wrote was proven by theWikiLeaks documents;

(7)the U.S.'s own Ambassador concluded that the July, 2009 removal of the Honduran President was illegal -- a coup -- but the StateDepartment did not want to conclude that and thus ignored it until it was too late to matter;

(8) U.S. and British officials colluded to allow theU.S. to keep cluster bombs on British soil even though Britain had signed the treaty banning such weapons, and,

(9)Hillary Clinton's State Department ordered diplomats to collect passwords, emails, and biometric data on U.N. and other foreign officials, almost certainly in violation of the Vienna Treaty of 1961.

(TotH to GG, as usual.) I appreciate why you believe what you wrote. You might want to reconsider your position given your primary source of news is from organizations whose allegiance is to parent corporations that, like Amazon, absolutely cannot afford to get on the wrong side of the government that regulates them.

They are not pointing out specific wrong doings

They are, in fact, pointing out wrong doings.

(1) the U.S. military formally adopted a policy of turning a blind eye to systematic, pervasive torture and other abuses by Iraqi forces;

(2)theState Department threatened Germany not to criminally investigate the CIA's kidnapping of one of its citizens who turned out to be completely innocent;

(3) the StateDepartment under Bush andObama applied continuous pressure on the Spanish Government to suppress investigations of the CIA's torture of its citizens and the 2003 killing of a Spanish photojournalist when the U.S. military fired on the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad (see ThePhiladelphia Inquirer's WillBunch today about this:"The day BarackObama Lied to me");

(4) the British Government privately promised to shield Bush officials from embarrassment as part of its Iraq War "investigation";

(5) there were at least 15,000 people killed in Iraq that were previously uncounted;

(6) "American leaders lied, knowingly, to the American public, to American troops, and to the world" about the Iraq war as it was prosecuted, a conclusion the Post's own former Baghdad Bureau Chief wrote was proven by theWikiLeaks documents;

(7)the U.S.'s own Ambassador concluded that the July, 2009 removal of the Honduran President was illegal -- a coup -- but the StateDepartment did not want to conclude that and thus ignored it until it was too late to matter;

(8) U.S. and British officials colluded to allow theU.S. to keep cluster bombs on British soil even though Britain had signed the treaty banning such weapons, and,

(9)Hillary Clinton's State Department ordered diplomats to collect passwords, emails, and biometric data on U.N. and other foreign officials, almost certainly in violation of the Vienna Treaty of 1961.

(TotH to GG, as usual.) I appreciate why you believe what you wrote. You might want to reconsider your position given your primary source of news is from organizations whose allegiance is to parent corporations that, like Amazon, absolutely cannot afford to get on the wrong side of the government that regulates them.

Look, another Slashdotter that can't figure out how to use Google.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/06/politics/campaign/06ohio.html?_r=1

http://makethemaccountable.com/articles/Ohio_s_Odd_Numbers.htm

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2005/08/0080696

http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/3/2004/995

http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/2004votefraud.html?q=2004votefraud.html

http://www.jqjacobs.net/politics/ohio.html

You could have left out

abductd off to parts unknown, tried under a military court and

See this...

My source for torture not working is several years of various readings, news articles, and so on. Sorry, I don't have a library saved, but I've been hearing it over and over for nearly the past decade. Here's what a google search for "torture truth" yields, among other things:

Washington Post: 5 myths about torture and truth
- Gestapo had better results from tips and informers, and failed to break (with torture) many.
- between 1500 and 1750, French prosecutors tried to torture confessions out of 785 individuals.... the number of prisoners who said anything was low, from 3 percent in Paris to 14 percent in Toulouse. [note: that's three percent said ANYTHING, let alone the truth]
- the CIA's own 1963 interrogation manual explains that "a time-consuming delay results" -- hardly useful when every moment matters.
- you can't reliably train to resist torture

Washington Post: The Torture Myth

Army Col. Stuart Herrington, a military intelligence specialist who conducted interrogations in Vietnam, Panama and Iraq during Desert Storm, and who was sent by the Pentagon in 2003 -- long before Abu Ghraib -- to assess interrogations in Iraq.... says Herrington, torture is simply "not a good way to get information." In his experience, nine out of 10 people can be persuaded to talk with no "stress methods" at all, let alone cruel and unusual ones. Asked whether that would be true of religiously motivated fanatics, he says that the "batting average" might be lower: "perhaps six out of ten." And if you beat up the remaining four? "They'll just tell you anything to get you to stop."

That's from someone whose job has been to extract information, and he says that torture doesn't work well.

Perhaps you don't like the Washington Post. Let's look at the BBC, reknowned as one of the better news sources in the world. (This was found by googling for "torture effective".)

BBC News: The truth about torture
This would actually seem to support your claims: they note several torturers who feel it's very effective. I'll accept that as a counterpoint. I'm including it so that you don't claim that I'm not linking things which disagree with what I expected to find. (There are several articles/pages about harsh techniques having yielded valuable information.)

FBI Interrogator says cookies are more effective than torture

On the other hand, there are lots of pages about torture being ineffective, too:

Information Secured Through Torture Proved Unreliable, CIA Concluded

When CIA officials subjected their first high-value captive, Abu Zubaida, to waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods.... The methods succeeded in breaking him, and the stories he told of al-Qaeda terrorism plots sent CIA officers around the globe chasing leads.

In the end, though, not a single significant plot was foiled as a result of Abu Zubaida's tortured confessions.... Nearly all of the leads attained through the harsh measures quickly evaporated, while most of the useful information from Abu Zubaida -- chiefly names of al-Qaeda members and associates -- was obtained before waterboarding was introduced, they said.

(Bold emphasis added by me. The "results" yielded by torture were valueless, whereas what he said before they tortured him was useful.)

Former Head of the Defense Intelligence Agency Says Torture Produces Unreliable Information
http://www.youtube.

If they are classified because of their source rather than their content it shouldn't matter if they are released.

More over unjustified classification of documents based on their source delegitimizes the entire classification scheme and prevents the citizens from providing informed oversight on the government. For the last century it has been a well known fact that classification is used for many purposes besides actually protecting secrets including bureaucratic infighting, avoidance of oversight, a means of backdoor regulation, and avoidance of accountability.

While General Hayden may be incensed that someone would reveal classified information, you should bear in mind that he has a direct interest in concealing his personal involvement with the ongoing failures in the Afganistan war. As well he has direct financial interests in the Afganistan war continuing so that the Chertoff group he now works for continues to recieve unaccountable contracts.

For some reading on how classification is abused try the following.
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2009/07/hbc-90005393
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moynihan_Commission_on_Government_Secrecy

A good read:

The radioactive boy scout: When a teenager attempts to build a breeder reactor

That money would sure buy a lot of smoke alarms (a legendary story). ...... Kids, don't try this.

Related link from Harpers.org April 2009:

On Friday, the New York Times reported that the federal Minerals Management Service (MMS) repeatedly violated environmental requirements when approving oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, ignoring and overruling scientists who noted the risk of potentially catastrophic spills. In the April 2009 issue of Harper’s Magazine, Bryant Urstadt discussed the “culture of ethical failure” at the MMS and its wasteful Royalty-in-Kind program.

It's not very long (a few pages), but a shocking read.

Scene from Wendy's:

Customer walks to the counter and order's a burger. Wendy's business model says the customer should pay and the customer does and enjoys the burger.

Wendy's goes to the BEEF supplier and says: Where's the BEEF? We need more! The Beef supplier complies. Wendy's hands them a bill and tries to walk off with the BEEF. Wendy's figures they are just providing a BEEF distribution service.

What most people don't know is that this happened to my Grandfather during the Great Depression. He was a Saskatchewan farmer and shipped a calf to Toronto. They sent him a bill because the calf didn't fetch enough to cover the transportation costs.

My Grandfather shipped no more calves to Toronto. Maybe some people in Toronto went to bed hungry.

In fact the telecommunications industry has been double dipping for YEARS. Google may well be able to negotiate a peering arrangement. The VAST MAJORITY of companies that provide internet content are NOT in a position to peer. So they pay for the privilege of providing free content for the telecommunications industry and clients who are often mum and pop ISP's.

Google might have enough clout to fight this. Most content suppliers have no chance. This is a very unfair business model. The ones who pay the price are the consumers who might be missing out on websites created by some very talented people. Then we have web masters and graphics artists many of whom spend a great deal of time and money one school and tuition while learning their craft. They are looking for careers that might not materialize.

How many people remember the Dot.Com Bubble? For those interested in economics I'll provide this link to Eric Janszen's website: http://www.itulip.com/ Eric writes of the technology bubble in a number of articles.

Eric writes that the action of the FED after the technology bubble burst leads directly to the housing bubble and the present recession. The issue is that a lot of the reason the tech bubble burst is _because_ there was no workable business model. Companies that tried to create internet content went bankrupt.

Look here: http://www.harpers.org/archive/2008/02/0081908

How many billions of dollars were lost by investors as the internet unfolded and the dream of "if we build it they will come" unfolded? Well - we did come. Unfortunately there was no money in it for those who were living the dream!

I say the greed of the telecommunications oligopoly had a lot to do with this.

Scene from Wendy's:

Customer walks to the counter and order's a burger. Wendy's business model says the customer should pay and the customer does and enjoys the burger.

Wendy's goes to the BEEF supplier and says: Where's the BEEF? We need more! The Beef supplier complies. Wendy's hands them a bill and tries to walk off with the BEEF. Wendy's figures they are just providing a BEEF distribution service.

What most people don't know is that this happened to my Grandfather during the Great Depression. He was a Saskatchewan farmer and shipped a calf to Toronto. They sent him a bill because the calf didn't fetch enough to cover the transportation costs.

My Grandfather shipped no more calves to Toronto. Maybe some people in Toronto went to bed hungry.

In fact the telecommunications industry has been double dipping for YEARS. Google may well be able to negotiate a peering arrangement. The VAST MAJORITY of companies that provide internet content are NOT in a position to peer. So they pay for the privilege of providing free content for the telecommunications industry and clients who are often mum and pop ISP's.

Google might have enough clout to fight this. Most content suppliers have no chance. This is a very unfair business model. The ones who pay the price are the consumers who might be missing out on websites created by some very talented people. Then we have web masters and graphics artists many of whom spend a great deal of time and money one school and tuition while learning their craft. They are looking for careers that might not materialize.

How many people remember the Dot.Com Bubble? For those interested in economics I'll provide this link to Eric Janszen's website: http://www.itulip.com/ Eric writes of the technology bubble in a number of articles.

Eric writes that the action of the FED after the technology bubble burst leads directly to the housing bubble and the present recession. The issue is that a lot of the reason the tech bubble burst is _because_ there was no workable business model. Companies that tried to create internet content went bankrupt.

Look here: http://www.harpers.org/archive/2008/02/0081908

How many billions of dollars were lost by investors as the internet unfolded and the dream of "if we build it they will come" unfolded? Well - we did come. Unfortunately there was no money in it for those who were living the dream!

I say the greed of the telecommunications oligopoly had a lot to do with this.

They do if they are publishing classified information, private information..

From "The Pentagon Loses a Skirmish with WikiLeaks"

In 1960, a congressional committee, recognizing the need to rein in the extravagant claims of secrecy that were thriving in the Department of Defense and intelligence community, observed that:
"Secrecy—the first refuge of incompetents—must be at a bare minimum in a democratic society, for a fully informed public is the basis of self-government. Those elected or appointed to positions of executive authority must recognize that government, in a democracy, cannot be wiser than the people."

Firstly, it means they have half as long to actually consider the policies they're trying to get through, so they're more likely to look to others for advice.

The less tyme they have the less tyme they can cause problems and create new laws for their paymaster lobbyists.

And the groups who can afford to pay people to talk to politians are the ones who will be heard first and loudest.

No, At home they aren't concentrated and in easy reach of lobbyists. But the voters are close. With all of congress in Washington they are easy for lobbyists to meet, just walk down and across the hall or street. But when they are home it would be harder, and more expensive for the lobbyists and cheaper for voters.

Secondly, you're only going to get rich, well-connected people if they have to find a new job every other year (or have the power to take even unpaid leave whenever they need to sit).

My sister was, along with millions of other citizens, in the Army Reserve. Though she worked full-time, as a nurse in a hospital, and had a daughter she worked 1 weekend a month and 2 weeks a year in the Reserves. That was many years ago, now mothers get maternity leave from work. So your problem isn't one, the jobs are still there, and the pay can make up for the loss of pay from work.

Personally, I'd rather pay our politicians a lot of money.

Oh, we do. Congressional pay. "Some critics feel members of Congress, who legislate their own salaries, are overpaid. In 2008, rank and file members of Congress earned $169,300 annually, compared with a median American income of $45,113 for men and $35,102 for women." After, I believe it's 10 years, serving in congress they also get a good pension. Former Sen Ted Steven gets more than $10,000 a month even though he was convicted of a crime.

Enough that firstly, we can attract the best, and more importantly, that they don't need to be tempted by anyone else's money.

See above.

Falcon

If Wikipedia had reliable information about that torture the government would start arresting people in a heart beat.

In the United States, conspiracy to torture is a felony. Dick Cheney admitted, on national television that he "was a big supporter of waterboarding", reliably implicating himself in such a conspiracy. Yet the federal government has not, so far, shown any interest in prosecuting him.