Sooner or Later

Sooner or later, the fubar known as US Healthcare (AKA Obama Care) will eventually become Single Payer as the public will eventually demand that this ongoing travesty be transformed into an efficient, cost effective and open environment with the profit motive removed, able to function as a 21st connected system able to meet the needs of the people at reasonable cost, something not possible with the current system in place given just how complexified healthcare has become due to 

1: The profit motive permeating every aspect of medical (IT, doctors, hospitals, labs, imaging, big pharma & insurance) with the end result of the public paying way too much for services rendered in a system dominated by big pharma and the insurance companies and...

2 : Government Regulatory, where inefficiency rules due to collusion with the insurance companies and significant others rather then acceding to the wishes of the people who want a system like that of H.R. 676 that works for all and not just the privileged few.

To whit.

• Let’s take Senator Ted Cruz up on his challenge.
• Repeal Obamacare.
• But instead of throwing ourselves at the mercy of the insurance companies, let’s replace Obamacare and the insurance companies with a single payer.
• It’s going to happen sooner or later.
• Let’s strike while the iron is hot.
• Let’s do it now while Cruz is on the Senate floor.
• The Repeal Obamacare Republicans say that the Obamacare is 2,000 pages and its regulations are 20,000 pages long.
• They have an alternative plan that is 200 pages.
• Well, the single payer bill in the House (HR 676) is only 30 pages.
• Single payer wins.
• It’s shorter.
• It’s the only system that controls costs.
• It’s the only system that covers everyone.
• Where are the single payer Democrats who are willing to stand, and say — repeal Obamacare, replace it with single payer?

To add fuel to the fire, Matt Miller, a conservative writer who does op-ed pieces for the Washington Post, has some interesting words to say about the Canadian system. something naysayers in the US don't want to hear about because it's socialistic.

Take David Beatty, a 70-year-old Toronto native who ran food processing giant Weston Foods and a holding company called the Gardiner Group during a career that has included service on more than 30 corporate boards and a recent appointment to the Order of Canada, one of the nation’s highest honors. By temperament and demeanor, Beatty is the kind of tough-minded, suffer-no-fools wealth creator who conservatives typically cheer.

Yet over breakfast in Toronto not long ago, Beatty told me how baffled he and Canadian business colleagues are when they listen to the U.S. health-care debate. He cherishes Canada’s single-payer system for its quality and cost-effectiveness (Canada boasts much lower costs per person than the United States). And don’t get him started on the system’s administrative simplicity — you just show your card at the point of service, and that’s it. Though he’s a well-to-do man who can pay for whatever care he wants, Beatty told me he’s relied on the system just as ordinary Canadians do, including for a recent knee replacement operation. The one time he went outside the system was to pay extra for a physical therapist closer to his home than the one to which he’d been assigned.

Factoid: Yours truly has good friends in Quebec and Toronto and all agree that their HC system works. In fact, whenever both parties come to the states, they take out temporary insurance to cover any unexpected medical costs that are, in fact, covered under the CA system.

Isn't it about time Single Payer becomes the way to do business regarding all things medical. Makes sense to me.

Addendum: Interesting piece in the NYTimes titled Single Payer, Period where numbers don't lie.

Canadians or the French or Germans have little or no choice of who pays their medical bills. But they can choose any hospital and any doctor. And they’re not socked with the enormous uncovered bills that will still afflict insured Americans. Elsewhere, insurance pretty much covers what you need.

In contrast, plans offered through the exchanges will saddle those who gets sick with hefty deductibles and co-payments – $2000 deductibles and 20 percent co-payments thereafter are typical in Massachusetts, the prototype for Obamacare.

If you’re too old to twerk the news is even worse. Health and Human Services' news release featured premium costs for a 27 year old. At that age you can get a Silver plan in New Jersey for $3,030 annually. But for someone 63 the premium is $8,535.

Any questions?

Info-graphic - Big Data

Just found a terrific site displaying the talents of Jacob O'Neal, a gifted designer who knows what tech is all about. Click his info-graphic to get an accurate take on what Big Data is all about. You won't be disappointed. Seen below is an IBM image showing, in this case, the amount of content generated by users of wikipedia edit, something done at grand scale without question.

A visualization created by IBM of Wikipedia edits. At multiple terabytes in size, the text and images of Wikipedia are a classic example of big data.

MOOCs

BRT talked about Cousera, the first viable MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) offering over a year ago, describing this initiative to be disruptive to the max. It seems this modest prediction was correct as this tech is going viral, something , as stated before, truly disruptive to the max, a force that will change higher education forever, which, in this writer's opinion, is a good thing without question. 

Available globally to hundreds of thousands of people at a time, these classes depend on highly sophisticated digital technology, yet they could not be simpler to use. Signing up takes less time than creating an iTunes account. You can create a user name and password and start exploring the rapidly expanding course offerings.

Seen below is A network diagram showing the distributive nature of Stephen Downes' and George Siemens' CCK08 course, one of the first MOOCs and the course that inspired the term MOOC to become adopted.

Dollars are now bits

Matt Taibbi, like Seymour Hersh, is relentless. Like Hersh, he has never been sued nor has his analysis on all things financial has ever been proven to be false, something yours truly treasures regarding the news as finding reliable sources who understand how the world works at deep level, is becoming ever more difficult given how utterly controlled the so called press is in the age of the web.

In his latest article for Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi reports that Wall Street firms are now making millions in profits off of public pension funds nationwide. "Essentially it is a wealth transfer from teachers, cops and firemen to billionaire hedge funders," Taibbi says. "Pension funds are one of the last great, unguarded piles of money in this country and there are going to be all sort of operators that are trying to get their hands on that money."

Read the transcript and view the video to see why Dollars are now bits.

All the News That's Fit to Print

Seymour Hersh rocks. Ruthless, bull dog tough and relentless, he's a reporter's reporter, an outlier and proud of it, has some strong words about the lack of a real press in America and what should be done about it. To whit

Seymour Hersh has got some extreme ideas on how to fix journalism – close down the news bureaus of NBC and ABC, sack 90% of editors in publishing and get back to the fundamental job of journalists which, he says, is to be an outsider.

It doesn't take much to fire up Hersh, the investigative journalist who has been the nemesis of US presidents since the 1960s and who was once described by the Republican party as "the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist".

He is angry about the timidity of journalists in America, their failure to challenge the White House and be an unpopular messenger of truth.

Don't even get him started on the New York Times which, he says, spends "so much more time carrying water for Obama than I ever thought they would" – or the death of Osama bin Laden. "Nothing's been done about that story, it's one big lie, not one word of it is true," he says of the dramatic US Navy Seals raid in 2011.

Needless to say, yours truly can't wait to read his upcoming book on national security, something Bush and Obama won't be happy about when it's released later this year. His take on Snowden is spot on.

"Duncan Campbell [the British investigative journalist who broke the Zircon cover-up story], James Bamford [US journalist] and Julian Assange and me and the New Yorker, we've all written the notion there's constant surveillance, but he [Snowden] produced a document and that changed the whole nature of the debate, it's real now," Hersh says.

76 and still being a PITA. Not bad, not bad at all. :)

A Sign of the Times...

This simple chart from Daily Kos says it all in terms of why I like science, something bloviators, religious fanatics and the uneducated think is too difficult to understand as science requires one to question how reality works from the perspective of intellect and open mindedness rather then accepting a pat answer from on high, which conveniently precludes any of the rigor demanded of a discipline as hard edged as science truly is. Adding fuel to the fire is this sad factoid.

A sign of the times: Popular Science, the 141-year-old publication that's one of my favorites to pick up at airports for in-flight reading, shut off comments on its website today. An important part of the decision was trolls and spambots, just like we struggle to keep in check through community moderation here at Daily Kos.

But there's something else, too, about how people yelling nonsense skews the discussion away from science. Away from fact. Away from their mission, which is to promote science. Away from reality.

Any questions?

The Right to be LEFT ALONE

The right to be left alone, a concept originally coined by David Brin in his prescient Transparent Society work, is systemically being taken apart, not only by the NSA but also the DEA, FBI, CIA and, who knows, the IRS, with complicit assistance from FISA, the secret rubber stamp for 24/7 spying known by its formal nom de plume,  the Foreign Intelligence Court.

In the U.S. these days, privacy is so been-there-done-that.  Just this week, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a secret outfit that hears only the government side of any argument and has generally been a rubberstamp for surveillance requests, declassified an opinion backing the full-scale collection and retention of the phone records (“metadata”) of American citizens.  That staggering act was, the judge claimed, in no way in violation of the Fourth Amendment or of American privacy.  She also gave us a little peek at corporate courage in our brave new surveillance world, writing that “no holder of records [i.e., telecommunications company] who has received an order to produce bulk telephony metadata has challenged the legality of such an order.”

That story, like so many others in recent months, arrived thanks to the revelations of Edward Snowden about the ever-widening powers of the National Security Agency (NSA), led by a general who, we now know, lives in a world of intergalactic fantasies of power and control out of Star Trek: The Next Generation and once even worked in an Army intelligence war room created by a Hollywood set designer in the style of that show.  As Christopher Calabrese and Matthew Harwood indicate today, however, gigantic as the NSA’s intrusions on privacy might be, they are only part of an uncomfortably large story in which many U.S. agencies and outfits feel free to take possession of our lives in ever more technologically advanced and intrusive ways.

Just this week, in fact, the American Civil Liberties Union (for which both Calabrese and Harwood work) released an important new report on the post-9/11 morphing of the FBI into a “secret domestic intelligence agency.”  In addition to the subterranean surveillance of protesters and religious groups, the Washington Post offered this summary list of the ways in which, according to that report, the Bureau has expanded in the twenty-first century: “The changes highlighted in the report include the FBI’s racial and ethnic mapping program, which allows the FBI to collect demographic information to map American communities by race and ethnicity; the use of secret National Security Letters, which asked for account information from telecommunications companies, financial institutions, and credit agencies and required no judicial approval; warrantless wiretapping; and the recent revelations about the government’s use of Section 215 of the Patriot Act to track all U.S. telephone calls.”

Click on the ACLU graphic to learn how the FBI, under the esteemed Robert Mueller, III, was
transformed into a domestic intelligence and law enforcement agency of unprecedented power and international reach.

The FBI remains widely admired on Capitol Hill and within the Obama administration, despite a record of extraordinary abuse—particularly targeting racial and religious minorities, immigrants, and protest groups under the guise of counterterrorism after 9/11.

The abuse, enabled by a roll-back of post-Watergate intelligence reforms and encouraged by long-standing Justice Department and FBI practices, has subverted internal and external oversight by squelching whistleblowers, imposing and enforcing unnecessary secrecy, and actively misleading Congress and the American people.

Click here to get the complete report, needless to say it will not warm the cockles of your heart.

While reading this, one might say, "I have nothing to hide." and... with undue modesty, yours truly doesn't but that's not the point. The abuse of power and the total lack of safeguards regarding the right to be left alone is, something an amendment, along the lines of the 28th, should be acted upon before it's too late. Just read the first paragraph of 1984 to see why.

Entering the Valley of Death :)

Anyone who has done a presentation has experienced this moment of terror, including me. :)

The Tower of Pisa - in 3D

Novel approaches to solving really difficult problems, i.e. capturing large immovable objects, like the Tower of Pisa, in system to generate accurate 3D models in efficient fashion, never ceases to amaze, somethng CSIRO has done with a spring loaded portable scanner that acts like, in indirect fashion, a large bubble head doll.

Developed by the CSIRO, Australia's national science agency, the Zebedee technology is a handheld 3D mapping system incorporating a laser scanner that sways on a spring to capture millions of detailed measurements of a site as fast as an operator can walk through it. Specialised software then converts the system's laser data into a detailed 3D map.

While the tower's cramped stairs and complex architecture have prevented previous mapping technologies from capturing its interior, Zebedee has enabled the researchers to finally create the first comprehensive 3D map of the entire building.

Seen below is a partial rendering of the Tower. Pretty cool to say the least.

No Question is a Dumb Question...

PHD Comics strikes again because yours truly has been in this situation many years ago. :)

Taking the Shot

Zeitgeist, the once in a life time opportunity given to us all to do something significant, might be happening with Iran and the US regarding Iran's nuclear program given the quiet dialog via letters that's been going on between Obama and Iran's newly elect president Hassan Rouhani.

TEHRAN — Iran’s leaders, seizing on perceived flexibility in a private letter from President Obama, have decided to gamble on forging a swift agreement over their nuclear program with the goal of ending crippling sanctions, a prominent adviser to the Iranian leadership said Thursday.

The Iranian leadership was encouraged by what was described as Mr. Obama’s offer to conduct face-to-face talks, which they prefer to the more bureaucratic and lengthy negotiating process with a group of five major world powers, Mr. Mohebbian said.

The one-and-a-half-page letter, which the Iranian president answered with a letter of similar length, has kindled hopes that the international charm offensive Iran began after Mr. Rouhani’s election in June may produce a genuine diplomatic breakthrough. But the differing interpretations of Mr. Obama’s letter in Tehran and Washington are a reminder of the political hurdles and the legacy of mistrust that both sides will have to overcome in negotiating a deal.

One can only hope given just how catastrophic a war with Iran would be.

Click here to view the NYTimes interactive timeline of Iran's Nuclear program, interesting to say the least. Maybe this is give back for the CIA's action against Mohammad Mossadegh back in 1953.

Addendum: Read the reason why Iran wants to move ahead here. Heartfelt and nuanced, Hassan Rouhani's message should be read by everyone who is concerned about the troubled Iran/US relationship.  

Addendum 2: WASHINGTON — President Obama spoke by telephone with President Hassan Rouhani of Iran on Friday afternoon, the first direct conversation between leaders of the two estranged countries since the rupture of the Tehran hostage crisis more than three decades ago.

Mr. Obama called the discussion an important breakthrough after a generation of deep mistrust and suggested that it could serve as the starting point to an eventual deal on Iran’s nuclear program and a broader renewal of relations between two countries that once were close allies.

'We Have No Idea What Those Wells Are Leaking'

Yours truly will not comment here, as Think Process has this Fubar totally covered.

"Historic flooding across large portions of Central and Eastern Colorado has caused an unprecedented amount of damage. Along with the rise in water levels came elevated concern over the tens of thousands of frack wells that scar the region's landscape. In one of the hardest hit areas, Weld County, there are over 20,000 frack wells alone.

"To check out a video of Marcellus Shale Earth First blockading an active hydraulic fracturing drill site click here: http://vimeo.com/rewilding/msef-blockde2012

"Colorado Floodwaters Cover Fracking And Oil Projects: 'We Have No Idea What Those Wells Are Leaking' http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/09/17/2630131/oil-fracking-colorado-flooding/

"Colorado flooding forces thousands more evacuations http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57602779/colorado-flooding-forces-thousands-more-evacuations/

"Biblical" rains trigger flooding that kills 3 in Colo. http://www.usatoday.com/story/weather/2013/09/12/boulder-colorado-flash-floods/2802833/

PHOTOS: The Deadly Toll Of Colorado's 'Biblical' Flood, So Far

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/09/16/2626051/photos-colorado-floods/

Anti-copyright: you can use any part of this in any way that you'd like. http://vimeo.com/74683562

Any Questions?

Not a Matter of IF but When Unless we change things NOW

We all know what this is but did you know how many times we could have experienced this first hand due the foibles of man vs tech of unimagined power and destruction. I know I didn't, until now.

That incident, which led to an anti-­nuclear movement in Britain, where the plane was bound, is one of many stories Eric Schlosser, the author of “Fast Food Nation,” tells in “Command and Control.” During the cold war, nuclear bombs fell out of the sky, burned up in plane ­crashes and were lost at sea. In the incident Schlosser describes in greatest detail, “the Damascus accident” of Sept. 18, 1980, the warhead from a Titan II missile was ejected after a series of mishaps that began when a repairman dropped a socket wrench and pierced a fuel tank. Tactical nuclear weapons scattered across Europe had minimal security; misplaced tools and failed repairs triggered serious accidents; inadequate safety procedures and poor oversight led to dozens of close brushes with nuclear explosions. People have died in these accidents, sometimes as a result of their own carelessness or bad luck, but often while doing their best to protect the rest of us from an accidental nuclear blast.

In Command and Control, Eric Schlosser blows the doors off of secrecy regarding just how precarious our situation truly is, particularly in Pakistan, the country of love and peace situated next door to India and Afghanistan, which happens to have nukes, lots of them and we know nada on how intelligently the Pakistanis are dealing with this monstrous tech.

The biggest concern right now, by far, is Pakistan. One of the things that just came out through some of Snowden's revelations is how little we know about how Pakistan is managing its nuclear arsenal. They're rapidly building all kinds of nuclear weapons. If you have 150 weapons and you only lose one of them, you're still taking care of more than 99 percent of them perfectly – but you can't afford to lose one. Again, one weapon equals one city. 

While reading Schlosser's incredible book, the reality of us chickens living in an aleatory universe, where probabilities rule and how sh*t happpens...always, strikes home. Because of this fact, yours truly thinks it's just a matter of time when the unimaginable becomes reality unless we abolish nuclear weapons because it's not a matter of if but when regarding the quantum universe, forever inhabited by Fortuna, the ever present fickle goddess of fortune & fate. 

Read this, it's the right thing to do.

Addendum: Back in 1961...

The document, obtained by the investigative journalist Eric Schlosser under the Freedom of Information Act, gives the first conclusive evidence that the US was narrowly spared a disaster of monumental proportions when two Mark 39 hydrogen bombs were accidentally dropped over Goldsboro, North Carolina on 23 January 1961. The bombs fell to earth after a B-52 bomber broke up in mid-air, and one of the devices behaved precisely as a nuclear weapon was designed to behave in warfare: its parachute opened, its trigger mechanisms engaged, and only one low-voltage switch prevented untold carnage.

Each bomb carried a payload of 4 megatons - the equivalent of 4 million tons of TNT explosive. Had the device detonated, lethal fallout could have been deposited over Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia and as far north as New York city - putting millions of lives at risk.

Click here to see the actual document in question.

Avoiding the Abyss, for now

Bill Maher makes a lot of sense. Intelligent, funny and above all else, politically savvy, his take on America and its insane approach to the Middle East and Syria is spot on.

New rule: 12 years after 9/11, and amidst yet another debate on whether to bomb yet another Muslim country, America must stop asking the question, "Why do they hate us?" Forget the debate on Syria, we need a debate on why we're always debating whether to bomb someone. Because we're starting to look not so much like the world's policeman, but more like George Zimmerman: itching to use force and then pretending it's because we had no choice.

Now, I'm against chemical weapons, and I don't care who knows it. And there's no doubt a guy like Bashar al-Assad deserves to get blown up: using toxic chemicals on unsuspecting civilians is purely and profoundly evil.

But enough about Monsanto. When it comes to Syria, I do understand the appeal of putting the world on notice that if you use poison gas, the United States of America will personally fuck you up: we will seek out the counsel and support of the entire family of nations, and then, no matter what they say, we will go ahead and fuck you up.

But however valid that argument may be, it is, I believe, outweighed by the fact that we have to stop bombing Muslim countries if we ever want to feel safe from terrorism in our own. The Chemical Weapons Convention is important, but to the jihadi in the street, it just looks like we're always looking for a new reason to bomb them. We keep calling this part of the world a tinderbox - and we keep lighting fires there.

Even worse, bombing seems to be our answer for everything.

Vladimir Putin makes a lot of sense as well in his extraordinary op ed piece in the NYTimes stating why caution, above all else, must be exercised on a situation too dangerous to mess with by bombing Syria instead of trying to get Syria to destroy its chemical weapons by diplomatic means, something that, thank god, may work based on the fact Russia and the US have reached agreement on doing just this.

The potential strike by the United States against Syria, despite strong opposition from many countries and major political and religious leaders, including the pope, will result in more innocent victims and escalation, potentially spreading the conflict far beyond Syria’s borders. A strike would increase violence and unleash a new wave of terrorism. It could undermine multilateral efforts to resolve the Iranian nuclear problem and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and further destabilize the Middle East and North Africa. It could throw the entire system of international law and order out of balance.

Syria is not witnessing a battle for democracy, but an armed conflict between government and opposition in a multireligious country. There are few champions of democracy in Syria. But there are more than enough Qaeda fighters and extremists of all stripes battling the government. The United States State Department has designated Al Nusra Front and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, fighting with the opposition, as terrorist organizations. This internal conflict, fueled by foreign weapons supplied to the opposition, is one of the bloodiest in the world.

Mercenaries from Arab countries fighting there, and hundreds of militants from Western countries and even Russia, are an issue of our deep concern. Might they not return to our countries with experience acquired in Syria? After all, after fighting in Libya, extremists moved on to Mali. This threatens us all.

Any questions?

Dead End?

Yours truly loves the net. I can honestly say I have been using it since the time of Arpa, phones placed in modem/headsets ( War Games ) and 6 kilobaud data rates, to talk to other geeks about the wonders of an environment years before the advent of Mosaic, the first GUI web browser that was developed, in large part, by the research done by  Tim Berners-Lee @ Cern using the NeXT computer  to create the HTTP protocol that all browsers use to access the web. During this time, we all have seen the tremendous changes, for both good and bad, wrought by the web upon the world at large but it's now under attack by the powers at be, slowly changing this wonderful and wild environment into something Orwell would understand as the start point to 1984.

Last week we learned that U.S. and British intelligence agencies have broken the back of digital encryption - the coded technology hundreds of millions of Internet users rely on to keep their communications private.

Over the weekend, Der Spiegel reported that the NSA and its British counterpart are also hacking into smartphones to monitor our daily lives in ways that wouldn't have been possible before the age of the iPhone.

This news, just the latest revelations from the files of Edward Snowden, only heighten our sense that we can no longer assume anything we say or do online is secure.

But that's not all. In a case that was heard in a U.S. federal appeals court on Monday, telecommunications colossus Verizon is arguing that it has the First Amendment right to block and censor Internet users. (That's right. Verizon is claiming that, as a corporation, it has the free speech right to silence the online expression of everybody else.)

It's come to this. Government and corporate forces have joined to chip away at two pillars of the open Internet: the control of our personal data and our right to connect and communicate without censorship or interference.

When looking at this, one sees, courtesy of the net that's under siege, how government, in collusion with big corporations, is trying to change the net in ways that impact us all. The question to ask is, what are we going to do about it? Click here to help stop this nonsense before it's too late, our freedom really does depend on it if we don't.

End of rant.

Fair & Balanced

Aljazeera is a breath of fresh air in terms of REAL NEWS. Fair & balanced, terms Fox News uses and abuses, apply here, IMHO, to this new news organization that's rapidly changing how America gets it's news. Check it out, you won't be disappointed.

The Conundrum of too much Data

PHD Comics rocks. Entertaining, concise and spot on, the site never ceases to put a smile on yours truly's face when it comes to the foibles of man and the oftentimes rocky road to attaining, in this case, the elusive Ph.D. The conundrum of too much data and how it applies to the humanities is the topic du jour of this video. Enjoy. 

The Right Approach

Yours truly was browsing Wired and came across this wonderful article titled Let’s Stop Focusing on Shiny Gadgets and Start Using Tech to Empower People, a post about Red Burns, a teacher I really wish I met as her approach to tech is the right one without question.

From Red Burns’ Opening Remarks to New Students

What I want you to know:

That there is a difference between the mundane and the inspired.

That the biggest danger is not ignorance, but the illusion of knowledge.

That any human organization must inevitably juggle internal contradictions — the imperatives of efficiency and the countervailing human trade-offs.

That the inherent preferences in organizations are efficiency, clarity, certainty, and perfection.

‘Create images that might take a writer ten pages to write.’

That human beings are ambiguous, uncertain, and imperfect.

I used the same approach at Pratt when I as an adjunct professor for 6 years teaching advanced computer graphics to kids getting their masters whereby the student chose their assignment according to the particular design discipline they were in (interior, graphic, packaging etc., etc.) with the only proviso being that said assignment had to be not only professionally done at the highest possible level but also the assignment had to be presented to the class as a whole as designers of all stripes have to do this when pitching a client. Needless to say, the results were astounding because the students used tech as a gateway to enable creativity to come forth on projects of their own choosing. Hopefully I channeled Red when doing this way back in the 80's as it was an experience I hold dear to the cockles of my heart. :)

Project Bullrun

Based on recently released documents courtesy Edward Snowden, it's evident the NSA either knows all or can get access to anything it wants by cracking all the normally used encryption technologies used on the Net as seen by the joint post  from the NY Times and The Guardian.

The National Security Agency is winning its long-running secret war on encryption, using supercomputers, technical trickery, court orders and behind-the-scenes persuasion to undermine the major tools protecting the privacy of everyday communications in the Internet age, according to newly disclosed documents.

The agency has circumvented or cracked much of the encryption, or digital scrambling, that guards global commerce and banking systems, protects sensitive data like trade secrets and medical records, and automatically secures the e-mails, Web searches, Internet chats and phone calls of Americans and others around the world, the documents show.

Seen below is a screen grab of the various types of private communications the NSA can crack. Click the image to learn about the different kinds of encryption we rubes use to "protect" our privacy.

Here is a blurb about Bullrun, the code word used for the top secret NSA decryption program.

A classification guide for NSA employees and contractors on Bullrun outlines in broad terms its goals.

"Project Bullrun deals with NSA's abilities to defeat the encryption used in specific network communication technologies. Bullrun involves multiple sources, all of which are extremely sensitive." The document reveals that the agency has capabilities against widely used online protocols, such as HTTPS, voice-over-IP and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), used to protect online shopping and banking.

I feel better already.

Why We Need Referendums

When looking at this Huffington Post image delineating the public's opposition to, IMHO, a disasterous military operation to be made against Syria, it shows, in spades, why referendums, as per Sweden's model, matter because if we had one today, this fubar would not happen but because we don't, our so called leaders continue to rush to war based on incomplete intel and a false sense of morality, something we lost a long time ago beginning with the removal of Iran's democratically elected Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953 courtesy the CIA. To add fuel to the fire, here is a quote from David Stockman, a person yours truly finds both insightful and entertaining at the same time regarding his take on important issue like finance and, in this case, war. Needless to say, his commentary on this totally unnecessary act of folly is most interesting to say the least.

Next week Congress can do far more than stop a feckless Tomahawk barrage on a small country which is already a graveyard of civil war and sectarian slaughter. By voting “no” it can trigger the end of the American Imperium—-five decades of incessant meddling, bullying and subversion around the globe which has added precious little to national security, but left America fiscally exhausted and morally diminished.

Indeed, the tragedy of this vast string of misbegotten interventions—from the 1953 coup against Mossedegh in Iran through the recent bombing campaign in Libya —-is that virtually none of them involved defending the homeland or any tangible, steely-eyed linkages to national security. They were all rooted in ideology—that is, anti-communism, anti-terrorism, humanitarianism, R2Pism, nation-building, American exceptionalism. These were the historic building blocks of a failed Pax Americana. Now the White House wants authorization for the last straw: Namely, to deliver from the firing tubes of U.S. naval destroyers a dose of righteous “punishment” that has no plausible military or strategic purpose. By the President’s own statements the proposed attack is merely designed to censure the Syrian regime for allegedly visiting one particularly horrific form of violence on its own citizens.

Well, really? After having rained napalm, white phosphorous, bunker-busters, drone missiles and the most violent machinery of conventional warfare ever assembled upon millions of innocent Vietnamese, Cambodians, Serbs, Somalis, Iraqis, Afghans, Pakistanis, Yemeni, Libyans and countless more, Washington now presupposes to be in the moral sanctions business?  That’s downright farcical.  Nevertheless, by declaring himself the world’s spanker-in-chief, President Obama has unwittingly precipitated the mother of all clarifying moments.

Pat Buchanan's analysis is also apt. 

Not since the War of Jenkins’ Ear has there been a dumber cause for a great country to go to war. Is there no way out?

There is, and it’s right in front of us.

The House, Senate or both can vote no on the war resolution and Obama can then say, as did David Cameron, that, while he disagrees, he respects the decision of a Congress in which the Constitution placed sole authority to authorize America’s going to war.

Are Brits now crying “catastrophe!”? Do the Spanish no longer think the Brits will defend Gibraltar? Is Britain now wholly non-credible to the world?

For Obama, and for us, it is the other options that invite catastrophe.

Click on the graphic to get information about the War of Jenkins' Ear, another totally needless military action lasting 9 years from 1739 - 1748 between Great Britain & Spain to encourage the Spanish not to renege on the lucrative asiento contract (permission to sell slaves in Spanish America).

Birds of Paradise

Evolution writ large. Enjoy

A Guilty Pleasure

TimeScapes 4K from Tom Lowe on Vimeo.

Another guilty pleasure of yours truly is video that amazes like this one from Timescapes.

Zombieland

Zombieland anyone?... and yes, yours truly has one as well. :)