The word assume yet again ...

 

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Back in the day, yours truly designed logos, work fraught with psychological implications for the companies in question as it's their identity stupid, something rather important as the logo and name is the face of the organization it presents to the world.  In the many years of corporate work I did, never was there an issue of copying another company's mark as I was a pretty damn good designer who made sure the mark in question was truly original and well researched, not like the fiasco created by Facebook in 2022 and in 1976,  the NBC disaster, a self-inflicted wound aided and abetted by the word assume. 

In 2022 ...

When Facebook changed its name to Meta in October, there were a few concerns that the company was planning to dominate the nascent metaverse — but there’s one aggrieved party that’s only now going public.

An installation-art company called META (or Meta.is) announced Tuesday that it will be suing Meta (or Facebook) for trademark violation, alleging that Zuckerberg’s name change violated the smaller company’s established brand.

“On October 28, 2021, Facebook seized our META mark and name, which we put our blood, sweat, and tears into building for over twelve years,” reads a post on the smaller company’s site. “Today, after eight months of trying to negotiate with Facebook in good faith to no avail, we were left with no choice but to file a lawsuit against them.”

“THE TOXICITY THAT IS INEXTRICABLY LINKED WITH FACEBOOK”

(Disclosure: The Verge partnered with Meta.is for a number of art installations at the Panorama Festival in 2016. In order to make this post comprehensible, we’re going to refer to the billion-dollar social media company as Facebook and the smaller augmented-reality company as Meta.is; this is not an endorsement of either side’s legal claims.)

Much of the case hinges on Facebook’s many privacy scandals, which Meta.is argues has made it impossible to share the name. “Meta can no longer provide goods and services under the META mark,” the complaint argues, “because consumers are likely to mistakenly believe that Meta’s goods and services emanate from Facebook and that Meta is associated with the toxicity that is inextricably linked with Facebook.”

met·a

/ˈmedə/

noun

1. short for meta key.

adjective

US

1. (of a creative work) referring to itself or to the conventions of its genre; self-referential.

   "the enterprise is inherently “meta,” since it doesn't review movies, for example, it reviews the reviewers who review movies"

In 1976 ...

Great logos are rare, one of the greats was the NBC Peacock.

Well, some marketing genius decided this was not good enough so the redo was this ...

Said design cost a cool mil back in 1976 but there was a problem because ...

It pays to check these things.

With much fanfare, on January 1,1976 NBC unveiled it’s new on-air logo – a big stylized N. They paid a million dollars to design this thing. That's right.  $1,000,0000.  The network was probably hoping to do the whole three letters but couldn't afford it.  Anyway...

I remember seeing it for the first time on the Rose Bowl game and thinking, “Huh?” In the ‘60s their main signature was the peacock and they would precede each program shown in color with this.

I know you had to be there, but when that would come on and the music started to crescendo it was thrilling every time. At least to me. 

And now there was a big blocky N.

NBC wasted no time in plastering that logo everywhere. ID’s, closing ID’s, mike flags, sportscasters’ blazers. I’m surprised they didn’t make Jane Pauley wear two N logo tassels on her breasts.

A month later, once this logo had now been firmly established, NBC got a call from the Nebraska ETV Network, the State’s chain of PBS stations. It seems they had the EXACT SAME LOGO. The only thing different was the colors. And I bet they paid some skeesix fifty bucks to design it.

From a design perspective, the N is a generic nothing so NBC returned to the mark that worked ...

Hope the genius that created the disaster was fired.

I sincerely hope the real Meta wins this case as FB is toxic to the nth degree. 

X marks the spot ...

The X Windows System logo (left) and the Twitter “X” logo (right). [Images: Microsoft, Twitter/X]

Back in the day, yours truly designed logos and honestly, there was never an issue as to whether I ripped off another logo in order to meet the needs of my clients as pride is a big issue with me along with the logical desire to avoid copyright issues in designing any given mark for said client. Regarding Musk, who seems to being having a nervous breakdown regarding Twitter, is also is having a brain freeze regarding rebranding with his ill advised design of X, suspiciously resembling the 1984 Microsoft X Window's logo depicted above. This is a no no, somewhat akin to the NBC disaster done back in 1976 whereby NBC paid a cool million for a geometric N, seen below, while an NBC subsidiary paid $100 for the same mark in 1975. Needless to say, the subsidiary made out big time. :)

Methinks Musk should stick with rockets and cars because his handling of Twitter has been an utter disaster.

The bird and name was much better IMHO.

 

And so it goes. - K. Vonnegut

Addendum: It's even worse than that. Seems Facebook has an X logo as well. 

And as it turns out, even Meta-formerly-Facebook has a federal trademark, which it registered in 2019, for a blue-and-white letter "X" — and it's directly related to "social networking services," presaging even more drama for Musk's troubled microblogging site.

Image by Harun Ozalp/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

FB's effort is sorta lame but it does exist. :)

Any questions as to why Elon screwed the pooch on this one? :)

NDAs

Mason County — a rural community in northeastern Kentucky bordering the Ohio River — is among dozens of U.S. localities weighing data center projects that residents say have been shrouded in secrecy.
Michael Swensen for NBC News

NDA, aka bribes, are cropping up everywhere in support of companies' attempts to install, in surreptitious fashion, data centers into towns that don't want them. 

On a March afternoon in Mason County, Kentucky, Dr. Timothy Grosser and his son Andy sat across the table from three men who came with an offer: $10 million for the 250-acre farm where they’d lived and worked for nearly four decades.

That’s 35 times what Grosser bought his land for in 1988 and significantly more than what others in the area had sold their land for recently. But there was a catch — it wasn’t clear who was funding the offer. One of the men said he represented a “Fortune 100 company” that wanted the property for an industrial development, but he refused to say what kind, which company or even his own name.

Instead, he pulled out a non-disclosure agreement.

Grosser said the contract would prevent him from discussing the project’s details with any third parties in exchange for limited information about its purpose, timeline and size. It didn’t disclose the company’s name, which could be discussed only after the company publicly announced its participation in the project.

“We refused to sign it,” Grosser said. “I’m not selling my farm for any amount of money.”

Dr. Timothy Grosser on his farm in Mason County on Oct. 20.Michael Swensen for NBC News

Five months after Grosser turned them down, local officials said at a public meeting that Mason County was being scouted as a location for a new data center development.

Any questions?

@ risk ...

 

Experts have thought for years about how AI could threaten humanity.Chelsea Stahl / NBC News

Excellent article, no bloviation, an intelligent analytic on how AI can go sideways in a nano second.

In interviews, AI researchers, analysts studying the intersection of AI and the military, and biologists studying AI-mediated risks said that worries about the technology’s growing capabilities are not the stuff of science fiction. Instead, they said, humans acting alone or with state support could soon use AI systems to cause potentially catastrophic harm.

“If the AI is smarter than all humans, it will likely be able to find and act on attack vectors that humans didn’t think of,” Barnett said, arguing that AI systems capable of autonomously improving themselves pose the most significant risks for humanity.

Anthropic, OpenAI and Meta all recently disclosed that AI systems have already disobeyed human developers’ instructions — in some cases autonomously hacking third-party companies, leading to growing concerns internally and from the general public — and causing some researchers at the companies to quit to focus on safety efforts.

Though many AI researchers working at the technology’s cutting edge have expressed these existential fears — both in interviews with NBC News and in a flurry of social media posts last week — many hesitate to say which specific pathway could cause the most harm to humans. 

In a "wonderful" BRT article, Mission Impossible, specifics on the rogue attacks were laid out with the end result, the four companies didn't do their homework in correctly testing their AI.s. Read the article, you will see why mistakes were made that, if I were doing the work, I would have been fired in a nano second but I digress ...

One prominent AI safety organization, the California-based Center for AI Safety, created an online textbook in early 2024 to break the scenarios into four key categories: rogue AIs, malicious use, AI race dynamics and organizational risks.

Click here for the paper. You will learn a lot, I know I did.

Past as Prelude

As my loyal readers know, Network is one of the all time favorites of yours truly, a film worthy, IMHO, of belonging in the same league as Strangelove, Godfather I and Citizen Kane as great cinema forcing one to think differently about reality after seeing the work in question. Well, it seems Chayefsky wanted to have an ending even more prescient then the one in the film as his take on the news was prescient to a fault.

Chayefsky - "We are shooting for a third act in which the NETWORK becomes so powerful it is an international power of itself and even declares war on some country."

For Chayefsky it wasn't just about the TV network; he was obsessed with the idea of a multination corporation buying all of America's networks, making them the propaganda arms of these independent powers. This sort of corporate dystopia is very familiar to modern scifi and cyberpunk readers, but was less common in the 70s - especially on the scale that Chayefsky was making Network. While the final film is not exactly science fiction, Chayefsky was heading in that direction, including sketching out his vision of what calamties might befall America in the second half of the 70s:

• racial hysteria + jingoism
• police violence in the ghettos + barrios
• a consolidation of a United Front joining together all sections of the 
• revolutionary, radical + democratic movements
• the sheer numbers of the prisoner class and their terms of existence make them a mighty reservoir of revolutionary substructures and infrastructures

Of course like all the best futurists Chayefsky was simply using the past as a guide; you can see the outlines of William Randolph Hearst's yellow journalism, which pushed America into war with Spain, in Chayefsky's original ending concept. He just took that idea - a media entity so powerful it can cause war - and extrapolated one step further - a media entity so powerful it can go to war.

When you think about it, 6 mega corporations run news in this country with the obstensive purpose to sell ads. The best way to do it is be sensationalist, sleazy, patriotic and fear mongering, characteristics The Donald leveraged to the max when beginning his successful run to get the GOP nomination. Also consider the fact the big 6 are connected directly or indirectly with the Military/Industrial/Congressional Complex, the money and power engine that keeps on giving thus helping the big 6 in transforming news into NOOZE, the "reality" show that misinforms 24/7 to keep us rubes quiet and in the dark along the lines of They Live sans the B&W sunglasses.

This infographic created by Jason at Frugal Dad shows that almost all media comes 
from the same six sources.

That's consolidated from 50 companies back in 1983.

NOTE: This infographic is from last year and is missing some key transactions. GE does not own NBC (or Comcast or any media) anymore. So that 6th company is now Comcast. And Time Warner doesn't own AOL, so Huffington Post isn't affiliated with them.

But the fact that a few companies own everything demonstrates "the illusion of choice," Frugal Dad says. While some big sites, like Digg and Reddit aren't owned by any of the corporations, Time Warner owns news sites read by millions of Americans every year.

Armageddon?

A U.S. Army Staff Sgt. prepares to send a chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear report on radio during the Best Warrior Competition at Fort A.P. Hill, Va., Oct. 8, 2019. Public domain.

Yours truly, along with many others, were wrong about the competency of the Russian Army as we all assumed it was going to be a cakewalk for Putin to take over Ukraine in a matter of days. Needless to say, belief has a way of going sideways when reality makes its presence known regarding, in this case, the innumerable missteps Putin has made in terms of not understanding anything in terms of how to properly conduct a war in any way, shape or fashion.

I vividly remember the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, yes I'm that old, when Kennedy. on a flickering  B&W tv, told the world about the possibility of Armageddon so ... in a very small way, the notion of quiet dread comes to mind when faced with a cornered dictator equipped with nukes, able to end the world in 2022.

Putin is having a bad week.

The sole bridge linking the Crimean Peninsula with Russia has been rocked by an explosion today, collapsing part of it into the sea. Putin opened the bridge personally in 2018 and it has been a cherished pet project.

Also, a Ukrainian drone attacked a Russian Tu-22M bomber base, which has been a hub for strikes on Ukrainian targets, 200-miles from the Ukrainian border, deep inside Russia.

Not to mention Putin’s army is collapsing on multiple fronts as Ukraine continues their relentless counteroffensive — and the Ukrainian government is winning the information war through its relentless trolling on Twitter.

As a result, Putin has been rattling the nuclear saber… Again.

So, what signs can you look for that will indicate that Putin is about to go nuclear?

First, if the U.S. had intel that a nuclear strike in Ukraine is imminent, expect to see the U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM) light up with activity..

Interestingly, the Biden administration has intentionally kept U.S. nuclear forces on a relaxed posture to not provoke Russia.

So, any increase in U.S. nuclear readiness is a clear signal that something is up. You would likely hear about this first on the Air Force amn/nco/snco public Facebook group before any public announcement.

In an imminent nuclear strike — even a smaller, tactical nuke in Ukraine — you would likely see U.S. continuity of government plans take effect.

Watch for Vice President Kamala Harris and senior congressional leaders canceling their public schedules. President Biden himself would probably remain at the White House to project calm and control.

If you see Beijing publicly warn Putin against using a nuclear weapon in Ukraine, we should start to worry.

Signs that Russian soldiers in Ukraine are being equipped with NBC gear (nuclear, biological, chemical) would also be a dead giveaway. 

We’re now closer to nuclear war than we’ve been in 60 years

Last week, President Joe Biden was caught on a hot mic saying “we have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban missile crisis. … [Putin] is not joking when he talks about potential use of tactical nuclear weapons or biological or chemical weapons because his military is, you might say, significantly underperforming.”

What’s most troubling about this statement is that it wasn’t meant for public consumption. It is an unfiltered appraisal of the situation from the most well-informed man in the world at a Democratic fundraiser.

If Biden is saying we are facing Armageddon, then it means he intends to strike Russia if Putin uses a nuke in Ukraine.

Time for someone to take out Putin now.

Internacine Warfare

The battle for access to the net has begun in earnest. On one side are the Telcos and Cable companies, on the other is WiFi, the love child of municipalities (wireless connects to online government services save billions) that promises free access to anyone equipped with a computer within distance of a WiFi node. Why is this important? It's important because WiFi points a dagger at the heart of the Verizons of the world who deem it their right to be the sole provider of the last mile connect to the web to your home or business without interference of any particular town or city. This was the case with Philadelphia, PA whereby they told Verizon and the state government to buzz off when they installed a city wide WiFi for their citizens using Free Speech as the mechanism to squelch the Verizon attempt to kill WiFi. As a result, WiFi now rules in the City of Brotherly Love. Ditto for Boston who is working with a non profit to do the same as is New Orleans.

What most people don't know is that the lines in the street are not controlled by the cable companies or telcos as different service providers use the fiber without a problem. It's the connect to the house that's controlled by the provider the homeowner pays to make the link to the net. When WiFi is factored into the equation, the need for T/Cvs is no longer a given given the fact Skype can run off the net for telephone via WiFi and "naked" access to content providers for video (Fox, Apple, NBC etc., etc.)is just a browser click away without the need to use T/CV "selected" channels keyed to the best interest of the T/Cv provider.

The threat to Net Neutrality is also real as T/Cvs want to pander to big video users as this burnishes the bottom line to the detriment of the web as a whole because the Net is based on open standards with equal access to all urls. If the Net is turned into a two tier system, proprietary tech keyed to the service provider inevitably raises it ugly head and the net, in this country , will go down the tubes because closed systems on the web will not work. Sir Tim Berners-Lee/Save the Internet Blog eloquently pointed this out at a congressional hearing last week.

Maybe when Mike Blomberg retires as NYC Mayor, he can give WiFi as a parting gift because $400-500 million won't break the bank to a guy worth about 6 billion. How about it Mike? It would be the right thing to do.

“It’s preposterous.”

“Our laws are clear,” Senator Mark Kelly, a retired Navy captain and astronaut, said in a video.
“You can refuse illegal orders.”Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times

Without merit ...

Pentagon Opens Inquiry Into Senator Mark Kelly Over What Hegseth Calls ‘Seditious’ Video

The defense secretary called the senator’s remarks urging troops not to follow illegal orders
“despicable, reckless, and false.”

The highly unusual announcement is the latest in a series of moves by the Trump administration to seek retribution against President Trump’s perceived political enemies.

Instead of employing the Justice Department as his means for punishment, this time the Trump administration seems to be turning to the Pentagon and the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

Senator Kelly, a retired Navy captain and astronaut, appeared in the video with five other Democratic lawmakers who served in the military or the intelligence community.

“Our laws are clear,” he said. “You can refuse illegal orders.” The other lawmakers repeated a similar message.

The lawmakers did not refer to a particular order that they viewed as illegal. But Mr. Kelly and others in the video earlier raised concerns about the fate of U.S. troops involved in the 21 strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

“What does this mean for their future if they find out later that they did this without legal justification?” he asked in an interview with NBC. “It puts them in legal jeopardy at some point.”

The brief video drew the ire of Mr. Trump, who called last week for the lawmakers to be punished and suggested that they be executed. “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!” Mr. Trump wrote on his social media site. He shared another person’s post that said: “HANG THEM GEORGE WASHINGTON WOULD !!”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in an online post on Monday that the video was “despicable, reckless, and false,” and he asserted that the lawmakers, whom he disparaged as the “Seditious Six,” were encouraging troops to “ignore the orders of their Commanders.”

“Their foolish screed sows doubt and confusion — which only puts our warriors in danger,” he wrote.

In the wake of Mr. Trump’s accusations, all six of the lawmakers said that they had been subjected to death threats.

“If this is meant to intimidate me and other members of Congress from doing our jobs and holding this administration accountable, it won’t work,” Mr. Kelly said on Monday in a statement. “I’ve given too much to this country to be silenced by bullies who care more about their own power than protecting the Constitution.”

As part of their training, troops are told that they should not follow orders that are illegal or immoral, such as the intentional targeting of unarmed civilians.

Charlie Swift, a lawyer and a retired lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy, said that in his view the  lawmakers in the video made a “true statement of the law” when they said troops should refuse illegal orders.

Mr. Kelly’s statements are also probably protected by the speech and debate clause that protects members of Congress from prosecution, Mr. Swift said.

Mr. Hegseth’s threat to recall and punish Mr. Kelly for speech made long after he retired is without precedent, Mr. Swift said. Retired officers are typically recalled for crimes committed only while they were serving on active duty, he noted.

Mr. Hegseth dismissed that distinction, contending that Mr. Kelly’s remarks were “addressed directly to all troops while explicitly using his rank and service affiliation — lending the appearance of authority to his words.”

Mr. Hegseth’s threat came on the same day that a federal judge tossed out separate criminal charges against the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey and New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, saying Mr. Trump’s appointment of the prosecutor was invalid.

Some military experts maintained that it was unlikely that Mr. Hegseth would be able to prosecute Mr. Kelly. “I have no idea what they’d court-martial him for,” said Eliot A. Cohen, a military historian who worked for President George W. Bush. “It’s preposterous.”

Yes it is.

It's Ok...

National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden called out Sen. Dianne Feinstein after her fiery floor speech Tuesday assailing the CIA, calling her anger hypocritical.

Snowden released a statement after the California Democrat spent nearly an hour on the Senate floor decrying the CIA for accessing Senate Intelligence Committee computers and interfering with staffers’ investigations into CIA interrogation tactics.

“It’s clear the CIA was trying to play ‘keep away’ with documents relevant to an investigation by their overseers in Congress, and that’s a serious constitutional concern,” Snowden said in a statement to NBC News and confirmed to POLITICO by a Snowden associate. “But it’s equally if not more concerning that we’re seeing another ‘Merkel Effect,’ where an elected official does not care at all that the rights of millions of ordinary citizens are violated by our spies, but suddenly it’s a scandal when a politician finds out the same thing happens to them.”

hy·poc·ri·sy

hiˈpäkrisē

noun

1. the practice of claiming to have moral standards or beliefs to which one's own behavior does not conform; pretense. 

Hugo Black & The Right to Know

Hugo Black, associate justice on the Supreme Court, was a judge who got it, particularly when it came to the role of the press and why having competition in the fourth estate was vital to the proper maintenance of democracy, something under attack as giant multinational corporations do the merger game in order to attain even more power at the expense of a viable press, a process essential if a democracy is to survive. 

The much-admired Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black may be rolling in his grave at the prospect of a merger between 21st Century Fox and Time Warner Inc., which would reduce control of the major Hollywood studios to five owners, from six, and major television producers to four, from five.

“The widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public,” he wrote in the majority opinion that decided a 1945 antitrust case involving major newspaper publishers and The Associated Press. “The First Amendment affords not the slightest support for the contention that a combination to restrain trade in news and views has any constitutional immunity.”

As seen below, 6 corporations own 90+% of all news and media organizations.

This infographic created by Jason at Frugal Dad shows that almost all media comes from the same six sources.

That's consolidated from 50 companies back in 1983. 

NOTE: This infographic is from last year and is missing some key transactions. GE does not own NBC (or Comcast or any media) anymore. So that 6th company is now Comcast. And Time Warner doesn't own AOL, so Huffington Post isn't affiliated with them.

But the fact that a few companies own everything demonstrates "the illusion of choice," Frugal Dad says. While some big sites, like Digg and Reddit aren't owned by any of the corporations, Time Warner owns news sites read by millions of Americans every year.

As George Carlin famously said, "You have no choice". Food for thought, don't you think?

One of 36 ...

The Israeli military strike on Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital 
in the early hours of Sunday.Anadolu / Anadolu via Getty Images

Well, if anyone has any doubts about the Israelis committing genocide in Gaza, those doubts should go away as the last hospital in Gaza got bombed, taking out a large part of the facility with consummate ease using US ordinance to make it happen because terrorists are plotting attacks yet again because hospitals are ideal places from which to attack Israelis without question.

NBC News verified multiple scenes from Al-Alhi Baptist Hospital showing people in beds being wheeled away from the area, and the devastation afterward, including a large hole in one of the walls that might have been part of the hospital facilities and video showing devastation inside the hospital’s church.

The Israeli military said the compound was used by terrorists “to plan and execute terror attacks,” without providing evidence, and that steps were taken to mitigate harm to civilians before the strike, including issuing advanced warnings.

Naim said there were “no militants or military activity in the building or anywhere in the hospital.”

Hamas called the attack “a new escalation of criminality” and accused Israel of a “systemic series of attacks” on hospitals and schools. It provided a list of 36 hospitals across Gaza it says Israel has attacked since the current conflict began.

Beds in the debris of Al-Ahli hospital.OMAR AL-QATTAA / AFP - Getty Images

Derecho

Image Credit: NBC News Screenshot

You know when things get weird when one sees green sky produced by hot air coming in contact with a band of rapidly moving showers or thunderstorms thus producing a long lasting wind storm of biblical proportions, this time in South Dakota. 

South Dakotans are accustomed to the storms known as derechos — they’ve had two recently. What they’re not used to seeing is skies that turn green right before severe weather tears through the region.

A derecho, which the National Weather Service describes as a powerful wind storm extending more than 240 miles, moved through South Dakota and other parts of the Plains on Tuesday and brought powerful winds — up to 99 miles per hour in some areas.

But before the derecho (pronounced deh-REY-cho) hit Sioux Falls, S.D., the storm caused the skies to turn green, an unusual weather phenomenon. Many people on social media shared images of the green skies, which were also captured on South Dakota Department of Transportation traffic cameras.

Development of derechos

Factoid

The unusual green color in the sky sometimes occurs before or during a storm depending on how sunlight interacts and scatters among different particles in the atmosphere, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service said.

A shelf cloud along the leading edge of a derecho in Minnesota

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. :)