“In November 2009, boyd traveled to New York City to deliver what she expected to be a major address at the Web 2.0 Expo, one of the year’s most important gatherings of Internet professionals. Her topic was what she terms “living in the stream,” or how not to drown in the flood of information that comes at us all the time. Teens, she believes, are especially good at this. The most web-savvy of them manage to stay open to all the digital stuff without having to process everything. They take what they can handle and remain untroubled that much may elude their grasp. It’s a kind of cyber-Zen. “The goal is . . . to be peripherally aware of information as it flows by, grabbing it at the right moment, when it is most relevant and valuable, entertaining or insightful,” she said at the Expo. “It is about a sense of alignment, of being aligned with information.” She talked about the high some Twitter users get “feeling as though they are living and breathing with the world around them, peripherally aware and in tune, adding content to the stream and grabbing it when appropriate.””
Starting to see initial indications that at least one part of DoD is gearing up to cut anywhere from 6% to 50% of its workforce within the fairly near term, perhaps beginning as soon as 01 Oct. Drivers could be generic deficit reduction, sequestration, and historic limitations on strength levels in certain types of organizations. Expect it to be ugly — sprung at last minute, execute without finesse.)
We've heard a lot in the past couple of years, pro and con, about escalating CEO compensation, but it seems to me at least one argument in their defense has merit. It is important to pay enough to recruit and retain the best talent available in the highly competitive global marketplace.
What seems strange to me is that those who believe this is true, that you have to pay well to attract the best talent, usually don't accept the same argument when it comes to government employees.
One of the more dangerous consequences of the financial crisis is how governments at all levels are, in effect, cutting off their noses to spite
their faces. In the rush to balance their budgets, some are indiscriminately firing, freezing and cutting pay, and cutting pensions — too often impacting the people who actually make government work.
The speech delivered by CIA General Counsel Stephen Preston at Harvard yesterday is important and illuminating, and I agree with Ken the administration should be commended for it. But wow does it raise some troubling questions about how the CIA understands the legal authority for and constraints on its drone operations. There’s too much to unpack in it for one blog post, and I’d urge those who follow these interests to read it for themselves. Meantime, I’ll start with two issues: (1) the CIA’s understanding of its domestic authority to use force; (2) the CIA’s understanding of whether/how international law constrains its actions.
Domestic authority. Preston correctly explains that the CIA must have some source of authority under domestic U.S. law to carry out “hypothetical” activities involving the use of force abroad. In this inquiry, of course, international law is irrelevant. And I don’t read Preston to suggest that international law can give the U.S. government powers it does not otherwise possess under our own Constitution and laws. So what gives the CIA its authority to carry out drone strikes? Here’s Preston:
The US government pretends to live under the rule of law, to respect human rights, and to provide freedom and democracy to citizens. Washington’s pretense and the stark reality are diametrically opposed.
US government officials routinely criticize other governments for being undemocratic and for violating human rights. Yet, no other country except Israel sends bombs, missiles, and drones into sovereign countries to murder civilian populations. The torture prisons of Abu Gahraib, Guantanamo, and CIA secret rendition sites are the contributions of the Bush/Obama regimes to human rights.
Washington violates the human rights of its own citizens. Washington has suspended the civil liberties guaranteed in the US Constitution and declared its intention to detain US citizens indefinitely without due process of law. President Obama has announced that he, at his discretion, can murder US citizens whom he regards as a threat to the US.
DENVER – New standards for air pollution caused by natural gas development – including standards for the process known as hydraulic fracturing (fracking) – are scheduled to be released next week by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The industry claims fracking has minimal environmental impacts, but a study by the Colorado School of Public Health has found that health risks from cancers and asthma are higher than normal for people living near fracking sites in the state.
According to an attorney with Earthjustice, Robin Cooley, it has been 25 years since the EPA last reviewed some of these standards. The industry has changed significantly since then, she says.
In early 1976 the National Enquirer published a story that shocked the elite political class in Washington, D.C. The story disclosed that a woman named Mary Pinchot Meyer, who was a divorced spouse of a high CIA official named Cord Meyer, had been engaged in a two-year sexual affair with President John F. Kennedy. By the time the article was published, JFK had been assassinated, and Mary Pinchot Meyer herself was dead, a victim of a murder that took place in Washington on October 12, 1964.<
The murder of Mary Pinchot Meyer is the subject of a fascinating and gripping new book by Peter Janney, who was childhood friends with Mary Meyer’s three sons and whose father himself was a high CIA official. Janney’s father and mother socialized in the 1950s with the Meyers and other high-level CIA officials.
Amazon Page
Janney’s book, Mary’s Mosaic, is one of those books that you just can’t put down once you start reading it. It has everything a reader could ever want in a work of nonfiction – politics, love, sex, war, intrigue, history, culture, murder, spies, racism, and perhaps the biggest criminal trial in the history of our nation’s capital.
Just past noon on the day of the murder, Mary Meyer was on her daily walk on the C&O Canal Trail near the Key Bridge in Washington, D.C. Someone grabbed her and shot a .38-caliber bullet into the left side of her head. Meyer continued struggling despite the almost certainly fatal wound, so the murderer shot her again, this time downward through her right shoulder. The second bullet struck directly into her heart, killing her instantly.
A 21-year-old black man named Raymond Crump Jr., who lived in one of the poorest sections of D.C., was arrested near the site of the crime and charged with the murder. Crump denied committing the crime.
There were two eyewitnesses, neither of whom, however, personally identified Crump. One witness, Henry Wiggins Jr., said that he saw a black man standing over the body and that the man wore a beige jacket, a dark cap, dark pants, and dark shoes. Another witness, William L. Mitchell, said that prior to the murder, he had been jogging on the trail when he saw a black man dressed in the same manner following Meyer a short time before she was killed.
The most persistent and pernicious Big Lie regarding the so-called “Civil War”— more properly called the “War to Prevent Southern Independence”— is this:
Noble and saintly yankees fought the war to abolish slavery; evil Confederates fought to preserve it.
The historical record incontrovertibly refutes this Big Lie and yet it lives on, repeated incessantly by many who know better, and by many, many more who accept without challenge what they were taught in government schools.
