Rule No. 4 – Avoid Food Products That Contain High-Fructose Corn Syrup.
From Food Rules, an eater’s manual by Michael Pollan
Found in my electronic chapbook. See also Eating Mindfully by Jan Chozen Bey.
I finished reading Elizabeth Warren’s A Fighting Chance yesterday and what follows are passages that grabbed my attention. In the wake of the disappointing performance of President Barack Hussein Obama, I am hesitant to get behind yet another Democrat, but I have liked and been public in my support of Warren in the past and I did my very best to read the book with an open mind. I need to think more and discuss my thoughts with a few savvy people whose opinions I trust, but for now, here’s my takeaway.
Bruce and I would walk Trover, and I would start talking about the damage the big banks were doing to families all across the country. One night my voice started rising as I told Bruce how vile I thought it was. Did the banks have any idea how many people were getting hurt?
I chopped the air with my hands. I clenched my teeth. I talked louder and faster, until finally I ran out of words. And then Bruce asked the question that has gnawed at me ever since: “So, what are you going to do about it?” —page 44.
This is a question I pose to people over and over again when they express outrage at some news item. I also don’t pay a great deal of attention to most news because I have a philosophy of not getting worked up about an event if I’m not going to take some action. My life is more stress-free because of that.
The banking industry brought everything; they even brought their own facts. The industry commissioned three different studies, each of which was touted as “independent.” Each explained the urgent need to change the law—exactly the way the banking industry wanted it changed. One particularly damaging result of these bogus studies was a claim that bankruptcy cost every hard working, bill-paying American family a $550 “hidden tax.” That number was entirely made up, fabricated out of thin air, but the press reported it as “fact” for years.
This one hit me hard. I’d spent nearly twenty years sweating over every detail in a string of serious academic studies, agonizing over sample sizes and statistical significance to make sure that whatever I reported was exactly right. Now the banks just wrote a check, commissioned a friendly study, and purchased their own facts. They had their press people distribute the facts and lobbyists hand the facts to congressional staffers. From the halls of Congress to the front pages of newspapers all over the country, these new “facts” became reality.
This strategy—and the cynicism behind it—made me furious. It also scared me. If the facts about bankruptcy could be purchased, then who knew what they would claim next? —page 65.
The Internet has made the distribution of ones own facts both infinitely easier and more difficult. Easier if your audience generally agrees with you and more difficult if those who don’t are willing to push back, hard, and call bull shit!
As I thought about the Congressional Oversight Panel’s mission, I kept coming back to one number: $700 billion. That number kept me awake at night. Heck, it still keeps me up from time to time. It’s hard to put in perspective just how gigantic that number was.
Sure, there are crazy comparisons. We could have bought seven laptops for every child in America. We could have sent thirteen million kids to a private university. We could have put a large colony of badgers on Mars. (Well, maybe not.)
But it was the real “could haves” that tore at me. We could have fixed our roads and bridges and public transportation. We could have launched universal preschool and made state universities affordable again. We could have doubled our federal investment in medical research and scientific research for the next twenty years. —page 90.
Warren’s infrastructure comment struck home with me because I’ve been thinking of late that a truly forward thinking politician would champion the idea of a moratorium on all new infrastructure construction until every public road and bridge in the nation is safe and up to code.
Late in the evening, [National Economic Council Director] Larry [Summers] leaned back in his chair and offered me some advice. By now, I’d lost count of Larry’s Diet Cokes, and our table was strewn with bits of food and spilled sauces. Larry’s tone was in the friendly advice category. He teed it up this way: I had a choice. I could be an insider or I could be an outsider. Outsiders can say whatever they want. But people on the inside don’t listen to them. Insiders, however, get lots of access and a chance to push their ideas. But insiders also understand one unbreakable rule: They don’t criticize other insiders. [Emphasis in the original, JH]
I had been warned. —page 106.
We cannot continue to play this kind of, in Rep. Jeb Hensaling’s (R-Texas) words, shirts and skins game (page 98). The very real lives of very real people are harmed or even destroyed as collateral damage in this boy’s game (girls don’t play for obvious reasons) that is no game.
Every now and then I’d walk down those hollow, high-ceilinged halls and bump into a member of the staff who would stop to say hello. I heard different versions of the following comment: “You don’t know me, but I was working in the [deleted] section [of the Treasury Department] during the financial crisis. When we talked about what we should do, someone always seemed to ask: What will Elizabeth Warren say when she finds out about this? That usually made people stop and think again. —page 125.
This is why the First Amendment is so important. This is why transparency is critical. This is why journalists need to be tenacious Rottweilers and not sweet King Charles spaniels; and why, in my own small way, I believe that bloggers, acting as citizen journalists, are vital.
Meanwhile, the megabanks just kept pouring more money into their campaign. According to one source, the financial industry was spending more than $1 million a day on lobbying and campaign contributions during their drive to kill any meaningful financial reform. —page 151
Warren’s endnote on the claim (page 312) states that:
According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the banking and financial industry spent, in the aggregate, more than $523 million on campaign contributions and lobbying, or $1.4 million a day, during the fight against financial reform.
I confess that I have become somewhat desensitized to such figures by my coverage of all things Walmart where I once reported that in an ongoing effort to eliminate inheritance taxes, Walmart, along with a small cabal of other wealthy-beyond-wealth families, spent $490.3 million dollars on lobbying Congress to save themselves $71.6 billion in taxes. That’s a 1,593 percent return on their investment.
For another Walmart example, consider the lobbying on the Employee Free Choice Act—commonly know as Card Check—where business opponents to the act outspent Labor 2-to-1 $200 million against $100 million to prevent what ought to have been President Barack Hussein Obama’s first success in office.
After we shook hands all around and everyone was seated, one of the lawyers said he had some bad news. No one made eye contact with me. Reluctantly, a second lawyer explained that the law had a little glitch. With that, my visitors reached into their folders and pulled out photocopies of a single page from the long Dodd-Frank Act. It seemed there was a one-word error: a provision setting up the consumer agency referred to powers under this “subtitle” rather than powers under this “title.”
Huh. It was just one word, yet the difference was huge.
The statutory language was a tangle, but using the wrong word in this sentence meant that the new agency would likely get its full powers only after a director was confirmed by the Senate (or, as we eventually figured out, appointed by the president during a congressional recess). The Department of the Treasury had some ability to get the agency moving before there was a director, but its power would be limited.
One little word. I had only one little thought: Oh Crap. —page 175
So, Public Law 111-203-July 21, 2010, The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform And Consumer Protection Act runs for 849 feckin’ pages. By my count, there are 396,348 words in the document and a single word–accidentally, carelessly or intentionally placed–nearly derails what must have been thousands of work hours? I’m afraid I would have not have been as genteel as Warren in my response.
Where does all of this leave me, and you? Corporations are people and there can be no limits on the spending of money to own the government, so say the majority of the Supreme Court Of The United States. The fight becomes harder and harder with each passing day, regardless of who sits in the Oval Office.
So, the question for me is: what am I going to do about it?
Earlier this year, I attended an event with former House speaker Newt Gingrich, despite knowing of his stereotypical attitude towards Muslims. I realized then the power of one voice to change people’s prejudices – and how rarely people like me use ours: I was the first Muslimah to whom he had ever spoken.
Yes, I am Muslim, and I am a Republican – and that’s why I was at the Heritage Foundation panel on Benghazi last month, where I asked the now-infamous question about how conservatives deal with the vast majority of people of my faith who are peaceful. Americans don’t expect minorities – especially Muslims – to be Republicans, and it happens often in conservative circles that I am the only Muslim woman in the audience.
I became Republican because I felt that my Islamic values – pro-life, pro-traditional family, pro-business, pro-trade – aligned best with the Republican party platform. I identified as a Democrat for several years when I was younger, but found it hard to defend liberal values as they were so often in conflict with my deeply-held beliefs.
Though I have been a Republican for a long time – and despite having had a tough time with my fellow Republicans in Oregon, where I lived until 2012 – I joined the Washington DC Republican Party earlier this year. They have all been kind and welcoming to me at their meetings, events and fundraisers, and I have made good friends in the GOP.
So the personal attacks by conservatives after my question at the Heritage event went viral came as somewhat of a surprise – though the support from the Republicans who reached out to me did not. As one of the few lobbyists among the 10,000 on Capitol Hill who is a practicing Muslim, I regularly attend congressional hearings bashing “Islamists”, but I didn’t expect to be called one of them.
Saba Ahmed writing in I am Muslim and Republican – and was attacked by people in my party for The Guardian.
When I began writing for a living, my feeling was that my job was to give the reader something vivid, quick and concrete that she couldn’t get in any other form; a writer was an information-gathering machine, I thought, and especially as a journalist, my job was to go out into the world and gather details, moments, impressions as visual and immediate as TV. Facts were what we needed most. And if you watched the world closely enough, I believed (and still do), you could begin to see what it would do next, just as you can with a sibling or a friend; Don DeLillo or Salman Rushdie aren’t mystics, but they can tell us what the world is going to do tomorrow because they follow it so attentively.
Yet nowadays the planet is moving too fast for even a Rushdie or DeLillo to keep up, and many of us in the privileged world have access to more information than we know what to do with. What we crave is something that will free us from the overcrowded moment and allow us to see it in a larger light. No writer can compete, for speed and urgency, with texts or CNN news flashes or RSS feeds, but any writer can try to give us the depth, the nuances — the “gaps,” as Annie Dillard calls them — that don’t show up on many screens. Not everyone wants to be reduced to a sound bite or a bumper sticker.
Enter (I hope) the long sentence: the collection of clauses that is so many-chambered and lavish and abundant in tones and suggestions, that has so much room for near-contradiction and ambiguity and those places in memory or imagination that can’t be simplified, or put into easy words, that it allows the reader to keep many things in her head and heart at the same time, and to descend, as by a spiral staircase, deeper into herself and those things that won’t be squeezed into an either/or
Pico Iyer writing in The point of the long and winding sentence for The Los Angeles Times.
Finally, I have discovered a horrible, rather brutal method that I recommend only to men of excessive vigor, men with thick black hair and skin covered with liver spots, men with big square hands and legs shaped like bowling pins. It is a question of using finely pulverized, dense coffee, cold and anhydrous, consumed on an empty stomach. This coffee falls into your stomach, a sack whose velvety interior is lined with tapestries of suckers and papillae. The coffee finds nothing else in the sack, and so it attacks these delicate and voluptuous linings; it acts like a food and demands digestive juices; it wrings and twists the stomach for these juices, appealing as a pythoness appeals to her god; it brutalizes these beautiful stomach linings as a wagon master abuses ponies; the plexus becomes inflamed; sparks shoot all the way up to the brain. From that moment on, everything becomes agitated. Ideas quick-march into motion like battalions of a grand army to its legendary fighting ground, and the battle rages. Memories charge in, bright flags on high; the cavalry of metaphor deploys with a magnificent gallop; the artillery of logic rushes up with clattering wagons and cartridges; on imagination’s orders, sharpshooters sight and fire; forms and shapes and characters rear up; the paper is spread with ink – for the nightly labor begins and ends with torrents of this black water, as a battle opens and concludes with black powder.
Honore de Balzac writing in The Pleasures and Pains of Coffee
I discovered chocolate covered espresso beans in the early ’90s when I was working in Cleveland’s Ohio City. I bought a quarter pound—approximately 114 g—on my lunch break from a coffee/candy shop in Tremont and ate the whole bag in the course of about an hour. By the middle of the afternoon I felt like John Moschitta.
The former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton has said Edward Snowden should have the right to launch a legal and public defence of his decision to leak top-secret documents if he returns to the United States.
“If he wishes to return knowing he would be held accountable and also able to present a defence, that is his decision to make,” Clinton said in a video interview with the Guardian on Friday.
Snowden, who is currently in Russia where he has been afforded temporary asylum, has been charged with three separate violations of the US Espionage Act. These charges include stealing government property and sharing classified documents with the Guardian and the Washington Post.
The broadly worded law makes no distinction between a spy and a whistleblower and affords Snowden almost no recourse to a defence.
The former NSA employee is likely to face a number of additional charges should he return to the US.
When Clinton was asked if she believed the Espionage Act – passed in 1917 – should be reformed in order to allow Snowden a defence, she claimed not to know what the whistleblower had been charged with as they were “sealed indictments”.
“In any case that I’m aware of as a former lawyer, he has a right to mount a defence,” she said. “And he certainly has a right to launch both a legal defence and a public defence, which can of course affect the legal defence.
“Whether he chooses to return or not is up to him. He certainly can stay in Russia, apparently under Putin’s protection, for the rest of his life if that’s what he chooses. But if he is serious about engaging in the debate then he could take the opportunity to come back and have that debate. But that’s his decision.”
Phoebe Greenwood writing in Edward Snowden should have right to legal defence in US, says Hillary Clinton for The Guardian.
So, when Clinton says, “In any case that I’m aware of as a former lawyer,” why didn’t say former lawyer (as far as I know she is still a lawyer, I’m not aware that she had been disbarred) instead of saying former Secretary of State? Could it be that she knows that Snowden has a near-zero chance of ever seeing a courtroom if he steps on American territory, or the territory of any nation under America’s thumb?
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This is my exercise in shoveling out the blogpile…
Rule No. 3 – Avoid Food Products Containing Ingredients That No Ordinary Human Would Keep in the Pantry.
From Food Rules, an eater’s manual by Michael Pollan
Found in my electronic chapbook. See also Eating Mindfully by Jan Chozen Bey.
[O]ne week a month was always reserved for a True Story. It was a dose of realism that gave The City its pedigree. No matter how much the strip changed over nearly a quarter century, even after I dropped almost all my original characters and morphed a silly Gen X humor strip into a savage political one, the True Stories remained.
If The City was known for anything over the years, it was these stories. I view them as diary entries…. one-page short stories. It’s thematically cohesive, unlike the rest of The City, so collecting them made perfect sense. I think you’re really going to like these volumes.
The publishing schedule is a little whacked. Volume One, above, will collect True Stories from 2002 to 2008, what I consider the peak years.
We’ll have to wait awhile for subsequent volumes, since the new Trashed graphic novel is slated for 2015 and I can’t have anything competing on the shelves with that. After that, Volume Two will cover strips from 2009 to the end in 2014. Then it’s back in time for Volume Three, with True Stories from 1996 to 2001. Volume Four will include my earliest True Stories, from The City’s debut in 1990 to 1995. Those last two volumes are dramatically different stylistically than my later work. I’ve never been a creator that stays in one place. I like those stories, but some of the artwork is, frankly, dogshit.
Derf writing in True Stories at Derfblog.
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This is my exercise in shoveling out the blogpile…
Rule No. 2 – Don’t Eat Anything Your Great Grandmother Wouldn’t Recognize as Food.
From Food Rules, an eater’s manual by Michael Pollan
Found in my electronic chapbook. See also Eating Mindfully by Jan Chozen Bey.
When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. – That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, – That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. – Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.
He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their Public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected, whereby the Legislative Powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
He has obstructed the Administration of Justice by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary Powers.
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
For protecting them, by a mock Trial from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury:
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:
For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies
For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:
For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.
He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & Perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.
He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.
In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.
Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.
We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these united Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States, that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. – And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.
New Hampshire: Josiah Bartlett, William Whipple, Matthew Thornton
Massachusetts: John Hancock, Samuel Adams, John Adams, Robert Treat Paine, Elbridge Gerry
Rhode Island: Stephen Hopkins, William Ellery
Connecticut: Roger Sherman, Samuel Huntington, William Williams, Oliver Wolcott
New York: William Floyd, Philip Livingston, Francis Lewis, Lewis Morris
New Jersey: Richard Stockton, John Witherspoon, Francis Hopkinson, John Hart, Abraham Clark
Pennsylvania: Robert Morris, Benjamin Rush, Benjamin Franklin, John Morton, George Clymer, James Smith, George Taylor, James Wilson, George Ross
Delaware: Caesar Rodney, George Read, Thomas McKean
Maryland: Samuel Chase, William Paca, Thomas Stone, Charles Carroll of Carrollton
Virginia: George Wythe, Richard Henry Lee, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Harrison, Thomas Nelson, Jr., Francis Lightfoot Lee, Carter Braxton
North Carolina: William Hooper, Joseph Hewes, John Penn
South Carolina: Edward Rutledge, Thomas Heyward, Jr., Thomas Lynch, Jr., Arthur Middleton
Georgia: Button Gwinnett, Lyman Hall, George Walton
From the Associated Press—Explosion investigations continue–this little bit of news, buried on the jump in the Marietta Times story, tells us that:
A spokesperson for the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, which regulates shale oil and gas drilling in the state, said the Statoil fire was apparently caused by a surface hose that malfunctioned during a hydraulic fracturing job. The malfunction caused a truck to catch fire and the blaze eventually spread to 20 trucks at the site.
From the Associated Press writing in separate story on the fire in Monroe county—Gas well fire probe continues—we learn that:
[Bethany McCorkle, spokeswoman for the Ohio Department of Natural Resources] said state regulators are also evaluating whether the well fire contributed to a fish kill in nearby Opossum Creek. Nathan Johnson, an attorney representing the Ohio Environmental Council interest group, said hundreds or thousands of dead fish [emphasis mine, JH] have been found in the creek.
“It is a shame because this is one of the cleaner, more pristine streams in the entire state,” he said.
Johnson said Ohio law now allows oil and natural gas well pads to be located within 50 feet of a stream, which he said is too close.
“The Ohio law on this needs to be improved. Fifty feet from a stream is not far enough,” he said.
On the continuing investigations over the Enviro-Tank explosions in Belpre the Associated Press reports:
State and federal investigations continued Wednesday into last week’s explosion at the Belpre area Enviro-Tank Clean, Inc., plant as well as a massive fire that occurred at a Statoil Eisenbarth natural gas well site near Hannibal Saturday.
Deborah Zubaty, area director for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration in Columbus, said the agency is looking into both incidents.
“We have people at both locations,” she said. “At Enviro-Tank we’re continuing our investigation which is only in the beginning stages. We’re interviewing management and employees at this time.”
Zubaty said there is currently no timeframe for completion of the investigation, which can take up to six months, although she does not expect the Enviro-Tank investigation to be nearly that long.
Three people were injured in the Enviro-Tank explosion.
Kevin S. McClain, age 32, Ravenswood, W.Va., suffered severe burns and was airlifted from the Camden Clark campus to Cabell Huntington Burn Center following the explosion. He remained in the hospital burn unit Wednesday where hospital officials listed McClain in stable but critical condition.
He is an employee of BBU Services of West Virginia, a Kenna-based environmental construction contractor.
Justin A. Flesher, 33, and Fred E. Johnston, 53, both Enviro-Tank employees from Belpre, were treated for less critical burns and released from area hospitals the day of the explosion.
The explosion occurred around 8:50 a.m. on June 24 as a mixture of fuel and water was being transferred from a truck to a storage tank at the Enviro-Tank facility. The Ohio State Fire Marshal’s Office has said the explosion was caused by the ignition of excessive gasoline vapor in the storage tank area.
“We closed our investigation there last week, and it was ruled an accidental incident,” said Lindsey Burnworth, information officer for the fire marshal’s office.
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Since we’re talking about fences…
On 13 June 2013, the Supreme Court Of The United States created a no-protesters buffer zone in front of their court.
Seems to me, and to Jen Sorensen, that what is good for the goose is good for the gander and protesters should quickly fill the previously off-limits plaza with citizens carrying placards–among others of course–thanking the five justices for affirming their right to protest in front of the court.
Civil libertarians saw their hopes for curtailing the National Security Agency’s massive digital surveillance program dimmed in the wake of a report from a US government privacy board vindicating much of the international communications dragnet.
The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board voted Wednesday to adopt a 200-page report on the NSA’s so-called “702” powers, which include the widespread collection of foreign email, voice and text messages and Americans’ international calls.
While PCLOB chairman David Medine said those efforts walked “right up to the line of constitutionality,” the report largely vindicated the controversial surveillance, the scope of which was disclosed through reporting on documents provided by Edward Snowden, as both effective and legal.
Elisebeth Collins Cook, one of five board members and a Justice Department official in the Bush administration, hailed the digital surveillance as “legal, valuable and subject to intense oversight,” and characterized the PCLOB’s recommendations as “relatively slight changes at the margins of the program.”
In ways both bold and subtle, the long-awaited report blessed the NSA’s large-scale collection of digital data, even as it found elements of it problematic.
The PCLOB denied that the 702 siphoning is bulk collection, even though it annually provides the NSA with “hundreds of millions” of different sorts of communications — blessing an NSA definition that considers only indiscriminate collection, untethered to surveillance targets, to be bulk.
“It’s a big program, but it is a targeted program,” Medine said after the sparsely-attended Wednesday hearing, which was held in the basement of a Marriott between Congress and the White House.
Civil libertarians castigated the PCLOB over what they consider a counterintuitive definition.
Spencer Ackerman writing in NSA reformers dismayed after privacy board vindicates surveillance dragnet
The quote in this story that quickly focused my mind was Chairman Medine’s statement that the collection of everyone’s data in the United states walked: right up to the line of constitutionality.
In Judaism there is a principle regarding the 613 commandments. Rigidly observant Jews hold that the commandments are so sacred that one ought not to push the envelope and generations of rabbis have erected gezeirah, what they call a fence around the Torah.
For example, the Torah commands us not to work on Shabbat, but a gezeirah commands us not to even handle an implement that you would use to perform prohibited work (such as a pencil, money, a hammer), because someone holding the implement might forget that it was Shabbat and perform prohibited work.
When we discuss our Constitution and our rights and obligations as citizens therein, I think walking right up to the line is a very dangerous principle for our nation.
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