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Government may withhold detainee photos

The Supreme Court has sided with the government in the matter of publicizing photos of detainees being abused.

The Supreme Court has thrown out an appeals court ruling ordering the disclosure of photographs of detainees being abused by their U.S. captors.

In doing so Monday, the high court cited a recent change in federal law that allows the pictures to be withheld.  The justices issued a brief, and expected, order Monday directing the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York to take another look at a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union to obtain the photos of detainee abuse. ...NYT

This particular decision -- withholding these particular photographs -- doesn't trouble this citizen.  What does, however, is having to face the fact that we are dealing with an institutionalist court and an institutionalist president.  I may be wrong, but I believe many Americans who are uneasy about the corporatization of America are no less troubled by the institutionalization of at least two branches of government.  Consistently defending the rights of the institution over the rights of the individual in a democracy is problematical. 

Reality TV eviscerated

Way overdue.  The steaming crud that passes as high-ratings television is snicker-snacked by James Wolcott in the latest Vanity Fair. 

In short (with comments):

Reality TV has lowered network property values. ...The mega-dosage of reality programming has lowered the lowest common denominator to pre-literacy.

(Noticeably.)

Reality TV has annihilated the classic documentary. ...They’re extinct, relics of the prehistoric past, back when television pretended to espouse civic ideals.

(I bet most viewers of "reality" TV believe "espouse" is a dirty word.)

Reality TV wages class warfare and promotes proletarian exploitation. ...The migrant camera fodder is often kept isolated, sleep-deprived, and alcoholically louche to render the subjects edgy and pliant and susceptible to fits.

(Does hate crimes legislation apply here?)

Reality TV has debased the time-honored art of bad acting. ...Eye-rollings. Dirty looks. Stick-figure Tinkertoy gestures. Incensed-mama head-waggings. Jaws dropped like drawbridges to convey stunned indignation.

(Psst! Remind you of George W. Bush's press secretaries?)

Emotionally, Reality TV is emaciated, envy and spite being the alternating currents. ...Nearly everyone conforms to crude, cartoon stereotype (bitch, gold digger, flamboyant gay, recovering addict, sofa spud, anal perfectionist, rageaholic)...

(Watched by whole populations of bloated sofa spuds, flag-huggers, wage-slaves, trailer trash, members of Congress, elitists, environmentalists, and evangelicals.  By choice.)

Reality TV encourages and rewards vulgar, selfish, antisocial, pissy-pants behavior.

(Sure.  But you're talking about "conservative" viewers.  Humorous, generous, friendly Independents and Democrats also watch, remember.)

Reality TV gives voyeurism a dirty name. 

(And Vanity Fair doesn't?)

Top o' the news

Kiss Afghanistan and say goodbye?  Not quite. But President Obama wants to make it clear that we're outta there ...eventually ... while letting Pakistan know that we're not "abandoning the region."

"It’s accurate to say that he will be more explicit about both goals and time frame than has been the case before and than has been part of the public discussion,” said a senior official, who requested anonymity to discuss the speech before it is delivered. “He wants to give a clear sense of both the time frame for action and how the war will eventually wind down.” 

The officials would not disclose the time frame. But they said it would not be tied to particular conditions on the ground nor would it be as firm as the current schedule for withdrawing troops in Iraq, where Mr. Obama has committed to withdrawing most combat units by August and all forces by the end of 2011. ...NYT 

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More jobs.  That is, in addition to the 30,000+/- in Afghanistan.  Paul Krugman notes that we're at the highest levels of unemployment we've seen since the 1930's and lays out a design to restore employment levels.

Now that total financial collapse has been averted, all the urgency seems to have vanished from policy discussion, replaced by a strange passivity. There’s a pervasive sense in Washington that nothing more can or should be done, that we should just wait for the economic recovery to trickle down to workers. This is wrong and unacceptable. Yes, the recession is probably over in a technical sense, but that doesn’t mean that full employment is just around the corner. ...

Failure to act on unemployment isn’t just cruel, it’s short-sighted.So it’s time for an emergency jobs program.

Any measures taken, says Krugman, should be direct measures rather than an indirect stimulus like a tax cut.  No more trickle-down:  no more of that "Reagan pees, we catch the drops" approach.

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Pakistan is the real concern.  (Don't pay attention to what Obama says.  Watch what he does.)

Despite the public and political attention focused on the number of new troops, Pakistan has been the hot core of the months-long strategy review. The long-term consequences of failure there, the review concluded, far outweigh those in Afghanistan.

"We can't succeed without Pakistan," a senior administration official involved in the White House review said. "You have to differentiate between public statements and reality. There is nobody who is under any illusions about this." ...WaPo

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New (old) controls on Wall Street?  Many of us would like to see controls that work and can be sustained -- no matter how off-beat they may seem. 

Sen. Maria Cantwell wants to use state gambling laws to regulate parts of Wall Street, saying someone needs to police financial markets where "casino capitalism" involving highly speculative trades she likens to sophisticated betting continue unabated and threaten to create yet another financial crisis. "She's going for their jugular," Michael Greenberger, a University of Maryland law professor, said of the effort by Cantwell, a Washington state Democrat. ...Cantwell wants to repeal parts of a 2000 law that barred states from using their gambling laws to help rein in the nearly $600 trillion derivatives market. ...McClatchy

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Harry Reid is feeling more pressure from the left.  Even as he's trying to keep right side of his party in line on health care reform, unions are pressuring him from the left.

According to union officials, the bill’s employer mandate needs to be expanded to include all employers. Further, they are lobbying for the elimination of an excise tax on high-cost insurance plans, known as “Cadillac” plans. Finally, labor’s support of a robust government-run insurance plan, the “public option,” puts the Senate leader in tough spot considering centrist senators either want to jettison the plan or find a weaker compromise before voting for the bill. ...The Hill

Leak? No, a tsunami of yottabytes.

Wikileaks has opened up for us every communication that took place on 9/11.  No, really.  And indexed them, it seems.  You can check out a selection at Boing-Boing.  Here's an excerpt:

The data includes pager messages sent by officials from the NYPD and the Pentagon, as well as citizens who witnessed the collapse of the twin towers. As I scroll through the archives, though, what strikes me as most fascinating is the jumbled mix: plaintive, automated cries from printers who've gone offline, or servers begging for a reboot -- those pings are jammed up against urgent ALL-CAPS messages from wives asking their husbands to please call and let them know they're still alive. There are commands for officials to "meet in the situation room." And texts from disgruntled corporate employees, asking why their bosses don't just give them the day off already. There's not much fodder for conspiracy theorists, but there's a lot of random weirdness: 

2001-09-11 09:15:38 Arch [1376997] B ALPHA (27)Hey Honey! Can you bring some bagels when you get back? The pork chop is now crying about the World Trade Center plane crash. Geez! It is scray but no reason to cry. Talk to you later! I love you!

And personal messages like this, odd in the context of great tragedy: 

Good morning sexy man!! Got my zebra thongs on!!! Feeling a little animalistic!!!

Others make you stop and think -- did this person die moments later? Did this person narrowly escape death?

 2001-09-11 07:51:33 Skytel [002691994] C ALPHA TAKE YOUR TIME. I WILL NOT BE AT 1WTC UNTIL 9:30 A.M. THANKS, SHAWN

The mundane, the mechanical, the meta, all in one data dump.

Where, Boing-Boing asks, did all this stuff come from?

I think it may have leaked from the NSA, perhaps during the transfer of data from Fort Meade, where it ran out of space, to two new information centers.  One is in Utah and the other in San Antonio. 

Here's the new NSA, according to intelligence expert, James Bamford:

On a remote edge of Utah's dry and arid high desert, where temperatures often zoom past 100 degrees, hard-hatted construction workers with top-secret clearances are preparing to build what may become America's equivalent of Jorge Luis Borges's "Library of Babel," a place where the collection of information is both infinite and at the same time monstrous, where the entire world's knowledge is stored, but not a single word is understood. At a million square feet, the mammoth $2 billion structure will be one-third larger than the US Capitol and will use the same amount of energy as every house in Salt Lake City combined.

Unlike Borges's "labyrinth of letters," this library expects few visitors. It's being built by the ultra-secret National Security Agency—which is primarily responsible for "signals intelligence," the collection and analysis of various forms of communication—to house trillions of phone calls, e-mail messages, and data trails: Web searches, parking receipts, bookstore visits, and other digital "pocket litter." Lacking adequate space and power at its city-sized Fort Meade, Maryland, headquarters, the NSA is also completing work on another data archive, this one in San Antonio, Texas, which will be nearly the size of the Alamodome.

Just how much information will be stored in these windowless cybertemples? A clue comes from a recent report prepared by the MITRE Corporation, a Pentagon think tank. "As the sensors associated with the various surveillance missions improve," says the report, referring to a variety of technical collection methods, "the data volumes are increasing with a projection that sensor data volume could potentially increase to the level of Yottabytes (10²⁴ Bytes) by 2015."^[1] Roughly equal to about a septillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text, numbers beyond Yottabytes haven't yet been named. Once vacuumed up and stored in these near-infinite "libraries," the data are then analyzed by powerful infoweapons, supercomputers running complex algorithmic programs, to determine who among us may be—or may one day become—a terrorist. In the NSA's world of automated surveillance on steroids, every bit has a history and every keystroke tells a story.

Honestly, now:  which part of this do you find more bizarro?  The news from Wikileaks and Boing-Boing?  Or Bamford's description of NSA's new plants?  Which makes you sleep better at night?

Did Christian "prosperity gospel" cause the financial collapse?

Don't be silly!  Of course not!

It was responsible for only some of the worst of it.

Demographically, the growth of the prosperity gospel tracks fairly closely to the pattern of foreclosure hot spots. Both spread in two particular kinds of communities—the exurban middle class and the urban poor. Many newer prosperity churches popped up around fringe suburban developments built in the 1990s and 2000s, says Walton. These are precisely the kinds of neighborhoods that have been decimated by foreclosures, according to Eric Halperin, of the Center for Responsible Lending.

Zooming out a bit, Kate Bowler found that most new prosperity-gospel churches were built along the Sun Belt, particularly in California, Florida, and Arizona—all areas that were hard-hit by the mortgage crisis. Bowler, who, like Walton, was researching a book, spent a lot of time attending the “financial empowerment” seminars that are common at prosperity churches. Advisers would pay lip service to “sound financial practices,” she recalls, but overall they would send the opposite message: posters advertising the seminars featured big houses in the background, and the parking spots closest to the church were reserved for luxury cars. ... Hanna Rosin, Atlantic

The obesity states

Even as you mourn the post-Thanksgiving puffiness, obesity trackers show that where you live may have something to do with whether you're fat or thin. 

Take Colorado, for example:  thin people, low incidence of heart disease, cerebrovascular disease, smoking, and a high sense of well-being.  Other markers of a state's health include more immigrants, artists, and gays.

If you live in Kentucky, don't continue to read this.  Make your Final Arrangements now.

Common sense would suggest that more affluent people would have lower levels of obesity and poorer ones higher, and we find such an association. Obesity is correlated with income levels (-.6) and more moderately so with economic output, measured as gross state product per capita (-.4).

One would think that states with greater concentrations of more highly educated people have lower levels of obesity, and that is what we find. States with higher levels of human capital, measured as the percentage of adults with a college degree, have lower levels of obesity (the correlation being -.8).

To what extent does obesity reflect the kind of work people do? We examine the relationships between obesity and three classes of jobs - creative/professional/knowledge jobs, blue-collar working class jobs, and standardized service class jobs like those in food processing and home health care. Obesity is strongly associated with the share of working class jobs (with a correlation of .7). Obesity is negatively correlated with the share of creative class jobs (-.6). Obesity is also negatively correlated with the share of service class jobs (-.4), though more moderately so.

Obesity is lower in states with higher concentrations of artists, musicians, and entertainers (with a correlation of-.6), those with larger concentrations of gays and lesbians (-.5), and immigrants (-.5). This likely reflects broader structural characteristics of those states, as more highly educated states also tend to be more tolerant and open to diversity.

Update:  Another big plus for Colorado.  According to NPR (11/30/09), Colorado has just passed a law outlawing texting while driving.  That should lower the state's death rate a bunch.