December 4, 2013 archive

New! Improved!

Democrat-Friendly! New and Improved Caricature of Barack Obama

“Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel.” – Mark Twain

Ruben Bolling

I believe that any site or publication has the right to refuse to publish any cartoonist or writer that they don’t want in thier pages.  And Daily Kos is a great site that has done a world of good not only in American politics, but also for my small world of alternative cartooning, and for me.  But to refuse publication specifically on these unwarranted grounds at the very least requires my vocal objection.  I’m standing up to say that I believe that Ted’s depiction of Barack Obama is no way racist.

The MMT Coloring Book

(h/t Stephanie Kelton @ New Economic Perspectives)

Cartnoon

On This Day In History December 4

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

December 4 is the 338th day of the year (339th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 27 days remaining until the end of the year

On this day in 1783, future President George Washington, then commanding general of the Continental Army, summons his military officers to Fraunces Tavern in New York City to inform them that he will be resigning his commission and returning to civilian life.

Washington had led the army through six long years of war against the British before the American forces finally prevailed at the Battle of Yorktown in 1781. There, Washington received the formal surrender of British General Lord Charles Cornwallis, effectively ending the Revolutionary War, although it took almost two more years to conclude a peace treaty and slightly longer for all British troops to leave New York.

Fraunces Tavern is a tavern, restaurant and museum housed in a conjectural reconstruction of a building that played a prominent role in pre-Revolution and Revolution history. The building, located at 54 Pearl Street at the corner of Broad Street, has been owned by Sons of the Revolution in the State of New York Inc. since 1904, which claims it is Manhattan’s oldest surviving building. The building is a tourist site and a part of the American Whiskey Trail and the New York Freedom Trail.

Revolution history

In August 1775, Americans took possession of cannons from the artillery battery at the southern point of Manhattan and fired on the HMS Asia. The British ship retaliated by firing a 32-gun broadside on the city, sending a cannonball through the roof of the building.

When the war was all but won, the building was the site of “British-American Board of Inquiry” meetings, which negotiated to ensure to American leaders that no “American property” (meaning former slaves who were emancipated by the British for their military service) be allowed to leave with British troops. Board members reviewed the evidence and testimonies that were given by freed slaves every Wednesday from April to November 1783, and British representatives were successful in ensuring that almost all of the loyalist blacks of New York maintained their liberty.

After British troops evacuated New York, the tavern hosted an elaborate “turtle feast” dinner on December 4, 1783 in the building’s Long Room for U.S. Gen. George Washington where he bade farewell to his officers of the Continental Army by saying “[w]ith a heart full of love and gratitude, I now take leave of you. I most devoutly wish that your latter days may be as prosperous and happy as your former ones have been glorious and honorable.”

The building housed some offices of the Confederation Congress as the nation struggled under the Articles of Confederation. With the establishment of the U.S. Constitution and the inauguration of Washington as president in 1789, the departments of Foreign Affairs, Treasury and War located offices at the building. The offices were vacated when the location of the U.S. capital moved on December 6, 1790 from New York to Philadelphia.

Late Night Karaoke


Competitive Advantage

Transcript

NSA Surveillance Fallout Costs IT Industry Billions

Mathew J. Schwartz, InformationWeek

11/27/2013 01:10 PM

Analysts predict US tech companies may lose $180 billion by 2016 due to international concerns about intelligence agencies’ spying.

For US technology firms that sell hardware, software, and services, that would be a collective loss of $22 billion to $35 billion through 2016 due to foreign businesses and governments worrying if the National Security Agency (NSA) can spy on those products or services. That figure comes via the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF), a Washington-based policy research group backed by many leading technology firms, including Cisco, Google, IBM, and Intel.

“The potential fallout is pretty huge given how much our economy depends on the information economy for its growth,” Rebecca MacKinnon, a senior fellow at Washington-based policy group New America Foundation, told Bloomberg. “It’s increasingly where the U.S. advantage lies.”



“If a foreign enemy was doing this much damage to the economy, people would be in the streets with pitchforks,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said last month at a Cato Institute conference, The Washington Times reported. Likewise, Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), who authored the Patriot Act, which the White House said authorizes the NSA’s digital dragnet, has accused the intelligence agency of overreaching. Some critics, however, have asked why Congressional oversight mechanisms failed to rein in the NSA’s surveillance programs.



Richard Salgado, Google’s director of law enforcement and information security, warned the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law that the NSA’s spying activities had caused governments in some countries — including Brazil and Norway — to rethink how they’ll procure cloud services or work with US firms. Brazil, for example, has introduced a bill that would require service providers such as Google to store all Brazilian data in the country or risk massive fines.

Salgado, in his testimony, said those types of efforts could undermine today’s Internet. “If data localization and other efforts are successful, then what we will face is the effective Balkanization of the Internet and the creation of a ‘splinternet’ broken up into smaller national and regional pieces with barriers around each of the splintered Internets to replace the global Internet we know today,” he said.

NSA: We Steal Industry Secrets, But Not for Competitive Advantage

by emptywheel

Posted on December 2, 2013

The NSA has uttered various versions of this claim since the Snowden leaks started. But I find this formulation particularly telling. NSA is not denying they steal industry secrets (nor could they, since we know they’ve stolen data from corporations like Petrobras and have stolen secrets from a range of hacking targets).

They’re just denying they steal secrets in order to give US companies a competitive advantage.

Of course, they’re not calculating the advantage that having the world’s most voracious COMINT spy might have for owners of IP. They’re not talking about how intelligence on opposition to US products (like GMO or untested chemicals) translates into industrial advantage. They’re not talking about how spying influences the work of Defense Contractors (who do, of course, also sell on the international market). They’re not talking about how larger financial spying ultimately gives American companies an advantage.

But so long as NSA’s workers can tell their mother-in-law they’re not facilitating US cheating (which they are), it’s all good, I guess.