The Breakfast Club (Spring)

I told you to expect something completely different.

You know, I really am a rebel and as pyrrho once said I rouse my own rabble.  Allow me to demonstrate by dispensing with the format.

The first thing is- why include a date?  All your posts are date stamped anyway, what’s the point?

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover  we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

I would never make fun of LaEscapee or blame PhilJD.  And I am highly organized.

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.

–Julius Caesar (I, ii, 140-141)

Perhaps you expected something newsy and grim from me.  Well, that’s not how I like to spend my Saturdays.  In fact I generally spend them resting up from the early morning cacaphony of sound that is Formula One Qualifying and refreshing my mind from the realities of another week of struggle.

Something I have mentioned before is that in my youth, before my DJ days, I was into long hair music.  No, not Twisted Sister- Mozart, Bach, and Brahms, which made my contemporaries instantly suspicious of me.  Good, they should have been, my Snape-like air of incipient menace is something I have carefully cultivated for many years.

What is hard for most people today to grasp is that these musicians were pop stars.  They think of them as dusty old relics. Let us talk then about ‘The Red Priest‘.

He was called that due to his red hair and the fact he was a priest.  The bulk of his work was written for Ospedale della Pietà an abandoned children’s home in Venice; though he had enourmous popularity in general for his Operas, a genre where he’s considered one of the major influences and wrote at least 40 of them (with all these composers periodically ‘missing’ pieces turn up of greater or lesser authenticity).

He was a violin prodigy a skill he learned from his father, a barber turned professional violinist and union organizer, and an instrument he was drawn to because of chronic ill health and breathing difficulties, so it’s not surprising that most of his compositions feature it including the one I wish to bring to your attention today.

The Four Seasons is a set of 4 concertos probably inspired by the scenery of Mantua where he worked for a time at the governor’s court.  They are actually part of a larger group of 12 concertos, Il cimento dell’armonia e dell’inventione (The Contest Between Harmony and Invention) published in 1725.

During his tenure in Mantua he struck up a relationship with Anna Tessieri Girò who was one of his favorite performers and while scholars speculate there’s no real proof that their collaboration was anything but professional and contemporary rumors were vehemently denied by Vivaldi himself.

Each concerto has 3 movements, a slow one between 2 faster ones.

Spring

The rest of The Seasons are below the fold.

Summer

Fall

Winter

This Day in History

News

Donald Rumsfeld Hasn’t Learned a Damn Thing

James G. Blight and Janet M. Lang, Politico Magazine

April 04, 2014

There is one supremely appropriate English-language term for the Rumsfeld who emerges in The Unknown Known-a term that has recently been imported into serious philosophical discussion, possibly for the first time, in an influential 2005 monograph by the Princeton philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt. The term is “bullshit,” and practitioners of this dark art are bullshit artists (or bullshitters). According to Frankfurt, “The bullshitter is neither on the side of the true or the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all … He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.” Regrettably, McNamara lied at times when he was in office. But he was not a bullshitter, not like Rumsfeld.

,,,

Morris reveals a black hole where facts, logic and a human connection ought to be. Rumsfeld appears equally comfortable asserting A and then listening to Morris read from documents that A is false and seemingly acknowledging that what the documents say also might be so.

…

Soon after becoming defense secretary in 2000, Rumsfeld circulated a list of “Rumsfeld’s Rules”-lessons from his already long career that (Samantha) Power writes were “not dissimilar from those Mr. Morris elicited from McNamara,” including “Don’t divide the world into ‘them’ and ‘us'” and “Try to make original mistakes, rather than needlessly repeating those of your predecessors].” Rumsfeld’s lessons, posted on the Pentagon website when he took office, were removed for unclear reasons shortly after the invasion of Iraq, though he has since repurposed them for a [book by the same name. Then, as now, his words ring hollow, disconnected from the world of pain and suffering to which the words point.

If, despite all the disincentives to do so, Rumsfeld decides to enter his own variant of historical boot camp, he should be advised: It won’t be pretty. It won’t be comfortable. It will begin with accusations and only with luck and a lot of effort will he begin to see that he has some responsibility for the killing and torture of other human beings.

Coast Guard Blames Shell Risk-Taking in Kulluk Rig Accident

By Marianne Lavelle, National Geographic

Published April 4, 2014

The Coast Guard concluded that Shell made an ill-advised decision to tow its drill rig away from the state, a 1,700-nautical-mile journey across the northern Gulf of Alaska in the final days of December 2012, in part to avoid millions of dollars in tax liability. Under state law, the tax would be assessed on January 1, 2013 if the vessel was still in Alaska waters, the Coast Guard report noted.

The Kulluk could not move under its own power, but had to be towed. The Coast Guard detailed the missteps aboard its tow ship, the Aiviq, and how its fuel tanks were improperly configured, leading to contamination, most likely by seawater. According to the Coast Guard report, the Aiviq tow master sent an email to the Kulluk tow master before the journey: “To be blunt I believe that this length of tow, at this time of year, in this location, with our current routing guarantees an ass kicking.”

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“This is an absolutely damning report by the Coast Guard,” said Alex Taurel, deputy legislative director of the League of Conservation Voters. “We can’t trust Shell or any other oil company to operate in such an environmentally challenging and sensitive area like the Arctic Ocean.”

Cindy Shogan, executive director of the Alaska Wilderness League, added, “The information revealed from the Coast Guard investigations just adds to what we already suspected about Shell and its mishaps and serious errors during its 2012 drilling program. Shell lied, Shell’s equipment failed, and Shell’s crew caused significant human error leading to the Kulluk running aground in 2012.”

The “Cuban Twitter” Scam Is a Drop in the Internet Propaganda Bucket

By Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept

4 Apr 2014, 6:15 PM EDT

According to top-secret documents published today by The Intercept, this sort of operation is frequently discussed at western intelligence agencies, which have plotted ways to covertly use social media for “propaganda,” “deception,” “mass messaging,” and “pushing stories.”

These ideas-discussions of how to exploit the internet, specifically social media, to surreptitiously disseminate viewpoints friendly to western interests and spread false or damaging information about targets-appear repeatedly throughout the archive of materials provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Documents prepared by NSA and its British counterpart GCHQ-and previously published by The Intercept as well as some by NBC News – detailed several of those programs, including a unit devoted in part to “discrediting” the agency’s enemies with false information spread online.

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One of the programs described by the newly released GCHQ document is dubbed “Royal Concierge,” under which the British agency intercepts email confirmations of hotel reservations to enable it to subject hotel guests to electronic monitoring. It also contemplates how to “influence the hotel choice” of travelers and to determine whether they stay at “SIGINT friendly” hotels. The document asks: “Can we influence the hotel choice? Can we cancel their visit?”

Previously, der Spiegel and NBC News both independently confirmed that the “Royal Concierge” program has been implemented and extensively used. The German magazine reported that “for more than three years, GCHQ has had a system to automatically monitor hotel bookings of at least 350 upscale hotels around the world in order to target, search, and analyze reservations to detect diplomats and government officials.” NBC reported that “the intelligence agency uses the information to spy on human targets through ‘close access technical operations,’ which can include listening in on telephone calls and tapping hotel computers as well as sending intelligence officers to observe the targets in person at the hotels.”

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(The GCHQ document also describes a practice called “credential harvesting,” which NBC described as an effort to “select journalists who could be used to spread information” that the government wants distributed. According to the NBC report, GCHQ agents would employ “electronic snooping to identify non-British journalists who would then be manipulated to feed information to the target of a covert campaign.” Then, “the journalist’s job would provide access to the targeted individual, perhaps for an interview.” Anonymous sources that NBC didn’t characterize claimed at the time that GCHQ had not employed the technique.)

Whether governments should be in the business of publicly disseminating political propaganda at all is itself a controversial question. Such activities are restricted by law in many countries, including the U.S. In 2008, The New York Times’ David Barstow won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing a domestic effort coordinated by the Pentagon whereby retired U.S. generals posed as “independent analysts” employed by American television networks and cable news outlets as they secretly coordinated their messaging with the Pentagon.

Because American law bars the government from employing political propaganda domestically, that program was likely illegal, though no legal accountability was ever brought to bear (despite all sorts of calls for formal investigations). Barack Obama, a presidential candidate at the time, pronounced himself in a campaign press release “deeply disturbed” by the Pentagon program, which he said “sought to manipulate the public’s trust.”

Conspiracy Theories

CASS R. SUNSTEIN and ADRIAN VERMEULE

1/15/08

Of course some conspiracy theories, under our definition, have turned out to be true. The Watergate hotel room used by Democratic National Committee was, in fact,  bugged by Republican officials, operating at the behest of the White House. In the 1950s, the Central Intelligence Agency did, in fact, administer LSD and related drugs under Project MKULTRA, in an effort to investigate the possibility of “mind control.” Operation Northwoods, a rumored plan by the Department of Defense to simulate acts of terrorism and to blame them on Cuba, really was proposed by high-level officials (though the plan never went into effect). In 1947, space aliens did, in fact, land in Roswell, New Mexico, and the government covered it all up. (Well, maybe not.)

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A recent newspaper story recounts that Arabic-speaking Muslim officials from the State Department have participated in dialogues at radical Islamist chat rooms and websites in order to ventilate arguments not usually heard among the groups that cluster around those sites, with some success. In another variant, government officials would participate anonymously or even with false identities. Each approach has distinct costs and benefits; the second is riskier but  potentially brings higher returns. In the former case, where government officials  participate openly as such, hard-core members of the relevant networks, communities and conspiracy-minded organizations may entirely discount what the officials say, right from the beginning. The risk with tactics of anonymous participation, conversely, is that if the tactic becomes known, any true member of the relevant groups who raises doubts may be suspected of government connections.

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In 2004, the U.S. government set up a broadcast network for the Middle East – Al-Hurrah, “the Free One” – that puts out news and third-party opinion. In May 2007, a House subcommittee called a hearing to investigate reports that Al-Hurrah had broadcast “terrorist” content, including “a 68-minute call to arms against Israelis by a senior figure of the terrorist group Hezbollah; [and] deferential coverage of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust denial conference . . . “. Legislators sharply questioned officials of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, the government corporation that ultimately funds Al-Hurrah, and those officials had to promise to address the legislators’ concerns. Those problems, however, were part and parcel of a broader strategy for enhancing credibility by permitting other viewpoints and voices on the air. In general, in order to enhance its credibility with antecedently skeptical Muslim audiences, the U.S. government must go a long way towards surrendering control over the content of its speech (or must speak anonymously, a strategy that carries its own risks, as we mention next). However, as this episode reveals, domestic political constraints may preclude whatever mix of credibility and control is optimal from the standpoint of dampening conspiracy theories or promoting U.S. public relations goals more generally.

The alternative to surrendering control over the content of the government’s responses, in order to enhance credibility, is for government officials or agents to speak anonymously. A mini-scandal erupted in 2006 when U.S. newspapers revealed that the Lincoln Group, an independent contractor of “influence services,” had paid Iraqi newspapers to publish hundreds of “news stories” written by U.S. military personnel but not identified as such, most of which portrayed events in Iraq in cheery terms or rebutted circulating conspiracy theories. The stories were factually true, but selective. As against the obvious moral objections to this practice, the Lincoln Group argued that speech identified as stemming from U.S. sources would, even if true, credible and important, be utterly discounted by the Iraqi audience, leaving the field entirely to conspiratorial and hostile rumors. On this view the implicit lie of planting “news” stories not identified to their true sources is necessary, in a deliberative environment that is already warped, to the goal of putting all relevant information before a quasi-rational audience. Where the marketplace of ideas is already malfunctioning, in the sense that relevant audiences discount to zero statements that should carry positive weight, practices  

that would not be permissible in a well-developed liberal state might be permissible on second-best grounds.

U.S. Eyes Afghan Vote, Seeking Amenable Ally

By ERIC SCHMITT, The New York Times

APRIL 4, 2014

Current and former administration officials, however, say that ensuring a stable Afghanistan remains important, not just to validate the 1,800 American lives lost and billions of dollars spent over the past 13 years, but to avoid complicating the United States’ larger strategic interests in the region: a stable nuclear-armed Pakistan, improved relations between Pakistan and India, and responding to the growing fear among Central Asian nations about an emboldened Russia.

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The top priority for the administration once Mr. Karzai’s successor is selected is to sign a security deal that would allow American troops to stay past 2014. The leading candidates for president – former Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah, former Foreign Minister Zalmay Rassoul, and Ashraf Ghani, a former official at the World Bank – have all promised to sign the deal if elected.

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The risk that Mr. Obama may be forced to pull all American troops out of Afghanistan by the end of the year if no agreement is reached has set off concerns inside American intelligence agencies that they could lose air bases used for drone strikes against Al Qaeda in Pakistan and for responding to a potential nuclear crisis in the region.

The Wolf Hunters of Wall Street

By MICHAEL LEWIS, The New York Times Magazine

MARCH 31, 2014

The first visit Katsuyama and Park made was to Mike Gitlin, who oversaw global trading for billions of dollars in assets for the money-management firm T. Rowe Price. The story they told didn’t come to Gitlin as a complete shock. “You could see that something had just changed,” Gitlin says. “You could see that when you were trading a stock, the market knew what you were going to do, and it was going to move against you.” But what Katsuyama described was a far more detailed picture of the market than Gitlin had ever considered – and in that market, all the incentives were screwy. The Wall Street brokerage firm that was deciding where to send T. Rowe Price’s buy and sell orders had a great deal of power over how and where those orders were submitted. Some exchanges paid brokerages for their orders; others charged for those orders. Did that influence where the broker decided to send an order, even when it didn’t sync with the interests of the investors the broker was supposed to represent? No one could say. Another wacky incentive was “payment for order flow.” As of 2010, every American brokerage and all the online brokers effectively auctioned their customers’ stock-market orders. The online broker TD Ameritrade, for example, was paid hundreds of millions of dollars each year to send its orders to a hedge fund called Citadel, which executed the orders on behalf of TD Ameritrade. Why was Citadel willing to pay so much to see the flow? No one could say with certainty what Citadel’s advantage was.

Katsuyama and his team did measure how much more cheaply they bought stock when they removed the ability of some other unknown trader to front-run them. For instance, they bought 10 million shares of Citigroup, then trading at roughly $4 per share, and saved $29,000 – or less than 0.1 percent of the total price. “That was the invisible tax,” Park says. It sounded small until you realized that the average daily volume in the U.S. stock market was $225 billion. The same tax rate applied to that sum came to nearly $160 million a day. “It was so insidious because you couldn’t see it,” Katsuyama says. “It happens on such a granular level that even if you tried to line it up and figure it out, you wouldn’t be able to do it. People are getting screwed because they can’t imagine a microsecond.”

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In the fall of 2009, Katsuyama’s friend at Deutsche Bank mentioned this Irish guy who seemed to be the world’s expert at helping the world’s fastest stock-market traders be faster. Katsuyama called Ronan Ryan and invited him to interview for a job on the RBC trading floor. In his interview, Ryan described what he witnessed inside the exchanges: The frantic competition for nanoseconds, clients’ trying to get their machines closer to the servers within the exchanges, the tens of millions being spent by high-frequency traders for tiny increments of speed. The U.S. stock market was now a class system of haves and have-nots, only what was had was not money but speed (which led to money). The haves paid for nanoseconds; the have-nots had no idea that a nanosecond had value. The haves enjoyed a perfect view of the market; the have-nots never saw the market at all. “I learned more from talking to him in an hour than I learned from six months of reading about [high-frequency trading],” Katsuyama says. “The second I met him, I wanted to hire him.”

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Eventually Brad Katsuyama came to realize that the most sophisticated investors didn’t know what was going on in their own market. Not the big mutual funds, Fidelity and Vanguard. Not the big money-management firms like T. Rowe Price and Capital Group. Not even the most sophisticated hedge funds. The legendary investor David Einhorn, for instance, was shocked; so was Dan Loeb, another prominent hedge-fund manager. Bill Ackman runs a famous hedge fund, Pershing Square, that often buys large chunks of companies. In the two years before Katsuyama turned up in his office to explain what was happening, Ackman had started to suspect that people might be using the information about his trades to trade ahead of him. “I felt that there was a leak every time,” Ackman says. “I thought maybe it was the prime broker. It wasn’t the kind of leak that I thought.” A salesman at RBC who marketed Thor recalls one big investor calling to say, “You know, I thought I knew what I did for a living, but apparently not, because I had no idea this was going on.”

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The deep problem with the system was a kind of moral inertia. So long as it served the narrow self-interests of everyone inside it, no one on the inside would ever seek to change it, no matter how corrupt or sinister it became – though even to use words like “corrupt” and “sinister” made serious people uncomfortable, so Katsuyama avoided them. Maybe his biggest concern, when he spoke to investors, was that he’d be seen as just another nut with a conspiracy theory. One compliment that made him happiest was when a big investor said, “Thank God, finally there’s someone who knows something about high-frequency trading who isn’t an Area 51 guy.” It took him a while to figure out that fate and circumstance had created for him a dramatic role, which he was obliged to play. One night he turned to his wife, Ashley, and said: “It feels like I’m an expert in something that badly needs to be changed. I think there’s only a few people in the world who can do anything about this. If I don’t do something right now – me, Brad Katsuyama – there’s no one to call.

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As they worked through the order types, the Puzzle Masters created a taxonomy of predatory behavior in the stock market. Broadly speaking, it appeared as if there were three activities that led to a vast amount of grotesquely unfair trading. The first they called electronic front-running – seeing an investor trying to do something in one place and racing ahead of him to the next (what had happened to Katsuyama when he traded at RBC). The second they called rebate arbitrage – using the new complexity to game the seizing of whatever legal kickbacks, called rebates within the industry, the exchange offered without actually providing the liquidity that the rebate was presumably meant to entice. The third, and probably by far the most widespread, they called slow-market arbitrage. This occurred when a high-frequency trader was able to see the price of a stock change on one exchange and pick off orders sitting on other exchanges before those exchanges were able to react. This happened all day, every day, and very likely generated more billions of dollars a year than the other strategies combined.

All three predatory strategies depended on speed. It was Katsuyama who had the crude first idea to counter them: Everyone was fighting to get in as close to the exchange as possible – why not push them as far away as possible? Put ourselves at a distance, but don’t let anyone else be there. The idea was to locate their exchange’s matching engine at some meaningful distance from the place traders connected to the exchange (called the point of presence) and to require anyone who wanted to trade to connect to the exchange at that point of presence. If you placed every participant in the market far enough away from the exchange, you could eliminate most, and maybe all, of the advantages created by speed. Their matching engine, they already knew, would be located in Weehawken (where they’d been offered cheap space in a data center). The only question was: Where to put the point of presence? “Let’s put it in Nebraska,” someone said, but they all knew it would be harder to get the already reluctant Wall Street banks to connect to their market if the banks had to send people to Omaha to do it. Actually, though, it wasn’t necessary for anyone to move to Nebraska. The delay needed only to be long enough for their new exchange, once it executed some part of a customer’s buy order, to beat high-frequency traders in a race to the shares at any other exchange – that is, to prevent electronic front-running. The necessary delay turned out to be 320 microseconds; that was the time it took them, in the worst case, to send a signal to the exchange farthest from them, the New York Stock Exchange in Mahwah. Just to be sure, they rounded it up to 350 microseconds.

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But the big Wall Street banks that controlled a majority of all stock-market investor orders played a more complicated role than an online broker like TD Ameritrade. The Wall Street banks controlled not only the orders, and the informational value of those orders, but also dark pools in which those orders might be executed. The banks took different approaches to milking the value of their customers’ orders. All of them tended to send the orders first to their own dark pools before routing them out to the wider market. Inside the dark pool, the bank could trade against the orders itself; or it could sell special access to the dark pool to high-frequency traders. Either way, the value of the customers’ orders was monetized – by the big Wall Street bank for the big Wall Street bank. If the bank was unable to execute an order in its own dark pool, the bank could direct that order first to the exchange that paid the biggest rebate for it.

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The stock market really was rigged. Katsuyama often wondered how enterprising politicians and plaintiffs’ lawyers and state attorneys general would respond to that realization. (This March, the New York attorney general, Eric Schneiderman, announced a new investigation of the stock exchanges and the dark pools, and their relationships with high-frequency traders. Not long after, the president of Goldman Sachs, Gary Cohn, published an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, saying that Goldman wanted nothing to do with the bad things happening in the stock market.) The thought of going after those who profited didn’t give Katsuyama all that much pleasure. He just wanted to fix the problem. At some level, he still didn’t understand why some Wall Street banks needed to make his task so difficult.

Technology had collided with Wall Street in a peculiar way. It had been used to increase efficiency. But it had also been used to introduce a peculiar sort of market inefficiency. Taking advantage of loopholes in some well-meaning regulation introduced in the mid-2000s, some large amount of what Wall Street had been doing with technology was simply so someone inside the financial markets would know something that the outside world did not. The same system that once gave us subprime-mortgage collateralized debt obligations no investor could possibly truly understand now gave us stock-market trades involving fractions of a penny that occurred at unsafe speeds using order types that no investor could possibly truly understand. That is why Brad Katsuyama’s desire to explain things so that others would understand was so seditious. He attacked the newly automated financial system at its core, where the money was made from its incomprehensibility.

Japan’s biggest online retailer, Rakuten, ends whale meat sales

Justin McCurry, The Guardian

Friday 4 April 2014 00.38 EDT

Monday’s ICJ ruling, in support of a four-year legal campaign by the Australian government, this week prompted Japanese authorities to call off next winter’s whale hunt in the Antarctic.

It is the first time the Antarctic hunt, during which harpoon vessels target almost 1,000 mainly minke whales, has been cancelled in more than a quarter of a century.

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(A) majority of judges at the UN court agreed with Australian claims that Japan had failed to demonstrate that the slaughter was of any scientific value.

Until recently Rakuten’s website carried more than 28,000 advertisements for elephant ivory and 1,200 for whale products, according to the EIA and the Humane Society International.

Must Read Blog Posts

Deflation Dementia

by William Black, New Economic Perspectives

Posted on April 1, 2014

There must be some café in Brussels where all the most inept U.S. financial journalists meet with the troika-trolls to get their take on eurozone deflation.

Dr. Draghi Prescribes a Dose of Deflation for Spain as his latest Quack Cure

by William Black, New Economic Perspectives

Posted on April 1, 2014

I posted an article earlier today on the demented memes about eurozone deflation U.S. financial journalists parrot after talking to Brussels’ troika-trolls.  That article used the latest AP story to illustrate my points.

I promised a second installment that used a New York Times article (not sourced to AP) that was posted last night to illustrate the meme.  The NYT article is simultaneously more complex and more alarmingly analytically awful than the AP piece.

The New York Time’s Disgraceful Reporting about Deflation

by William Black, New Economic Perpectives

Posted on April 2, 2014

To sum it up to this point, the troika-trolls spoon feed the U.S. journalists supposedly covering Europe’s disastrous response to the financial crisis a narrative in which everything a reader needs to know is systematically removed from the articles.

The First Real Russian Retaliation for American Sanctions

by Ian Welsh

2014 April 4

The US has, to use the phrase du jour, a great deal of “privilege” because the US dollar is the standard unit of trade, most significantly, trade in oil.  If you get frozen out of the dollar, you get frozen out of a large part of the world economy.  American sanctions can virtually destroy a country, as banks, even non-American banks, won’t do business with a country the Treasury department has forbidden doing business with.

Breaking that-moving to a multilateral world, or to a world where trading in Yuan is just as acceptable, goes a long way to breaking American power. In general, the Europeans will follow the US lead, so moving to the Euro provides no protection from America.  But moving to the Yuan and the Ruble, does.  Pricing large oil transaction in rubles also helps protect the Russian currency from large moves: if the ruble drops too much, people will go into it if you can buy oil in rubles, and the Russians are opening a futures operation as well, meaning traders can make that play, even if the US doesn’t like it.

Why Did 3 Top DOJ Officials Feed Their Dog DOJ’s Homework?

By emptywheel

Published April 4, 2014

DOJ has submitted what it claims is an explanation for why it materially misstated facts to Reggie Walton in discussions about destroying phone dragnet data. (See this post and this post for background.)

As you recall, Walton had read EFF’s emails closely enough to realize that EFF had asked Civil Division lawyers why they had claimed there was no protection order when they believed they had one.

The Evening Blues – 4-4-14

by joe shikspack, Daily Kos

This evening’s music features blues rock guitarist Jimi Hendrix.

A final note

Volume loud enough for you?  Since they went to blown sixes you really have to crank it up to 11 so you can hear the shoes squeak.  I have two blogs, The Stars Hollow Gazette and DocuDharma, that I reserve most of my energy for, the rest is mere diversionary tactics.  While I would never, ever poke fun at LaEscapee I’m convinced his latest is simply designed to thwart me and make my life more difficult than it already is.