The Breakfast Club 7-15-2014

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. Everyone’s welcome here, no special handshake required. Just check your meta at the door.

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.

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This Day in History

Breakfast News

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Tomgram: Engelhardt, The Age of Impunity

For America’s national security state, this is the age of impunity.  Nothing it does — torture, kidnapping, assassination, illegal surveillance, you name it — will ever be brought to court.  For none of its beyond-the-boundaries acts will anyone be held accountable.  The only crimes that can now be committed in official Washington are by those foolish enough to believe that a government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from this earth.  I’m speaking of the various whistleblowers and leakers who have had an urge to let Americans know what deeds and misdeeds their government is committing in their name but without their knowledge.  They continue to pay a price in accountability for their acts that should, by comparison, stun us all.

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Newly Obtained Emails Contradict Administration Claims on Guardian Laptop Destruction

On July 20, 2013, agents of the U.K. government entered The Guardian newsroom in London and compelled them to physically destroy the computers they were using to report on the Edward Snowden archive. The Guardian reported this a month later after my partner, David Miranda, was detained at Heathrow Airport for 11 hours under a British terrorism law and had all of his electronic equipment seized. At the time, the Obama administration-while admitting that it was told in advance of the Heathrow detention-pretended that it knew nothing about the forced laptop destruction and would never approve of such attacks on press freedom.

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But emails just obtained by Associated Press pursuant to a Freedom of Information Act request (FOIA) prove that senior Obama national security officials- including Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and then-NSA chief Keith Alexander-not only knew in advance that U.K. officials intended to force The Guardian to destroy their computers, but overtly celebrated it.

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The ultimate goal of the NSA is total population control

The NSA will soon be able to collect 966 exabytes a year, the total of internet traffic annually. Former Google head Eric Schmidt once argued that the entire amount of knowledge from the beginning of humankind until 2003 amount to only five exabytes.

Binney, who featured in a 2012 short film by Oscar-nominated US film-maker Laura Poitras, described a future where surveillance is ubiquitous and government intrusion unlimited.

“The ultimate goal of the NSA is total population control”, Binney said, “but I’m a little optimistic with some recent Supreme Court decisions, such as law enforcement mostly now needing a warrant before searching a smartphone.”

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40 Percent of Colleges Haven’t Investigated a Single Sexual Assault Case in 5 Years

According to the results of a national survey commissioned by Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) and the Senate Subcommittee on Financial and Contracting Oversight, nearly half the country’s four-year colleges haven’t conducted a single sexual assault investigation in the past five years. The survey was completed by 236 four year-institutions across the country-private and public, small and large-but in order to encourage candid reporting, the names of the schools surveyed were not released.

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Former UVa climate scientist awarded damages in FOIA case

It’s not the size of the penalty, it’s the principle behind it, but that principle depends on which side you’re on.

The state Supreme Court has ordered the nonprofit Energy & Environment Legal Institute to pay $250 in damages to former University of Virginia professor Michael Mann and the school following the institute’s failed legal bid to obtain Mann’s emails regarding climate change research.

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Must Read Blog Posts

Hellraisers Journal: U. M. W. of A. Withdraws Support for Southern Colorado Coalfield Strikers

by JayRaye

Sunday Train: Crutches vs Splints for the Highway Fund’s Broken Leg

by BruceMcF

Interact to see what 1,001 cities’ summers will be like by 2100.

by Climate Central

Photographer Shows Proof of Shocking Similarities In Human Templates Between Complete Strangers

by The Mind Unleashed

30 Abandoned Places that Look Truly Beautiful

by The Mind Unleashed

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The Daily Wiki

Perigee Moon

A supermoon is the coincidence of a full moon or a new moon with the closest approach the Moon makes to the Earth on its elliptical orbit, resulting in the largest apparent size of the lunar disk as seen from Earth. The technical name is the perigee-syzygy of the Earth-Moon-Sun system. The term “supermoon” is not astronomical, but originated in modern astrology.[1] The association of the Moon with both oceanic and crustal tides has led to claims that the supermoon phenomenon may be associated with increased risk of events such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, but the evidence of such a link is widely held to be unconvincing.[2]

The most recent occurrence was on July 12, 2014. The next and closest supermoon of 2014 will be on August 10.[3]

The opposite phenomenon, an apogee-syzygy, has been called a micromoon,[4] though this term is not as widespread as supermoon.

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Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac

Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. It is far better take things as they come along with patience and equanimity. ~Carl Jung

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Breakfast Tunes

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Stupid Shit by LaEscapee

I have Daughters

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1 comment

    • TMC on July 15, 2014 at 19:13

    Another stormy day ahead with more flash flood warnings. People forget that NYC is built mostly on islands and, in many areas is at or below sea level with poor drainage and inadequate storm sewers. Some areas still haven’t recovered from Sandy and many were damages again by the torrential rain we’ve been getting since this Spring.

    The sun keeps peeking out but I’m not fooled. At least I don’t have water the garden but I do need to get some errands done before the next round.

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