The Breakfast Club (What’s Opera Doc?)

I’m extremely happy that I’ve finally dismissed Wagner who was no more than a third rate hack with no talent except for shameless self promotion (hey, it takes one to know one), but he codified The 3 Rules of Opera in a way that led Chuck Jones to create the best cartoon of all time (I’d embed it, but it never stays up for long).

Sung by Elmer J. Fudd, Millionaire, who owns a mansion and a yacht, and Bugs Bunny (from Flatbush Brooklyn by most accounts though some say the Bronx or even shudder Poughkeepsie New Joisey), there are Three Acts and as I recall it goes a little something like this (Elmer in Italics, Bugs in Normal; Singing Centered, Spoken Left Justified)-

Be vewy quiet I’m hunting wabbitsWabbit tracks!!!Kill the wabbit, kill the wabbit, kill the wabbitKill the rabbit?Yo ho to oh! Yo ho to oh! Yo ho…O mighty warrior of great fighting stockMight I inquire to ask, eh, what’s up doc??I’m going to kill the wabbit!!Oh mighty hunter t’will be quite a taskHow will you do it, might I inquire to ask??I will do it with my spear and magic helmet!Your spear and magic helmet?Spear & magic helmet!Magic helmet?Magic helmet!(Dismissively) Magic helmetYes, magic helmet, and I’ll give you a sample

Stage direction: General Devastation

Bye

That was the wabbit!!!

Stage direction: Bugs Cross Dressed

Oh Brunhilda, you’re so wuvelyYes I know it I can’t help itOh Brunhilda be my wuveReturn my wuve a longing burns deep inside meReturn my love I want you always beside meWuve like ours must beMade for you and for me(Harmony) Return won’t you return my love for my love is yours

Stage direction: You tip your hat to this Teuton son and all them ears come out from underneath

I’ll kill the wabbit!Arise stormsNorth winds blow, south winds blowTyphoons, hurricanes, earthquakes, SMOG!Flash lightning strike the wabbitWhat have I done?? I’ve killed the wabbit…Poor little bunny, poor little wabbit…

Well what did you expect in an opera, a happy ending???

That HTML is more complicated than it looks.

Now you might suspect this is the introduction to some Wagnerian Opus and I’ve already said it will be a cold day in Muspelheim.  He represents everything bad and overblown about Romantic Art Music.  No, it’s simply to remind you of The 3 Rules of Opera which are-

1. It must be long, boring, and in an incomprehesible foreign language (even if that language is English).
2. The characters, especially the main ones, must be thoroughly unsympathetic and their activities horrid and callous.
3. Everyone must die, hopefully in an ironic and gruesome way.

Ballet is the same, but with more men in tights and without the superfluous singing.

Today’s subject is Lucia di Lammermoor, also Romantic but from a time when Wagner was a struggling nobody and Gaetano Donizetti was the last remaining “genius” of the Italian School after the death of Vincenzo Bellini and the retirement of Gioachino Rossini.

While the plot bears some similarity to a mashup of Romeo and Juliet and MacBeth it is in fact lifted from Sir Walter Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor.

Lucy Ashton’s (Lucia) family is feuding with the Ravenswoods.  She’s in love with Edgar Ravenswood (Edgardo) who is observed sneaking into the Castle by Norman (Normanno) who duly reports this to her brother Henry (Enrico) who is consumed with a deep and abiding hated of all things Ravenswood.

Lucy waits for Edgar by a fountain with her maid Lisa (Alisa) and tells her (or rather sings her because this is an Opera after all) that she has seen the ghost of a girl killed on the very same spot who was killed by a (now also dead) Ravenswood out of jealousy.  Lisa replies that this is an omen and Lucy really ought to ditch Edgar.  Edgar arrives and tells Lucy he must leave for France and that he hopes to convince Henry of his sincerity and marry before he goes.  Lucy says- ‘Are you nuts?’ and instead they exchange rings and pledge eternal love.

While Edgar is away, Henry arranges to marry Lucy off to Arthur (Arturo).  Worried she is still in love with Edgar (which is true), he shows her a forgery that ‘proves’ Edgar has forgotten her and is shacking up with someone else.  He leaves it to her old pastor Raymond (Raimondo) to make the argument that she should go through with this for the good of the family.

Arthur arrives to pick up his bride Lucy but she’s behaving, umm…, erraticly.  Edgar assures Arthur she’s just upset over the death of her Mom.  Arthur signs on the dotted line and Lucy follows reluctantly.  At that point Edgar shows up and Raymond steps in and shows Lucy’s signature on the contract.  He yells at her (well, sings, you know) and demands she return his ring and takes hers and tramples it on the floor.  At this point the bouncers show him the street.

Henry is still pissed and challenges Edgar to a duel.  He tells Edgar she is already doing it with Arthur and likes it very much thank you.  Edgar replies- ‘I’m going to kick your ass’.

Well, Lucy is not enjoying it and has killed Arthur.  Raymond comes in and tells everyone what she has done and proclaims her ‘Mad’.  Then Lucy shows up and cops an insanity defense, singing passionately of an imagined happy life with Edgar.  Henry enters and is at first enraged and then softens as he becomes convinced his sister truly is insane.  She collapses and Raymond blames Norman for the whole tragedy.

And now, dear reader, I’ll ask you to pause.

Is Lucy dead?

Mental Illness is a bad thing and very real, leading you to suicidal and homocidal impulses and self destructive behaviors, but it doesn’t generally strike you down like a brain aneurysm unless that’s what caused it.  There’s no reason to think Lucy’s actions anything but rational (if a bit psychotic) in today’s culture.  Sure juries find people like that guilty and pack them off to the pen or execute them all the time, but they’re not stricken down by the lightning bolts of Zeus or the Hand of God.  Keep that in mind as I tell you what happens next.

Edgar has resolved to die in order to kill Henry.  He hears of Lucy’s sudden breakdown and then instead of Henry, Raymond appears and tells him Lucy is dead.  Edgar stabs himself fatally so he can be reunited with Lucy in Heaven.

Hmm…, ironic and gruesome enough for you?

“Don’t stop, belie“.

Embedding disabled by request.  Told you things don’t stay up.

My personal theory is that Henry, still hating Edgar and the Ravenswoods as much as ever and unwilling to risk a duel with a kamikaze, sends Raymond out just to provoke the reaction he got.  Does he marry Lucy off to someone else?  Does he send her to a nunnery?  Does she commit suicide herself?  Henry is evil through and through and is not above doing anything to get what he wants.

At this point I don’t care either.  It’s been two and a half hours and my butt is sore and I gotta pee.

Sure Il dolce suono is considered one of the greatest arias ever and is a staple of every famous soprano you’ve ever heard of except for Tony, but it’s Scene 2 of the Third Act!

I suppose you can linger over dessert and get that second cup of coffee without guilt.  You won’t miss anything important.  Oh, and don’t bother sticking around for the last credit to roll in Age of Ultron either.  Once Thanos says he’ll do it himself it’s Third Grips and Craft Services until they close the curtains.

Obligatories, News and Blogs below.

Obligatories

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)

This Day in History

News

Vast Antarctic ice shelf a few years from disintegration, says Nasa

Reuters

Friday 15 May 2015 04.28 EDT

The last intact section of one of Antarctica’s mammoth ice shelves is weakening fast and will likely disintegrate completely in the next few years, contributing further to rising sea levels, according to a Nasa study released on Thursday.

The research focused on a remnant of the so-called Larsen B Ice Shelf, which has existed for at least 10,000 years but partially collapsed in 2002. What is left covers about 625 sq miles (1,600 sq km), about half the size of Rhode Island.

…

Once that happens, glaciers held in place by the ice shelf will slip into the ocean at a faster rate and contribute to rising sea levels, scientists say.

Canada reneges on emissions targets as tar sands production takes its toll

by Suzanne Goldenberg, The Guardian

Friday 15 May 2015 15.24 EDT

The environment minister, Leona Aglukkaq, who made the announcement in Winnipeg, said the new goals were in keeping with Canada’s economic conditions.

“This target is fair and ambitious, an ambitious commitment based on our national circumstances, which includes a growing population, a diversified growing economy and Canada’s position as a world leader in clean electricity generation,” Aglukkaq said.

…

Keith Stewart, climate campaigner for Greenpeace Canada, said the weak target made Canada an outlier in the international climate negotiations.

“The Harper government has not only ignored its existing reduction target, but the pro-tar sands policies it has adopted are taking us in the opposite direction,” he said.

…

Analysts said the lowball target was not unexpected. Over the last decade, Canada has dramatically expanded production from the tar sands, and Harper has lobbied hard in the international arena to open up new markets for tar sands crude.

It demands huge amounts of energy to dig the thick, gooey petroleum from the earth, a process that is up to 4.5 times as carbon intensive as conventional oil extraction.

Tar sands production hovered just below 2m barrels a day last year – and Harper has spoken of ramping up production to 5.5m barrels a day.

The expansion of tar sands production destroyed any prospect of Canada meeting its earlier target of a 17% emissions cut on 2005 levels by 2020, agreed by Harper in 2009. Current analysis suggests Canada will get only halfway to that goal.

The increased production has also overwhelmed efforts by other provinces to cut their carbon pollution.

Amin Asadollahi, the oil sands director of Canada’s Pembina Institute, noted that by 2020 Alberta would be responsible for 40% of the country’s carbon pollution because of the tar sands. The province accounts for about 12% of Canada’s population.

U.S. rushing new weapons to Iraq as Islamic State advances in Ramadi

By Mitchell Prothero, McClatchy

May 15, 2015

The Islamic State on Friday took control of the provincial government center of Ramadi, the capital of Iraq’s largest province, and appeared to be in control of most of the city in a major defeat for the Iraqi government.

Islamic State forces also appeared to be closing in on government positions in two other key locations in Anbar province, the towns of Baghdadi and Karmah, in a broad offensive that if successful would end the government presence in all of the province’s major population centers. The capture of Baghdadi also would cut the supply lines to the Iraqi garrison protecting the strategic Haditha Dam.

…

Security officials, while begging Baghdad commanders for immediate reinforcements, air support and help with evacuation, said they were moving as many of their routed troops and other civilians from pro-government tribes to a stadium on the outskirts of town in the hopes of evacuating them by air. The stadium, to the south of the city, was being protected by the Iraqi army’s elite Golden Brigade, one of the last combat-effective units available to the government in the area. But some residents from tribes not directly affiliated with the government said the soldiers were preventing many civilians from reaching the last safe haven because of fears that Islamic State militants were hiding among them.

Student who told Jeb Bush ‘Your brother created Isis’ speaks out about incident

by Alan Yuhas, The Guardian

Friday 15 May 2015 13.55 EDT

Ivy Ziedrich, a 19-year-old University of Nevada student, addressed the likely presidential candidate after he spoke at town hall event in Reno, telling him: “Your brother created Isis.”

…

“You stated that Isis was created because we don’t have enough presence and we’ve been pulling out of the Middle East,” Ziedrich said, shifting blame instead on to the consequences of George W Bush’s invasion of Iraq. “The threat of Isis was created by the Iraqi coalition authority, which ousted the entire government of Iraq.

“It was when 30,000 individuals who are part of the Iraqi military – they were forced out. They had no employment, they had no income, yet they were left with access to all the same arms and weapons. Your brother created Isis!”

Bush patted her on the arm and asked: “Is that a question?”

“You don’t need to be pedantic to me, sir,” Ziedrich shot back. “You could just answer my question.”

“Pedantic? Wow,” Bush replied, taken aback by the rebuke.

“When we sent young men to die for the idea of American exceptionalism,” Ziedrich asked, “why are you spouting nationalist rhetoric to get us involved in more wars?”

Amtrak crash: safety mechanism to slow speeding trains was close to operational

by Jessica Glenza, The Guardian

Friday 15 May 2015 14.54 EDT

Had an existing safety system been in use, however, the accident may have been prevented. On the Amtrak line between New York and Philadelphia, transponders already on tracks could have slowed the speeding locomotive, but the system was awaiting testing to use the private airwaves that would have made the technology operational, federal officials said.

The safety systems, called positive train control (PTC), were required on commuter and some commercial rail lines in 2008 by Congress in the Rail Safety Improvement Act. The law requires the systems to be implemented by the end of 2015.

Federal railway regulators say the technology uses digital airwaves and GPS to slow speeding trains on bends, preventing speed-related derailments. The technology can also prevent head-on collisions, and stop trains from speeding through work zones, rail regulators say.

In early March, the Federal Communications Commission had just finalized its approval a deal between the railroad and a private purveyor of digital frequencies to begin the safety devices. The deal was years in the making; Amtrak had been working to obtain the frequencies since 2011.

However, Amtrak, a publicly funded railroad run by a for-profit corporation, struggled to complete the safety project under its existing funding.

Congressional Republicans voted to further cut that funding Wednesday, just hours after the preventable accident killed eight people along the rail. No railroad has finished the safety upgrades to date, federal railway regulators said.

“Knowing many railroads were struggling both financially and technically to meet the deadline for PTC implementation at the end of this year, we have twice asked Congress for authority to better manage the deployment of this safety system as quickly and safely as possible,” said Kevin F Thompson, spokesperson for the Federal Railroad Administration in a statement emailed to the Guardian.

“Additionally, we have twice requested additional funding from Congress to help Amtrak and commuter railroads implement PTC. While we wait for Congress to act, we will continue to work with all of our stakeholders to ensure that railroads have PTC in use across the country as quickly as possible.”

On Wednesday, the House appropriations committee voted to cut Amtrak’s funding by more than $250m from the $1.4bn it invested last year in the publicly funded, for-profit rail.

This is why Americans can’t have nice trains

by Jordan Fraade, Al Jazeera

May 15, 2015 12:45PM ET

The remarkable thing about Tuesday night’s Amtrak crash isn’t that these things happen. It’s that they don’t happen more often.

…

From the beginning, Amtrak was set up to fail. For most of U.S. history, passenger rail had been provided by private companies. Then in 1970, Richard Nixon’s administration consolidated the various passenger train operators into a single national rail service to adapt to falling ridership. Either as an act of sabotage or short-sightedness, Amtrak was set up as a for-profit company receiving government subsidies rather than as a fully integrated part of the national transit infrastructure, and nobody expected Nixon’s measure to last for more than a few years. According to a recent profile of Amtrak in National Journal, “the tension between Amtrak’s for-profit mandate and money-losing reality has always dogged it. In 1997, Congress mandated that Amtrak become self-sufficient by 2002 or get liquidated. It didn’t, and it wasn’t.”

That’s not to say Amtrak isn’t always profitable. Some of its routes are. In particular, the Northeast Corridor, from Washington, D.C., to Boston, is indispensable. The line had a record 11.6 million passengers in 2014 and consistently pulls in profits in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The New York-D.C. portion of that route carries more than 70 percent of all commercial passenger traffic between the cities.

However, thanks to the mandate that established Amtrak, those profits must be redistributed to subsidize long-distance, low-ridership lines in the rest of the country, leaving Northeastern passengers with higher fares and worse equipment than they need and deserve.

Greek Prime Minister Rejects Further Austerity or Labor Changes

By NIKI KITSANTONIS, The New York Times

MAY 15, 2015

“I want to reassure the Greek people that there is no possibility or chance that the Greek government will back down on pension and labor issues,” he said, adding that additional pension cuts “cannot be accepted.”

…

He set out four conditions for what a “single and unified agreement” would be. Such a deal should include a budget in the black before debt is repaid, no further cuts to salaries and pensions, a restructuring of the debt and “strong public investments.”

“We invite the other side, after five years of nonrealistic targets and constant failures, to give in to reality,” he said, calling for “not just an agreement but a solution.”

Greece’s creditors appear reluctant to make concessions that could encourage other countries to seek similar relief. European and International Monetary Fund officials have insisted in recent days that Greece must complete economic reforms to unlock a €7.2 billion bailout installment.

SNP prepared to defy Cameron on a second independence referendum

by Rowena Mason, The Guardian

Thursday 14 May 2015 22.02 ED

Before the general election, SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon repeatedly stressed that another referendum is off the agenda unless there is a “material” change in circumstances. However, there is no clear definition of what this means and the SNP has several options that might pave the way for it to argue it has a mandate for another.

Possible reasons include if Cameron resists the SNP’s demands for greater devolution of powers, if the UK votes to leave the European Union or withdraw from the European convention on human rights, or if the SNP wins a decisive victory at the Holyrood elections in 2016 having expressed a desire for another referendum in its manifesto.

…

The fact that the SNP is talking about opportunities for another referendum is likely to make for a combative parliament. Many of the party’s new MPs have been celebrating in the House of Commons this week, taking over a bar in parliament called the Sports and Social Club that has usually been populated by Labour researchers.

The party is already in talks to get all the obligations and privileges of the Liberal Democrats as the new third party in Westminster. An SNP MP said the party has secured use of the old Lib Dem corridor and suggested renaming it “Freedom Alley”. Robertson will move into Nick Clegg’s old office and the party’s whips will get an office allowing them to open unofficial communications with the Labour and Tory whips, known as the “usual channels”.

FBI had internal concerns over licence plate readers, documents reveal

by Ed Pilkington, The Guardian

Friday 15 May 2015 07.00 EDT

The paper trail, obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union under freedom of information laws, shows how the FBI has used the technology – known as automatic license plate readers or LPRs – in several of its field offices. But the documents also reveal that privacy concerns have been raised within the agency itself that temporarily put a halt to the practice.

An email exchange between FBI agents dated June 2012 records that the assistant director of the FBI postponed the purchase of a particular type of camera linked to LPRs after he was advised by his own legal department, the office of general counsel (OGC), of privacy concerns. The document is redacted, thus obscuring the precise nature of the camera, but it does note that the OGC is “still wrestling with LPR privacy issues”.

…

A spokesperson for the FBI confirmed to the Guardian that the agency was deploying license plate readers around the country, but stressed that they were only used in already active investigations and “only when there’s a reasonable belief that the LPR will aid that investigation”.

He said there was no general data grab of random license plate details or storage of such information in bulk databases. With the help of the OGC, the agency had produced guidance governing the use of LPRs “that addresses privacy concerns”.

The ACLU and other civil liberties groups have long been concerned about the proliferation of LPRs as a form of law enforcement surveillance. Privacy activists have focused on the practice of many police departments of indiscriminately scraping data from thousands of cars and storing it indefinitely.

…

Jay Stanley, the ACLU’s expert on technology-related privacy issues, said that the heavily redacted documents released by the FBI left many questions still unanswered. “As is so often the case, we are left with the feeling that the public should know more about the policies that the FBI has developed – if the agency has guidance relating to privacy concerns over this very sensitive technology, then the public should be told about it.”

Poland pays $250,000 to victims of CIA rendition and torture

Associated Press

Friday 15 May 2015 12.02 EDT

Poland is paying a quarter of a million dollars to two terror suspects tortured by the CIA in a secret facility in this country – prompting outrage among many here who feel they are being punished for American wrongdoing.

…

It irks many in Poland that their country is facing legal repercussions for the secret rendition and detention programme which the CIA operated under then-President George W Bush in several countries across the world after the 9/11 attacks.

So far no US officials have been held accountable, but the European court of human rights has shown that it does not want to let European powers that helped the programme off the hook. The court also ordered Macedonia in 2012 to pay €60,000 ($68,000/£43,000) to a Lebanese-German man who was seized in Macedonia on erroneous suspicion of terrorist ties and subjected to abuse by the CIA.

…

Witold Waszczykowski, an opposition lawmaker, says he considers the punishment unfair because the suspects were in the sole custody of American officials during their entire stay in Poland in 2002 and 2003 – and never under Polish authority.

“I think we shouldn’t pay, we shouldn’t respect this judgment,” Waszczykowski said. “This is a case not between us and them – it’s between them and the United States government.”

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The country apparently received millions of dollars from the United States when it allowed the site to operate in 2002 and 2003, last year’s report on the renditions program by the US Senate intelligence committee said in a section that appears to refer to Poland though the country name was redacted.

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“This secret rendition programme was generated by the CIA, but it could not have taken place without the active collaboration of states like Poland,” said Amrit Singh, a lawyer with the Open Society Justice Initiative, who represented Nashiri before the European court. “Had states like Poland said no this, torture would not have happened.”

Liberal rebellion over trade pact reflects wider fissure among Democrats

by Naureen Khan, Al Jazeera

May 15, 2015 1:02PM ET

Even as odds for passage of a bill to give Obama fast-track authority are looking better in the Senate, where a number of Democrats who support the TPP have been mollified by a concurrent bill that takes up the issue of currency manipulation, opposition in the House has mounted among both progressive Democrats and conservative Republicans who do not want to grant Obama additional powers.

…

Although liberal TPP opponents say they object first and foremost to the scale and contents of the 12-country agreement – provisions of which they say would undercut U.S. regulations and harm workers and wages – they also see the battle around the trade deal as emblematic of the wider battle within the Democratic Party between its traditional business elements and a resurgent populist wing. The TPP, whose text is classified and available only to members of Congress and others with a security clearance, has the potential to touch on a number of different policy arenas, from rules for foreign investment to environmental protections to intellectual property rights.

After years in which environmentalists, labor unions and good-government groups have felt that corporate interests have run roughshod over public policy, critics said the TPP is another flashpoint that progessives are rallying around.

“[Hillary] Clinton and Obama are good Democrats who want to do a lot of good liberal things, but on economic policy, they have been captured by Wall Street,” said Roger Hickey, a co-director of the progressive Campaign for America’s Future. “They are so aligned with corporate America and multinational corporations that they can’t even think of opposing trade treaties, even though the base of the Democratic base is rebelling against them. It’s an attempt by the base of the Democratic Party to educate the establishment that we’ve got to have a new approach.”

…

Michael Podhorzer, the political director of the AFL-CIO, said in the last few decades, the world has learned to distrust assurances that what will be good for corporations will also benefit workers.

“Twenty or 30 years ago, before it was fully experienced, there was less resistance around the world to these neoliberal policies,” he said. “But now after the fruit of those policies, which is stagnating and declining wages, have been seen around the world, I think there’s that much more energy around opposing these kinds of deals.”

For others, frustration has mounted with Obama for teaming up with congressional Republicans to speed up a pro-business agenda item as other progressive priorities, from raising the minimum wage to increasing spending for infrastructure, have languished.

“It’s bewildering to me that the president chooses to lash out at Democrats, be friendly with [House] Speaker [John] Boehner and [Senate] Majority Leader [Mitch] McConnell and focus on an agreement that will likely make things more difficult for middle-class Americans,” said Scott Paul, the president of the Alliance of American Manufacturing. “I wonder why we don’t see the same sort of forcefulness on infrastructure, for example. That’s baffling to me.”

Tefere Gebre, the executive vice president of the AFL-CIO, made a similar argument at a protest against the TPP last month, upbraiding an accelerated process for trade agreements when there is not a similar mechanism in place for policies that directly benefit workers.

“We can’t raise the minimum wage in this country to $10.10 because it takes 60 votes [in the Senate]. We can’t get a responsible way to insure the long-term unemployed because it takes 60 votes,” he said. “But they are saying with a simple vote, with a simple majority, they want to pass the largest trade agreement this country has ever seen or this world has ever seen?”

The Battle of Waterloo, and not a single reporter in sight

by Brian Cathcart, The Guardian

Friday 15 May 2015 10.00 EDT

News stories do not come much bigger, you might think. Yet here is a curious fact: not one of the editors of those 50-odd London newspapers sent a journalist to Belgium with a brief to send home timely reports of what happened. So when Napoleon suffered his crushing defeat on 18 June, not a single British newspaper representative was on the battlefield, or even at the allied headquarters in Brussels.

What were the editors thinking? Looking back across the centuries, it is hard to conceive of a world in which newspapers operating in a competitive market could fail to do something so obvious. In fact, so closely do we associate the business of reporting events – bearing witness – with the very idea of journalism that it seems a dereliction of duty when journalists don’t do it.

What happened in 1815, however, reminds us that journalism and news reporting have not always been so intimately connected. And it is a useful reminder, because in the 21st century the link is once again weakening.

Looking back, there were two principal reasons why editors did not send reporters to Belgium. The first was that the government did all it could to prevent such initiatives. Newspapers were small enterprises and they carried a heavy burden of taxes explicitly designed to price dangerous information and ideas out of the reach of the masses. It is likely that few papers were more than marginally profitable, so most editors would not have been able to afford to keep a reporter overseas for any length of time.

…

In the absence of foreign correspondents, the principal source of news from abroad was imported foreign newspapers, and by law every newspaper entering the country had to go first to Post Office headquarters in London. There they passed into a kind of bureaucratic quarantine. Government ministers enjoyed the right to see them before editors, as did friendly foreign diplomats. And even after this, Post Office officials were in no hurry to deliver them, for they had found a way to turn this business to profit.

While the foreign papers were impounded, often for several days, Post Office staff were able to pick over them for the most interesting items, which they compiled into a short digest offered at a guinea a time. News-hungry editors gratefully paid up, but the consequence was that foreign news often made its first appearance in all of the papers at the same time and in exactly the same words – and it was coordinated, written and approved by government officials.

Efforts to bypass all this were strongly discouraged. Even letters from the continent were interfered with. Just days before Waterloo, in fact, customs officers received a stern reminder to search all vessels arriving in British ports and confiscate any letters “carried illegally to and from Ostend” – the principal port of access to Belgium.

…

Yet no one seems to have raised an eyebrow at the time: it was not considered part of a journalist’s job to bear witness personally to events. So how, you may wonder, did press get hold of news? The answer, to use a modern term, is that they aggregated it. For the most part, the slim papers of Regency England gathered content that had already been published elsewhere – lists of bankruptcies and military dispatches from the official London Gazette; basic trial summaries compiled by court clerks; the court circular; snippets from rival or out-of-town newspapers; those Post Office summaries of foreign newspapers, or longer extracts once the papers themselves were released.

Debates in parliament, which were regarded as the principal fare of the press, were delivered verbatim or in summary (we would probably call this data rather than news), and very rarely in the form of news reports. The job of the journalist or editor was to track these items down, choose the most interesting and hand them to the printers. After that, their remaining involvement with the news – an important one – was to supply commentary, usually in the form of the leading article, which was given special prominence.

…

With its post-chaises, turnpikes and brig-sloops, the story of the news from Waterloo predates not only electrical communications but also the age of steamships and steam railways, so it may all seem remote and irrelevant. It is not. It shows us that the relationship between news and journalism has not always been as we understand it now. In Britain, they entered into a kind of marriage towards the middle of the 19th century, but though the bond has been an extremely close one, we would be wrong to assume things were always this way.

Today there are strong forces pulling them apart. Aggregation is back, with Google and others supplying “news” to their users by pulling together on one screen lots of items freshly produced by other organisations and people, for other purposes.

It is now a commonplace, moreover, to observe that a lot of news travels between its originators – governments, companies and military commanders, but also individuals – and its consumers without the involvement of reporters or journalists. If we want to know the England lineup in a football international or the quarterly results of Unilever, we can access the data more or less directly through our phones and laptops. If a fire breaks out in central London, we may well learn of it first from a passerby who tweets. Of course we still need journalists who report, who ask questions and who dig out the information people don’t want us to read. And we also need journalists who analyse, interpret and explain. But we should recognise that the bond between journalism and news is not what it was.

Blogs

• Fraternity of Failure, by Paul Krugman, The New York Times
• Government Watchdog: Afghan Military “Will Need Our Help for the Foreseeable Future”, By Sam Knight, The Intercept
• Did Jeb Bush’s Brother Create ISIS?, by Justin Salhani, Think Progress
• Politico Gives CIA’s Worst WMD Liar a Platform to Slam Seymour Hersh, By Jon Schwarz, The Intercept
• No, Just Because Seymour Hersh Had The Same Story As You, It’s Not ‘Plagiarism’, by Mike Masnick, Tech Dirt
• The TPP Could Have Disastrous Results For The Climate, Environmental Groups Warn, by Samantha Page, Think Progress
• Opportunity Or Inequality? That’s No Choice At All, By Richard RJ Eskow, Crooks & Liars
• Wall Street Analyst Encouraged Rail Company to Lobby Against Train Safety Rules, By Lee Fang, The Intercept
• Pope Francis makes Tea Party heads explode: Why Steve King & Louie Gohmert have it in for the pontiff, by Jim Newell, Salon
• What You Need To Know About The NSA Reform Bill Passing Through Congress, by Lauren C. Williams, Think Progress
• Former NSA Lawyer Says Keeping Bulk Collection Secret Was a Mistake, By Dan Froomkin, The Intercept
• FBI Spied On Activists Because Protecting Corporate Interests Is Roughly Equivalent To Ensuring National Security, by Tim Cushing, Tech Dirt
• Brown v. Board of Education Came Very Close To Being A Dark Day In American History, by Ian Millhiser, Think Progress
• Leaked Video Reveals Omissions in Official Account of Police Shooting, By Spencer Woodman, The Intercept
• Video reveals Baltimore cops were looting during Freddie Gray protests, by Arturo Garcia, Raw Story
• Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s last stand: Why the power-hungry Arizona lawman could finally go down, by Manny Otiko, Salon

Bonus Video