[Mr. Mechanical]

I'm going to take this development to mean that Joe Lieberman's proposed cyber security bill will have a much easier time moving through the process now.
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[Mr. Mechanical]

FBI Launching Mass Raids of Antiwar Activists’ Homes

[Mr. Mechanical]

U.S. Tries to Make It Easier to Wiretap the Internet

[Mr. Mechanical]

Man I loved every bit of that CoSo. I wanted to pick out my favorite bits but there are just so many!
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[Mr. Mechanical]

So there's a coup going on in Ecuador. Part of the military is trying to oust the president, Rafael Correa.

There is reason to believe the CIA might have had something to do with it but no real definite proof.

More rationale for the CIA-was-involved perspective. From 2008.

Oop, seems to be over with as of yesterday. Shit happened fast.

This seems like a pretty good analysis of the situation.
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[Mr. Mechanical]

[Mr. Mechanical]

The Altars of Fear: Wrong Turns on a Long, Dark Road by Chris Floyd

That sound you hear is the hammer striking the nail directly on the head.
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[Mr. Mechanical]

Caught Spying on Student, FBI Demands GPS Tracker Back

Laughing my ass off at this in an attempt to stave off despair.

At the same time I'm glad they posted the picture of the thing. Now I have an idea what to look for should I become suspicious the FBI is trying to track me via their covertly placed GPS dongle.

Seems like they were tracking him because his friend posted on reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/ciiag/so_if_my_deodorant_could_be_a_bomb_why_are_you/c0sve5q
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[Mr. Mechanical]

Little bit of good news for a change:

SAN DIEGO — A federal judge issued a worldwide injunction Tuesday stopping enforcement of the "don't ask, don't tell" policy, ending the military's 17-year-old ban on openly gay troops.

U.S. District Judge Virginia Phillips' landmark ruling was widely cheered by gay rights organizations that credited her with getting accomplished what President Obama and Washington politics could not.

"This order from Judge Phillips is another historic and courageous step in the right direction, a step that Congress has been noticeably slow in taking," said Alexander Nicholson, executive director of Servicemembers United and the sole named veteran plaintiff in the case along with the Log Cabin Republicans.

Servicemembers United is the nation's largest organization of gay and lesbian troops and veterans.

U.S. Department of Justice attorneys have 60 days to appeal. Legal experts say the department is under no legal obligation to do so and could let Phillips' ruling stand.

Let's see if that actually happens.
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[Mr. Mechanical]

Back in 1960 the travel writer James Morris went to Afghanistan. He watched American and Soviet diplomats jockeying for influence, both convinced they could persuade the Afghans to support them in the Cold War.

But, wrote Morris, the world the diplomats entered was a strange one:

While the Afghan climate is clear, brisk and extreme, the political atmosphere is blurred, inconstant and soggy.

Afghanistan is like the fairy wood in A Midsummer Night's Dream, and many a confident diplomat, striding briskly into its groves has come out with a donkey's head.

'Don't be alarmed my dear fellow', the Afghans will tell you, 'we know just what we are doing'.

Fifty years later nothing has changed.

This is the very odd story of the events that led to a horrific mass killing of Afghan civilians by coalition forces in August 2008.

At the time there was outrage. Hamid Karzai publicly attacked the Americans for the deaths.

It was also taken up by the anti-war movement in the west as evidence of the Americans' gross disregard of innocent people in their pursuit of the Taliban.

But the truth is far stranger.

It doesn't let the Americans off the hook. But far from being a simple piece of incompetence, the events that led to the killings are exactly what James Morris described in 1960.

It is the story of the Americans and the British striding into the fairy wood only to find themselves spun around so much by the Afghans that they do not know who is the enemy and who is a friend any longer.

And they come out with a donkey's head. But on the way they kill 90 innocent people.
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[Mr. Mechanical]

[Mr. Mechanical]

http://www.mo.be/index.php?id=340&tx_uwnews_pi2[art_id]=29989&cHash=c7f254ce3e

[Mr. Mechanical]

Benoit Mandelbrot is dead


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[Mr. Mechanical]

Also you won't know if the Tea Party is for real or not until after there's another Republican elected president.
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[Mr. Mechanical]

WikiLeaks May Release 400,000 Iraq War Documents

Also, regarding the last major leak over the summer: Gates: Leaked documents don't reveal key intel, but risks remain
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[Mr. Mechanical]

[Mr. Mechanical]

Hundreds of millions of dollars are pouring into advertisements for and against candidates — without a trace of where the dollars are coming from. They’re laundered through a handful of groups. Fred Malek, whom you may remember as deputy director of Richard Nixon’s notorious Committee to Reelect the President (dubbed Creep in the Watergate scandal), is running one of them. Republican operative Karl Rove runs another. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a third.

The Supreme Court’s Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission made it possible. The Federal Election Commission says only 32 percent of groups paying for election ads are disclosing the names of their donors. By comparison, in the 2006 midterm, 97 percent disclosed; in 2008, almost half disclosed.

We’re back to the late 19th century when the lackeys of robber barons literally deposited sacks of cash on the desks of friendly legislators. The public never knew who was bribing whom.
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[Mr. Mechanical]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-11611319

[Mr. Mechanical]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey_de_Grey
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[Mr. Mechanical]

I love this graph.



http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/10/partisan_bias
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[Mr. Mechanical]

I posted this once before but it's worth posting again.

Gore Vidal: ‘We’ll have a dictatorship soon in the US'

The grand old man of letters Gore Vidal claims America is ‘rotting away’ — and don’t expect Barack Obama to save it
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[Mr. Mechanical]

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/world/nasa-mars-mission-a-one-way-trip/story-e6frf7lf-1225945124330

[Mr. Mechanical]

http://reason.com/blog/2010/10/29/attack-ads-circa-1800

[Mr. Mechanical]

Oh my god. Amazing speech and Q/A session from Glenn Greenwald at University of Wisconsin on Civil Liberties and Terrorism. As I'm sure everyone is aware by now civil liberties are central to my political beliefs, so if you want to know in general where I stand w/r/t American/World politics I hope you will make the time to take a couple hours and just watch both these videos sometime.

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/11/04/speech/index.html




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[Mr. Mechanical]

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[Mr. Mechanical]

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Before Tuesday's midterm elections, there were 95 House and Senate candidates who pledged support for Net neutrality, a bill that would force Internet providers to not charge users more for certain kinds of Web content.

All of them lost -- and that could mean the contentious proposal may now be all but dead.

Also, according to this marine toxicologist woman a few of the workers who cleaned up the beaches during the BP spill are dying with enlarged hearts and dissolving organs.
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[Mr. Mechanical]

If AT&T has its way before the Supreme Court, any business that issues a contract to customers would be able to prevent them from joining class-action lawsuits, taking away arguably the most powerful legal tool available to the little guy.
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[Mr. Mechanical]

Goodbye 2010. Hello 1984.
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[Mr. Mechanical]

Buck up parker! You gotta understand the problem before you can work out the solution. Anyway, maybe someday you won't have to put up with the world's bullshit anymore.

Study says solar systems like ours may be common

[Mr. Mechanical]

Vote for Time's Person of the Year

The editor's reserve the right to choose whomever they want though, and it looks like they just might invoke that right because right now the leading choice by popular vote is Julian Assange.
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[Mr. Mechanical]

The Terrible, Awful Truth About Supplementary Security Income
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[Mr. Mechanical]

[Mr. Mechanical]

Meanwhile in America, almost 15% of US households experienced a food shortage at some point in 2009, a government report has found.

[Mr. Mechanical]

The problem with education isn't cheating or admitting "deficient students", it's that the educational system has become a profit-making enterprise and whether or not anyone actually gets educated during that process is irrelevant to the overt goal of making money.
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[Mr. Mechanical]

The 19 Senators Who Voted to Censor the Internet

Assholes.
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[Mr. Mechanical]

Komopromat?

Or maybe he really did it, I dunno.
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[Mr. Mechanical]

A U.S. senator has vowed to fight attempts to pass a controversial copyright protection bill that would allow the U.S. government to shut down websites suspected of hosting infringing materials.

[Mr. Mechanical]

[Mr. Mechanical]

Awesome. My brother is military intelligence and he and his family are stationed in Seoul right now. Hopefully this is just a flare up of chest beating and bravado and not the "tipping point" into whatever the hell apocalyptic scenario the internet doomsayers fantasize about.
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[Mr. Mechanical]

Ooohhh snaps.

The U.S. government has notified Ottawa that the WikiLeaks website is preparing to release sensitive U.S. diplomatic files that could damage U.S. relations with allies around the world.

U.S. officials say the documents may contain accounts of compromising conversations with political dissidents and friendly politicians and could result in the expulsion of U.S. diplomats from foreign postings.
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[Mr. Mechanical]

Early next year, Julian Assange says, a major American bank will suddenly find itself turned inside out. Tens of thousands of its internal documents will be exposed on Wikileaks.org with no polite requests for executives’ response or other forewarnings. The data dump will lay bare the finance firm’s secrets on the Web for every customer, every competitor, every regulator to examine and pass judgment on.

Oh my god yes.