[Mr. Mechanical]

(CNN) -- Wisconsin's top court Tuesday reinstated a contentious law that curbs the collective bargaining rights of most state employees. Opponents of the law said the fight will now be taken to those who supported it.

The state's Supreme Court, by a 4-3 vote, set aside a ruling by a lower court judge who had placed a permanent injunction against the law. The court ruled the state Legislature did not violate the state's constitution when it passed the legislation.

The ruling was a major victory for Republican Gov. Scott Walker, who pushed for the bill over a chorus of angry teachers, union members and others who said it was an attack on worker rights.

"The Supreme Court's ruling provides our state the opportunity to move forward together and focus on getting Wisconsin working again," Walker said in a statement.

The Wisconsin AFL-CIO criticized the ruling.

"The inability of the Wisconsin Supreme Court to separate partisan politics from the well-being of Wisconsinites is the latest indication that citizens do not have a voice in this state," it said in a statement. "And the only way for Wisconsinites to repair that voice is to take back the Senate this summer, stop Walker's unbridled assault on working people and take back the statehouse in 2012."
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[Mr. Mechanical]

Hahaha it's like that food robot from the Judge Dredd movie.

"Eat recycled food. It's good for the environment and okay for you."
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[Mr. Mechanical]

If only we had some sort of legislative body that acted as a check on the power claimed by the executive branch...

Wait, no, I mean if only the legislative body we already have still had some testicles and weren't as guilty of convenient acquiescence to expansive executive theories of power...

No, wait, I mean if only both of the party's leadership of the Congress weren't explicitly allying themselves with the people in the executive even though a growing number of representatives underneath them from all across the political spectrum are finding common ground and agreeing that the executive shouldn't get to claim the power to wage war willy nilly without seeking approval first...
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[Mr. Mechanical]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jun/16/bilderberg-2011-tipping-point

It's interesting how media coverage of the annual, super-secret Bilderberg group meetings have crossed over from being something only internet-based alternative news sites covered to being a topic of relatively mainstream interest. Such a nice, positive development.
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[Mr. Mechanical]

That's unfortunate because I think it's right to be uncomfortable with knowing that global leadership meets in secret to discuss policy and who knows what else without telling their public and everyone else who will end up being affected by their decisions. It seems kind of antithetical to the entire idea of democratic representation even if I can understand the stated reasons for doing it in secret.

Alex Jones is a lot of things but I think he was right to be alarmed by Bilderberg and if it had to take his particular brand of reactionary alarmism to push to the subject out into mainstream awareness at the expense of it being a thing associated with conspiracy theorists then so be it. A broken clock is right at least twice a day etc.
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[Mr. Mechanical]

The Patriot Act: When Truth Becomes Treason

By Susan Lindauer, former Asset covering Iraq & Libya and the second non-Arab American indicted on the Patriot Act

[Mr. Mechanical]

Yeah like I said I can see why they do it like this I just think if they're talking about stuff and deciding on things that will affect public policy then the public should be in on it as well.

It's a balancing act because there are times when that kind of secrecy is appropriate but how can either party (the public or leadership) tell when it's appropriate due to the nature of each group's circumstances? Secret meetings might be occasionally necessary but they will always breed rumors and mistrust from outsiders. I see this dynamic play out on SB whenever the admins make a decision to ban someone or something and someone makes the accusation that they're ganging up on someone in their secret forum. They probably aren't but just having a secret forum means they totally could if they wanted or that depending on the character of the people involved they could fall into that sort of behavior if they weren't careful. I know that sounds like a slippery slope fallacy but you can understand that if the director of the NSA is meeting up with people from Google and Microsoft to talk about social networks and the internet I'm going to rightfully wonder about all the directions that conversation between those kinds of people could go but since I don't even have an inkling about what they actually talked about I can only hope that it's benign or that they have the interests of ordinary, relatively powerless people like me at heart.
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[Mr. Mechanical]

Well, it's not that difficult actually*. There are new world orders and then there is the New World Order. People extrapolate the second partially from things said about the first by politicians and various kinds of powerful people. A new world order is simply a term used to describe the shifting of the balance of power on the international scale and ways that the powerful are thinking about addressing any variety of issues that affect the entire globe. I think it is quite legitimate to have concerns about the decisions made by the powerful under this context but I can understand that the term is tainted by conspiracy theorists so it's not really useful to use it in discourse even if that is what's actually being discussed. Basically it's a red herring you shouldn't get too caught up on unless the person you're talking to genuinely believes there is a global genocide being plotted by the powerful right this minute or something.

*Okay yeah, it is kind of difficult at times.
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[Mr. Mechanical]

[Mr. Mechanical]

[Mr. Mechanical]

[Mr. Mechanical]

Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who oversaw the official investigation into detainee abuse, wrote: "there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account."

Thanks to the Obama DOJ, that is no longer in question. The answer is resoundingly clear: American war criminals, responsible for some of the most shameful and inexcusable crimes in the nation's history -- the systematic, deliberate legalization of a worldwide torture regime -- will be fully immunized for those crimes. And, of course, the Obama administration has spent years just as aggressively shielding those war criminals from all other forms of accountability beyond the criminal realm: invoking secrecy and immunity doctrines to prevent their victims from imposing civil liability, exploiting their party's control of Congress to suppress formal inquiries, and pressuring and coercing other nations not to investigate their own citizens' torture at American hands.

All of those efforts, culminating in yesterday's entirely unsurprising announcement, means that the U.S. Government has effectively shielded itself from even minimal accountability for its vast torture crimes of the last decade. Without a doubt, that will be one of the most significant, enduring and consequential legacies of the Obama presidency.
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[Mr. Mechanical]

[Mr. Mechanical]

Obama Administration Overrides 2009 Ogden Memo, Declares Open Season on Pot Shops in States Where Medical Marijuana Is Legal

[Mr. Mechanical]

[Mr. Mechanical]

US claims all .com and .net websites are in its jurisdiction

[Mr. Mechanical]

RobotRocker, that sounds great but doesn't Murdoch effectively have both major political parties in the UK in his pocket already?

In other news: Top ISPs agree to become copyright cops

[Mr. Mechanical]

I think he meant Peerblocker and no, not really. Even Tor will not save you* if you want to really get down to brass tacks (also Tor isn't very effective for piracy anyway). Big Media is winning and the crackdown is commencing so bend over and get ready for it.

I'm starting to wish there was some sort of "public internet" that was somehow owned entirely by the public and maintained using tax revenue or something but that battle was lost in the 90s when the internet, as we knew it back then, was suddenly privatized and commercialized into the internet we know today before the general public really understood what the internet was or its possible potential. And even today we still don't really know the details of how that deal went down and what all the terms and arrangements were, between DoD who developed the internet and the companies that would later become the ISPs. Though really who knows how a public internet would work or how "public" it would end up being in the long run.

*this appears to be the wrong article I meant to link to but is still useful to read in a food-for-thought sort of way. I'll try and find the actual article I meant to link to.

edit-This isn't the article I meant to link either but it's worth reading if you ever decide to try using Tor.
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[Mr. Mechanical]

Also, interesting take on the News of the World shutdown and related Murdoch phone hacking scandal: http://blogs.reuters.com/mediafile/2011/07/07/is-murdoch-free-to-destroy-tabloids-records/

[Mr. Mechanical]

Come on dude what's that supposed to mean.
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[Mr. Mechanical]

Oh I see. Yeah, I agree with you in that it probably doesn't really change much. They can fine me and threaten me with jail all they want, I just don't want my bandwidth throttled.
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[Mr. Mechanical]

Whoa I had not heard about the community isp thing. We should all start shit like that in our areas.
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[Mr. Mechanical]

[Mr. Mechanical]

Anonymous Hackers Breach Booz Allen Hamilton, Dump 90,000 Military Email Addresses

[Mr. Mechanical]

It's basically trolling with some idealism mixed in. Or maybe the other way around. It's hard to tell sometimes.

There's a chance good stuff will come of this, like uncovering actual evidence of the kind of shady stuff we all just assume is par for the course at a company like BAH.

But there is also the chance for blowback. I can just see antisec's activities this summer being used as the pretext for even stricter laws that place tighter controls on internet freedom and such. The US government/military-industrial-complex isn't going to take this sort of thing lying down. They will respond and probably overreach in their response, and the rest of us will have to suffer for it.

Makes me wonder what the internet will look like a year from now. We might just all find ourselves living under Chinese or Saudi Arabian style internet censorship.

As for the risk of this information hurting innocent service members by being released, well, I guarantee you if it does hurt any of them in any way we will hear all about it for several weeks on every major news network. Remember all those people who were supposedly at risk of danger when Wikileaks released their documents? Pretty interesting that we never actually heard of a single confirmed instance of that happening, outside of that ambassador from Nigeria.
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[Mr. Mechanical]

A Visit to the Warehouse of Soul-Crushing Sadness

[Mr. Mechanical]

COIN SEIGNIORAGE: A LEGAL ALTERNATIVE TO THE DEBT CEILING

[Mr. Mechanical]

WASHINGTON -- Debt ceiling negotiators think they've hit on a solution to address the debt ceiling impasse and the public's unwillingness to let go of benefits such as Medicare and Social Security that have been earned over a lifetime of work: Create a new Congress.

This "Super Congress," composed of members of both chambers and both parties, isn't mentioned anywhere in the Constitution, but would be granted extraordinary new powers. Under a plan put forth by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and his counterpart Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), legislation to lift the debt ceiling would be accompanied by the creation of a 12-member panel made up of 12 lawmakers -- six from each chamber and six from each party.

Legislation approved by the Super Congress -- which some on Capitol Hill are calling the "super committee" -- would then be fast-tracked through both chambers, where it couldn't be amended by simple, regular lawmakers, who'd have the ability only to cast an up or down vote. With the weight of both leaderships behind it, a product originated by the Super Congress would have a strong chance of moving through the little Congress and quickly becoming law. A Super Congress would be less accountable than the system that exists today, and would find it easier to strip the public of popular benefits. Negotiators are currently considering cutting the mortgage deduction and tax credits for retirement savings, for instance, extremely popular policies that would be difficult to slice up using the traditional legislative process.

I don't really know how serious this whole debt ceiling thing actually is but the leadership of both parties in the government sure do seem to be using it as the pretext to consolidate more power into less-accountable formats.
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[Mr. Mechanical]

How a clueless "terrorism expert" set media suspicion on Muslims after Oslo horror
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[Mr. Mechanical]

They take turns pretending but there actually aren't any good cops.
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[Mr. Mechanical]

Historian Bruce Bartlett, a former domestic policy adviser to President Ronald Reagan, sat down with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews on Wednesday to discuss the national debt.

Bartlett said it was a myth that tax cuts are the key to prosperity, noting that Reagan raised the capital gains rate. He was also skeptical that Congress would be able to solve the current budget crisis.

“I think at this point, there’s nothing that can pass the House of Representatives,” he said.

“I think a good chunk of the Republican caucus is either stupid, crazy, ignorant or craven cowards, who are desperately afraid of the tea party people, and rightly so.”
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[Mr. Mechanical]

Also I saw this political ad on tv earlier tonight.

Spin doctors at work making bank this year.
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[Mr. Mechanical]

[Mr. Mechanical]

I don't know that they have a position. I mean I guess they do and it could be summed up as "government is bad and spending money on things that don't benefit me is waste". Remember that for the Tea Party types the belief that government can't do anything right is fundamental.

Some good news regarding two high profile whistleblower cases that were being prosecuted by the DOJ, from Greenwald: http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/07/30/whistleblowers/index.html
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[Mr. Mechanical]

Nixon's Grand Jury Watergate testimony might get released

Also, researchers expose cunning online tracking service that can't be dodged.

Hulu and Spotify are in cover-your-ass mode now.
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[Mr. Mechanical]

http://money.cnn.com/2011/08/01/news/economy/debt_ceiling_breakdown_of_deal/index.htm?hpt=hp_t1

This is the deal that's currently on the table. No idea if it'll go through.

It amounts to $2.4 trillion in spending cuts coming with Social Security, Medicaid, VA benefits/pensions, food stamps and SSI exempt for now.

Across the board cuts will be triggered by the end of the year unless Congress gets a Budget Amendment out to the states for ratification. Which is basically another way of saying across the board cuts are coming by the end of the year because there's no way Congress will put together and agree on a constitutional amendment in four months time.
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[Mr. Mechanical]

http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2011/07/the_terrible_awful_truth_about_3.html

[Mr. Mechanical]

"Pray on this" not "Pray for this". I think we're supposed to be hoping that mom and dad can work it out so we can be a family again or something.

Also I like how every time someone analogizes a current state of affairs involving the government the people always end up in the children role.
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[Mr. Mechanical]

Oklahoma has had nearly a month straight of 100+ temperatures. Today it was up to 111. Weatherman says it's all due to a "heat dome" that's set up shop over OK, Texas and surrounding states in the midwest etc.

It is some straight up bullshit. The morning glories I planted in the spring died of the heat before they ever got a chance to bloom. The tomato plants ended up dying too but at least with those I got some tomatoes out of them before they went.
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[Mr. Mechanical]

I think we're on a "don't water your lawn except for every other day" sort of deal. We've had a drought going on for most of the year, actually probably most of the last two years. On the rare occasion that it does rain it will rain buckets but it's never enough.
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[Mr. Mechanical]

Why? American police shoot and taser people to death all the time and nothing ever happens. What's the context with the London incident?

Also here are a couple recent Greenwald articles on the recent debt ceiling fracas that are both worth reading:

Democratic politics in a nutshell

The myth of Obama's "blunders" and "weakness"

A large part of the problem in US politics right now is that there is no actual representation for the parts of the population that hold progressive ideologies. Plenty of Democrats, including the President, were pushing for huge spending cuts but they knew it wouldn't look good to their base. Good thing Republicans and the Tea Party stepped up to the plate to act as bogeymen.

We need a left wing Tea Party as an alternative to the Democrats because for whatever reason the Democrats cannot or will not stand up to Republicans and Tea Partiers. It seems like they've done nothing but cave and capitulate to the GOP on a host of issues since Obama took office and now that the Tea Party knows they can hold the economy hostage and make the Democrats give in to their demands they will try it again the next time the debt ceiling comes up for vote. Mitch McConnell said as much himself. We're going to go through all this bullshit again in the near future and the Democrats are probably going to do jack shit to stop it, like they usually do.
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