Did Spencer Ackerman threaten to throw the FBI director through a plate glass window if he didn’t come clean on the training sessions?

I believe you missed the really big news: CERN believes they recorded particles traveling faster than light, a finding which would undermine both the Standard Model of physics and Einstein’s theory of special relativity.

Multiple warp, think of that.

Given the silence, I guess most of her colleagues are fine with this:

Rep. Speier delivers eighth House speech on rape in the military

‘“Nineteen thousand rapes a year occur in the military, those are figures determined by the Department of Defense itself.”’

So, this seems to solve not much:

US net neutrality rules finalized, in effect November 20

“But the plan will likely be derailed by lawsuits.”

‘Bout time!

FBI Expanding Interaction With Local Agencies To Combat Militia Extremists

More.

A little background on David’s tweet about HP and NutMeg:

“Hewlett-Packard Co.’s board is expected to oust Chief Executive Leo Apotheker and replace him on a permanent basis with former eBay Inc. CEO Meg Whitman on Thursday, according to a person briefed on the matter.”

More on poverty among US children:

Nearly 1 in 4 young children now live in poverty in U.S.

“Big cities and rural areas have the highest rates of poverty among young children. Thirty-one percent of children under age 6 in America’s cities and 30 percent of young children in rural areas are poor.”

From your link about operation Twist where at least one economist thinks it will increase GDP and spur jobs…

Obviously I am not an economist but I’m just trying to put pieces together, but i have questions maybe some smart FDLer can answer. Since when does increasing GDP result in the creation of more jobs? We’ve seen a jobless recovery already with more class stratification.

The Federal Reserve announced an unconventional plan on Wednesday to reduce borrowing costs for businesses and consumers, trying once more to spur economic growth despite urgings from Republicans that it refrain from any expansion of its stimulus program….

“Three members of the 10-member Federal Open Market Committee dissented from the decision, just as they had with the committee’s last aid effort, in August, but their concerns did not seem to restrain the Fed’s chairman, Ben S. Bernanke”

“Some liberals said the Fed had not done enough. “Today’s action by the Federal Reserve is not bold and will not create the millions of jobs that America needs,” said Senator Bernard Sanders”

What is unconventional about QE? It seems like the Fed is a one trick pony to me. What did the Fed do in August besides release the Oil Reserves and unmoor the price from Bent Crude that ubetchaiam wrote about which was a back door QE? (AFAIK)

I found page 2 of this article in the Guardian interesting (remember the letter the Republicans sent to Bernanke yesterday telling him to not to use QE again(also referred to in the NYT link):
Stock markets tumble after Operation Twist … and doubt

Gary Jenkins, head of fixed income at Evolution Securities, said: “Twist and doubt? You have to hand it to the Fed. They have gone all retro on us and persuaded the market to call their latest attempt at intervention ‘Operation Twist’ rather than ‘QE 3′. The latter might imply that the first two attempts didn’t quite work out as hoped so far better to change the name.”

He added: “The basic idea is of course to stimulate economic growth by persuading investors into risk assets … the one thing that is clear is that Mr Bernanke is prepared to use all the weapons in his armoury in order to try and ensure that the US does not enter a long period of low growth, so Operation Twist may not be the last intervention unless it works. And of course the UK is about to follow suit.”

Paul Ashworth, chief US economist at Capital Economics, was not convinced Operation Twist would do much good. “The big question is whether this latest action will accomplish anything. We doubt it. Judging by the modest rally in 10-year treasury yields since the announcement, most of this was already priced in.

“More generally, the cost of borrowing simply isn’t the problem. Businesses don’t have the confidence to invest and half of all mortgage borrowers don’t have the home equity needed to refinance at lower rates.”

How will this reduce unemployment, or increase household spending to create demand?
What the hell is going on? Is the D party trying to get progressives to cheer for satan sandwiches?

Okay, I’ve clicked on the second link… hahahahaha.
God Damn it.

dday, your snark has reached obscurantist levels these days and it’s inspiring conspiracy theories-(with more than just me!) …

Yep. That would be a game-changer. Press conference tomorrow in Europe so I’m sure we’ll be hearing a lot more. Skeptics are saying it was probably a measurement error, but these guys’ jobs is to measure things accurately. I don’t think it will be dismissed so easily.

If HP’s goal is to shrink down to the size of e-bay, I think they’ll be very satisfied with Meg Whitman at the helm.

Remember when everything HP made was best in class? Calculators, printers, scientific equipment… Seems like so long ago.

Office of the CLASS Act shutting down:

The administration can’t legally kill the program, but they’re doing everything else. Apart from being the end of a long effort to create a nursing home benefit, losing CLASS blows a $70 billion hole in the deficit between now and 2019.

No, regulations don’t destroy jobs. Let’s kill this meme.

Well, they do kill lemonade stands and such.

This guy sounds like a real jerk:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/23/us/texas-death-row-kitchen-cooks-its-last-last-meal.html

Texas Democrat John Whitmire got the prison to stop serving last meals, citing the old eye-for-an-eye trope “he didn’t give his victim a last meal.”

Whitmire is previously known for getting a waiter fired for refusing to serve him more alcohol after he was drunk, playing the “do you know who I am?” card. The waiter sued his employer for wrongful termination.

And don’t forget–this guy is a Democrat, one of the “good guys”.

You can look at people in all kinds of ways (age, gender, income, ethnicity, education levels, religion, occupation, culture, political affiliation, etc.). But the most basic, I think, is whether or not people are assholes, that is whether you’d really want to know them and have them around in your life. Whitmire? A Dem in name, perhaps, but his wiki contains some telling indicators.

I heard that on the radio.

yes that is interesting.

shuttle to Betelgeuse, leaving in five minutes.

• Score one for Spencer Ackerman: after his Wired series on Islamophobic training sessions for counter-terrorism, the FBI has acknowledged the problem and launched a “comprehensive review.”

nice!

The “Hikers” are free.

missed in the excitement:

N.Y. Times:

and an Iranian news agency, ISNA, said Mr. Shafiei reported that Oman paid the money.

Oman paid one million bucks to get these two released?

something odd about that.

Reminds me of the Jay Leno line about the politician who, in an effort to look tougher on crime than anyone else, promised to put the electric chair inside the gas chamber, with a firing squad on the ready outside.

If the speed of light has been broken it proves two things: 1 You dont need massive amounts of energy to break the cosmic speed limit (you probably would for a space ship but thats a different story). 2 The sky is the limit!

I cant wait to see if this is verified, exciting times!

Since the two were arrested for espionage, the information they acquired in Iran was, by definition, worth less than $1 million.

I think big cities and rural areas are the obvious place for poor people and thus their children. I havent seen alot of affordable housing in the Hamptons, West Hartford CT, Longport NJ, Beverly Hills or where ever else rich people live.

Saw that, but only one observation, so a lot of replication needs to be done before it even becomes an hypothesis.

She ran her campaign so well, how could she not be good for flailing HP. /s

how does that compare to non military, say per one thousand people?

another reason not to have a gigantic standing army.

sickening.

See 23. Doesn’t matter how accurate the measurements were or weren’t. Replication is the key.

Any guesses about what’s odd? I know nothing about Oman so I ask out of ignorance.

You are right to be skeptical. The Fed messing with the term structure of interest rates — buying long term securities and selling short term securities — is not going to produce increases in demand or jobs. In fact, the entire effect of them doing so can be offset by private investors selling long term securities and buying short term securities.

There is very little the Fed can do to spur growth in a liquidity trap. Even adopting a higher inflation target will not automatically create demand and jobs. This is all about appearances. Making it look that all possible steps are being taken. To cover the fact that fiscal policy — except for more tax cuts — has been taken off the table.

We are fucked.

Years ago, when I was in etouch with an army major, he told me rape incidence was similar for nonmilitary of same demographics, i.e. males aged 18-25 or whatever the demographic is. Not sure I believed him and never checked it out. But even if true, military should certainly not be satisfied to have so many rapes & should be working on reducing their frequency. The absence of attention to this problem (she typed channeling Rummy) suggests presence of all sorts of agendas to tolerate it.

A year or two ago, I emailed cnbc that increasing “labor productivity” was going to be permanent & they read my email on air. Labor productivity, as skf points out, makes fewer jobs out of a given GDP (or demand). The reason for the astonishing “labor productivity” is the substitution of capital for labor bc capital is cheap (zero int rates, falling computer prices for example) and labor is expensive (medical benefits costs), and it is the owner of capital, the corp, that benefits. Workers do NOT benefit from labor productivity. Corp profits are doing just dandy despite anemic economy.

I thought the link you provided the other day — about how the ECB could distribute reserves to the countries to mitigate the financial crisis — had an interesting parallel. The Fed could do that with state and local governments — to maintain employment and services.

I know, a pony.

How about turning this around: No Regulations Kill people!

The article used Canada as a model, where the federal govt redistributes revenue to poorer provinces like Quebec which can’t afford their major expenses like medical care. Of course, that was before Harper, so who knows how long that will last.

The Wall Street Protesters had 300 campers in the Park last night. That is pretty remarkable.

Oh, and the republican’ts don’t have nothing. They can’t fix the economy. They can’t fix the trade deficit. They can’t fix the job mess, and they can’t even tie their own shoes!

I watched about 10 minutes of their clown show last night. Not a one of them is what I would call Presidential material.

United States in 2009: 28.6 cases of reported rape per 100,000 population

“According to a statistical average over the past 5 years, about 60% of all rapes or sexual assaults in the United States are never reported to the authorities.”

Be sure to note Sweden’s rate when you go to this source. Thanks to Assange, we now know that Sweden has “a broader legal definition or rape than in other countries, and an effort to register all suspected and repeated rapes.”

Same thing drives sex and killing ………. Testosterone.

Do you suggest estrogen for the boy troops?

Obama isn’t “Presidential material”, either, so it looks like “muddling through” is about all the political cla$$ can mu$ter …PP.

The political cla$$, unfortunately, is into to Repetition … sort of the way eCAHN rightly suggests that the faster-then-light crew are going to have to be into Replication. At this point, I’m figuring the f-t-l folks are going to get better and longer lasting good results … while the other folk$ are probably going to be satified with continuing to get bad results … obcviously not grasping the fact that things don’t have to move at the speed of light to bite EVERYBODY in the assets … it’s all just a matter of time … (okay, stupidity and mindless greed do factor into the equation).

DW

Texans are in a place that’s sort of all their own, apart from party.

Military is a narrow demographic. Got to compare stats for similar demos.

Your Q is well above my pay grade. I’m just adding what little info I’ve collected on the subject. I have no knowledge of what, if any, credible programs exist for minimizing rape.

Apparently, Portlanders want to get in on the fun, and are organizing “Occupy PDX.”

http://my.firedoglake.com/adam503/2011/09/23/occupypdx-now-on/

I guess I wonder what their definition of rape is.

I was responding to mafr’s specific query. If you find the stats of interest to you, please share them.

Definitions are in the article.

Hatred of women has a lot to do with it.

yup

OMG, I just heard the bestest piece of trivia on Libya, broken by a blogger a day or two ago. The reason why Gaddafi can’t be tracked is that a French military corp sold him a stealth SUV in 2008. About 20 minutes into the interview.

Yeah, the perfectly obvious. Perhaps it’s an over-reaction on my part since I grew up in precisely those circumstances, but I included that quote since the extent of poverty among children in the vast rural areas of this country can be obscured by the concentration of poor children in urban areas.

How do you consider that such hatred arises, fatster?

Does it begin with fear of some kind … or a sense that love has been withheld, or never evidenced or some other identifiable “thing”? Is it learned, is a range of “psychological” difficulties? Is it a transferance of perceived “victimhood” onto someone considsred to be weaker?

Rape, clearly, is not about sex, but about power, about “control”.

DW

Good thread, Dave, and that about Allawi (ostensibly) not on board with leaving any U.S. troops in Iraq past the SOFA expiration, is…interesting.

However, a quick browse of that piece yielded nothing about keeping 8,000 well-armed corporate “diplomats” in the green zone. I doubt if Allawi will beat the drum against that. Someone is going to have to chase Iraqis who will endeavor to turn our Vatican-City-On-The-Tigris into the world’s largest and most expensive mortar training range, and I’d be very surprised if the Iraqi “security” forces have the spittle or the enthusiasm for doing that, week after week after week. Of course, once the terrist-hunters leave the green zone, they will be at increased risk from the tiny percentage of ungrateful ragheads who don’t appreciate all that we’ve done for their country.

In other news, the Wall Street Crap Shoot is ailing this morning, along with most of the foreign crap shoots.

I wonder why David basically lays half the blame on the Palestinians.

Would anyone even notice if they got rid of the Dept. of Education? Conservatives probably keep bringing it up because it’s an excellent example of a federal bureaucracy that’s competely superfluous.

CIS does excellent research as far as I can tell. They proved that immigrants are reducing employment opportunities for native teenagers, for example. More immigration might very well be good for Mexicans and Mexico, and it might help employers keep their labor costs down, but hardly anyone with any intellectual honesty believes that more immigration is good for American workers, which is why most average Americans would like to see less of it.

Best book I read on that subject is an oldie: Mermaid & Minotaur by Dorothy Dinnerstein. She argues that, owning to larger brain, humans are born are earlier stage of development than any other species. That leaves them vulnerable to caretaker, female, for a huge amount of time when only the limbic system is developed, but otherwise the infant is preverbal, preintellectual (human brain is not fully developed until 20s). Thus infant experiences everything as existential threat or as bliss. If infant is fed on time & kept the right temp & has good other physical responses, its experiences are good, but if it’s feeding is delayed, it experiences the beginning of starvation as an existential threat. Humans (and other animals?) are hard wired to pay more attention to negative experiences than to positive ones for survival reasons.

All this burden gets placed on the female caretaker, which means that humans enter adulthood with unexamined emotionally stacked decks against women. Adult women have to move to the other side of issue as they become caretakers but men can maintain their subconscious resentments & fears.

At least that Dinnerstein’s blah blah blah fwiw. Only thing I’ve ever read that seems to make sense in a comprehensive way. Don’t know whether her work has been discredited or not.

Rs will never get rid of DoE. If they did, what would their whipping boy be?

The article about jobs in Texas going to recent immigrants (yay!) from the Center for Immigration Studies has an interesting byline:

‘Steven A. Camarota is the Director of Research and Ashley Monique Webster a demographerat the Center for Immigration Studies.’

Is a ‘demographerat’ similar to a ‘demoncrat’?

Probably is, since that article seems to imply that we need more immigrants for entry level jobs (who also pay into social security and keep the supposed Ponzi scheme going–to the consternation of the TPers.)

Here’s something I found, DWB, which does resonate with my experience, both personally and in the public health arena:

“Rape isn’t primarily about sex. It’s a violent crime linked to feelings of rage or hatred in the assailant. Some of the cultural, sociological, and psychological factors that contribute to rape are increased exposure to sex, permissiveness, cynicism about relationships, feelings of anger, and powerlessness amid social pressures. Many rapists have feelings of violence or hatred toward women or sexual problems, such as impotence or premature ejaculation. They may feel socially isolated and be unable to form warm, loving relationships. Some rapists may be psychopaths who need violence for physical pleasure, no matter how it affects their victims; others rape to satisfy a need for power. Some were abused as children.”

Source.

Thank you for that in-depth link, fatster, it is much appreciated, as your links always are.

DW

What this subject needs is a Durkheim. Tons of information about suicide have been added to the literature since he published his classic, but it remains the classic nonetheless.

De nada, de nada. Gracias.

10 minutes, you have a stronger stomach then mine.

thankyou.

Do you suggest estrogen for the boy troops?

male candidates for public office should be required take a saltpetre pledge.

no, I am curious about who’s million dollars it is, and why it was paid for these two.

when someone is kidnapped in Mexico, (happens frequently, and I know someone who had to pay a bribe to a kidnapper)

does some foreign state pay out a million to free them?

No.

So why do these two get this treatment? Since when did Oman care about American kids. if it was someone else’s money, who paid the money?

it’s murky.

All Qs, no As.

I didn’t realized that it was Oman that paid, at least on the final passing of money, so I’m grateful for that piece of info. At least that Q has been answered.

Same thing drives sex and killing ………. Testosterone.

Do you suggest estrogen for the boy troops?

I call bullshit on this comment. Do you really believe that estrogen makes humans less aggressive? Ever seen a pissed off woman? Ever seen a pissed off woman soldier? If woman can fight in combat, estrogen ain’t the answer for calming people down.

Shorter reality:

The notion that the corporate amurka is better equipped, or even willing, to get us out of the mess we’re in, than the federal government, is arrant horseshit.

It’s just that we need a president who’s willing to do it…and thereby cut one large piece of flatulence squarely in the face of the american right.

Incidentally, after he, or she, does it, they’ll be like Roosevelt: Captain-fucking-america.

(I think Obama was deeply frightened of that possiblility when he came in.)

Thank you.

These people are evil.

“t’s just that we need a president who’s willing to do it…and thereby cut one large piece of flatulence squarely in the face of the american right.”

Start grooming him/her now. But do it intelligently.

Use their (1%) methods, since these methods are working.

Get some promising candidate /worms/ moles that climb the establishment ladder, say the right things to the one percent in the back rooms, gain power, and then reverse course, and go to work for the good of the country.

He got me too. Dave has been very snarky lately, but it’s too subtle unless you click on his links or have read what he’s written before.

Maf, I think the candidate needs to take the assholes on, up front. He or she won’t be able to sneak into the White House as a centrist and then govern as a progressive.