Wisdom of the Capybara

It’s too long to quote at any length, but check out this hilarious-yet-scary interview. Afghanistanica is probably my favorite blog right now, but may not be your cup of tea for regular reading given its exclusive area focus. This post, however, is worth a read no matter who you are.

Not enough experts, hmm? Nobody can speak the languages? The government needs people with area knowledge? Well, of course they do. And there is of course a shortage of available people with the required skill set. So why are so many experts being turned down for employment? You can find this debate discussed ad nauseum elsewhere. Instead I will share a little story about an acquaintance who was turned away by the bureaucracy of the United States government.

Read on…

This from Pandora’s website today:

Hi, it’s Tim from Pandora,

I’m sorry to say that today Pandora, along with most Internet radio sites, is going off the air in observance of a Day Of Silence. We are doing this to bring to your attention a disastrous turn of events that threatens the existence of Pandora and all of internet radio. We need your help.

Ignoring all rationality and responding only to the lobbying of the RIAA, an arbitration committee in Washington DC has drastically increased the licensing fees Internet radio sites must pay to stream songs. Pandora’s fees will triple, and are retroactive for eighteen months! Left unchanged by Congress, every day will be like today as internet radio sites start shutting down and the music dies.

A bill called the “Internet Radio Equality Act” has already been introduced in both the Senate (S. 1353) and House of Representatives (H.R. 2060) to fix the problem and save Internet radio–and Pandora–from obliteration.

I’d like to ask you to call your Congressional representatives today and ask them to become co-sponsors of the bill. It will only take a few minutes and you can find your Congresspersons and their phone numbers by entering your zip code here.

Your opinion matters to your representatives – so please take just a minute to call.

Visit www.savenetradio.org to continue following the fight to Save Internet Radio.

As always, and now more than ever, thank you for your support.

I guess congressmen don’t listen to music on this newfangled internet too much. Looks like Pandora might have to relocate to a country that doesn’t respect copyrights (most countries).

Christ, stupid Congress literally can’t accomplish anything except restricting our music. Unbelievable. Immigration? Health care? Social security? Nah, let’s tackle internet radio first – that’s the real problem facing America. Help, the massive record companies are in danger of going under!

We are rightly pretty critical of America to varying degrees on this blog. But, especially as a student of the former Soviet Union, every now and then a piece of news will come across that makes me (somewhat paradoxically) really proud to be an American.

For instance:

The CIA will declassify hundreds of pages of long-secret records detailing some of the intelligence agency’s worst illegal abuses — the so-called “family jewels” documenting a quarter-century of overseas assassination attempts, domestic spying, kidnapping and infiltration of leftist groups from the 1950s to the 1970s, CIA Director Michael V. Hayden said yesterday.

The documents, to be publicly released next week, also include accounts of break-ins and theft, the agency’s opening of private mail to and from China and the Soviet Union, wiretaps and surveillance of journalists, and a series of “unwitting” tests on U.S. civilians, including the use of drugs.

“Most of it is unflattering, but it is CIA’s history,” Hayden said in a speech to a conference of foreign policy historians.

Now obviously much of the content here is nothing to be proud of at all. But I can’t help but thinking that America has to be one of the first countries in history to have the attitude “Yeah, we’d love to hide this stuff because it makes us look really bad, but whacha gonna do.”

Also obviously, there are plenty of other examples of the government concealing information, etc., but I am trying to imagine the head of the FSB (successor to the Russian KGB) making a similar press statement, let alone any country in the Middle East or Africa.

So basically what I am saying is “Bravo, CIA, declassifying information == really really good.”

Scalia Justifies Torture by referencing “24″

I think in ancient Rome, under Nero, the judges were quoting television shows, too. 

From the Freakonomics blog:

Reporters have been abuzz recently over the release of a document revealing that, in 1994, the U.S. military had asked for $7.5 million to develop a bomb filled with aphrodisiac chemicals intended to cause “homosexual behavior” that would “affect discipline and morale in enemy units.”

I think we’ve discovered an answer to the millions of sexually frustrated, angry, male Muslim adolescents in the Middle East.

America… fuck yeah.

 Political rhetoric, has it gotten better or worse over the last century or has it just changed to fit the times.

This flash program is worth attempting to resucitate this blog. 

 ExxonSecrets.org

It builds a map of the all the institutes that receive money from Exxon and the climate-change skeptics who profit from it–and information about each.  The most stunning thing is that for every new person who shows up on your map, they will almost invariably have one line connecting them to the original institution and three or four other lines connecting them to other organizations.

I just spent two hours choosing five organizations at random and seeing how many people I could get interconnected to all of them.