Think mass government surveillance won't ever impact you? Think again.

Google Pressure Cookers and Backpacks, Get a Visit from the Cops (The Atlantic Wire)

Michele Catalano was looking for information online about pressure cookers. Her husband, in the same time frame, was Googling backpacks. Wednesday morning, six men from a joint terrorism task force showed up at their house to see if they were terrorists. Which prompts the question: How'd the government know what they were Googling?

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"[T]hey were peppering my husband with questions. Where is he from? Where are his parents from? They asked about me, where was I, where do I work, where do my parents live. Do you have any bombs, they asked. Do you own a pressure cooker? My husband said no, but we have a rice cooker. Can you make a bomb with that? My husband said no, my wife uses it to make quinoa. What the hell is quinoa, they asked. ..."

Back in 2011 we mentioned the case of Aaron Tobey, who wrote a portion of the Fourth Amendment on his chest and took off his t-shirt to protest TSA screening procedures. He arrested and charged with disorderly conduct. The charges were dropped, and Tobey followed up with a lawsuit.

A lower court ruled against him, claiming that that the location of the protest was not appropriate. But the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has overturned that decision.

Airline Passenger’s Stripping Protest Lands Officers In First-Amendment School (PopularResistance.Org)

“It is crystal clear,” the appeals court wrote, “that the First Amendment protects peaceful nondisruptive speech in an airport, and that such speech cannot be suppressed solely because the government disagrees with it.”

The attempt to categorize fossil fuel methane, especially that obtained by fracking, as a source of "clean energy" would be laughable if it weren't so dangerous to our planet's life support system. Anthony R. Ingraffea, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Cornell and president of Physicians, Scientists and Engineers for Healthy Energy, explains:

Gangplank to a Warm Future

Methane is a far more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, though it doesn’t last nearly as long in the atmosphere. Still, over a 20-year period, one pound of it traps as much heat as at least 72 pounds of carbon dioxide. Its potency declines, but even after a century, it is at least 25 times as powerful as carbon dioxide. When burned, natural gas emits half the carbon dioxide of coal, but methane leakage eviscerates this advantage because of its heat-trapping power.

And methane is leaking, though there is significant uncertainty over the rate. But recent measurements by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration at gas and oil fields in California, Colorado and Utah found leakage rates of 2.3 percent to 17 percent of annual production....

...However, the release of unburned gas in the production process is not the only problem. Gas and oil wells that lose their structural integrity also leak methane and other contaminants outside their casings and into the atmosphere and water wells. Multiple industry studies show that about 5 percent of all oil and gas wells leak immediately because of integrity issues, with increasing rates of leakage over time. With hundreds of thousands of new wells expected, this problem is neither negligible nor preventable with current technology.

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The scientific community has been waiting for better data from the E.P.A. to assess the extent of the water contamination problem. That is why it is so discouraging that, in the face of industry complaints, the E.P.A. reportedly has closed or backed away from several investigations into the problem....

We have renewable wind, water, solar and energy-efficiency technology options now. We can scale these quickly and affordably, creating economic growth, jobs and a truly clean energy future to address climate change. Political will is the missing ingredient.

If you were to try to deliberate devise a policy that illustrated the corruption and bias of the prison-industrial complex, you couldn't do better than this.

California prison offering inmates $150 nightly 'Pay to Stay' rates (Yahoo! News)

That’s because a jail in Fremont is offering prisoners the chance to pay-as-they-go for a cell in the prison . And the rent isn’t cheap, running $155 a night, the same as a local three star hotel, according to local affiliate WTKR.

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While the program is unusual, the Fremont Police Department said that similar “Pay to Stay” programs currently exist in Southern California cities such as Anaheim and Beverly Hills .

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"There should not be one form of punishment for those who can afford to pay and a different form of punishment for those who can't," ACLU National Prison Project attorney Carl Takei told the Bee.

Oh, but that's pretty much the whole basis of the American system, Mr. Takei. (Though I'm sure you know that.)

The oceans have been a setting for SF since Jules Verne, so perhaps it's not surprising that genre authors and artists have put one of the ocean's most fascinating inhabitants in space. (The author misses one of my favorite examples, David Brin's starship-piloting dolphins.)

For more images of Whales In Space, see whalesinspaceblog.blogspot.com

The Fantastical Allure of the Space Whale (Lapham's Quarterly)

The space whale was born at the tail end of two hundred of the worst years in the history of cetacean-human relationships. Like other charismatic megafauna, the whale went from threatened to idolized with dizzying speed. The early-nineteenth-century whaling vessels that were the setting for Melville’s Moby-Dick took whales for their oil, their baleen, and their bones....

In the 1960s and 1970s, the country’s ongoing fascination with space, which (arguably) began with the popularity of “rocketman” television shows in the 1950s, coincided with burgeoning environmentalism. (Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us was a bestseller in 1951.) Photographers and filmmakers like Jacques Cousteau and James Hudnall published new images of whales in their underwater habitats, and nature writer Victor B. Scheffer had a hit in the popular book The Year of the Whale.

Meanwhile, science fiction increasingly linked space exploration with psychedelic mind-expansion—a theme that fit with the implications of the new research on dolphin and whale communication.

Most folks are smart enough not to try to rob a gun store, at least during business hours. The folks there have guns, after all. But "most folks" is different than "everyone"...

Guy tries to rob a gun store with a baseball bat, fails miserably (KATU.com)

Sheriff's deputies say Mosley walked into Discount Gun Sales on Southwest Beaverton-Hillsdale Highway around 4 p.m. Thursday with a bat in hand and smashed a display case.

But they say when Mosley tried to steal a gun, the store manager simply pulled out his own personal firearm and pointed it straight at the would-be-robber. The manager then yelled some orders at the guy and got him to drop the baseball bat, the gun he had tried to take and a nine-inch long knife he had on him.

Man...that's Not Cool. Just speculating, but as supporters of the anti-American terrorist group that called itself the "Confederate States of America" have gotten more and more bold the past few years, I'd have to wonder if some stars-and-bars-flying moron is responsible. (Though it could be just a garden-variety moron with no political overtones.)

Lincoln Memorial is shut down after vandals splash paint on it (Washington Post)

The Lincoln Memorial was shut down Friday morning after vandals splashed light green paint on the statue of the nation’s 16th president and the marble floor around it, U.S. Park Police said.

No words or symbols were painted or written on the memorial, police said.
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A crew successfully removed the paint from the memorial floor....They are still testing “conservation-based cleansers” on the defaced statue, and plan to proceed with the appropriate cleaning product when they determine which is best, the park service said.

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Authorities said they were not aware of past incidents of vandalism at the Lincoln Memorial. In general, they said, damage to the statues and monuments that dot the nation’s capital is relatively rare.

It's been sad watching some so-called "progressives" tie themselves in knots trying to defend the abuses of the Obama administration (apparently out of some misplaced loyalty, a mistaken belief that under it all Obama is some sort of closet progressive). The state is generally the ally of the powerful, not of the working class or of the disenfranchised. Progressives should seek to empower it only when the alternative is plutocracy, and only in ways that are subject to open and democratic control. David Segal and Sam Adler-Bell have an excellent look at this issue over at In These Times:

Why NSA Surveillance Should Alarm Labor

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Nayman may be right that “[d]efense of life, freedom and property is a legitimate function of government,” but history loudly testifies to the fact that the state always defends “life, freedom and property” more vigorously for some than for others. Any wholesale defense of the U.S. government’s spying apparatus depends on a disturbing amnesia about the state’s dealings with working people and their organizations, both in the recent and more distant past. And it depends on the assumption that working people and their organizations have never been, and will never be, the targets of surveillance.

But throughout the 20th century, U.S. domestic spying tended to focus on precisely those individuals and organizations who posed a perceived threat to corporate plutocracy and the hegemony of (white) elites—i.e. radical labor, left-wing advocates for a more just economy, and organizers in the fight for racial justice. As early as 1916, New York police were revealed to have wiretapped the phones of labor organizations in the city. “The police tap the wires of a union as soon as a strike is started,” testified a union official, “as soon as it is known that trouble is brewing.” Information regarding unions’ plans, he said, was then transmitted to the employers, enabling them to block strikes.

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Leaders Eugene V. Debs, Emma Goldman, and hundreds more were charged and imprisoned under the Espionage Act of 1917. (It’s not incidental that NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has also been charged under the Espionage Act). And in 1920, Goldman and 248 other suspected foreign radicals were loaded onto the USAT Buford—nicknamed the “Soviet Ark” by the press—and hauled off to Soviet Russia.

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As PCFJ executive Director Mara Verheyden-Hilliard explained to Democracy Now, “[t]hroughout the materials there is repeated evidence of the FBI and Department of Homeland Security, [and other] American intelligence agencies working as a private intelligence arm for corporations, for Wall Street, for the banks, for the very entities that people were rising up to protest against.”

From the "you are not helping" department:

Pennsylvania police chief: F*ck all you libtards out there, you take it in the a** | The Raw Story

In a video that has received wide attention, [Gilberton, Pennsylvania] police chief Mark Kessler repeatedly tells those upset by his use of profanity to “go f*ck yourself” as he fires various automatic weapons.

Mayor Mary Lou Hannon told The Morning Call that Kessler had the right to express himself. The city would “not take action to quash free speech, whether or not each member of council or any member of council agrees with it.”

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“F*ck all you libtards out there, as a matter of fact, read my shirt,” he says, turning around to show a message on his back which read, “Liberals take it in the a**.”

“You take it in the ass and I don’t give a f*ck what you say so you can all just go f*ck yourselves. Period. I wont be going to D.C. and I don’t give a f*ck. If you f*cking maniacs want to turn this into an armed revolt, knock yourselves out. I’m not about that, so see you on the other side.”

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"Q: What have been the reactions from men to this book? A: One looked grim and said this is a cause of deep concern; another said, “This scared the bejesus out of me.” It says something that men may not want to think about and that men have a lot to worry about." Hey, guys? If you want to know what the women in your life want...don't be afraid, try listening to them.

Q&A: Author Dan Bergner on What Women Want (Hint: Not Monogamy) | TIME.com (TIME.com)

For a long time, we have as a society told ourselves a kind of fairytale about male and female desire, that males are programmed for spreading cheap seed around, for promiscuity, and females desire relationships, with some exceptions.

We’re speaking in generalities here, but on average, we’re told that women are sexually programmed to seek out one good man and thus more suited to monogamy. That seems so convenient and comforting to men and so soothing to society, that we can rely on women as a kind of social glue.

That is one of many things we need to look beyond because the evidence for that is thin at best.