Ken Layne has some fiery words about what Labor Day is supposed to be about:

Labor Day Is a Scam To Keep You Poor and Miserable Forever (Gawker)

Labor Day is a complete rip-off. Labor isn't celebrated at all—instead, a single day's break from labor is celebrated. You might think this is a stupid thing to care about, because Labor Day is really just about getting drunk in your yard, again. But that's actually evidence of this very successful con job pulled on you, the American worker (or unemployed person, or discouraged worker, or "grad student"). You probably don't even believe in Labor Day.

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On May 4 of 1886, police opened fire on laborers demanding an eight-hour workday. The cops had been sent over by their bosses at the slaughterhouses and City Hall to break up the rally and smash skulls....

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The phony trial gave fuel to the new global labor movement, and it inspired the creation of International Workers' Day on May Day of 1889, meshing with the European spring festivals held on May 1.

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For Washington, the answer was to simply have a different kind of May Day—one that was more about sitting in the yard getting drunk, instead of storming the Bastille or seizing the means of production. After U.S. marshals and soldiers slaughtered railroad workers during the 1894 Pullman Strike, the federal government quickly whipped up a national workers' holiday.

I remember when I lived in College Park and would drive up 295 to visit the parental units. Some days you could see the dome of brown air hovering over Bmore.

Baltimore: Number 1 in air pollution deaths | Citypaper Blogs

A troubling report in the journal Atmospheric Environment claims that, not only do 200,000 Americans die needlessly in the US each year from the effects of breathing air pollution, but that Baltimore City leads the nation in deaths per 100,000 residents.

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Math time: 130 people times 6.3 (Baltimore’s population divided by 100,000) would be 819 Baltimoreans cut down each year. Put another way, that’s four times the number killed annually by homicide.

Yet more evidence of inadequate oversight of the intelligence-industrial complex. And no, the fact that it only happens once in a while is not a comfort: there should be no way for it to happen at all.

NSA Officers Sometimes Spy on Love Interests (WSJ.com)

National Security Agency officers on several occasions have channeled their agency’s enormous eavesdropping power to spy on love interests, U.S. officials said.

The practice isn’t frequent — one official estimated a handful of cases in the last decade — but it’s common enough to garner its own spycraft label: LOVEINT.

Radley Balko's book Rise of the Warrior Cop (and no, I haven't read it yet) seems to have succeeded in generating a good deal of attention on the problem of the militarization of policing. I've previously mentioned how The Wall Street Journal and the BBC have covered his work. Now an excerpt appears in the the July 2013 edition of the ABA Journal. To see the American Bar Association publish a piece critical of the "warrior cop" system is a hopeful sign.

How did America’s police become a military force on the streets? - ABA Journal

The founders and their contemporaries would probably have seen even the early-19th-century police forces as a standing army, and a particularly odious one at that. Just before the American Revolution, it wasn’t the stationing of British troops in the colonies that irked patriots in Boston and Virginia; it was England’s decision to use the troops for everyday law enforcement. This wariness of standing armies was born of experience and a study of history—early American statesmen like Madison, Washington and Adams were well-versed in the history of such armies in Europe, especially in ancient Rome.

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Police departments across the country now sport armored personnel carriers designed for use on a battlefield. Some have helicopters, tanks and Humvees. They carry military-grade weapons. Most of this equipment comes from the military itself. Many SWAT teams today are trained by current and former personnel from special forces units like the Navy SEALs or Army Rangers. National Guard helicopters now routinely swoop through rural areas in search of pot plants and, when they find something, send gun-toting troops dressed for battle rappelling down to chop and confiscate the contraband. But it isn’t just drugs. Aggressive, SWAT-style tactics are now used to raid neighborhood poker games, doctors’ offices, bars and restaurants, and head shops—despite the fact that the targets of these raids pose little threat to anyone.

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How did we get here? How did we evolve from a country whose founding statesmen were adamant about the dangers of armed, standing government forces—a country that enshrined the Fourth Amendment in the Bill of Rights and revered and protected the age-old notion that the home is a place of privacy and sanctuary—to a country where it has become acceptable for armed government agents dressed in battle garb to storm private homes in the middle of the night—not to apprehend violent fugitives or thwart terrorist attacks, but to enforce laws against nonviolent, consensual activities?

The ignorance, bigotry, and incompetence that Aditya Mukerjee encountered should make you weep for what America has become.

Don't Fly During Ramadan (/var/null)

Having been selected before for so-called “random” checks, I assumed that this was another such check.

"What do you mean, ‘in private’? Can’t we just do this out here?"

"No, this is a different kind of pat-down, and we can’t do that in public." When I asked him why this pat-down was different, he wouldn’t tell me. When I asked him specifically why he couldn’t do it in public, he said "Because it would be obscene."

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He then asked, “What is your religion?”

"I’m Hindu."

"How religious are you? Would you describe yourself as ‘somewhat religious’ or ‘very religious’?"

I was speechless from the idea of being forced to talk about my the extent of religious beliefs to a complete stranger. “Somewhat religious”, I responded.

"How many times a day do you pray?" he asked. This time, my surprise must have registered on my face, because he quickly added, "I’m not trying to offend you; I just don’t know anything about Hinduism. For example, I know that people are fasting for Ramadan right now, but I don’t have any idea what Hindus actually do on a daily basis."

I nearly laughed at the idea of being questioned by a man who was able to admit his own ignorance on the subject matter, but I knew enough to restrain myself.

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"You’ll have to understand, when a person of your… background walks into here, travelling alone, and sets off our alarms, people start to get a bit nervous. I’m sure you’ve been following what’s been going on in the news recently. You’ve got people from five different branches of government all in here - we don’t do this just for fun."

The best superhero tales are about how the heroes inspire others, how their examples leads others to step up.

Masked hero hauls bags, babies up and down Tokyo subway stairs (Yahoo! News)

In a green outfit with silver trim and matching mask, a superhero waits by the stairs of a Tokyo subway station, lending his strength to the elderly, passengers lugging heavy packages and mothers with baby strollers.

"Japanese people find it hard to accept help, they feel obligated to the other person, so the mask really helps me out," said Tadahiro Kanemasu.

When giants roamed the Earth, when True Hackers carved the bits of the One True Operating System, Unix, in the Holy Language of C.

In their own words: Unix pioneers remember the good times (Network World)

We caught up with the pioneers who brought us the Unix operating system and asked them to share some memories of the early days of Unix development.

I think that a big part of the philosophy of the GOP base is an unconscious belief that, other than a handful of sinners, everyone is Just Like Them. You hear it over and over in the voter ID debates: "Well, everybody has a state issued ID!" (No, they don't.) Same idea in play here: "Well, everybody is a Christian!"

Republican Horrified to Discover that Christianity is Not the Only Religion (Jezebel)

It's an honest mistake, assuming that the Constitution only protects your own personal megachurch faith. But one Louisiana Republican is learning the hard way that religious school vouchers can be used to fund education at all sorts of religious schools, even Muslim ones. And while she's totally in favor of taxpayer money being used to pay for kids to go to Christian schools, she's willing to put a stop to the entire program if Muslim schools are going to be involved.

Valarie Hodges admitted that when she supported Governor Bobby Jindal's school voucher program, she only did so because she assumed the religious school vouchers could only be used for Christian schools. Religious freedom means that everyone's free to follow Valarie Hodges' religion! She explains,

"I actually support funding for teaching the fundamentals of America's Founding Fathers' religion, which is Christianity, in public schools or private schools. I liked the idea of giving parents the option of sending their children to a public school or a Christian school."

Another face of the horrid absurdity of murdering people to show that murdering people is wrong. I can no longer view capital punishment as even attempting to be a rational policy, it's nothing but a human sacrifice ritual meant to appease a twisted deity of justice.

The Death Row Torture Of Warren Hill | The Nation

It is not uncommon for prisoners on death row to face multiple execution dates and last-minute stays as attorneys try to keep them alive. Some might consider Hill lucky for surviving so many execution dates. But human rights experts believe that repeated trips to the death chamber, followed by last-minute reprieves, amount to psychological torture. Although the death penalty has long been upheld despite the Eighth Amendment ban on “cruel and unusual punishment,” Brian Evans, head of Amnesty International USA’s Death Penalty Abolition Campaign, compares the psychological impact of an eleventh-hour stay of execution to a mock execution, in which someone is falsely led to believe he or she is about to be killed. “Mock executions are a form of torture under international law,” Evans told The Nation. “A last-minute stay isn’t quite as deliberate, but for the person on the gurney it’s the same effect.”

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According to Kammer, Hill’s mental limitations make the uncertainty of his fate even more difficult to bear because “he has fewer coping skills to handle the stress of being taken out of [a] regular cell and put into a death watch cell.” Then there’s “the anticipation of being killed. That’s hard for anyone to handle. It’s even more cruel for someone who’s mentally disabled.”

Some things just don't need to be networked.

It Now Appears Possible to Hack a (Fancy, Japanese) Toilet (The Atlantic)

The information security company Trustwave Holdings published an advisory regarding Satis-brand toilets. Satis are a top-of-the-line product of LAXIL, one of Japan's largest commode companies, and they're advertised in the US with the tagline "SATIS defines toilet innovation."

And indeed! How innovative they definitionally are. For not only does the commode sport a broad set of features standard in Nipponese toilets -- deodorizing capabilities, an automatic seat, a two nozzle bidet spray -- but also it can be controlled by an Android app.

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...According to Trustwave, every Satis toilet has the same hard-coded Bluetooth PIN, which means "any person using the 'My Satis' [Android] application can control any Satis toilet."