Blueberry Bagel

A few months ago when I got tiddly on a late Wednesday night and had to work a 10 hour shift the next day, I vowed to never be drunk again on a weeknight.  I broke that vow yesterday.

But a blueberry bagel really helped things shape up this morning.

And a few hours later I snuck downstairs for a second one, and as I spread that blueberry schmear on my blueberry bagel (I am the blueberry whore of Utah I swear it), I started singing out of the complete blue the song from A Muppet Christmas Carol--not one of the whimsical upbeat ones, but that depressing one the girl sings to Ebeneezer and you fast forward through because you're like "geeez lady this is boring! You aren't even a Muppet, what are you doing here??"

Plus it is just kind of annoying, the way she sings. Is it just me?
Anyhow, this was just so unexpected and bizarre even for me, to be singing the crappiest song from my favorite Muppets movie in the workplace that I didn't even know I knew the lyrics to. I had to share it.

Am I a complete freak?

Maybe. But that isn't a bad way to be. Or...bee! 
I am loving this new app far too much.  See that chunker on my shoulder? He's my favorite.

Hope your Tuesday is less hungover than mine.

Daniel Ellsberg: Civil Disobedience and the Vietnam Conflict

“If the machine of government is of such a

nature that it requires you to be the agent of 

injustice to another, then, I say, break the 

law."

-Thoreau, Civil Disobedience

Civil disobedience (also known as nonviolent resistance) is the active defiance of particular government demands.  It is nothing new; you can find it in Antigone, the ancient Greek play.  It was used by the Egyptians against the British occupation, Gandhi and Thoreau made it particularly famous, Martin Luther King was a proponent of it  for Civil Rights, East Germany manifested civil disobedience to banish communism, and it is a current favorite with the Baltic revolutions.
Sometimes you just gotta say no and stand up for what you know is right.

Sometimes being neutral or being all talk and no action isn't enough.

Daniel Ellsberg knows this.

Many people do not know his name.  Unfortunately.  He is making the rounds with these new NSA leaks because he knows a thing or two about whistle-blowing (well, he kind of wrote the book on it).  Ellsberg is the reason that the American people know so much about Vietnam, and by revealing secret documents about the inadequate, fallacious instigation of the war in Indochina  the American public was able to educate themselves and unite in protest against the war and helped fuel a conclusion.  Ellsberg even had a role in Watergate the downfall of President Nixon.  He is a fascinating guy and a personal hero of mine (and, of course, an inspiration to Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden).

Vietnam was an ugly war.  It lacked the dignified marches into battle of earlier wars, instead taking on the tone of the Korean War, in that it was a Cold War conflict set in Asia.
Fighting in 'Nam was in unfamiliar jungles in humid heat against guerrillas and much of the later was was televised.  The draft further unpopularized the war.

The war was begun (and justified by) the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Incident, when Vietnamese torpedo boats supposedly attacked the U.S.S Maddox while it was an an espionage mission. A "sea battle" ensued. There are multiple theories as to what really happened, the most popular being a radar issue that made it seem as though the Maddox were being attacked with torpedoes.  Some think the whole incident was fictitious and warhawk President Lyndon Johnson (who during Vietnam would become villainized in the chant "Hey Hey LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?") manipulated it in order to warrant a presence in Vietnam.

Daniel Ellsberg started work the day of the Gulf of Tonkin Incident as Special Assistant to Secretary of Defense McNamara.
Two years later, wary with the war and what it was turning into, McNamara ordered an investigative report into the history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

I love Bob McNamara. Please see the documentary The Fog of War if you haven't-- it is an interview-type session with Bob before he passed away, as an old man, speaking on the lessons he learned throughout his life (often the hard way).  It is absolutely incredible and his perspectives on Vietnam, which he was profoundly involved in under multiple presidents are wise, clarifying, and indispensable to anyone analyzing a difficult war.


Anyhow, this top-secret commissioned report became known as The Pentagon Papers.
Ellsberg was involved with the creation of the report and completed a 350 page draft regarding JFK's Vietnam policy.  In 1969 the study was completed and ended up being 7,000 pages.  It had numerous volumes and dealt with America's presence in Indochina between the early 1940s and 1968 (bet you didn't realize we were involved there that early, eh?).

At this point, Ellsberg was working on a project with the Defense Department and the copy of the Pentagon Papers he was given was ordered to be kept in a locked safe in his office.
But Ellsberg knew what he had in his possession, and as the year went on and the crisis in Vietnam worsened, he knew that he had to take action and employ this critical document beneficially.

In the autumn of 1969, Ellsberg began selecting volumes of the papers and smuggling them out in his briefcase, Xerox copying them at night.  He met with several members of Congress to help draft a resolution advocating withdrawal from Vietnam.
He provided copies of excerpts of the papers to Senator Fulbright and Secretary of State Kissinger.  Fulbright's aide suggested a way to make the papers public in order to inform the American people and Ellsberg admitted he was considering sending it to a major newspaper for publication.  For the next few years Ellsberg investigates various possibilities for best disseminating the report to the American people. 
He nearly got presidential candidate George McGovern to read the Pentagon Papers on the Senate floor, but McGovern backed out.  He had several meetings with The New York Times and finally, in 1971, the Times published several columns regarding the report on the front page and Tricky Dick read the report and was not happy.
And anyone that knows anything about Nixon is aware that he never hesitated to go after anyone that made him angry.

By the way, Ellsberg never released anything threatening to the country or foreign negotiations--it was all intended as education for the public that had been mislead from the beginning on the cause and goal of the conflict in Vietnam.  As Ellsberg has put it, "Of about 7,000 pages, I withheld about 3,000 pages that dealt with negotiations because I didn’t want to interfere with negotiations. I wanted to interfere with the war. I put out 4,000 pages of secret material, high-level documents by the joint chief of staff, the secretary of defense, the White House, the CIA. Not one paragraph of those 4,000 pages was ever shown by the government to have done any harm on its release. Not 1 percent."


The New York Times had an injunction filed against it preventing further publication so Ellsberg took the papers to the Washington Post. 
At this point the FBI was hot on his trail and he was jumping from motels constantly to stay one step ahead.  It was a national manhunt and Kissinger infamously labelled Ellsberg "the most dangerous man in America."
Smaller papers began publishing the papers as well and injunctions were sought against them as well, but the truth was finally getting out and the government trying to stop the publishing drew more attention to the story.
The Supreme Court had to hear the argument regarding the publication of the secret documents in national newspapers and determine whether or not the First Amendment protected this right.  They determined that the newspapers could publish he classified documents without threat of censorship or punishment.  It was a landmark decision.

Two days after this decision, on June 28, 1971, Ellsberg submitted to arrest at the federal courthouse in Boston.  He was wanted to ensure the information was successfully put out there and protected, and then his job was done.  He enacted civil disobedience to inform the American people, stating
"I felt that as an American citizen, as a responsible citizen, I could no longer cooperate in concealing this information from the American public. I did this clearly at my own jeopardy and I am prepared to answer to all the consequences of this decision."

A grand jury indicted him for espionage and theft.

Nixon, in an attempt to discredit Ellsberg to the American public, got his famous "Plumber's Unit" together (headed by G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt).  This was their first assignment.  The Plumbers functioned out of a basement in the White House and were called such because they "fixed leaks."  Nixon had them break into Ellsberg's therapist's office to steal his file and make him look like a complete nutter. 
But, in typical Tricky Dick fashion, this ended up backfiring.

During the case against Ellsberg, evidence of illegal wiretapping and other government miosconduct, including the therapist office breaking on Dr. Fielding came out.
The Plumber's Unit got busted, though nothing near what would happen later when the Watergate break in was investigated.

It was declared a mistrial and all charges were dropped.
I highly recommend the documentary The Most Dangerous Man in America (you can watch the whole thing on YouTube, see video below) about Ellsberg, who tells the story in his own words.

Find more on the whole shebang here with primary sources, including access to the Pentagon Papers themselves.  More on civil disobedience principles here.

Ellsberg is back in the spotlight with more leaks coming to light, and the leakers proudly declaring who they are and why they did it, much in the manner of Ellsberg itself.
Read his article from yesterday comparing what he did to what Manning and Snowden have recently done, where ha analyzes whitle-blowing and encourages their act of civil disobedience (saying that Snowden's release is even greater than the Pentagon Papers).  As he writes of Snowden, "A lot of people will surely call him a traitor, but they’re mistaken. That’s an extremely unpleasant experience for someone who knows he’s a patriot, who’s certainly a patriot from what I know so far. Someone willing to sacrifice and die for his country."

What do you think? When is civil disobedience appropriate?  What would you risk to provide accurate but secret information your were privy to to the uninformed nation?
Can one person's disclosure really make a difference?

"We were young, we were foolish, we were arrogant, but we were right."

-Daniel Ellsberg

To Squeal or Not to Squeal ? Whistle-blowing and Unconstitutionality

Top Secret. Torture. Violations of the Geneva Convention. Whistle-blowers on Trial.
Did you know the Obama Administration has prosecuted whistle-blowers at a historically unprecedented rate?

These are some disturbing events and long-disputed moral dilemmas that have been occurring in the United States the last few years, but have been pushed to the background. We'd rather focus on events that we feel "concern us as individuals on a personal level."  Well guess what. THIS DOES.  



But not many citizens took much notice of it (myself included, I am ashamed to admit I was sorely misinformed and am making up for it now) until now, with all the uproar about Verizon being involved.
Because that is an American household name and when people hear whisperings (now shouting) that their electronic devices are being mined for personal data going on record that could possible be used against them in the future, that sure as hell gets their attention.

So I'll talk about that first, since that is the priority for most Americans, and then go into the real story with Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning.

On April 25, the NSA (National Security Agency--employed as intelligence gathering and analysis, particularly from foreign sources in order to protect the U.S. via information security and cryptography) ordered Verizon to give them records of all customers' phone calls (within and outside of the U.S.) between that date and mid-July of this year.  ALL customers, regardless of it they have a rational cause for investigating a particular customer of Verizon.  And there is reason to believe Verizon is not the only carrier to receive this order (AT&T and Sprint are also suspected to have been pulled).  All in all, the Washington Post has declared that nine carriers are currently involved.
WHY? To protect us.


Supposedly this order does not give them access to actual recorded calls, but to who made them and who they called and how long the call lasted...but there is this op within the NSA order called "PRISM" that allows them to pull data from clients' phones, including photos, emails, videos, internet history, etc.
President Obama is currently defending it as being necessary to national security and claims that it is only being used outside of the U.S. (contrary to the actual content of the order).
So we've got this triangle here of the NSA requesting the order, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court approving the order, and Obama defending it rather than restricting/withdrawing it.

And if you get any ambitious little J. Edgar Hoover types in there, it won't take long for the accumulation of records on "persons of interest" turns to blackmail.
Have you seen Enemy of the State? That's the real deal now.

Some say "how dare they spy on me?!?!" while others acknowledge the necessity of such a program (like PRISM) to prevent terrorist attacks that have become all to common in our modern world.
What do you think?
[Remember those Maryland nuns that made it onto the supposed terrorist database???]


Also keep in mind that many of the people getting up a head of steam about their privacy being violated have Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Google, LinkedIn, etc.  So anyone can find anything about them and they are offering up their personal lives to Big Brother.  If you consider all of the intimate crap we put on these sites and the amount of data it accumulates to, the internet knows more about us than our own parents (what blogs you follow, who you got drunk with last weekend, where you get your hair cut). Not to mention GoogleEarth.
That should scare you. And many of these are within your control.
So watch the hypocrisy.  This is a social media age and we are creating a dangerous situation for ourselves where oversharing is not just common, it is encouraged.

And this is rewarding for the terrorists--the mass hysteria that has been awoken in the American public. It is how we first ended up in Iraq (and a lot of the foreign conflicts of the 1950s-70s).
Government acts (often secret) are nothing new in America's pursuance of peace and liberty and all that--just look up the Insurrection Act of 1807, The Garden Plot, Posse Comitatus.
Self-education is critical...these government forces rely on corrupt media to continue to misinform (and it is working all too well).
Do your research, know your rights.

The new NSA center in Utah (about half an hour outside of Salt Lake City) is slated to be fully functional in October.  And it is MASSIVE. We've watched them gradually build it here and the capabilities of this building are astronomical.  That is a big reason why I am so interested in this stuff and the capabilities of government agencies.  It is mystifying.
We drove by last November and it was a bit eerie to see about 40 brand new police cars and a dozen tanks in the parking lot with a dusting of snow on them, and no people around.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It belongs in the public domain.

So now onto these two young men, the Whistle-blowers involved in releasing secret documents.

Bradley Manning is a 25 year old Army Intelligence Analyst that released a series of information regarding the war in the Middle East, particularly injustices going on in Iraq that the government has covered up.
You may have heard of the Collateral Murder video--he released that via WikiLeaks.  It shows a U.S. Army  Apache helicopter taking out a crowd including a Reuters journalist and his photographer in 2007, and then killing a man that stopped to help them. A few of them were carrying weapons, but obviously without intent to do anything with them... if you know anything about the Middle East, it is common and practical to have guns with you on the street.  And journalists are definitely a target themselves.
Warning--this video is graphic and upsetting.

The next day the American military released a statement about the 11 people killed in "a raid...against a hostile force." Full article here.
The most disgusting part of this military video is the commentary of the soldiers involved in it.  One guy can be heard cheering "oh yeah, look at those dead bastards!" and they even captured a crewman begging to shoot the Good Samaritan that arrived in his van to help the wounded in the street (permission was granted, and when two small children were found in the van afterward, shot and bleeding, another soldier declared "it's their fault bringing their kids to a battle."
There are claims the journalist's telephoto lens was mistaken for a rocket launcher.
You can hear them laughing while "engaging" men that have done nothing to indicate they are dangerous in the slightest.  And when a few of them attempt to crawl away, they mow them down. And laugh about one of their tanks driving over a body.

Manning's other documents illuminated the real number of civilian casualties and causes of their deaths, which was obviously recondite knowledge, as well as abuses perpetrated by U.S. contracted parties in the Middle East (the dirty work we'll pay other to do).  

What is notable about Manning's release of this secret information is that he had access to even higher classified records but he did not yield anything that would endanger any troops or civilians.  He released evidence of war crimes.

And what happened? Manning is on trial of course.  The evidence he provided with information allowing those responsible for war crimes has not resulted in their prosecution, but his own.
Isn't that just the American way?

Chat log of Manning's that is being used as evidence.

The soldiers responsible for his holding have also broken U.S. Military law in the manner of his imprisonment, denying his rights as a prisoner and executing severe pre-trial punishment. This is abhorrently unacceptable.  I continue to be disappointed in the American military and what it has become, through my experience with family members and friends that have served, and my outside research including this case.

In one week, more than half a million Americans signed a petition for President Obama to intervene (not to free Manning, just to end the inhumanity of his imprisonment).  He did not respond.
300 elite legal advisors have concluded this ongoing abuse is in violation of both the 5th and 8th Amendments.

Manning fits the definition of whistle-blower and he deserves better treatment.  He has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.  And he is my age! It makes you wonder how far you would go to do what you know is right.  Learn more at http://www.bradleymanning.org

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I have no intention of hiding who I am because I know I have done nothing wrong.


Now what of Edward Snowden?
This is the dude responsible for one of the biggest leaks in U.S. history who has requested they reveal his identity because he has "no intention of hiding who I am because I have done nothing wrong."
Damn, he is audacious and resolute.  This 29 year old recently gave up information on the NSA (he was a technical assistant for the CIA and worked with several outside contractors).

After he removed the documents from the NSA and made them available to the American public, he fled to Hong Kong (because of their "spirited commitment to free speech) where he is now attempting to hide out, until he is captured.  There are multiple people and organizations with reasons for this, including NSA spies, the CIA, the Chinese government, or any third party with something to gain.

He is the one that released much of the information I disclosed above, particularly regarding the PRISM program.

In his own words:

"Most of the secrets the CIA has are about people, not machines and systems, so I didn't feel comfortable with disclosures that I thought could endanger anyone".

"I really want the focus to be on these documents and the debate which I hope this will trigger among citizens around the globe about what kind of world we want to live in... My sole motive is to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them."


"you can't wait around for someone else to act. I had been looking for leaders, but I realized that leadership is about being the first to act."

 "There are more important things than money. If I were motivated by money, I could have sold these documents to any number of countries and gotten very rich...The government has granted itself power it is not entitled to. There is no public oversight. The result is people like myself have the latitude to go further than they are allowed to."

"I carefully evaluated every single document I disclosed to ensure that each was legitimately in the public interest," he said. "There are all sorts of documents that would have made a big impact that I didn't turn over, because harming people isn't my goal. Transparency is."

Read more here
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I applaud both of these courageous, defiant young men and their dedication to inform their country-- a country that has long had the wool pulled over its eyes by the very systems that are supposed to protect us.  Enforced ignorance is not the equivalence of safety.

Please educate yourself and ensure their risks were not taken in vain.
They remind my of Daniel Ellsberg, who took a comparable gamble to inform the American public about Vietnam.  He will be the topic of my blog tomorrow.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/06/10/politics/edward-snowden-profile/
http://www.vice.com/read/the-torture-of-bradley-manning
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/blog/2013/jun/10/edward-snowden-revealed-as-nsa-whistleblower-reaction-live
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2013/06/bradley-manning-court-martial-starts-today/
http://www.denverpost.com/colorado/ci_23426300/nsa-claims-know-how-ensure-no-illegal-spying

It's Heston Time Bitches!

Okay, it's been one of those weeks. We are relieved, exhausted, and just going to collapse into the weekend.

It's okay, the weekend can handle it.  Lean into it.

But before this leaning commences, can we please just talk about Charlton Heston for a minute?

This guy was nutso, but in the best possible way.

He was a gallant brute, onscreen and off.  He was a giggling beefcake that parted the Red Sea, won a chariot duel, kissed an ape, and uncovered what Soylent Green really was ("people! We're eating...people!!!").  It doesn't get much better.

I grew up on The Ten Commandments and always loved this guy.  He was commanding but good, and there was something strangely soothing about his ruggedness.

And in real life he was a Staff Sergeant that achieved the highest possible security clearance, supported JFK and later, Nixon, participated in Civil Rights, became president of the NRA, and suffered from Alzheimer's and prostate cancer.  He was here in Utah for alcoholic treatment in 2000. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

He said in a speech "The Constitution was handed down to guide us by a bunch of wise old dead white guys who invented our country! Now some flinch when I say that. Why! It's true-they were white guys! So were most of the guys that died in Lincoln's name opposing slavery in the 1860s. So why should I be ashamed of white guys? Why is "Hispanic Pride" or "Black Pride" a good thing, while "White Pride" conjures shaven heads and white hoods? Why was the Million Man March on Washington celebrated by many as progress, while the Promise Keepers March on Washington was greeted with suspicion and ridicule? I’ll tell you why: Cultural warfare!"

Interesting guy, right?
He kind of embodies American contradiction.

And he is silly (as you will see below, if this is your first time experiencing "The Heston").
Oh, and that name? He came up with it himself.  He was born John Charles Carter.

So he is this larger-than-life guy that loved post-apocalyptic dramas and has a tendency to overact.  Which is why we love him.

So without further ado,  please relish this Friday and The Heston that goes with it.