AdamSmith

Now I'm not getting the warning either. Good! Almost time for Danny & Cazin...

No question. I think the general usage could be stated as: Expensive, and available at Whole Foods. Although in fairness, I find a fair amount of 'organic' foods better enough to be worth the often modest price difference.

The numbers prove it: The GOP is estranged from America By Andrew Kohut, Friday, March 22, 11:05 AM Andrew Kohut is the founding director and former president of the Pew Research Center. He served as president of the Gallup Organization from 1979 to 1989. In my decades of polling, I recall only one moment when a party had been driven as far from the center as the Republican Party has been today. The outsize influence of hard-line elements in the party base is doing to the GOP what supporters of Gene McCarthy and George McGovern did to the Democratic Party in the late 1960s and early 1970s — radicalizing its image and standing in the way of its revitalization. A 20-year low for the GOP In those years, the national Democratic Party became labeled, to its detriment, as the party of “acid, abortion and amnesty.” With the Democrats’ values far to the left of the silent majority, McGovern lost in a landslide to Richard Nixon in 1972. While there are no catchy phrases for the Republicans of 2013, their image problems are readily apparent in national polls. The GOP has come to be seen as the more extreme party, the side unwilling to compromise or negotiate seriously to tackle the economic turmoil that challenges the nation. It is no surprise that even elements of the Republican leadership that had been so confident of a Mitt Romney victory — including when it was clear that he was going to lose the election — are now looking at ways to find more electable candidates and cope with the disproportionate influence of hard-liners in the GOP. Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus only scratched the surface this past week when he dissected the party’s November defeat: “There’s no one reason we lost. Our message was weak; our ground game was insufficient; we weren’t inclusive; we were behind in both data and digital; and our primary and debate process needed improvement. So there’s no one solution. There’s a long list of them.” A long list, but one that doesn’t address the emergence of a staunch conservative bloc that has undermined the GOP’s national image. The Republican Party’s ratings now stand at a 20-year low, with just 33 percent of the public holding a favorable view of the party and 58 percent judging it unfavorably, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey. Although the Democrats are better regarded (47 percent favorable and 46 percent unfavorable), the GOP’s problems are its own, not a mirror image of renewed Democratic strength. Americans’ values and beliefs are more divided along partisan lines than at any time in the past 25 years. The values gap between Republicans and Democrats is now greater than the one between men and women, young and old, or any racial or class divides. But while members of the Republican and Democratic parties have become more conservative and liberal, respectively, a bloc of doctrinaire, across-the-board conservatives has become a dominant force on the right. Indeed, it is their resolve and ultra-conservatism that have protected Republican lawmakers from the broader voter backlash that is so apparent in opinion polls. For decades, my colleagues and I have examined the competing forces and coalitions within the two parties. In our most recent national assessments, we found not only that the percentage of people self-identifying as Republicans had hit historic lows but that within that smaller base, the traditional divides between pro-business economic conservatives and social conservatives had narrowed. There was less diversity of values within the GOP than at any time in the past quarter-century. The party’s base is increasingly dominated by a highly energized bloc of voters with extremely conservative positions on nearly all issues: the size and role of government, foreign policy, social issues, and moral concerns. They stand with the tea party on taxes and spending and with Christian conservatives on key social questions, such as abortion rights and same-sex marriage. These staunch conservatives, who emerged with great force in the Obama era, represent 45 percent of the Republican base. According to our 2011 survey, they are demographically and politically distinct from the national electorate. Ninety-two percent are white. They tend to be male, married, Protestant, well off and at least 50 years old. Knowing how this slice of the electorate came together is key to understanding why GOP lawmakers have been able to withstand the public backlash that is so visible in polls — and why the party will face great difficulty in reinventing itself. According to our polling, three factors stand out in the emergence of the GOP’s staunch conservative bloc: ideological resistance to President Obama’s policies, discomfort with the changing face of America and the influence of conservative media. The Obama backlash The conservative response to Obama was fast and furious as he began his first term. While Republicans wished him well for a month or two after his 2008 victory — as many as 59 percent reported a favorable opinion of him in January 2009 — their disapproval of the new president soon rose sharply. By the 100-day mark of Obama’s first term, 56 percent of Republicans disapproved of the president. And by January 2010, 61 percent of Republicans and 73 percent of conservative Republicans strongly disapproved of the president. On a host of issues — gun control, abortion rights and global warming — national opinion quickly veered right. For the first time in more than a decade of polling, a Pew Research survey in April 2009 found nearly as many people saying it was more important to protect the right of Americans to own guns (45 percent) than to control gun ownership (49 percent). The same poll found that the share of the public saying that abortion should be legal in all or most cases had declined to 46 percent from 54 percent just eight months earlier. In the fall of 2009, those saying they believed that the Earth was warming fell to 57 percent from 71 percent a year earlier. The abortion shift proved to be short-lived — 54 percent once again believe it should be legal in most or all cases. But the public’s change of heart on gun control continues, even after Newtown. And belief in global warming has rebounded somewhat, but it remains significantly lower than it was before Obama took office. Perhaps the most far-reaching change we observed in 2009 concerned the size and role of government. A growing plurality of Americans said they preferred a smaller government that offered fewer services (48 percent) rather than an activist government that offered more (40 percent), compared to a virtually even split on this question a year earlier. At the same time, a clear trend of increasing public support for the social safety net that we’d seen during the George W. Bush presidency reversed itself within months of Obama taking office. hese trends kicked in before health-care reform became such a dominant political issue, but the charged political debate over Obamacare only reinforced them. This conservative tide of opinion — strengthened with the emergence of the tea party — showed its power in 2010, with a dramatic midterm election victory for the GOP that Obama himself called a “shellacking.” As the election approached, conservatives accounted for 68 percent of the Republican base, compared with 60 percent eight years earlier. The changing face of America The nation’s demographic and social shifts have also played a role in galvanizing the new bloc. Conservative Republicans are more likely (33 percent) than the public at large (22 percent) to see the growing number of Latinos in America as a change for the worse. Similarly, 46 percent of conservatives see increasing rates of interracial marriage as a positive development, compared with 66 percent of the public overall. During Obama’s first term, ethnocentric attitudes — on immigration, equal rights and interracial dating — grew by 11 percentage points among conservative Republicans but did not increase significantly among any other political or ideological grouping. Some academic surveys found similar partisan polarization on racial measures over the course of Obama’s first term. Race has loomed larger in voting behavior in the Obama era than at any point in the recent past. The 2010 election was the high mark of “white flight” from the Democratic Party, as National Journal’s Ron Brownstein called it — the GOP won a record 60 percent of white votes, up from 51 percent four years earlier. To the conservative base, Obama, as an African American in the White House, may be a symbol of how America has changed. Unease with him sets conservative Republicans apart from other voting blocs — including moderate Republicans, who have hardly been fans of the president. For example, a fall 2011 national survey found 63 percent of conservative Republicans reporting that Obama made them angry, compared with 29 percent of the public overall and 40 percent of moderate Republicans. The conservative media If a values backlash and racial-political polarization helped forge the staunch conservative bloc, the conservative media has reinforced it. The politicization of news consumption is certainly not new; it’s been apparent in more than 20 years of data collected by the Pew Research Center. What is new is a bloc of voters who rely more on conservative media than on the general news media to comprehend the world. Pew found that 54 percent of staunch conservatives report that they regularly watch Fox News, compared with 44 percent who read a newspaper and 30 percent who watch network news regularly. Newspapers and/or television networks top all other news sources for other blocs of voters, both on the right and on the left. Neither CNN, NPR or the New York Times has an audience close to that size among other voting blocs. Conservative Republicans make up as much as 50 percent of the audiences for Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’ Reilly. There is nothing like this on the left. MSNBC’s “Hardball” and “The Rachel Maddow Show” attract significantly fewer liberal Democrats. I see little reason to believe that the staunch conservative bloc will wither away or splinter; it will remain a dominant force in the GOP and on the national stage. At the same time, however, I see no indication that its ideas about policy, governance and social issues will gain new adherents. They are far beyond the mainstream. Any Republican efforts at reinvention face this dilemma: While staunch conservatives help keep GOP lawmakers in office, they also help keep the party out of the White House. Quite simply, the Republican Party has to appeal to a broader cross section of the electorate to succeed in presidential elections. This became apparent last fall. Voters generally agreed with the GOP that a smaller government is preferable to a larger, activist one, and therefore they disapproved of Obamacare. However, exit polls showed popular support for legalizing same-sex marriage and giving illegal immigrants opportunities for citizenship. This combination of conservative and liberal views is typical. To win, both parties must appeal to the mixed values of the electorate. But it will be very hard for the Republican Party, given the power of the staunch conservatives in its ranks. Of course, the Democrats of the 1970s were able to overcome their obstacles. All it took was Watergate, an oil embargo and a presidential pardon of Nixon for Jimmy Carter to secure a thin victory in 1976. Not even the most frustrated Republicans could hope for a similar turn of events. kohuta@pewresearch.org http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-numbers-prove-it-the-republican-party-is-estranged-from-america/2013/03/22/3050734c-900a-11e2-9abd-e4c5c9dc5e90_story.html

So just now, clicking on one of the Flirt4Free guys above, I got a 'Reported Attack Page!' warning. Clicking the 'Why was this page blocked?' link took me to the notice below. All F4F pages get this warning now on my machine. Anyone else getting this? Safe Browsing Diagnostic page for flirt4free.com Advisory provided by What is the current listing status for flirt4free.com? Site is listed as suspicious - visiting this web site may harm your computer. Part of this site was listed for suspicious activity 33 time(s) over the past 90 days. What happened when Google visited this site? Of the 584 pages we tested on the site over the past 90 days, 395 page(s) resulted in malicious software being downloaded and installed without user consent. The last time Google visited this site was on 2013-03-22, and the last time suspicious content was found on this site was on 2013-03-22. Malicious software includes 24 exploit(s). Successful infection resulted in an average of 2 new process(es) on the target machine. Malicious software is hosted on 3 domain(s), including vs5.com/ , sahonero.net/ , ht-bs.info/ . 2 domain(s) appear to be functioning as intermediaries for distributing malware to visitors of this site, including vs5.com/ , sahonero.net/ . This site was hosted on 1 network(s) including AS25973 (GTT) . Has this site acted as an intermediary resulting in further distribution of malware? Over the past 90 days, flirt4free.com appeared to function as an intermediary for the infection of 7 site(s) including girlscamtube.com/ , camgirlstrippers.com/ , chat-girls-live.net/ . Has this site hosted malware? No, this site has not hosted malicious software over the past 90 days. How did this happen? In some cases, third parties can add malicious code to legitimate sites, which would cause us to show the warning message. Next steps: Return to the previous page. If you are the owner of this web site, you can request a review of your site using Google Webmaster Tools. More information about the review process is available in Google's Webmaster Help Center.

Advised that the Politics forum is also the repository for things religious, herewith without comment... http://www.naturist-christians.org/

I recall my grandmother (b. 1902) used the term "get high" to mean get drunk. She was describing the one time of year when it was permissible publicly (for men, not women, natch) to get a buzz on in the country crossroads where she grew up: when the apple juice being made into vinegar was going through its cider phase. Of course the menfolk could procure white lightning any time, but it had to be consumed in secrecy from the family, which was not always to hand.

So instead of continuing to pollute the Joke for the Day thread with political cartoons, here's a new thread, in the right forum, for political funnies.

If your navel does what that picture does, one has to wonder how many martinis went into your gestation.

...Whether this is him ('Morgon'?) or not, still the thought.

Rounding error?

"Organic"! The chemist manque in me can't resist the mini-lecture thereon. Chemically, organic compounds are, essentially (sorry! ), those based on carbon. For long, the "vitalist" hypothesis of Jöns Jakob Berzelius (blatantly copying and pasting from Wikipedia here) held that "organic" compounds could only be made by living things. This tidy idea was revealed to be nonsense in 1828 when German chemist Friedrich Wöhler (31 July 1800 – 23 September 1882) accidentally synthesized urea. Ain't science grand? Your query "isn't everything organic" reminds me, through the freest of associations, of a question our AP bio teacher put on a test one time. Actually I forget the question; what sticks in memory is one of the four possible multiple-choice answers: D. A non-chemical substance Out of our class of 25 kids, one poor guy actually chose that answer. Giving us back our graded tests, teacher couldn't resist asking him, "Bob, can you actually think of anything that's a non-chemical substance?" His priceless answer, after a bit of flailing: "... Well ... like ... rocks?!"

Interesting questions about the law of ownership as applicable here. Will keep an eye out for clarifications. Meanwhile, video of the retrieval: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/video/2013/mar/21/nasa-apollo-engines-atlantic-video Occurs that these things are practically like religious relics, for some of us of a certain age and interest. Very well worth Bezos' investment, to my mind.

And the beat goes on... The persecution of Barrett Brown - and how to fight itThe journalist and Anonymous activist is targeted as part of a broad effort to deter and punish internet freedom activism Glenn Greenwald guardian.co.uk, Thursday 21 March 2013 10.15 EDT Aaron Swartz's suicide in January triggered waves of indignation, and rightly so. He faced multiple felony counts and years in prison for what were, at worst, trivial transgressions of law. But his prosecution revealed the excess of both anti-hacking criminal statutes, particularly the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), and the fixation of federal prosecutors on severely punishing all forms of activism that challenge the power of the government and related entities to control the flow of information on the internet. Part of what drove the intense reaction to Swartz's death was how sympathetic of a figure he was, but as noted by Orin Kerr, a former federal prosecutor in the DOJ's computer crimes unit and now a law professor at GWU, what was done to Swartz is anything but unusual, and the reaction to his death will be meaningful only if channeled to protest other similar cases of prosecutorial abuse: Prosecutorial abuse is a drastically under-discussed problem in general, but it poses unique political dangers when used to punish and deter online activism. But it's becoming the preeminent weapon used by the US government to destroy such activism. "I think it's important to realize that what happened in the Swartz case happens in lots and lots of federal criminal cases. . . . What's unusual about the Swartz case is that it involved a highly charismatic defendant with very powerful friends in a position to object to these common practices. That's not to excuse what happened, but rather to direct the energy that is angry about what happened. If you want to end these tactics, don't just complain about the Swartz case. Don't just complain when the defendant happens to be a brilliant guy who went to Stanford and hangs out with Larry Lessig. Instead, complain that this is business as usual in federal criminal cases around the country - mostly with defendants who no one has ever heard of and who get locked up for years without anyone else much caring." Just this week alone, a US federal judge sentenced hactivist Andrew "Weev" Auernheimer to 3 1/2 years in prison for exploiting a flaw in AT&T's security system that allowed him entrance without any hacking, an act about which Slate's Justin Peters wrote: "it's not clear that Auernheimer committed any actual crime", while Jeff Blagdon at the Verge added: "he cracked no codes, stole no passwords, or in any way 'broke into' AT&T's customer database - something company representatives confirmed during testimony." But he had a long record of disruptive and sometimes even quite ugly (though legal) online antagonism, so he had to be severely punished with years in prison. Also this week, the DOJ indicted the deputy social media editor at Reuters, Matthew Keys, on three felony counts which carry a maximum penalty of 25 years in prison for allegedly providing some user names and passwords that allowed Anonymous unauthorized access into the computer system of the Los Angeles Times, where they altered a few stories and caused very minimal damage. As Peters wrote about that case, "the charges under the CFAA seem outrageously severe" and, about Keys' federal prosecutors, observed: "apparently, they didn't take away any lessons from the Aaron Swartz case." But the pending federal prosecution of 31-year-old Barrett Brown poses all new troubling risks. That's because Brown - who has been imprisoned since September on a 17-count indictment that could result in many years in prison - is a serious journalist who has spent the last several years doggedly investigating the shadowy and highly secretive underworld of private intelligence and defense contractors, who work hand-in-hand with the agencies of the Surveillance and National Security State in all sorts of ways that remain completely unknown to the public. It is virtually impossible to conclude that the obscenely excessive prosecution he now faces is unrelated to that journalism and his related activism. A brief understanding of Brown's intrepid journalism is vital to understanding the travesty of his prosecution. I first heard of Brown when he wrote a great 2010 essay in Vanity Fair defending the journalist Michael Hastings from attacks from fellow journalists over Hastings' profile of Gen. Stanley McChrystal in Rolling Stone, which ended the general's career. Brown argued that establishment journalists hate Hastings because he has spent years challenging, rather than serving, political and military officials and the false conventional wisdom they spout. In an excellent profile of Brown in the Guardian on Wednesday, Ryan Gallagher describes that "before he crossed paths with the FBI, Brown was a prolific writer who had contributed to publications including Vanity Fair, the Guardian, the Huffington Post and satirical news site the Onion." He also "had a short stint in politics as the director of communications for an atheist group called Enlighten the Vote, and he co-authored a well-received book mocking creationism, Flock of Dodos." But the work central to his prosecution began in 2009, when Brown created Project PM, "dedicated to investigating private government contractors working in the secretive fields of cybersecurity, intelligence and surveillance." Brown was then moved by the 2010 disclosures by WikiLeaks and the oppressive treatment of Bradley Manning to devote himself to online activism and transparency projects, including working with the hacktivist collective Anonymous. He has no hacking skills, but used his media savvy to help promote and defend the group, and was often referred to (incorrectly, he insists) as the Anonymous spokesman. He was particularly interested in using what Anonymous leaked for his journalism. As Brown told me several days ago in a telephone interview from the Texan prison where he is being held pending trial, he devoted almost all of his waking hours over the last several years to using these documents to dig into the secret relationships and projects between these intelligence firms and federal agencies. The real problems for Brown began in 2011. In February, Anonymous hacked into the computer system of the private security firm HB Gary Federal and then posted thousands of emails containing incriminating and nefarious acts. Among them was a joint proposal by that firm - along with the very well-connected firms of Palantir and Berico - to try to persuade Bank of America and its law firm, Hunton & Williams, to hire them to destroy the reputations and careers of WikiLeaks supporters and, separately, critics of the Chamber of Commerce (as this New York Times article on that episode details, I was named as one of the people whose career they would seek to destroy). HB Gary Federal's CEO Aaron Barr, who advocated the scheme, was fired as a result of the disclosures, but continues to this day to play a significant role in this public-private axis of computer security and intelligence. Brown became obsessed with journalistically investigating every strand exposed by these HB Gary Federal emails and devoted himself to relentlessly exposing this world. He did the same with the 2012 leak of millions of emails from the private intelligence firm Stratfor, obtained by Anonymous and published by WikiLeaks. As Gallagher describes about Brown's fixation on these documents: The issues Brown was investigating are complex and serious, and I won't detail all of that here. In addition to Gallagher's article, two superb and detailed accounts of Brown's journalism in these areas have been published by Christian Stork of WhoWhatWhy and Vice's Patrick McGuire; read those to see how threatening Brown's work had become to lots of well-connected people. Suffice to say, Brown, using the documents obtained by Anonymous, was digging around - with increasing efficacy - in places which National Security and Surveillance State agencies devote considerable energy to concealing. "Hackers would sometimes obtain data and then pass it on to him. He would spend days and nights hunkered down in his small uptown Dallas apartment pouring through troves of hacked documents, writing blog posts about US government intelligence contractors and their 'misplaced power' while working to garner wider media coverage. . . . "Brown was frustrated that mainstream media outlets were not covering stories he felt deserved attention. He would complain that reporters would often approach him and ask about the personalities of some of the more prominent hackers . . . but ignore the deeper issues about governments and private contractors contained in documents that had been hacked." All of this is the crucial background to the charges he currently faces. In March of last year, Brown's home was raided by the FBI, armed with a search warrant relating to both the HB Gary Federal and the Stratfor leaks. Brown told me they were intent on finding out what he had learned about those firms, particularly HB Gary Federal. Having apparently learned that the FBI agents were coming, Brown went to his mother's home, so the FBI broke down his door and entered his apartment. They seized various documents but could find nothing linking him to either hack, so he was not arrested. After that, FBI agents went to his mother's home. They found Brown there and asked for his laptop, which he denied having. Over the next several months, FBI agents continued to harass not only Brown but also his mother, repeatedly threatening to arrest her and indict her for obstruction of justice for harboring Brown and helping him conceal documents by letting him into her home. Those months of FBI pursuit, but particularly the threats against his mother, finally caused Brown to explode with rage. Brown has been open in discussing his past battles with substance abuse, and at the time, he had stopped taking various medications which he uses to control his addiction problems. In September, he posted detailing that the FBI and HB Gary Federal had threatened to ruin his life, and was particularly incensed about the threats against his mother. Obviously distraught, he said he intended to do the same to the FBI agent making the threats against his mother, FBI agent Robert Smith. While expressly disavowing any intent to physically harm Smith, Brown issued rambling threats to "destroy" Smith.That was more than enough pretext to allow the FBI to do what they long wanted: arrest Brown. The same day he posted the video on YouTube, the FBI arrested him on charges of threatening a federal agent, and then kept him imprisoned with no indictment for weeks on the ground that he posed an immediate threat to Smith. Finally in October, the DOJ unveiled an indictment charging him with three counts of, essentially, harassing a federal officer online. In December, the DOJ filed a second indictment, which is now the heart of the government's case against him. It alleged that he "trafficked" in stolen goods, namely the Stratfor documents leaked by Anonymous and published by WikiLeaks. The indictment focuses on one small part of the leak: a list of Straftor clients and their credit card numbers. Critically, the indictment does not allege that Brown participated in the hack or in obtaining any of those documents. Instead, it simply alleges that he helped "disseminate" the stolen information. He did that, claims the DOJ, when he was in a chat room and posted a link to those documents that were online. As the harsh Anonymous critic Adrian Chen of Gawker wrote: What makes all of this even worse is that there is zero suggestion that Brown made use of these credit card numbers. To the contrary, when Anonymous advocated that people use the numbers to donate money to charity, Brown vocally condemned that suggestion as a distraction from Anonymous' mission. He told me in our telephone interview that he did the same privately. As McGuire wrote: "It's obvious by looking at the most recent posts on Barrett Brown's blog that while he is highly interested in Stratfor, it wasn't the credit card information that motivated him." Is it a crime for someone simply to share a link to stolen information? That seems to be the message conveyed by today's indictment of former Anonymous spokesman Barrett Brown, over a massive hack of the private security firm Stratfor. Brown's in legal trouble for copying and pasting a link from one chat room to another. This is scary to anyone who ever links to anything . . . . "This charge does not allege Brown actually had the credit card numbers on his computer or even created the link: He just allegedly copied a link to a publicly-accessible file with the numbers from one chat room and pasted it into another. . . . As a journalist who covers hackers and has 'transferred and posted' many links to data stolen by hackers - in order to put them in stories about the hacks - this indictment is frightening because it seems to criminalize linking." The documents to which he linked contained all sorts of other information that he wanted to investigate and write about, including Straftor's client list. There are countless legitimate reasons to link to those documents, particularly for a journalist. That this extremely dubious allegation now forms the crux of the DOJ's case against him reveals what a persecution this actually is. In January, the DOJ filed yet another indictment against Brown, its third. This one added charges of "obstruction of justice" for allegedly failing to tell them about his laptop when they came to his mother's house (it also alleged that his mother "aided and abetted" him in these acts, thus maintaining the implicit threat to indict her for having let her son into her home). Those charges, by themselves, carry a possible prison sentence of 20 years. So here we have the US government targeting someone they clearly loathe because of the work he is doing against their actions. Then - using the most dubious legal theories, exploiting vague and broad criminal statutes, and driving him to ill-advised behavior with deliberately vindictive harassment (including aimed at his mother) - they transform what is at worst very trivial offenses into a multi-count felony indictment that has already resulted in his imprisonment for six months and threatens to imprison him for many years more. In his great analysis of the case, Christian Stork compares Brown's treatment to Swartz's (about which Stork wrote previously) and captures perfectly what is going on here and what is at stake: Brown may not be as cuddly as Swartz, and certainly does not have the same roster of influential friends. Nor can it be categorically argued that Brown did nothing wrong (just as many of Swartz's most ardent defenders acknowledged about him): that YouTube video, made when he was admittedly struggling with impaired judgment, was certainly ill-advised. "Swartz's treatment wasn't anomalous, but 'a symptom of the entire disease' that underlies America's singular status as the world's jailer - of those who anger formidable interests, and those without friends in the right places. "Brown's case is even more egregious:As even the government itself concedes, ProjectPM comes under the definition of the legitimate practice of journalism. Brown simply harnessed information gathered from someone else's 'criminal' hack. Then he used it to expose the foul and potentially illegal activities of some of the world's leading corporations - in partnership with secretive sectors of the government. "Brown punctured a wall of secrecy, constructed over the past decade, that shields the state from accountability to its citizens. For that, he is threatened with a century behind bars. "His tale deserves to be told, not just because of the injustice involved. It also shows the awesome power of the Internet in adjusting the balance sheet between the big guys and the small ones. And the lengths the insiders will go to keep their advantage." But none of that should matter. The claim with prosecutorial abuse is never that the person targeted is a perfect being or even that he never did anything wrong. The issue with prosecutorial abuse is that the punishments being meted out are wildly disproportionate to the alleged acts when the trivial harms of the acts are considered and/or that the prosecution is being pursued for improper purposes. That's particularly true when viewed next to the far more egregious criminality the US government shields, Both prongs of prosecutorial abuse are clearly present in Brown's case. There is no evidence that the link he posted to already published documents resulted in any unauthorized use of credit cards, and certainly never redounded in any way to his benefit. More important, this prosecution is driven by the same plainly improper purpose that drove the one directed at Aaron Swartz and so many others: the desire to exploit the power of criminal law to deter and severely punish anyone who meaningfully challenges the government's power to control the flow of information on the internet and conceal its vital actions. Brown's acts, like Swartz's, were political in nature, and the excessive prosecution is equally political. What the US government counts on above all else is that the person it targets is unable to defend themselves against the government's unlimited resources. It takes an enormous amount of money to mount an effective defense. That's what often drives even the most innocent people to plead guilty and agree to long prison terms: they simply have no choice, because their reliance on committed and able but time-strapped public defenders makes conviction at trial highly likely, which - under an outrageous system that punishes people for exercising their right to a fair trial - means a much harsher punishment than if they plead guilty. If the US government is going to attempt to imprison activists and journalists like this, it should at the very least be a fair fight. That means that Brown, who is now represented by a public defender, should have a vigorous defense able to devote the time and energy to his case that it deserves. He told me in the telephone interview we had that he believes this is the key to enabling him to avoid pleading guilty and agreeing to a prison term: something he has thus far refused to do in part because he insists he did nothing criminal, and in part because he refuses to become a government informant. A legal defense fund has been created by several young, smart and committed internet freedom activists, two of whom I had the chance to meet and speak with in the Boston area several weeks ago. I really hope everyone who is able to do so will donate what they can to his defense fund. You can do that at this link here, or via paypal to freebbfund@gmail.com. All donations will be used exclusively to hire private criminal defense counsel and to fund his defense. The US government's serial prosecutorial excesses aimed at internet freedom activists, journalists, whistleblowers and the like are designed to crush meaningful efforts to challenge their power and conduct. It is, I believe, incumbent on everyone who believes in those values to do what they can to support those who are taking real risks in defense of those freedoms and in pursuit of real transparency. Barrett Brown is definitely such a person, and enabling him to resist these attacks is of vital importance. Whistleblower documentary Obviously related to all of this: the great filmmaker Robert Greenwald (no relation) has a new documentary coming out in April entitled "War on Whistleblowers: Free Press and the National Security State". Among other things, it contains interviews with Dan Ellsberg, the Washington Post's Dana Priest, former New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller, persecuted whistleblowers and others (I'm interviewed as well). Here is the new trailer for the documentary: • Editor's note: this article originally referred to private security firm HB Gary Federal as HB Gary; this was amended at 3pm ET on 21 March http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/mar/21/barrett-brown-persecution-anonymous

A bit like Cold War espionage and skulduggery: their success in keeping it such a secret proves it must exist as we imagine it. Shades of 'Eyes Wide Shut'!

Indeed. The increase being 0.579% of the total age as now estimated. More significant is the urgent need for Starfleet-class inertial damping technology, to navigate without whiplash from hitoall's first sentence above to his second one.

You need to rethink your priorities.

I didn't say I liked it. Then again, I didn't deny it either.

How do you know he doesn't like it?