Obsidian Wings

Extraordinary Rendition

by liberal japonicus

The Guardian has a piece today about revelations about CIA extraordinary rendition network as revealed by recent court filings in upstate New York. This article (which confusingly has the same picture at the top and so could be confused with the previous one) gives more details while this companion opinion notes how the information was essentially hidden in plain sight.

This AP piece gives a bit more detail about what was revealed and how it was revealed.

I'm not sure how the case came about, but hope some of the lawyers in the commentariat might be able to point to it. I did find this European Parliament Working Paper (pdf) from 2006 on rendition flights, but it seems that the lawsuit was completely orthogonal to any questions of renditions. 

This topic is what I have always thought of as the meat and potatoes of this blog, but I'm certainly not the person to do this justice, so, absent the return of some of the folks on the left sidebar, if someone would like to do a guest post on this, please let me know at libjpn at gmail.

Barring that, I'd note a few points of intersection with recent discussions. First of all, I'd like to note my prescience in praising the Guardian earlier, which makes the score 1 correct to umpteen million wrong.

More interestingly, we've had a bit of a food fight about taxation and I wonder what the regulars would say about government "taking their stuff" to pay 

$301,113 relating to a series of flights over eight days that took the Gulfstream jet on an odyssey through Alaska, Japan, Thailand, Afghanistan and Sri Lanka, tallies with the rendition of Encep Nuraman, the leader of the Indonesian terrorist organisation Jemaah Islamiyah, better known as Hambali.

or this

The Gulfstream IV executive jet was made available at a cut-rate $4,900 (about £3,000) an hour. Crew members were paid $800 a day, according to invoices submitted to the hearing. They would submit expenses claims for meals (pdf) – deli sandwiches at $19.95 a time, bottles of wine at $39.95 each – and stay in expensive hotels: $391 a head for one night's stay in Barcelona in January 2004, for example; $277 each for accommodation at Shannon on the west coast of Ireland the following August.

So, at the risk of putting the fox in the henhouse, have at it.

View of an outsider

by liberal japonicus

I mentioned that I was really attracted to the Guardian site after reading it quite a bit for the Murdoch phone hacking scandal. The paper has been, strangely enough, a thread for me in my wanderings. I remember getting it in the UK when I visited my uncle on numerous occasions and turning to it when I lived in Europe. When I first came to Japan, I got an international subscription, which would come on this incredibly, almost tissue like paper. But there were more substantive reasons that I put below the fold.

Bunker Hunkering

by Doctor Science

Incoming Tide, Scarboro, Maine by Winslow Homer, IMHO the greatest painter of the ocean in the canon of Western art.

We're finishing up our Irene prep, so I'll keep this short. We're 30 miles from the ocean, so we don't have to worry about storm surges and such. Using Hurricane Floyd as our baseline, we expect a power outage, a couple inches of water in the basement, and possibly the water treatment plant will fail again and we don't have potable water for a few days. We have a gas stove this time, so I'm not too worried about not having food.

Your conching Friday open thread

by liberal japonicus

If you are like me, you may have assumed that the conching in this title is another bizarre and short-lived stunt like planking or owling. It's not:

Attention hipsters and other people seeking hipness: there’s a new fad catching on in Western Australia's Shark Bay, and you won’t want to be the last to to post pictures of yourself imitating it to your Tumblr feed. “Conching” is a method by which Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins are trapping small fish in conch shells, bringing the shells to the surface, and then shaking them with their rostrums to clear out the water and dump the fish into their mouths. More remarkably, the trend appears to be spreading throughout an entire population of dolphins, and fast.

To all the cetaceans out there: Sorry you have to share a planet with us, guys. You deserve better.

The Time of the Season

by Doctor Science

In Why We Eat What We Eat, Raymond Sokolov wrote:

Real (as I will call vine-ripened, soft-walled, acid-flavored, summer-grown) tomatoes are an article of faith, a rallying point for the morally serious, a grail. And the real tomato's acolytes are not some ragged band of malcontents. They are us, brothers and sisters in tomato-mania, converts to the first Western religion since the Stone Age to worship a plant. [p. 112; emphasis mine]

Sokolov's book was published 20 years ago, but his remarks about tomatoes have only become more accurate with time.

On the one hand, we have what you might call Tomato Satanism, described by Brian Estabrook in Tomatoland: winter tomatoes from Florida, hard and tasteless, raised on chemicals and picked by workers who may be out-and-out slaves.

On the other, there's this:

Wow. Just wow.

by liberal japonicus

This news from the Electronic Frontier Foundation really has me wondering. 

The “first sale” principle is what allows the purchaser of a copy of a book or CD or other copyrighted work to later resell that copy to someone else without infringing the copyright owner’s distribution right. It’s an important free-market limitation on copyright owners’ rights that most of us take for granted. In the recent Second Circuit case, Wiley v. Kirtsaeng, a graduate student lawfully acquired foreign editions of textbooks abroad and then resold them in the United States. The student was subsequently sued by the U.S. textbook owner for copyright infringement. Looking at the statutory language of the first sale provision together with another provision of the Copyright Act concerning importation of copyrighted works, the court concluded that the first sale doctrine applies only to copies that are manufactured domestically, and not to copies manufactured abroad.

I'm no lawyer and I don't even play one on this blog, but looking at the opinion, I find this

The Court explained that Wiley could not introduce evidence of profits earned by Kirtsaeng from the sales of textbooks produced by other publishers, but “in . . . anticipation that the net worth testimony [would indicate] that [Kirtsaeng did not have] significant net worth . . . [Wiley’s counsel had the] right to inquire about additional revenues and the profits therefrom and where they went in order to make sure that we had an accurate record about [Kirtsaeng’s] net worth.”

Reading down, there was this

In a factually similar case from 2008, the Ninth Circuit found that the mere presence of a copyrighted logo enabled a manufacturer to invoke the first sale doctrine to block the unauthorized sale of imported goods. But the court created a limitation on that principle: If the initial sale had occurred with the copyright owner’s authority, then the first sale doctrine would apply. The Wiley court established no such limitation. Under its holding, even a sale authorized by the copyright owner would not trigger first sale provisions. The breadth of the rule is striking.

It is indeed. 

your asynchronous Friday open thread

by liberal japonicus

Asynchronous because it's Sunday here. Whoops. 

Working at a university means, at least for me, that when there are no classes, I really have no schedule. Lots of things to do, mind you, but not having the comforting rigidity of classes means that I don't pay much attention to what day it is. Sorry about that.

So, tell us about your schedule? What anchors it and what wrecks it?

the new normal

by russell

OK, here is some food for thought.

My personal take on this: folks who are, say, younger than forty should not plan on living as well as their folks did.

Sorry about that kids.

Likewise, folks who are, say, fifty and over, and who got hit with big losses over the last couple of years - I'm talking lost jobs, savings, homes - are probably not ever going to live as well as might have before, say, fall of 2008.  For a lot of folks, that ground is lost, and is not going to be made up.

Get used to it.  It's a great big crap sandwich, and we're all going to eat our bite, some way more than others, until it's all gone.

Jobs may well be returning to the US, but they're gonna pay $10 an hour.  Employment at will, limited or no benefits, no retirement other than whatever you put together for yourself.

If you're some form of exceptionally clever fellow and work your behind off, you may find a way to do well.  Most folks will basically scrape by, one way or another.  For a lot of folks, that's gonna be for their entire productive lives.

But the kind of world I grew up in, where a person of average ability with a reasonable work ethic could expect to find some kind of useful, satifsfying work to do, and achieve a moderate level of basic financial security, is probably not going to happen for a lot of folks.  Probably the majority.  For quite a while.

Welcome to the new normal.  It took us a generation to dig ourselves into this, it's gonna take us at least a generation to dig ourselves back out.

What if you weren't you?

by liberal japonicus

This piece about Ralph Branca prompts that question.

When I had phoned Branca and told him that his mother, Kati, was Jewish and that thus, according to traditional Jewish law, he and his 16 siblings were, too, the loud man was quiet. But when I had told him of the murder of his uncle, Branca had looked for words. “Uh, oh, boy,” he had said. “My mother never mentioned this to me.”

Interesting read.

Michele Bachmann gave me her migraines Friday open thread

It is the most logical explanation. Discuss