Things to read today

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"In the spring of 2009, after the panel issued its third report, critical of the bailout, Larry Summers took Warren out to dinner in Washington and, she recalls, told her that she had a choice to make. She could be an insider or an outsider, but if she was going to be an insider she needed to understand one unbreakable rule about insiders: 'They don’t criticize other insiders.'"

Larry Summers explains Washington to Elizabeth Warren in one sentence (via Glenn Greenwald)

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Open tabs for Monday

http://boingboing.net/2014/04/14/children-confused-by-walkmans.html

http://washingtonexaminer.com/k-street-loses-a-loyal-ally-in-kathleen-sebelius/article/2547122

http://www.buzzfeed.com/alanwhite/worlds-coolest-dad-recreates-famous-album-covers-with-his-so

http://www.fastcoexist.com/3028167/the-quantified-cattle-dairy-cows-are-now-tracking-their-monthly-cycle

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/04/oil-subsidies-renewable-energy-tax-breaks

http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/04/14/4059006/911-defense-lawyers-accuse-fbi.html

http://www.seattleorganicrestaurants.com/vegan-whole-food/gmo-corn-treated-with-neonicotinoids-pesticides-manufactured-by-Bayer-Syngenta-kill-honeybees.php

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/04/13/us/politics/obama-lets-nsa-exploit-some-internet-flaws-officials-say.html

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117348/ayaan-hirsi-ali-brandeis-controversy

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Why Obama's Regulators Let Wall Street Bankers Off Easy | VICE United States

Remember when the economy collapsed because some people were criminally negligent and nobody went to prison?

"The last successfully litigated complex financial fraud case was in 2005," said one congressional aide who is active on financial issues. "At this point the entire white collar legal profession and much of the court system is rotten. They are too corrupt to even know what corruption is."

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Lack of criminal prosecutions for bankers, hedge funds managers and other moguls has altered the calculus -- huge fines are now a cost of doing business.

The rules have changed, and so have the penalties. The lessons of the post-crisis era are clear:

Laws are made to be broken

Steal Big or don’t bother.

Always reserve 10 percent of your criminal proceeds for your newest partner, Uncle Sam, to settle all claims, both civil and criminal.

Decades from now, when legal scholars try to pinpoint the moment when the U.S. abandoned the Rule of Law, they will point to 2008 crisis as a turning point.

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Where Americans think Ukraine is.

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Citigroup Says the ‘Age of Renewables’ Has Begun : Greentech Media

Investment bank Citi says solar and wind are competing on costs with fossil fuels in the U.S.

The report notes that nuclear and coal are structurally disadvantaged because both technologies are viewed as uncompetitive on cost.

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For a lesson on economics, the book featured a cartoon character of a smiling lump of coal with arms and legs, holding open the door to a bank.

CHEMICAL VALLEY: The coal industry, the politicians, and the big spill

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"But even in Iraq, America sought to work within the international system. We did not claim or annex Iraq’s territory. We did not grab its resources for our own gain. Instead, we ended our war and left Iraq to its people in a fully sovereign Iraqi state that can make decisions about its own future."

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The U.S. military averaged more than a mission a day in Africa in 2013 and previously unrevealed documents indicate more of the same for 2014.

Is it any wonder that the men running America’s secret ops in Africa call it “the battlefield of tomorrow, today”? (via Nick Turse, America’s Non-Stop Ops in Africa | TomDispatch)

[dowackado]

But it’s pretty clarifying, don’t you think? The real obscenity is that people drink that water, that they have no choice but to bathe in it, and to bathe their children in it. You know that, and I know that. But if a massive surface mining operation in the vicinity of your house poisons your water table, and if your well water runs brown with coal sludge and heavy metal particulate, well, that’s just the cost of doing business in America, a cost that will be paid by the Appalachians who only live there. It’s regrettable, at best. You can’t call the police and the state doesn’t want to know. And if you dare to take a picture of child’s exposure to that poison, if you have the nerve to walk into the halls of Congress and show them the obscenity that is a child that must wash herself with poison every day, they will call you a child pornographer. They will call the police.

Obscenity: I Know It When I See It (via dowackado)

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Swedish Pop Mafia

How a culturally conservative effort in the 1940s backfired to create the greatest engine of pop music in the world.

Think of what we could be with free music education for all, free broadband for all -- nah, we'd rather be a nation of claims deniers for insurance companies....

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What it Feels Like to Be Washed Up at 35

A behind-the-scenes report from the most ageist place in America: Silicon Valley.

Consider a fortysomething engineer who was recently up for a job at a company whose product he suspected I use daily. The engineer believes he aced all his technical interviews, then he Skyped with a young programmer he would be working with. “He basically tried to explain to me that it’s a college mentality. People bring their college buddies in. They run around the office, which is a big converted factory, running after each other with Nerf guns,” says the engineer. “He mentioned the word ‘culture’ several times.” The engineer quickly deduced that his chances were roughly nil. “I think that was him saying, not in so many words, ‘Dude, you’re too old for us.’ ”

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When we finally have proof that NSA nanobots are harvesting our very thoughts, remember that you heard it here first — thanks to Tom Tomorrow!

(via The Perks of NSA Surveillance | The Nation)

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Libya is a disaster we helped create. The west must take responsibility

Owen Jones: Who could object to the removal of Colonel Gaddafi? But what has happened since shames western interventionists

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The modern finance industry is at a loss when it comes to justifying its own existence. Its finest minds can’t explain why we wouldn’t be better off with a much simpler and more heavily circumscribed model of capital formation. Sorkin likewise can’t make his readers fully grasp why the current system—which turns large amounts of other people’s money and even more people’s debt into huge paper fortunes for a small super-elite, and in such a way as to regularly imperil the entire worldwide economic order—is beneficial or necessary. But the New York Times and Wall Street each need him to try.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88UVJpQGi88

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Florida’s gruesome execution theater

The state is experimenting on inmates by executing them with drugs that are unproven, untested, and were never designed for killing. And Florida is not alone.

The moon suits still stick out in Word’s memories. “It kind of surprised me when they first showed up. It was kind of bizarre.” Regardless, he says, “after two or three executions they quit using them.” The moon suits appeared to attract rather than deflect attention.