As he has done repeatedly in the past couple of years, Bernanke again bemoaned the government's austerity obsession on Wednesday, including this year's payroll-tax increase and the brutal budget cuts of sequestration.  Bernanke suggested that the government could replace some of this foolishness with longer-term fixes to Social Security and Medicare. A "Grand Bargain" on the deficit that does away with some short-term austerity might help the economy, Bernanke added.

A new proposal reportedly allows the FBI to listen in on any conversation online, regardless of the technology used, by mandating engineers build "backdoors" into communications software. The White House is currently debating whether or not to introduce the bill. EFF supporters should tell the administration now that it needs to stop this plan in its tracks.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki has called for serious change in the senior ranks of Iraq's armed forces, in light of the recent wave of violence that has swept the country over the past month. 

AP reported that Iraqi spokesman Ali Al Moussawi announced that these changes will include "commanders of divisions and operation commands nationwide". 

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Canadian artist Howie Tsui redesigned a pinball machine to turn it into a crude simulation of a musket-ball rattling around a soldier's guts for a War of 1812-themed exhibition currently running at the Agnes Etherington Arts Centre at Queens University in Kingston. It's meant to demonstrate the way that repetition and concentration can inure you to the horrors of war:

The first part of his exhibition is a re-themed pinball machine, which now, having been Tsui-ed, is called Musketball! Tsui repainted the front glass panel and it now shows a British soldier reeling back as his guts explode from a musket shot (no rolling around inside for this one). The playing surface is painted with organs, tissue and bone, with the words “mangled viscera” at midfield. It would all be tame in a modern shooter video game, but it’s shockingly graphic on a vintage board.

I step up to the game and fire my first ball, which gets back in the gutter faster than I thought possible. I fire the second ball — which I note are gold, not silver, to which Tsui says, “I kind of blinged it up a little bit.” This ball stays in play just long enough to hit a few bumpers and set off sound effects of rifle shots and artillery blasts. I fire my remaining three balls, and my final score is slightly less than one-tenth of Tsui’s high score. “It’s your first time playing. I had to do a lot of testing,” Tsui says, showing he’s also talented in the art of diplomacy.

“After a while,” he says, “you sort of get hooked on the game, and the whole idea for me is that it distances the player from the idea of violence.”

Pinball, bones and animal skins: Howie Tsui’s wonderful horrors of the War of 1812 [Peter Simpson/Ottawa Citizen]

(via Kadrey)     

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One of the most damning accusations against copyright-trolling operation Prenda Law is that the attorneys who manage it engaged in identity theft. Corporate papers on Prenda shell companies were signed by Alan Cooper, the former housekeeper of John Steele. Cooper has said someone else signed his name; Prenda-linked lawyers have said Cooper is basically crazy.

Crazy or not, Cooper lawyered up. He sued Prenda for fraudulent use of his name and the accusations were heard in court this week. At the same time, Prenda lawyers are continuing to fight off a devastating sanctions order with penalties growing at the rate of $1,000 per day.

Observant citizen and Minneapolis resident Matthew Sparby published an article about his observations on the recent Cooper v. Prenda hearing at Techdirt.

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While many of America's classrooms remain criminally regressive when it comes to their sexual education policies, today Illinois has helped put a kibosh on some of that bullshit by stepping slightly into the 21st Century.

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