New York Times reporter James Risen, via Twitter.

James Risen recently won the Elijah Parish Lovejoy Journalism Award for excellence in journalism.

The Pulitzer Prize winning national security reporter has long been hounded by the US Justice Department to disclose his confidential sources from his 2006 book State of War.

As the Washington Post wrote back in August, “Prosecutors want Mr. Risen’s testimony in their case against Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA official who is accused of leaking details of a failed operation against Iran’s nuclear program. Mr. Risen properly has refused to identify his source, at the risk of imprisonment. Such confidential sources are a pillar of how journalists obtain information. If Mr. Risen is forced to reveal the identity of a source, it will damage the ability of journalists to promise confidentiality to sources and to probe government behavior.”

While accepting the Lovejoy Award, Risen had this to say:

Bonus: The NSA and Me, James Bamford’s account of covering the agency over the last 30 years, via The Intercept.

Double Bonus: Elijah Parish Lovejoy was a minister in the first half of the 19th century who edited an abolitionist paper called the St. Louis Observer. He was murdered by a pro-slavery mob in 1837. More via Wikipedia.

Images: Selected tweets via James Risen.

And the photo of the day is…

via ianbremmer

Re: the Holocaust

I personally feel that the Germans went too far.

Venezuela is on the verge of both economic and social collapse, and the Bolivarian socialist government headed by President Nicolás Maduro is lashing out any everyone from “whingeing” factory owners (who lack the raw materials they need to produce anything of value) to the U.S. government, who he accused offormenting a coup when he extended the nation’s state of emergency last Friday.

The style of socialism introduced to the oil-rich country by Maduro’s predecessor, the late Hugo Chavez, was credited bySalon’s David Sirota with creating an economic miracle as recently as 2013. But the disaster currently unfolding is more than just a failure of socialism.

Venezuela has been spending a fortune on unnecessary and ridiculous expenditures for years. That is, when government officials haven’t been (allegedly) stealing billions in oil profits and pocketing the cash outright.

Despite sitting on the world’s largest oil reserves and having nationalized oil production, Venezuela spends $45 million a year on Pastor Maldonado — an undistinguished Formula One race car driver with a predilection for crashing a lot — who essentially serves as a walking billboard for the country’s oil company. Wasting taxpayer money on sponsoring a loser athlete is bad enough, but what could possibly be the justification for spending that kind of cash to advertise the national oil company, which by definition has no competition?

The waste and graft surrounding sports doesn’t end with Maldonado. Formula Freak reports that following Chavez’s death in 2013, “Alejandra Benitez, the Venezuelan minister of sports, found that her falsified signature had moved over 65 million in sporting-fund dollars to places in which it did not belong.”

In 2007, as part of Chavez’s ambition to “combat American cultural hegemony,” he forked over nearly $18 million for “scripts, production costs, wardrobe, lighting, transport, makeup and the creation of the whole creative and administrative platform” of a prospective Danny Glover-helmed film project about a Haitian slave revolt. The film never went into production.

Pro-free market types enjoyed a good laugh when the country’s largest beer company ceased production last month, as a direct result of a lack of access to foreign currency and a domestic currency now more useful as toilet paper than legal tender, but the situation in Venezuela grows more tragic by the day.

Though supermarket shelves are pretty much empty these days, for the past two years the government has been fingerprinting shoppers to prevent “hoarding,” which itself was also made illegal. As could be completely expected by such scarcity of basic items needed to live, much less live in any semblance of comfort, Bolivarian socialism has spawned a thriving black market.

“In a system that mirrors the rationing implemented across communist countries last century,” Andrew Rosati writes in Bloomberg, “Venezuelans are allotted certain days of the week that they can purchase goods deemed most essential by the government.” The hole in the marketplace is now filled by entrepreneurs known as bachaqueros, who in turn “have developed their own ecosystem, rules and regulations.”

Though Maduro would classify any unauthorized transaction as emblematic of the “economic war” he imagines himself fighting, the economic realities his movement has created have led to “Doctors and accountants moonlight[ing] as cooks at restaurants” and everyday survival the only matter of concern to the populace.

Electricity has been rationed and the workweek has been cut to two days. The government, never known for its tolerance for dissent dating back to Chavez’s earliest days in office, recently tried to get a U.S. court to shut own a website advertising favorable exchange rates in towns along the Colombia-Venezuela border.

In The Wall Street Journal, Mary O'Grady wrote of how the hunger of the Venezuelan people can be directly pinned on the arrogance and incompetence of the government:

Venezuela has had “free health care for all” since 1999, and has long relied on imported Cuban doctors to make good on that promise to the people, but these days basic medical items like gloves, soap, and intravenous fluids are nearly impossible to come by, to say nothing of medicine and equipment such as X-Ray and dialysis machines.

China will likely help Venezuela stay afloat during its self-created inflation crisis with a $5 billion loan, but with babies dyingfor lack of basic medical care, riots and looting born of sheer desperation, and the very real and growing risk of a military coup, stability may be a luxury Venezuela can’t afford for a long time to come.

@enrique262

That face. He knows what’s up.

YO OKAY SO I WAS IN THE DIAMOND DISTRICT IN NYC JUST CASUALLY WINDOW SHOPPING AND SHIT, YOU KNOW, THE USUAL, WHEN ALL OF A SUDDEN THIS FUCKING THING CATCHES MY EYE. THIS. FUCKING. THING. ITS AS BIG AS MY FUCKING HAND AND ITS MADE OF REAL MUFUCKIN DIAMONDS AND GOLD. THIS HAS GONE TOO FAR PEOPLE. LOOK WHAT YOUVE DONE. THIS IS WHAT THE WORLD HAS COME TO. FUCK.

what a shrektacular piece of jewelry 

all that glitters is gold

@renegadebusiness

When they got machine guns and yo NCO tells you to fix bayonets.

people are shitting on avgn for this

why would you even take time out of your day to even get mad about this, who gives a shit. he’s a cool guy and just made a video saying hes not fuckin seeing this shitty movie like leave the man be DAMN hes not even being angry or mean spirited 

me irl

I hope you like the taste of Babylonian sausage

And I hope you like seeing your people being massacred by merchants . I sure do :D