Raining but warm this early Monday on California’s north coast and this whole week is forecast to be all wet.
We all need the water, though.

And meanwhile, the whole world has gone ape shit over those NSA disclosures of snooping on everybody and with the flying burrito brother, Ed Snowden, in Moscow,  the US has near-about screamed at Russia: ‘Send Him Back!‘

However: But Russian media have reported that the country’s security services have no basis for arresting Snowden. Russian officials didn’t immediately comment on the matter Monday.

(Illustration found here).

In fact, the US, the UK and other bullshit countries are afraid of what Snowden really has in his possession.
Investigative journalist Tony Gosling told the Russian news organization, RT, some bad press can come out of this, so the bad guys are after him:

There have been serious crimes over the last ten years — particularly since 9/11 when the war on terror started — in Afghanistan, Iraq, in places like Yemen, Pakistan where many people were murdered through the use of drones and hellfire missiles completely illegally by mainly three countries — Israel, the US and the UK.
But this is what people don’t necessarily understand: there will be information that Edward Snowden has that can actually bring some of these people to trial.
That’s why the West is so afraid.
If Britain was serious about any kind of real justice, we would be able invite him to London and say, “Yes, you can tell all your secrets or stories to people here in Britain, you’ll be safe here.”
Snowden is actually exposing criminals and the criminals are going for him now.
I’m afraid that is the case.

The US, of course, are part of the bad guys — terrible, but true.

Also terrible but true is that the US government — in its current state and its past state, too — cannot be trusted, even if NSA honcho Gen. Keith Alexander says all the surveillance is of “noble intent” the power once turned on cannot be turned off.
This is only the beginning. Wait awhile and see. As President Obama tries to reassure us that all is legal, and there’s much oversight on the whole scheme, we should scream, Bullshit!
Jonathan Schell at The Nation examines the terrible future of this surveillance ‘revolution.’
Some highlights:

The first thing to note about these data is that a mere generation ago, they did not exist.
They are a new power in our midst, flowing from new technology, waiting to be picked up; and power, as always, creates temptation, especially for the already powerful.
Our cellphones track our whereabouts.
Our communications pass through centralized servers and are saved and kept for a potential eternity in storage banks, from which they can be recovered and examined.
Our purchases and contacts and illnesses and entertainments are tracked and agglomerated.
If we are arrested, even our DNA can be taken and stored by the state.
Today, alongside each one of us, there exists a second, electronic self, created in part by us, in part by others.
This other self has become de facto public property, owned chiefly by immense data-crunching corporations, which use it for commercial purposes.
Now government is reaching its hand into those corporations for its own purposes, creating a brand-new domain of the state-corporate complex.
Surveillance of people on this scale turns basic liberties—above all the Fourth Amendment, which protects citizens against unreasonable search and seizure—into a dead letter.
Government officials, it is true, assure us that they will never pull the edges of the net tight.
They tell us that although they could know everything about us, they won’t decide to.
They’ll let the information sit unexamined in the electronic vaults.
But history, whether of our country or others, teaches that only a fool would place faith in such assurances.
What one president refrains from doing the next will do; what is left undone in peacetime is done when a crisis comes.
…
Our system of checks and balances has gone into reverse.
The three branches, far from checking one another’s power or protecting the rights of Americans, entered one after another into collusion to violate them, even to the extent of immunizing the wrongdoers.
Balanced, checked power has become fused power — exactly what the founders of this country feared above all else.
The political parties have been no more useful as checks than the branches of government; their leaderships stand together protecting the abuses, though individual senators, including Jeff Merkley and Ron Wyden, have proposed sensible reforms.
Finally, even elections have proven ineffective: the voters chose a president who taught constitutional law running on a platform of stopping civil liberties abuses; but he has become the author of new abuses.
Even now, his soothing demeanor and reputation for liberalism (“Change we can believe in”) confuses and thwarts those who otherwise would be reacting with anger.

Eye in the sky, pie in the oven.