Linkage

• Against Fortress Liberalism (Jacobin) Money quote: "For forty years, liberals have accepted defeat and called it “incremental progress."
• EU Files New Antitrust Charges Against Google Over Android Apps (NPR) All your base are belong to us.
• Panama Papers include top military contractor Triple Canopy (Fusion) Mercenaries laundering money? Least surprising news of the decade.
• Why Western Mass Doesn’t Have the Internet (Backchannel) This is what happens when you elect Republicans. Any attempts at benefiting the greater good through collective action is sabotaged. Rather ironically, Western Mass is the Republican part of the state.
• Google’s Remarkably Close Relationship With the Obama White House, in Two Charts (The Intercept)  Not surprising:  Both entities are opaque, secretive, paranoid, and dedicated to supporters of undermining our privacy.
• FBI informant who lived with 911 hijackers Nawaf Al-Hazmi and Khalid AI-Mihdhar (28 Pages) (PDF) You can also read a summary here.
• When Media Shill For Saudi Money (Moon of Alabama)  A nice survey of lobbying by the House of Saud.
• Fantasy Math Is Helping Companies Spin Losses Into Profits (New York Times) They should call it fraud, but they don't.
• Radical Islamism Flops in Scotland (War Is Boring) Unlike most of the rest of Europe, the Scotts don't segregate and impoverish their Muslim immigrants.
• The web is DOOM'd: Average page now as big as id's DOS classic (The Register) Too much crap JavaScript out there.
• Fair use prevails as Supreme Court rejects Google Books copyright case (Ars Technica) The decision going the other way would result in lesser known works vanishing over the next few years.
• UK dead-set on 10-year sentences for P2P pirates (Ars Technica) Why file sharing is not a matter for private torts is beyond me, so I see 10 years as batsh%$ insane.

Here is a neat video of a model of a dam failure scale model doe by some school kids: