This evening's music features blues rocker Rory Gallagher.

Here are some stories from tonight's posting:

Fanboys' favorite artist turns his back on bots.

Hope dashed: Obama poster artist says president is a disappointment

Shepard Fairey, whose blue and red portrait became the defining image of the 2008 campaign, says president did not live up to the hype – ‘not even close’

The man on the poster is still president. But the artist behind the poster has moved on.

Shepard Fairey, whose stencil portrait of Barack Obama with the caption “Hope” became the defining image of the 2008 presidential campaign, told Esquire magazine in an interview published on Thursday that the politician had not lived up to the propaganda.

“Not even close,” Fairey said.

“Obama has had a really tough time, but there have been a lot of things that he’s compromised on that I never would have expected. I mean, drones and domestic spying are the last things I would have thought [he’d support].”

Obama denies the "Pottery Barn rule."

White House: US Not Responsible for Iraqi Security

In an effort that simultaneously seeks to eschew responsibility for the situation on the ground and to define certain limits on the scope of the US war, the White House today declared itself to be unwilling to be “responsible” for the security situation in Iraq.

Though press secretary Josh Earnest emphasized the growing problem of foreign fighters flowing into Iraq, he insisted the war itself, at least on the ground, was up to the Iraqi government to fight and win.

This comes irrespective of Pentagon efforts to dictate exactly where and when Iraqi forces launch offensives, and to try to push them into cooperative relationships with pro-US tribal factions.

Inside NSA, Officials Privately Criticize “Collect It All” Surveillance

As members of Congress struggle to agree on which surveillance programs to re-authorize before the Patriot Act expires, they might consider the unusual advice of an intelligence analyst at the National Security Agency who warned about the danger of collecting too much data. Imagine, the analyst wrote in a leaked document, that you are standing in a shopping aisle trying to decide between jam, jelly or fruit spread, which size, sugar-free or not, generic or Smucker’s. It can be paralyzing.

“We in the agency are at risk of a similar, collective paralysis in the face of a dizzying array of choices every single day,” the analyst wrote in 2011. “’Analysis paralysis’ isn’t only a cute rhyme. It’s the term for what happens when you spend so much time analyzing a situation that you ultimately stymie any outcome …. It’s what happens in SIGINT [signals intelligence] when we have access to endless possibilities, but we struggle to prioritize, narrow, and exploit the best ones.”

The document is one of about a dozen in which NSA intelligence experts express concerns usually heard from the agency’s critics: that the U.S. government’s “collect it all” strategy can undermine the effort to fight terrorism. The documents, provided to The Intercept by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, appear to contradict years of statements from senior officials who have claimed that pervasive surveillance of global communications helps the government identify terrorists before they strike or quickly find them after an attack.

The Patriot Act, portions of which expire on Sunday, has been used since 2001 to conduct a number of dragnet surveillance programs, including the bulk collection of phone metadata from American companies. But the documents suggest that analysts at the NSA have drowned in data since 9/11, making it more difficult for them to find the real threats.

What Happens #IfThePatriotActExpires? ISIS, Hellfire, Doom http://t.co/WMCjDaNX1S by @georgejoseph94 pic.twitter.com/vokJaB1J6g

— The Intercept (@the_intercept) May 28, 2015

#IfThePatriotActExpires then giant zombie Bin Laden will rise from the dead and terrorize America. pic.twitter.com/uSLg8AudMd

— Charles Featherstone (@Feathersongs) May 28, 2015

#IfThePatriotActExpires Putin will finally be able to unleash his army of laser-eyed flying bears. @ggreenwald pic.twitter.com/uLyNm9LW60

— StalinZilla (@StalinZilla) May 28, 2015

*Peels off 215 label*
*Places 12333 label*
There, happy? We're no longer collecting data under section 215 of the Patriot Act

— NSA Public Relations (@NSA_PR) May 7, 2015

Big data is coming for your purchase history - to charge you more money

Unprotected consumer data will allow price personalization by companies who know how much you need something and how much you can manage pay

A study by Benjamin Reed Shiller, an economist at Brandeis University looked at what happened to Netflix’s profits when it collected varying degrees of information about its customers and charged different prices for the same product. Just having basic demographic information alone to charge different prices increased profits 0.14%, while adding data from web browsing history increased profits by 1.4%, with some customers paying twice as much as others for the exact same product.

The goal is to get to a market of one. One-to-one selling pits each individual against a far more knowledgeable and sophisticated seller. Instead of standard prices and products offered to everyone, companies can instantly set prices specifically for you. In the right circumstances, a company that knows how much you need something and how much you can manage to pay can empty your wallet in a millisecond. ...

Before the internet, market power was equated with monopoly, the power of a single seller across a large market. Big data changes the game, tilting the balance dramatically in favor of data-rich sellers. Rather than raising prices uniformly across huge markets, a data-rich seller can opportunistically exercise power where traditional monopoly is not visible, charging extra for gas today and a bit more for a movie tomorrow. That granular capability is entirely new, and requires new responses.

That’s why antitrust enforcement has become more important than ever as big data supercharges the power of traditional monopolies. Consumers are just as vulnerable to the effects of personalized pricing as they are to price fixing - yet the government has done little to put safeguards in place. That’s why we must start with protecting the very weapon that companies use against us: our data.

The US and China can avoid a collision course – if the US gives up its empire

The problem isn’t China’s rise, but rather America’s insistence on maintaining military and economic dominance right in China’s backyard

Americans fear that China’s rapid economic growth will slowly translate into a more expansive and assertive foreign policy that will inevitably result in a war with the US. Harvard Professor Graham Allison has found: “in 12 of 16 cases in the past 500 years when a rising power challenged a ruling power, the outcome was war.” Chicago University scholar John Mearsheimer has bluntly argued: “China cannot rise peacefully.”

But the apparently looming conflict between the US and China is not because of China’s rise per se, but rather because the US insists on maintaining military and economic dominance among China’s neighbors. Although Americans like to think of their massive overseas military presence as a benign force that’s inherently stabilizing, Beijing certainly doesn’t see it that way. ...

Leaving aside caricatured debates about which nation should get to wave the big “Number 1” foam finger, it’s worth asking whether having 50,000 US troops permanently stationed in Japan actually serves US interests and what benefits we derive from keeping almost 30,000 US troops in South Korea and whether Americans will be any safer if the Obama administration manages to reestablish a US military presence in the Philippines to counter China’s maritime territorial claims in the South China Sea. ...

International relations theorist Robert Jervis has written that “the pursuit of primacy was what great power politics was all about in the past” but that, in a world of nuclear weapons with “low security threats and great common interests among the developed countries”, primacy does not have the strategic or economic benefits it once had. ...

The struggle for military and economic primacy in Asia is not really about our core national security interests; rather, it’s about preserving status, prestige and America’s neurotic image of itself. Those are pretty dumb reasons to risk war.

Obama's Arctic drilling tweets alarm environmentalists

Environmental groups were baffled on Thursday after President Barack Obama wrote a series of seemingly misleading tweets justifying Royal Dutch Shell being allowed back into the US Arctic for exploration and drilling.

Two weeks ago, the Obama administration gave Shell the go-ahead to restart drilling in the region despite repeated warnings from environmentalists that it could very probably lead to an ecological disaster as well as a finding in one of the government’s own reports that the likelihood of a spill in the next 77 years was as high as 75%. ...

Obama, using his recently acquired @POTUS Twitter handle, answered a question posed to him: “Why are you allowing oil drilling in the Arctic if you are concerned about climate change?”

The president’s response was issued in three parts.

@BigBennyFL 1/ We've shut off drilling in the most sensitive arctic areas, including Bristol Bay.

— President Obama (@POTUS) May 28, 2015

.@BigBennyFL 2/ But since we can't prevent oil exploration completely in region we're setting the highest possible standards

— President Obama (@POTUS) May 28, 2015

.@BigBennyFL 3/ already rejected Shell's original proposal as inadequate which shows we're serious.

— President Obama (@POTUS) May 28, 2015

Addressing the claim that oil exploration could not be entirely prevented in the region, Cassady Sharp with Greenpeace said oil exploration in the US Arctic could be halted, and that the person who could halt it was the president himself.

“He has the power as the executive branch,” Sharp said, adding Obama had not shied away from executive action in other fields.

“He is skirting around the issue, making it look like the decision [to allow Shell into the US Arctic for drilling] is not in his hands, when it is.”