4 December 2011

via Skeptical Eye, "75 Years in Prison For Videotaping Police"
[the youtube link is here.]

(I've discussed this trend before: "The right to be forgotten.")


Thomas Rogers, in Salon: The Internet: Triumph of human evolution
The Web is more than just a powerful tool, it's our greatest adaptation. An expert explains why

The Internet allows us to do all kinds of things we never imagined possible. It lets us communicate with people across the world. We can learn whatever we want at the click of a button. We can navigate roads using our iPhones, and translate languages within seconds. It makes us smarter, and more versatile, and faster than ever. But the Web isn’t just a truly extraordinary invention, it is the apex of human evolution — and the ultimate evolutionary adaptation.

It may seem strange to think of the Web as part of the process of natural selection, but Raymond Neubauer, a professor at the University of Texas, doesn’t think so. In his far-reaching new book, “Evolution and the Emergent Self,” he argues that technology should be seen as part of our planet’s grand evolutionary narrative.

Neubauer's book sounds interesting, but I doubt I'll read it because of my limited time and budget. Although it occurs to me from what I gleaned from Rogers's article, that the prof is more likely channeling Hegel than Darwin, because I see several decades of devolution likely to be in store for us.

see also Ian Welsh, "Public Opinion is Irrelevant"

Where's your warrant, flatfoot?

Jack Crow, KFO, this one's for you: "Make Mine Freedom", from 1948.

I found this fascinating. Yes, they gloss over a lot. Ironically some of the things that "-ism" brought to these characters like the union busting, is here today, and not because the commies took over.

Also, they'd probably have to leave the bit out about protection against cruel punishment today.(Or maybe not, the power of projection and compartmentalization being what it is.)

STFU 2011

If you missed the eminently missable SOTU 2011, the transcript is here. Tax cuts, defunding social security,[via] but not the war in Afghanistan. Is it possible that he really believes his proposals will actually arrest the long term decline of the US, rather than accelerate it? If Barry is really as smart as his apologists say he is, then you'd think he knows better.

BHO=GWB.

For years I believed the democrats were the good guys and the republicans were the bad guys. I even voted for Mondale in '84, as well as Dukakis and Clinton later on. Now I believe the democrats are the bad guys and the republicans are the bad guys, and the so-called tea partiers are just crazy and stupid, daydreaming about their cock-eyed vision of the pre-civil rights era. Bipartisanship, at least as as most people construe it is likewise delusional, a psychological crutch for those who want to believe the system still works, and don't want to see the rot. Don't get me wrong- I understand the desire to believe, but the only choice we have left is whether or not we withhold our consent. That's all they want from us anyway, the conferral of legitimacy. Our opinions about what they do tofor us are irrelevant.

Friday, 14 May 2010

photo: Eboni Knox USAF

Chris Hedges, "No One Cares":

"The roots of mass apathy are found in the profound divide between liberals, who are mostly white and well educated, and our disenfranchised working class, whose sons and daughters, because they cannot get decent jobs with benefits, have few options besides the military. Liberals, whose children are more often to be found in elite colleges than the Marine Corps, did not fight the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994 and the dismantling of our manufacturing base. They did nothing when the Democrats gutted welfare two years later and stood by as our banks were turned over to Wall Street speculators.

They signed on, by supporting the Clinton and Obama Democrats, for the corporate rape carried out in the name of globalization and endless war, and they ignored the plight of the poor. And for this reason the poor have little interest in the moral protestations of liberals. We have lost all credibility. We are justly hated for our tacit complicity in the corporate assault on workers and their families.

Our passivity has resulted, however, in much more than imperial adventurism and a permanent underclass. A slow-motion coup by a corporate state has cemented into place a neofeudalism in which there are only masters and serfs. And the process is one that cannot be reversed through the traditional mechanisms of electoral politics."

and Michael Hudson, "Euro-Bankers Demand of Greece: the wealthy won’t pay their taxes, so labor must do so":

Riddle: How are the Greek rioters like America’s Tea Party movement?
Answer: Both reject government being taken over by the financial oligarchy to shift the tax burden onto labor.

The difference is that the Tea Partiers have lost faith in government. This is just what the financial oligarchy wants, of course. Giving up hope of gaining electoral control to pursue a fair fiscal agenda, the Tea Partiers have abandoned the centuries-long fight for reform to make governments better by giving them the power to check predatory finance and wealth. Sliding to the right wing of the political spectrum and acting mainly out of frustration, they have succumbed to a utopian desire simply to shrink a government that they see acting adversely to their interests.

Financial lobbyists are using the Greek crisis as an object lesson to warn about the need to cut back public spending on Social Security and Medicare. This is the opposite of what the Greek demonstrators are demanding: to reverse the global tax shift off property and finance onto labor, and to give labor’s financial claims for retirement pensions priority over claims by the banks to get fully paid on hundreds of billions of dollars of recklessly bad loans recently reduced to junk status.

Bank lobbyists know that the financial game is over. They are playing for the short run. The financial sector’s aim is to take as much bailout money as it can and run, with large enough annual bonuses to lord it over the rest of society after the Clean Slate finally arrives. Less public spending on social programs will leave more bailout money to pay the banks for their exponentially rising bad debts that cannot possibly be paid in the end. It is inevitable that loans and bonds will default in the usual convulsion of bankruptcy.

via Xymphora and Ella2007k.

I don't entirely agree with Michael Hudson's assessment of the Tea-partiers having given up on government, although their demands on government are incoherent. Reduce taxes and pay down the deficit? And they're mostly middle-class whites, hence able to afford gated communities, at least for now.

For the next three weeks or so I have non-Horse things to attend to, but I will put up the expanded blogroll in the first week in June. In the meantime be nice to Rob n' Mimi n' Micah n' Bob, cause they're swell.

the real news: Matt Welch discusses European style healthcare

My computer at home is acting up and for once I don't seem to be able to fix it without outside help. As always I am grateful for Rob Payne for more than holding up his end of the horse, as it were. the above is an interview that Paul Jay did recently with Matt Welch of Reason magazine.

A Star chamber

The DMCA, perhaps notably enacted when the last democrat was president, was bad enough. I don't remember the specifics of the progression of copyright law, but I seem to recall that in the 1790s copyright was for just 14 years. Under the DMCA it can be as much as 95 years for corporate-held copyrights, and the lifetime of the artist plus 70 for individuals and their estates, which is undoubtedly why so many dead people like Marilyn Monroe and Elvis are raking it in.

Now there's this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Counterfeiting_Trade_Agreement

via Avedon Carol:

In other news, you can kiss Flickr good-bye thanks to Mr. Internet-savvy Obama and his secret copyright treaty, which requires ISPs to go out of their way to police user-contributed material for copyright violations, to cut off internet access too anyone accused of such a violation (and anyone who shares the same net access), and make this insanity international. I just knew they were going to take this thing away from us....

Arthur Silber: "The Internet as You Know It Will Cease to Exist", who links to

Cory Doctorow:

The internet chapter of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a secret copyright treaty whose text Obama's administration refused to disclose due to "national security" concerns, has leaked. It's bad. It says:

* That ISPs have to proactively police copyright on user-contributed material. This means that it will be impossible to run a service like Flickr or YouTube or Blogger, since hiring enough lawyers to ensure that the mountain of material uploaded every second isn't infringing will exceed any hope of profitability.

* That ISPs have to cut off the Internet access of accused copyright infringers or face liability. This means that your entire family could be denied to the internet -- and hence to civic participation, health information, education, communications, and their means of earning a living -- if one member is accused of copyright infringement, without access to a trial or counsel.

If you piss off a corporation-- or anybody substantially more powerful than you-- they can acuse you of copyright infringement and law enforcement takes your stuff away, maybe including your means to defend yourself. Sounds a little like the War On Drugs®, doesn't it?

She's a witch!

Incidentally, it's Guy Fawkes' night in the UK.

we don't do body counts

Wednesday, 7 October 2009: 8th anniversary of the first airstrikes in the US-led invasion of Afghanistan.

Friday, 9 October 2009: Obama awarded Nobel peace prize.

''I think it would be a profound mistake for us to use nuclear weapons in any circumstance, involving civilians. Let me scratch that. There's been no discussion of nuclear weapons. That's not on the table.''

Barach Obama, 2008


"Please don't bomb Iran, and try not to kill so many Afghans, OK?"

Nobel peace prize committee, 2009

(I think they told Martin Luther King and that broad under house arrest in Burma the same thing when they got their Nobel peace prizes.)

In medias res: welcome young 2009

The year is barely 24 hours old as I write this, and 3 notable persons have already passed on:

• Claiborne Pell, 90, American politician, Senator from Rhode Island (1961-1997)
  
• Nizar Rayyan, 49, Palestinian military commander for Hamas, air strike.
  
• Helen Suzman, 91, South African anti-apartheid activist, MP (1953–1989)

For some time me brain been percolating a post about American decline, and given this background preoccupation, inevitably I find myself thinking about how these three person's lives illustrate various perspectives on that topic.

Nizar Rayyan was by no means a choir boy, but he was the closest thing Gaza had to a secretary of defense, and in some ways his death and the stolid, "nothing-to-see-here" way the US press has dealt with it helps illustrate one aspect of US decline, as we juxtapose the IDF airstrikes against Hamas with the EU's condemnation and the US's official impassivity, as Bush, jnr insists he won't break off his last Christmas vacation as president to address the Israeli violence. and our new talk-show-culture president elect insists on framing the conflict in terms of how he thinks he would react if he was an Israeli parent, discussing hypothetical danger to his daughters whom we should see as people, unlike, say, your average no-good Palistinian kid. Americans have traditionally flattered themselves that their government leads the world, but the EU shows leadership while the US establishment, the Congress having voted to supply the bombs that destroy Gazan lives, hide behind the moral indolence of their shrub-clearing lame-duck president.


Claiborne Pell's death reminds me of how forward-thinking the US welfare state once was with respect to financing higher education, as we juxtapose the 1960s and the era of the Pell Grant, still around but endangered , with the current state of financial aid and higher education, as state and federal budgets put the squeeze on working-class and lower-middle class aspirants to a better life.

Helen Suzman was a civil rights pioneer-- from South Africa. She was one of Nelson Mandela's few white friends who visited him in jail and agitated for his release, years before hip Western kids identified him as a signifier of coolness, like the Dalai Lama or Coldplay or yes, Barack Obama. Her life, and those (several) dark chapters in South Africa's history remind me of how, here in the US, we once had a functioning left, one that successfully shamed many American institutions into divesting themselves of their South African holdings, something that might be impossible today, when so many people seemingly settle for voting as absolution in which a vaguely religious political leader forgives you for your civic laziness because you voted for him. And don't forget to help him pay off Hillary Clinton's debt to pollster Mark Penn. I hear he doesn't really need the money, but hey, a contract is a contract. Yes you can.


photos: Reuters


cross-posted at Hugo Zoom