roots.lab :: seeds

What "Citizens United" Wrought

Fri, 04 May 2012 10:39:00 -0400

Happy as I am with the themes and execution of Norm Ornstein’s important new book and gratifyingly direct WaPo op-ed, there’s just no forgiving him for his long association with AEI. Nonetheless, here’s an excellent summation of how Citizens United absolutely screwed our already debilitated democracy on January 21, 2008:

By giving corporations free rein to meddle in politics without any accountability required, just like in the robber baron days, and by defining money as speech, the court dealt a body blow to American democracy. Candidates no longer can focus simply on raising money for their campaigns against other candidates. Because corporations have almost unlimited sums they can put in with no notice, candidates have to raise protection money in advance just in case such a campaign is waged against them.

And in many cases, as I have written before, they will pay for protection by quietly giving companies or other interests what they want legislatively to avoid a multimillion-dollar slime campaign against them. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote the majority opinion in Citizens United, said there could be no corruption in independent spending. What planet does he live on?

As for money being speech, imagine if your next-door neighbor puts up 50-foot speakers in his yard and blares music at ear-splitting levels and tells you that this is his speech; he is happy to let you listen to your own music on your iPod. The fact that you cannot hear your own music, much less share it with anyone else because you are drowned out is not material to Kennedy or Chief Justice John Roberts.

"Rick Santorum had only been in the senate for a few weeks when Bob Kerrey, then Senator from..."

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 22:27:24 -0500

“Rick Santorum had only been in the senate for a few weeks when Bob Kerrey, then Senator from Nebraska, pegged him. “Santorum, that’s Latin for asshole.””

- Counterpunch » The Mullah Omar of Pennsylvania

"Paul’s vision reveals—with candor and specificity—what the G.O.P.’s rhetorical hostility to..."

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 10:13:32 -0500

“Paul’s vision reveals—with candor and specificity—what the G.O.P.’s rhetorical hostility to government would mean if it were rigorously put into practice. A minimal state, without welfare provisions for the unemployed. A quarter of a million federal workers—as a first installment—joining those unemployed. Foreign policy and national defense reduced to a few ballistic-missile submarines. The civil-rights legislation of the nineteen-sixties repealed as so much unwarranted government intrusion. As for the financial crisis, Paul would have countenanced no regulation that might have prevented it, no government stabilization of the financial system after it happened, and no special help for working people hurt by it. This is where the logic of government-shrinking leads.”

- Enemy of the State — www.newyorker.com — Readability

newsflick: Nigeria: A man covers his hands in crude oil during...

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 13:57:36 -0500

newsflick:

Nigeria: A man covers his hands in crude oil during an anti-Shell protest after a spill at the Bonga oilfield. (EPA via Guardian)

(via imgTumble)

LA Times: Massachusetts Senate race tests feelings about Wall Street

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 13:54:21 -0500

Damn, I want her to win next fall in the worst way.

Warren’s campaign rhetoric wasn’t dreamed up by a political consultant.

The Harvard University law professor has spent years researching the financial struggles of average Americans and said she’s been “protesting Wall Street for a very long time.”

“I think after three years with no accountability, people across this country are madder than ever,” Warren said after a Democratic debate at Stonehill College on Dec. 6.

“They’ve watched the people who brought us the financial crisis walk away, and walk away with their pockets stuffed with money. They know that’s not right,” she said. “I think it’s a key part of the protests.”

Yipe!

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 14:46:04 -0500

Jobs, we learn, was a bully. “He had the uncanny capacity to know exactly what your weak point is, know what will make you feel small, to make you cringe,” a friend of his tells Isaacson. Jobs gets his girlfriend pregnant, and then denies that the child is his. He parks in handicapped spaces. He screams at subordinates. He cries like a small child when he does not get his way. He gets stopped for driving a hundred miles an hour, honks angrily at the officer for taking too long to write up the ticket, and then resumes his journey at a hundred miles an hour. He sits in a restaurant and sends his food back three times. He arrives at his hotel suite in New York for press interviews and decides, at 10 P.M., that the piano needs to be repositioned, the strawberries are inadequate, and the flowers are all wrong: he wanted calla lilies. (When his public-relations assistant returns, at midnight, with the right flowers, he tells her that her suit is “disgusting.”) “Machines and robots were painted and repainted as he compulsively revised his color scheme,” Isaacson writes, of the factory Jobs built, after founding NeXT, in the late nineteen-eighties. “The walls were museum white, as they had been at the Macintosh factory, and there were $20,000 black leather chairs and a custom-made staircase… . He insisted that the machinery on the 165-foot assembly line be configured to move the circuit boards from right to left as they got built, so that the process would look better to visitors who watched from the viewing gallery.”

Occupy … all the things. via motherjones

Fri, 28 Oct 2011 19:08:53 -0400

Occupy … all the things. via motherjones

Holy smokes. rhamphotheca: insectlove:fuckyeaheukaryotes:...

Fri, 28 Oct 2011 19:04:56 -0400

Holy smokes.

rhamphotheca:

insectlove:fuckyeaheukaryotes: Atlas Moth (Attacus atlas)

* The moth with the largest wingspread (by width)

"The mean half life of a link on twitter is 2.8 hours, on facebook it’s 3.2 hours and via ‘direct’..."

Fri, 28 Oct 2011 18:44:54 -0400

“The mean half life of a link on twitter is 2.8 hours, on facebook it’s 3.2 hours and via ‘direct’ sources (like email or IM clients) it’s 3.4 hours.”

- via bit.ly blog, You just shared a link. How long will people pay attention?

Mike Watt on the "I'm no spring chicken" thing.

Sat, 22 Oct 2011 22:44:17 -0400

Aas always, Watt … centers me. Don’t know how else to put it.

Q: Why did you want to make an album dealing explicitly with midlife?

A: Because I’m immersed in it. It’s on me. Mechanically, in terms of my other two operas, there’s a kind of arc or a thread that binds them, but in the other ones I was kind of retelling something that had happened to me, and on this one I was trying to be more right there in the moment. What is happening with me. I wanted that challenge because it’s hard to do. It becomes past the next minute after you’ve done it.

Q: Is it harder to be immediate than to reframe things in hindsight?

A: Well, yeah. There’s two other ways of doing it. I could have been a younger man and guessed what it was going to be like. They would have been very far-off guesses. I could have waited until I got past middle age, into senility, when you probably forget everything. There’s no way to really know about this place for me except by living it.

Q: What is it like?

A: You have experience that you didn’t have as a younger person, but your body ain’t as good. You have a different, I think, overall picture of things. The glass half empty, half full thing is big-time when you’re young. That finitism, the awareness of it, isn’t as strong as now. Because you can feel it, you can feel it in your body that you’re breaking down, the body parts, maybe even the mind parts. But the mind parts have the things that the younger mind doesn’t have, with the experiences. You just can’t create those, you know. You have to live them.

vusie-deuce: suitep: aberjona: Ri-res overhead of Times...

Sun, 16 Oct 2011 01:02:15 -0400

vusie-deuce:

suitep:

aberjona:

Ri-res overhead of Times Square right now (via REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz).

Soup is live-tweedling.

And I am guessing the Mayor is shitting himself. Good luck with all your jackass cops! Plus tourists! Plus cameras! Fucking everywhere!

This is beautiful.

This is all restoring my faith in this country.

AP’s caption: “Tens of thousands of people take a...

Sat, 15 Oct 2011 20:41:11 -0400

AP’s caption: “Tens of thousands of people take a part in a demonstration in Puerta del Sol square in Madrid on Saturday, part of the global movement against corporate greed.” (link)

Krugman on what REALLY gets under the skin of the "1%" and their media/political minions

Mon, 10 Oct 2011 21:27:49 -0400

The way to understand all of this is to realize that it’s part of a broader syndrome, in which wealthy Americans who benefit hugely from a system rigged in their favor react with hysteria to anyone who points out just how rigged the system is.

Last year, you may recall, a number of financial-industry barons went wild over very mild criticism from President Obama. They denounced Mr. Obama as being almost a socialist for endorsing the so-called Volcker rule, which would simply prohibit banks backed by federal guarantees from engaging in risky speculation. And as for their reaction to proposals to close a loophole that lets some of them pay remarkably low taxes — well, Stephen Schwarzman, chairman of the Blackstone Group, compared it to Hitler’s invasion of Poland.

And then there’s the campaign of character assassination against Elizabeth Warren, the financial reformer now running for the Senate in Massachusetts. Not long ago a YouTube video of Ms. Warren making an eloquent, down-to-earth case for taxes on the rich went viral. Nothing about what she said was radical — it was no more than a modern riff on Oliver Wendell Holmes’s famous dictum that “Taxes are what we pay for civilized society.”

But listening to the reliable defenders of the wealthy, you’d think that Ms. Warren was the second coming of Leon Trotsky. George Will declared that she has a “collectivist agenda,” that she believes that “individualism is a chimera.” And Rush Limbaugh called her “a parasite who hates her host. Willing to destroy the host while she sucks the life out of it.”

What’s going on here? The answer, surely, is that Wall Street’s Masters of the Universe realize, deep down, how morally indefensible their position is. They’re not John Galt; they’re not even Steve Jobs. They’re people who got rich by peddling complex financial schemes that, far from delivering clear benefits to the American people, helped push us into a crisis whose aftereffects continue to blight the lives of tens of millions of their fellow citizens.

Yet they have paid no price. Their institutions were bailed out by taxpayers, with few strings attached. They continue to benefit from explicit and implicit federal guarantees — basically, they’re still in a game of heads they win, tails taxpayers lose. And they benefit from tax loopholes that in many cases have people with multimillion-dollar incomes paying lower rates than middle-class families.

Ayup.

femmebot: kthread: abangupjob: superamit: About two weeks...

Fri, 07 Oct 2011 23:56:08 -0400

femmebot:

kthread:

abangupjob:

superamit:

About two weeks ago I got a call from my doctor, who I’d gone to see the day before because I’d been feeling worn out and was losing weight, and wasn’t sure why.

He was brief: “Amit, you’ve got Acute Leukemia. You need to enter treatment right away.”

I was terrified. I packed a backpack full of clothes, went to the hospital as he’d instructed, and had transfusions through the night to allow me to take a flight home at 7am the next day. I Googled acute leukemia as I lay in my hospital bed, learning that If it hadn’t been caught, it would have died within weeks.

—

I have a couple more months of chemo to go, then the next step is a bone marrow transplant. As Jay and Tony describe below, minorities are severely underrepresented in the bone marrow pool, and I need help.

A few ways to help:

If you’re South Asian, get a free test by mail. You rub your cheeks with a cotton swab and mail it back. It’s easy.

If you’re in NYC, you can go to this event my friends are putting on.

If you know any South Asians, please point ‘em to the links above. Thank you.

jayparkinsonmd:

My friend Amit Gupta founded my favorite photography site Photojojo. A few weeks ago, he was diagnosed with leukemia. Amit is one of the nicest, most genuine, most creative people you could ever meet. Prior to founding the awesome Photojojo, he also co-founded Jelly in 2006 in NYC, a coworking community, that’s now spread to 60 cities across the world and helped spark the coworking revolution. It looks like Amit will need a bone marrow transplant quite soon. We can help him with that.

tony b:

Unlike blood transfusions, finding a genetic match for bone marrow that his body will accept is no easy task. The national bone marrow registry has 9.5 million records on file, yet the chances of someone from South Asian descent of finding a match are only 1 in 20,000.

This is where we come in. We’re going to destroy those odds.

How? By finding and registering as many people of South Asian descent as we possibly can.

Tests are easy– a simple swab of the cheek. If you’re a match, the donation involves an outpatient procedure. It’s not fun, but it’s not dangerous either. And doing it could save a life.

We are encouraging anyone of South Asian descent to take a test to see if you’re a match.

You can get a free test by mail, or, if you’re in New York, you can join us Friday, October 14th for a special party to rally support.

We’ll have test kits on hand at the party, as well as music, booze, and maybe even a photo booth. It will, for the first time, combine a House 2.0-style party with a New Work City-style party, and if you’ve ever been to either, you know they are always something special.

Please spread the word and please do everything you can to help Amit beat leukemia. He’s a superstar.

Much thanks to Tony and pals for organizing this event, and EVERYONE who’s been tweeting and reblogging.

Please help us get the word out any way you can. My life quite literally depends on it.

Please help Amit find a bone marrow donor!

This is almost every post on my dash today; please pass this along because finding the right bone marrow donor is like dating (the way most people date) - you’re only looking for the one match.

Someone in your circles may be that one, so please pass this on. Amit is a friend and an inspiration; we need him around for a really long, full life.

I really can’t take this much bad news. I don’t want to accept that my friend Amit is this sick. This really shouldn’t happen to such a nice, generous person. But really my emotional state is trivial compared to his health issues. Please help find a bone marrow donor.

"Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma —..."

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 09:27:51 -0400

““Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.””

- Steve Jobs: Imitated, Never Duplicated - NYTimes.com

"This is a right-left issue if there ever was one, and the potential to build an unstoppable movement..."

Tue, 04 Oct 2011 23:55:05 -0400

“This is a right-left issue if there ever was one, and the potential to build an unstoppable movement is unprecedented. Just last weekend, liberal and Tea Party activists joined together for an unusual conference about the feasibility of a constitutional amendment to check undue corporate power in elections and government.”

- Josh Silver: Wall Street Protests: A Right-Left Movement Must Emerge…. I tend to agree w/ folks like Lessig — get the money out of government first, and then perhaps we can get to work on the rest of the problems.

"#OccupyWallStreet, to me, is about institutional failure. And so it is appropriate that..."

Mon, 03 Oct 2011 09:00:20 -0400

“#OccupyWallStreet, to me, is about institutional failure. And so it is appropriate that #OccupyWallStreet itself is not run as an institution. We don’t trust institutions anymore. Name a bank or financial institution you can trust today. That industry was built entirely on trust — we entrusted our money to their cloud — and they failed us. Government? The other day, I heard a cabinet member from a prior administration call Washington “paralyzed and poisonous” — and he’s an insider. Media? Pew released a study last week saying that three-quarters of Americans don’t believe journalists get their facts straight (which is their only job). Education? Built for a prior, institutional era. Religion? Various of its outlets are abusing children or espousing bigotry or encouraging violence. The #OccupyWallStreet troops are demonizing practically all of corporate America and with it, capitalism. What institutions are left? I can’t name one.”

- #OccupyWallStreet & the failure of institutions « BuzzMachine

"Irene was intended to destroy the city of Miami, as retribution for the hubris of the Miami Heat and..."

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 22:52:43 -0400

““Irene was intended to destroy the city of Miami, as retribution for the hubris of the Miami Heat and their followers,” the Lord said today in a statement delivered in the form of a thunderbolt to various media outlets, including Fox News and the New York Times. “Unfortunately, as with so many of my well-intentioned initiatives, it went horribly awry,” instead decimating much of the Eastern seaboard and outlying areas. “Collateral damage is inevitable with any of my missions,” the Lord added, and He asked believers to remember that “I’m still the same benevolent, all-forgiving fuck-up that I’ve always been.””

- God Speaks Out on Hurricane Irene « The Imperial

"algorithmic culture" exacts a price...

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 21:09:44 -0400

Indiana University’s Ted Striphas:

When I began writing about “algorithmic culture,” I used the term mainly to describe how the sorting, classifying, hierarchizing, and curating of people, places, objects, and ideas was beginning to be given over to machine-based information processing systems. The work of culture, I argued, was becoming increasingly algorithmic, at least in some domains of life.

As I continue my research on the topic, I see an even broader definition of algorithmic culture starting to emerge. The preceding examples (and many others I’m happy to share) suggest that some of our most basic habits of thought, conduct, and expression — the substance of what Raymond Williams once called “culture as a whole way of life” — are coming to be affected by algorithms, too. It’s not only that cultural work is becoming algorithmic; cultural life is as well.

The growing prevalence of algorithmic culture raises all sorts of questions. What is the determining power of technology? What understandings of people and culture — what “affordances” — do these systems embody? What are the implications of the tendency, at least at present, to encourage people to inhabit experiential and epistemological enclaves? But there’s an even more fundamental issue at stake here, too: who speaks for culture?

For the last 150 years or so, the answer was fairly clear. The humanities spoke for culture and did so almost exclusively. Culture was both its subject and object. For all practical purposes the humanities “owned” culture, if for no other reason than the arts, language, and literature were deemed too touchy-feely to fall within the bailiwick of scientific reason.

Today the tide seems to be shifting. As Siva Vaidhyanathan has pointed out in The Googlization of Everything, engineers — mostly computer scientists — today hold extraordinary sway over what does or doesn’t end up on our cultural radar. To put it differently, amid the din of our pubic conversations about culture, their voices are the ones that increasingly get heard or are perceived as authoritative. But even this statement isn’t entirely accurate, for we almost never hear directly from these individuals. Their voices manifest themselves in fragments of code and interface so subtle and diffuse that the computer seems to speak, and to do so without bias or predilection.

That’s just exactly why I’d rather get my cues by bouncing around my own handmade list of go-to individuals — news editors, critics, WFMU dj’s, friends, etc — than rely on Pandora or Postrank or other “social graph” meat grinders to extract a précis of what everyone else finds interesting…

"Facebook is no paragon of virtue. It bears the hallmarks of the kind of pump-and-dump service that..."

Sun, 25 Sep 2011 13:51:49 -0400

“Facebook is no paragon of virtue. It bears the hallmarks of the kind of pump-and-dump service that sees us as sticky, monetizable eyeballs in need of pimping. The clue is in the steady stream of e-mails you get from Facebook: “So-and-so has sent you a message.” Yeah, what is it? Facebook isn’t telling—you have to visit Facebook to find out, generate a banner impression, and read and write your messages using the halt-and-lame Facebook interface, which lags even end-of-lifed e-mail clients like Eudora for composing, reading, filtering, archiving, and searching. E-mails from Facebook aren’t helpful messages; they’re eyeball bait, intended to send you off to the Facebook site, only to discover that Fred wrote “Hi again!” on your “wall.” Like other “social” apps (cough eVite cough), Facebook has all the social graces of a nose-picking, hyperactive six-year-old, standing at the threshold of your attention and chanting, “I know something, I know something, I know something, won’t tell you what it is!””

- Cory Doctorow, How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook (via stoweboyd)