Scholars and Rogues

Space X’s Falcon 9 launch leaves dreamers behind

Jane Briggs-Bunting — Tue, 22 May 2012 20:00:33 +0000

I had a dream when I was 10 years old and was thrilled when Alan Shepard, in the first manned Mercury Mission, orbited the earth. Okay, we were a bit behind the Soviets, but, still we had done it, and very soon, I knew we would eclipse them. And we did.

On that day, I decided I wanted to be an astronaut, too. To explore space. Never mind that women, including the legendary Mercury 13, were not part of NASA’s mission back then. It was a manly task in this pre-lib era. Never mind that my Coke bottle-thick glasses (in a fashionable blue metallic complete with fake diamonds) would have rendered me ineligible, I still dreamed the dream back then.

Through the years, even when I accepted the futility of my dream, I avidly followed the highs and lows of space exploration. The spectacular failures and soul shattering fatalities, the thrilling first step on the moon, the slow evolution of the space station and the multiple trips of the shuttles.

So today, Tuesday, May 22, was a day of mixed emotions when the privately owned Space Exploration Technologies Corp.’s unmanned Falcon 9 rocket lifted off its launch pad at fabled Cape Canaveral. Its mission: to ferry 1,200 lbs. of supplies and clothing to the astronauts on the space station, scatter some ashes of deceased humans like actor James Doohan (better known as the Star Trek’s “Scotty,” the grumbling ever resourceful engineer on the original Enterprise) and deliver some student experiments. If all goes well, the Falcon X will be remotely sidled up near the space station and its cargo snared by the astronauts (mainly Soviet cosmonauts) currently aboard the space station.

It’s a new era for the U.S. space program–using private companies to ferry materials around. Though I wish them all the best, I prefer to hope that the USA will as a nation get back into space exploration. Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson’s book Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier provides some reasons why, as a nation, we should. (Check out this excellent review from io9.com.) An excerpt was also published in The Week’s May 4 issue.

Noted in both were Tyson’s point that: “…a year’s expenditure by the United States military is equal to that of the entire half-century’s spending on NASA, which has put men on the Moon, robots onto planets, moons and asteroids, and brought us incredible images of the universe that surrounds us. Put another way, as he notes in a number of chapters, NASA’s budget is a half cent on the dollar when it comes to someone’s taxes. If you double that investment, the United States can do incredible things in outer space and here on the ground.”

Sure, there are lots of problems on terra firma that needed to be fixed, but so much innovation, creativity and inspiration comes from the dreams and reality of millennia of generations as they gazed skyward.

How many 10 year-olds were inspired with today’s launch?

‘Why protest? – LIVE from the NATO summit in Chicago’ – M.O.C. #142

Lee Camp — Tue, 22 May 2012 19:55:48 +0000

Click here to view the embedded video.

Who’s the biggest Heat and Celtics fan in the world?

Samuel Smith — Tue, 22 May 2012 19:43:48 +0000

Want to know who woke up screaming this morning? This guy:

Miami, home to one of the NBA’s showpiece franchises, is in deep trouble versus Indiana. LeBron James stepped up big time in Game 4, but Chris Bosh is out, Dwyane Wade is clearly hobbled and the rest of the team is playing like the lunchtime pickup crew down at your local Y. Bron is great, but there’s only one of him and the Pacers are not afraid.

In the other East semi, Boston won Game 5 to take a 3-2 series lead and restore a little bit of order against Philly, but the Sixers have been good enough and the Celtics have looked old enough that nobody is breathing easy just yet.

Out West the conference matchups are set: it’s San Antonio vs Oklahoma City. Which brings me back to David Stern’s cold sweats. There is a distinct possibility that the NBA semifinals could feature the least sexy final four, from a marketing and revenue perspective, in recent league history. Let’s illustrate with a table:

	TV Market Rank	Who Cares Index*
Philadelphia	4	0
Indianapolis	25	-2
San Antonio	37	3
OKC	45	4

* A subjective, if relatively informed best guess metric that evaluates how likely, on a scale of one to ten, a theoretical viewer in a non-local market with no vested interest in the outcome would be to tune in a game involving this team. Traditional powers like the Lakers and Celtics probably get eights or nines.

David Stern’s happiness is a function of those two numbers. Big TV markets and teams with large Who Cares scores mean ratings which mean money. Smaller markets are bad. Low Who Cares scores are toxic.

Now, Philly is a big TV market, so that’s good. But their Who Cares multiplier is non-existent. Outside of dedicated NBA watchers and actual Philly sports fans, how many people in the country can name the Sixers’ starters? Heck, how many people can name any of the Sixers’ starters? Right. So Philadelphia in The Finals means happy viewers in the City of Brotherly Love (America’s most ironic municipal nickname, btw) and a great big yawn everywhere else.

By contrast, Indy makes Philly look like a ratings bonanza. At #25 in the market size rankings, they’re actually smaller than Charlotte. Who Cares Index? If the Pacers get past the Heat you’re going to have to make viewing mandatory just to get league office employees to tune in.

In the other bracket you have the #37 and #45 TV markets squaring off. Verily, if the Commish were any more excited he’d be running around the house widdling on the floor and trying to hump everybody’s leg.

There’s some consolation here, I suppose. The Spurs have won four titles and are a known commodity, which helps. None of their stars (even the greatest power forward who ever lived, Tim Duncan) are exactly TMZ material, though (although Tony Parker was married to Eva Longoria – believe it or not, that probably helps here). In OKC you have the scoring champ and his dynamic sidekick and they’re sort of fun to watch, although that identically dressed Stepford Crowd is whiter than a Klan rally and frankly they creep me right the hell out. I can’t be the only one.

So who’s the biggest Miami and Boston fan in the world today? Right. This guy:

Unpaid internships triggering lawsuits

Jane Briggs-Bunting — Tue, 22 May 2012 17:48:56 +0000

Unpaid interns feeling exploited may want to check out a web site launched by a NYC law firm, Outten & Golden LLP. The firm is trolling for more clients.

Internships are an important part of OTJ (on the job) training for many college and high school students, and others wanting experience for a career shift even years after graduation. It should be a terrific opportunity to learn if this is the career one hopes to pursue, network with potential references and maybe nab a chance at a job that could be opening. It can also be an opportunity for a mid-course correction when an intern discovers that the profession is not, after all, something he/she wants for a career.

But internships are also a way for some employers to exploit young and nowadays twenty and thirty-something talent and be too cheap pay for it. Where employers would get nailed with state wage and hour law violations, if a student is earning credit or if there is an educational benefit and they are not doing a job a paid employee would otherwise be doing, then it arguably becomes legally permissible to exploit them. And that is wrong.

Interns are starting to muster the backbone to object: Hearst Publications, Fox Searchlight and PBS’s The Charlie Rose Show are all facing lawsuits filed in the last year against them by unpaid interns.

And the NYC law firm, Outten & Golden LLP, as noted above, is hunting for more.

Time did two stories in May on the practice with an estimate that fully half the internships in the U.S. are unpaid. (Time reports it pays its interns but notes: “Limited exceptions may be made where appropriate, such as when a student is receiving academic credit and meets other requirements as well.” Hmmmmm.) The story also notes that nearly half of college students now work as interns as some point in their academic careers: “The National Association of Colleges and Employers reported that 50% of college grads in 2008 had held an internship, compared with 17% in 1992. But the Great Recession accelerated that boom. Today, an estimated one-third to one-half of the 1.5 million internships in the U.S. are unpaid.”

Internships have proliferated in business, public relations, advertising, engineering, media and other fields where hands-on experience can augment what was learned in a classroom..

In the journalism world, large daily newspapers, especially those with Newspaper Guild contracts, usually pay their interns. Even many smaller papers offer some sort of stipend to offset tuition costs for credit-bearing internships. Others would pay for stories at the freelance rate or, at a minimum, pay mileage. A small weekly newspaper in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula each summer hires two interns, gives them housing on beautiful and historic Mackinac Island and pays them, too, to cover the stories for one of its weekly editions. (Kudos to publisher and editor Wes and Mary Maurer.)

However, at other newspapers, as budgets got slashed and staffs laid off, fewer internships were offered, leaving students scrambling to find opportunities.

Broadcast outlets have traditionally and disgracefully not paid their interns (though there are a very small number of exceptions). Interns sometimes work up to 40 hours a week for the privilege of fact checking, coffee getting, job shadowing, even dog sitting for various on-air personalities. True, some of these “opportunities” lead to fulltime work, but it is a shameless exploitation reminiscent of apprenticeships two centuries earlier. A child is farmed out to learn a trade. Unpaid, they at least were given food and shelter. The 21st century version gets neither. Those landing spots at network jobs often pay their own way to New York, including travel and housing, for the coveted and competitive opportunity.

Too often, however, only those students with financial support from parents or others using savings can afford a payless experience as an intern. The so-called Great Recession (it was a full depression in my opinion, but that’s a politically toxic word) created a surge in these unpaid internships. As fewer employees were expected to do more work, internships seemed like a way to cope.

Each state sets its own wage and salary laws, as do the feds. As noted in Josh Sanburn’s well-reported article in Time:

The federal “Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938…specifically lays out a 6-point test, still in use today, for hiring unpaid interns:

1. The internship must be similar to training that would be given in an educational environment;
2. The internship must be for the benefit of the intern;
3. The intern does not displace regular employees;
4. The employer derives no immediate advantage from the intern;
5. The intern is not entitled to a job at the end of the internship; and
6. The intern understands that he or she is not entitled to wages.”

With blue stocking law firms imploding, attorneys in others states might go fishing, as well. As the high season for internships is about to beging, employers should take note.

Heartland Institute attacks critics, still refuses to apologize for Unabomber billboard

Brian Angliss — Tue, 22 May 2012 00:03:02 +0000

Joe Bast and others at The Heartland Institute continue to attack their critics and refuse to apologize for the dishonest comparison of the Unabomber to genuine climate realists nearly three weeks after Heartland took down the billboard.

Doubleplusungood: Adam Smith (D-WA), indefinite detention “hero” of NDAA amendment fame, pushes domestic propaganda

Frank Balsinger — Mon, 21 May 2012 12:00:25 +0000

If you’re not from Washington State, you might only know of Adam Smith for sponsoring HR 4192 – Due Process and Military Detention Amendments Act, a laudable act, to be sure. While it was hardly major news in March when he introduced the bill, news of his sponsorship piggy-backed on the momentous occasion of US District Judge Katherine Forrest’s ruling that, “that Section 1021 of NDAA was facially unconstitutional — a rare finding — because of the potential that it could violate the 1st Amendment” (LA Times, May 18, 2012). Smith gets his mention way down at the bottom (similarly in coverage elsewhere, as well). Sadly, his attempt to protect citizens from indefinite military detention without due process failed 182-238.

Late Friday the 18th, however, BuzzFeed broke the news that the same Adam Smith would like you to believe that:

WAR IS PEACE

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

Why else would have had his name added as co-sponsor of HR 5736 on May 10? HR 5736 - the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012, was introduced a day earlier by Texas Republican William Thornberry. The ramifications of the bill are a tad unclear, but what would one expect of authorization for a domestic disinformation campaign by our own State Department? The BuzzFeed description of the bill is chilling, to say the least, so by all means read the article linked above. While you’re at it, give HR 5736 a gander, too.

From what I can make of it, the bill updates the language in the Smith-Mundt Act (US Information and Educational Exchange Act of 1948) to bring it into the 21st century by including the Internet and social media as tools for disseminating abroad “information” friendly to US people and policy. By itself, that might not be so bad (as propaganda goes). But, through the usual tricky legislative funding and authorization language, the bill seems to make that same propaganda readily available to domestic sources through the US Archives, so long as the proper requests, licenses, and payments are arranged. At first, second, and third glances, it looks like a pay-as-you-go propaganda bonanza. I guess having the MSM rubber-stamp press releases was just too constricting.

On the bright side, the act would shield us from recent disinformation (oddly coinciding with the Bush years) by preventing release of any materials pre-dating the act for twelve years after initial dissemination. Wouldn’t want yesterdays brainwashing to interfere with today’s new and improved brainwashing, now would we?

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” – George Orwell, 1984

RIP, Mr. Orwell. You tried your best, but your words continue to fall on deaf ears.

—-

Image credit: Brian Robert Marshall, licensed under Creative Commons.

Graduation Day 2012

Samuel Smith — Sun, 20 May 2012 17:52:37 +0000

We seem to offer this up each year around this time. Congratulations, grads, and please accept this tidbit of advice from those of us here at S&R: always remember where you’re from, but don’t ever let it keep you from where you want to go.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Carlos Fuentes, RIP

wufnik — Sun, 20 May 2012 09:58:26 +0000

Carlos Fuentes, Mexico’s dominant literary figure over the past many decades, passed away several days ago. He was a remarkable writer—international in taste (serving as Mexcico’s ambassador to France at one point), but resolutely ground in Mexico’s complex and often tragic history.

Fuentes was probably best known in the US for The Old Gringo, but I always thought this was a relatively slight work compared with some of his other efforts. Reading Terra Nostra and Christopher Unborn were, if not transformative, nonetheless significant literary experiences of my life. He was often associated with the Magical Realism of many Latin American authors, but this was a bit too limiting. He could do everything, much like Vargas Llosa. The Buried Mirror is his history of the continent told from a Latin Perspective, and it’s a fascinating and informative read. Every couple of pages I had to stop and think, I didn’t know that.

And he wrote about everything—there wasn’t much he didn’t know. I confess I haven’t read his most recent novel, Destiny and Desire—but it has just moved up the pile a notch. He was also, equally important, a relentless critic of US and Mexican government policy when these became mindless, as they often have. Here’s the NYT obituary; Alberto Manguel and Liz Calder’s tributes in The Guardian are here. Another great one gets away without a Nobel Prize.

KINGS OF THE WORLD!!

Samuel Smith — Sat, 19 May 2012 23:03:28 +0000

Folks, this was just one of those incredible moments in sports. I don’t use phrases like “destiny” or “fate” because they’re as silly as thinking God wants your team to win. But even the skeptics at Napoli, Barca and now Bayern have to be asking themselves if somebody at Chelsea hired a witch to employ some sort of black magic voodoo fuckery on the team.

Put simply – and I say this with all due respect to the Chelsea players – there is NO FECKIN’ WAY that the Blues should have been able to come back from the hole Napoli had them in in the quarter-finals. The semi-final Barcelona tie was a Miracle on Ice moment if ever there were one. And when Petr Cech saved Arjen Robben’s penalty in extra time today Munich fans had to be reflecting back on the Barcelona/Chelsea matches and thinking that they had seen this movie before. And that it didn’t turn out well for the team Chelsea was playing.

My voice is just about gone. I hope those of you who watched the match did so in environments as charged as the British Bulldog here in Denver. There were moments where the place simply went white with noise and we Chelsea fans were literally still singing, laughing, screaming, crying, dancing, hugging and kissing each other 15 minutes after the final whistle.

I’ve been trying to come up with a post that explains how the passion behind Euro (and world) football doesn’t really map onto the American experience. So far I’m at a loss for words. In any case, I hope all our readers have occasion to be as insanely, irrationally, deliriously happy over their teams as I am about mine today.

Here’s a shout-out to the Rocky Mountain Blues: KTBFFH….

Three reasons not to get kidney stones. You know, in case you were considering it.

Patrick Vecchio — Sat, 19 May 2012 12:00:58 +0000

I visited my local hospital’s emergency room in the middle of the night back in March because a kidney stone had barged into my urinary tract. It woke me from my deep, pharmaceutically induced slumber with a pain best described as being stabbed with a knitting needle — from the inside. The stone is still causing pain, but not of the physical variety. But first, what’s a kidney stone story without a description of the physical pain?

In the wee hours of that March night, the stabbing pain attacked my back midway between my last rib and my hip. Here’s how my sleepy brain figured out what was going on: Man-that-hurts-like-hell-did-I-pull-a-muscle-doing-the-yard-work-today? Let-me-feel-around-back-there-it-doesn’t-feel-like-a-pulled-muscle-OH-FCK-IT’S-A-FCKNG-KIDNEY-STONE.

As I’ve explained to people who ask about the pain, imagine stopping to take your shoe off because it feels like you have a pebble hurting your foot, but when you shake your shoe out, the pebble turns out to be just a small cinder, something a little smaller than a peppercorn. Then imagine trying to piss that cinder. Our bodies are not built to piss cinders. Our bodies rebel against the presence of these sharp-spined mineral nuggets in our urinary tracts by unleashing the Pain That Will Leave You Whimpering on All Fours, Begging the Lord to Smite You Dead.

I’ve thrown kidney stones before and have been able to jettison them by drinking about a gallon of water, which forces the issue: You don’t want to pee because the stone is scraping its way toward the exit, and the last inch or so is really a bitch, but there’s so much water in you that you have to let it flow, so why not just try to blast the stone out? That wasn’t working this time, so my wife kindly offered to drive me to the emergency room, probably because she didn’t want to hear the mix of moaning and “Shit! Shit! Ow! Shit!”

As it turned out, the pain was so bad I was admitted to the hospital shortly after the emergency room nurse gave me a shot of Dilaudid. It left me painless but crosseyed—and this was from a slow push into my IV. The best way I can explain the feeling is that it was like a combination of the worst hangover headache you’ve ever had and the worst case of the spins you’ve ever had after a night of drinking. A nurse told me the next day that some patients time their doses of Dilaudid to the minute and ask the nurses to push it into their IV all at once. How someone could endure that rush and continue living at anything above the mental level of a spare tire is beyond me. The next time I needed something for pain, I insisted on morphine. Then I asked for a Popsicle. Eating that Popsicle in a morphine cloud was the closest I have come to nirvana.

Fortunately, the stone shifted while I was in the hospital, leaving me pain free. It’s still in there, though, hanging out in the ureter (the plumbing between the kidney and the bladder), just south of the right kidney, and my urologist is going in after it at the end of this month because it is hindering my kidney function. He’ll knock me out and then venture in through the out door, as it were, probing his way upstream with surgical instruments to remove the stone. Depending on its size, he may need to use a laser to blast it into smaller pieces. Then he’s going to pull the pieces out. When we discussed the procedure yesterday morning, I kind of zoned out and quit hearing him when he used the phrase “blood in the urine.” But that will be a tale for another time. Guys, you now can uncross your legs and stop sucking air between your teeth.

I said a moment ago that I’m pain free. That’s not quite true. My kidney stone continues to cause pain—as in a pain in the ass from trying navigate the health insurance paperwork maze.

Fortunately, I was a journalist for nearly 23 years, so I know how difficult it can be to get answers. I know the routine of “can I put you on hold?” and “she’s away from her desk” or “I can’t answer that question for you. You’ll have to call so-and-so.” But I can see how someone without my background could be driven to tooth-grinding frustration because of how hard it can be to get simple answers, to say nothing of complicated answers involving tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars and life-or-death situations.

Compared to, say, a cancer patient or someone recovering from a heart attack or stroke, my case is minor, but even with a minor case, I still spent 90 minutes on the telephone yesterday afternoon trying to get answers about a bill I had received. I called my insurance provider and discussed the situation with a customer service rep for close to an hour. She was polite and helpful but unable to answer all of my questions. And every time we did the math, the numbers changed.

She recommended I call my local hospital’s business office. I tried one extension and the phone rang 10 times with no answer or voice mail prompt. I tried a second extension, where someone picked up. Again, the person was polite and helpful—but again, she could not address all of my questions. She referred me to another office in the hospital to talk to the person who is the liaison between the hospital, its business office, insurance providers, and the emergency room physicians, who are medical free agents who do not work for the hospital. This phone call launched me across the border into the Bizarro World.

No one answered the telephone, but the out-of-office recording told me that messages left at this number would be returned “during normal business hours: 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. Monday through Friday.”

Now, if I were a cynic, I’d say having “normal business hours” of 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. in the Eastern Time Zone is as inconvenient as humanly possible. And God have mercy on your soul if you’re calling that office from the West Coast. If I were a cynic, I’d say these “normal business hours” show a hard-shelled disregard for people needing to deal with this company. I’m not a cynic, though.

But the only business I’m engaged in at 6 a.m. is sleeping. I might make it a point to get up to call these people at 6:01 a.m. Whoever answers the phone will more than earn her or his daily wage dealing with my pre-coffee, snarling werewolf self, believe me.

S&R 701 Final Exam, Spring Semester 2012

Samuel Smith — Fri, 18 May 2012 17:00:13 +0000

Watch the two TED talks below. The question, which represents 100% of your final grade, follows.

First, Nick Hanauer in 2012.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Now, Peter Weyland in 2023.

Click here to view the embedded video.

From a technocultural and political economic perspective, very little changes in the course of a decade. Discuss.

Be thorough. Provide examples.

Are Islamists role models to Christian fundamentalists?

Russ Wellen — Fri, 18 May 2012 12:20:37 +0000

Despite what Christian fundamentalists wish, religion and politics are unlikely to become one in the United States.

The Dead: As good as zombie movies get

Chris Mackowski — Fri, 18 May 2012 06:12:09 +0000

The zombie apocalypse implies a global pandemic, but most of what I’ve seen so far has been good ol’ fashioned American zombies. The 28 Days franchise has English zombies, as does Shaun of the Dead, but since zombies don’t speak, the difference in accents is pretty much moot. World War Z provides an excellent international perspective, of course, but on the silver screen, the walking dead have been mostly Western.

That’s why The Dead (2010) looked so enticing (wait, can the dead be enticing? Oh, never mind…). The Dead promised a look at the apocalypse from a non-Western perspective—as if Africa isn’t war-torn enough, zombies overrun the continent—so I snatched it up.

Good call.

Co-directors Howard and Jon Ford craft an artful movie that’s tense, moody, and at times quite gross, but it’s also gorgeous at times and, best of all, thoughtful. The Ford Brothers take their time telling their story, which centers on a downed U.S. Air Force engineer who must find his way across hostile territory to a military base several hundred miles to the north.

Zombies populate the landscape, not so thick they move in hordes but thick enough that you wouldn’t want to be out of your car long enough to change a flat tire. The Fords’ zombies are slow, shuffling creatures that can’t seem to even shamble because they move so slow. Their yellow eyes somehow look both vacant and accusatory; they somehow both pierce and gaze.

Rob Freeman plays the engineer, Lt. Brian Murphy, and his eyes do more work in a single desperate shot as his plane is crashing than many actors do in an entire movie. Freeman has remarkably expressive eyes and facial expressions, allowing him to do his best work without speaking. He has the grizzled good looks of a man weathered by the apocalypse, so he looks like a survivor without looking like an action star. The understated performance keeps the film from ever teetering over the edge into B-movie action schlock. The Dead is A-list movie-making all the way.

The sun-parched African savannah stretches out in stunning beauty at times, which makes the zombie violence all the uglier. The Ford Brothers aren’t afraid of using the landscape to establish and reinforce mood, made all the more effective by the traditional-styled African music of Imran Ahmad’s haunting score.

One could easily watch The Dead as a metaphor for all the warfare that has rocked central Africa for decades. Corpses litter the landscape, and it’s hard at times to know whether it’s zombie carnage or genocide footage.

That’s all behind us now, one character says. We have a common enemy now. We fight that.

Despite the ever-present, unrelenting horde, Murphy encounters hope throughout his journey. It becomes apparent that the entire world is being overrun, and Murphy grows ever more dazed and despondent, but the movie ends on such a strong note of hope, hitting you up-side the head so hard you might want to wear a helmet.

I remember something Matt Mogk of the Zombie Research Society told me a couple months back. He wanted to see a zombie movie win best picture sometime in his lifetime. While The Dead doesn’t quite measure up to those standards, it’s an excellent step in the right direction. The Dead is the best the zombie apocalypse has looked in a long time.

The Saverin follies rumble on

wufnik — Thu, 17 May 2012 21:48:50 +0000

So there seems to be a firestorm over the issue of whether Facebook co-founder and Brazilian-born Eduardo Saverin should have given up his US citizenship. While some on the Right have apparently taken this as a vindication that the US tax system is one step away from the Apocalypse, and we should therefore celebrate Saverin’s courage or something, the position on the left, if I can characterize it as a position, is that Saverin deserves his own special circle in hell. Mistermix over at Balloon Juice is outraged. Josh Marshall at TPM is scandalized, and is still devoting multiple posts to the subject. The Nation is fuming. The nerve of this guy. And the comments. Jeez, it’s like stepping into the comments at NRO. The level of invective is comparable, as is the level of knowledge on occasion, since so many people apparently derive their sense of history and current events from movies. Of course, US companies, as we mention below, do this from time to time, and the outrage level has been considerably lower.

Oh, honestly. Grow up. Lots of Americans renounce their citizenship every year—although clearly not as many who become citizens every year. Some do it for tax reasons, as Saverin may be doing (although his lawyer denies it, and even if he is, it’s probably at the expense of a substantially higher tax bill now). And that’s probably not a good thing on balance, if that’s all there is to it. But as Bruce Bartlett has recently discussed, taxes may not even be the most prevalent reason why people renounce citizenship, let alone move—there’s lots of other factors as well. For one thing, foreign banks are now much less willing to extend banking services to Americans living abroad because of the recently-passed Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act. I’m certainly looking forward to my bank telling me they don’t want my business any more because the paperwork is too onerous.

Then again, we know people here in London who have lived here for decades, think of this as home (as we do), find using a British passport not at all inconvenient, and are tired of having to file with the IRS every year. Here’s the thing—even if you have never lived in the US or worked there, even if you weren’t even born there, if you’re a US citizen, you have to pay taxes to the IRS. Every year. We know people who were born in London, have lived here all their lives, and have never lived in the US. But because they were born of US parents, they’re US citizens, and therefore subject to cavalier US tax laws. And when I say “cavalier,” what I mean is the fact that the US is the only country that makes its citizens pay taxes no matter where they live—even if they have never lived, let alone worked, in the US.

There’s a more general point, and it speaks to the fact that, frankly, Americans need to get out more. Apparently the “greatest nation on earth” meme that we all grew up with, no matter how old we are, is a hard one to put into some sort of perspective. It’s not exactly American nationalist triumphalism, as Larison, for example, discusses it—but there certainly seems to be some sort of American exceptionalism at work here. Saverin himself has said he feels like a global citizen. Most of the writers (and commentators) that I’ve cited, and I’m sure there are many more, find this a preposterous statement. Why is this? Tom Paine referred to himself as a Citizen of the World. Here’s someone who grew up in Brazil (in a wealthy family threatened with kidnap, so you can already guess the socioeconomic background here). The only reason he got to live in the US in the first place, where he moved when he was 13, was because his family was rich in the first place and could pay what needed to be paid to move the family here. It’s not like he had a choice in the matter. And if his family was poor, they wouldn’t have been allowed in at all, in all likelihood.

More broadly, what intrigues me is the complete rejection across the spectrum here that anyone in their right mind would even consider not being a US citizen. It’s like moving to another planet, apparently. Well, get over it. It’s a big world out here. There are lots of places to live out here that are better run and more tolerant than the US—the UK, where I live, for example, which is certainly setting a better example of preserving the social contract than the US is these days. As is most of Europe, in fact. We know people who have moved to Singapore, and many of them may stay there forever. There are Americans, or ex-Americans, all over the world, who have no wish whatsoever to return to the US. We’re everywhere.

Why is this? Well, after the wretched politics of the past several decades, the complete obliteration of local economies and culture by the globalizing machine, the forced equivalence of militarism and patriotism that shows no signs of diminishing, the mindlessness of mainstream media, the steady march towards government by oligarchy, the emerging national security state, the desperate search for the next Mideast war to fight, the perpetual war to create a permanent underclass characterized mostly by poverty…I would think that it would be pretty obvious why some of us no longer choose to live in the US. Henry Miller called it The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (although he, of course, returned to the US to live out his days on Big Sur.) And why some of us are in the process of gaining citizenship elsewhere. We would rather live in a country where you can turn on the television news and not be shouted at, where you can get somewhere without having to drive, and in a country that doesn’t declare illegal and unnecessary wars every couple of years. The United States of America is still the best idea for a country that anyone has ever had. The reality of what America is becoming, sadly, may be another story, and seems a far cry from these ideals.

And actually, if one is going to vent one’s ire on US citizens renouncing their citizenship to avoid taxes, there are certainly better, although perhaps not easier, targets than a guy who co-founded a company that looks set to have the biggest IPO ever, and which will undoubtedly be paying gazillions in corporate taxes to the US treasury as far as the eye can see (the State of California alone looks set to clear at least three times the amount of taxes that Saverin is alleged to be saving right off the bat). Hedge fund managers, for example, whose net contribution to the sum of human happiness is almost certainly negative. But the better route to follow would be to fix America’s corporate tax system. Let’s start with no longer allowing US companies to move their headquarters offshore to avoid US taxes, for example—or if they do, then they give up their right to work for the US government, particularly companies with lucrative defence contracts. This is something worth getting upset about. If you don’t like the US tax laws, get your act together to elect people who will change them.

“Murderers, tyrants, and madmen” – a video response from Peter Sinclair

Brian Angliss — Thu, 17 May 2012 21:47:06 +0000

Peter Sinclair shows how claims that global warming advocates are "murderers, tyrants, and madmen" by Joe Bast of The Heartland Institute are wildly inaccurate.

Romney vs. Obama: Big campaign cash spent neither wisely nor well

Dr. Denny — Thu, 17 May 2012 17:27:37 +0000

On the north wall of my living room is a 37- by 58-inch map of the United States. It shows only landforms and drainage. It is beautifully executed.

There are no state boundaries on the map. There are no political divisions on the map of any kind, not even the names of states or cities or towns. There are just landforms — rivers, mountains, valleys, plateaus, lakes.

This map is all of us, commingled in our differences. But until November, we will be shown differing, even disturbing, realities in other media-manufactured and “Magic Wall” maps of the United States. Pundits and candidates will talk about red states and blue states and purple states — battleground states vs. safe states. And we’ll likely be shown maps with different shades of green.

Those green maps will show who’s spending what amounts of political money where. (For example, scroll down to this Washington Post map showing political ad spending by states. Some markets get plenty; many get bupkis.) But it’s not likely that we’ll be shown maps identifying the sources of that money — because, it seems, the Supreme Court of these United States says much of this money, given by the few, can be hidden from us, the many.

When former senator Rick Santorum ended his presidential campaign last month, he had not run out of ideological gas. He had run out of money.

“Money is not everything in politics,” he told The New York Times. “But you do have to have enough to be successful … Someone — one of the old politicos when I got involved in this race — said the same thing, which is: ‘Every presidential campaign ends for the same reason: You run out of money.’”

It is difficult to believe, especially in this election cycle, that money is not everything in politics, as Santorum argues. Reading news reports and blogs, it’s easy to conclude that the principal media topic is who raised how much and from whom — not discussion of actual policy initiatives or analyses of same by pundits fair and foul.

The presidential candidates have raised $330 million thus far in funds that must be reported to the Federal Election Commission, The Times reports. President Obama has raised $196 million for his official campaign committee, more than twice Mitt Romney’s $87 million — and that’s just through March 31.

“This is going to be the most moneyed election in the history of the United States,” Bob Edgar, the president of Common Cause and a political child of Watergate, told The Times. His organization seeks increased limits on campaign spending. After reading Jeffrey Toobin’s New Yorker analysis of Chief Justice Roberts’ Citizens United manuevering, it’s clear that decreased limits, not increased limits, are more likely.

Obama raised more than $750 million in his 2008 campaign. Super PACs — trade and union associations largely freed by the Court to spend unregulated money on “electioneering communications” — were not on the political radar.

They are now. They are forbidden by law to “coordinate” with candidates’ official campaigns, as convincingly demonstrated by faux news anchors Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart. But they are free to coordinate among themselves on fundraising and spending.

The Center for Responsive Politics, a non-partisan organization focused on campaign finances, reports that as of May 16 “542 groups organized as Super PACs have reported total receipts of $204,716,872 and total independent expenditures of $105,730,175″ in this election cycle. Candidate and super PAC fundraising has topped half a billion dollars — and it’s only May. Forbes reports that 40 billionaires — 40 individuals — have already provided (principally GOP) candidates with tens of millions of dollars.

Several of these super PACS — such as the Republican-leaning Restore Our Future and American Crossroads and the Democratic-leaning Priorities USA — are expected to raise hundreds of millions of dollars more for the general election. Some believe the president’s official campaign organizations alone will raise $1 billion.

In this election cycle, Romney and Obama and their “non-coordinating” entities may raise and spend well more than $2 billion.

So we scream for transparency. Tell us who these hidden donors are, we cry. Lo and behold, the Campaign Legal Center reports:

[A] three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals denied a motion to stay a lower court ruling in Van Hollen v. FEC that requires comprehensive disclosure of funders for groups making ‘electioneering communications.’ Millions of dollars have already been spent this cycle on electioneering communications and those funding them will now have to be revealed.

Riiight. If this case makes it to the Supreme Court, Roberts will bat it away. Even if he doesn’t, how long will it take Congress to re-engineer (again) campaign finance “reform”?

How will Romney and the president (and those “non-coordinating” super PACs) spend these enormous sums?

Much, if not eventually most, of those monies will be spent on advertising. The Washington Post reported that super PACs spent $55 million on advertising during the presidential primary season. That’s more than the official candidates’ committees spent.

Now that Romney reigns as the apparent GOP nominee, expect advertising expenditures to surge. So the political discourse of Romney and Obama will consist primarily of advertising attacking each other or tightly controlled, highly scripted speeches and interviews with carefully chosen pundits.

But not all of us will be exposed to this contemptuous discourse. Ad dollars will flow unevenly from state to state. Look at that WashPo map again of ad spending by states. It’s disturbing.

That’s because modern politics dictates that money is primarily spent in states considered winnable. That’s not the same as states in which candidates know they can win. The former gets maximum ad buys; the latter minimal. States that candidates know they’ll lose get squat. If you’re a Republican, you bet heavy on purple, light on red, and nada on blue.

In states getting heavy spending, broadcasters will swoon over the free money falling into their coffers. They will air the ads in which super PACs assure that candidates can substitute style for substance, rancor for reality, and deception for honesty. Fact-checking by a few prominent media organizations will be bulldozed by the sheer volume of the broadcast muck.

A big chunk of these opaque funds will pay for slicing and dicing the electorate through computerized micro-targeting. That’s gone further upscale.

Thomas Edsall, who covered national politics for a quarter-century for The Post, wrote in The Times:

On a broader scale, the emergence of nanotargeting represents the addition of one more factor in modern political life that intensifies polarization. The industry capitalizes on (and profits from) identifying how partisans on the left and right differ. Campaigns then use this information to target explicitly polarizing messages that are designed to expand or suppress turnout among a specific subgroup of voters.

The men and women who earn a living by selling microtechnology to campaigns benefit from this intensifying polarization, which drives greater segmentation of the electorate, which in turn becomes ever more receptive to ideologically extreme communication.

So we’re minutely segmented for finely tuned messaging. Sheesh.

Some money will be spent on “opposition research” — you know, digging up dirt on the other candidate.

By now you may be thinking, “Yeah, I know. I know all this. So what?”

Direct your dismay not to what these monies are buying; direct it instead to what this money is not buying.

Aside from the acquisition of requisite “policy position” and “briefing” papers by “noted experts,” how many tens of millions are candidates spending to research innovative policy solutions for what ails the nation regardless of what party or ideology politically benefits from such research?

What have they invested beyond the tired imperatives demanded by their “political bases”? Where are the new ideas that need testing by the electorate to determine whether they will make the Republic safer, fairer, more tolerant, and better able to foster opportunity for its citizenry? Why have presidential candidates been über-dependent on recycled, ideologically driven platform planks?

It’s not the money itself that should trouble us. As Lawrence Lessig writes in “Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress — and a Plan to Stop It”, it’s “money in the wrong place.”

Hundreds of millions of dollars will be spent primarily to deceive the electorate by telling, if not outright falsehoods about an opponent, then partial lies. Tens of millions will be spent merely to program computers to dissect electorate by political, economic, and demographic sensibilities. So much money will be spent to acquire power — rather than investing in what could make us collectively exceptional as a nation.

No, I do not know “what could make us collectively exceptional.” But neither do Romney and Obama. They would rather spend hundreds of millions of dollars to badmouth each other rather than search for that definitive something that could resurrect the Republic from the mess that ideological politics has created for all of us.

New National Defense Authorization Act, old NDAA, and Waffler-in-Chief Obama on the issue of indefinite detention

Frank Balsinger — Thu, 17 May 2012 14:00:15 +0000

Breaking news re: the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act that President Obama signed under cover of the New Year festivities in hopes that a hungover populace would maybe not notice. This might just put a wrinkle in the 2013 NDAA that goes up for a vote in the House today (Thursday, May 17, 2012).

“The government was given a number of opportunities at the hearing and in its briefs to state unambiguously that the type of expressive and associational activities engaged in by plaintiffs — or others — are not within Section 1021,” Forrest said. “It did not. This court therefore must credit the chilling impact on First Amendment rights as reasonable — and real.”

That’s funny. First a whole slew of politicians and a wide swath of press fall all over themselves saying “oh, of course this doesn’t mean you can be detained indefinitely without due process” (with a very notable exception coming from Glenn Greenwald). Lindsay Graham actually came the closest to speaking power to truth on the matter when he all but said, “Fuck Americans. America! Fuck yeah!” The sole relevant amendment that actually made it into the bill punted the matter to the courts to decide. President Obama signed it with his signing statement pen, essentially promising, “I’ll never use this for evil,” while allowing for future presidents to do just that.

Well, the court fair caught the ball and called a time-out. For an administration that so many on the left (hold up your hands, palms outward, with your thumbs out…the one that makes the L is on your left, just in case you forget where it really is) just swear is wonderful, why, just look at all the great things O has done for us!…for an administration that claims it won’t use the vague verbiage in 1021 or elsewhere to our detriment, for an administration that basically thinks we should just trust it while it assassinates US citizens and goes on an extra-judicial drone-powered killing spree and violates the national sovereignty of an ally to kill the all but useless bin Laden (instead of going after the operational evil genius Zawahiri) and assures us that due process doesn’t actually have to mean judicial due process (just a bunch of guys in a back room playing craps with your life and rights will do)…for THIS administration to not take advantage of this particular case to make a clear and compelling argument as to what would not be sufficient for it to break its solemn signing statement (and maybe a few bones and a few international rules about human rights) is damning, at best.

There’s less than six months to go before “America” (or someone going by that name) decides who will be the next Champion of Wall Street, Mr. President. Now might be a really good time to further distinguish yourself from the Rabid Right when it comes to little matters of civil liberties. A veto threat for the new NDAA to help coax DINO Levin back toward an authentic left would be a good start. Of course, doing so would just be political theatre since there’s no guarantee you’ll be sitting in the Oval Office to sign it or veto it one way or the other. In other words, it’s a safe bet. Besides, even if you threaten the veto it’s not like you have to use it. After all, what’s a little campaign promise but a trifle to be broken?

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Image credit: Adapted from image of the Constitution of the United States of America (in the public domain) and Hands Behind Prison Bars Vector Art by Vectorportal, licensed under Creative Commons.

Nota Bene #125: Awesome Stuff

Mike Sheehan — Thu, 17 May 2012 05:14:25 +0000

“I left in love, in laughter, and in truth and wherever truth, love and laughter abide, I am there in spirit.” Who said it? The answer is at the end of this post. Now on to the links! … “It’s really hard to be objective and have a vagina at the same time” … “It is time for an end to Big Food” … “No Bastards May Enter the Church” … “Hypernuclei can be interpreted as the core of strange matter” … “Hey, Morrie, did you get Belle her Danish?” … “Congratulations on the promotion, Jim!” … “We’ve been so slow to realize these things” … “Somebody’s got to grab ahold of it and choke it!” … “Once these things gain the ability to move on their own, even without the virus or the bad guy dialing in from the Internet, if there is a bug in it, it can hurt you” … “DON’T GET ME STARTED ON JANITORS AND THEIR LIVES OF LUXURY!” … “It’s the first thing I think of when I wake up after having some breakfast and doing the crossword” … “This elite group of super-moochers includes Ford, eBay, Verizon, Boeing, Motorola, Honeywell, Dow Chemical, General Electric, Coca-Cola Enterprises, Prudential Financial, Capital One Financial and International Paper” … “In the basement, attic, turrets, back hallways and closets there’s an equally dizzying array of awesome stuff” … “When a 91-year-old former justice is patiently explaining to a comedian that corporations are not people, it’s clear that everything about the majority opinion has been reduced to a punch line” … “I’M SAYING NOTHING!” … “Why have they been, with a few exceptions, relegated to local news pieces replete with jokes?” … “At 20, he attempted suicide-by-jaguar“/”A story like this pretty much writes itself” … “I will barnstorm American living rooms” … “Numbers of this awesome kind / Boggle even Sagan’s mind” … “Without exception, they betray their followers” … “This was the biggest dose of heat we’ve received from a solar storm since 2005″ … “I wish there was a secret, because I’d love to hear it” … “You will find a giant android robot, a dinosaur and pink flamingos” … “I realize I might be unusual” … “What is happening on Wall Street now is even more terrifying” … “The immediacy and secrecy of drones make it easier than ever for leaders to unleash America’s military might—and harder than ever to evaluate the consequences of such clandestine attacks” … “I see everything through this tragedy” … “He created a video that is stunning” … “Someone like Ike would never make it through a Republican primary today” … “That’s how the game is played in the National Basketball Association” … This issue’s quote was from Bill Hicks … And finally, “When I look up at the night sky, I know that, yes, we are part of this universe, we are in this universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts is that the universe is in us.” ∞

Nota Bene is S&R’s long-running (since 2007), periodic compilation of interesting blog posts, bits of news and creative works from around the Net. NB’s complete post history here. Feed your brain.

Meet America’s newest conservative welfare queen

Samuel Smith — Wed, 16 May 2012 21:00:16 +0000

Guess who needs a gummit bailout? Hint: he once said this:

“There can be no question our country is in the worst economic crisis of our lifetimes. I also think there can be no question that it falls on us, the individuals, to find a way out of our own personal crisis.”

Give up? It’s this guy.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Former Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling asked Rhode Island for additional help to save his video game company Wednesday, prompting state leaders to consider whether the firm is viable enough to justify further investment.

But, isn’t that the avowed conservative, pro-Tea Party guy who called Obama a socialist? And, wait – wasn’t it a sweetheart $75M gummit loan deal that got his company to Rhode Island in the first place?

Ahem. Well. At least give credit where it’s due. Conservative icon Ayn Rand took welfare, so Schil is following the playbook….

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Thx to Brad Reed and Sean Cassidy for pointing me at this one….

Deroy Murdock’s latest NASA column a nearly fact-free, logical fallacy-filled screed

Brian Angliss — Wed, 16 May 2012 18:53:22 +0000

Deroy Murdock's column on the letter from 49 former NASA employees who question global warming is nearly 700 words of fact free inflammatory language and logical fallacies.