Squashed

"More than 100 million Americans—one-third of the population—live in poverty or a category called..."

Tue, 21 May 2013 19:48:31 -0400

“More than 100 million Americans—one-third of the population—live in poverty or a category called “near poverty.” Yet the stories of the poor and the near poor, the hardships they endure, are rarely told by a media that is owned by a handful of corporations—Viacom, General Electric, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., Clear Channel and Disney. The suffering of the underclass, like the crimes of the power elite, has been rendered invisible.”

- Chris Hedges (via azspot)

This would be a great point, if there were even a shred of truth to it. But there isn’t:

“What ever happened to poor people?” asks Katha Pollitt in The Nation. Everybody talks about the middle class these days, she writes, and nobody talks about the poor.

She’s not alone. A few weeks ago radio host Tavis Smiley teamed up with Princeton prof Cornel West for a 16-city “Poverty Tour” whose aim was to “insert the word poverty into the American public sphere (where it rarely appears).” This is a common refrain on the left. If it’s not NPR’s Lynn Neary opining that Hurricane Katrina taught America we had been “ignoring poverty,” it’s The New York Times reminding everyone about America’s “forgotten poor.”

Pollitt wrote her piece shortly after the latest Census Bureau report showed a jump in poverty. Maybe you saw that story. It certainly was hard to miss. It got front-page treatment from The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and plenty of other papers, and the equivalent from TV.

Hmmmm. Maybe only the East Coast liberal elite pays any attention to such data. Then again, maybe not. “Census Shows High Poverty Levels in Peoria,” reported the Peoria Journal Star. “More Residents Sinking Into Poverty,” noted the Seattle Times. “SD Children Impacted by Poverty,” reported KDLT News in South Dakota. Those were just some of the more than 2,000 news stories on the Census report.

And yet the myth that America pays no attention to poverty lives on.

Three points:

Chris Hedges is dumb. The tendency of both media and society to ignore poverty has little to nothing to do with media oligopoly. It’s just that upper-middle class reporters and editors don’t know a whole lot about poor people. They don’t get particularly incensed about poverty issues because they aren’t affected personally. Contrast that with the hullaballoo over the AP wiretaps. The media’s favorite topic is itself. The further removed a story is from the reporter, the less likely it is to be covered.

A. Barton Hinkle is an okay guy—but he’s not good at writing about poverty. The claim that the poor are “invisible” is not a claim that the poor have super powers and can literally disappear if they feel like it. The claim is that they aren’t are rarely addressed as humans. It’s not that it never happens. It’s just that it happens rarely enough that a publication would write an article with a headline like “Faces of the Poor.” You don’t see “Faces of the Rich” because the rich hugely disproportionate coverage. The fact that people even need to ask who the poor are or what they are like is, in itself, evidence of inadequate coverage.

Get off my lawn.

Graduation, 2013 My sister graduated from Augustana College...

Tue, 21 May 2013 12:44:00 -0400

Graduation, 2013

My sister graduated from Augustana College last weekend. With so many amazing people graduating, it’s impossible not to feel optimistic.

Any newly graduated readers doubtlessly picked up the subtext in that previous statement. But for anybody else, I’ll make it explicit: Help. You’re our last, best hope.

As you have noticed, the world has some problems. We might have caused some of them. And we don’t know how to fix them. So good luck. This might sound unfair—but under the circumstances, I think it’s pretty reasonable.

I’ll put it this way. Do you have any idea how many lead paint chips the previous generations consumed? Swimming pools full of Baby Boomers had DDT sprayed on them. And it was the Greatest Generation that thought this was a good idea. We’ve since figured out, for example, that if a mercury thermometer breaks, the broken glass is not a free straw. These basic public health innovations may seem like no-brainers—but when you consider the quantity of neurotoxins doutlessly consumed in childhood by the people who came up with them, give credit where it’s due. Some of us are still figuring out that there might be a better approach to students struggling in school than more nuns and thicker rulers. I’m not saying you all had a childhood totally free from what, in retrospect, is obvious exposure to major toxins. I’m just saying that you’re the best we’ve done so far. (Pictured above: Me, attempting to smile and look at a camera. And failing. Probably because my car seat was made out of carcinogens. Angie nailed it.)

It took us until 1964 to really grok that smoking is bad for you. And we’re still working out the implications of second-hand smoke. And as obvious as all this is, it hasn’t been easy. Every time somebody suggested that maybe it would be nice not to have our cities visibly covered in smog, Team Asthma piped up with, “What about the nice sunsets?” We only recently decided that maybe we should try to teach our children to be a bit less racist, a bit less sexist than we are. We’ve had a concerted effort to stop poisoning our children’s bodies and minds—and you’re the payoff. Now we need your help.

This might seem like a lot of pressure—but I’m really only asking you to do a bit better than Generation Paint Chip. This is an easy bar. You just need to be awake enough not to trip over it. All I’m asking is that when you see the opportunity to put everybody who came before you to shame, take it.

Anyway, Congratulations. I’m looking forward to you solving all my problems. Let me know how I and any of the other Olds can help.

Yahoo!'s acquisition of Tumblr

Mon, 20 May 2013 13:02:41 -0400

… means the exclamation mark in Yahoo! is now ironic.

Yahoo search is the new trucker hat.

Hezbollah Suffers Losses in Fierce Battle for Syrian City - NYTimes.com

Mon, 20 May 2013 11:01:29 -0400

Hezbollah Suffers Losses in Fierce Battle for Syrian City - NYTimes.com

Do you think I can persuade the new Yahoo! Overlords that my blog is the coolest thing happening on...

Mon, 20 May 2013 10:45:35 -0400

Do you think I can persuade the new Yahoo! Overlords that my blog is the coolest thing happening on Tumblr? I mean, obviously it’s not. But I’m banking on Yahoo! not being very good at figuring that out. (“The GIF is an image format created by Compuserve. For some reason it is very popular with the coveted demographic of people trying to connect with young people.”)

Maybe this is my hour.

It's been a good ride while it lasted, but Yahoo has to try to monetize tumblr to justify throwing a billion at it, so it has to become something else.

Sun, 19 May 2013 23:14:40 -0400

I don’t think Yahoo needs to directly monetize Tumblr. Yahoo needs Tumblr because Yahoo doesn’t want to be the kind of company where people are like, “Oh, crap. Yahoo.”

Guys, I’m old and I’m scared. If Yahoo buys Tumblr...

Sat, 18 May 2013 18:00:51 -0400

Guys, I’m old and I’m scared. If Yahoo buys Tumblr and then turns it into Geocities or whatever, what if I don’t know any other social media site. Here’s a picture of my face. Maybe one of you all can tell me how to Facebook it or whatever? Or maybe pin it somewhere like all the kids are doing?

Status: v. concerned.

"We will know the Decline of the West has been completed when the children of the bourgeoisie turn to..."

Sat, 18 May 2013 14:07:54 -0400

“We will know the Decline of the West has been completed when the children of the bourgeoisie turn to handicrafts.”

- In The Count of Concord, Nick Delbanco translates Oswald Spengler’s 1918 work, Decline of the West.

On a related note, could somebody explain Pinterest to me?

If Yahoo buys Tumblr...

Sat, 18 May 2013 11:16:19 -0400

azspot:

squashed:

… okay. I mean, I guess that would be fine.

I guess change is inevitable. It happens fast on the Internet. The blogs I first followed on Tumblr are by and large gone. Or less active. In some way, I feel like the old guy who hangs out with kids because all his friends are dead. And he likes yelling at kids.

The point being, Yahoo isn’t looking to buy talent, technology, or a quick profit in Tumblr. It’s looking for relevance. It’s knows that when you drop a billion to buy a cool friend, you don’t immediately screw it up by doing something massively uncool.

It’ll be okay.

Is this misguided rosiness in lieu of Yahoo historical pattern of buying and burning successful online platforms?

OTOH, outside of steadfast service stability (which I am indeed most thankful for :)), Tumblr has languished in the past year — the only “enhancements” being of a negative nature (i.e., the recent editor “upgrade”, still riddled with bugs that make it excruciating to edit posts with blockquote text)

And it might serve as the needed impetus for me to complete development on my own homebrewed (and self hosted) tumble-wiki alternative.

In 2007, I was drinking coffee in Marco’s livingroom/dining room/office. He told me he and David had launched a website that had done remarkably well. He urged me to register before somebody else registered daniel.tumblr.com. Maybe I could write things there instead of on LiveJournal. There were about 27,000 users at that point, one of whom was AZSpot. Since then, Tumblr has grown to about 300 billion users, each more unique than the last. So it’s done okay. Marco has left Tumblr, started Instapaper, and recently left Instapaper. The last time we were drinking coffee together, he had a living room and a dining room and an office. So he’s done okay. And I’ve done okay with Tumblr as well. The point being, on the Internet, a lot has changed since 2007. And in 2007 if somebody had announced that LiveJournal was maybe being acquired, I would feel about like everybody feels now. (Where would I store my feelings!?!)

The point being, life is brutal and short on the Internet. When awesome websites are acquired and eventually shut down by other websites, it’s either a pattern or it’s just what happens on the Internet. Does anybody seriously think that if Yahoo hadn’t acquired GeoCities it would be the coolest site on the Internet now?

Though, there’s another angle. Yahoo was founded in 1995. In Internet years, that’s like the Roman Empire. (I’m going to resist the urge to troll you all by saying that, it’s not bad to be in a conquered province because at least you get to be part of the glory of Rome.) Yahoo has at least survived.

The broader point being, things change quickly on the internet. There’s always a younger, cooler site looming just over the horizon. I’m not sure that acquisition by Yahoo particularly diminishes Tumblr’s longterm prognosis. It means an influx of cash, stability, and technical capability. Heck, probably a functional search feature. And it means that Tumblr doesn’t need to desperately look for ways to monetize.

The Internet will kill everything you love. But by the time it dies, you won’t even care.

Also, lol at $1.1b all cash deal because that Facebook stock thing didn’t work well for...

Fri, 17 May 2013 22:38:25 -0400

Also, lol at $1.1b all cash deal because that Facebook stock thing didn’t work well for Instagram. And also nobody wants to be paid in Yahoo stock.

If Yahoo buys Tumblr...

Fri, 17 May 2013 22:02:29 -0400

… okay. I mean, I guess that would be fine.

I guess change is inevitable. It happens fast on the Internet. The blogs I first followed on Tumblr are by and large gone. Or less active. In some way, I feel like the old guy who hangs out with kids because all his friends are dead. And he likes yelling at kids.

The point being, Yahoo isn’t looking to buy talent, technology, or a quick profit in Tumblr. It’s looking for relevance. It’s knows that when you drop a billion to buy a cool friend, you don’t immediately screw it up by doing something massively uncool.

It’ll be okay.

Somebody should have Wikipediaed that

Thu, 16 May 2013 23:11:20 -0400

When I told Carolyn that I had located a vein of ebony ore in Skyrim and successfully mined it, she laughed at me. Apparently neither I nor any of Skyrim’s designers knew that ebony does not come from mines. Or perhaps Bethesda has a sick sense of humor and revels in making unsuspecting nerds look dumb.

Three Stories about Government Overreach

Thu, 16 May 2013 20:35:15 -0400

First, Benghazi. As the story goes, the Obama administration tried to pass off a terrorist attack as an anti-American protest in order to secure reelection and/or coddle our enemies and/or persecute Christians. And it turns out that there’s no actual evidence for that story. So the real story is why the Obama administration hasn’t given us the evidence we demand. Or maybe the real story is the Republicans prioritization of political gamesmanship over any pretense of sound government. This is not a scandal. It’s an obnoxious distraction—and most people have figured this out at this point.

Second, the AP phone record subpoenas. Perhaps somebody else could explain this to me. It sounds like some information leaked that was both extremely newsworthy and extremely sensitive for legitimate national security reasons. There was an investigation into the leak—and I don’t think anybody disputes that a leak of that type was worth investigating it. Holder recused himself from the investigation. AP and the press are angry that they were drawn into the investigation and feel that they should get extra protections. (It’s not an unreasonable request). And the Obama administration is now asking for a press shield law to provide the extra protections. I don’t believe there is any allegation that any laws were broken. Nor do I think anybody is even claiming an attempt to intimidate or harass the press. I see a controversy—but not a scandal.

Of course, it’s also a story about percieved encroachments on press freedom … so there are some reporters who are really into it. I get that. And I’m not trying to say that the entire media is composed of entitled whiners. At least, I’m not trying to say it expressly.

Third, the IRS flap. Okay. This one was bad. And as more details emerge, it’s starting to look like at least a couple IRS employees may have had a political agenda. And there’s a good story in here for any libertarian seeking an anecdote about public officials abusing power.

The Republicans want answers. They expect people to be fired. They want criminal prosecution. On Wednesday, John Boehner asked who was going to go to jail over this scandal.

Except … the Justice Department had announced a criminal probe in the matter on Tuesday. The acting head of the IRS has already been asked to resign—not because he personally targetted the groups, not because he directed people to target them, not because the targetting happened on his watch, but because he knew that the targetting and didn’t immediately blow the whistle. So this looks like a case of something bad happened on Obama’s watch and he brought the hammer down before the Republicans could even get their talking points together. This is a scandal—but I don’t think it’s the Obama Administration’s scandal.

So … right. The new narrative is that these three stories are some kind of perfect storm of scandals that is going to plague Obama’s entire second term and relegate his Presidential library to the log next to the sewage treatment plant. I don’t buy it. I count one Republican fabrication, one fight over the balance between press access and national security, and one legitimate scandal in a politically isolated agency that Obama has aggressively responded to.

Of course, there is a real scandal. This whole sequestration thing. Cuts in programs are okay … until they start annoying wealthy people. So the Federal Aviation Administration cuts get reversed. But massive cuts in emergency unemployment benefits have gone largely without comment.

White House releases emails on Benghazi talking points

Wed, 15 May 2013 18:57:10 -0400

White House releases emails on Benghazi talking points:

shortformblog:

The White House on Wednesday released almost 100 pages of internal emails regarding the talking points that Ambassador Susan Rice and other officials used on Sunday shows following the deadly Benghazi, Libya attack on September 11, 2012.

You can read ‘em here. Meanwhile, the President is going to give a statement on the IRS scandal in 20 minutes.

For those of you who don’t want to read a hundred pages of email chains:

There was a large inter-agency group that prepared a reasonably specific talking point summary of what was known when it was known. They said, essentially, “We think this was a reaction to the Cairo protests, but we don’t know. Also there are terrorists hereabout and we think some of them were involved.”
At some point they were like, “Let’s loop in the State Department.”
The State Department was like, “Hold on, we’re doing a criminal investigation into this. We don’t want to say anything specific that could screw things up later.” There was also some concern that mentioning previous knowledge of vaguely similar threats could make the State department look bad.
There was some meeting the next morning where all the details were crossed out and the resulting talking points were more or less, “Uh, we think it was a protest, but we don’t know.”
The boring talking points were the ones used.
This was all, really boring. I was expecting something at least mildly shocking. All the drama happens on p. 62. But it’s really the sort of drama you get when people are sick of being in a tense meeting and are like, “Fine, screw it. Can we at least agree on these three things?”

Or, to put it differently, a ton of government agencies spent a ton of time on this, and the result was three bullet points, all of which said, “Ask again later.”

"Protecting the press would matter a lot more to me if they were worth a damn. "

Wed, 15 May 2013 12:29:29 -0400

Quoth TheCallus

That’s about the speed of it, right? I mean, does anybody seriously think we should tolerate routine leaks of classified information? If it’s not important to keep it secret—release it in the normal way. That’s transparency. If it is important to keep secret, don’t release it. I don’t see room for This is a Secret But You Get Access Because Good Old Boys.

(Yes, I know that whistleblowing is a different thing. We can talk about that later when there’s a case that actually involves a whistleblower.)

Stop the leaks. Open the faucet. That’s transparency. That way anybody can have access to the information everybody should have access to. “Stop cracking down on leaks” is not about free information. It’s about dinosaurs squabbling over exclusive grazing.

If the occasional leak was leading to a golden age of jouralism, I’m sure I’d feel differently. Maybe I’d feel that a select few news outlets were doing such a great job of disseminenting information in a socially responsible manner that nothing should be done that risks upsetting the balance. Maybe I’m missing a golden age of journalism behind the celebrity trial and the news report on what’s trending on Twitter.

I've been sick for a few days.

Wed, 15 May 2013 10:34:58 -0400

Today is the first day back at work—which means showing up at work looking underdressed, unshaven, and exhausted. I’m trying to figure out what message this projects. Is it, 1) I’ve been sick for two days, or 2) I lied about being sick for days but I was actually on a legendary bender. I’m hoping it’s #2 so people think I’m cooler than I am.

I’m worried it’s actually, 3) I’m the kind of guy who uses a cement truck to make complications disappear.

Persecution, Persecution Complexes, and the Press

Tue, 14 May 2013 15:37:42 -0400

Some phone records of the AP were subpoenaed in response to a massive intelligence leak. The AP has highlighted concerns that it might chill future sources from turning information over to the press. Of course, since this involved the illegal leak of a highly classified information, perhaps chilling that sort of leak is the entire point of the investigation (and whatever prosecution follows).

This is all something to be concerned about. But … be wary of systemic bias when reading about press reports. If the press is reporting that the press is angry, its probably not a neutral arbiter of how you should interpret that information.

Or, to put it differently, if I published classified information on my blog, I would expect some type of inquiry into how exactly I got that information. That inquiry might include subpoenas. It might involve everything you would expect a potentially criminal breach of national security would involve. And if I said, “Hold on. Leave me out of this. I’m, um, a journalist,” everybody would laugh at me. Especially the AP. Because I’m a guy with a blog, not a journalist.

The real question is what level of special deference old media journalism is entitled to beyond what everybody is entitled to as freedom of speech.

Targeting the Tea Party

Tue, 14 May 2013 09:24:00 -0400

On one hand, targeting Tea Party groups for extra scrutiny looks like a massively and systemically unfair abuse of power by the IRS.

That said, it’s important to keep this in context. Additional scrutiny was given to “various local organizations in the Tea Party movement…applying for exemption under 501(c)(3) or 501(c)(4).” A 501(c)(3) organization is a charity of the traditional sense that cannot support political candidates and gets massive tax benefits. So if a Tea Party group is applying for 501(c)(3) status, extra scrutiny is warranted. The only problem would be if left-leaning groups were routinely let through.

There has been an explosion of 501(c)(4) groups—which allow all sorts of dark money into politics. While they are nominally supporting “issues,” some of them are pushing even the relatively lax legal boundaries. And, yes, most of the new ones were conservative groups last time around. Additional scrutiny can both makes sures the laws are upheld from the beginning and prevents people from the facing the extremely unpleasant consequences of inadvertently breaking them.

This is worth investigating—but I suspect that the findings should be relatively benign. Somebody was trying to save time by a clumsy, albeit impermissibly partisan, shortcut. As a matter of accountability, it’s important to take this sort of thing seriously. Of course, insisting that there is a corruption scandal regardless of what the investigation shows is another way of not taking the investigation seriously.

existentialcrisisfactory: Space Oddity (by Chris Hadfield) This...

Mon, 13 May 2013 09:01:24 -0400

existentialcrisisfactory:

Space Oddity (by Chris Hadfield)

This is the most wonderful thing I’ve ever seen.

Chris Hadfield is the one guy in the world who makes me wonder if, perhaps, I had played my cards differently, could I have been an astronaut?

The Humane Society must be doing something right...

Sat, 11 May 2013 17:53:00 -0400

Suppose you saw a swarm of uniformed Nazis, men in slick-business suits, and maybe some evil-looking clowns all chasing after one guy. You might not know what was going on. But you’d know that the man had just done something awesome.

That’s about how I reacted when YouTube served me a gritty attack ad targeting the the Humane Society of the United States. The claim of the ad (and the website it directed viewers to) was that if you want to give money to your local animal shelter you should give to your local animal shelter—not to the Humane Society of the United States. As anybody who gives to the national Humane Society knows, HSUS is a large charity that dedicates its resources to the types of big-picture national issues local shelters can’t take on. And as everybody knows, when a non-profit reaches the size of HSUS or the Red Cross or the Sierra Club or whatever, you can find something to criticize if you’re determined to rake mud. But who had decided to buy ad time to compare the Humane Society to Bernie Madoff? It’s certainly not the National Federation of Humane Societies.

Turns out it’s the “Center for Consumer Freedom.” The Center for Consumer Freedom is one of those “non-profits” that funnels all its money to a for-profit lobbying organization run by its President. So it’s just a shell to allow anonymous donations and candy-coat hyper-partisan attack ads. I have no idea where the actual money comes from—but the start-up money for CCF came from Phillip Morris (via Wikipedia). My best guess would be that it’s mostly coming from the same companies that want to make it illegal to blow the whistle on animal abuse at factory farms.

So I don’t know what the Humane Society is doing to make somebody feel threatened enough to do that sort of muck raking. But I’m for it.