May 31st
2:28 PM

5 notes

"‘I Roger Ailes plan to undermine the role of an independent press by constantly whining that any reportage that deviates from a staunch conservative narrative is biased while at the same time filling the editorial vacuum that creates by building a conservative propaganda juggernaut in the guise of a news organisation.’

And he said, I think he said… ‘Jon I’m going to call the organisation Fox News, and its tag line will be, you’re gonna love this: A fanatically micro-managed media fiefdom where my own far right agenda and personal sense of victimhood drive every aspect of the operation …and Balanced’"

— John Stewart, recounting “what Roger Ailes admitted” to him. Parody is the propaedeutic when it comes to Fox, Ailes and an confronting epidemic absurdity.

May 29th
10:21 AM

1 note

Taken too seriously, pure concept contraposed to the manifold of intuition renders an horrific scene: The bumping and grinding of sheer moronism - and a fate, where real understanding is inaccessibly aloof. Schematism can’t be invoked as an explanation to ward off a Night of the Living Dead. It must be an old act, an echo we can hear, an atmosphere we can breathe.

9:32 AM

42 notes

Source

Via

"Mitt was not particularly popular. He was very, very ordinary. He was an average Cranbrook student. He was not an athlete, he was not a student leader, he was not a scholar. The thing that separated Mitt there was that his father was the governor of Michigan."

— Sidney Barthwell, who just might be the only person on the planet who went to school with both Mitt Romney and Barack Obama. (via thedailyfeed)

8:28 AM

4 notes

May 25th
1:00 PM

1 note

Historic Vote in Egypt

Run-off Stakes | Nasserist Darkhorse | Key Players

Jadaliyya Coverage | Tight margin for 2nd

SCAF to issue preliminary constitution

____________________updates________________

Tahrir Rumbles | Broad Coalition Promise

Spotlight Egypt | Replay of American 60s?

May 24th
11:43 AM

65 notes

Source

Via

thepeoplesrecord:

Quebec students defy government threats

The strike of post-secondary students in Québec has taken a dramatic turn with the provincial government rushing adoption of a special law on May 18 to suspend the school year at strike-bound institutions until August and to outlaw protest activity deemed disruptive of institutions not participating in the strike. >continue<

May 23rd
5:36 PM

5 notes

Paul Krugman on Euro Rescue Efforts
‘Right Now, We Need Expansion’

SPIEGEL: More stimulus also means more debt. Many European nations, as well as the US, are already drowning in debt.

Krugman: I’m not saying that I don’t ever care about debt, but not now. If you slash spending, you just depress the economy further. And, given the low interest rates and what we now know about long-run effects of high unemployment, you almost certainly actually even make your fiscal position worse. Give me a strong-enough economic recovery that the Fed is starting to want to raise interest rates to head off inflation — then I become a deficit hawk.

SPIEGEL: So, for now, we should just ignore the huge debt burdens?

Krugman: That’s right. It’s quite amazing that we’re giving priority to the imagined threat that the bond markets might lose faith even though they give every indication of not being worried at all, given the reality that millions of people have been unemployed for more than a year and the almost certain long-term damage that that’s inflicting.

SPIEGEL: But we can’t just kick the debt can down the road and let future generations deal with it. The debt has not been shrinking even in good economic times.

Krugman: That’s not true. We went into huge deficits when the economy plunged, and this is the time for huge deficits, not later. And it’s not a date; it’s a condition. When the economy has recovered sufficiently so that we’re no longer in the liquidity trap is when you start to worry about debts again… >continue<

image: Francisco Seco/Associated Press, Tom Tomorrow interpolated

May 22nd
5:16 PM

2 notes

DuckDuckGo and Ixquick take a tiny bite out of Google
Private: some search engines make money by not tracking users

Cyrus Farivar - arstechnica »

“The problem is that [people] have never had a choice…They don’t perceive that they have a choice. If you say: yes, you can go to this privacy search engine, they feel that they’re sacrificing something for that. But I don’t want to hamper my search experience. We’ve been trying to offer high privacy and a comparable or better search experience [than Google].”

[Gabriel] Weinberg’s not the only one saying it. Search Engine Land wrote last month that in terms of user experience and interface, DuckDuckGo “has begun to beat Google at its own game.” >continue<

While a “tiny bite” may sound quixotic in a world where Google is almost synonymous with ubiquity, the emergence of “filter bubbles” and the inescapable avalanche of personally tailored information appears to mark the extreme frontiers of sophistry. Constantly being told what we want to hear, given what we want to see, subtly subverts both intelligence and its emergence. If Socrates told any interesting stories or asked any interesting questions, that and how one might counter it should be remembered above all.

It’s not just balkanization into ever more finely tuned demographics and the herding of citizens into a consumeristic fate here in the Age of Marketing - but the chief mode whereby soul is rendered into slavishness, and where the hope for an adroit political intellect is forever attenuated into an infinity of desire.

Which is to say, the linked Eli Pariser video and the arstechnica piece above are worth more than passing attention.

May 17th
1:18 PM

8 notes

Source

Via

"We just need a president who can sign the legislation that the Republican House and Senate pass. We don’t need someone to think. We need someone with enough digits on one hand to hold a pen."

—

Grover Norquist on Mitt Romney (via idroolinmysleep)

Reminiscent of Justice Thomas suggesting that all important questions of law are settled, and we only need to mechanically implement settled principles. Art, judgement, phronesis - in short, humanity is wholly unnecessary when all you have to do is paint by numbers.

12:24 PM

4 notes

"…when businesspeople take credit for creating jobs, it’s a little like squirrels taking credit for creating evolution. In fact, it’s the other way around"

— Nick Hanauer, from a presentation TED won’t show

11:06 AM

56 notes

Source

Via

randomactsofchaos:

Jim Morin/Miami Herald (05/17/2012)

May 14th
3:51 PM

61 notes

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Via

"I’m still waiting for the moment when Romney actually tells the truth about something difficult. He could have said, “You know, I’ve been troubled by the Cranbrook episode for most of my life, and I feel relieved, in a way, that it’s come out now. I did a really stupid and terrible thing. Teenage boys sometimes do such things and deserve to be punished for them. What I most regret is that I never apologized to John and won’t be able to now that he’s gone, but let me apologize to his family and friends. Bullying is unacceptable under any circumstances. It is especially unacceptable when prejudice — against one’s race, ethnicity or sexual orientation — is involved. If elected President, I will try to atone for my teenage behavior by campaigning against bullying all across this country. What I did back then should be an example of how not to behave. I hope we can all learn from this. I know I have.”

Instead, Romney has a near perfect record of cowardice, obfuscation and downright lies. It shows enormous disrespect for the intelligence of the public."

—

Joe Klein: Romney’s Apology for Bullying Insufficient

Can you imagine?!

(via apoplecticskeptic)

May 9th
12:16 PM

8 notes

Everything you know about Anonymous is wrong

Gabriella Coleman »

By painting Anonymous as so inchoate we not only empirically misrepresent them; we drift inevitably into hyperbole, exaggerating the extent to which people find them threatening, adding to the air of mystery surrounding hackers who fly under that banner, feeding into the hysteria that law enforcement (and the defence contractors selling security and “anti-hacker solutions”) self-consciously seek to cultivate….

The more immediate danger in portraying Anonymous as a diabolical, nebulous hydra is that fallacious arguments such as this will only serve to strengthen the arguments of those who seek stiffer legal penalties against protest activity. Alternatively, we could face the current, depressing realities of the state of surveillance - and the surveillance state - and inspire individuals to join the fight against efforts to undermine individual freedoms, while we still can. >continue<

May 4th
2:35 AM

2 notes

"…this line is a direct reflection of religion. Our mythos of individuality (even rights), the stuff we see in various political creeds. No matter what we call ourselves, we tend to reflexively buy this story line… this premium on the individual “coming first”, that there is some atomic individuality that “does things” in some pure zone of doing that has mastery over everything else as a tool. Then these mystical entities called “rights” get woven in to the picture. Many self-styled atheists buy it too, unaware that it cannot be verified or legitimized by any hard science"

— XHerakleitos