Brilliant piece from Michael Kinsley, I think.
Also, Gawker on not feeding the Limbaugh troll:
http://gawker.com/5890597/only-you-can-end-the-tragic-cycle-of-rush-limb...
MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE
by Michael Wolraich
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In the News
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Senate Republican leader said Monday the United States should use overwhelming military force against Iran if American intelligence shows that Tehran has decided to build a nuclear weapon.....
A 'Use of Force Resolution' is, of course, how the Iraq fiasco started. Iran is three times as big, with three time the population of Iraq. Determining who has 'decided' what on nuclear arms in Iran may be difficult, as there is no The Decider in Iran. Power is not under one person's control, there are multiple factions. Any attack on Iran would likely give more power to the most extreme pro-nuke faction, and unify the nation behind them.
"An Aipac official noted that this idea originated with Mr. McConnell, not with Aipac.....“My supreme responsibility as prime minister of Israel is to ensure that Israel remains the master of its fate,” Mr. Netanyahu said." NYT
Not even Israel believes Iran can be stopped from producing a nuclear weapon without forces on the ground in Iran, possibly including occupation of the country. Of course, nuclear armed Israel must be the 'master of its fate', but the same is apparently not true of the Palestinian people in the occupied territories of Israel, or even Iran itself.
By Carol J. Williams, Los Angeles Times, March 5, 2012
Reporting from Los Angeles—Tucson shooting suspect Jared Lee Loughner can be forcibly medicated with antipsychotic drugs, a federal appeals court ruled Monday.
In a 2-1 ruling, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals said prison authorities have the right to treat an inmate who would otherwise be a danger to himself or others around him. [....]
By Alexis Madrigal, Atlantic.com, March 5, 2012
The site is like a 1995 Ford Escort with a 500-horsepower advertising engine under the hood
[....]
The point of laying all this out is that the boundary between business and politics, between the commercial and civic spheres, is porous [....]
The rise of ideologically-aligned media helped people sort themselves into different knowledge communities. Sophisticated targeting tools will now reinforce those initial positions, automatically providing ads that have been designed to keep people within the boundaries of the things they once read and thoughts they once had.
TPM:
Before you can join the Laurens County Republican Party in South Carolina and get on the primary ballot, they ask that you pledge that you’ve never ever had pre-marital sex — and that you will never ever look at porn again.
Last Tuesday, the LCGOP unanimously adopted a resolution that would ask all candidates who want to get on the primary ballot to sign a pledge with 28 principles, because the party “does not want to associate with candidates who do not act and speak in a manner that is consistent with the SC Republican Party Platform.”
Full story with link. And gee, I really, really want this to go to SCOTUS!
By Nate Silver, FiveThirtyEight @ nytimes.com, March 5, 2012, 2:13 pm
Rick Santorum got a rough result in the Washington caucuses on Saturday, finishing third in a state he had seemed to have a reasonable shot of winning. Now, Mr. Santorum’s slump is carrying over into the polls in crucial Super Tuesday states.
In Ohio, Mitt Romney has been the beneficiary of this. Although some polls still show Mr. Santorum with a lead, Mr. Romney was ahead in the majority of surveys that were conducted over the weekend and seems to have favorable momentum. Our forecast model there now shows Mr. Romney ahead by 2.5 percentage points there, and makes him a 2-to-1 favorite to win the state.
Mr. Santorum is also creating opportunities for his opponents in the two other Super Tuesday states that have been heavily polled [.....]
By Paul Harris in New York, Guardian.co.uk, March 3, 2012
New shows such as Revenge, Ringer, GCB and Downwardly Mobile win viewers with stories of inequality, covering ground where US politicians fear to tread
By Ian Duncan, Los Angeles Times, March 4, 2012
Reporting from Washington -- Israeli President Shimon Peres will receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom this spring, President Obama announced at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference in Washington. [....]
Also see:
Shimon Peres: a dovish voice in Obama's ear
By Joshua Mitnick, Christian Science Monitor, March 4, 2012
Israeli President Shimon Peres meets with President Obama today. Mr. Peres opposes an Israeli preemptive strike on Iran, adding a dovish voice to deliberations between the US and Israel
Tel Aviv - On the eve of a summit between President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to close gaps on confronting Iran, Mr. Obama meets today with an Israeli elder statesman who has staked out a more dovish position than the government. [....] A report in the Haaretz newspaper last week said he opposes an Israeli preemptive attack on Iran right now, even though many Israeli leaders have been hinting at the possibility. Opposing an attack now puts Mr. Peres closer to the US president than some Israeli cabinet members [....]
Putin "wants to be understood, but he can't understand why we don't understand him."
The powerful Russian politician has never been the subject of such an intimate portrayal on film, and certainly not from the perspective of a Western journalist who can edit the footage as he sees fit. Putin normally doesn't let journalists get too close to him. For him, journalists are nothing but vicarious agents for his elaborate propaganda productions, in which he is often shown posing in Formula 1 cars or fighter jets.
The Kremlin media pool, a group of more than two dozen handpicked journalists, accompanies Putin during his public appearances. The journalists often spend hours playing billiards at his residence outside Moscow while waiting for the chronically late Putin. Some of them were clearly jealous when the premier decided to grant such unprecedented access to Seipel, giving interviews in which nothing was off-limits except Putin's private life.
The filmmaker manages to establish considerable intimacy with the prime minister, who is aiming to once again become president, but without being taken in by him. He also manages to break through the façade that Putin might have been hoping to present. Putin plays the tough guy, while Seipel shows that there is a certain weakness and sadness to always having to play this role.
A new twist on radio waves could massively boost the capacity of Wifi and other wireless networks.
A team of scientists demonstrated the technique in Venice by beaming signals across the lagoon.
They exploited a property of radio waves called "orbital angular momentum" to send two signals on the same frequency. They gave the two signals different amounts of orbital angular momentum to differentiate them.
According to the scientists, their technique in principle* allows an infinite number of channels, potentially solving congestion problems in the electromagnetic spectrum....
...To create wave with different orbital angular momentum, the scientists split normal standard satellite dish-shaped transmitter along its radius and separated the two edges to create a corkscrew and twist the two signals different amounts.
Their research is described in the New Journal of Physics.
*emphasis added
Like the team that engineered President Obama’s victory in 2008, Mr. Romney’s lawyers and strategists say they have devised an approach to the second half of the primary campaign intended to ensure that he methodically amasses the 1,144 delegates necessary to win the nomination, staying ahead of his rivals in that count even if they win the popular vote in some states.
...
Rich Beeson, Mr. Romney’s political director, said of Mr. Santorum: “He has no states on Super Tuesday where he is going to do anything to cut the delegate lead. He is going to fall further and further behind. It becomes a mathematical battle as much as it is a political one, and the math just doesn’t add up for Santorum.”
Hogan Gidley, a senior strategist for Mr. Santorum, mocked Mr. Romney’s advisers, saying they were hunting for delegates because Mr. Romney’s message was failing to inspire voters. “Nothing inspires this country like math — that’s ridiculous,” Mr. Gidley said. “The argument that math is on their side is uninspiring and laughable.”
Virgin Galactic almost ready for passengers. Citizen space travel is due to start next year. You'll need $20,000 to hold your place; suborbital tickets will cost upward of $200,000. Next up (they say): SpacshipThree flights from London to Melbourne, via space in about two hours. I’ll believe the second part when I see it. But it's cool and I describe much of this (and more) inExistence. One of the better sides of a new Gilded Age.
As Virgin Galactic gets closer to becoming the world's first commercial space line, Playboy is eagerly pondering the creation of the ultimate intergalactic entertainment destination. Zero gravity dance floor...and sights out of this world at the new Two Hundred Mile High Club.
An updated circulation model reveals the Southern Ocean as a powerful influence on climate change.
The world’s oceans act as a massive conveyor, circulating heat, water and carbon around the planet. This global system plays a key role in climate change, storing and releasing heat throughout the world. To study how this system affects climate, scientists have largely focused on the North Atlantic, a major basin where water sinks, burying carbon and heat deep in the ocean’s interior.
But what goes down must come back up, and it’s been a mystery where, and how, deep waters circulate back to the surface. Filling in this missing piece of the circulation, and developing theories and models that capture it, may help researchers understand and predict the ocean’s role in climate and climate change.
Taiwan National University (NTU) Department of Agricultural Economics professor Wu Pei-ing (吳珮瑛), aged 53, was handed a final sentence of 10 days in prison or a fine by the High Court on Thursday for calling a fellow professor “worthless.”
By China Melville for the New York Times Sunday Magazine, March 4, 2011
On "Apocalyptic London." Just published, already has 38 comments, many blasting the article because, as one says, The .journalist is a Marxist member of the Socialist Workers Party and others calling it an Excellent piece. I haven't read it yet, but based on the "reviews" already there, seems it's a "people are going to be talking about this" must read.
The editor's note: China Miéville .is the author of several novels, including ‘‘The City and the City.’’ He lives and works in London. An expanded version of this essay will be published on March 5, 2012, on his Web site www.londonsoverthrow.org.
Related in the same issue:
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True Londoners Are Extinct (March 4, 2012)
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Explaining Londoners (March 4, 2012)
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It’s the Economy: London Is Eating New York’s Lunch (March 4, 2012)
By Alex Perry, Global Spin blog @ Time Magazine, March 1, 2012
The African National Congress’ expulsion of its enfant terrible, Julius Malema, answers one question: Yes, the party of Nelson Mandela, the party which overthrew apartheid, still finds racism and hate speech intolerable. But it also poses another: Who now proposes to lead South Africa’s millions of poor, young and unemployed?
The ANC made its surprise move late Wednesday in response to Malema’s appeal against its decision last year to suspend him for five years for bringing the party into disrepute after calling for the overthrow of the government in neighboring Botswana. By appealing, and not apologizing, the leader of the ANC’s Youth League had proven himself to be a “repeat offender,” the ANC’s disciplinary committee found, and aggravated his offense by threatening that “the disciplinary proceedings will come to an end, but the real battle will start after that when the ANC has to persuade the youth.” [....]
As someone who purported to speak for the poor and young but who conspicuously enjoyed the high life himself, Malema was never a true champion of South Africa’s marginalized. But his departure only serves to underline how no political figure in South Africa truly speaks for the millions of black South Africans who find themselves living in the same townships, and enduring the same [....]
By Lee Ferran, ABC News, March 2, 2012
Far from spying on terrorists, more than a dozen high-tech surveillance drones, which together cost the U.S. government more than $3 billion, could soon be sitting in a storage facility gathering dust after top Air Force officials admitted this week the birds still are not as good as the half-century-old spy planes they were designed to replace.
Air Force Gen. Norton Schwartz appeared with Air Force Secretary Michael Donley before a Senate committee Tuesday where the two defended the service's decision to stop acquisition of the Global Hawk Block 30 drones and to shelve the 18 Block 30 unmanned drones the Air Force already has, claiming it will save the Pentagon $2.5 billion. In joint written testimony, Schwartz and Donley said the Block 30s cost too much and would require expensive upgrades to match the current version of the Cold War era U-2 spy plane's technical capabilities. [....]
Associated Press, March 3, 2012
Chinese village goes to the polls to elect new leaders after running authorities out of town over land grabs
Chinese villagers in Wukan who staged a rebellion against local officials they accused of stealing their farmland voted for new leaders on Saturday in a much-watched poll that reformers hope will set a standard for resolving similar widespread and protracted disputes.
The Wukan protests flared in late 2011, with villagers smashing a police station and cars. After key village activists were detained in December, villagers drove out officials and barricaded themselves in for 10 days, keeping police out and holding boisterous rallies. Villagers said the local head, in power for decades, sold their farmland to developers without their consent [.....]
Similar standoffs in China often end in arrests, but in Wukan the provincial government conceded. It offered to hold the new elections, return some of the disputed farmland and release the detained activists, as well as the body of one who died in detention. [.....]
Private equity or hedge fund moguls make up more than half of the top donors to Restore Our Future -- the PAC created by former Romney aides to supplement his official campaign with unlimited contributions. Six of them have given $1 million or more each......
Per capita, it may be the biggest giveaway for the fewest people in the entire tax code. And Romney is a poster child for it. Carried interest is the main reason that he so famously was able to end up paying 13.9 percent in taxes on his $21.7 million income in 2010. Much of that income came from performance bonuses still trickling in from private-equity investments he managed during his career at Bain Capital.
By contrast, each of Obama's proposed budgets has called for eliminating the sweetheart deal for carried interest.
Excellent Article, whole piece with link - well worth reading entire report.
And do you believe he was only 43?
I do not wish to speak ill of the dead right now.
So I shall simply submit the link!
By Tina Rosenberg, Foreign Policy, March/April 2012 issue
The choreography of a typical human rights investigation goes like this: Researchers interview victims and witnesses and write their report. The local media cover it -- if they can. Then those accused dismiss it; you have nothing more than stories, it's one word against another, the sources are biased, the evidence faked. And it goes away.
On March 13, 2002, in a courtroom in The Hague, something different happened. In the trial of Slobodan Milosevic, Patrick Ball, an American statistician, presented numbers to support the case that Milosevic had pursued a deliberate policy of ethnic cleansing [....]
Traditionally, human rights work has been more akin to investigative reporting, but Ball is the most influential of a handful of people around the world who see that world not in terms of words, but of figures. His specialty is applying quantitative analysis to mountains of anecdotes, finding the correlations that coax out a story that cannot easily be dismissed.
Could the movements of refugees have been random? No, Ball said. He had also plotted killings of Kosovars and found that both phenomena occurred at the same times and in the same places -- flight and death, hand in hand. "I remember well the moment of astonishment that I felt when I saw the killing graph for the first time," Ball replied to Milosevic. "I assumed I had made an error, because the correlation was so close."
Something had caused both phenomena, and Ball examined three possibilities [....]
In testifying, Ball was doing something other human rights workers can only fantasize about: He confronted the accused, presented him with evidence, and watched him being held to account [....]
By Robert Greenall, BBC News, Feb 29, 2012
[....] In a country with tightly controlled TV and few independent newspapers and radio stations, the internet is a vital space for alternative opinion. Almost all of it appears on the blogging platform LiveJournal, known in Russian as Zhivoy Zhurnal, or simply ZheZhe.
Set up by US developer Brad Fitzpatrick in 1998, as a way to communicate online with his friends, LiveJournal - complete with its mascot "Frank the goat" - may seem at first sight a strange medium for Russia's new-found political vibrancy.
But Russians have made LiveJournal their own, turning what is in the West a relatively obscure and nowadays rather dated platform into a huge, seething mass of political anger, colourful prose and clever repartee [....]
Analysts say there are a number of reasons why LiveJournal became so popular and permanent among Russians [....]
(The numbers, from a side chart: 5,791,138 users and 171,915 communities using the Cyrillic alphabet)
By Charlie Savage, New York Times, Feb 28/29, 2012
WASHINGTON — Last year, the Obama administration strongly objected to a Congressional mandate that foreigners suspected of being Al Qaeda operatives be held in military custody rather than go through the civilian criminal justice system.
On Tuesday, President Obama sought to have the last word, issuing waivers that would exempt sweeping categories of future prisoners from the requirement, which became law in December.
The rule, imposed by Congress, applies only to a narrow category of terrorism suspects: those who are not American citizens, who are deemed to be part of Al Qaeda or its allies and who are suspected of participating in a terrorist plot against the United States or its allies.
The provision, which the administration called unwise and unnecessary when it was proposed by lawmakers, became another flash point in the debate over whether terrorism suspects should be handled exclusively as wartime prisoners, as many Republicans argue, or whether the civilian criminal justice system should remain an option, a more flexible approach backed by the Obama administration [.....]
By Suzanne Daley, New York Times, Feb. 28/29, 2012
HIGUERA DE LA SERENA, Spain — It didn’t take long for Manuel García Murillo, a bricklayer who took over as mayor here last June, to realize that his town was in trouble. It was 800,000 euros, a little more than $1 million, in the red. There was no cash on hand to pay for anything — and there was work that needed to be done.
But then an amazing thing happened, he said. Just as the health department was about to close down the day care center because it didn’t have a proper kitchen, Bernardo Benítez, a construction worker, offered to put up the walls and the tiles free. Then, Maria José Carmona, an adult education teacher, stepped in to clean the place up.
And somehow, the volunteers just kept coming. [....]
“We lived beyond our means,” Mr. García said. “We invested in public works that weren’t sensible. We are in technical bankruptcy.” Even some money from the European Union that was supposed to be used for routine operating expenses and last until 2013 has already been spent, he said. [....]
The volunteers wear badges while they work just so that no one thinks they are being paid. There is a lot of suspicion around the town’s finances, a sign of the times, some residents say. Scandals are popping up all over Spain. Even the king’s son-in-law is under investigation, accused of diverting public money for his own use. [....]
Higuera de la Serena’s former mayor, Bibiana Frutos Martín, a Socialist, says it was hard to resist giving in to the residents’ desire for more and more services. “We maintained a lot of services that we haven’t been able to pay for,” she said. “But we did it because the residents wanted them.” [....]