Category Archives: Media Warfare

Quick Review: Breaking Bad

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Breaking Bad is good and engaging but the value to time payoff isn’t quite dense enough for me.  Some episodes are amazing.  Others are suuuuuper boring.  I only made it halfway through season two, I think this is generally because I’m not as attracted to stories with a flawed protagonist.  Walter should have just taken the job at the company he founded and gotten super rich that way.  I also don’t like the way that he lied to his wife so much.  Anyway, stories about people who make a lot of bad decisions aren’t that engaging to me.

–

On a broader note, people seem to develop problematic relationships with substances when they use them as a coping tool.  Alcohol, cigarettes, coffee, sugar (my fav!), marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamine, etc etc.  Those things have nothing inherently wrong with them but using them to cope and escape is when things start to go awry.

Another way to put this is that you should be sober about 90% of the time.  I’ll say this again even more carefully, if you find yourself doing some intoxicant everyday, it’s not helping, it’s just making your problems worse.

Person of the Day: Jake Tapper

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Last Wednesday in the White House briefing room, the administration’s press secretary, Jay Carney, opened on a somber note, citing the deaths of Marie Colvin and Anthony Shadid, two reporters who had died “in order to bring truth” while reporting in Syria.

Jake Tapper, the White House correspondent for ABC News, pointed out that the administration had lauded brave reporting in distant lands more than once and then asked, “How does that square with the fact that this administration has been so aggressively trying to stop aggressive journalism in the United States by using the Espionage Act to take whistle-blowers to court?”  He then suggested that the administration seemed to believe that “the truth should come out abroad; it shouldn’t come out here.”

Fair point. The Obama administration, which promised during its transition to power that it would enhance “whistle-blower laws to protect federal workers,” has been more prone than any administration in history in trying to silence and prosecute federal workers.

::: Actual Journalism via The NYTimes :::

@JakeTapper you are the badass of the day.  Thank you very much!

The Stories Behind Democratizing Knowledge

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Salman Khan, founder of Khan Academy, did a great Ask Me Anything (AMA) on Reddit a couple weeks ago. This comment really hit me:

Hi my name is ****** ** and I’m a second year student in the University of Western Australia (UWA) majoring in Physics and Maths. I was originally from Singapore where I spent the first 15 years of my life failing school, day after day I would not understand a word the teacher was saying as they said, “you must remember this or you won’t get a job in your future.” and every year I would fail school. When I was 14, I started failing pretty badly and fell into a world of drug addiction. When I was 15, my drug addiction got so intense that it affected my grades so badly that I had to be held back a grade in my high school in Singapore. Finally in January 2008 (the year I was 16), my parents decided to move to Perth in Western Australia. They had me enrolled in a private school where within 8 months I was expelled for fighting and drugs. At the end of that ordeal and closely evading arrest, my parents had me enrolled in a local public school where I was faced with the worst problem of my entire life. The final exam of high school that determines if you go to University or not was coming, and I had no idea what to do as I never listened in class since I was 13. All I could do was expand a bracket and that was it, no factorizing, solving an equation or doing trigonometry. I first met the Khan Academy in December 2009 where I stumbled on his videos on Complex Numbers on YouTube. I had a whole load of heavy weight subjects like Literature, Physics, Advanced Maths, Chemistry and Biology. Everyday when I came home from school, it would be a 4pm – 10pm study session driven by my own fears. With 5 years of work to catch up on and only Khan Academy helping me, it was a grueling experience. I failed every test and exam that year, thankfully none of those tests and exams contribute to your final University determination grade. I worked through the Khan Academy playlists on Basic Algebra, Trigonometry, Physics, Chemistry and Biology before moving on to the “higher level” things like Calculus and Differential Equations. Thanks to Salman Khan for quitting his day job as a Hedge-fund Analyst, he has allowed a drug addict whom the public would look down upon to persevere through his A levels and come out on the other side with a result good enough to get into Western Australia’s best University. I hope and pray that the Khan Academy will expand to do subjects like Modern Physics and Maths topics like Topology, Differential Geometry and so on. In any case, I thank you Salman Khan, and the effort you have put into the Khan Academy. You’ve opened doors for us that we would have never been able to unlock alone.

::: I am Salman Khan, AMA via Reddit ::

Salman Khan’s Ted Talk is pretty rad too

There is another question from the AMA that I found pretty interesting:

What made you study for so many degrees? (Three from MIT and an MBA from Harvard!)
Also, thanks a lot and much respect from me, a student from Hong Kong. You make learning truly enjoyable.

MIT let you take as many courses as you wanted for the same tuition. I was the hungry kid at the all-you-can-eat buffet :)
My prime motivation for going back to Boston in 2001 to get an MBA was to find a wife (and it worked). Silicon Valley in the late 1990s was not a great place to be a young single guy. My secondary motivation was to broaden my experiences and allow me to think about what I really wanted to do longer term (I did end up changing careers).

A Logic Puzzle and An Analysis

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The Puzzle >>

Banksters ambush an #occupywallst march on Fulton St and capture three protesters. The Banksters give the protesters a single chance to escape without co-opting their movement by giving them dead-end, churn and burn analyst positions at Goldman.

The hippies are lined up in order of height, and are tied to parking meters facing the same direction. The protester in the rear can see the backs of his two friends, the protester in the middle can see the back of the protester in front, and the protester in front cannot see anyone. The Banksters show the protesters five protest signs. Three of the signs are black and two of the signs are white.

Blindfolds are then placed over each protester’s eyes and a sign is placed in each protester’s hand. The protesters cannot see their own signs. The two signs left over are hidden. The blindfolds are then removed and it is said to the protesters that if one of them can guess what color sign they have all three can go back to their shanties in Zucotti park. However, if the protesters cannot guess correctly they will have to work 85 hours a week making power points of capital structure risk profiles for counterparties.

The protester in the rear who can see both of his friends’ signs but not his own says, “I don’t know”. The middle protester who can see the sign of the LGBTQ in front, but not her own says, “I don’t know”. The front protester who cannot see ANYBODY’S sign says “I know!”

How did ze know the color of zer sign and what color was it?

See also:

Over drinks at a bar on a dreary, snowy night in Washington this past month, a former Senate investigator laughed as he polished off his beer. “Everything’s fucked up, and nobody goes to jail,” he said. “That’s your whole story right there. Hell, you don’t even have to write the rest of it. Just write that.”

I put down my notebook. “Just that?”

“That’s right,” he said, signaling to the waitress for the check. “Everything’s fucked up, and nobody goes to jail. You can end the piece right there.”

This is from a pretty interesting article on SEC corruption and how it lead to the economic debacle. I think it’s a critical piece of the puzzle.

::: Why isn’t wall st in Jail? via conversation (Thanks Pevner!) :::

From the "Things You Didn't Know Were A Felony" File

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MARCH 2–In a bold and bizarre attempt to destroy evidence seized during a federal raid, a New York City man grabbed a flash drive and swallowed the data storage device while in the custody of Secret Service agents, records show. ….. Necula and several codefendants had been transported to a Secret Service office in Brooklyn, where they were to be questioned and processed. While there, and in the view of investigators, Necula “grabbed Subject Flash Drive 2, which had been on his person at the time of his arrest, and swallowed,” Agent Joseph Borger noted in the below February 25 search warrant affidavit. When Necula was unable to pass the item after about four days, doctors–concerned that the drive was not compatible with the suspect’s GI tract–concluded he “would be injured if they allowed the flash drive to remain inside of him,” reported Borger. Necula eventually agreed to allow doctors at New York Downtown Hospital to remove the item, according to a source familiar with the incident. A Kingston executive said it was unclear if stomach acid could damage one of their drives. “As you might imagine, we have no actual experience with someone swallowing a USB,” Mike Sager wrote in an e-mail to TSG. In return for swallowing the storage device, Necula was charged with obstruction of justice, one of four felonies detailed in an indictment returned in late-January. Prosecutors allege that Necula and three other men placed card readers over ATM slots to “skim” magnetic strip information off cards inserted in those machines.

:: via The Smoking Gun via Fred’s Twitter @Mecredis (which is almost always delightful) ::

While I’m not an electronics expert or a biologist, I’m pretty sure that stomach acid (mostly hydrochloric acid) would fuck a thumb drive up pretty bad. According to my guesses, which are based mostly on wild conjecture, it would take about 20 minutes in the stomach to make the drive unreadable in a regular usb drive. However, I think it would take closer to two hours until the data itself was actually destroyed.

Ranty McRanterson: I really just don't care about the Olympics

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++ I wrote this in an airport while it was still relevant but then couldn’t get wireless access to post. ++

Personally, I just can’t bring myself to care about sports in general, but the olympics specifically. I mean, it’s certainly impressive that a fucking dolphin disguised as a man won 8 gold medals but I don’t think it’s really worth more than a passing nod of recognition. I’m sure this is an unpopular opinion but usually the ceaseless pandering commercialism of the olympics is just the regular tedium of televised spectator sports on overdrive. Today at the airport I saw a headline that a famous chinese runner hurt himself and that he will now lose millions worth of endorsements.

First, the idea of a celebrity endorsement is a goddamn psychological trick employed by advertising hacks. Companies that use it should be shunned. It is of zero bearing on the quality of the product that the world curling champion likes the new brand of swiffers. And anyone seeing it should know that any meathead would endorse anything for a million dollars. That this transparent fraud is somehow seen as persuasive is deeply troubling to me.

Second, the corruption of pure sport for “endorsements” is disturbing. Whatever, I could rant about this for a while.

///That is all

UCSC Politics Redux – Hilarity Ensues

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Okay, UCSC is being really sketchy and incompetent about expanding campus. They created something called the Long Range Development Plan which is poorly conceived and probably illegal. Part of it involves cutting funding to liberal arts, increasing class sizes and increasing funding for the sciences. Many students are justifiably unhappy about this and decided to set up a tree sit in a grove of gigantic redwoods that is going to become a biomedical center. It was successful (to some extent) the trees haven’t been cut down and campus is in a general uproar about the stupidity of the plans. It’s created a flood of student activism. Something happened with a group of hooded intruders breaking into a professors house, after that accounts differ heavily. see the following:

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: LRDP-Resistance Media
Date: Sun, Mar 9, 2008 at 10:44 AM
Subject: [counterlrdpcoalition] From the UCSC Tree Sit: Statement on Feb. 24 Incident

To all those concerned,

As you may have heard, on February 24th, some kind of protest took place at the home of a UCSC researcher who experiments on animals. Hyped-up news articles and administrative messages on campus have led
some people to associate this protest with the Tree-Sit on Science Hill. We wish to take this opportunity to make it clear that the tree-sit is NOT affiliated.

The tree-sit uses civil disobedience as a way of drawing attention to the issues of expansion, and physically preventing trees from being cut down. While many of us are concerned with the University’s plan to replace animal habitats with animal testing facilities, we are focusing on the long term impacts that the university’s planned construction will have on life in Santa Cruz and the forest in upper campus.

Yours in resistance,
Science Hill tree-sit organizers and supporters

The Campus Provost sent out the following response:

Thank you for this clarification. I look forward to seeing a public condemnation of the events that took place on the 24th from you, preferably with a list of names of people for whom you are speaking.

Dave Kliger

The Media Director of the Tree Sit responded:

Dave,
Thank you for your comment. I will pass on your gratitude to the people who wrote the statement, as well as your suggestion. In the mean time, I look forward to seeing the University administration publicly condemn the use of pepper spray, pressure point pain-compliance, and baton-beating used by the UC Police against non-violent campus protests since 2005, preferably with a list of the law enforcement officers involved in those events.

Jennifer Charles

Nesson Guards the Fair Students of Harvard from the RIAA

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Since beginning its campaign against college students in February, the RIAA has sent out 4,157 prelitigation settlement letters to 160 different schools in ten separate waves.

The schools targeted run the gamut. There are large state schools like Ohio State University, the University of Texas – Austin, and the University of Tennessee. There are also a handful of small liberal arts colleges on the list, including Swarthmore College, evangelical Christian school Bethel University in Minnesota, Gettysburg College, and Carleton College. And the elite schools in the US are well represented, too: Stanford, Northwestern, MIT, and the aforementioned Ivy League schools have all received missives from the RIAA. But not Harvard.

There may be another factor at work here: hostility towards the RIAA’s campaign on the part of Harvard Law School professors Charles Nesson and John Palfrey, who run the law school’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Responding to the RIAA’s claim that its litigation strategy has “invigorated a meaningful conversation on college campuses about music theft, its consequences and the numerous ways to enjoy legal music,” the profs called on Harvard to not betray the “trust and privacy” of its students.

“The university has no legal obligation to deliver the RIAA’s messages. It should do so only if it believes that’s consonant with the university’s mission,” wrote Nesson and Palfrey. “[The RIAA seems] to be engaging in a classic tactic of the bully facing someone much weaker: threatening such dire consequences that the students settle without the issue going to court. The issue is that the university should not be carrying the industry’s water in bringing lawsuits.”

Should the RIAA decide to send prelitigation settlement letters to Harvard, chances are good that 1) the letters will not be passed on, and 2) some of the best and brightest at Harvard Law School will get involved in a big way. That doesn’t look too appealing, especially when the campaign isn’t going as smoothly as the RIAA would like.

Yay!!! Some background on what’s actually going on here. So when people are sharing music the only thing that the RIAA can see is an ip address linked to a university. They send a prelitigation settlement letter to the university that in turn passes it onto the student. Until the point the RIAA doesn’t know who the student is. It turns out that the RIAA doesn’t have much legal footing and banks on the idea that students won’t commit the legal resources to fighting the battles. I’ve read in other places that the funds recovered don’t actually even go to the RIAA, they just go to pay for lawyers. No one wins here.

:: Article via ars technica ::

Onslaught

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I have reservations about this. in fact it feels totally wrong. Dove sells the same products and notions that their own ad slams. Ogilvy and Mather, the longtime advertising powerhouse responsible for the ad, expertly reproduced these images of rampant consumerism because….they are the leading experts on exploiting people via images of rampant consumerism.

fuck, they’re selling us the rope to hang them with, I just wish we’d get around to hanging them.

Greenpeace Convinces Apple to Clean Up

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guidegraph430.gif

More than twenty thousand [greenpeace members] wrote, called, and sent cards to Steve Jobs, asking him to green your Apples. Because of you, he listened, and just announced a greener Apple. Apple has agreed to peel toxic chemicals like Brominated Fire Retardants (BFRs) and Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC), out of their product line by 2008. Apple’s new commitment to environmental transparency and the phase out of the worst chemicals in its product range are genuine steps forward.

Yes, signing stuff actually matters.

:: Greenpeace Works ::

Apple has a different perspective (of course) they say that they are actually in the lead in many green areas.

The Pixelator

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Pixelator is an unauthorized on-going video art performance collaboration with the New York City Metropolitan Transit Authority, Clear Channel Communications, and its selected artists.

Since 2003, the MTA has made available for exhibition purposes 80 LED screens located at subway entrances across New York City. Unfortunately, the high cost of exhibiting (an estimated $274,000 per month per screen) prevents most artists from having access to these facilities. While the MTA’s effort to create more opportunities for video art exhibition in public spaces is to be commended, selected works remain wholly fixated on commercial goods and media conglomerate events, a short-sighted curatorial choice that regrettably ignores the full potential of these promising exhibition spaces.

In an attempt to broaden the scope of MTA’s video art series, Pixelator takes video pieces currently on display and diffuses them into a pleasant array of 45 blinking, color-changing squares. Since the project is an anonymous collaboration, the resulting video is almost entirely unplanned and unanticipated, with the original artists helping to create new works of art without any knowledge of their participation.

very cool, please ignore weird, slightly annoying music.

::: Instructions and Main Page via Email {Thanks Chloe!} :::

–TitaniumDreads