Person of the Day: Jake Tapper

Posted on February 29, 2012 by Dustin Boyer

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!

Ohhhhh Snap! – Congressional Budget Office Reality Patrol

Posted on November 5, 2009 by Dustin Boyer

The CBO is probably my favorite government agency. It’s non-partisan and focused on empirical reality (hearts!!!). Noah just sent me this article about the CBO review of the latest Republican health care plan and I think it bears a bit more inspection than regular news hype.

Late last night, the Congressional Budget Office released its initial analysis of the health-care reform plan that Republican Minority Leader John Boehner offered as a substitute to the Democratic legislation. CBO begins with the baseline estimate that 17 percent of legal, non-elderly residents won’t have health-care insurance in 2010. In 2019, after 10 years of the Republican plan, CBO estimates that …17 percent of legal, non-elderly residents won’t have health-care insurance. The Republican alternative will have helped 3 million people secure coverage, which is barely keeping up with population growth. Compare that to the Democratic bill, which covers 36 million more people and cuts the uninsured population to 4 percent.

But maybe, you say, the Republican bill does a really good job cutting costs. According to CBO, the GOP’s alternative will shave $68 billion off the deficit in the next 10 years. The Democrats, CBO says, will slice $104 billion off the deficit.

The Democratic bill, in other words, covers 12 times as many people and saves $36 billion more than the Republican plan. And amazingly, the Democratic bill has already been through three committees and a merger process. It’s already been shown to interest groups and advocacy organizations and industry stakeholders.

::: Ezra Klien via email (thanks Noah!!) :::

Subtle

Posted on October 20, 2008 by Dustin Boyer

The best thing about kids who are raised in Williamsburg is that they know firsthand how boring creative white people are. They didn’t have to learn it from a blog like the rest of us.

Quarters Only

Posted on October 14, 2008 by Dustin Boyer

UCSC Politics Redux – Hilarity Ensues

Posted on March 15, 2008 by Dustin Boyer

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

Guest Blogger: Sean McGowan

Posted on December 13, 2007 by Dustin Boyer

Coffee – Word of the Day

Today, clean up begins on South Korea’s worst oil spill ever. It spilled yesterday and already there are widespread uncertainty campaigns about the threats.

Today, Al Gore accepts the Nobel Peace Prize for countering uncertainty campaigns by conservatives who suggest suspending judgement on global warming.

Today, Togo gets a new Prime Minister and nobody knows or cares.

Good morning.

Consider for a minute the concept of uncertainty. Doubt. Ignorance.

Today, many people still believe oil spills can be cleaned, man-made global warming is debatable, and Togo does not exist. They’re not necessarily wrong. Doubt is important – and the study of ignorance is a serious discipline. So it should be no surprise that the word of the day, today, is agnotology.

Gnosos is Greek for knowledge. A-Gnosos means the absence of knowledge (like asymmetry, or anecrophilia – both of which I’ve been diagnosed with). Agnotology is the study of ignorance.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnotology

So how much knowledge can we have about ignorance? Consider this.

Answer one: there is enough knowledge about ignorance to merit the some five hundred doctorates and some thirty books that exist in the field.

Answer two: there is enough knowledge about ignorance, at least, to make a serious discipline of it.

Answer three: the term is itself a hoax invented earlier this week by Sean McGowan, who doctored a small number of open-source websites to engineer the term enough for others to reference it, thus creating the illusion of legitimacy and establishment. Outside of the claims in this email and the Wikipedia article, no proof exists that the word is even real.

What do you think?

This week work on trusting more of what you actually see. Build more confidence in your sense of smell and touch. Consider that, while your thoughts may not be the greatest in the history of mankind, they are probably better than something you read in a book.

And certainly more accurate than an email.

Good Morning,

Sean McGowan (http://sean.mcgowan.be)

——

Sean is a gifted writer and old friend. He just published his first book, Click Click Snap which is quite delightful. I purchased it after reading the excerpt that he put online for free. I’m still busy but forever feel the whirring pull of your rss feeds.

Zing! Malawi Shows Up World Bank/IMF

Posted on December 1, 2007 by Dustin Boyer

Over the past 20 years, the World Bank and some rich nations Malawi depends on for aid have periodically pressed this small, landlocked country to adhere to free market policies and cut back or eliminate fertilizer subsidies, even as the United States and Europe extensively subsidized their own farmers. But after the 2005 harvest, the worst in a decade, Bingu wa Mutharika, Malawi’s newly elected president, decided to follow what the West practiced, not what it preached.

Stung by the humiliation of pleading for charity, he led the way to reinstating and deepening fertilizer subsidies despite a skeptical reception from the United States and Britain. Malawi’s soil, like that across sub-Saharan Africa, is gravely depleted, and many, if not most, of its farmers are too poor to afford fertilizer at market prices.

One of the key reasons that I’ve become so disenchanted with studying economics in school is that it’s simply not true. The most frustrating part is that I have to regurgitate inaccurate theories despite the fact that they are obviously and demonstrably wrong. This is only one of a vast majority of *countless* examples where World Bank and IMF policy have actually made poor countries worse off. Economics is little more than extremist free market fundamentalism thinly disguised as academically verified truth.

The whole article is pretty short but definitely instructive in a broader context. Subsidies, when not horribly corrupt, are extremely effective.

::Ending Famine, Simply by Ignoring the Experts via the NYTimes ::

Nesson Guards the Fair Students of Harvard from the RIAA

Posted on November 27, 2007 by Dustin Boyer

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 ::

Ohh Snap!! – Ron Paul

Posted on September 5, 2007 by Dustin Boyer

Sen. John McCain, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and Giuliani all stressed support for the war, at times even competing to show their commitment. “The surge is apparently working,” said Romney, referring to the increase in troops. That brought an instant rebuke from McCain, who said, “The surge is working, sir, no, not apparently. It’s working.”

Alone among the contenders, Paul, a veteran Texas congressman with a libertarian streak, made the case for withdrawing troops. That drew a sharp challenge from Chris Wallace, one of the debate questioners, who asked whether the United States should take its marching orders from al-Qaida.
“No! We should take our marching orders from our Constitution,” Paul shouted back, pointing his pen at Wallace for emphasis. “We should not go to war without a declaration” by Congress. Occasionally interrupted by applause, Paul doggedly stuck to his point. “We have lost over 5,000 Americans over there in Afghanistan, in Iraq and plus the civilians killed,” he said during his exchange with Huckabee. “How long — what do we have to pay to save face? That’s all we’re doing, is saving face. It’s time we came home,” Paul said.

::: Daaaamn via YahooNews :::

See previous posts in which I rant about libertarians being insane but I really appreciate that Ron Paul has the balls to call these bastards out.

MIT: Ohh SNAP!!

Posted on April 26, 2007 by Dustin Boyer

The dean of admissions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who had counseled students applying to colleges not to try to “measure up to everybody else’s standards,” resigned from her post today after acknowledging that she had padded her own résumé.

:: NYTimes Article via Email {Thanks Pink!} ::

Given how arbitrary and ridiculous college ranking is it’s a bold and perhaps inadvisable move to tell everyone about the fuckup. Probably a better move in the long run though.