Saturday, 8 January 2011
Friday, 7 January 2011
Big Government and the Constitution
Listen to this discussion with Keith Olbermann and Yale political scientist Akhil Reed Amar. Progressives despise limited government, a concept that never leaves the lips of either of these men. The full entry is here: "Progressives Want to Read Slavery Back Into Constitution."
Additional commentary at American Power.
Technology, the Public Sphere, and Political Change
I mentioned previously that one of the extreme gender feminists suggested on Twitter that the #MooreandMe protest was something akin to a new civil rights movement. No doubt there's quite a bit of self-congratulations there. And while the gender feminists did gain a lot of attention, the power of Twitter and other media is to mobilize social change through strengthening civil society. The new media gets people out in the streets, to the ballot box, raising money and distributing information. This is not to minimize the leveling effect we saw with this most recent feminist campaign, but large-scale political effects of social technology will vary across regime development, or at least that's one of the things I'm getting from Clay Shirky's article at Foreign Affairs, "The Political Power of Social Media." While Shirky discusses the new social media as a global phenomenon, the essay focuses on the potential for revolutionary change in authoritarian regimes. The established democracies aren't prone to regime change of this sort, although some of those in the U.S. and Europe are backing the WikiLeaks project with such hope in mind. That said, it's an informative discussion at the article. The key point is the contrast between "instrumental" and "environmental" approaches to Internet freedom. The former relates to U.S. efforts to pressure repressive regimes to open access to online information sources. The latter focuses on the more traditional theme of opening civil society in general, taking the long view to social and political change:
In January 2010, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton outlined how the United States would promote Internet freedom abroad. She emphasized several kinds of freedom, including the freedom to access information (such as the ability to use Wikipedia and Google inside Iran), the freedom of ordinary citizens to produce their own public media (such as the rights of Burmese activists to blog), and the freedom of citizens to converse with one another (such as the Chinese public's capacity to use instant messaging without interference).In any case, Charli Carpenter has more thoughts: "Information Doesn't Want to be Free, People Do."
Most notably, Clinton announced funding for the development of tools designed to reopen access to the Internet in countries that restrict it. This "instrumental" approach to Internet freedom concentrates on preventing states from censoring outside Web sites, such as Google, YouTube, or that of The New York Times. It focuses only secondarily on public speech by citizens and least of all on private or social uses of digital media. According to this vision, Washington can and should deliver rapid, directed responses to censorship by authoritarian regimes.
The instrumental view is politically appealing, action-oriented, and almost certainly wrong. It overestimates the value of broadcast media while underestimating the value of media that allow citizens to communicate privately among themselves. It overestimates the value of access to information, particularly information hosted in the West, while underestimating the value of tools for local coordination. And it overestimates the importance of computers while underestimating the importance of simpler tools, such as cell phones.
The instrumental approach can also be dangerous. Consider the debacle around the proposed censorship-circumvention software known as Haystack, which, according to its developer, was meant to be a "one-to-one match for how the [Iranian] regime implements censorship." The tool was widely praised in Washington; the U.S. government even granted it an export license. But the program was never carefully vetted, and when security experts examined it, it turned out that it not only failed at its goal of hiding messages from governments but also made it, in the words of one analyst, "possible for an adversary to specifically pinpoint individual users." In contrast, one of the most successful anti-censorship software programs, Freegate, has received little support from the United States, partly because of ordinary bureaucratic delays and partly because the U.S. government is wary of damaging U.S.-Chinese relations: the tool was originally created by Falun Gong, the spiritual movement that the Chinese government has called "an evil cult." The challenges of Freegate and Haystack demonstrate how difficult it is to weaponize social media to pursue country-specific and near-term policy goals.
New media conducive to fostering participation can indeed increase the freedoms Clinton outlined, just as the printing press, the postal service, the telegraph, and the telephone did before. One complaint about the idea of new media as a political force is that most people simply use these tools for commerce, social life, or self-distraction, but this is common to all forms of media. Far more people in the 1500s were reading erotic novels than Martin Luther's "Ninety-five Theses," and far more people before the American Revolution were reading Poor Richard's Almanack than the work of the Committees of Correspondence. But those political works still had an enormous political effect.
Just as Luther adopted the newly practical printing press to protest against the Catholic Church, and the American revolutionaries synchronized their beliefs using the postal service that Benjamin Franklin had designed, today's dissident movements will use any means possible to frame their views and coordinate their actions; it would be impossible to describe the Moldovan Communist Party's loss of Parliament after the 2009 elections without discussing the use of cell phones and online tools by its opponents to mobilize. Authoritarian governments stifle communication among their citizens because they fear, correctly, that a better-coordinated populace would constrain their ability to act without oversight.
Despite this basic truth -- that communicative freedom is good for political freedom -- the instrumental mode of Internet statecraft is still problematic. It is difficult for outsiders to understand the local conditions of dissent. External support runs the risk of tainting even peaceful opposition as being directed by foreign elements. Dissidents can be exposed by the unintended effects of novel tools. A government's demands for Internet freedom abroad can vary from country to country, depending on the importance of the relationship, leading to cynicism about its motives.
The more promising way to think about social media is as long-term tools that can strengthen civil society and the public sphere. In contrast to the instrumental view of Internet freedom, this can be called the "environmental" view. According to this conception, positive changes in the life of a country, including pro-democratic regime change, follow, rather than precede, the development of a strong public sphere. This is not to say that popular movements will not successfully use these tools to discipline or even oust their governments, but rather that U.S. attempts to direct such uses are likely to do more harm than good. Considered in this light, Internet freedom is a long game, to be conceived of and supported not as a separate agenda but merely as an important input to the more fundamental political freedoms.
RELATED: Evgeny Morozov, "Why Washington's support for online democracy is the worst thing ever to happen to the Internet."
Cross-posted from American Power.
Pentagon Faces the Knife
At WSJ, "Savings Ordered Up, Spurring First Troop Cuts in Decades; Salvo in Budget War":
In an early salvo in Washington's battle over the deficit, the White House ordered the Pentagon to rein in its budget, a move that will force a sizable cut in overall troop numbers for the first time in two decades.RTWT.
The surprise decision, which is designed to cut a total of $78 billion from the military budget in the next five years, shows how even the military isn't immune from the political heat brought on by worsening U.S. fiscal woes. It also represents a setback for Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who had fought to stave off such an outcome.
We are having to tighten our belts," Mr. Gates said Thursday.
The projected five-year budget outlined by Mr. Gates doesn't include an actual decrease in the military budget. But it will stop growing by 2015. With salaries, health-care and fuel costs climbing every year, the Pentagon needs a 2% to 3% annual budget increase to avoid making cuts in programs.
Under Mr. Gates's proposal, the Army and Marine Corps will shrink by up to 47,000 people, a reduction that comes on top of a 22,000 decrease already planned for the Army. Currently, the two services have about 772,000 members, with the last cuts to the Army and Marines coming after the 1991 Gulf War.
No new head-count cuts are planned for the Navy or Air Force, which recently underwent reductions.
By seeking long-term cuts in the Pentagon budget, the White House is taking on a Republican bastion and hoping to put the GOP on the defensive, especially tea-party-backed lawmakers who campaigned on slashing government spending.
Plus, Secretary Gates' interview is excellent, especially at 5:00 minutes, the discussion of the defense budget in perspective (as a percent of total federal spending and of GDP); and also the later discussion on the Chinese challenge and DADT repeal.
RELATED: Gordon Adams and Matthew Leatherman, at Foreign Affairs, "A Leaner and Meaner Defense: How to Cut the Pentagon's Budget While Improving Its Performance."
Cross-posted from American Power.
Both Elvis Presley and Tom Jones Loathed John Lennon
At London's Daily Mail, "Girls, Guns and Why Tom Jones and Elvis BOTH Wanted to Beat Up John Lennon." (Via Dana Loesch.)
Read it all. Elvis couldn't stand Lennon's antiwar pacifism, and Jones was tempted to kick Lennon's but himself.
PREDICTING THE WEATHER
It's an old Indian trick; Sean Linnane shows us how Green Berets predict the weather using Wooly Worms.
Who ARE these idiots?.............from Rico
Who ARE these idiots, a reasonably sane chap might ask?
What color is the sky on the planet THEY obviously live on, I ask?
OK, Janet Napolitano aka "Big Sis" is a disaster-in-action, thus perfect for Berry Soetoro-Obama's regime and purposes.
Joy Behar? My best guess is that she's one of those people only famous for being famous aka she's on TV. Some moronic show called the "View" I'm told, where stupid people argue with other stupid people as entertainment for the viewing stupid people.
- It's worth noting that our Marxist-Muslim-Metrosexual in Chief appeared on this show and fit right in with the cast and the viewership
But I digress...both Janet and Joy are harridans, harpies, and absolutely 'horror show' (h/t to Kubrick's "Clockwork Orange") intellectually BUT they are extreme left-wing nutcases, so are useful idiots for the Ministry of Truth which promotes all views "progressive" much like water cuts rock (this explains BOTH the Grand Canyon and the uber-leftist Democratic Party (C) of today, by the way).
It's not MY job to make them happy by accepting their cultural seppuko and mental hari-kari.
Better them than me..........................
News.........
What up rifqa bary?
Global Warming Hoax Weekly Round-Up, Jan 6th
United Church Witch: Fate Of Coptic Christians In Middle East Almost As Bad As Muslims In West!
"Mighty bold talk for a one-eyed fat man ... ."
US DIPLOMAT RECALLED FROM LIBYA
Man attacked by kids at L'Enfant Metro -- bystanders watch, film it
Sniffing women's tears dampens sexual desire in men, study suggests
Barron's: US Will See Run on Treasurys, Hyperinflation
Gates cutting Pentagon budget by $78bn over five years
MoD accused of covering up controversial BAE aircraft carrier deal worth £5.2billion
Terror threat to London stations and airports
Ivory Coast expels British ambassador
China plans to rebuild Burma's World War Two 'Stilwell Road'
'Baby bin Ladens' posing new threat to West
'Unruly' Russian junior ice hockey team removed from US flight
Thursday, 6 January 2011
Woman Disrupts Congress During Reading of Constitution
At the "natural born" passage, a heckler apparently yelled: "Except Obama, except Obama. Help us Jesus."
See ABC News, "Constitution Reading on House Floor Mired by Yelling, Objections." (And more at Memeorandum.)
Cross-posted from American Power.
The Left's Use of the 'Rape Card' For Political Gain
I've got some additional thoughts on the Assange rape allegations backlash: "The Gender Feminist 'Rape Card'."
RELATED: "Gender Feminists Throw The Nation's Greg Mitchell Under the Bus."
Ane more commentary later today at American Power.
Birthright Citizenship Looms as Next Immigration Battle
At NYT:
NOGALES, Ariz. — Of the 50 or so women bused to this border town on a recent morning to be deported back to Mexico, Inez Vasquez stood out. Eight months pregnant, she had tried to trudge north in her fragile state, even carrying scissors with her in case she gave birth in the desert and had to cut the umbilical cord.That's an amazing introduction (and more at the link).
“All I want is a better life,” she said after the Border Patrol found her hiding in bushes on the Arizona side of the border with her husband, her young son and her very pronounced abdomen.
The next big immigration battle centers on illegal immigrants’ offspring, who are granted automatic citizenship like all other babies born on American soil. Arguing for an end to the policy, which is rooted in the 14th Amendment of the Constitution, immigration hard-liners describe a wave of migrants like Ms. Vasquez stepping across the border in the advanced stages of pregnancy to have what are dismissively called “anchor babies.”
The reality at this stretch of the border is more complex, with hospitals reporting some immigrants arriving to give birth in the United States but many of them frequent border crossers with valid visas who have crossed the border legally to take advantage of better medical care. Some are even attracted by an electronic billboard on the Mexican side that advertises the services of an American doctor and says bluntly, “Do you want to have your baby in the U.S.?”
Women like Ms. Vasquez, who was preparing for a desert delivery, are rare.
Cross-posted from American Power.
Groping is good for the USA
Napolitano explains how the TSA grope works
During her visit to Israel this week, the head of security at Ben-Gurion Airport gave Napolitano a tour of his airport's system and a "comprehensive briefing" on Israeli airport security that "covered the spectrum from intelligence to the perimeter security of the airport to checkpoint screening and everything in between."
During an interview following the tour of Ben Gurion International Airport, Napolitano noted, there are many differences between the American and Israeli systems, one of which is the sheer size of the security apparatus. She said that what worked in Israel, a country of some 7 million citizens, would not necessarily work in a country of some 310 million.
Here are some of the differences:
Israeli aviation security is world renowned
for effectiveness.
USA aviation security is best known for the silly
t-shirts and spoofs on late night TV.
Israeli aviation security uses a multi-layered approach that is under the auspices if a single agency.
USA aviation security is managed by seven different agencies and departments.
Israeli aviation security utilizes innovative technology to augment the highly trained security staff. USA aviation security relies on ineffective and intrusive technology and the outcome is that poorly trained TSA personnel invades your privacy, steals your belongings, and lets loaded firearms through.
Israeli aviation security regularly uses profiling to effectively single out and remove threats.
USA aviation security is so politically correct that they would
prefer to fondle, grope, and molest law abiding citizen....
Read the entire article at DoubleTapper
---
Are you a Redneck..........
You might be a redneck if: It never occurred to you to
be offended by the phrase, 'One nation, under God..'
You might be a redneck if: You've never protested about seeing
the 10 Commandments posted in public places.
You might be a redneck if: You still say ' Christmas'
instead of 'Winter Festival.'
You might be a redneck if: You bow your head when
someone prays.
You might be a redneck if: You stand and place your
hand over your heart when they play the National Anthem
You might be a redneck if: You treat our armed forces
veterans with great respect, and always have.
You might be a redneck if: You've never burned an
American flag, nor intend to.
You might be a redneck if: You know what you believe
and you aren't afraid to say so, no matter who is listening.
You might be a redneck if: You respect your elders and
raised your kids to do the same.
You might be a redneck if: You'd give your last dollar to
a friend.
H/T Nebraska Bob
Chavs....
Q. What does a chav use as protection during sex?
A. The bus shelter.
Q. What do you call a 30-year-old chav?
A. Grandma.
Q. Why did the chav cross the road?
A. To start a fight with a complete stranger for no reason whatsoever.
Q. What do you call a chav in a white tracksuit?
A. The bride.
Q. What’s the first question during a chav quiz night?
A. What you looking at?
Q. Two chavs are in a car without any music, who is driving?
A. The policeman.
Q. What;s the difference between a chav boy and a chav girl?
A. The girl has a higher sperm count.
H/T Old Dude
PACIFIC OCEAN (Jan. 1, 2011) The aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson (CVN 70) transits the Pacific Ocean. Carl Vinson and Carrier Air Wing (CVW) 17 are on a deployment to the U.S. 7th Fleet area of responsibility. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Christopher K. Hwang)
H/T Marc
News........
We're sunk. No wait, I mean cinq.
Why does Elizabeth Warren hate women and poor people?
Low Sperm Count: Why Male Fertility is Falling
Mascot Politics
Coffee spill causes diversion for US flight
Video: Steve Malzberg Interviews Jeff Kuhner – If The Truth Got Out About Obama There Would Be A Civil War
Muslim KFC Employee Foams At the Mouth After Customer Asks For Bacon…
Light Bulbs vs. The Nanny State
82-year-old Army veteran nabs accused thieves
Food costs hit record high
'Great Garbage Patch' in the Pacific Ocean not so great claim scientists
Pakistan brewery's beer battle with India
'World's most dangerous pest' found in bag of rice at LA airport
J-20 stealth fighter: can any conclusions can be drawn about China's fifth-generation fighter programme?
The Gazprom Cables: 'Not a Competitive Global Company'
and finally.......
The Ten Best Movie Trailers of 2010
7 big life decisions that sound awesome (until you do them)
2011's best new cruise ships
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