Flicker Fusion

The techno-libertarian utopianism that pervades Silicon Valley means that both corporations and individuals buy into the idea that they don’t need to bend anyone’s ear in Washington D.C.

The problem is, D.C. is still going to talk other people. (Notably, the entertainment industry, which has a long, effective track record of getting its legislation passed.) Together they’re going to talk about us, and we can be a part of that conversation, or not. But no matter how much we may wish that Congress wouldn’t listen to lobbyists, it’s an unrealistic expectation borne of idealism that ignores how our broken, dysfunctional government actually works. In the America of 2012, laws are written by lobbyists.

The techno-libertarian utopianism that pervades Silicon Valley means that both corporations and individuals buy into the idea that they don’t need to bend anyone’s ear in Washington D.C.

The problem is, D.C. is still going to talk other people. (Notably, the entertainment industry, which has a long, effective track record of getting its legislation passed.) Together they’re going to talk about us, and we can be a part of that conversation, or not. But no matter how much we may wish that Congress wouldn’t listen to lobbyists, it’s an unrealistic expectation borne of idealism that ignores how our broken, dysfunctional government actually works. In the America of 2012, laws are written by lobbyists.

—Mat Honan says SOPA And PIPA are the internet’s own damn fault and he’s right.

Congress appropriates military funds with alacrity and generosity. It appropriates poverty funds with miserliness and grudging reluctance. The government is emotionally committed to the war. It is emotionally hostile to the needs of the poor.

Congress appropriates military funds with alacrity and generosity. It appropriates poverty funds with miserliness and grudging reluctance. The government is emotionally committed to the war. It is emotionally hostile to the needs of the poor.

—Martin Luther King, Jr. (via azspot)

Electronics are our talismans that ward off the spiritual vacuum of modernity; gilt in Gorilla Glass and cadmium. An in them we find entertainment in lieu of happiness, and exchanges in lieu of actual connections.

Electronics are our talismans that ward off the spiritual vacuum of modernity; gilt in Gorilla Glass and cadmium. An in them we find entertainment in lieu of happiness, and exchanges in lieu of actual connections.

—Mat Honan writes the best CES post I can imagine being interested in ever reading. It feels like an obvious cop-out to call it Hunter S. Thompson-esque but I mean that in the best possible way. Personal and reflective and honest and interesting and dare I say thought provoking.

If you’ll take a look at the map of New Hampshire here, Wolf, you’ll see that we’ve color-coded each county according to the number of tweets in the last thirty seconds using the hashtag # kitchentables and/or # CNNElection and/or #tubdining, and combined it with a motion-sensitive illustration of polling results in each particular county. Each Republican candidate is represented by a different special effect—here, you’ll see Rockingham county is reddish-orange and appears to be bouncing, which indicates that it leans Huntsman and is very kitchen-table heavy. Merrimack County, as you can see, is purple and appears to be violently spinning, which indicates almost no kitchen tables and a strong preference for Mitt Romney and taking meals in the bath.

If you’ll take a look at the map of New Hampshire here, Wolf, you’ll see that we’ve color-coded each county according to the number of tweets in the last thirty seconds using the hashtag # kitchentables and/or # CNNElection and/or #tubdining, and combined it with a motion-sensitive illustration of polling results in each particular county. Each Republican candidate is represented by a different special effect—here, you’ll see Rockingham county is reddish-orange and appears to be bouncing, which indicates that it leans Huntsman and is very kitchen-table heavy. Merrimack County, as you can see, is purple and appears to be violently spinning, which indicates almost no kitchen tables and a strong preference for Mitt Romney and taking meals in the bath.

—McSweeney’s CNN’s Political Team Has It Covered.

1.9 million

[1.9 million](http://pmcarpenter.blogs.com/p_m_carpenters_commentary/2012/01/19-million.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed: pmcarpenterscommentary (p m carpenter’s commentary)&utm_content=Google Reader)

From the Washington Post:

Private employers added 220,00 jobs, moving the total of private-sector jobs created in 2011 to 1.9 million [my emphasis].

From the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

1.1 million: The number of jobs gained under President George W. Bush.

That would be *eight years* of George W. Bush.

no title

officialssay:

Fmr. Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, getting in an argument with a reporter who pointed out that one of Romney’s top advisors is a lobbyist — right after the GOP candidate stated that lobbyists were not running his campaign.

“You’re out of line,” Romney’s spokesperson told the reporter later. “Save your opinions and act professionally. Don’t be argumentative with the candidate.”

Dear journalists,

Please be more argumentative with these candidates. Please call them out on their bullshit. That is acting professionally.

In his very brave and very public dying, though, one could see again why so many religious people felt a kinship with him. When stripped of Marxist fairy tales and techno-utopian happy talk, rigorous atheism casts a wasting shadow over every human hope and endeavor, and leads ineluctably to the terrible conclusion of Philip Larkin’s poem “Aubade” — that “death is no different whined at than withstood.”

Officially, Hitchens’s creed was one with Larkin’s. But everything else about his life suggests that he intuited that his fellow Englishman was completely wrong to give in to despair.

In his very brave and very public dying, though, one could see again why so many religious people felt a kinship with him. When stripped of Marxist fairy tales and techno-utopian happy talk, rigorous atheism casts a wasting shadow over every human hope and endeavor, and leads ineluctably to the terrible conclusion of Philip Larkin’s poem “Aubade” — that “death is no different whined at than withstood.”

Officially, Hitchens’s creed was one with Larkin’s. But everything else about his life suggests that he intuited that his fellow Englishman was completely wrong to give in to despair.

—

Ross Douthat, in full display of the kind of soft-headed arrogance that so easily passes for conservative intellectualism, declaring Christopher Hitchens to be “the believer’s atheist”.

I have no clue how Hitchens would himself have responded but as a non-believer who has found some measure of comfort in his (and Dawkins’s and Dennett’s and Harris’s) writing, I find it to be in poor taste to say the least, not to mention simply offensive to anyone with a working capacity to think intelligently. Of course Hitchens lived an absolutely full life – he plainly and eloquently believed this was his only chance and that wasting it on some hope of an ill-defined (and utterly boring) afterlife was antithetical to everything he stood for.

And why are “rigorous atheists” and agnostics the only ones who have to suffer such indignity when they pass? Why is the perfectly reasonable question of “when stripped of actual fairy tales and pre-civilization-utopian happy talk, rigorous Catholicism casts a wasting shadow over every human hope and endeavor, inevitably to the terrible conclusion that free will is an illusion of an unloving god” never asked so pointedly of the pious?