We have a government that says it’s okay to eat Twinkies and Cocoa Puffs and Mountain Dew, but it’s illegal to drink raw milk and eat compost-grown tomatoes and Aunt Matilda’s pickles.
From sustainable farmer Joel Salatin. Quote captured by Amy Eddings on WNYC Culture blog.
(via kateoplis)
James Fallows, responding to my question on his Reddit AMA yesterday:
[…]our political system is uniquely resistant to change. Our Constitution is harder to change than most other countries’ – and is getting quite old now. If “the Founders” were around today, they would never come up with something like today’s Senate. They were practical-minded people, and they would have seen it as unworkable that (a) a state with over 30 million people had the same representation as one with half a million people, (b) the modern abuse-in-practice of the filibuster makes it possible for an entrenched minority to block majority will. I don’t have the cite here, but a very valuable piece in the NYT a few days ago pointed out that no other countries are copying our Constitution. It no longer makes sense.
I cleaned it up a bit.
And here’s the NYT piece he references: ‘We the People’ Loses Appeal With People Around the World. One highlight:
In a television interview during a visit to Egypt last week, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the Supreme Court seemed to agree. “I would not look to the United States Constitution if I were drafting a constitution in the year 2012,” she said. She recommended, instead, the South African Constitution, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms or the European Convention on Human Rights.
Thanks to James for pointing my mind in new directions, and thanks to everyone who voted for my question.
Fine, it may not be legal to flip the bird on television, but that’s simply a remnant of the fifties we haven’t shaken. Unless somebody was handing out Xanax with the foam fingers, Lucas Oil Stadium was ringing with the music of profanities last night. More to the point, television viewers were submitted to ad after ad that likened women – negatively – to sofas, cars, and candy. Mr. Winter didn’t have anything to say about that, so I’d like to raise both of my middle fingers to him and anyone who thinks profanity is somehow more harmful to our children than images of violence and misogyny.
Sasha Frere-Jones to Tim Winter of the Parents Television Council, from M.I.A. Shouldn’t Have Apologized.
“Still, there’s a reason for optimism about America’s workforce, and a good lesson to be learned from Apple’s surge. What really makes the iPhone work isn’t the hardware. Sure, the glass—designed by Corning in upstate New York and manufactured in China—is beautiful. But the transformative part of the phone is the software. The code behind the touch-screen was written here; the iOS operating system was written here; most of the apps that we use are written here. Thousands of companies, in fact, have been started here to write apps for Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android. Software remains a great American expertise, and it’s only becoming more important as processors shrink into ever more powerful forms. As Marc Andreessen argued in the Wall Street Journal this summer, “software is eating the world.” Computer code is transforming industry after industry, and writing code is something that Americans are very good at. It’s also something that requires creativity, which isn’t fostered in giant factories with guards guiding people through crowded doorways and a central kitchen that roasts three tons of pork and thirteen tons of rice a day.
So perhaps there’s a different insight from Apple for Obama. Yes, there are industries where manufacturing jobs can be brought back to America through proper tax incentives and training programs. But maybe he should have talked more about the things that he could do to keep software jobs here. He spoke of federal funding for university and scientific research. But a real pro-software agenda would also include reforming patent law to stop trolling (and perhaps eliminating software patents altogether); increasing H-1B visas for highly skilled coders; stopping Congress from defunding DARPA, whose research helped create Siri, the iPhone’s talking assistant; and opening up the unused, federally owned wireless spectrum.
That agenda wouldn’t bring Apple’s manufacturing jobs back, but it would help to keep the company’s coding jobs here. And it would certainly help develop “an economy that’s built to last.”
Yes.
The Caging of America; Why do we lock up so many people?
The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life. Every day, at least fifty thousand men—a full house at Yankee Stadium—wake in solitary confinement, often in “supermax” prisons or prison wings, in which men are locked in small cells, where they see no one, cannot freely read and write, and are allowed out just once a day for an hour’s solo “exercise.” (Lock yourself in your bathroom and then imagine you have to stay there for the next ten years, and you will have some sense of the experience.) Prison rape is so endemic—more than seventy thousand prisoners are raped each year—that it is routinely held out as a threat, part of the punishment to be expected. The subject is standard fodder for comedy, and an uncoöperative suspect being threatened with rape in prison is now represented, every night on television, as an ordinary and rather lovable bit of policing. The normalization of prison rape—like eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallows—will surely strike our descendants as chillingly sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who thought themselves civilized. Though we avoid looking directly at prisons, they seep obliquely into our fashions and manners. Wealthy white teen-agers in baggy jeans and laceless shoes and multiple tattoos show, unconsciously, the reality of incarceration that acts as a hidden foundation for the country.
- In this week’s issue, Adam Gopnik writes about mass incarceration and criminal justice in America: http://nyr.kr/A75iOm
Photograph by Steve Liss.
This is important. Remember this every time someone carelessly talks about the “land of the free.” We need to deserve to call ourselves that. Right now, we do not.
Unfortunately financial calculators show with the current inflation figures and interest rates, savings of $100 per month in a child’s 529 plan utilizing an age-based strategy from birth to college-age may not amass enough even to pay for the first year’s expenses.
Am I saving enough for my kids’ college? | BrightScope
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Of course the answer is “no, you are not saving enough,” because it’s impossible to save a billion dollars (projected cost of our daughter’s tuition) over 18 years.
From the Library of Congress:
The Alan Lomax Fellows Program, established for a period of five years, supports scholarly research that contributes significantly to a greater understanding of the work of Lomax and the cultural traditions he documented over the course of a vigorous and highly productive seventy-year career. It provides an opportunity, for a period of up to 8 months, for concentrated use of materials from the Lomax Collection and other collections of the Library of Congress, through full-time residency at the Library. The program supports research projects in the disciplines of anthropology, ethnomusicology, ethnography, ethno-history, dance, folklore and folklife, history, literature, linguistics, and movement analysis, with particular emphasis on the traditional music, dance, and narrative of the United States, England, Scotland, Ireland, Italy, Spain, and the Caribbean, as well as methodologies for their documentation and analysis. We encourage interdisciplinary projects that combine disciplines in novel and productive ways.Applications are due on February 28. Learn more about the fellowship and how to apply.
Someone from the Internet should do this. Someone must be doing dissertations on Soulja Boy et al right now, right?
The thing is — and this is kind of important — governments are not corporations. I cannot stress this enough. There’s the obvious point that in democracies, legislatures tend to impose a more powerful constraint than shareholders, making it that much harder for leaders to execute the policies they think will be the most efficient. … There’s been a lot of bragging in the 2012 primary about candidates that have “real world” business experience, and how that translates into an effective ability to govern. That logic is horses**t. Being president is a fundamentally different job than being a CEO — because countries are not corporations.
Dan Drezner, America Isn’t a Company (via kateoplis)
And now we get to prematurely place behind us another quite troubling incident in our recent history. Secret prisons? Eh, let’s forget about those. Torture? Let’s just move on. A incredible transformation of huge chunks of the military into a privately contracted mercenary army? La la la la la! Years and years of National Guard reservists being unexpectedly called up for active duty in Iraq? Oh well! Thousands of soldiers having had their service contracts forcibly extended, creating a stop-lossed conscription army, under a policy that somehow no judge would find illegal? Sorry guys and gals! (And sorry families of dead guys and gals.) Operation New Dawn: the war we had after the war? Deadly. A decade of a wildly, wildly, crushingly expensive invasion, that involved more than a million Americans in combat, and the occupation of a country under false pretenses? Let’s just agree to not talk about it anymore. The CNN crawl says ‘Ceremony Ends Nine Years of Conflict,’ which isn’t actually what happened either: we actually didn’t have a ‘conflict.’ America’s great at putting things behind us, so guess we’ll just file this under “things that are already over,” though we still have billions of dollars to spend in ongoing operations. But at least we should let the Iraq War have an asterisk for ‘things that should never have happened.’
Choire Sicha, The “War” Is “Over” (via peterfeld)
(via markcoatney)
George Skelton: Let’s make textbooks affordable. Making textbooks truly affordable, or even available free, is the least we can do for California’s beleaguered college and university students. And the state would ultimately benefit.
State Senate leader Darrell Steinberg plans to introduce legislation aimed at slashing the price of textbooks to about $20.
Smart. I hope this idea gains traction, and I’m curious to see how the textbook cabal organizes to quash it. The market cannot bear insanely priced textbooks for much longer.
