"Mann and Ornstein have done a great public service in opening a dialogue on how to fix the mismatch between our political and constitutional systems of government. But we need to go back to the drawing board on how to fix Washington. And if no-compromise candidates like Richard Mourdock are our future, things will have to get much worse before they get better."

The Case for Breaking Up With Your Parents - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education (via Instapaper)

"An industry that once told hard truths to corporate and government clients now mostly just tells them what they want to hear, making it harder for us all to adapt to a changing world -- and that's why I'm leaving it."

This reads like my mental process when I dropped out of college:

"You will deal with a person who doesn't have those clearances only from the point of view of what you want him to believe and what impression you want him to go away with, since you'll have to lie carefully to him about what you know. In effect, you will have to manipulate him. You'll give up trying to assess what he has to say. The danger is, you'll become something like a moron. You'll become incapable of learning from most people in the world, no matter how much experience they may have in their particular areas that may be much greater than yours."

"One of the duties of the artist – not the only duty, but a central one – is to impel people to imagine the complexity of thought and feeling inside another person. Art complicates moral action, because we have to accept that other people matter, that their hardship and suffering, even their rage and sorrow, are, to some extent, our responsibility.

Propaganda has the opposite aim: it is intended to simplify moral action. People get to disregard the humanity of others. This makes them easier to ignore, deport, imprison, torture, enslave, and kill."

So! To sum up: The U.S. government can decide unilaterally who is a terrorist organization and who is not. Anyone speaking to such a designated terrorist group is “providing material support” to the terrorists—and is therefore subject to prosecution at the discretion of the U.S. government. And if, in the end, it turns out that one definitely was not involved in terrorist activities, there is no way to receive redress by the state.

Sounds like a fascist police-state to me.

"20 American politics is almost broken

The founding fathers of the US were anxious to limit the power of government – hence the famous checks and balances in the constitution. In fact, the US is so checked and balanced it is a small miracle that government happens at all – which, if you think government is the source of all evil, means the constitution is doing its job. What made the US system work in the last resort was the power of reason and loyalty to a common set of core values. Both have disappeared.

Today's US government is almost completely gridlocked – and astonishingly vulnerable to vested interests. President Obama and Congress cannot get to grips with the scale of the budget deficit, nor the need to contain the threat of a new financial crisis. Corporations write the law. The public realm is hollowed out, and most public institutions, from education to the transport infrastructure, are decaying – there seems little hope of turning the tide.

Reason is close to impossible with the Tea party. And adherence to common values is disintegrating. The American centre is crumbling, and with it economic, social and political power."

Although Assange the character is a sitting duck for satire his actions make it extremely difficult for commentators of all persuasions to bag him with impunity. This presents a dilemma for those darker forces that wish to eliminate him. In their bid to have him extradited to the US to face trumped up espionage charges, the political establishment runs the risk of escalating him to global hero status as a celebrity political prisoner and champion of free speech. Imagine the trial.
No, I doubt his enemies will take this course. Far more effective would be to build on the narrative of Assange-as-terrorist by linking his actions and motives to those of militant Islamism. This, in some ways, provides the establishment with a perfect opportunity to conflate the deeds of Assange with the rising militancy of workers and students in Europe protesting against ‘austerity measures’ being imposed on them by the neocorporatist response to the fallout of the Global Financial Crisis. The real challenge, for establishment and anti-establishment alike, will come when the disenfranchised taxpayers of America, lumbered with the socialisation of a crippling debt, courtesy of Wall Street, finally realise that the stone in their hand is aimed at the wrong target. That realisation may come when WikiLeaks releases a tranche of documents from what is rumoured to be a source within the Bank of America.

With or without WikiLeaks, the personel, technical know-how, and ideological will exists to enable anonymous leaking and to make this information available to the public.

Yet the debate over WikiLeaks has proceeded as if the matter might conclude with the eradication of these kinds of data dumps—as if this is a temporary glitch in the system that can be fixed; as if this is a nuisance that [will] go away with the application of sufficient government gusto. But I don't think the matter can end this way. Just as technology has made it easier for governments and corporations to snoop ever more invasively into the private lives of individuals, it has also made it easier for individuals, working alone or together, to root through and make off with the secret files of governments and corporations. WikiLeaks is simply an early manifestation of what I predict will be a more-or-less permanent feature of contemporary life, and a more-or-less permanent constraint on strategies of secret-keeping.

"It takes a certain minimal intelligence for the truly dim to have a notion of their own dimness, but this is denied George Bush. He has the self-awareness of a bison"

"This conceit that we’re the greatest country ever may be self-immolating. If people believe it’s true, they won’t do what’s necessary to make it true. The Brits, who suffer no such delusion (and who, in fact, cherish the national myth of being people who smile through adversity), have just accepted cuts in government spending that no American politician — even a tea bagger — would dream of proposing. Maybe these cuts are a mistake or badly timed, but when the British voted for “change,” they really got it.

Every time I strike this note, which I guess I do a lot, I hear from people calling me elitist or unpatriotic. Here is my answer: If you think a friend is talking nonsense or behaving in a way that damages both of your long-term interests, it is not elitist to say so. To the contrary, it is treating him or her like an adult and an equal. As for patriotism, if you think your country is in danger, how is it unpatriotic to say so?"

The real message of Callahan's book is not that the rich have become liberal. It's that American liberalism itself no longer feels the need to espouse an economic agenda that is decidedly different from that espoused by conservatives. Economics has been surgically removed from the realm of politics and transplanted into a technocratic robot that is run by the Federal Reserve and its acolytes. At least for the time being, most liberal politicians don't seem to miss it.

In the past few decades, workers have generally lost ground against employers in negotiating terms of employment. Defined-benefit pension plans have been replaced by 401(K)s, and then employers sometimes cut the matching contributions. A smaller percentage of private-sector jobs today come with health insurance, while many workers who have insurance have to pay more for it. Given globalization, the furious pace of mergers and acquisitions, and continuous cost pressures, job security is increasingly tenuous. And so the main thing employees—and potential employees—look at when evaluating their current jobs and potential offers is wages. And here, too, corporate America hasn't been delivering. The median income in 2008 was below what it was in 1998.

It's not that secrets are bad, or that contractors shouldn't be involved in this sort of thing, or that (gee whiz) a lot of people have Top Secret clearances. It's that, in the aftermath of Sept. 11, improving intelligence became an urgent issue, the money spigots opened up to make it so, and everything remotely connected to the issue was slammed behind walls of secrecy.

One thing to say on behalf of the Post series is that nobody in the government could have produced the data its reporters put together. No office has such data on hand. That says it all.

It's tempting to call a stop to deployment of such emerging technologies. But that approach promises to be as successful as "Just Say No" was in the war on drugs, or as the original Luddites were at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. The United States will develop these strange and alarming new technologies, but not, perhaps, for the reasons that many suspect.

"Capital can flow freely, but labour is in shackles world-wide.

If you don't see a very specific political subtext here (being sold to the voting masses on the back of crude xenophobia and racism), let me be more explicit: labour wants to migrate where working conditions and pay are best. Capital wants to invest for growth where working conditions and pay are worst.

By penning us (the labour) in, capital can maintain, for a while, the wage imbalances that maximize profit. (Take raw material. Process as cheaply as possible. Sell for as much as possible.) In the long term, it's unsustainable — labour in the high-cost developed world is taking a hammering due to being uncompetitive, and wages will be forced down until it is competitive, while labour costs in the developing world are skyrocketing."

"The current raft of regret seems to be a response to the Girls Gone Wild archetype of the late '90s and early aughts. Ariel Levy described the new era's version of sex positive in Female Chauvinist Pigs, "a tawdry, tarty, cartoonlike version of female sexuality has become so ubiquitous, it no longer seems particular." We were supposed to dance on tables like Paris Hilton and wear ass-baring chaps and hump the floor like 22-year-old Christina Aguilera did in her "Dirrrty" video, or at least find that sort of thing appealing, otherwise we were marmish prudes. We were supposed to go to strip clubs and wear Playboy necklaces around our necks—as Sex and the City star Carrie Bradshaw did.
But after a while, we did not really want to do any of those things anymore, as Tina Fey explained [...]. We have been handed "a sort of Spice Girls' version of feminism. We're supposed to be wearing half-shirts and jumping around. And, you know, maybe that's not panning out.""

"[...] the reduction of male mortality and liberalized divorce laws account for the growing excess of single males over single females at all reproductive ages. Nonetheless, this male surplus might still translate into a smaller one on the marriage market. Men are likelier than women to end up in jail, in psychiatric institutions, and on skid row. As far as the marriage market is concerned, such men don’t exist. The rate of homosexuality is also higher among men than among women."
"I used to be something of a libertarian. No longer. The sexual marketplace does not function like the marketplace of goods and services. Increasing the demand for young single women will not increase the supply. Nor will this market failure go away if “losers” attend special seminars or get special coaching. Nor will it go away on its own. This is a real problem and one that will likely get worse. Yes, if nothing is done we will have a society where marriage is unattainable for over one third of all men."

"The thing about a Nash Equilibrium is that what is rational from within the game can be absurd from an outside perspective. I’m calling bullshit on the state of Smalltalk. Vendors, you’re acting crazy. Have the tiniest possible core defined in terms of test cases. Build a shared library on top of that, implemented in terms of the core. Include numbers, collections, meta-objects, code structure, and code loading. None of this parcel/bundle/package/pundle/category nonsense. Compete on VMs, graphics libraries, and enterprise-y tools.

I know this can’t be a sensible proposal. There must be huge, insurmountable problems with it. After all, I’m too mad to think straight. But it would have made my job a lot easier today."

Republicans are more indulgent of the public's unrealism in general, but Democrats have spent years fostering their own forms of denial. Where Republicans encourage popular myths about taxes, spending, and climate change, Democrats tend to stoke our fantasies about the sustainability of entitlement spending as well as about the cost of new programs.
Our inability to address long-term challenges makes a strong case that the United States now faces an era of historical decline. Our reluctance to recognize economic choices also portends negative effects for the rest of the world. To change this story line, we need to stop blaming the rascals we elect to office and start looking to ourselves.

Mikel Evins on early Lisp-based Newton development.

(text assembled August 2004 by Rainer Joswig (http://lispm.dyndns.org/) from conversations with Mikel Evins.)

(HTML version at <http://lispm.dyndns.org/news?ID=NEWS-2004-08-14-1> )

Bauhaus: Newton OS written in Ralph.

Ralph: Dylan back when it was a Scheme+CLOS variant.

Leibniz: MCL plus a Ralph compiler that cross-compiled to
the ARM, plus a remote listener.

MCL: Macintosh Common Lisp.

Many factors explain the sluggish performance. Globalization, the continuing information technology revolution, and the offshoring of manufacturing and service jobs kept employment in check. But at root, it turned out that the policies enacted by the folks running the system—low interest rates, cutting taxes aggressively, disempowering unions, empowering Wall Street, deregulating the financial system—just didn't work as advertised. Meanwhile, policymakers neglected some important areas that can help support financial stability—such as health insurance. Between 1999 and 2008 (see Table C-1, Page 59 of the census report), the population of the United States rose 9 percent, but the uninsured population of the United States rose 19.5 percent.

My father's friend died at Six Flags over Texas's "Texas Cliffhanger" ride in the mid-80's. And I went to Walt Disney World and Epcot Center that decade. Many memories are attached to those maps.

“IF you really want to know why the financial system nearly collapsed in the fall of 2008, I can tell you in one simple sentence.”

The good news, if you're a pro-choice progressive, is that freedom-loving Americans will protect your private abortion coverage. The bad news is that they'll do it by killing health care reform.

I’ve come to the conclusion that there are four key parts to news stories, and we typically only get one of them, even though journalists possess all four, and the other three are arguably more important.
- WHAT WE GET: What just happened
- WHAT WE MISS (1): The longstanding facts
- WHAT WE MISS (2): How journalists know what they know
- WHAT WE MISS (3): The things we don’t know

With a latest-news-only approach, we stoke demand for journalism by trying to snag people’s attention with each new development.

Suggestions:
- Enlarging the market for journalism by making it easier for more people to understand the longstanding facts behind each story.
- Increasing the appeal of journalism by letting folks in on the details of our quest to uncover the truth.
- Expanding the appetite for journalism by explaining what we don’t know, and what we’re working to find out.

The chief goal of all other species is to turn food into offspring. More food means more offspring. It is this biological logic that underlies the perennial fears of human overpopulation. Most creatures live in environments that correspond to open access commons. Recent fertility trends strongly suggest that the simple biological model of human breeding is wrong, or at least, is wrong when the institutions that support economic freedom and the rule of law, e.g., markets, price stability, honest bureaucracies, security of private property, and the fair enforcement of contracts, are well-developed. Economic freedom and the rule of law are the equivalent of enclosing the open access breeding commons, causing parents to bear more and more of the costs of rearing children. In other words, economic freedom actually generates an invisible hand of population control.

But blaming Bush is an excuse rather than a reason. Cases like Sudan and Zimbabwe and Lebanon all show that American fatigue is not the only explanation. Also at play is the increasing ability of rogue leaders to deter the international community. To do this, they follow two simple rules learned from past interventions:
Be sure there's a threat of violence should anyone attempt to intervene.
Make the world believe that with just a little more negotiation, it might be possible to solve the problem diplomatically.

Americans often search for explanations by looking inward to apportion blame—by pointing a finger at Bush or Obama, expressing an urgent need to prioritize the economy, or rehashing the vices of liberalism and the sins of conservatism. [...] looking inward is not enough—indeed, it's just another sign of Western narcissism. The end of interventionalism is not just a sign of the mellowing of the West; it is also an indication that the enemy is getting stronger—and smarter.

"Cooking is a powerful biological force and the universal activity around which the rest of human history—the households and tribes, the migrations and wars, the religion and science—arranged itself. But the added treat of the I-cook-therefore-I-am idea is the counterintuitive light it sheds on one of our most intense cultural preoccupations—living the right life by eating naturally. For the last few decades, we in the first world have been challenged by a surplus of attractive food with none of the chastening effects of actual hunting and gathering or the rigors of food shortages. We have become rightly concerned about what all the chemicals involved in the growing, packaging, and delivery of food are doing to our health and that of the environment. A trusty rule of thumb has been that food should be as natural—that is, as unprocessed—as possible. But this is no longer as simple as it seems, and it's not just a matter of calories."

The nifty-keen thing here is that Web 2.0 is a web. It's a web of bubbles and squares. A glorious thing -- but that is not a verbal argument. That's like a Chinese restaurant menu. You can take one bubble from sector A, and two from sector B, and three from sector C, and you are Web 2.0. Feed yourself and your family!

Web 2.0 theory is a web. It's not philosophy, it's not ideology like a political platform, it's not even a set of esthetic tenets like an art movement. The diagram for Web 2.0 is a little model network. You can mash up all the bubbles to the other bubbles. They carry out subroutines on one another. You can flowchart it if you want. There's a native genius here. I truly admire it.

This chart is five years old now, which is 35 years old in Internet years, but intellectually speaking, it's still new in the world. It's alarming how hard it is to say anything constructive about this from any previous cultural framework.

Everything wrong with public discourse in 2008, summarized relatively neatly.

"This century we're going to learn a lesson about what it means to be unable to forget anything. And it's going to go on, and on. Barring a catastrophic universal collapse of human civilization [...] we're going to be laying down memories in diamond that will outlast our bones, and our civilizations, and our languages. Sixty kilograms will handily sum up the total history of the human species, up to the year 2000. From then on ... we still don't need much storage, in bulk or mass terms. There's no reason not to massively replicate it and ensure that it survives into the deep future."

Modern conservatism was born in opposition to Jacobin universalism. The father of conservatism, Edmund Burke, was an English liberal, a Whig, who was very friendly to the American colonists; he thought they had strong traditional grounds for challenging king and Parliament. What Burke argued passionately against, by contrast, was the French Revolution and Jacobin thinking, which he saw as expressing an unhistorical, tyrannical spirit and an importunate desire for power. Burke warned specifically against “liberty” in the abstract.

Like Burke, the Framers of the U.S. Constitution associated liberty with particular inherited traditions, limited, decentralized government, checks on power, self-restraint, moderation, and a willingness to compromise. Jacobin “freedom,” by contrast, justifies unchecked imperial power.
That is the “freedom” for which George W. Bush has become the most prominent advocate.

Steampunk's key lessons are not about the past. They are about the instability and obsolescence of our own times. A host of objects and services that we see each day all around us are not sustainable. They will surely vanish, just as "Gone With the Wind" like Scarlett O'Hara's evil slave-based economy. Once they're gone, they'll seem every bit as weird and archaic as top hats, crinolines, magic lanterns, clockwork automatons, absinthe, walking-sticks and paper-scrolled player pianos.

We are a technological society. When we trifle, in our sly, Gothic, grave-robbing fashion, with archaic and eclipsed technologies, we are secretly preparing ourselves for the death of our own tech. Steampunk is popular now because people are unconsciously realizing that the way that we live has already died. We are sleepwalking. We are ruled by rapacious, dogmatic, heavily-armed fossil-moguls who rob us and force us to live like corpses. Steampunk is a pretty way of coping with this truth.

In attacks that escalated from the 1970s through Sept. 11, 2001, terrorists exploited and demonstrated a huge advantage over life-valuing societies: [...] they're more willing to kill and die than we are.

In the last few years, however, we've developed a countermeasure: drones. By sending mechanical proxies to do our spying and killing, we avoid risking our lives. The terrorists can't kill the pilots who operate the drones from the United States. But the terrorists can kill local civilians, thereby generating political pressure on the local government to pressure the United States to call off the drones. [...] the terrorists win. The drone controllers are more sensitive to death than the terrorists are.

[...] the simplest way to re-establish the drones' supremacy is to release them from our command, turning them into real robots. [...] Then we can finally stop worrying about the terrorists ... and start worrying about the drones.

Lending money to poor people doesn't make you poor. Lending money poorly to rich people does.

From the beginning, subprime has been a symptom, not a cause. And the notion that the Community Reinvestment Act is somehow responsible for poor lending decisions is absurd.

There was a culture of stupid, reckless lending, of which Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the subprime lenders were an integral part. But the dumb-lending virus originated in Greenwich, Conn., midtown Manhattan, and Southern California, not Eastchester, Brownsville, and Washington, D.C. Investment banks created a demand for subprime loans because they saw it as a new asset class that they could dominate. They made subprime loans for the same reason they made other loans: They could get paid for making the loans, for turning them into securities, and for trading them—frequently using borrowed capital.

I’ve come to think, that a society guided by economic ideas treats pollution as an amenity problem, rather than a factor that can reduce the Earth’s ability to support human societies, and treats resource scarcity as something that can be solved by investing more money, rather than a hard limit to growth. On a larger scale, it’s for these reasons that the three-hundred-year boomtime of industrialism looks normal to so many people today. Looked at with an eye tempered by the cycles of history and the principles of ecology, it takes on a very different shape; its similarity to a speculative bubble is hard to miss; its dependence on reckless, unsustainable exploitation of half a billion years of stored photosynthetic energy, in the form of the Earth’s fossil fuel reserves, becomes just as visible as the dependence of the late housing bubble on wild overestimates of how much future buyers would pay for homes.

I still have a lot of optimism about ways we can leverage the excellent Smalltalk development world to make new and exciting products. We can create Smalltalk jobs both for ourselves and others. Maybe that's our best purpose.

There are many (many, many) film websites out there in Internetville, U.S.A., so why another one? Because this one is designed to have a little fun with all of those other websites and with the people who take films way too seriously. You will not find any familiar sounding movie titles or actors or directors here because, well, there aren't any. The Parallel Universe Film Guide is a grand parody of film buffdom and film history. Everything here has specific targets in the "real" world and I hope there is enough to amuse any person who drops by even casually to look. But…the more you know about films, the more you will get all the references in this parallel universe and be able to enjoy matching all the elements in my fictional world with those of the so-called real one with which we are sadly all too familiar.

Digging into the history of something like Erlang is always fascinating, and Armstrong has done a good job of explaining how Erlang came to be.

Here are a bunch of quotes on topics that I found interesting. I’ve grouped them into categories, but searching the PDF of the paper shouldn’t be hard if you want to know where they originated.

Academics have compiled a list of the most ancient gags and the oldest, harking back to 1900BC, is a Sumerian proverb from what is now southern Iraq.

Which means that basically we're turning America into one giant hospital. And the illness is life. Our cultural doctors don't really know how to make life better, so they've prescribed a heavy dose of Comcast. Think I'm exaggerating? Name the biggest

From 1908 to 1932, Sidney Gamble (1890-1968) visited China four times, traveling throughout the country to collect data for social-economic surveys and to photograph urban and rural life, public events, architecture, religious statuary, and the countrysid

X-plane enthusiast who identify and recover remains from famous (or not-so-famous) crash sites.

or Democrats at the moment, it is no doubt exasperating to watch working-class voters choose candidates whose economic tastes run to comforting the comfortable. And it may be cold comfort to learn that such impulses are not confined to time and place. But

As part of the scientific program for the International Geophysical Year, the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) was officially delegated the responsibility of placing an artificial satellite with a scientific experiment into orbit around the earth. NRL deve

This is an attempt to assemble a full history of the evolution of Squeak including all images released and all updates ever posted. It currently covers Squeak 1.1 through 3.6 (which at the time of this writing is the latest release). The updates should be

Nicknamed The Pitmanual, The Revised Maclisp Manual describes the programming language MACLISP, which ran on the DEC PDP-10 and Honeywell 6180/6880. This newly-updated Sunday Morning Edition features many editorial corrections, an enhanced hypertext index

The right research and policy question today is not “what kind of family do we wish people lived in?” Instead, we must ask “what do we know about how to help every family build on its strengths, minimize its weaknesses, and raise children more succe

S-Graphics running on Symbolics hardware became nearly ubiquitous in broadcast and film animation in the late 80s and early 90s. Many of the short films in The Mind's Eye, a 1990 compilation of computer animation, were created on Symbolics systems. The vi

Stockhausen's death rendered the musical world less outlandish and more reasonable—but also less ambitious and more boring. Detractors called him a charlatan. If so, Stockhausen—who, as a young man, spent a year as a touring accompanist for an illusio

Interactive Tree Of Life is an online tool for the display and manipulation of phylogenetic trees. It provides most of the features available in other tree viewers, and offers a novel circular tree layout, which makes it easy to visualize mid-sized tree (

"His account is highly biased, and in many places just plain wrong. Here’s my own perspective on what really happened."

This is a five-part series about the laws we are allowed to break in America and why.

A review by Bill Watterson, creator of Calvin and Hobbes, of SCHULZ AND PEANUTS: A BIOGRAPHY that explains the life of Charles Schultz and how it related to his comics.

Walk through the Skype headquarters in Tallinn, look through the big picture windows at the crumbling concrete buildings outside, and it becomes clear that the phenomenon of economic progress and historical contemplation are actually closely connected. Th

Heidegger was a fox and recognized traps, but, having isolated and denounced so many homes as traps, as limitations to thought, he found himself in a difficult position when it came time to seek a refuge for himself, and, so the story goes, when he set ab

Culture is not about men against women. By and large, cultural progress emerged from groups of men working with and against other men. While women concentrated on the close relationships that enabled the species to survive, men created the bigger networks

Looking at Washington, dreaming of Rome

An allegory of the history of Squeak development in the last 7 years.

Dan Everett believes that Pirahã undermines Noam Chomsky’s idea of a universal grammar.