Fuck this guy: ‘“I don’t see myself as a man of great wealth,” he said. “To say that I’m enjoying a millionaire’s lifestyle — well, I can tell you, I guess a millionaire’s income doesn’t go very far these days.”’

An incredibly well-done dissection of the ‘Oh Brother, Where Art Thou’ soundtrack, replete with hyperlinks.

‘It's no longer acceptable for us to not take responsibility for our Congress anymore. If we want it to be better then throwing bums out, and replacing them with new bums doesn't seem to be doing the trick. Let's work instead to educate whomever is in Congress, and the professional class around them. Let's do more of the stuff that works, and less of the stuff that doesn't.’

What to do in the short and long term about SOPA.

‘The problem is that this is exactly what the competition are doing — they are competing with the iPad rather than solving a problem that hasn’t been solved yet. They’re always one step behind because they’re simply trying to re-create the solution that Apple has created for their vision of a touch tablet device.’

Worth looking into, perhaps.

‘Anthropologist Mary Douglas has a nice definition for dirt, saying it is “matter out of place.” A fried egg on the plate is fine, but a fried egg all over my hands is dirty. Hyde continues to say that dirt is always a byproduct of creating order: to create a place for things means that there will be situations where things will be out of place. And this is why Louis CK’s comedy is dirty: the thoughts, as dark and natural as they may be, are put out of place. The secrets are told on stage in front of others, but it’s through that vocalization that we begin to understand ourselves and our relationship to the world we live in.’

‘A letter back then might simply ask one question. The reply would answer it. Just that. A letter might describe a single event, or pass on a single piece of news. I’m pregnant. Your father is dying. I was sent on patrol last night, and I survived. I love you. I still love you. I no longer love you.’

‘So it was as proponents of the Hollywood-funded bill curmudgeonly shot down all but two amendments proposed by its opponents, who fought to dramatically alter the document to preserve security and free speech on the net. But the chilling takeaway of this whole debacle was the irrefutable air of anti-intellectualism; that inescapable absurdity that we have members of Congress voting on a technical bill who do not posses any technical knowledge on the subject and do not find it imperative to recognize those who do.’

“It really seems like this list of things you thought were good is just your opinion.”

‘The vast majority of the formally codified doctrines that the West shows aversion to are, in my opinion, absolutely contradictory to Islam. Instead of being concerned with Shari’a law in general, I think one should be concerned with precisely who is interpreting it and how.’

On Beyoncé's ‘Countdown’.

‘I’m so torn by this. On the one hand you have one of the most dynamic pop songs of the year. Something that roars with polyphony. One listen through and you feel like you could live in this shit, Matrix-like, deluding yourself in its universe endlessly. And on the other hand you’ve still got Beyoncé‘s mind-numbing conflation of feminist empowerment with consumerism and a conveniently male-approved sexuality.’

Reflecting on his newly self-released $5 internet-only special.

‘I learned that money can be a lot of things. It can be something that is hoarded, fought over, protected, stolen and withheld. Or it can be like an energy, fueled by the desire, will, creative interest, need to laugh, of large groups of people. And it can be shuffled and pushed around and pooled together to fuel a common interest, jokes about garbage, penises and parenthood.’

‘Nobody wants a recession. Nobody wants historically high poverty rates and unemployment rates. Curiously, it’s the Occupy Wall Street folks who are most passionate about making whatever changes are necessary to ensure the next recession doesn’t happen. The financial industry, on the other hand, is fighting any effort at common-sense regulation tooth and nail.’

‘In all, industry advocates met more than two dozen times with White House and Education Department officials, including senior officials like Education Secretary Arne Duncan, records show, even as Mr. Obama has vowed to reduce the “outsize” influence of lobbyists and special interests in Washington.’

Solid gold, legitimate questions.

‘Like a service? Make them charge you or show you ads. If they won’t do it, clone them and do it yourself. Soon you’ll be the only game in town!’

‘We should not underestimate, however, the difficulty of prosecuting high-ranking officials in large corporations. This case may be an exception, but senior corporate officers rarely have sufficient personal involvement to be charged with crimes. To reach the boardroom, where policies are formed that can lead to tragedy, we must be willing to hold corporations criminally responsible.’

‘No amount of lawsuits or legal threats will change the fact that this behavior is considered normal — I'd wager the vast majority of people under 25 see nothing wrong with non-commercial sharing and remixing, or think it's legal already.’

‘What does it say about our country that nonviolent protesters are given the bottom of a police boot while those who steal hundreds of billions, do trillions worth of damage to our economy and shatter our social fabric for a generation are not only spared the zipcuffs but showered with rewards?’

‘The teachers’ role, then, is not only to teach students what to learn, but to teach them how to learn. And you can’t teach the learning process from the top in the way that you can teach content from the top (“here’s what I know; here’s what they need to know”). You have to meet students where they are and create steps to the path. It isn’t just the teacher’s responsibility to do so — it’s the teacher’s primary responsibility. And it’s a responsibility that needs to be very sensitive to the ways in which students learn at every developmental level, from the time they’re born to the time they enter a classroom.’

‘the church’s desire for “answers” has not served it well. Whether that was the church insisting that Galileo recant his position that the earth was not the center of the universe or whether it’s trying to come up with easy ways for Americans to not have to think critically about how we live and consume and participate in the capitalist society which is willing to let the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.’

This barely talks about Occupy Honolulu and instead focuses on our homelessness problem, which is a huge one.

Eric Harvey on Occupy Bloomington:

‘The fact that the Bloomington protest was small but well-intentioned and pretty well-executed is a good sign that the non-violent performance of democratic citizenship is infiltrating the everyday lives of people everywhere, to the degree that many people might be viewing these protests as a DIY set of actions that anyone can do.’

‘Further, I think the more that people see similar-looking YouTube tableaux of quiet kids sitting with locked arms being shoved around by black-suited mean-looking authority figures—particularly with the idea that this is “citizen journalism”—the more that they’re going to (maybe) start thinking more generally about the way that state power functions in American society, and maybe (just mayyybe) want to do something about it. And that’s something I hope continues to flourish, even to a small degree.’

‘No. Of course not. The rule is pure theater.’ The writer suspects that the real reason is to keep passengers undistracted in case of emergency.

‘Most of the biggest Occupy Wall Street camps are gone. But their slogan still stands.’

- Consuming more than you create
- Watching your own vanity metrics
- Starting the day responding to others
- Prioritizing the wrong activities
- Relying on multi-tasking to 'save time'

About our current political situation.

‘Every image of a human, ever, is of a human reacting to something.’

A lot of good advice, or at least a perspective to be well acknowledged.

An overview of the job market for millenials.

‘What we need to do is to build meritocratic selection processes, and then go our of our way to tell people about them. We should emphasize the objectivity of the selection process and our efforts to weed out all forms of bias.’

‘For example, there are many compassionate, decent, competent police officers who do a terrific job day in and day out. There are others who are, quote, “bad apples.” What both of them have in common is that they occupy, as it were, a system, a structure that itself is rotten. And I am talking about the paramilitary bureaucracy.’

‘So, when you connect the dots, properly understood, what happened this week is the first battle in a civil war; a civil war in which, for now, only one side is choosing violence. It is a battle in which members of Congress, with the collusion of the American president, sent violent, organised suppression against the people they are supposed to represent.’

On China’s satirists and what happens to them.

Just how dangerous (and lethal) pepper spray can be.

A software synthesizer I’d very much like to try.

‘Thanksgiving is a one of our better ideas. We, theoretically, reflect on how fortunate we are to have what we have. The day after Thanksgiving would be a great day to start thinking how we might start addressing wrongs perpetuated on anybody trampled in the process of putting together the comfort and security we are so thankful for. Instead, we’ve turned it into a symbolic date for acquiring shinier objects in anticipation of how we can best miss the point of our next major holiday. Perhaps worse, it infects Thanksgiving itself, turning the holiday into, effectively, a paean to culinary gluttony in preparation for commercial gluttony.’

This irks me. Boys that care more about their music or their TV show or their friends than the girl who expresses undying love for them aren't taking that girl for granted -- they're just not into that girl! Or perhaps I'm wrong, and this hits too close to home and confronting it makes me uncomfortable.

‘Calepin is a hosted blog publisher that watches your Markdown files stored in Dropbox.’

‘This is the most important effect of the Occupy movement: acts of defiance, courage and conscience are contagious. Just as the Arab Spring clearly played some significant role in spawning, sustaining and growing the American Occupy movement, so too have the Occupy protesters emboldened one another and their fellow citizens. The protest movement is driving the proliferation of new forms of activism, citizen passion and courage, and — most important of all — a sense of possibility. For the first time in a long time, the use of force and other forms of state intimidation are not achieving their intended outcome of deterring meaningful (i.e., unsanctioned and unwanted) citizen activism, but are, instead, spurring it even more. The state reactions to these protests are both highlighting pervasive abuses of power and generating the antidote: citizen resolve to no longer accept and tolerate it. This is why I hope to see the Occupy movement — even if it adopts specific demands — remain an outsider force rather than reduce itself into garden-variety partisan electioneering: in its current form, it is demanding and re-establishing the indispensable right of dissent, defiance of unjust authority, and sustained protest.’

‘As CD sales plummet and famed shops close, brave entrepreneurs are trying to reinvent the model. Is it too late?’

‘We have a major economic crisis in this country that was brought on by the greedy and irresponsible behavior of big banks. No banker has been arrested, and certainly none have been pepper sprayed. Arrests and chemical assault is for those trying to defend their homes, their jobs, and their schools.’

‘Asking computer nerds to design social software is a little bit like hiring a Mormon bartender.’

‘I am sure that he is a man like me, and he didn’t become a cop to shoot history majors with pepper spray. But the current policing paradigm requires that students get shot in the eyes with a chemical weapon if they resist, however peaceably. Someone has to do it.’

‘How the rank and file of both the City and the NYPD deal with our mass nonviolent protests is on them, not us, and certainly not on the people reporting the events of the day.’

‘Now that it's done, how do you feel?’

‘I feel immense gratitude to these youngsters for kicking my ass into gear. I'm feeling so much gratitude to everyone, for putting their bodies on the line every day, for this movement. It's a global uprising we're part of. We have to win.’

‘A funny thing happened to the First Amendment on its way to the public forum. According to the Supreme Court, money is now speech and corporations are now people. But when real people without money assemble to express their dissatisfaction with the political consequences of this, they’re treated as public nuisances and evicted.’

Awesome.

Why Anil favorites so much.

‘In short, favoriting or liking things for me is a performative act, but one that's accessible to me with the low threshold of a simple gesture. It's the sort of thing that can only happen online, but if I could smile at a person in the real world in a way that would radically increase the likelihood that others would smile at that person, too, then I'd be doing that all day long.’

Fake old video game animations.

‘olegco gaming experiences are listed in chronological orders. safe winds guide you.’

‘With an entire body at your command, do you seriously think the Future Of Interaction should be a single finger?’

‘This is a timeline of sexist incidents in geek communities.’

Don’t worry about getting <article> and <section> right — there's no ‘right’. The web is mostly not structured content, and semantic tags aren’t necessarily more accessible or searchable or portable.

‘Jay-Z’s lyrics would work just fine in a literature or poetry class (Decoded is basically his own Norton Critical Anthology of Jigga), but that's irrelevant to this discussion because, as nearly everyone who mocked the course seemed to ignore, Dyson is teaching a Sociology course! And Jay-Z's career is perfectly suited for the study of that discipline.’

Good interview.

This is important.

Counterpoint, consistency, and variety.

‘There needs to be room for music writing that’s not just about the author performing taste and making value judgments. So much of the life of music — the ways we hear it, the things we want from it, and so on — exist in a huge, complicated context, and someone needs to describe that context.’

‘The emergence of the Social Media Exile essay has been swift and smug. A language expert dissects a genre while also being seduced by its allure.’

‘Every artist deals with critics differently—Richard Ford spitting on Colson Whitehead, for example. But the rule is to avoid direct contact. Not for John Warner, debut novelist, who decided to seek out the man behind his worst review.’

What privilege is.

Good interview.

‘A few years ago, before anyone knew his name, before rap artists from all over the country started hitting him up for music, the rap producer Lex Luger, born Lexus Lewis, now age 20, sat down in his dad’s kitchen in Suffolk, Va., opened a sound-mixing program called Fruity Loops on his laptop and created a new track.’ That was ‘Hard in da Paint’.

‘Rooney was an unremarkable, cranky bore whose bitching about simple annoyances struck a nerve with other aging white people who were frightened by or opposed to change.’

As Paul Irish put it, ‘Some of the finest research and writing about HTML & CSS & JS.’

‘Upon reflection, it is very obvious where the problems are. There’s no universal health care to handle the randomness of poor health. There’s no free higher education to allow people to develop their skills outside the logic and relations of indentured servitude. Our bankruptcy code has been rewritten by the top 1% when instead, it needs to be a defense against their need to shove inequality-driven debt at populations. And finally, there’s no basic income guaranteed to each citizen to keep poverty and poor circumstances at bay. We have piecemeal, leaky versions of each of these in our current liberal social safety net. Having collated all these responses, I think completing these projects should be the ultimate goal of the 99%.’

Great photos from Hallowbaloo this year, including the Baths show that I opened!

The sweatshops, the censorship and authoritarianism, the ‘rough treatment of underlings’.

‘If we stop looking to the past, we might realize that we’re living in a golden age of music listening and discussion. The Internet has enabled more people to hear more music than at any point in human history. More people are writing about music than ever — on websites, on personal blogs and Facebook pages.’