Wednesday, May 2, 2012
Mitt Romney's Dangerous Foreign Policy Team: Nostalgic for Bush, Hellbent on War with Iran The candidate's foreign policy team features the usual belligerence, mixed with some serious nostalgia for a thoroughly discredited foreign policy framework. May 2, 2012
Why Are Universities Buying Up Drones Faster Than Police Departments?
For all the attention given to U.S.
law enforcement’s interest in adopting drones, the biggest users turn
out to be not police departments, but universities. We learned this last
week, when the Electronic Frontier Foundation forced the Federal
Aviation Administration to reveal that it had approved 25 universities to
fly drones in U.S. airspace. Not that universities were waiting on the
FAA to begin working in the field: Last fall, Kansas State University
created a degree in unmanned aviation. So far, 30 undergraduates have
signed up.
The spreading drone
curriculum is, for better and worse, a sign of the coming normalization
of drones in American life. Interviews with university officials
revealed widespread excitement about the possibilities of unmanned
aviation technology, which has the potential to transform fields like
agriculture and disaster response. The U.S. military, however, is
funding parts of this academic research, and so are leading defense
contractors. Whether their intentions are as pure as the universities’
is an open question. READ MORE
"Festive, Righteous Anger": Occupy Makes a May Day Comeback With Massive Demonstrations
May 1, 2012
All over the world, May 1st is
celebrated as International Workers Day. Yesterday, May Day also marked
the reemergence of the Occupy movement, with events in cities all over
America. AlterNet's reporters were in the field -- here are their
dispatches from New York and the Bay Area.
Midtown NYC, morning
-- Sarah Jaffe
Midtown
is a great place for chanting; your voice echoes off the tall buildings
and you can hear it blocks away. Even better for marching bands, bells
and whistles. There may not actually be 99 pickets, but midtown
Manhattan is clogged with them in the morning, and they're inside the
heads of the people on the street--I walk past a couple discussing our
"cruel," unequal society as I hurry from picket to picket.
I
made it to Bryant Park a few minutes after eight in a haze of rain, and
found a crowd of around a hundred huddled under their umbrellas or the
ones at tables in the park. The Rude Mechanical Orchestra were clustered
around their instruments but not playing, and Occupiers chatted with
one another.
Why Is the Conservative Brain More Fearful? The Alternate Reality Right-Wingers Inhabit Is Terrifying
Consider for a moment just how
terrifying it must be to live life as a true believer on the right.
Reality is scary enough, but the alternative reality inhabited by people
who watch Glenn Beck, listen to Rush Limbaugh, or think Michele
Bachmann isn't a joke must be nothing less than horrifying.
Research
suggests that conservatives are, on average, more susceptible to fear
than those who identify themselves as liberals. Looking at MRIs of a
large sample of young adults last year, researchers at University
College London discovered that “greater conservatism was associated with
increased volume of the right amygdala” ($$).
The amygdala is an ancient brain structure that's activated during
states of fear and anxiety. (The researchers also found that “greater
liberalism was associated with increased gray matter volume in the
anterior cingulate cortex” – a region in the brain that is believed to
help people manage complexity.) READ MORE
Welcome to the 2012 Hunger Games: Sending Debt Peonage, Poverty, and Freaky Weather Into the Arena
When I was growing up, I ate books for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and since I was constantly running out of reading material, I read everyone else’s -- which for a girl with older brothers meant science fiction. The books were supposed to be about the future, but they always turned out to be very much about this very moment.
Some of them -- Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land -- were comically of their time: that novel’s vision of the good life seemed to owe an awful lot to the Playboy Mansion in its prime, only with telepathy and being nice added in. Frank Herbert’s Dune had similarly sixties social mores, but its vision of an intergalactic world of disciplined desert jihadis and a great game for the substance that made all long-distance transit possible is even more relevant now. Think: drug cartels meet the oil industry in the deep desert.
We now live in a world that is wilder than a lot of science fiction from my youth. My phone is 58 times faster than IBM’s fastest mainframe computer in 1964 (calculates my older brother Steve) and more powerful than the computers on the Apollo spaceship we landed on the moon in 1969 (adds my nephew Jason). Though we never got the promised jetpacks and the Martians were a bust, we do live in a time when genetic engineers use jellyfish genes to make mammals glow in the dark and nerds in southern Nevada kill people in Pakistan and Afghanistan with unmanned drones. Anyone who time-traveled from the sixties would be astonished by our age, for its wonders and its horrors and its profound social changes. But science fiction is about the present more than the future, and we do have a new science fiction trilogy that’s perfect for this very moment. READ MORE
Tuesday, May 1, 2012
Marty Kaplan on Big Money’s Effect on Big Media
Tuesday, 01 May 2012 11:13
By Bill Moyers, Moyers & Co. | Video
Big money and big media have coupled to create a ‘Disney World’ of democracy in which TV shows, televised debates, even news coverage is being dumbed down, just as the volume is being turned up. The result is a public certainly more entertained, but less informed and personally involved than they should be, says Marty Kaplan, director of USC’s Norman Lear Center and an entertainment industry veteran. Bill Moyers talks with Kaplan about how taking news out of the journalism box and placing it in the entertainment box is hurting democracy and allowing special interest groups to manipulate the system.
“It’s all about combat. If every political issue is [represented by] combat between two polarized sides, then you get great television because people are throwing food at each other,” Kaplan tells Moyers. “And you have an audience that hasn’t a clue at the end of the story, which is why you’ll hear, ‘Well, we’ll have to leave it there.’”
“The problem is that there’s not that much information out there if you’re an ordinary citizen. You can ferret it out, but it ought not be like that in a democracy,” Kaplan says. “Education and journalism were supposed to, according to our founders, inform our public and make democracy work.”
TRANSCRIPT READ MORE
Big money and big media have coupled to create a ‘Disney World’ of democracy in which TV shows, televised debates, even news coverage is being dumbed down, just as the volume is being turned up. The result is a public certainly more entertained, but less informed and personally involved than they should be, says Marty Kaplan, director of USC’s Norman Lear Center and an entertainment industry veteran. Bill Moyers talks with Kaplan about how taking news out of the journalism box and placing it in the entertainment box is hurting democracy and allowing special interest groups to manipulate the system.
“It’s all about combat. If every political issue is [represented by] combat between two polarized sides, then you get great television because people are throwing food at each other,” Kaplan tells Moyers. “And you have an audience that hasn’t a clue at the end of the story, which is why you’ll hear, ‘Well, we’ll have to leave it there.’”
“The problem is that there’s not that much information out there if you’re an ordinary citizen. You can ferret it out, but it ought not be like that in a democracy,” Kaplan says. “Education and journalism were supposed to, according to our founders, inform our public and make democracy work.”
TRANSCRIPT READ MORE
British Panel Finds Murdoch Unfit to Lead Media Empire
London - In a damning report after months of investigation into the hacking scandal at Rupert Murdoch's British newspapers, a parliamentary panel here concluded on Tuesday that he was "not a fit person" to run a huge international company, amplifying a public outcry against him, but threatening further bruising divisions within the political establishment.
The startling conclusion about the world's most influential media tycoon went much further in lambasting Mr. Murdoch than had been expected from Parliament's select committee on culture, media and sport, which has conducted several inquiries into press standards in recent years, the most recent starting last July.
DOCUMENT: The Full Parliamentary Report (PDF)
But the impact of the report by the all-party committee was blunted by divisions within the panel itself. Presaging further disarray within Britain's strained coalition government, the committee said it had split, 6 to 4, on party lines, with the dominant Conservatives opposing the censure of Mr. Murdoch while the Liberal Democrats, the junior partner in Prime Minister David Cameron's government, joined the Labor opposition in supporting it.
"On the basis of the facts and evidence before the committee," the report said in one passage, "we conclude that, if at all relevant times Rupert Murdoch did not take steps to become fully informed about phone hacking, he turned a blind eye and exhibited willful blindness to what was going on in his companies and publications." READ MORE
Rupert Murdoch's Fox broadcast licences targeted by US ethics group
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