Past Imperfect: Starfish Prime

[ed. I remember this, standing on a high hillside watching strange clouds and colors bloom on the horizon. How many people can say they've seen a thermonuclear blast fired first hand?]

The first Starfish Prime launch, on June 20, 1962, at Johnston Island in the Pacific, had to be aborted when the Thor launch vehicle failed and the missile began to break apart. The nuclear warhead was destroyed mid-flight, and radioactive contamination rained back down on the island.

Despite protests from Tokyo to London to Moscow citing “the world’s violent opposition” to the July 9 test, the Honolulu Advertiser carried no ominous portent with its headline, “N-Blast Tonight May Be Dazzling; Good View Likely,” and hotels in Hawaii held rooftop parties.

The mood on the other side of the planet was somewhat darker. In London, England, 300 British citizens demonstrated outside the United States Embassy, chanting “No More Tests!” and scuffling with police. Canon L. John Collins of St. Paul’s Cathedral called the test “an evil thing,” and said those responsible were “stupid fools.” Izvestia, the Soviet newspaper, carried the headline, “Crime of American Atom-mongers: United States Carries Out Nuclear Explosion in Space.”

Soviet film director Sergei Yutkevich told the paper, “We know with whom we are dealing: yet we hoped, until the last moment, that the conscience, if not the wisdom, of the American atom-mongers would hear the angry voices of millions and millions of ordinary people of the earth, the voices of mothers and scientists of their own country.” (Just eight months before, the Soviets tested the Tsar Bomba, the most powerful nuclear weapon ever detonated—a 50-megaton hydrogen bomb—on an archipelago in the Arctic Ocean in the north of Russia.)

Just after 11 p.m. Honolulu time on July 9, the 1.45-megaton hydrogen bomb was detonated thirteen minutes after launch. Almost immediately, an electromagnetic pulse knocked out electrical service in Hawaii, nearly 1,000 miles away. Telephone service was disrupted, streetlights were down and burglar alarms were set off by a pulse that was much larger than scientists expected.

Suddenly, the sky above the Pacific was illuminated by bright auroral phenomena. “For three minutes after the blast,” one reporter in Honolulu wrote, “the moon was centered in a sky partly blood-red and partly pink. Clouds appeared as dark silhouettes against the lighted sky.” Another witness said, “A brilliant white flash burned through the clouds rapidly changing to an expanding green ball of irradiance extending into the clear sky above the overcast.” Others as far away as the Fiji Islands—2,000 miles from Johnston Island—described the light show as “breathtaking.”

In Maui, a woman observed auroral lights that lasted a half hour in “a steady display, not pulsating or flickering, taking the shape of a gigantic V and shading from yellow at the start to dull red, then to icy blue and finally to white.”

by The Smithsonian |  Read more:

Photo: Los Alamos National Laboratory

What Does Obama Really Believe In?

[ed. Excellent article on poverty and the challenges of addressing it.]

Obama arrived in Roseland in the summer of 1985 as a 23-year-old Columbia University graduate on a quest for a sense of purpose and belonging. It was a confusing, conflicted time to be black in Chicago. The election two years earlier of Harold Washington, the city’s first African-American mayor, energized black residents, but many of them were still living in poverty, and whole sections of black Chicago seemed to be turning into war zones. The dispatches that journalists like Alex Kotlowitz and Nicholas Lemann filed from the city’s gigantic high-rise housing projects during Obama’s time in the city are shocking even today: children crawling on the ground to avoid bullets, apartments firebombed, a prolonged gun battle between gangs in two neighboring high-rise buildings that drew not a single police car in response.

Life in Roseland in those days was not as bad as it was in the high-rise projects like Cabrini-Green and the Robert Taylor Homes, but the neighborhood was changing, and as Obama conducted fact-finding interviews with local residents, he heard again and again the anxiety and fear that those changes were producing. In his memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” Obama wrote that the middle-aged, working-class African-Americans he met in Roseland expressed satisfaction at what they had achieved in life: “On the strength of two incomes, they had paid off house notes and car notes, maybe college educations for the sons or daughters whose graduation pictures filled every mantelpiece.” But when they talked about the neighborhood’s future, Obama wrote, “our conversations were marked by another, more ominous strain.” They worried about the neighborhood’s trajectory of decline, “the decaying storefronts, the aging church rolls, kids from unknown families who swaggered down the streets — loud congregations of teenage boys, teenage girls feeding potato chips to crying toddlers, the discarded wrappers tumbling down the block — all of it whispered painful truths, told them the progress they’d found was ephemeral, rooted in thin soil; that it might not even last their lifetimes,” Obama wrote. (...)

And indeed, Obama’s approach to poverty as a politician was activist and innovative. Early in his presidential campaign, in July 2007, he gave an entire speech about poverty at a community center in Anacostia, a high-poverty neighborhood in southeast Washington. While Obama expressed support in the speech for some of the traditional, broad-brush Democratic antipoverty policies — raising the minimum wage, strengthening unions, expanding access to health care, improving educational opportunity — his focus was on the need for new solutions to concentrated urban poverty, which he described as “the cause that led me to a life of public service almost 25 years ago.”

With a nod to the ideas of William Julius Wilson, Obama made the case that inner-city poverty is qualitatively different from other strains of poverty. “What’s most overwhelming about urban poverty is that it’s so difficult to escape,” he said. “It’s isolating, and it’s everywhere.” Addressing this kind of poverty was neither simple nor straightforward, Obama said. “If poverty is a disease that infects an entire community in the form of unemployment and violence, failing schools and broken homes, then we can’t just treat those symptoms in isolation. We have to heal that entire community.”

Obama laid out an ambitious agenda to do just that. At its center was a proposal to expand the work of Geoffrey Canada and his organization, the Harlem Children’s Zone, which takes an intensive and comprehensive approach to child development in a 97-block high-poverty neighborhood in central Harlem, providing poor children with not just high-quality charter schools but also parenting programs, preschools, a medical clinic, a farmers’ market, family counseling and help with college applications. (My 2008 book, “Whatever It Takes,” is a profile of Canada and a history of the Children’s Zone.)

“When I’m president,” Obama said, “the first part of my plan to combat urban poverty will be to replicate the Harlem Children’s Zone in 20 cities across the country.” With a candor unusual for a presidential candidate, Obama acknowledged the high price of his program: “Now, how much will this cost?” he asked. “I’ll be honest — it can’t be done on the cheap. It will cost a few billion dollars a year. . . . But we will find the money to do this because we can’t afford not to.”

Looking back at the Anacostia speech today, what is striking about Obama’s proposal, beyond its size and scope, was that he didn’t conceive of it as just one more federal spending program. It was, instead, something more potentially disruptive: a thorough overhaul of existing federal aid to inner cities, a blueprint for a more coordinated, more effective, more responsive way to direct the often haphazard flow of government money into urban neighborhoods devastated by the multiple effects of concentrated poverty. It represented a break from the past: a new way of doing things in neighborhoods like Roseland.

As president, Obama has followed a very different path from the one he described in Anacostia. The Promise Neighborhoods program exists, but it is a small item tucked away in the discretionary budget of the Department of Education. Rather than devoting “a few billion dollars a year,” his administration has spent a total of $40 million on the program in the last three years, with another $60 million in grants going out to community groups later this year. A few other initiatives have focused on concentrated urban poverty, but they are mostly small and scattered. Instead, the antipoverty path that Obama has pursued looks more like a traditional Great Society Democratic approach: his administration has spent billions of dollars on direct aid to poor people, mostly working-poor families.

The reason for this shift in priorities, according to people in the Obama administration, was the economic crisis they inherited. As David Axelrod, Obama’s former senior adviser and current chief campaign strategist, described it to me, “We were essentially an economic triage unit, trying to prevent the country from sliding into a second Great Depression.” (...)

And so in 2009 and 2010, the Obama administration put a tremendous amount of money, very quickly, into the hands of low-income Americans. As part of the Recovery Act, the administration extended the eligibility rules for existing programs like food stamps and unemployment insurance, and the combination of the collapsing economy and the more generous rules meant the programs grew quickly. The number of individuals receiving food stamps rose to 45.1 million in 2011 from 27.4 million in 2007. From 2008 to 2010, an additional 6.8 million people, mostly children, began receiving Medicaid. Temporary changes in the eligibility criteria for various tax credits, including the earned-income tax credit and the child tax credit, produced tax refunds for millions of low-income workers, often totaling thousands of dollars a year.

And while it is true that the Census Bureau’s official poverty figures have grown steadily worse under Obama, rising to 15.1 percent of Americans under the poverty line in 2010 from 13.2 percent in 2008, those dismal numbers come with a significant caveat. When government statisticians calculate the poverty rate, they include only cash income. And over the last two decades, and especially during the Obama administration, the way the federal government gives aid to poor people has shifted away from cash transfers toward noncash transfers — food stamps, Medicaid subsidies, housing vouchers — none of which are included in a family’s income for the purposes of poverty statistics. If you do count food stamps and other noncash aid, the poverty rate has, according to some calculations, not gone up much at all during the Obama administration, during the worst economic crisis in 70 years. That is a remarkable accomplishment. When I asked William Julius Wilson last month for his thoughts on the current administration’s antipoverty efforts, he said that Obama had “done more for lower-income Americans than any president since Lyndon Baines Johnson.”

In Roseland, the stimulus may not have made things much better, but it stopped them from getting much worse. Food stamps helped some families get enough to eat, teenagers got summer jobs, some tenants received help with their rent. A stimulus grant to the Chicago public schools helped pay for the YAP program, which let Steve Gates start working with children like Jasmine and Damien. But it was, by definition, a temporary fix.

by Paul Tough, NY Times |  Read more: 

Photo: Antonio Bolfo/Reportage for The New York Times

Juan Gris (Spanish, 1887-1927), The Guitar, 1913. Oil on canvas. Private collection.

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Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?, 1956, Richard Hamilton

”The main impetus for British Pop came out of discussions between writers like Lawrence Alloway and artists such as Richard Hamilton. This group put on a pioneering exhibition in 1956 called This Is Tomorrow - a quasi-anthropological, semi-ironic, but wholly enthusiastic look at the mass imagery of the early electronic age. Hamilton exhibited a small but densely prophetic collage called Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing? In it, the word ‘Pop’ makes its first appearance in art, emblazoned on the hilarious phallic sucker the muscle-man is holding. Moreover, all the chief image sources of later Pop art are compressed into the collage: a literally framed Young Romance comic on the wall (Lichtenstein), the packaged ham on the table (Rosenquist), the TV set, brands like the Ford logo on the table lamp, the movie theatre with its cut-off kneeling Al Jolson billboard visible through the window, the brand-new vacuum cleaner and tape recorder…and the Health and Beauty couple displaying their lats, pects and tits as product.”

- The Shock Of The New, Robert Hughes

Channels on Every Single Screen

YouTube rolled out a new app for the PS3 yesterday. This might not sound like a big deal, but the new app is just the first salvo in a war for your living room, one powered by an all-new channel-driven YouTube.

Remember YouTube? You could use it to watch baby pandas sneezing, or a kid named David riding home from the dentist hopped up on drugs. YouTube grew into an 800-million-viewer megolith largely on the strength of one-off uploads that were 21st-century versions of America’s Funniest Home Videos. Along the way it spawned its own stars and even series, including Lonelygirl15, The Gregory Brothers, and of course, um, Fred. It spawned its own genres, like reaction videos and unboxing videos. Go to the front page, and it would show you the latest viral hit. And then another. And another. And suddenly, 20 minutes were gone.

But now that’s all changing.

The old YouTube you knew (and maybe loved!) is gone. It’s been replaced by something that’s a lot more like a play-anywhere, device-agnostic, multi-channel network. It’s becoming a cable network for people who don’t have cable. YouTube doesn’t want you to watch videos anymore — not in the singular sense, at least. It wants you to stick around and see what comes next. It wants you to start watching on your phone as you head home from work, pick up again on your TV as you relax in the evening, and then nod off to its content while you’re lying in bed, as it streams from your tablet.

And mostly, YouTube is becoming a backdoor to let Google into your living room, no matter whose set-top box sits on your Ikea MAVA. And so how will YouTube pull this off? Channels.

“The benchmark for what makes mass-market television has changed,” says Shishir Mehrotra, YouTube’s VP of product management. “Cable has run out of space. If you’re going to broadcast content to everybody whether or not they watch it, you can only afford to broadcast a few hundred channels. But if you move to a world where you can broadcast on demand to only whoever wants it, now you can support millions of channels.”

YouTube is moving away from videos and into a world of channels — on the web, Google TV, gaming console, internet-enabled televisions, smartphones, and anything else with a screen and an internet connection. YouTube is even uglyfying its web interface — on purpose — just to make you notice them.

Google also ponied up something in the neighborhood of $300 million to create and promote new channels, lining the pockets of the likes of Madonna and Ashton Kutcher to create original online episodes for the site, while also using algorithms to generate topical channels made from its existing treasure trove of content. It’s a massive shift in strategy, one meant to boost watch times and overall viewers, rather than total view numbers, YouTube’s traditional performance metric. And it all means is that no matter what type of video content you’re into, you’ll be able to find it on YouTube by the bucketful.

Want your MTV? I mean old-school, music videos broadcast all the time? They’re on YouTube, powered by the Vevo channel. Want the best big wave surfing channel on TV? It’s also on YouTube. Or how about the new drama series from Jon Avnet of Black Swan fame? It’s called WIGS, stars A-list actresses like Jennifer Garner and Dakota Fanning, and is only on YouTube.

There’s more. Twilight Zone-style scream-o creepouts? CSI creator Anthony Zuiker has you covered on the YouTube series BlackBox TV. Live videos from the U.S. Olympic team? 24/7 live coverage of Ramadan, straight from Mecca? Original comedy? Original animation? Original automotive TV with attitude? It’s all on YouTube.

But, look, if you do just want to watch cat videos, for hours on end, there’s still a channel for that too. And it’s freaking awesome.

What’s more, YouTube is taking its channels absolutely everywhere it can. Today it’s PlayStation, but tomorrow it’s the world. Your channels will follow you from device to device — be it a gaming platform, a phone, a tablet or a desktop. It wants you to think, “What’s new on TV?” and then turn to your favorite channel on YouTube to find out.

But YouTube also has two problems, and they’re both very big. First, it has to get you to notice the channels. Second, it has to be able to show you the channels, no matter where you are. Here’s how it plans to pull that off.

by Mat Honan, Wired | Read more:
Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired

Christian Dior S/S 2009 Couture
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Boss Rove

Not long ago, Karl Rove seemed toxic: the brains of a disastrous presidency, tarred by scandal. Today, as the mastermind of a billion-dollar war chest—and with surrogates in place in the Romney campaign—he’s the de facto leader of the Republican Party. But in Rove’s long game, 2012 may be just the beginning.

On Wednesday, April 21, 2010, about two dozen Republican power brokers gathered at Karl Rove’s Federal-style town house on Weaver Terrace in northwest Washington, D.C., to strategize about the fall midterm elections.

Rove, then 59, had host­ed this kind of event many times before. Six years earli­er, he’d held weekly breakfasts for high-level G.O.P. operatives to plan for the 2004 fall elections. Back then, as senior adviser to President George W. Bush, Rove oversaw Bush’s re-election campaign. More important, he was attempting to implement a master plan to build a permanent majority through which Republicans would maintain a stranglehold on all three branches of government for the foreseeable future. This was not simply about winning elections. It represented a far more grandiose vision—the forging of a historic re-alignment of America’s political landscape, the transformation of America into effectively a one-party state.

But now Rove was no longer in the White House. He had been one of the most powerful unelected officials in the United States, but, to many Republicans, his greatest achievement—engineering the presidency of George W. Bush—had become an ugly stain on the party’s reputation.

After the two biggest political scandals of the dec­ade, the Valerie Plame affair and the outcry following the firing of nine U.S. attorneys, Rove resigned in 2007 under a cloud of suspicion, barely escaping indictment. His longtime patron then left the White House with the lowest approval rating in the history of the presidency—22 percent. And in 2008 the Democrats had vaporized Rove’s dreams by winning the ultimate political trifecta—the House, the Senate, and the White House. Finally, on the right, there was the insurgent Tea Party, to which he personified the free-spending Bush era and the Republican Party’s Establishment past, not its future.

But Rove had an incredibly powerful ally. It could be fairly said that no other political strategist in history was so deeply indebted to the United States Supreme Court. In December 2000, inBush v. Gore, one of the most notorious decisions in its history, by a five-to-four vote, the Court effectively resolved the 2000 United States presidential election in favor of Rove’s most famous client, George W. Bush. Then, on January 21, 2010, three months before his luncheon, the Supreme Court once again provided the answer to Karl Rove’s prayers, this time in the form ofCitizens United v. Federal Election Commission.

The Court ruled in a five-to-four decision that the First Amendment prohibits the government from limiting spending for political purposes by corporations and unions and effectively granted corporations and unions the same free-speech rights enjoyed by individual citizens. The first decision legitimized Rove’s power during the two terms of George W. Bush. The second one allowed Rove to re-establish his power and gave a new life to his vision of creating a “permanent Republican majority.”

by Craig Unger, Vanity Fair |  Read more:

Illustration by André Carrilho

Birches 1879, Artist: Arkhip Kuindzhi
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Can This Wedding Be Saved?

In all the spittle-flecked, hymn-humming, hair-tugging, petal-strewn pre-nuptial hysteria over how many gays should be allowed in a marriage—the happy homo couple or just the priest, the choirmaster, and the hairdresser—we’ve all overlooked something far more important. The big day. The wedding.

No aspect of our 21st-century lives is more parched of gayness than weddings. They are desperate for a fairy makeover. We heteros should be begging gays to come and give the best day of our lives a dressing-down by joining in. Weddings are a kitsch style crash of appalling taste, snotty tissues, blisters, lip gloss, dads dancing, and hypoglycemia. A wedding is like porn in that it promises far more than it’s ever going to deliver; unlike porn, we witness this scene with our grandparents and our kids.

“The Wedding” is supposed to be a peak moment in our lives. Small children are encouraged to look forward to theirs with a fairy-tale longing. Little girls plan theirs before they’ve ever said a civil word to a boy, let alone kissed one. Then some tongue-tied, giddy swain slumps to one knee and tugs a velveteen box from his pocket, and his sweetheart, who up to this very moment has quite liked him, is more acutely embarrassed than she ever thought humanly possible. She stares at the pitiful diamond. The engagement ring is the ugliest, gaudiest piece of jewelry most women will ever wear. It sets in motion the most stressful and tearful year of their lives, one that will culminate in a day only heterosexuals could come up with. (...)

Viewed from the pews, weddings are theater produced by straight amateurs using their own money. The resulting spectacle is what a dog show would be like if it were organized by the dogs. When gays remake weddings, the lighting will be the first thing to improve. Secondly, no one’s going to think that a fatless steak fryer is a suitable pres­ent, and the flowers won’t look ordered for a clown’s funeral. The music will also be classier; you won’t have to walk down the aisle to Meatloaf singing, “I would do anything for love / But I won’t do that.”

The history of queer culture shows us that gay men are the trailblazers. Where they go, heterosexual women follow, dragging reluctant straight men behind them, who in turn bring Texans. That’s how civilization and musical theater evolve. Not to mention catering. The cake has got to go. The original wedding cake was a biscuit broken over the bride’s head to represent what was about to happen to her hymen. But that’s vulgar. Today the happy couple jointly hold a very phallic knife and together force it through the virginal white icing into the soft, moist sweetness, and in America, for those who are slow at symbolism, they then push cake into each other’s face as a sort of cakealingus.

I understand that the bureaucratic holdup in allowing gays to have weddings like the rest of us is a problem with the exclusivity rules of the club. I thought that marriage was supposed to be a basic building block of society, that marriages come together to give the nation-state its tensile strength. Marriages make families, and families marry one another, creating a web of security and morality. Surely the right thing, the conservative thing, would be to get as many people into marriages as possible. The really radical-right, hair-shirt-and-burning-torches thing would be to insist that gays get married because, without wanting to be indelicate, all the stuff that gets the religiously intense so book-thumpingly incandescent about homosexuality is all the stuff that goes on before you’re married. If you want to stop them having fun up against walls and behind sofas, just let them get married. They’ll soon learn there’s precious little cake in the face after the wedding.

by A.A. Gill, Vanity Fair |  Read more:

Photo: Classicstock/Alamy; Digital Colorization by Lorna Clark

“A Right Fit”: Navigating the World of Literary Agents

Imagine that one night you have a dream in which you are in an enormous bookstore lined with shelves upon shelves of books, each bound in the same plain white cover displaying only the author’s name, the title of the book, and a brief description of the book and its author. This is an anxiety dream, so it turns out that your livelihood depends on your ability to search this enormous bookstore and figure out which books are good and which aren’t. The thing is, in this bookstore, the vast majority of the books are bad - trite, derivative, poorly written, or simply the sort of book you would never read in a million years. You know there are some really good books in this store, maybe even one or two genuinely great ones, but from the outside they’re indistinguishable from the terrible ones.

How do you choose? Do you sit down at the first shelf and read each book all the way through? No way; you’d starve, if you didn’t kill yourself from boredom first. Do you glance at the descriptions of the book and author on the back cover, and then read a page or two of the ones that sound more interesting? That’s better, but we’re talking a huge room here – thousands and thousands of books – and what can you really tell from a couple of paragraphs, anyway?

So you begin to look for shortcuts. You decide to only consider the kinds of books you already know you like – mysteries, say, and literary novels with strong female protagonists. Still, there are a lot of mysteries and novels with strong female protagonists in this bookstore. So you look for other shortcuts. If you recognize the name of the author as someone who has already written something else good, you read that one. You might also look for other people in the bookstore so you could ask them what good books they had read lately and start looking for those. You might even take some of them out for lunch – it’s okay, you can expense it – to pick their brains.

For several hundred people, most of them living in New York City, this dream is their daily reality. They are called literary agents, and if you are a writer with one or more unpublished books on your hard drive you have probably received a terse note from several dozen of them telling you that your novel is “not a right fit” for their agency at this time. In that moment you tore open that thin self-addressed envelope or read the two-line return email, you probably hated them. Not just that one agent, but all literary agents, as a class. How could they not see the brilliance in your manuscript? How could they possibly guess at the quality of your manuscript based on a one-page letter and a synopsis? And what the hell does “not a right fit” mean, anyway? Is that even grammatical English?

This is a perfectly natural and human response. It hurts to be rejected, and it hurts even more when you walk into a real bookstore, one with chirpy sales clerks and splashy book covers, and see truly godawful books by authors represented by some of these very same agents. But as natural as that rage might be, as satisfying as it is to rant to your friends or online about the idiocy of the people in mainstream publishing, this anger is misplaced. There are good literary agents and bad ones – the gap between the two is huge – but literary agents are only middlemen navigating the rough seas between the swarms of unpublished writers and an ever-diminishing readership for literary fiction.

If your book isn’t selling, literary agents are not to blame. It may be that your book doesn’t really belong in mainstream commercial publishing, in which case you should consider self-publication or send your book to an indie publisher like Ig, Two Dollar Radio or Small Beer Press. Or it may be that your book would appeal to a mainstream publisher, but you haven’t done the groundwork you need to do to get out of the slush pile and onto a literary agent’s radar. Or perhaps your book just isn’t ready yet. Whatever the case, you would be wise to pay attention to what literary agents are trying to tell you, even if all they’re saying is “no”.

I should know because I recently finished a novel and have spent the last six months hearing polite, carefully hedged versions of “no.” This can be an enormously confusing, even maddening process. One agent will say she found my book too commercial, and then a few weeks later another will say she thought the plot “too quiet” and wished it had been more overtly commercial. Well, which is it? Commercial-minded pap, or wannabe Henry James?

One of the nice things about being a journalist is that when you want to know how something works, you can call up people who know and they will sit down and explain it for you. So earlier this year, on assignment from Poets & Writers magazine, I spent a day at the offices of Folio Literary Management in Midtown Manhattan to see for myself what literary agents do all day.

by Michael Bourne, The Millions |  Read more:

Image via CompletelyNovel.com/Flickr

Franz Kline
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Aaron Allen Westerberg - Black Kimono
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The New Totalitarianism of Surveillance Technology

[ed. Another week, another litany of constitutional and privacy abuses. Heard about Trapwire? The super-secret surveillance program outed by Wikileaks last week? You can read about it here and here. Also, in case you missed it, be sure to read about Target's surveillance system and how they can even predict if someone is pregnant.]

A software engineer in my Facebook community wrote recently about his outrage that when he visited Disneyland, and went on a ride, the theme park offered him the photo of himself and his girlfriend to buy – with his credit card information already linked to it. He noted that he had never entered his name or information into anything at the theme park, or indicated that he wanted a photo, or alerted the humans at the ride to who he and his girlfriend were – so, he said, based on his professional experience, the system had to be using facial recognition technology. He had never signed an agreement allowing them to do so, and he declared that this use was illegal. He also claimed that Disney had recently shared data from facial-recognition technology with the United States military.

Yes, I know: it sounds like a paranoid rant.

Except that it turned out to be true. News21, supported by the Carnegie and Knight foundations, reports that Disney sites are indeed controlled by face-recognition technology, that the military is interested in the technology, and that the face-recognition contractor, Identix, has contracts with the US government – for technology that identifies individuals in a crowd. (...)

According to Homeland Security Newswire, billions of dollars are being invested in the development and manufacture of various biometric technologies capable of detecting and identifying anyone, anywhere in the world – via iris-scanning systems, already in use; foot-scanning technology (really); voice pattern ID software, and so on.

What is very obvious is that this technology will not be applied merely to people under arrest, or to people under surveillance in accordance with the fourth amendment (suspects in possible terrorist plots or other potential crimes, after law enforcement agents have already obtained a warrant from a magistrate). No, the "targets" here are me and you: everyone, all of the time. In the name of "national security", the capacity is being built to identify, track and document any citizen constantly and continuously.

by Naomi Wolf, The Guardian |  Read more:

Photograph: Allstar/20th Century Fox

No Criminal Case Is Likely in Loss at MF Global

[ed. Words fail.  wtf...invited to be interviewed?]

A criminal investigation into the collapse of the brokerage firm MF Global and the disappearance of about $1 billion in customer money is now heading into its final stage without charges expected against any top executives.

After 10 months of stitching together evidence on the firm’s demise, criminal investigators are concluding that chaos and porous risk controls at the firm, rather than fraud, allowed the money to disappear, according to people involved in the case.

The hurdles to building a criminal case were always high with MF Global, which filed for bankruptcy in October after a huge bet on European debt unnerved the market. But a lack of charges in the largest Wall Street blowup since 2008 is likely to fuel frustration with the government’s struggle to charge financial executives. Just a few individuals — none of them top Wall Street players — have been prosecuted for the risky acts that led to recent failures and billions of dollars in losses.

In the most telling indication yet that the MF Global investigation is winding down, federal authorities are seeking to interview the former chief of the firm, Jon S. Corzine, next month, according to the people involved in the case. Authorities hope that Mr. Corzine, who is expected to accept the invitation, will shed light on the actions of other employees at MF Global.

Those developments indicate that federal prosecutors do not expect to file criminal charges against the former New Jersey governor. Mr. Corzine has not yet received assurances that he is free from scrutiny, but two rounds of interviews with former employees and a review of thousands of documents have left prosecutors without a case against him, say the people involved in the investigation who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

by Azam Ahmed and Ben Protess, Dealbook |  Read more:

Photo: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

A Novel Asks Seattle to Laugh at Itself

[ed. Love the quote about hairstyles.]

Maria Semple made an instant, jarring discovery when she moved with her boyfriend and daughter from Los Angeles to Seattle, a city whose Patagonia-clad inhabitants like to talk about bicycling, the environment and the eternally dull question (in her opinion) of whether it might rain.

“It’s just not a funny place,” said Ms. Semple, a novelist and veteran comedy writer who worked on the television shows “Arrested Development” and “Mad About You.” “I was in a miserable mind frame, and I found that I was driving around and all I was thinking about were funny things about how awful Seattle was. I would do these riffs in my head and I would polish them in my head. It was poisonous and self-pitying.”

But from those silently brooding riffs came an idea for her next heroine: Bernadette Fox, a difficult, creatively frustrated misanthrope who, like Ms. Semple, had relocated to Seattle from Los Angeles and loathed her new city.

“Where’d You Go, Bernadette,” published this week by Little, Brown & Company, has emerged as one of the most absorbing novels of the summer. It tells the story of Bernadette, a former architect who won a MacArthur “genius” grant and then disappeared from public view; her tech-guru husband, Elgin Branch, who is nerd-famous for an especially rousing TED talk; and their precocious teenage daughter, Bee, who has convinced her parents to go on a family trip to Antarctica before she heads off to boarding school.

In Bernadette’s eyes Seattle is an earnest, unfashionable, bewildering place where five-way intersections clog traffic, Microsoft is Big Brother, invasive blackberry bushes are a mysterious citywide plague and Craftsman houses are annoyingly ubiquitous — “turn-of-the-century Craftsman, beautifully restored Craftsman, reinterpretation of Craftsman, needs-some-love Craftsman, modern take on Craftsman,” Bernadette rants. “It’s like a hypnotist put everyone from Seattle in a collective trance. You are getting sleepy, when you wake up you will want to live only in a Craftsman house, the year won’t matter to you, all that will matter is that the walls will be thick, the windows tiny, the rooms dark, the ceilings low, and it will be poorly situated on the lot.”  (...)

Last week at the Elliott Bay Book Company, an independent shop in Seattle, a buyer, Rick Simonson, listened in as two browsing women were chatting about Ms. Semple’s book. One of them said she wanted to read it; another huffily pointed out a Bernadette zinger that has been repeated in reviews, mocking Seattle residents for having only two hairstyles: “short gray hair and long gray hair.”

“She was pretty miffed by that line,” Mr. Simonson said, adding that he compared the response to Ms. Semple’s book to the attention brought to Portland, Ore., by the satirical television series “Portlandia.” “I think the reaction will be communal and social that way, and I think it’s a book that people will talk about. In a way, Seattle hasn’t had anyone really do anything that makes it look at itself and laugh.”

by Julie Bosman, NY Times |  Read more:

Photo: Matthew Ryan Williams

Zoe Pawlak: Blue Holding
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National Night Out

[ed. I'll admit I'd never heard of this initiative until today (and I read a fair amount, which tells me it might have a bit of a marketing problem). But what a great idea. Almost like Halloween for homeowners.]

The first Tuesday in August is a red-letter evening in many towns and cities—National Night Out. This year August 7th is the occasion for tens of thousands of people across the U.S. to renew their commitment to stopping crime by looking out for one another. It’s also a celebration of community and all that we share as neighbors.

Up to 30 million people take to the streets and parks, with no one calling the cops. Indeed, local police departments helped organize this evening of block parties, neighborhood festivals, and music performances. The idea is that when people step out of their homes to meet the neighbors, communities are safer. People who know one another are more likely to work together to prevent crime in their community.

For most people, neighborhoods are a form of the commons that is most familiar. Nearly every one of us lives in one, and they are important to our lives whether we realize it or not. If your home is burglarized while you’re away, it’s your neighbor who calls the police. Even more likely, your neighbor’s presence strolling down the sidewalk or keeping on her porch light discourages hoods from breaking in at all.

That’s why police want to mobilize the power of the commons to fight crime. Spending many years out on the streets, they have come to understand that government and the private sector can only do so much to assure public safety. A lot depends on people themselves, working together in informal but powerful ways to protect their community from violence, theft, and vandalism.

by Jay Walljasper, Guernica |  Read more:

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Everlasting
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Who Picks Assisted Suicide?

Dr. Richard Wesley has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, the incurable disease that lays waste to muscles while leaving the mind intact. He lives with the knowledge that an untimely death is chasing him down, but takes solace in knowing that he can decide exactly when, where and how he will die.

Under Washington State’s Death With Dignity Act, his physician has given him a prescription for a lethal dose of barbiturates. He would prefer to die naturally, but if dying becomes protracted and difficult, he plans to take the drugs and die peacefully within minutes.

“It’s like the definition of pornography,” Dr. Wesley, 67, said at his home here in Seattle, with Mount Rainier in the distance. “I’ll know it’s time to go when I see it.”

Washington followed Oregon in allowing terminally ill patients to get a prescription for drugs that will hasten death. Critics of such laws feared that poor people would be pressured to kill themselves because they or their families could not afford end-of-life care. But the demographics of patients who have gotten the prescriptions are surprisingly different than expected, according to data collected by Oregon and Washington through 2011. (...)

Oregon put its Death With Dignity Act in place in 1997, and Washington’s law went into effect in 2009. Some officials worried that thousands of people would migrate to both states for the drugs.

“There was a lot of fear that the elderly would be lined up in their R.V.’s at the Oregon border,” said Barbara Glidewell, an assistant professor at Oregon Health and Science University.

That has not happened, although the number of people who have taken advantage of the law has risen over time. In the first years, Oregon residents who died using drugs they received under the law accounted for one in 1,000 deaths. The number is now roughly one in 500 deaths. At least 596 Oregonians have died that way since 1997. In Washington, 157 such deaths have been reported, roughly one in 1,000.

In Oregon, the number of men and women who have died that way is roughly equal, and their median age is 71. Eighty-one percent have had cancer, and 7 percent A.L.S., which is also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. The rest have had a variety of illnesses, including lung and heart disease. The statistics are similar in Washington.

There were fears of a “slippery slope” — that the law would gradually expand to include those with nonterminal illnesses or that it would permit physicians to take a more active role in the dying process itself. But those worries have not been borne out, experts say.

Dr. Wesley, a pulmonologist and critical care physician, voted for the initiative when it was on the ballot in 2008, two years after he retired. “All my career, I believed that whatever makes people comfortable at the end of their lives is their own choice to make,” he said.

But Dr. Wesley had no idea that his vote would soon become intensely personal. (...)

In both Oregon and Washington, the law is rigorous in determining who is eligible to receive the drugs. Two physicians must confirm that a patient has six months or less to live. And the request for the drugs must be made twice, 15 days apart, before they are handed out. They must be self-administered, which creates a special challenge for people with A.L.S.

Dr. Wesley said he would find a way to meet that requirement, perhaps by tipping a cup into his feeding tube.

The reasons people have given for requesting physician-assisted dying have also defied expectations.

Dr. Linda Ganzini, a professor of psychiatry at Oregon Health and Science University, published a study in 2009 of 56 Oregonians who were in the process of requesting physician-aided dying.

“Everybody thought this was going to be about pain,” Dr. Ganzini said. “It turns out pain is kind of irrelevant.”

At the time of each of the 56 patients’ requests, almost none of them rated pain as a primary motivation. By far the most common reasons, Dr. Ganzini’s study found, were the desire to be in control, to remain autonomous and to die at home. “It turns out that for this group of people, dying is less about physical symptoms than personal values,” she said.

by Katie Hafner, NY Times |  Read more:

Photo: Leah Nash