Surveillance: The government isn’t spying on us; Google is spying on us, and the government is asking Google for certain results.

Mass information gathering by for profit companies and the use of that information is becoming a major issue for societies, groups and individuals who are gradually waking up to the reality that if you type it with a keyboard or upload it and hit the send key you might as well be writing graffiti on government building walls and leaving your name and address in the bottom right hand corner.

What is amazing is how innocent and lulled most of us have been about the use of computers and keyboards.  Especially allowing kids to spend hours unsupervised on the same machines we do our most important communicating with banks, friends, colleagues, you name it.

So here we are having a debate about our relationship with online entities and the use of the data we willingly share and that data they are also able to produce deductively beyond what we are willing to share.

Whether we have anything to hide or not, most of us assume we get to make that choice.

Apparently, our keyboards, desktop computers and online connection are a gateway to big business and big brother which today seem to be becoming one and the same.

“LET’S get the most contentious point out of the way first: Edward Snowden made the right call to make public the extent of the National Security Administration’s surveillance of electronic communications. The American people can now have a debate about whether or not they consent to that level of surveillance in order to prevent terrorist attacks, a debate that we were previously denied by the government’s unwillingness to disclose even the …”

via Surveillance: Should the government know less than Google? | The Economist.

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NSA Snooping Was Only the Beginning. Meet the Spy Chief Leading Us Into Cyberwar

Conflict and competition can be argued are leading forces in the development of civilizations.  However, when conflict and competition exist within a system that is competing with a plethora of external sources, these internal forces can be destructive because a divided house is more easily destoyed.

America is such a system today.  This is especially true of our divided political system.  From Watergate to various false attempts at “Obamagate” today, America finds itself at an important crossroads.  Eisenhower’s military industrial complex seems to be reaching Orwellian proportions.  It is not just made up of electronic eavesdropping.  It has plenty of mortal and brick and significant parts of it are independent, for profit and privatized.

The abuses of Black Water during the Gulf War are now looking temporary and relatively small compared to the all pervasive and apparently institutionalized programs that listen in on private communication among all Americans in a new America where BIG BROTHER seems to be watching, listening, recording and even sending drones.

“INSIDE FORT MEADE, Maryland, a top-secret city bustles. Tens of thousands of people move through more than 50 buildings—the city has its own post office, fire department, and police force. But as if designed by Kafka, it sits among a forest of trees, surrounded by electrified …”

via NSA Snooping Was Only the Beginning. Meet the Spy Chief Leading Us Into Cyberwar | Threat Level | Wired.com.

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A Lifeline for No-Longer-Illegal Immigrants – NYTimes.com An interesting comment from this NYT’s comments section …

Contrary to popular belief America was not created by immigration. It was created by conquest and exploration and it was done so on top of many other “native” nations. To this day Americans have not been able to assimilate and fully include those natives into its polity or its economic success. How then can we argue that immigration has been so noble and that immigrants are naturally a part of the American way?The truth lies much closer to Plato’s “necessary untruths.” To romanticize immigration, both in terms of why people leave their native lands and in terms of why they come to America is simply false and misleading. People come to America because they hope for better than they have where they reside as they make the often courageous decision to uproot and venture into the relatively unknown. What never seems to be discussed is how few of us here in America consider leaving this country. In an important way, America was created by people leaving their homeland because they were pushed out by various political and economic factors. That is what we have in common with the new comers. They come here because it is not comfortable where they previously resided. Here then lies the central question that needs to be considered by all of us who want to be fair minded and responsible. What would have become of us and our ancestors if the then native “americans” would have had the wherewithal to keep our ancestors out? Just as many of us want to keep other people out today.

More via A Lifeline for No-Longer-Illegal Immigrants – NYTimes.com.

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Suburbs and the New Geography of Poverty | Demos

Decades after Michael Harrington’s work on poverty, the issue of what causes poverty and what can be done about it continues to be a controversial and confused one.

The work poverty has come to mean many things to many people and in important ways it has changed for people who do not look nor live like traditionally poor people lived and looked…

“Concentrated poverty has a new address, and this time it’s not in the inner city. For many Americans, moving to a house in the …”via Suburbs and the New Geography of Poverty | Demos.

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“Killer drones: Out of the shadows” or are they?

Technology is changing war but legal concepts and international law are not as mutable.  As governments and leaders enthusiastically move forward with technological efficacy, the legal morass and moral quandary caused by social, psychological and economic destruction promises to create new problems that may haunt us for generations.  But technology moves fast, corporate America knows how to package and sell it, and the American public is the last to weigh in.  Democracy is increasingly purchased in the ongoing divided American electorate and the internecine warfare election politics now represent.  Like the proverbial Pyrrhic victory, we crush and pick off our enemies as the facts of our deeds slowly leek out and we potentially stand in ubiquitous and unforgiving popular judgement at home and abroad.

We seem to be getting farther and farther away from “though shall not kill” and “violence begets violence”

At last we have a technological equivalent to hackers threatening social and economic information exchange where the government is “anonymous” and civilization itself is the victim.  It is legion, expect it…

“WHEN it comes to lethal drone strikes against foreign targets, America’s government and Congress should be aware that “what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander”, says …”

via Killer drones: Out of the shadows | The Economist.

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Personality, social media and marketing: No hiding place | The Economist

Getting into the heads of consumers seems to be the new marketing genius being applied to developing advertisement campaigns that will move us to buy products.

But who is us?  That seems to be the main problem.  Some people have limited budgets, strong discipline, and limited opportunities to veer from their social rounds–all making it nearly impossible for them to want, need or even have the opportunity to use many products.  Nevertheless, new tonics and theories are being developed into marketing strategies that will deliver consumers for available products, seemingly needing them or not.  They seem to be inventing ways to get into your mind and then direct it towards buying decisions that will move your money from your hands to their deposit boxes.

“Modern psychology recognizes five dimensions of personality: extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism and openness to experience. Previous research has shown that people’s scores on these traits can, indeed, predict what they purchase. Extroverts are more likely to respond to an advert for a mobile phone that promises …”

via Personality, social media and marketing: No hiding place | The Economist.

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Mountain of Petroleum Coke From Oil Sands Rises in Detroit – NYTimes.com

There may be no more important singular idea than the notion that corporations are persons.  Indeed, they are.

The Koch brothers continue to be the target of media attention and this time they are not strategizing or paying for it.  They are getting a freebee.  It appears that an environmental secretion from their pursuit of wealth function has piled up higher and deeper in the  eye of the media and in the middle of the “pristine” great lakes region.  Oil… of course.  Texas gold, or US black mud… or whatever earth exploiters and investors call it these days.  Environmentalists and world builders are colliding once again as they accuse one another about tree hugging the world on the one hand and exploiting it for  greed on the other.  In the meantime the real lesson at hand here goes unnoticed.

The key and central problem we see on the horizon today is not piles of environmental waste but the proverbial “free rider problem” which is as old as cave metaphors and necessary untruths.   It is big corporate money (to be sure corporate profits in the hands of ideologues) applied to our political discourse.  The NYTs points it out… but what are we to do?

“Assumption Park gives residents of this city lovely views of the Ambassador Bridge and the Detroit skyline. Lately they’ve been treated to another sight: a three-story pile of petroleum coke covering an entire city block on the other side of the …”

via Mountain of Petroleum Coke From Oil Sands Rises in Detroit – NYTimes.com.

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Heritage Foundation Cuts Ties to Jason Richwine – from The Atlantic Wire

What do barbie dolls and the Heritage Foundation have in common?  Barbie dolls are to sexism as the heritage foundation is to racism —  they both used to be bastions of each ideology but today they appear increasingly useless and irrelevant.

The Atlantic Wire reports that the Heritage Foundation is running for cover as the facts come out about one Jason Richwine, a former Harvard student who wrote his Ph.D. thesis exploring the presumed intellectual inferiority of Hispanics in America.  The Heritage Foundation used the controversial Harvard former student to publish a recent report arguing about the so called costs of immigration for America.

The Heritage Foundation is a conservative think tank born in the aftermath of the Nixon era when America saw itself through the eyes of a popular media, government and academia largely of European ancestry and xenophobia towards all things not “White” or of European origin.  This world view was forged at a time when civil rights at home and Vietnam abroad crushed the former American dream which was forged in a 1950s America which was being torn asunder by hippie kids and non-White civil rights marchers.

Today the modern expression of these reactionary movements are anti immigration, states rights and anti affirmative action diatribes that fly in the face of the facts of an America that needs every once of talent and muscle from its growing “brown majority.”

Recent demographic reports show that Rodriguez is now the most numerous last name held by new born babies in our country.  Tomorrow is here and the Heritage Foundation seems to be trying to cover the overwhelming historical truth with an increasingly ineffective ideological argument about the size of a broken barbie doll umbrella.

 

“Jason Richwine, co-author of a controversial report from the Heritage Foundation that criticized the potential cost of immigration reform, has resigned from the organization. The resignation follows revelations that Richwine’s college dissertation argued that …”

via Heritage Foundation Cuts Ties to Jason Richwine – Philip Bump – The Atlantic Wire.

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Most Muslims in Region Reject Violence Against Civilians – Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life

The Pew Forum on Religion continues to bring us facts and figures to enlighten our view of the religious world which is often clouded by a sensationalist media and the rose colored lenses of young ambitious journalists trying to move up the career ladder or older ones stuck in yesterday’s phobias and mired in a short and myopic view of a changing modern world where the acts of the few motivate and move the masses through the loud megaphone that is our entertainment driven media establishment…. Read the Pew article and tell us what you think…

“A new Pew Research Center survey report finds high levels of concern about religious extremism among Muslims in the North Caucasus area of Russia and the neighboring Central Asian countries of Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. The survey also finds that few Muslims across the region support the use of violence against civilians in the name of Islam, though there is somewhat more support for suicide bombing and similar violence among Muslims in Kyrgyzstan than in Russia or Kazakhstan.”

via Most Muslims in Region Reject Violence Against Civilians – Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

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Equating Islam with terrorism – chicagotribune.com

When the media feeds xenophobia, sensationalism, ethnocentrism and religious bigotry, the crazies and the extremists win.  The crazies and the extremists are such a minute minority but their acts are so big and their intentions are to cloud our judgement and make us crazy.  The media’s handling of these acts magnifies them and makes these pitiful bigots super heroes, if evil ones.  They become larger than life and feed our need to catch and conquer the proverbial boogyman.  Read the following article by a Chicago journalist for some clarity and what is happening to us every time we over state the role of religion in violent acts that are perpetrated by people who in the end are not very religious at all…

“Before we knew anything about the dead Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev, we knew that he “recently became a devout Muslim who prayed five times a day.” This piece of information was placed in the lead of an Associated Press article published as the police were still on the hunt for Tsarnaev’s younger brother and alleged accomplice, Dzhokhar.

As the day went on with increasing panic and an intensifying sense of terror emanating from television and computer screens across America, and news outlets scrambled to release sound bites and tweetable articles with any information they could scrounge up on …”

More via Equating Islam with terrorism – chicagotribune.com.

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Malden woman attacked by man accusing Muslims of Marathon bombings – Metro – The Boston Globe

No one ever talks about it.  It is taboo.  Or perhaps, it is not important in our mostly Western European culture.

As we have developed a culture of fear, xenophobia, and antipathy towards foreigners, we have begun to kill our American Dream.  We dislike people who look poorly dressed, “dark,” or otherwise not like “us.”  We forget, or perhaps our history books don’t explain and our grandparents did not share, that most people who came through Elis Island came here with few  belongings, lived in very modest quarters and felt as isolated and alienated as today’s monolingual and “lost in America” recent immigrant population.

Mexicans, Haitians, Pakistanis, Egyptians, Puerto Ricans, many, many, groups are portrayed as “less than American” and continue to be seen as different from the mainstream ideal.  An ideal that may now be shattered after the savages who attacked innocent people in Boston.  The facts are developing at this time.  But the monsters in the two FBI photos are nothing like the “dark guy” ridiculously and irresponsibly described by CNN’s John King with Wolf Blitzer supporting.

“I want to be very careful about this, because people get very sensitive when you say these things,” King said Wednesday. “I was told by one of these sources who is a law enforcement official that this is a dark-skinned male.”

America is now more diverse than ever.  It’s mainstream leadership is woefully out of touch with the silent growing segment of the population that is destined to inherit our tomorrow.

The Boston Globe reported a story that confirms the damage mainstream media does to our fabric when they echo the fears and phobias suffered by less educated Americans…  By less educated we don’t mean did not go to College–we mean people who were raised and educated by parents and schools that failed.  Some of these people have high degrees and are millionaires who lead our nightly broadcasts…

“Every day, Heba Abolaban of Malden checks on her family in war-strafed Syria, where water, bread and electricity are in short supply. She was far more worried about them than about herself on Wednesday morning when she put her baby daughter in a stroller and headed into the sunshine to a play group with a friend.But as they strolled down Commercial Street, an angry-faced man charged toward the petite woman, his hand balled into a fist. He punched her hard in the shoulder and screamed curses inches from her face. Then he pointed at her and …”

More via Malden woman attacked by man accusing Muslims of Marathon bombings – Metro – The Boston Globe.

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Rubio and the Zombies – NYTimes.com The Policy ThinkShop comments: Marco loco, Marco, loco, Marco loco… In search of a rising star to peddle tired Republican ideas…

In a sad game of hide and seek, hide economic reason and seek Latino votes, Marc Rubio is being paraded out of the Republican political stables to get the attention of Latino voters …  It’s not working…

“In case you’re wondering, a zombie idea is a proposition that has been thoroughly refuted by analysis and evidence, and should be dead — but won’t stay dead because it serves a political purpose, appeals to prejudices, or both.”

via Rubio and the Zombies – NYTimes.com.

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