Read moreConcerned about Google’s complicity with the NSA, the Indian government plans to ban the use of Gmail for official correspondence. The matter has also become a key issue in the run-up to the German federal elections in the third week of September.
Google is fast developing a reputation as a rogue company that pursues its own agenda at the expense of the rule of law. At the time of writing the Dutch data protection authority has published a ruling that outlaws Google Analytics – a decision that mirrors bans by Germany and Norway. Google has simply refused to offer a lawful contract.
Earlier this year Sweden banned public sector use of Google’s cloud services over privacy concerns, while France and Spain have ruled that the company is operating unlawfully in those countries.
It is now becoming a momentous task to document all the findings against Google by trade and privacy authorities, but the true threat posed by the company goes much further than mere transgressions of law. Google is now claiming immunity from the law itself.
Quotes
Read moreIn extreme cases, these armed groups are substituting for the state as the sole arbiter of disagreements between citizens. Many set themselves up as one of the few defenses against the onslaught of the myriad criminal organizations that plague poor, under-serviced Central American neighborhoods. Along the way, some of the larger gangs have become power brokers, managing political campaigns and getting out the vote in collusion with local and national parties. In extreme cases, they set up their own political organizations with the power to sway domestic and even international agendas.
Such is the case in El Salvador, where the most prominent parties have protected high-ranking traffickers, presumably in return for sizeable campaign contributions. The extent of this kind of corruption came to light during an infamous case in 2007, when three members of the Central American Parliament were killed, along with their bodyguard, by alleged drug traffickers as they drove from San Salvador to Guatemala City. Surprisingly, four of the suspected killers, all policemen, were captured. However, each of them was assassinated in their jail cell days later .
Throughout the region, violent gangs consort with some of the most powerful bankers, lawyers, businessmen, and politicians. They provide start-up capital, secure contracts, finance campaigns, and keep pesky investigators at bay on behalf of their partners. It is ordinarily a symbiotic relationship and with complicity reaching the highest levels of power.
Along with being killed and extorted with reckless abandon, Central Americans are also being displaced in ever-greater numbers. In an eerie echo of the region´s civil wars during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, hundreds of thousands of residents have packed up and crossed a border. A small proportion of them – more than 25,000 – recently sought asylum in neighboring countries as refugees. Yet most undocumented migrants prefer to maintain a low profile for fear of being forcefully repatriated. And while many of the displaced join the vast caravan of economic migrants to the United States, the vast majority of victims remain internally displaced, seeking sanctuary in their country of origin.
This includes Sabine Moreno , who fled from her small town to San Salvador after seven members of her family, including her grandfather, were killed by the MS-13 street gang. The MS-13 and the Barrio 18, the two most prominent gangs in the region, have created invisible borders throughout the Northern Triangle. As locals well know, if you live in one gang’s neighborhood, you simply cannot enter the rival’s area.
There are unsettling similarities in the ways violence plays out across the region. In spite of a recently brokered gang truce in 2012, Salvadorians continue leaving because of threats posed by gangs – more than 8,000 at last count. Meanwhile, ruthless drug enforcer gangs like the Zetas have contributed to the displacement of at least 6,000 Guatemalans from their homes. An estimated 230,000 people fled Mexico or were internally displaced over the past half-decade for fear of being targeted by drug cartels, maras, militias, or soldiers. Meanwhile, Costa Rica is hosting more than 20,000 refugees while Panama supports 17,000 more. Entire neighborhoods are emptied and fields are going fallow. Yet because there is no international group dedicated to monitoring the conflict, the scale of the suffering generated by displacement is still largely hidden from view.
And after all this, many of these nomadic populations continue to be persecuted after being displaced. Some of them are enslaved by criminal groups, forced to cook and clean for them in the best of circumstances, and work as prostitutes in the worst. Recruitment into the ranks of armed groups is common, mostly for youth who face dim employment prospects as they bounce from city to city. Professionals are also not immune. Criminal gangs in Mexico are kidnapping engineers and computer scientists to help them build their sophisticated communications systems that sometimes surpass the government’s.
Read moreWe experience cultural continuity with our parents’ and our children’s generations. Even when we don’t see eye to eye with our parents on political questions or we sigh in despair about our kids’ fashion sense or taste in music, we generally have a handle on what makes them tick. But a human lifetime seldom spans more than three generations, and the sliding window of one’s generation screens out that which came before and that which comes after; they lie outside our personal experience. We fool ourselves into thinking that our national culture is static and slow-moving, that we are the inheritors of a rich tradition. But if we could go back three or four generations, we would find ourselves surrounded by aliens – people for whom a North Atlantic crossing by sail was as slow and risky as a mission to Mars, people who took it for granted that some races were naturally inferior and that women were too emotionally unstable to be allowed to vote. The bedrock of our cultural tradition is actually quicksand. We reject many of our ancestors’ cherished beliefs and conveniently forget others, not realizing that, in turn, our grandchildren may do the same to ours.
Read moreThe takeaway from all of this is not that this is just a crazy professor spinning esoteric nonsense as an excuse to keep the human race from advancing. It is that if and when helium 3 fueled fusion power and lunar mining becomes viable, we should be prepared for another environmentalist assault on yet another new form of energy production. It is enough to make one want to leave the planet and start anew somewhere.
Read moreMany observers say ‘Elysium’ depicts the natural conclusion of a process that began with the Koch Industries $67 million campaign to deny the effects of climate change, the signing by the GOP leadership of a pledge to the Koch Brothers to do nothing about climate change and the question the top 1% asked themselves: “What’s the point of having $32 trillion in offshore bank accounts if you can’t say ‘fuck the world, I want to get off’ once in a while?”
Flickr had 25 million (U.S.) users in July 2012 according to comScore, a number that had declined to 21.5 million in July 2013.
No Henry, you need to get real about Yahoo. Here are the facts — Tech News and Analysis (via iamdanw)
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To me, the core of that attraction is that she is a better reporter than he is. Think about being Superman for a second. The Olympic record for weightlifting is 1,038 lbs., but you could lift more than that as a child. The record for the 100 meter dash is 9.58 seconds, but you can travel over 51 miles in that time. Going to Vegas? You don’t need your X-Ray vision to win at Blackjack, because you can just count the cards while holding down a conversation about nuclear physics. Without really trying, you are better at just about everything than anyone else in the world.
However, (as Mark Waid once pointed out in a podcast with Marv Wolfman) none of that really translates to your chosen profession. Typing really fast does not help your prose. Being able to lift a tank does not help you convince a source to go on record. It is as near to competing straight up with normal people as Superman would ever be capable of. Even then, it comes easily enough to him that you get a pretty lofty perch at a great paper very early in your career. It is just in this one context, there is someone better than you are: Lois Lane.
As mild-mannered reporter Clark Kent, you reach up for the first time in your life and she rejects you.
To me, it is an inversion of the Luthor story. Luthor sees someone above him and feels hate. Superman sees someone above him and feels love.
Dean Hacker, comment on “Giving Lois Lane A Second Look, For The First Time” by Kelly Thompson (CBR: She Has No Head!)
Lois, and not Clark, was a large part of why I wanted to become a journalist. Well, Lois and Hunter, of course.
(via zerosociety)
“So who made the machines? That’s who we want to contact.”
“They made the machines. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Meat made the machines.”
“That’s ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You’re asking me to believe in sentient meat.”
“I’m not asking you, I’m telling you. These creatures are the only sentient race in that sector and they’re made out of meat.”
Terry Bisson, They’re Made Out of Meat, 19910 (via betaknowledge)
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Today it is politically effective, and socially acceptable, to deny scientific fact – Adam Frank http://t.co/N0kntLxR3Q #denialism
— Stowe Boyd (@stoweboyd) August 22, 2013
Adam Frank levels a strong polemic against denialism — those that deny scientific findings that have been overwhelmingly supported by the evidence — like human evolution and anthropogenic climate change.
Adam Frank, Welcome to the Age of Denial
In 1982, polls showed that 44 percent of Americans believed God had created human beings in their present form. Thirty years later, the fraction of the population who are creationists is 46 percent.
In 1989, when “climate change” had just entered the public lexicon, 63 percent of Americans understood it was a problem. Almost 25 years later, that proportion is actually a bit lower, at 58 percent.
The timeline of these polls defines my career in science. In 1982 I was an undergraduate physics major. In 1989 I was a graduate student. My dream was that, in a quarter-century, I would be a professor of astrophysics, introducing a new generation of students to the powerful yet delicate craft of scientific research.
Much of that dream has come true. Yet instead of sending my students into a world that celebrates the latest science has to offer, I am delivering them into a society ambivalent, even skeptical, about the fruits of science.
[…]
Today, however, it is politically effective, and socially acceptable, to deny scientific fact. Narrowly defined, “creationism” was a minor current in American thinking for much of the 20th century. But in the years since I was a student, a well-funded effort has skillfully rebranded that ideology as “creation science” and pushed it into classrooms across the country. Though transparently unscientific, denying evolution has become a litmus test for some conservative politicians, even at the highest levels.
Meanwhile, climate deniers, taking pages from the creationists’ PR playbook, have manufactured doubt about fundamental issues in climate science that were decided scientifically decades ago. And anti-vaccine campaigners brandish a few long-discredited studies to make unproven claims about links between autism and vaccination.
Denialism has lead to a policy gridlock around mitigating climate change, when our only hope have become worse hurricanes and increased drought to shake the disbelievers out of the propaganda trance they’re in.
Welcome to the postnormal, where the postmodern era’s voodoo versions of economics, climate science, and business management are deeply embedded in the discourse about our future, and it will likely take us a generation or longer to rewire our society, and defuse the IED that the deniers constructed out of everyday bits of discourse.
(via stoweboyd)
Read moreAcknowledging those points of weakness, however, Pacific Rim is very progressive in portraying unconventional versions of typical action heroines/heroes.
Let’s begin with Mako Mori. Mako (played by the fabulous Rinko Kikuchi) is the main character of the film. You might be asking– “wait, isn’t Raleigh Becket (Charlie Hunnam) the main character?” Well, yes and no. Raleigh is the protagonist whose perspective we follow throughout much of the narrative, but Mako is the main character. She is the the crux of the story, the one we cheer for, the one whose story we learn and troubles we care about. Raleigh is our point of reference, but Mako is what binds the rest of the characters in the story together. So we’ve got a female main character of color who is incredibly smart, observant, capable (she can beat up Raleigh in a one-on-one match and also manage an entire Jaeger restoration program), determined, and passionate, who goes on a Campbellian heroic journey.…
Raleigh (despite the white-bread action-man appearance) is also a structurally-interesting character in his own way because he displays something very unconventional for an all-American action movie tough guy– emotional intelligence… The fact that he is not portrayed as any less of “a man” for being emotionally available and interpersonally cognizant is worth mentioning. He easily could have been written as a dark and brooding figure: he’s got a tragic backstory and the weight of the world on his shoulders, but everything he does is an outward, extroverted motion to try and do something good for the world. Whether that “good” is battling Kaiju or helping Mako make her wish to become a Jaeger pilot a reality (or punching Chuck Hansen in the face) is another story.
On the topic of Mako and Raleigh, their relationship is one of the few representations of a close, emotionally-intimate male-female friendship that never turns physical. Upon first watching the film all the way through, I was continually waiting for him to kiss her and the music to get sweeping and explosions to go off in the sky behind their heads.
It never happened.
…
Pacific Rim is smart because it’s self-aware, particularly with regards to how it treats the characters on-screen.
I could go on about other, smaller facets that carry representative weight (for example, the importance of Stacker Pentecost’s working-class British accent making the grand proclamation “We’re cancellin’ the apocalypse!”, or the loving interracial non-nuclear family unit formed by Mako and Pentecost), but I think the last important takeaway I should mention is the overall message of the film.
***Defeating Kaiju is not a one-man job.***
Within the Hong Kong Shatterdome there is a constant collective presence– the mechanics maintaining the Jaegers, the scientists researching furiously, the technicians in LOCCENT monitoring every happening. Even prior to Raleigh’s arrival in Hong Kong we get a sense of the global scale of the situation and how it affects peoples’ lives though the workers building the wall, or the worldwide news reports, or the civilians who find Raleigh almost-dead on the beach. The focal point of the story is a collective one as told through the experience of Mako and Raleigh, who just happen to be at the center of it… What makes this film particularly emotionally nuanced is how much attention it gives to the people who enable the heroes/heroines to do their grandiose world-saving.
In this way the message of Pacific Rim‘s story is communal: cooperation, aid, appreciation for the efforts of others.
The Committee to Nuke Elysium 