Alex, Fuck Yeah!

Both PIPA and SOPA had been expected to have some Congressional action next week, and the PIPA procedural vote for Tuesday has been postponed indefinitely in the face of a number of Senators, including several PIPA co-sponsors, announcing their opposition.

Kenneth Pollack, "Are we sliding toward war with Iran?", Jan. 18, 2012

LMAO 'creativity by fiat'

The best of these ecosystems will be cities and towns that combine a university, an educated populace, a dynamic business community and the fastest broadband connections on earth. These will be the job factories of the future. The countries that thrive will be those that build more of these towns that make possible “high-performance knowledge exchange and generation,” explains Blair Levin, who runs the Aspen Institute’s Gig.U project, a consortium of 37 university communities working to promote private investment in next-generation ecosystems. Historians have noted that economic clusters always required access to abundant strategic inputs for success, says Levin. In the 1800s, it was access to abundant flowing water and raw materials. In the 1900s, it was access to abundant electricity and transportation. In the 2000s, he said, “it will be access to abundant bandwidth and abundant human intellectual capital,” — places like Silicon Valley, Austin, Boulder, Cambridge and Ann Arbor.

The method of teaching in these private schools is much the same as elsewhere in India, where rote learning dominates. But the teachers, though younger teenagers]and far less educated [rickshaw drivers] than their government school colleagues, are far more accountable in educating the children. Most importantly — they show up.

Attaching your happiness to outcomes is what causes distress. As soon as you attach your happiness, worth and wellbeing to something -- to connection with someone, to money, things, approval, success, and so on -- you then want control over getting what you want. And it is your controlling behavior that causes your distress. Not only does the attachment itself cause anxiety because you might ruminate on getting what you want, but all the things you do to attempt to control the outcome keeps you from being present to your experience of life in the moment.

That character-degradation is produced at least as much by conditioning the citizenry to stand and cheer, to beat its chest, to feel righteous and proud, each time the government produces a new dead Bad Guy. Even at its most necessary and justified, the act of ending a human life with state violence should be a somber and lamentable affair. There’s something bloodthirsty about reacting ecstatically. To react that way when guilt is unproven (Awlaki), or when the person is unknown (most drone victims), or is killed by acts of pure barbarism (Gadaffi) is the mind of a savage. But it’s now been more than a decade since 9/11, and this has been the prevailing mentality in America continuously since then (to say nothing about the lengthy, brutal wars fought before that). What happens to a citizenry and a nation that so frequently erupts into celebratory dances over the latest dead body its government displays?

SURPRISE!!!!

“They kept telling us to show the mines. We said we didn’t know where the Taliban planted mines. Then they told us to move forward to the next village, on the way if anything happens, you are responsible for the consequences. We kept praying, oh, God, save us,” another participant named Ahmad told NPR.

Because the participatory democracy of OWS is an ideological endeavour, it can avoid the hard problem of liberal society: the ineradicable diversity of moral belief and the impossibility of consensus. Consensus-based communes composed of individuals who opt in specifically because they already agree with the commune's founding values can work precisely because the people who would make consensus impossible—people with very different opinions and values—stay away. But not only does the OWS experiment skirt the problem of pluralism through self-selection, the ideological homogeneity of self-selection may make deliberation tend toward extremism, as Cass Sunstein's important work on deliberation and group polarisation shows. He writes: "When like-minded people are participating in 'iterated polarization games'—when they meet regularly, without sustained exposure to competing views—extreme movements are all the more likely."

For me, this raised the question of why one would not consider the fiscal problems of any American state or municipality to be similarly a problem of sovereign debt caused by the imprudent decision to use the US dollar rather than issuing a local currency. The pension obligations of the California state government might be easier to meet if they were denominated in calis, rather than US dollars: disproportionate real-estate decline and economic slowdown in California would lead to a fall in the value of the cali, exports to the US would thus earn more calis and generate more calis in taxes, and the state government's problems would look somewhat less stark.

What Mr Abbas is objecting to here is Israeli insistence that the Palestinian Authority recognise its character as a Jewish state as part of any peace agreement. He's not saying the Palestinians will not recognise Israel. He's not even saying they won't recognise its right to exist. He's saying the Palestinians refuse to be singled out, as Egypt and Jordan were not when they signed peace deals with Israel, and forced to approve the religious Jewish character of the state. Israel never demanded this recognition during peace negotiations in the 1990s or early 2000s. They're not part of the Clinton administration-mediated Taba agreements or the Bush administration-brokered "road map" for peace. The Israelis first introduced the demand in 2007.

If we're going to use the money to kill, imprison, and otherwise oppress people in other countries who have done us no wrong, I would just as soon let Warren Buffett keep his money. Maybe he will donate some of it to a good cause. But even if he uses it to buy caviar, that would be better than continuing the war in Afghanistan, which is, on a routine basis, violating the basic human rights of the Afghan people, in addition to killing and maiming Americans for no good reason.

“Generally speaking, the farther away from the South — and the smaller the African-American population — the less attention paid to the civil rights movement,” the report says.

Unfortunately, the debate is dominated by those who either support the Israeli side in the conflict, or those who support the Palestinian desire for statehood. We rarely seem to hear the view of those who support the U.S. side and U.S. interests. I am on that side. I believe that we can no longer police the world. We can no longer bribe the Israelis and Palestinians to continue an endless “peace process” that goes nowhere. It is not in our interest to hector the Palestinians or the Israelis, or to “export” democracy to the region but reject it when people vote the “wrong” way.

The letter was signed by Likud chairman Ze’ev Elkin, Shas chairman Avraham Michaeli, Habayit Hayehudi chairman Uri Orbach, and the leader of the National Union faction Yaakov Katz.

Turkish Defense Minister İsmet Yılmaz also told reporters on Saturday that the drones would be received by the US and given directly to the Turkish Armed Forces (TSK) to fight against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in the country’s southeast. Violent skirmishes between the PKK and TSK have taken place in the past few months.