By way of my pal David Wallis: what we can do to save refugees from conflict zones http://www.nationswell.com/shockingly-simple-thing-can-save-refugees/
Want a Custom Phone Cover?
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This is my personal cellphone cover. For a limited time — i.e., as long as I feel like it — I’ll make one for you.
Tell me what you want on it and, if I can, I will draw it. My guarantee: I won’t use the same image for anyone else. Your cover will be unique.
Sorry, no rough sketches.
You pay $200 in advance. (The cellphone cover joint charges $50ish so I’m netting $150.) Tell me what kind of phone you have, what you want on it. Wait a week or two. Cover comes by mail.
(More for overseas shipping.)
Click the button:
ANewDomain.net Essay: Why It’s Time for Zuck to Back His NSA Criticisms with Cash
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From my new essay, exclusively on ANewDomain.net, about Zuckerberg’s call to Obama asking him to ramp down NSA spying:
“The Internet is our shared space,” Zuckerberg wrote. “It helps us connect. It spreads opportunity. This is why I’ve been so confused and frustrated by the repeated reports of the behavior of the U.S. government. When our engineers work tirelessly to improve security, we imagine we’re protecting you against criminals, not our own government.”
Given that Facebook worked with the NSA to create “the tech equivalent of a safety deposit box that only the NSA and the corresponding tech company can access… (the equivalent of) … a locked briefcase full of intel left in a digital garbage can with the NSA swinging in to pick it up at a prescribed time,” Zuckerberg’s confusion is — what else? — confusing.
It’s as if he is shocked — shocked! — to find that crazy dystopian data-vacuuming of everything about everyone all the time is going on at his own company. Yet he engineered it, in part.
But here’s the part of Zuck’s doth-protest-buckets post I found especially intriguing. He writes:
So it’s up to us — all of us — to build the Internet we want. Together, we can build a space that is greater and a more important part of the world than anything we have today, but is also safe and secure.”
Can we? Can we really?
Phones on a Plane
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So now it is a given that cell phones don’t work at cruising altitude on passenger jets. We’re hearing that over and over again about the missing Malaysia Airlines flight. But the very same aviation authorities at the US government claimed that passengers on United Flight 93 were using their cell phones repeatedly from cruising altitude. Perhaps they should get their story straight.
Flight 370 might be in Kazakhstan
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So Malaysian investigators say that one possibility is that flight 370 may have traveled as far north as Kazakhstan. Some analysts say this is unlikely because the northern projected route would require the plane to have traveled across US-occupied Afghanistan, but to me, it is not inconceivable that the US military might not have noticed it. The truth is, only the airspace of eastern Afghanistan is of real interest to US military radar as it is used as a staging area for drone strikes and other airstrikes against targets in western Pakistan.
Let me be clear: in the betting pool, I vote that flight 370 is at the bottom of the Indian Ocean.
That said, is it possible that it landed in Kazakhstan? Yes it is. Kazakhstan is a nation of just over 12 million people that covers one-third of the continental United States. The population is very scarce. Most people live in a few cities.
It is hard, even for people who live in remote parts of the United States like Nevada or Montana, to imagine a place where a Boeing 777 could touch down without being noticed, but Kazakhstan is exactly the kind of place. Big parts of it are very flat. There are many areas where people either would not have seen it, or would be unable to tell anyone that they had. Cell phone service is nonexistent in most of the country. And many nomads don’t have cell phones to begin with. Not to mention, this is a dictatorship where any contact with the authorities or the police is carefully avoided.
One time I went to visit a friend and noticed the body of a man who had been struck by a car several days earlier in front of his apartment building. Nobody had called the militsia police because everybody knew that it would just provoke a pretext to be robbed or worse.
Again, I don’t think the plane made it to Kazakhstan. But is it possible? Yes.
Guest Post: You can lead a horse’s ass to water …
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… but you can’t make him think.
Alex the Tired here, and this one not only has me just shaking my head in amazement, it ties in beautifully with the recent discussion about the cost of college.
Today’s sad, sick laugh comes via the New York Times’ article about a Georgetown Law School graduate — I’m going to repeat that: a GEORGETOWN LAW SCHOOL GRADUATE — who is in a whole lot of trouble. Here’s the link. (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/15/business/an-underling-among-the-officials-accused-of-fraud-at-dewey.html?hp&_r=0)
I am NOT a lawyer. Another thing I’m going to repeat — I am NOT a lawyer. But here’s some things to keep in mind.
1. The police can/will/do lie. They do it all the time. If the cops bring you in for questioning, you DO NOT talk to them. You demand a lawyer. And then you stop talking. And by that, I mean you go Tommy: deaf, dumb and blind. If they ask if you’d like water, you say nothing. If they ask if you’d like a blowjob, you say nothing. The only thing you say to a cop other then “I want a lawyer” is the thing you say BEFORE that: “Am I free to go?”
2. Many lawyers are like cops, but more predatory. Whereas a lot of cops are just high school thug-bullies who got older but never grew up (emotionally or intellectually), a whole lot of lawyers, especially prosecutors, grow intellectually (at least in the narrow venue of entrapping people) and shrink emotionally, until they become the person who sits at a desk and calculates how he can get you into prison. He isn’t interested in your personal struggles, he isn’t interested in whether you’re a good person, whether you have children, the morality of the law in question or anything else. He succeeds at his job by getting convictions. You jay walk and the cops slap you with jay walking, resisting arrest, creating a public nuisance, terrorism, and lefthandedness. The prosecutor will smile (just like a shark before it takes off your arm) and magnanimously offer to throw out four of the five charges, as long as you plead guilty to the jay walking without a trial. The Village Voice did an article about this sort of “justice” about a year ago. If you find a compassionate prosecutor, one who DOES evaluate each case, count yourself lucky.
3. Yes, there are good cops AND good lawyers. The time to have them is not AFTER you’ve signed a confession to the Oklahoma City bombings and six murders committed before you were born. More precisely, the time to know what to do if confronted by a cop is BEFORE you’re confronted by a cop. Google it. Lots of good sites out there. But you have to take the time to educate yourself about these things.
And that’s where we come in on the poor unfortunate Georgetown-educated lawyer who didn’t know he was being set up to be nailed to a cross. We have a graduate of one of the most prestigious law schools in the country, and, when asked to come in to answer a few questions, he committed a mistake that any law student should have seen. All that education, and he’s looking at a nice long stretch in the thug jug. Why? Because most education now does not require the student to think. And he got complacent. Oh, the predators will never turn on me. I’m one of them.
Right. Until the food runs low.
In one of my favorite television programs, one of the characters says something about how the radio signal they’re receiving could be a trap. The other character responds that if it is, it isn’t a very good trap, as they’re already suspicious. The first character replies (something like), “The question isn’t whether we’re suspicious. The question is whether we get caught.”
I don’t walk down alleys, I don’t listen to hard-luck stories on deserted streets, I don’t get drunk at bars. I avoid cops because I can never tell when one of them will clock me with a baton, shove a bag of cocaine down my shirt, and tell his partner to back him up on the statement about how I went nuts and attacked him.
Think I’m wrong? Ever been in a speed trap? You think the cops care about fair? Talk to all those people who were arrested at the RNC. The ones where the cops committed perjury. Go on. Name any cop who lost his job over that. I’m wait.
And while I wait, I must, in the utmost discretion, communicate with you on a matter requiring your assistance concerning the release of $$83 millions U.S. dollars, kind sir or kind madam.
SYNDICATED COLUMN: No College, No Job. College is Expensive. Is It Any Wonder Students Turn to Porn?
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Everybody’s talking about — scratch that. Culture is too atomized for everybody to be talking about anything.
Lots of people who don’t usually cop to knowing about, much less watching, porn — writers at high-end intellectual magazines, columnists for The Washington Post — are talking about Belle Knox, the Duke University freshman who embraced her outing as an adult film actress in an eloquent, feminist theory-imbued attack against slut-shaming.
Social media has responded as you’d expect: lots of mean slut-shaming that proves Knox’s point that “We deem to keep women in a place where they are subjected to male sexuality. We seek to rob them of their choice and of their autonomy. We want to oppress them and keep them dependent on the patriarchy.”
Tabloids and gossip sites are reveling in their usual witches’ brew of judginess and salacious intrigue.
Big corporate media is reacting like George C. Scott finding out his daughter is a whore. Considering that the average age of a journalist is Old Enough to Be Knox’s Mom or Dad, knee-jerk Talibanality comes as little surprise, though quite unpleasant to watch.
About that Post columnist:
Ruth Marcus, Old Enough to Be Knox’s Grandma and apparently a freelance psychologist, calls Knox a “troubled young woman.”
If Marcus hates the sin and not the sinner, it’s hard to tell. Her column drips with condescension and contempt.
“Methinks the freshman doth protest too much,” writes Marcus. Because, you know, like, 18 years old is mature enough to decide which Arabs to shoot, but not to have sex for money.
“Even more heartbreaking is listening to Knox’s still little-girlish voice describing how she’ll tell her parents. ‘I don’t want to,’ she told the Duke Chronicle last month, in the whiny tone of a child told to go to bed.”
Charming.
Marcus goes on. Who could stop her? “She mentioned rough sex, which requires an unpleasant discussion of what kind of pornography we’re talking about here and the increasingly violent nature of the Internet-fueled pornography trade. These are not your father’s Playboys. Letting a man ejaculate on your face is not empowering under anyone’s definition of the term. It’s debasing.”
Two things.
One: bukkake predates the Internet. If Marcus doesn’t know that, or how to Google, she should have spoken to or been edited by someone who does.
Two: what’s sexy and what’s empowering are purely subjective. Knox describes feeling “fear, humiliation, shame” — not from her work, but from neo-Puritan assholes on the Internet giving her a hard time. “Doing pornography fulfills me,” she writes.
Part of respecting women — of being a feminist — is taking them at their word. Thus, in the absence of evidence that Knox is lying or insane, I choose to believe her.
So. Why did Knox become a sex worker? Her answer: “If Duke had given me the proper financial resources, I wouldn’t have done porn. My story is a testament to how fucking expensive school is.”
Media gatekeepers are ignoring it, but this is the real/big story.
Each year in the United States, 12 million freshmen take out student loans. By the time they graduate (or not), they wind up owing $26,000 — plus several times that amount in compound interest payments. In many cities, that’s more than the cost of a house.
Duke University charges Belle Knox $61,000 a year in tuition, room and board. I don’t care how many hours she could have put in at Starbucks; the only way a typical college kid can generate $250,000 in cash over four years is to think outside the box.
Knox isn’t alone. Many college students work as prostitutes.
When I attended Columbia University, I met many students who cut moral and legal corners to make their bursar bills.
I knew students who were call girls, including one who brought her clients to her dorm room to save on hotel rooms. Topless and nude dancers weren’t rare at Columbia. A close friend took advantage of his room’s southern exposure to grow pot plants; he sold his stash out of a deserted Butler Library stack full of 17th century Italian folios. Another pal was banking six figures as a cocaine dealer (it was the ’80s.)
I discovered that one of my classmates was sleeping in the park. There was nothing left after he paid tuition.
One of my buddies, now a minor success in Silicon Valley, had a unique racket. He climbed outside locked campus buildings using grappling hooks. Yes, like a ninja. He entered the chemistry and physics department storerooms through the windows. He then sold the chemicals — including radioactive stuff — to an oily man who worked at the mid-Manhattan consulate of a nation that did not get along with the U.S.
I won’t mention the guy who sold his poo in the Village.
Reagan slashed student financial aid during my freshman year. To pay my way sophomore year, I broke laws.
If I knew then what I know, I wouldn’t have done it. Going into debt or risking jail to pay exorbitant tuition at an “elite” school like Duke or Columbia is insane. You can get an excellent education at any number of cheaper, no-name schools. You can save tens of thousands of dollars by attending a community college for two years, then transferring for junior year; the name on the diploma is what matters.
But that’s the point. I was 18. Like Knox. There’s a reason the military recruits 17- and 18-year-olds. They don’t know anything. I still can’t believe when my mom drove me to the bank to sign the student loan agreement. I was 17. Seriously? I couldn’t vote or drink.
I thought Manhattan was Long Island.
Americans hear a drumbeat of “unless you attend college, your life will suck” propaganda the first 18 years of their lives. Their parents say it. Their teachers say it. Their guidance counselors and the media say it. The college/university industry spends millions to advertise the message that the more you spend on tuition, the more you’ll earn during your lifetime.
The President says it too.
Everyone says college is a must and that expensive college is better than cheap college. Of course Belle Knox and young Ted Rall and 20 million new suckers every year believe it.
Ruth Marcus concludes: “Knox’s pathetic story wouldn’t be worth examining — exploiting? — if it didn’t say something deeper about the hook-up culture run amok and the demise of shame.”
Wrong.
Belle Knox has nothing to be ashamed of.
The real sluts are the cash-whore trustees of Duke University, who are sitting on top of a $6 billion endowment, and the overpaid college and university officials who have jacked up tuition at twice the inflation rate year after year.
(Support independent journalism and political commentary. Subscribe to Ted Rall at Beacon.)
COPYRIGHT 2014 TED RALL, DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM
LOS ANGELES TIMES CARTOON: RoboSheriff
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Computer algorithms drive online dating sites that promise to hook you up with a compatible mate. They help retailers suggest that, because you liked this book or that movie, you’ll probably be into this music. So it was probably inevitable that programs based on predictive algorithms would be sold to law enforcement agencies on the pitch that they’ll make society safe.
The LAPD feeds crime data into PredPol, which then spits out a report predicting — reportedly with impressive accuracy — where “property crimes specifically, burglaries and car break-ins and thefts are statistically more likely to happen.” The idea is, if cops spend more time in these high-crime spots, they can stop crime before it happens.
Chicago police used predictive algorithms designed by an Illinois Institute of Technology engineer to create a 400-suspect “heat list” of “people in the city of Chicago supposedly most likely to be involved in violent crime.” Surprisingly, of these Chicagoans — who receive personal visits from high-ranking cops telling them that they’re being watched — have never committed a violent crime themselves. But their friends have, and that can be enough.
In other words, today’s not-so-bad guys may be tomorrow’s worst guys ever.
But math can also be used to guess which among yesterday’s bad guys are least likely to reoffend. Never mind what they did in the past. What will they do from now on? California prison officials, under constant pressure to reduce overcrowding, want to limit early releases to the inmates most likely to walk the straight and narrow.
Toward that end, Times’ Abby Sewell and Jack Leonard report that the L.A. Sheriff’s Department is considering changing its current evaluation system for early releases of inmates to one based on algorithms:
Supporters argue the change would help select inmates for early release who are less likely to commit new crimes. But it might also raise some eyebrows. An older offender convicted of a single serious crime, such as child molestation, might be labeled lower-risk than a younger inmate with numerous property and drug convictions.
The Sheriff’s Department is planning to present a proposal for a “risk-based” release system to the Board of Supervisors.
“That’s the smart way to do it,” interim Sheriff John L. Scott said. “I think the percentage [system, which currently determines when inmates get released by looking at the seriousness of their most recent offense and the percentage of their sentence they have already served] leaves a lot to be desired.”
Washington state uses a similar system, which has a 70% accuracy rate. “A follow-up study…found that about 47% of inmates in the highest-risk group returned to prison within three years, while 10% of those labeled low-risk did.”
No one knows which ex-cons will reoffend — sometimes not even the recidivist himself or herself. No matter how we decide which prisoners walk free before their end of their sentences, whether it’s a judgment call rendered by corrections officials generated by algorithms, it comes down to human beings guessing what other human beings do. Behind every high-tech solution, after all, are programmers and analysts who are all too human. Even if that 70% accuracy rate improves, some prisoners who have been rehabilitated and ought to have been released will languish behind bars while others, dangerous despite best guesses, will go out to kill, maim and rob.
If the Sheriff’s Department moves forward with predictive algorithmic analysis, they’ll be exchanging one set of problems for another.
Technology is morally neutral. It’s what we do with it that makes a difference.
That, and how many Russian hackers manage to game the system.
(Ted Rall, cartoonist for The Times, is also a nationally syndicated opinion columnist and author. His new book is Silk Road to Ruin: Why Central Asia is the New Middle East.)
