Check out Beijing’s new airport terminal by Zaha Hadid: 700,000 square meters (173 acres!) in total, with an 80,000-square-meter ground transportation centre. It kind of looks like the mother of New Mexico’s spaceport, from where Virgin Galactic operates:
Reports say less than half of U.S. households are equipped with landlines. I remember when a landline was the best thing that ever happened to me. Do you still have one? What do you use it for?
This image of blood vessel cells stained for identification is a stunning reminder: We are made of star stuff.
Gawker Jeff Wise Is Here to Chat About His Flight MH370 Disappearance Theory | Jalopnik Dear Car Companies: Fire Everyone And Hire These Amazing Kids Instead | Jezebel A Chat with Sonia Van Meter, Woman Preparing for a One-Way Trip to Mars | Kotaku How Video Game Breasts Are Made (And Why They Can Go Wrong) | Kinja Popular Posts
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has raced forward in the last few years, championed by a libertarian, tech-loving and science-driven elite. These “transhumanists” pronounce the eventual victory of the machine over nature. First we will become integrated with chips; and then, perhaps, we will be surpassed by them. This AI-inspired future, with echoes of Blade Runner and Battlestar Galactica, is profoundly depressing for many people, bringing with it a world where human creativity and uniqueness has been replaced by the standardization of robots.
The transhumanist vision is premised on the belief that brains are essentially computers. That AI-fans are inspired by this idea is not surprising, given that many have made obscene amounts of money building silicon-based machines; or the algorithms that run on them. Algorithms underpin the entire business of the internet, powering the might of Google, Facebook and Netflix. They are unique bits of code that make computations. They serve up adverts, content or services to us users based on the results of these computations. AI advocates think that once computers have sufficiently advanced algorithms, they will be able to enhance, and then replicate, the human mind.
However, this seductive belief is rooted more in metaphor than reality.
Humanity has always approached cognition through the rule metaphor of the day. The ancients thought about the mind in terms of humors. Early Modern christians, like Rene Descartes, saw our mind as something intangible, probably to do with God. In the Industrial Age we saw the brain finally becoming a machine. First, a kind of steam engine; then a telephone exchange; and finally a computer (or network of them).
Yet the computer metaphor ignores perhaps the most species-defining characteristic of human beings: That we can create things; and we can do so consciously. Not only can we create concepts, business models and ideas; every single human cell can create itself! Yet no machine, no matter how flashy, has ever been able to do this. No scientific theory has fully explained how life creates itself; and where this creativity comes from. Great scientists like Erwin Schrödinger have expressed profound curiosity about how life can buck the great laws of physics, notably that of entropy, the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
Mainstream science claims that the universe works according to fixed rules, discovered by Newton, Faraday and Maxwell. This is the universe as machine. Yet here is the doozy: Whilst our most advanced machines, algorithms, make complex calculations according to a series of rules, disruptive innovators and genius creatives — the kind that birth new business models like AirBnB and new forms of art like Guernica — break the rules. And we can all enjoy this kinds of rule-defying breakthroughs every time we conquer habit and speak to our lover in a new way; or break free of the past by following a new passion.
So where do those breakthroughs — these disruptive innovations — come from? Well, if they came from an algorithmic brain, then surely we would already have been able to access those outcomes in the past? Breakthrough creativity would merely be a re-assembling of what we already know. Yet breakthroughs, by their nature, are unpredictable; whereas algorithms make people rich by being predictable. If breakthrough creativity cannot be fully forecast by past behaviours and beliefs (as many disrupted businesses can testify), then it must come from somewhere other than the past (and our memories of it). The complexity theorist Stuart Kaufmann calls this “partial lawlessness“; a little gap that allows creativity to come out of regulatory. This gap is the paradox of Kurt Godel, who posited that no mathematical system can ever be totally complete or totally consistent. There is always a chink or kind. Ironically, the father of computing, Alan Turing, seems to have come to the same conclusion.
Countless ground-breaking artists — from multiple Booker Prizewinner Hilary Mantel to Isabel Allende; from Ludwig Van Beethoven to John Lennon — have made it adamantly clear that they have never been able to predict what creations will emerge next; and indeed, know where they really come from. Additionally, the act of bringing those breakthroughs into the world, usually against enormous resistance from the status quo, is itself a profoundly human talent, driven as it is by narrative, vision, empathy and influence.
For this reason, I am convinced that no computer, no matter how powerful, will ever be able to purposefully innovate an artistic breakthrough like Hip Hop; or a commercial one like Instagram. Breakthrough creativity is fundamentally organic, not algorithmic. Whilst computers and businesses that run on are breakthroughs; they themselves will never
So rather than using a machine metaphor, even one as elegant as the internet, to understand the brain, I propose we use an organic metaphor. After all, our brain is an organ in a biological organism working to help us survive and thrive in a biological ecosystem. When we see creativity as organic and not mechanic, we begin to glimpse possible ways to account for it, including revelations from quantum biology that suggest some of the functions of our brain may be quantum mechanical in nature… and so conceivably be able to provide us access to all the information in the universe, past or future.
I have spent 20 years investigating how breakthroughs can be created, sustained and communicated. Having led countless breakthrough innovation projects and personal development programs, Breakthrough Biodynamics has emerged. It’s a comprehensive framework that aims to support us all to lead transformative change in human systems (whether within individuals, families, businesses or societies). It unites the latest science, with timeless philosophy to uncover the logic of how discontinuous, non-linear breakthroughs can be created and then sustained, so that our brains or businesses do not return to their historical default settings.
At the heart of it is a “J-shaped” curve, the Breakthrough Curve, that appears wherever breakthroughs occur; from enzyme catalysis and narrative arcs to scientific revolutions and political ones. It may even trace the process of the death and birth of universes within a many-worlds interpretation of quantum field theory.
The Breakthrough Curve may be nature’s blueprint of creativity; but each breakthrough we human beings have is unique to the context it emerges in. Each involves us blending emotion and reason, rule-breaking and rule-making, as we unleash from within us whatever is seeking to emerge in that matchless moment. No machine will ever be able to mimic our peerless organic nature as inherently, inescapably, beguilingly creative.
Already reeling from accusations of pandering to corporate advertisers, Britain’s Telegraph newspaper is now under fire for withholding emails that might harm its friends in the Conservative government. The latest scandal threatens to further damage the Telegraph‘s editorial and political integrity and independence.
The Telegraph‘s extra-friendly relationship with the Conservative party dates back years. Just before the 2010 general election, as the Leveson Inquiry later exposed, the paper’s chief executive, Murdoch MacLennan, wrote to David Cameron, the Conservative leader: “We desperately want there to be a Conservative government and you to be our next Prime Minister.”
“We’ll do all we can to bring that about and to give you great support in the grueling months ahead,” MacLennan promised. He added: “And as we are no fair weather friend, we’ll be there with you too when you’re in Downing Street.”
Last week the Telegraph‘s executive editor finally admitted to me that the paper holds internal email exchanges from senior officials at the Conservative Campaign Headquarters relating to child abuse. In so doing he contradicted Conservative Party Chairman Grant Shapps, who told me that after reviewing the situation he hadn’t found “any evidence to substantiate” my claims that the emails exist.
The emails are so potentially damaging to Tory reputations that the political correspondent who was inadvertently copied in on them assumed the Telegraph would be publishing them, even assuring one MP that he was not the subject of the “silly emails.” The paper is still sitting on the emails and, as far as I know, has not given them to Grant Shapps to read so that he can form a view of whether they amount to an attempt to smear Labour politicians, as at least one Telegraph insider has claimed.
That the Telegraph might spike a story that could damage the Conservative government should not be a surprise to those who read the evidence in the Leveson Inquiry.
The direct promise of help with newspaper coverage of the Conservatives during the general election campaign was outmatched by an even more remarkable offer made in March 2010 by Aidan Barclay, the chairman of the Telegraph Media Group. Barclay texted the aspiring prime minister, saying he had spoken “to Tony G” (Tony Gallagher, then editor of the Telegraph). He said that “they would arrange a daily call during the campaign” between Cameron and Gallagher.
Later, Barclay explained it away, saying that if Cameron wanted “to get the attention of the editor [of the Telegraph] and wanted to get his message across in the most efficient manner, he should make a habit of calling on a daily basis and I recommended that that’s what they should do.” However, there was no suggestion at the time that such a call would be restricted to commenting on possible Telegraph editorials.
As it happens, Tony Gallagher was sacked by the newspaper. Though he is too discreet to say it, many think he was pushed out because he was too independent-minded, particularly when it came to editorial judgments on the Cameron government.
Of course, none of this email correspondence is conclusive when it comes to proving news bias. We have to read the Telegraph‘s news coverage of the general election campaign to show its determination to present the Conservatives in the best light and Labour in the worst possible light. No doubt the Telegraph will claim it did not hold back from outing Conservative MPs in 2009 over their Commons expenses and then say how tough it was on Maria Miller, who resigned as culture secretary in 2014 over her expenses. But of course she made the mistake of trying to bully the paper, which lost her all public support.
There is now a huge gaping hole in Mr. Barclay’s claims to the Leveson Inquiry that the Telegraph‘s news coverage and its business interests “do not collide” and that the relationship “is arm’s length and transparent,” giving no advertiser special favors in their news coverage.
There is clearly also a huge hole in the contention that the Telegraph‘s news coverage is “fair and balanced,” and bears no relationship to what looks like a deal struck with the Conservative Party in 2010.
When it comes to its conservative leanings, no one denies the Telegraph is a paper with both “small C, and a capital C”, as Mr. Barclay put it when he came before Leveson. But that is not what the debate is about: It is about the paper’s much-vaunted claims to integrity and to impartiality when it comes to news coverage. And now that it is clear from Telegraph insiders and former insiders that the paper’s news judgements about its own advertisers are distorted by commercial considerations, is it now possible to ignore the clear bias in its news coverage of politics?
Gordon Brown complained to the Telegraph early in 2010 about such bias and “a lack of balance” in the paper’s news coverage of the Labour government. The then editor-in-chief of the Telegraph Media Group, Will Lewis, responded in a staff email that editors had to be “cautious” and remain “fair and balanced” in the paper’s coverage. But this did not happen and soon Lewis was replaced, anyway.
The facts speak for themselves. When the Telegraph had a sensational coup in 2010 that Vince Cable, secretary of state for business, innovation and skills, had declared “war on Murdoch,” the paper’s leadership shied away from publishing its own scoop. Cable’s comments to undercover Telegraph reporters did not emerge until the transcript of their interview was leaked to the BBC‘s political editor, Robert Peston, who broke the story. How the Telegraph failed to publish its own world exclusive for fear of embarrassing David Cameron merely reinforces its chief executive’s promise to be more than “a fair weather friend” and to “be there with you when you’re in Downing Street.”
And when we look at the MPs’ expenses scandal, we find something else: that on the first day of the Telegraph‘s coverage in May 2009, the first target was Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown with a little-disguised attempt to bring him down.
In the MPs’ expenses scandal, it was Gordon Brown who was to be accused of falsely claiming money for a cleaner, whilst David Cameron repaid £680 for having a wisteria trimmed on his country home in Oxfordshire. Mr. Brown, on the other hand, was pursued for days but subsequently received an apology that appeared in a small box far from the front page, where the original story splashed.
The Telegraph remains defiant over the latest scandals, claiming in an editorial that it will make “no apology for the way in which it has covered the HSBC group and the allegations of wrongdoing by its Swiss subsidiary, allegations that have been so enthusiastically promoted by the BBC, the Guardian and their ideological soulmates in the Labour Party.”
Despite the belligerent denial that news coverage does not favor advertisers like HSBC and Sony, the paper has been exposed by its own current and former employees. No one should really mind much that in their text exchanges on the issues of the day, the Conservative leader and Mr. Barclay are so close that they exchange secrets.
However, the hypocrisy of claiming impartiality in its news coverage and the reality of news bias raises big questions about the Telegraph Media Group’s integrity. As we approach yet another election in which the Telegraph seeks to promote the Conservatives irrespective of the facts, it cannot now go without challenge.
If the executive editor of the Telegraph really wants to retrieve the public standing of a 160-year-old newspaper institution, he can start by publishing the internal Tory emails. At the very least he should send them to Grant Shapps, so that he can form a view of the conduct of those who wrote them.
When I first entered through the door of Leland Melvin’s home in Lynchburg, Virginia, there was a momentary feeling that I was walking down the long hallway of a chic hotel lobby. A grand piano came into view directly ahead, while a wall of cloud photos as seen from space lined the corridor; in my peripheral view I caught the colorful brush strokes of a Michael Kagan print — yellow and blue splashes of paint shooting out of a shuttle propelling itself forth off its canvas with unbounded conviction. That’s when it occurred to me that this wasn’t a chic hotel, but was in fact, Leland’s very inviting home.
Leland admitted how spacious it was in Lynchburg — far more commodious than what we New Yorkers are used to — but what really drew him back to his hometown was not the space, but his family. His father had fallen ill and Leland wanted to make sure he was there for him.
The day that I moved back here we had this great conversation about why he needs to take a bath — and then he passed the next day. It rocked me, it floored me, but I remembered some of the things that my dad said to me and he said, ‘Hey, take care of your mom,’ so I’m here for my mom.
Leland’s father, a former school teacher for three decades, is unequivocally his biggest hero. “He showed me that you can do anything,” recalls Leland. “It really hit me when we converted a $500 bread truck one summer into our home-away-from-home RV.”
It was those types of activities that primed Leland for his eventual move to NASA. Prior to his induction into that role, however, he had a brief stint in the NFL as a wide receiver — first chosen by the Detroit Lions and then by the Dallas Cowboys; a pulled hamstring, however, prevented him from moving further with his football career. “It was really a series of events that led me [to NASA],” Leland recounts. “A friend shared with me that NASA was looking but I didn’t apply. Then a friend entered the corps that year and exposed me to the job and I said, ‘I can do that!’ That’s when I went out to pursue the dream.”
Becoming an astronaut is easily the dream of many but sometimes that’s all it ever is — a dream. For Leland, who happens to be the 13th African American astronaut, that all became a reality through patience, hard work, and a knack for problem solving. About 14 years after Melvin joined NASA, he flew two missions on the Space Shuttle Atlantis — first as a mission specialist in February 2008 and then as a mission specialist 1 the following year.
“I always think about my first flight; we were flying around the world 17,500 mph every 90 minutes and we are eating this meal with people that we [the United States] used to fight against,” he recounts in the IDEA NOSH podcast. “We all float over to [the dinner table] and amass around [it] — people from Russia, Germany, France, African American, Asian American, the first female commander — and we are listening to Sade on the iPod through the speakers as we’re tasting these different meals from around the world.”
Leland says that was the moment where he recognized exactly where he was.
Everything before that was your task, getting the job done… but this was a moment where you can have this incredible meal with people that you used to fight against. That was the most transformative moment for me because it also helped me get my orbital perspective.
The orbital perspective was a term that Leland’s colleague, Astronaut Ron Garan, first used to describe the shift that happens inside one’s brain when you are looking at the Earth from above. It’s the realization that, “we are all traveling together on the planet and that if we all looked at the world from that perspective we would see that nothing is impossible.”
This shift was something that Leland discusses early on in IDEA NOSH: “When you’re launching and preparing for this journey into space and you’re sitting there on the launchpad… 3, 2, 1 lift off, you take off your seatbelt and you float over to the window and you look back at the planet… and it humbles you,” he says reflectively. “How do we make sure that everyone has the opportunity to see the planet in such a magnificent way that it changes you fundamentally inside?”
It’s this perspective that brought both Leland and Garan to the idea of starting Spaceship Earth Grants — a public benefit venture whose mission is to make space more accessible through human spaceflight and parabolic flights. “We have a vision to democratize space by allowing others to get the orbital shift when you see the planet from the off-planet perspective,” says Melvin. “Everyone can’t afford the price tag to fly in space, so we wanted to pay for people that can return from a space-like experience and inspire through their story.”
Stay tuned for more information on Spaceship Earth Grants here.
To listen to more of Leland’s story, head over to IDEA NOSH via iTunes or Stitcher or watch below.
It’s not the first time ISIL has released a video featuring their now trademark brutality and disregard for human life. Each one has left us more breathless in horror and disbelief than the last–and the thought that we haven’t seen the final one is desperately tragic. “Savages” we whisper to ourselves when our breath begins to return. And we are right. They lined 21 young men in bright orange jumpsuits against the organic line of a blue coast with the aesthetic precision of a Christo and Jean-Claude installation and summarily beheaded each and every of them. These are savages. That word gets a lot of second-guessing these days–and often for good reason–but that doesn’t mean it’s never appropriate. Of course it’s appropriate; at times like this, it’s the only word we can physiologically voice.
There is an argument that we shouldn’t call them Savages or Extremists or any of our lexicon’s most heinous descriptors because it only encourages them. These savages, the logic goes, take great pride in being savages, and having their savagery called out as such is a kind of accomplishment or reward. I don’t know. That may be true, but, in our hearts, we know real savagery when we see it.
There is also, of course, a wariness of the sentiment in any context among some audiences–a concern recently lodged as one of the many complaints against the movie American Sniper. The main character apparently refers to Iraqis indiscriminately with that term. I can’t say for sure; I didn’t see the film.
(To be clear, I believe the respect we pay our veterans and service members stems from our understanding that they volunteer to do whatever they are told by their commanders for the good of the country, so I have no interest in blaming Chris Kyle for the task he was given overseas. If you do what your country asks and do it better than anyone ever has, that is heroic. And I’m not about to judge the mindset he had to get himself into in order to do a job I would never want. I’m just not going to be bullied into giving Warner Bros. $12.50 in some bid to prove my patriotism, either.)
If Chris Kyle had to view everyone around him that he might be called on to shoot as a savage, I thank him for making that sacrifice for our country. It was a sacrifice, though. Those everyday Iraqis were not savages. Kyle used the term as a tool to distance himself from them, to otherize them, to rob them of their humanity. That’s how the term has almost always been used. And, as is also always the case, using it cost him some of his.
The word means wild, of course, but wild can refer to a great many things. Like an Aristotelian vice, it can mean too near a state of nature or too far away from it.
In usage it’s always meant other, so it’s sadly unsurprising that, almost every time the word is used, it is used to justify real savagery on the part of the user. Such was the case with the “godless natives” as well as the kidnapped and enslaved Africans on this continent not too long ago. In fact, it’s often been used interchangeably with “godless,” and there might be something to that; while nearly every major religion has been used as a justification for acts of savagery it has always been the result of corrupting that religion to the point of heresy. As any theologian would confirm, the Inquisitors were not good Catholics and the KKK were not good Christians, no matter how steeped in the iconography of “divine right” their robes might have been.
The savages of ISIL are not good Muslims. They too have corrupted their religion into something ugly and barbaric, and there is no doubt that they did so, in part, by dehumanizing everyone not of their sect. One can almost imagine them spewing “savage” along with “infidel” as they slaughter farmers, journalists and aid workers like cattle, or as they trade kidnapped girls as concubines to an endless market of rapists.
Calling someone a savage is an act of savagery, and I’m completely okay with that when is comes to ISIL. It dehumanizes, and these monsters have dehumanized themselves. That it probably does rob me of some of my humanity to deny theirs–their childhoods and the mothers who loved them, the spiritual vacuum that drives them to such a hopeless perversion of faith–is fine with me. It’s the least I can give in response to such horror, and I’m fully prepared to answer for it.
But calling all Muslims savages is not okay, and it would make us savages to dehumanize them so. I see thought leaders and advocacy media outlets claiming that Islam preaches hate, or that only Muslims kill in the name of religion, or that all Muslims believe in killing Christians and I start to get breathless, again.
It isn’t true.
This is how terrorists attack a continent with putting a single shoe bomb on the ground. They tempt us to fall back on the easy demarcations of religion and race–and if you doubt race plays a role ask any Sikh or Coptic Christian in the US about the anti-Muslim vitriol he’s endured. They invite us to sacrifice our own humanity by denying others theirs. Hell, they even model it for us.
Wild can mean a lot of different things. It can mean lost in a primordial wood or lost in a dangerous delusion. The anti-hero of Huxley’s dystopian Brave New World was called Savage because he epitomized the humanness that everyone else had forgotten.
Other always means other. It always means less.
Our shared humanity should not be easily surrendered. It’s what makes us want to raise our families and nurture our communities in peace; it’s why good people have an innate respect for human life. Trafficking in the false claims that most Muslims support ISIL or that their acts are a natural extension of Islam seeks to dehumanize nearly 2 billion mothers, fathers, sons and daughters. Not only is that a barbarity in its own right, but it makes it even harder to find the common ground we need to fight the real savages.
And fight them we must, on every front. The question is, do we know real savagery in our hearts when we see it. If not, then it won’t mean other for very long.
The Justice Department decided to not pursue charges against George Zimmerman — Americans with heart conditions are advised to stay away from their Facebook feed for the next few days. Ron Paul said recently that the Congressional Black Caucus opposes wars only because “they want all of that money to go to food stamps” — a shocking revelation that an old white man could be cranky about minorities and the social safety net. And the secretary of veterans affairs apologized for embellishing his military record, further proving that puffing up your military service or war zone experience is the political-media world’s version of saying you were at Woodstock. This is HUFFPOST HILL for Tuesday, February 24th, 2015:
DHS FUNDING STILL UNCERTAIN – Elise Foley: “Almost as quickly as it came about, a plan from Senate Republican leaders to avert a shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security has hit a snag. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) announced Tuesday the chamber would move on a full-year DHS funding bill without measures to restrict President Barack Obama’s immigration policies, which have so far hindered the passage of a bill that would keep the department from shutting down on Feb. 27. The Senate will also vote on a separate bill to stop Obama’s 2014 executive actions on immigration. But the plan was quickly questioned by Democratic leaders, who said they don’t want to move forward on even a clean DHS funding bill unless there are assurances from House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) that he’s on board…Time is running out to fund DHS before the deadline, and McConnell’s offer was the first Plan B from Republicans after a House-passed bill was repeatedly blocked in the Senate. The House’s bill would prevent Obama from carrying out a number of his immigration policies as part of funding for DHS, something the president said he would veto. Now McConnell is aiming to split DHS funding from the immigration issue.” [HuffPost]
PRESIDENT VETOES KEYSTONE XL PIPELINE BILL – Prepare to get a final-scene-of-Miracle-on-34th-Street amount of correspondence relating to this in your inbox. Kate Sheppard: “President Barack Obama formally vetoed legislation authorizing the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline on Tuesday, the latest development in what has become an ongoing standoff between him and congressional Republicans over approval of the controversial pipeline. This is only the third veto of Obama’s presidency, but it’s likely not the last. Congressional Republicans are poised to send a number of other measures to Obama’s desk that he is expected to reject, including changes to his signature health care reform law. Obama vetoed the bill privately on Tuesday afternoon, hours after it was sent over from the Hill. White House spokesman Josh Earnest said in the day’s press briefing that the president planned to veto it “without any drama or fanfare or delay.’ The House passed the measureauthorizing construction of the pipeline on Feb. 11, two weeks after the Senateapproved the same legislation. Congressional Republicans held a signing ceremonyand waited until after the weeklong Presidents Day recess to send it to Obama’s desk.” [HuffPost]
President’s veto message to the Senate: “I am returning herewith without my approval S. 1, the ‘Keystone XL Pipeline Approval Act.’ Through this bill, the United States Congress attempts to circumvent longstanding and proven processes for determining whether or not building and operating a cross-border pipeline serves the national interest. The Presidential power to veto legislation is one I take seriously. But I also take seriously my responsibility to the American people. And because this act of Congress conflicts with established executive branch procedures and cuts short thorough consideration of issues that could bear on our national interest — including our security, safety, and environment — it has earned my veto.”
ICYMI: VA CHIEF PULLED A BRIAN WILLIAMS – David Wood broke the story last night: “Robert McDonald, the secretary of veterans affairs, wrongly claimed in a videotaped comment earlier this year that he served in the Army’s elite special forces, when his military service of five years was in fact spent almost entirely with the 82nd Airborne Division during the late 1970s….‘I have no excuse,’ McDonald told The Huffington Post, when contacted to explain his claim. ‘I was not in special forces.’” [HuffPost]
McDonald continued his apology tour on Tuesday.
RON PAUL STILL GIVING OFF THAT ‘FREEDOM REPORT’ VIBE BuzzFeed: “Former Republican Rep. Ron Paul, the father of potential presidential candidate Rand Paul and a former presidential candidate himself, said the Congressional Black Caucus does not support war because they want that money for food stamps. ‘I was always annoyed with it in Congress because we had an anti-war unofficial group, a few libertarian Republicans and generally the Black Caucus and others did not–they are really against war because they want all of that money to go to food stamps for people here,’ Ron Paul told Lew Rockwell in early February during a discussion on sanctions.” [BuzzFeed]
DAILY DELANEY DOWNER – Freshman Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.) reportedly said at a town hall in his district last week that constituents should monitor purchases made with debit cards from Food Share, which is Wisconsin’s name for the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Grothman “told the people in attendance to keep an eye on the types of things people on Food Share buy at the grocery store,” Oshkosh Northwestern Media reported Monday. [HuffPost]
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WALKER OUT IN FRONT IN 2016 GOP POLL – Hey, remember Unskewed Polls? PPP: “PPP’s newest national Republican poll finds a clear leader in the race for the first time: Scott Walker is at 25% to 18% for Ben Carson, 17% for Jeb Bush, and 10% for Mike Huckabee. Rounding out the field of contenders are Chris Christie and Ted Cruz at 5%, Rand Paul at 4%, and Rick Perry and Marco Rubio at 3%. Walker has more than doubled his support since his 11% standing on our January national poll, and Carson has moved up 3 points. Bush, Huckabee, Paul, and Perry have largely stayed in place while Cruz has dropped 4 points and Christie has dropped 2 points. Walker is climbing fast in the polling because of his appeal to the most conservative elements of the Republican electorate. Among ‘very conservative’ voters he leads with 37% to 19% for Carson, 12% for Bush, and 11% for Huckabee. Bush has a similarly large lead over Walker with moderates at 34/12…the problem for Bush though is that there are two times more GOP primary voters who identify as ‘very conservative’ than there are ones who identify as moderates.” [PPP]
GOP DONOR FIRST TO HIT CONTRIBUTION LIMIT – Dude, he’s like the Jackie Robinson of rich white guys who are willing to spend .0001 percent of their income to disproportionately influence elections. Paul Blumenthal: “Ken Griffin, the hedge fund billionaire who once complained about the wealthiest Americans having ‘insufficient influence’ in politics, has become the first — and so far only — donor to report giving the maximum amount to a national political party under newly loosened campaign contribution limits. According to a Friday filing with the Federal Election Commission, Griffin gave $324,000 to the Republican National Committee in January. This huge contribution was split among four separate accounts, two of which were made possible by rule changes slipped into the December omnibus budget bill and one of which could expand due to that legislation. Griffin gave $32,400 to the RNC’s central election account and $97,200 each to the committee’s building, recount and convention funds.” [HuffPost]
The Justice Department won’t charge George Zimmerman for murdering Trayvon Martin.
MIKE HUCKABEE: SNOB? Igor Bobic: “Mike Huckabee says it’s not an issue that Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) doesn’t have a college degree. Walker, a potential 2016 presidential candidate, dropped out of Marquette University in 1990, just one semester shy of graduating. If he wins the presidency, he’d be the first person without a college degree to do so in more than 60 years….In 2002, the incumbent governor faced a stronger-than-expected, though ultimately unsuccessful, challenge from state treasurer Jimmie Lou Fisher (D), then a pioneering female politician in Arkansas…. ‘If you check her Web site, it says she is a graduate from the Harvard School of Law. The truth is, she took a three-week course,’ Huckabee said at a campaign stop in October 2002, according to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.” [HuffPost]
CALIFORNIA GOP CLAMORING FOR CONDOLEEZZA RICE SENATE RUN – Or, “How Carly Fiorina’s ego really can’t take much more of this.” WaPo: “The ‘Draft Condoleezza Rice for [fill in the blank office]’ movement will never ever die. And with an open Senate seat in California in 2016, the unquenchable desire among Republicans for candidate Rice has an actual office that she could run for in sight. A new Field poll, showing Rice leading a poll of other ‘prominent Californians,’ has only added fuel to this ever-burning fire. Based on this (name recognition) poll, which shows Rice leading current California Attorney General and declared Senate candidate Kamala Harris in terms of peoples’ ‘inclination’ to vote, the Conservative Action Fund launched yet another attempt to get Rice to run. The Black Conservative Fund has also joined the efforts…There’s also not one single shred of evidence that Rice has any interest whatsoever in running for elected office. Like zero, zilch, nada, as in please move on.” [WaPo]
BECAUSE YOU’VE READ THIS FAR – Here’s a relaxed cat.
COMFORT FOOD
– Find a good movie to watch by genre, mood or just have one chosen for you on A Godd Movie To Watch.
– Elephant tries to break stick, fails, throws mini tantrum.
– Monk snowball fight.
TWITTERAMA
@Max_Fisher: A subtweet about a tweet about an article about a tweet of a photograph of a magazine listicle
@TheStalwart: I wonder if in 10 years, pot brownies will be illegal because of the sugar.
@StevenTDennis: Orrin Hatch tells me he didn’t watch the Oscars. He said he was watching Downton Abbey instead.
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What has been deployed over the last few of weeks, since the new elected Greek government unleashed its efforts to convince some of its European partners to align with it against the austerity oriented and Germany driven policies in Europe, is a game of power directly connected with the question of who finally has the upper hand in dictating the decisions in the Union. I draw the conclusion that the fundamental reason that Europeans — and particularly Germans — were irritated by the sentimentally and ideologically unyielding negotiating strategy of the left wing Syriza government in Greece was not actually its logical purpose to alter the harmful parameters of the imposing fiscal policies in the country. It was the fact that the Greek officials’ attitude towards Europeans in the negotiations in the Eurogroup meetings in Brussels was interpreted by Germans and others as a questioning of their hegemony in a Union that since 2010 has been transformed from a political to a corporate one within which the superiority of creditors over lenders is not posed under any kind of doubt. One month was enough time for Europe to roll the new leftist government in Greece back into the harsh European reality by destroying very quickly the illusions that Syriza had created as part of its electoral campaign, which rested on the belief that it could easily become the change that the Union needed towards a more socially prudent economic policy. Greece started participating in that “chicken game” by having high expectations for its capability to drag Europeans and Germans to its position, but also by being determined not to push things to a point that could not be rectifiable afterwards, like a potential Grexit.
The latest Eurogroup agreement means a defeat for the Syriza government because they were forced to accept the terms of the current bailout program that they had rejected before the elections and were left with very little room to maneuver. Under the agreed upon terms, Greece can convert some parts of the agreement only under very strict conditions of prior approval from Germany and other European creditors, with the Greek authorities having committed not to take unilateral actions during the implementation of the program. Is this the first step toward a complete transformation of Syriza from a leftist to a moderate centrist party in the political spectrum, much like New Democracy and even more like PASOK, both of which are facing the anger of the voters because of the same unpopular policies imposed on them by the lenders in previous years? It’s a question for which the answer is not very clear at the moment, although ostensibly Syriza is making steps back from its pre-electoral promises. But that’s not enough to make Greeks disappointed by their new government, though there is reason for them to be.
Until the 26th of January, when the new Syriza government was elected, Greek people felt that their previous governments (Papandreou, Papadimos, Samaras and Venizelos) since 2010 neither defended nor even tried to protect the country’s interests in the negotiations with its creditors during the first and second bailout program. And I can say that this kind of feeling is not so far away from reality according to what we as journalists experienced through our coverage and reporting on the IMF in Washington, D.C. and European institutions in Brussels. Over the last five years the governmental executives of Greece were blindly adopting the orders from the EU, IMF and ECB bureaucrats. They never came out with any objection, which resulted in them being viewed by their voters as people whose duty was just to execute what the so called “Troika” was demanding from Greece. Perhaps many of the external observers trying to explain the Greek situation cannot understand how people in Greece may feel humiliated by their supervision from the Troika and not by their dependance from the money of Germans and other European nations. This is a misunderstanding which is at the core of the argument made by those who believe that Greeks are more emotionally than realistically driven.
For the moment what matters for the vast majority of Greek people is that for the first time they feel they have a government which, despite its compromises, has proved that it made its best effort to bring Europe back to the table for a fair and equal negotiation about the terms of the Greek bailout program. But whether their feeling or satisfaction will be viable over the long term is a question posed by many who expect a new period of political turmoil to come back in Greece the longer the country struggles to survive with its debts in the waters of uncertainty.
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