Politics
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FreedomLeaks
We’ll start with four essential posts on the Wikileaks matter. First is Iran and the Bomb, by Hedrik Hertzberg, It’s this week’s Talk of the Town in The New Yorker. Here’s the pull quote: Perhaps the two biggest secrets that the WikiLeaks leaks leaked are that the private face of American foreign policy looks pretty much… Continue reading
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Public radio still rocks
Lately, thanks to the inexcusably inept firing of Juan Williams by NPR brass, and the acceptance of a $1.8 million grant from George Soros, NPR has tarred its credentials as a genuinely fair and balanced news organization. Which it mostly still is, by the way, no matter how much the right tries to trash it.… Continue reading
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Obama’s About page, in a podcast
If you can park your politics (whatever it might be) long enough to listen with an open mind to a one-hour podcast, please dig Reading Obama’s Mind: Pragmatism and Its Perils, an interview by Chris Lydon of James T. Kloppenberg, chair of the Department of History at Harvard, author of “A Nation Arguing with Its… Continue reading
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Networds
Live blogging Barbara van Schewick’s talk at Maxwell Dworkin here at Harvard. (That’s the building from which Mark Zuckerberg’s movie character stumbles through the snow in his jammies. Filmed elsewhere, by the way.) All the text is what Barbara says, or as close as I can make it. My remarks are in parentheses. The talk… Continue reading
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Food for re-thought
The summary paragraph of a great column by Tom Friedman: A dysfunctional political system is one that knows the right answers but can’t even discuss them rationally, let alone act on them, and one that devotes vastly more attention to cable TV preachers than to recommendations by its best scientists and engineers. Here’s a link… Continue reading
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Informal vs. Illegal
Immigrants and Crime: Time for a Sensible Debate is a Wall Street Journal op-ed by Francis Fukuyama with the subhead, The gardeners and maids who cross the border illegally are very different from the tattooed Salvatrucha gang member who lives by extortion and drug-dealing. Here’s the gist: There is indeed a huge problem of crime… Continue reading
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Quote du Jour
On the phone with Britt Blaser, who just said, Politics is so complicated that only zealots get involved. Of course, he’s been working on fixing that. I think this here can help. Continue reading
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How about just making mesothelioma the state disease?
The California state rock is serpentine (correct name, serpentinite), which comes in many varieties, some which contain asbestos, which doesn’t get dangerous unless you grind it up and spread it into the air. Just sitting there, as it does through much of California and in other parts of the world, serpentine is mostly a greenish… Continue reading
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Manners vs. Mores
Until her Supreme Court nomination turned Elena Kagan into big-time news fodder, there was not an abundance of great pictures of her to be found on the Web. Among the better ones to be found were a couple I had posted on Flickr a couple years ago, when she was still Dean of Harvard Law… Continue reading
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On power, balance, shifting and disruption
What is this stuff we call power? This question came to mind when I read about Digital Power and Its Discontents, a conference coming up on 21 April at Georgetown. In it (says that link) they will be “exploring the ways digital technologies disrupt the balance of power between and among states, their citizens and… Continue reading
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Oil + Water
Four years and one day ago, we took a trip aboard a sailboat captained by our friend John Pfarr (who a few days later would later sail the same vessel to Hawaii, the South Seas and back — the dude is a serious sailor). Our modest destination was the string of oil platforms that rise… Continue reading
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Deliberate Explosive Devices
After visiting the Titan Missle Museum in Arizona, Matt Blaze wrote, How did we keep from blowing ourselves up for all those years? Good question. Take a listen the next time you hear somebody say “Good question.” It means they don’t have the answer. Maybe it also means the best questions are unanswerable. And maybe… Continue reading
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What you see is what they buy
Brilliant of the Sunlight Foundation to show who pays each elected speaker, in text next to them as they’re speaking at the Heath Care Summit. Dig it here, live. Via @mathowie. [Later…] In the interest of fairness, here’s a Democrat, and his major backers: (I’ve cropped and moved the video image a bit so browsers… Continue reading
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How the Internet becomes the Content-o-net
The Cinternet is Donnie Hao Dong’s name for the Chinese Internet. Donnie studies and teaches law in China and is also a fellow here at Harvard’s Berkman Center. As Donnie sees (and draws) it, the Cinternet is an increasingly restricted subset of the real thing: He calls this drawing a “map of encirclement.” That last… Continue reading
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Do we want “smart” utilities?
‘Smart’ Electric Utility Meters, Intended to Create Savings, Instead Prompt Revolt is a New York Times story that perhaps suggests a deeper truth: People don’t want their utilities to get smart on them. Except, occasionally, on request. Like, when a bill one month is strangely high. These paragraphs encapsulate several problems at once: At the… Continue reading
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Reversing the comms industry power ratio
Empowering the Internet One American at a Time is an excellent post by Erik Cecil, a battle-hardened telecom lawyer whose vision of the Big Picture and around all curves continues to delight me. The post first appeared on a mail list, and is addressed primarily to fellow Internet and telecom obsessives (myself included). Here are… Continue reading
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Liberating the Net from Telephony
Yesterday the FCC released a public notice seeking comment on the “transition from circuit switched network to all-IP network.” (Here’s the .pdf. Here’s the .txt version.) Translation: from the phone system to the Internet. This is huge. Really. Freaking. Huge. Or maybe not. Could be it’s all just posturing or worse. But I don’t think… Continue reading