Today, I went down to the Labor Temple on S. Park in Madison and signed the petition to recall the governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker. You can find out more about the recall effort at A United Wisconsin to Recall Scott Walker AKA United Wisconsin, which is the group that is organizing the recall. On their website, you can find out where to sign a petition all over Wisconsin or even print out your own petition form. The goal is to get one million signatures of which a little over half a million have to be valid. I bet this man thinks you should sign the recall petition! And before you’re done, visit the Democratic Party of Wisconsin’s Recall Headquarters.
Chomsky’s piece in the Boston Review covers a lot of familiar territory if you’ve read his work and listened to his lectures. But he makes a very salient distinction amongst intellectuals. Of public intellectuals, he says there are two types. First, there are those intellectuals that serve the state and are generally considered responsible. And second, value-oriented intellectuals (and Chomsky would place himself in this class) are “dismissed or denigrated.” The term Chomsky prefers for value-oriented intellectuals is dissidents.
Why this distinction is interesting is because what Americans value at home differs from what we value in other countries. Chomsky uses Soviet Russia as a historical example of how this works. While intellectuals in the service of the government in U.S. receive acclaim for being a guiding force in policy, the West regarded those intellectuals (“apparatchiks and commissars, the technocratic and policy-oriented intellectuals”) who served the Soviet state with disdain. Dissidents, that is, value-oriented intellectuals such as Andrei Sakharov were held in high regard. But where we appreciate a foreign dissident and give them the aid of the U.S. government, those within our sphere of influence suffer.
Chomsky often returns to Central and South America, and here he uses the example of the murder of Jesuit priests in 1990 by U.S.-sponsored state terrorists in El Salvador as a clear indication of how dissidents fair internally. The priests were intellectuals (or theologians, to use the religious term) following in the trend of liberation theology that began at Vatican II. Liberation theology was actively eliminated and discouraged in the ’80s by the Vatican through the lead of then Cardinal Ratzinger who is now Pope Benedict XVI. The Vatican’s ties with repressive Latin American governments during that time is well-known, and to wit, not just the Vatican but the U.S. as well.
I had been thinking about the term liberation in regards to liberal protest a couple of years ago. And to my mind, liberation has been a good word to describe those longings during the dissembling Bush administration. The kind Canadians at AdBusters though have endowed us with a new vocabulary. The Wisconsin protests against the policies of Governor Scott Walker started out this year in February. The Arab Spring liberated many people from repressive regimes in the Middle East, regimes that maintained the status quo for the U.S. And it comes down to this newly anointed word: Occupy.
It is not a word I like, but it is the right term for now because it reflects how the U.S. has been an occupying force in Afghanistan and Iraq for a decade. The war mongers and the hawks have had their day, their decade really. And it takes the gathering of many, many people in many cities and many countries to cry out and declare what is wrong. Enough is enough! I find these words so very interesting. Liberation and occupy are words at opposite ends of the spectrum. Liberation is to be freed. Occupy is the opposite of being free. But because of the changes our government has made since 9/11, we are less free. Our adherence to a policy of the preëmptive strike has mortgaged our future. We have fought these wars on Asian credit. Bin Laden has bankrupted us, morally and economically. He could not have had a better foil than George W. Bush.
If you prefer video to reading, you can watch Chomsky’s talk at MIT on the responsibility of intellectuals on YouTube.
Rupert Murdoch’s scion 38-year-old James Murdoch came up to a parliamentary committee for questioning again today after his first appearance this past summer. The shine is definitely off News Corp. Reporters are digging up the dirt on News Corp.’s operations in both the UK and the US. There was October’s scandal about goosed circulation numbers at the Wall Street Journal for which a senior European executive was fired. And then last week’s scandal of a reporter at The Sun who was arrested for bribing police officers.
I’d written a few reviews for my college newspaper, but being a movie critic was not my career goal. If I had one at all, it was to become a columnist like Royko. When the Daily News folded in 1978, Mike worked at the Sun-Times until Rupert Murdoch bought the paper in late 1983. This was a crushing blow to Mike. He went home and had a few drinks, and when the local TV stations brought their cameras into his den, he announced that a Murdoch paper was “not fit to wrap fish in.”
The Fedora Project is the community-based Linux distribution shepherded by Red Hat. A new version of Fedora was released on Tuesday, which features the first updates to GNOME 3, the relatively new version of the classic desktop environment. Staffers at Red Hat manage some aspects of Fedora, but a lot of volunteers go into making the Fedora community what it is. The first billion-dollar company in the open source world, Red Hat established the Fedora Scholarship that contributes $8,000 to the college expenses of one lucky high school senior. The scholarship also includes travel money for attending the Fedora users and developers convention, or FUDCon for short.
But luck is not the biggest part of it. Rather the scholarship aims to reward up and coming contributors to open source software and specifically the Fedora Project. Applications are open through February 24 for the 2012 scholarship award. Inspiration is free.
The Unofficial Apple Weblog reported tonight that Apple took its lossless audio codec and made it open source. Apple Lossless Audio Codec (or ALAC for short) is a way to compress audio files without losing any audio quality. Uncompressed, the ALAC files match the originals exactly. This is good news because previously the exact method of the codec was not known. People have reverse-engineered so you could play ALAC files with other media software other than iTunes, but now Apple’s own reference encoder and decoder (as in, best of breed) are available to anyone. Apple posted the source code over on Mac OS Forge.
So whether you’re using foobar2000 or Rhythmbox, you’ll soon have reference decoders available. There is already FLAC, which is an open source lossless audio codec, but Apple has never opened their players–whether iTunes or iPhones–to FLAC. No worries either about format lock-in with ALAC because with the open sourcing of the codec anyone could use the posted code.
This hopefully means a lot more support for the ALAC format in both hardware or software. It also helps clarify any legalities of the codec and makes clear that Apple here is giving the codec to the community. Good work, Apple!
There were attempts by Hindu nationalists to censor the book after articles in The Daily Mail and the Wall Street Journal used the book as trying to slander Gandhi’s good name. The Indian publisher brought the book to market regardless.
Nussbaum makes the case that the book would have been stronger had the author stayed with Gandhi’s twenty-plus years in South Africa as the transformative time in Gandhi’s thinking and the author’s area of expertise. The half of the book that deals with India is less balanced in its treatment of Indian history, e.g. liberal growth in the Muslim community.
The cover story of the November issue of The Atlantic centers around the decline of marriage, the rise of independent women, and the decline of the modern American male. In the article called All the Single Ladies, Kate Bolick starts in a very personal way, relating the story of her own experiences with love and the desire to maintain independence. And throughout the article bounces back between Bolick’s personal take on marriage and the words of authors, professors, women with an opinion on the subject.
A key insight of the article is the research into societies with more males and fewer females (high-sex ratio) and those with more females and fewer males (low-sex ratio). In the high-sex ratio cultures, men revere women’s roles, and there is more marriage and less divorce. But also there comes with that a secondary aspect that women are kept more from education and the workplace. In the low-sex ratio cultures, where women outnumber the men, the men become more promiscuous. Bolick uses today’s college campuses as examples of that. With women earning 60% of the bachelor’s and master’s degrees in the U.S. in 2010, men are being increasingly marginalized.
The degree to which women are getting more education and earning higher incomes means that they are becoming less focused on the family and looking to other areas for more of their life fulfillment. And as more women are succeeding, more men are falling down the educational and economic ladders. Men are now more likely than women to just have a high-school education, and the evidence is unequivocal that without college, people earn a lot less money.
One thing to think about is, where is this all leading to? Part of the answer simply is that women used to marry up the economic ladder and are more likely to find romantic prospects with less status and less income. The successful men the author introduces anecdotally can play the field and maintain relationships with multiple women without feeling the need to commit to a single one. One aspect that the Bolick gets at is the role of race. At one time, the plight of the black family was seen as strictly a problem within the black community. But instead, what began in black households has come to white households as well. Currently, married households make up 48% of households in the U.S. More people are single both men and women.
Bolick also delves into some interesting ideas of the atomic family. The suggestion is that the so-called atomic family is purely a recent and short-lived phenomenon. The couple receives the emphasis, which coincides with lessening external ties. But in the past, both men and women maintained strong bonds with friends of their own sex. It’s like how people treat their pets in today’s world. A pet is like a family member for many people. Couple may refer to cats or dogs as “their kids.” But this devoted passion for pets is a recent phenomenon as technology lessens our normal social, communal ties.
There’s a lot to mull over in this article, and the 1,054 or so comments on the online article so far indicate that it’s something people are thinking and wondering about. So check out All the Single Ladies by Kate Bolick in November’s The Atlantic.
In 1912, an Italian named Corrado Gini published a paper that described a statistical method for showing inequality. His mathematical formula is known as the Gini coefficient. Economists use the Gini coefficient to show income inequality. The result of the equation is a real number from 0 to 1. A result of 0 means that everyone in the group, say, all adults in the U.S., has an equal income. If the result is 1, that means only one person receives all the income.
Because the Gini coefficient has been known for some time, economists have been able to track income inequality in countries over many decades. And here’s where it gets interesting, at least in respect to the U.S. Our Gini coefficient has risen since around 1980 when Ronald Reagan came into office.
In 1980, the U.S. was around 0.38 and had been around that level going back at least thirty or forty years. In the thirty or so years since then, our income inequality has been steadily heading towards 0.50. That number itself may not mean much until you compare it to other countries. We’re now at the level of income inequality of countries like Mexico and the Philippines. And that is shocking.
In simple terms, the middle class is gradually disappearing. A few people at the top are getting massively wealthier, and at the other end we have many more people living in poverty.
A recent article in the Wall Street Journal looked at how Procter & Gamble, which estimates that it has at least one product in 98% of U.S. households, is changing its product lineup due to changes in consumer demand. Superbrands like Tide laundry detergent are high quality and could be sold at a premium. But P&G found that people are leaving in droves for cheaper products. In the new economic realities, people perceive Walmart and Target high-priced, and so-called dollar stores are picking up the slack.
P&G is no longer aiming for the wide middle but is instead moving toward a two-tiered product strategy. They are increasing the number of lower cost products, and at the same time are increasing their presence at the top-end of the market. The middle class as defined as households with income between $50K and $140K a year no longer controls the market as more people shift down the income ladder.
Tip of the hat to John for the article from the WSJ.
I’ve listened to two podcasts lately that are both really great. One of them is all talk: Radiolab from NPR’s New York station WNYC. And the other one is all music: Modcast from Modular People.
Radiolab is a podcast about science, and it’s fascinating. Each show hovers over a different theme, and if you look through their archive, there’s a lot there. If you subscribe through iTunes, you can download shows from the beginning.
Radiolab was recently in the news because its host Jad Abumrad won a MacArthur “genius” grant. The show is a mix of hour-long shows and shorts. Mr. Abumrad is a great host, and if you have at least a passing interest in science, I think you’ll find something there to like.
If you’re more into the beats than science, then Modcast has a long store of great mixes. Each podcast is like a mixtape, and a different artist or producer creates each one. There is so much good music on it. You can grab the full archives on the website, but it’s probably just easier to let iTunes do all the work. Usually the mixes are beat-oriented, but there’s a wide gamut of music that fits into each mix depending on who created it. It ranges from ’70s R&B to ’80s-era Malcolm McLaren to recent beats.
Tip of the hat to Janne for showing me Radiolab and Chris for Modcast.
The 
The cover story of the November issue of 