An interview with Jordan Davis's mother. The more I read about the Michael Dunn case, the more I realize the deck's stacked against black (or those perceived as black) Americans.
The internet is fucked (but we can fix it) →
Flowery language aside, this seems to be where we're heading:
In a perfect storm of corporate greed and broken government, the internet has gone from vibrant center of the new economy to burgeoning tool of economic control. Where America once had Rockefeller and Carnegie, it now has Comcast’s Brian Roberts, AT&T’s Randall Stephenson, and Verizon’s Lowell McAdam, robber barons for a new age of infrastructure monopoly built on fiber optics and kitty GIFs.
Fewer and fewer companies own more and more of the content, or communication lines across which that content flows, or both. The U.S. is already notorious amongst industrialized nations for its relatively low competition in this area. That the FCC, the one government regulator, tasked with watching out for consumers' interests in the communications industry, keeps mumbling about what it's going to do, is worrisome.
Breaking Up the NSA →
I regularly turn to Bruce Schneier for the latest on breaking security news.
The NSA has become too big and too powerful. What was supposed to be a single agency with a dual mission -- protecting the security of U.S. communications and eavesdropping on the communications of our enemies -- has become unbalanced in the post-Cold War, all-terrorism-all-the-time era.
I'd argue that many of the problems with the NSA were there well before the GWOT, though they have been exacerbated since (along with those in every other intelligence/security agency).
Broadly speaking, three types of NSA surveillance programs were exposed by the documents released by Edward Snowden. And while the media tends to lump them together, understanding their differences is critical to understanding how to divide up the NSA's missions...
Breaking up the NSA will certainly cause problems, but it sounds pragmatic, especially given "[t]hat the NSA can, in the view of many, do an end-run around congressional oversight, legal due process and domestic laws..." vis a vis domestic surveillance.
'Desert Inhabited by Nomads' →
IN my quest to gain all knowledge of what's going on in the world and why a great essay:
Mauritania has been overlooked for a variety of reasons that began even before the country achieved its independence from France. The country’s history of an altered social structure produced by colonialism and the consequent social tensions that this brought about along ethnic and tribal lines during the period following independence bears watching as an overlooked case study of the challenges that many states in the region faced following independence. The state looked to religion as a unifying force, but relied increasingly on a pan-Arabist outlook premised on the exclusion of the Afro-Mauritanians who were the very inhabitants who had experienced favoritism under French colonialism. Later, Mauritania’s period of limited liberalization, and the subsequent history following the abortive democratic transition in the mid 2000s, merits observation because it echoes – and has sometimes presaged – well-covered events elsewhere in the region, along with particularities unique to Mauritania.
#LaSalida? Venezuela at a Crossroads →
The best writeup I've seen so far on events in Venezuela, the first in this list of links. Contrary to most reporting:
...But where are the protests headed? From the beginning, the numbers have not been particularly impressive by Venezuelan standards, and certainly far fewer than the opposition is capable of mustering. But more problematic for the opposition is the makeup of the protesters and the very predictable geography of the protests, largely confined to the wealthiest neighborhoods. Even the ferociously anti-Chavista blogger Francisco Toro of Caracas Chronicles put it bluntly: “Middle class protests in middle class areas on middle class themes by middle class people are not a challenge to the Chavista power system.”
Yanukovych’s gamble and Kiev’s burning →
Good analysis on the what's happening in Ukraine.
Roots of Bosnian Protests Lie in Peace Accords of 1995 →
In my endless effort to learn more about the rest of the world:
Ethnic divisions fueled almost four years of war in the 1990s. Today, if there is one thing that unites many of Bosnia’s 3.8 million people — Bosniaks (or Muslims), Serbs and Croats — it is their disgust with the hydra-headed presidency and multiple layers of government that developed to appease the nationalist sentiments of all sides. But the terms of the accords were in time supposed to be replaced by a more streamlined system. They were never supposed to remain in force this long.
On The Killing Of Jordan Davis By Michael Dunn →
Spare us the invocations of "black on black crime." I will not respect the lie. I would rather be thought insane. The most mendacious phrase in the American language is "black on black crime," which is uttered as though the same hands that drew red lines around the ghettoes of Chicago are not the same hands that drew red lines around the life of Jordan Davis, as though black people authored North Lawndale and policy does not exist...