We Speak For Earth

WTFrack?!

Honestly, what on earth is the argument for giving subsidies to companies netting millions and billions in profits? (Let alone oil companies?!)

Seriously, could someone explain this to me?!

“Bully,” Lee Hirsch’s moving and troubling documentary about the misery some children inflict upon others, arrives at a moment when bullying, long tolerated as a fact of life, is being redefined as a social problem. “Just kids being kids” can no longer be an acceptable response to the kind of sustained physical and emotional abuse that damages the lives of young people whose only sin is appearing weak or weird to their peers.

And while the film focuses on the specific struggles of five families in four states, it is also about — and part of — the emergence of a movement. It documents a shift in consciousness of the kind that occurs when isolated, oppressed individuals discover that they are not alone and begin the difficult work of altering intolerable conditions widely regarded as normal.

The feeling of aloneness is one of the most painful consequences of bullying. It is also, in some ways, a cause of it, since it is almost always socially isolated children (the new kid, the fat kid, the gay kid, the strange kid) who are singled out for mistreatment. For some reason — for any number of reasons that hover unspoken around the edges of Mr. Hirsch’s inquiry — adults often fail to protect their vulnerable charges. […]

But while we are on the subject of adult failures, it should be noted that the Motion Picture Association of America’s ratings board, by insisting on an R rating for “Bully,” has made it harder for young audiences to see. The Weinstein Company, which is distributing the film, has released it without a rating after the association denied its appeal and after a widely publicized petition drive was unable to change the board’s mind.

There is a little swearing in the movie, and a lot of upsetting stuff, but while some of it may shock parents, very little of it is likely to surprise their school-age children. Whose sensitivity does the association suppose it is protecting? The answer is nobody’s: That organization, like the panicked educators in the film itself, holds fast to its rigid, myopic policies to preserve its own authority. The members of the ratings board perform a useful function, but this is not the first time they’ve politicianed us.

This looks like an interesting documentary and I’m really fascinated by this transition, as I bolded above, of treating bullying as a ‘sad fact of life’ to a social problem to be addressed.

socialuprooting:

Lasts from 3 pm (or the time of this posting) to 6 pm. 

usagov:

Through the National Mortgage Settlement, the country’s five biggest mortgage servicers must commit about $25 billion in relief to individuals and governments because they broke the law in how they managed home loans.

It will take time to figure out which individuals are eligible for help from…

Of interest…

climateadaptation:

“During his presidential campaign, Barack Obama promised to “create a centralized Internet database of lobbying reports, ethics records and campaign finance filings in a searchable, sortable and downloadable format.” Last week, President Obama fulfilled that promise with the rollout of Ethics.gov, which “brings records and data from across the federal government to one central location, making it easier for citizens to hold public officials accountable.”

Ethics.gov is available to the public and allows anyone to access and search the records of seven different databases:

• White House Visitor Records;

• Office of Government Ethics Travel Reports;

• Lobbying Disclosure Act Data;

• Department of Justice Foreign Agents Registration Act Data;

• Federal Election Commission Individual Contribution Reports;

• Federal Election Commission Candidate Reports; and

• Federal Election Commission Committee Reports.

According to a White House press release, the database includes millions of White House visitor records, records for entities registered with the Federal Election Commission such as PACs, records for each candidate who has either registered with the FEC or appeared on a ballot list prepared by a state elections office, lobbying registrations, and much more.

On his Sunlight Foundation blog, John Wonderlich, who is Policy Director for the Sunlight Foundation and an advocate for open government, wrote that while Ethics.gov fulfilled the president’s pledge, “neither money and politics research nor executive branch oversight are going to be revolutionized by this search page — at least not yet.” He added that while it will not happen immediately, the site could become a primary destination for investigative journalists or ethics officials.”

More here and here.

Of interest…

This is a quite shocking and moving read, and yet, ordinary.

I found it quite upsetting, perhaps more-so since I saw a woman being harassed on the bus the other night. I’m a bit ashamed that I didn’t step in. I think I was partially in shock, and it all probably took less than a minute - though it felt like hours. When I was leaving the bus, I seriously contemplated apologizing to the woman, on behalf of all men, to say something like “we’re not all…” But I didn’t. I didn’t want to disturb her, she seemed so absorbed in her anger and sadness.

For a long time I’ve wondered how some men can do such barbaric, sexist stuff. It’s just beyond me. I don’t understand how this still survives in modern times in modern places. I’m realizing though that it’s not enough to disdain such people. If this pains your conscience, you have to help it stop. How you do that is up to you. It could be wearing a button, talking to coworkers, stepping up for someone on the bus, or just writing a tumblr post. But we can’t just let this continue. If we want to see change, if we know things have to change, we have to be part of it.

statedept:

Ronan Farrow, Special Adviser for Global Youth Issues, will hold a conversation with Nancy Lublin, CEO, DoSomething.org, on Global Youth Issues. The discussion will be moderated by Cheryl Benton, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs, and will be available for on demand viewing soon on DipNote, the U.S. Department of State’s official blog.

You are invited to participate by submitting questions, some of which will be selected for response during the broadcast. Submit your questions on DipNote, and join the ongoing discussion via Twitter using the hashtag #GlobalYouth. Please submit questions via DipNote and Twitter today for consideration.

Through Conversations with America, leaders of national nongovernmental organizations have the opportunity to discuss foreign policy and global issues with senior State Department officials. These conversations aim to provide candid views of the ways in which leaders from the foreign affairs community are engaging the Department on pressing foreign policy issues.

View other Conversations with America here and by accessing the Conversations with America video podcasts on iTunes.

If I was a “youth,” I’d probably ask something like: What is being done to ensure the planet we inherit isn’t an environmental wasteland? #GlobalYouth

I honestly can’t think of a more pressing global, youth issue.

rockyanderson2012:

Last Thursday, Attorney General Eric Holder enacted guidelines that further expand the US government’s asserted powers to collect and store private information, without a warrant, concerning individuals who are not suspected of any crime.

The guidelines constitute a further step by the Obama administration to expand and entrench unconstitutional spying operations on the American people by all levels of government that were spearheaded by the Bush administration.

In the period since September 11, 2001, the US government has secretly compiled vast databases containing private information on the American public. These databases include telephone conversations, the contents of personal emails, visited web sites, Google searches, text messages, credit card transactions, mobile phone GPS location data, travel itineraries, Facebook activity, medical records, traffic tickets, surveillance camera footage and online purchases. The vast quantities of information that are being collected and stored by the US government far exceed what was gathered by the most infamous police states of the last century.

Holder’s guidelines permit intelligence officials to secretly use these databases to profile and track Americans who have no connection to terrorism—alleged or otherwise—for up to five years. The previous guidelines, issued in 2008 by Bush administration Attorney General Michael Mukasey, were understood to limit the retention of such information to 180 days.

According to an article Friday in the New York Times, the new guidelines are expected to result in increased collection and “data mining” of information on ordinary Americans by the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC).

The Electronic Privacy Information Center issued a brief statement denouncing the guidelines: “The change represents a dramatic expansion of government surveillance and appears to violate the Privacy Act of 1974, which limits data exchanges across federal agencies and establishes legal rights for US citizens.”

The guidelines, which are couched in military, legal and intelligence jargon, were drafted in secret and not made available for public comment before they were enacted. In addition to Holder, National Counterterrorism Center Director Matthew G. Olsen and Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper, Jr. signed the guidelines.

The new guidelines must be understood as part of a vast escalation of domestic surveillance being undertaken by the Obama administration. According to a report last week in Wired magazine, the Obama administration is constructing a secret facility of unprecedented size in Bluffdale, Utah to store and process all of the information it is presently gathering about Americans. The new data center is conceived as a central hub that will link to National Security Agency (NSA) electronic eavesdropping facilities that are already operating around the country. “The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013,” the report stated.

“Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails―parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital ‘pocket litter,’” the article reported.

[…]

Also revealed last week were Department of Homeland Security (DHS) internal manuals for agents in the department’s Media Monitoring Capability program. The manuals were ordered released pursuant to a Freedom of Information Act request. These manuals make clear that the agency has been closely monitoring political discussions and activity on social media sites such as Facebook. The manual identifies as “items of interest” warranting investigation any activity on social media sites concerning “policy directives, debates and implementations related to DHS.”

The escalation of domestic surveillance by the Obama administration is one aspect of the disintegration of American democracy. On December 31 of last year, Obama signed the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act, which gives intelligence agencies and the military the power to abduct any person, anywhere in the world, including US citizens, and imprison him or her indefinitely in a facility such as the one located at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The NDAA was followed by Holder’s speech earlier this month asserting the power of the president to unilaterally assassinate US citizens without any kind of judicial process whatsoever. The pseudo-legal arguments advanced by the Obama administration in support of these measures exceed the most authoritarian presumptions of the Bush administration.

These unprecedented attacks on democratic rights, in which the entire political establishment and both Democrats and Republicans are participating, must be understood as preemptive preparations by the political establishment to meet the coming social upheavals with police state measures.