SOPA-cking Stupid (Not to Mention Unconstitutional...)

There has been much ado about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) that was proposed in the House; mainly because it is a monumentally stupid piece of legislation. Although it's purpose is described in the bills subtitle as such:

"To promote prosperity, creativity, entrepreneurship, and innovation by combating the theft of U.S. property, and for other purposes." 

 it would actually act as a huge infringement on First Amendment rights as it is applied to the world wide web (a kind of wonky explanation, as well as links to memoranda from two leading legal scholars on the First Amendment, can be found here). The simplest argument against the legislation is that is unconstitutional because it is both overbroad and too vague; annddd you can get a taste of it on the above tagline with the uber-ominous and open-ended "[...] and for other purposes." Laws must be of a certain specificity and limited in scope so people on both sides of the law, those who are to comply with it and those that are too enforce it, know what exactly they are supposed to do and without empowering the government to enact a sweeping agenda. It is why we don't have laws saying simply "Don't do bad things," and almost every law is replete with definitions of terms in the beginning. Secondly, the bill cedes some enforcement capability to actual copy-right holders (let that sink it. Crazy right?). From the above linked article:

Coupled with this overbroad scope, the bills authorize remedies that lack the usual procedural safeguards, ensuring that even more protected, non-infringing speech will be restricted. Even though a judicial determination is generally required to remove speech from circulation, the House version empowers copyright-holders to send notices to payment processors and advertisers to shut off funding for non-infringing sites that meet the bill's broad definitions. The bills also encourage over-enforcement by making companies immune from suit for mistakenly punishing sites outside even the bills' over-expansive scope.

This is unequivocal nutbaggery. The bill essential says that a copyright-holder can have funding shut off. This cannot be used for nefarious purposes? An uninterested party should not hold this role whether it be a judge or an independent body?

The technocracy of the U.S. immediately responded by speaking out against the bill. We are talking Facebook, Google, Tumblr, Zynga, Mozilla... essentially everyone except GoDaddy and their eccentric (putting it kindly) CEO. After coming under attack from the social news website Reddit, where a broad GoDaddy protest thread led to a proposed boycott of GoDaddy. The site eventually folded to the increasing pressure and announced that it no longer supported SOPA, as well as the Senatorial version in the Protect IP act.

Inside of Congress, however, support still seems strong and there is a decent chance that a version of this disastrous act gets passed. If any of you (6 friends of mine) feel strongly against this as well, please contact your local representative in Congress and your state Senators and tell them to vote no to both SOPA and Protect IP or they lose your vote. The only thing they will strongly react to, aside from the threat of losing money from big business, is losing their position as an elected official.

Poorly Played Home Box Office...

HBO recently decided to renew their new show Enlightened, while canceling Bored to Death, Hung, and How to Make it in America. I am fairly certain that top HBO brass have deemed this "How to Kick America in the Balls: an enlightened method to bore the watching public to death until they death by hanging" (Disclaimer: this is probably not true). I like Laura Dern and all, and admittedly I never really gave that show much of a chance, but how could you re-up that while canceling Bored to Death, one of the better shows, with one of the best casts, on TV (in my humble opinion). Hung and How to Make it... were not nearly as innovative but seemed like they would appeal to a better target demographic than a middle aged female office drone who flips out in the office after an affair with a co-worker and then gets all zen.

I hope the next group of shows they have lined up strike a chord with viewers, because it seems to me that HBO has been steadily slipping as of late as Showtime and AMC continue to pickup faithful viewers (a.k.a., market share). Considering HBO's track record (or even just The Sopranos and The Wire), however, it's hard to doubt them (he said at the end of a post that is composed almost entirely with HBO doubts). Just do us all a favor and get Zach Galifianakis back on TV HBO. You owe us that much...

"Homeland"- An Apology to America for Excesses of "24"?

Homeland, Showtime's excellent new show about the possibility of an American POW(s) turned to terrorism that just ran its absolutely bananas season finale this past weekend, is brought to you, me and everyone else by the creators of 24, Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa, and seems (to me at least) to be a full throated mea culpa for the world view presented in their previous terrorism related television show. Don't get me wrong, this is not an attack on 24. I watched regularly and thought it was a delightful piece of escapism... it just presented a very binary and dark world. There was Jack Bauer and CTU on one side and then there were terrorists on the other. Something really bad would be happening in the next 24 hours if Jack Bauer did not stop it. Being under this single day time crunch, Jack might have to toss some civil liberties aside, maybe torture someone, and just get the job done. This has unfortunately been an inspiration to many Republicans, who think its legitimate to cite a fictional TV character in discussions about proper interrogation techniques.

Everyone on Homeland, however, lives in increasingly complex shades of gray. Is Sgt. Brody a patriotic hero, a terrorist, a family man, suffering from PTSD, all of the above? Is Carrie Mathison good at her job in spite of suffering from bipolar disorder or do the manic episodes drive her to be great? Abu Nazir is a terrorist, but he showed Brody compassion and went into a quiet mourning period when his son died (or did he show Brody compassion just to turn him and go quiet just to plan an immensely complicated terrorist attack taking out most of the national security apparatus using two turned Marines?). David Estes and Vice President Walden have ostensibly devoted their lives to protecting the American people, but ordered a drone strike on a school killing nearly a hundred children, including Abu Nazir's youngest son, and then covered it up in furtherance of their careers. This is without delving too much into the intertwining relationships between Brody/Mathison, Nazir/Brody, Mathison/Estes, Estes/Walden, Walden/Brody and Mathison with her mentor Saul Berenson. Nothing is as it seems and clearly divided into good and bad. 

Further, and more importantly in comparison to 24, Carrie's efforts to stop terrorist attacks on the nation do not involve torture at all. There is nary a gun to a prisoners head to be seen. Instead, she uses legal (most of the time) surveillance, legal (skirting the line, but still okay) interrogation, old fashion chasing of leads and hard work to connect the dots of why things have happened and how that indicates what is likely to happen. Even the turning of Brody indicates what type of interrogation is successful. Al Qaeda affiliates beat the hell out of him, but he doesn't turn and doesn't "talk" until he is shown kindness. In its willingness to look at the contradictions in life that make up the shades of gray, the multitude of mixed motivations for why people do what they do and its much more realistic portrayal of how terrorist attacks are investigated (or should be) and stopped, Homeland is like Gordon and Gansa taking a mulligan and promptly thwacking a hole-in-one. I cannot wait to see where this show goes next season and I can only hope that our lawmakers pay as much attention to the actions of Carrie Mathison and Saul Berenson (and learn a lesson from Walden/Estes) as they did from Mr. Jack Bauer. 

Plus, I am pretty sure that Clare Danes never attacked a Christmas tree.

NERD ALERT- Like a Rolling CERN

I'm taking artistic license on the title, so back up off me. CERN, a.k.a. the European Center for Nuclear Research, had its big reveal today on whether the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) had determined the existence, or non-existence, of the Higgs boson. And they revealed (drum roll please)... (dramatic pause to enhance excitement)... (pause/drumroll has gone on too long and now people are annoyed)... that they'd only found hints of the particle and would need another year of data to make any real determination! WOOO! The Higgs boson particle, and thus the excitement about it, is a little bit hard to explain, which is attempted with more success here, but it is essentially the smallest building block of the Higgs field which, according to the Standard Model, gives particles mass. This is disappointing for those hoping to know, either way, but there is, seemingly, a silver lining:

"Given the outstanding performance of the L.H.C. this year, we will not need to wait long for enough data and can look forward to resolving this puzzle in 2012.”

Over the last 20 years, suspicious bumps that might have been the Higgs have come and gone, and scientists cautioned that the same thing could happen again, but the fact that two rival teams using two different mammoth particle detectors had recorded similar results was considered to be good news. Physicists expect to have enough data to make the final call by the summer.

For those, like me, who geek out over this stuff, it only means that we've been thrown a cliff hanger that will bring us back in this summer. Kind of like the "Game of Thrones." That's good enough for me (at least CERN didn't pull a "The Killing"... people will probably be interested enough to come back for Higgs boson in the summer). 

NBA Players- Before They Speak, Their Suit Bespoke

Grantland has an interesting article from Wesley Morris on the "rise of the NBA nerd." In his estimation, there has been a shift in black culture that has opened up possibilities for personalities such as Kevin Durant, Amare Stoudemire and LeBron James, not to mention Kanye West or Lil Wayne, throw on clothes that would get them beat up a decade ago. I think Mr. Morris tries to get too deep with it, however. It seems to me that, more so than a broad cultural shift illustrated by Jay-Z rapping "Y'all niggas acting way too tough / Throw a suit and get it tapered up" in Changes Clothes or, as above, Kanye rapping "Before he speak, his suit bespoke," in Estelle's American Boy, this represents a smaller shift amongst young and prominent black men. The lyrics themselves reveal this; there are not broad swaths representing young black culture grabbing bespoke suits after all. More representative would be "I'm not a businessman, I'm a BUSINESS, mannn." LeBron wants to be the first billionaire athlete and he has almost as many side business interests as he has endorsement deals (he's boys with Warren Buffett for the love of god). Amare seems to be actively attempting to become an NBA fashion icon (and not in the tragic D Rodman way). K Diddy is following in LeBron's footsteps. And all these guys are just going down the trail blazed by Kanye and, first and foremost, Jay-Z (aka, "the black Warren Buffett"). All of these gentlemen are still heavily invested in their image, it's just a different image that they are trying to cultivate. Street cred has ceded way to boardroom cred. To the young, black, talented and wealthy, drug dealing and getting shot at is no longer as cool as the Wizard of Omaha... who woulda thunk it?


(IMAGES: Too many to separate, but from Google Images [natch])

From the Annals of Common Sense- Legalize It

 

 Looking at the facts objectively, the illegality of marijuana is a failed policy. The U.S. spends roughly $8 billion dollars (BILLION) on enforcing the prohibition of marijuana with 88% of arrests coming from simple possession (See this article for more information/statistics). Despite this, the regulations are having a negligible effect on the number of people who consume marijuana. Further, since there is a federal law outlawing marijuana that supersedes any state law allowing medical marijuana, and since the DEA continues to enforce it despite the White House's proclamation they would not interfere with state medical marijuana laws, many people with serious medical issues are not able to get the significant relief that marijuana provides them with. This includes increasing comfort and hunger of those receiving radiation treatment for cancer and military veterans who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). 

Not to mention the fact that prohibition of marijuana seems to come from, originally, somewhat racist motives. For example:

 Around 1915, right at the height of its popularity, cannabis was in over 100 pharmaceutical preparations and seen as a medicine extraordinaire especially for difficult to treat neuralgia. It was in the early 20th century that America discovered jazz, and jazz seems to have been born with an affinity to the good herb. Louis Armstrong, besides being one of the best Jazz musicians of all time, was a cannabis ambassador and really was the very first cannabis activist. At that time cannabis was still legal. It was available in pharmacies, of course, but also could be ordered from catalogs as Hashish Candy and was commonly passed around amongst jazz musicians as cigarettes (“muggles“).[...]

According to Dale Gieringer [2] the very first anti marijuana law was passed in California in 1913. Dr. Gieringer reports that testimony that led up to the ban included this statement from a California pharmacy official: “Within the last year we in California have been getting a large influx of Hindoos and they have in turn started quite a demand for cannabis indica; they are a very undesirable lot and the habit is growing in California very fast…”
Anti-immigrant sentiment may have started the ball rolling, but it wasn’t long until marijuana was seen as a useful weapon to put the genie of African American civil rights back into its bottle.

The policy is even more nonsensical (see what I did there?) considering the United State's current economic dire straits, since the legalization of marijuana, even if only for medical purposes at a federal level, would allow for the more careful regulation and, more importantly, taxation of marijuana. According to the Cato Institute (re-link):

The potential of the industry as a whole is frequently overlooked. Marijuana is by most estimates a more valuable commodity than corn and wheat combined, with experts estimating its annual value to be between $10 and $120 billion. The employment potential of such a market is enormous. [...] If economic stagnation continues, however, employment and tax waste will become more and more relevant in driving public support for ending Prohibition. Unfortunately, that support may have to increase dramatically before any real ground is gained.

That is a rather large spectrum that the Cato Institute is offering but, going conservative with their estimate, even if the value was only $40 billion, you would probably be looking at, roughly, a $15 billion swing to the government. This accounts for the taxes that could be established on the newly found industry as well as a little under $8 billion that would no longer have to be spent on the prohibition of marijuana (if simple possession was also decriminalized). If the government goes for full legalization (since many feel that marijuana is safer than either alcohol or cigarettes), even more could be raised with excise taxes being added on the purchase of marijuana.

Change is gonna come and the  U.S. government (C'MON Obama, we know you inhaled...) should embrace it sooner rather than later. The vast majority of Americans support medical marijuana and roughly 50% support full legalization. Why not give the people what they want and help refill the coffers/decrease unemployment? Tis a no-brainer, no? Getting ahead of public opinion policy wise (barely at that) seems much better, albeit somewhat less safe, than obstinately staying the course and allowing federalism to take its course as public opinion continues to change. Plus, everyone knows the founding fathers were all about the herb... that's just science.

David Stern- Titanic Tool of a Tyrant

Things I love: the National Basketball Association and alliteration. Things I despise: hypocrites, liars and David Stern.

As I am sure most are aware, the NBA (read: David Stern) vetoed a trade the would've sent Chris Paul to the Lakers, Pau Gasol to the Houston Rockets and Kevin Martin, Luis Scola, Lamar Odom, Goran Dragic and a 2012 First Round Draft Pick to the NoLA Hornets. NBA analysts and commenters found, universally, that this was an eminently fair trade with many saying that Dell Demps, GM of the Hornets, did a fantastic job of getting a respectable haul back for Paul. Despite this, Stern and the NBA owners, with Dan Gilbert of the Cleveland Cavs being the most vocal, decided to kill the trade for "basketball reasons" thinking that the Hornets were better served by retaining CP3 in a Hornets jersey.

There have been a lot of articles (some much better than this post) covering this, but the basic gist of all of them is that this is a load of horse shit. Other owners who have spoken out get closer to the truth; after the lockout recently ending, the NBA didn't want another NBA star to force his way out of a small market team to a team like the Lakers. Whiny school boy biatches like Gilbert threw a fit (again) and Stern, in his determined effort to destroy any legacy he might have, caved to their whims. This has created problems for every team involved with the trade and led to disgruntled players. The problem is that there is really nothing the NBA can do about preventing players from trying to dictate where they liked to play. Chris Paul has made it perfectly clear that there is absolutely no chance that he re-signs with the Hornets. Therefore, the teams options are they trade Paul for the best mix of established players and you building blocks for the future, which they accomplished in this trade, or lose him for absolutely nothing in free agency. Sure Paul's options would be limited in free agency and determined by who has enough cap room; but his options were limited in this situation. His expressed first choice, the New York Knicks, had nowhere near enough trade prospects to try and get Paul. He, therefore, was settling for the Lakers, who were taking a tremendous risk by trading a lot of size to create the best back court in the league. The trade, and the discussion regarding possible trades before it was consummated, also re-generated interest in the NBA immediately after the agony of the lockout. Just as people were forgetting about it, however, Stern reminded everyone by giving the Demps, the Lakers and the fans a giant middle finger. Additionally, he and the owners are exhibiting an epic conflict of interest as the Hornets are owned by the 29 NBA owner's collectively. I don't know about casual fans, but I'm incredibly offended by this abuse of power (and this comes from a self-avowed Laker-hater who was pissed to see them get CP3).

I do not know how Stern plans to next destroy his legacy but I'm looking forward to see what he pulls out of his ass in the way that people wait excitedly for a car accident once they hear the screeching of brakes. I fully expect, however, to see Stern walking back from this decision after some superficial changes are made to the trade. It is almost shocking to see a once prescient commish, who seemed to be 5 moves ahead at all times, become completely reactionary... but that's where we're at.

Eff you David Stern.

Image from Google Images (and probably a collection of pictures of people who look even douchier with beards. I call dibs on the rights to make that coffee table book...)

(Belated) Music Video Mondays

Because it is one of the most beautiful songs ever...