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Javier E

Silicon Valley Roused by Secession Call - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-roused-by-secession-call.html

libertarian utopianism tech silicon valley secession

shared by Javier E on 29 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • a speech this month by a Stanford University lecturer and entrepreneur named Balaji S. Srinivasan. The speech gained attention in technology circles. But it deserves a wider audience, because it was an unusually honest articulation of ideas that are common among members of a digital overclass whose decisions shape ever more of our lives.
  • told a group of young entrepreneurs that the United States had become “the Microsoft of nations”: outdated and obsolescent. When technology companies calcify, Mr. Srinivasan said, you don’t reform them. You exit and launch your own. Why not do so with America?
  • In practice, this vision calls for building actual communities that would be beyond the reach of the state that Silicon Valley’s libertarians despise. But in the near term, Mr. Srinivasan noted, there are piecemeal ways to opt out of the society — like spending unregulated digital currency, sleeping in unregulated hotels and manufacturing unregulated guns. What Mr. Srinivasan called “Silicon Valley’s ultimate exit,” he explained, “basically means build an opt-in society, ultimately outside the United States, run by technology.”
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  • Nicholas Carr, author of “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains,” said the speech was part of “a resurgence of millenarian thinking in Silicon Valley.” The dream of an extra-societal utopia grows in part out of a “naïve libertarianism” ascendant in the Valley, and in part out of older American cultist traditions dating as far back as the Pilgrims, he said.
  • Mr. Srinivasan cast entrepreneurs as a persecuted people who must flee to survive. The Valley, he argued, is taking over the rest of America’s traditional raisons d’être. Netflix and iTunes challenge Hollywood. Twitter and blogs challenge New York media. The Khan Academy and Coursera challenge Boston’s universities. Uber and Airbnb challenge the regulatory state personified by Washington.
  • His proposed solution is seceding from the society before the “backlash” against the Valley grows.
  • Some of the biggest names in the Valley have variously proposed building a Mars colony, an unregulated zone of experimentation on Earth or floating libertarian islands at sea.
  • “The best part is this,” he said. “The people who think this is weird, the people who sneer at the frontier, who hate technology — they won’t follow you out there.”
Javier E

ZPM Espresso and the Rage of the Jilted Crowdfunder - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...of-the-jilted-crowdfunder.html

crowdsourcing startup financing

shared by Javier E on 02 May 15 - No Cached
  • The rancor is due, perhaps, to a fundamental confusion about what crowdfunding really is. On one hand, a backer is not a customer, because the product does not exist yet and may never
  • On the other hand, though, neither is a backer an investor, even if many of ZPM’s backers insisted they be treated as such. A Kickstarter pledge does not buy a portion of a company. Backers do not sit on the board; they are not enfranchised to review the company’s audited financials. Investors’ interests, at least ideally, are aligned with those of the company, whereas nothing in the crowdfunding relationship ties a backer to the company for the long term. Moreover, the last thing Kickstarter wants to deal with is S.E.C. regulations.
  • Kickstarter’s founders hardly imagined that a situation like this would arise. Neither was a technologist — Perry Chen, now 38, was an artist and gallerist, and Yancey Strickler, 36, was a music journalist — and although several of their recent hires have engineering backgrounds, they continue to see Kickstarter as something of an arts institution
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  • Projects like the Oculus Rift virtual-reality headset or the Pebble watch (both of which were Kickstarter successes that went on to become big independent businesses; the former was acquired last year by Facebook for $2 billion) course with a special energy that derives from the exchange of far-flung resources among the sympathetic and like-minded. The realized object takes on a kind of totemic significance through the aspirations and the values of the community that brought it into being
  • Until last October, Kickstarter’s terms of use stipulated that project creators had only two options to discharge their obligations: ship or refund
  • Today, in response to situations like ZPM’s, creators can refund, ship or explain, and if a full audit — financial or narrative — shows that the creators have made “every reasonable effort” toward a decent outcome, the backers are encouraged to feel satisfied. Strickler told me he feels it undermines the whole concept of crowdfunding to guarantee that products will be delivered or that refund money will be held in escrow; the acceptance of some risk, after all, is an integral part of patronage
  • Ethan Mollick, who has published several papers on crowdfunding, has found that more than 80 percent of hardware projects ship with significant delays. Most of those do ultimately deliver something, but Mollick has found that 14 percent of the projects studied have, since 2012, shipped either nothing at all or something too shoddy to use
  • If backers lack an absolute right to a product, and their legal options are limited, the policy only heightens their feeling of entitlement to full disclosure. “I long ago gave up on getting a machine, but I want my $250 of information,”
  • A chief tenet of the Internet age is belief in the natural proliferation of democracy and decentralization, in the ability of distributed networks of everyday people to achieve what once required top-down hierarchies and a great concentration of power. When you contribute to a Kickstarter campaign that funds an album or a documentary, you’re participating in the creation of cultural value outside the risk-averse bureaucracies of mass cultural production. You’re kicking in to cut out the middlemen of music labels or Hollywood studios.
  • it wasn’t until 2010, when the founders were faced with an iPhone tripod proposal, that they had to decide if such commercial projects qualified as “creative” in the way they intended. As Strickler remembers it, the tripod’s creators responded that their particular tools happened to be injection molding and AutoCAD software, but that their enterprise was absolutely in the spirit of the platform. Kickstarter agreed to host the project, but that decision inspired a sustained effort to shape best practices for gadget campaigns. Its new rules included a requirement that there be a working prototype, and a prohibition on fancy computer renderings
  • At the same time, like all 21st-century consumers, Kickstarter backers have been trained to expect a world custom-engineered for total frictionlessness. Everything is supposed to work easily, right away and well. O
  • manufacturing remains a supremely difficult process, the success of which continues to rely on marshaling a lot of resources: development money, an extensive network of trusted vendors, the dedicated personnel to sit in conference rooms in concrete campuses in Shenzhen and Dongguan and refuse to budge until the product is streaming off the assembly line in the right amounts, at the right quality and at the agreed-upon price.
  • the advice became overwhelming. “They’re doing it on their own schedule, nights and weekends, taking up a huge amount of Igor’s time when he’s got a ton of work to do,” she said. “People got insulted because they couldn’t be involved as much as they wanted.”
  • The ongoing calls for transparency put pressure on ZPM to carry on all of its business in public, but transparency and efficacy can be incommensurable ideals. ZPM couldn’t blame its vendors in updates, even for the mistakes they were consistently making, if the company wanted to keep working with them — or with anyone at all. The backers had a hard time understanding this; they continued to operate under the shared assumption that more demo­cracy, more engagement and more transparency lead inexorably to more success.
  • ZPM also could not publish a full financial audit, because open books make meaningful cost negotiation impossible. “I just can’t publish our financials, our cost breakdown,” Tambasco said. “If I do that then when I go to get this thing made, then everybody knows how much I have in the bank. Then what they’re going to do is just drain that money.”Which is exactly what happened.
  • When one of those consultants demanded, in the spring of 2014, that the project act like a “real start-up” and go into what people in Silicon Valley often call “stealth mode,” the updates came to an abrupt halt. The founders hoped that by posting their email addresses and phone numbers, and offering to field queries and complaints in person, they might assuage the backer community, but this plan, in hindsight, seemed misbegotten. It only confirmed for the backers that their one plank of accountability — the public nature of the story on offer — had been withdrawn.
  • the reality of ZPM’s failure was pretty banal: The founders were naïve and inexperienced, well intentioned but clumsy, and they serially trusted and paid the wrong people for ineffective help.
  • The backers suspected that Polyakov would try to sell the intellectual property and pocket the proceeds, but in fact Polyakov’s total asking price for the company was $35,000 to settle the founders’ legal and professional debts, equity consideration for their angel investors and, most important, a guarantee that Buckman would honor ZPM’s commitment to its backers.
Javier E

Understanding The Permanence Of Greater Israel « The Dish - 1 views

dish.andrewsullivan.com/...e-permanence-of-greater-israel

israel war netanyahu moral equivalence hamas

shared by Javier E on 01 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • Jeffrey Goldberg, has been busy pondering why Hamas has sent hundreds of rockets – with no fatalities – into Israel. He argues that it does this in order to kill Palestinians. It’s an arresting idea, and it helps perpetuate the notion that there are no depths to which these Islamist fanatics and war criminals will not sink.
  • nihilist and futile war crime is all that Hamas has really got left.
  • for all the talk of aggression on both sides, no serious equivalence in capabilities between Hamas and the IDF. The IDF has the firepower to level Gaza to the ground if it really wants to. Hamas, if it’s lucky, might get a rocket near a town or city. I suppose Israel’s reluctance just to raze Gaza for good and all is why John McCain marveled that in a war where one side has had more than 170 fatalities, 1,200 casualties, 80 percent of whom are civilians, and the other side has no fatalities and a handful of injuries, Israel has somehow practiced restraint. One wonders what no restraint would mean.
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  • as if to balance Hamas’s blame for every single death in the conflict, Goldblog feels the need to chide the Israeli prime minister for his “mistake” in having utter contempt for any two-state solution. “Mistake” is an interesting word to use. It implies a relatively minor slip-up, a miscalculation, a foolish divergence from sanity. But it is perfectly clear to anyone not always finding excuses for the Israeli government that Netanyahu wasn’t making a mistake. He was simply reiterating his longstanding view that Israel will never, ever allow a sovereign Palestinian state to co-exist as a neighbor. And unless you understand that, nothing he has done since taking office makes any sense at all. Everything he has said and done presupposes permanent Greater Israel. And he is not some outlier. Israel’s entire political center of gravity is now firmly where Netanyahu is. The rank failure of the peace process simply underlines this fact. As do half a million Jewish settlers and religious fanatics on the West Bank.
  • Since the whole idea of a two-state solution is as dead as the infamous parrot, why on earth are Americans still pursuing it? I think because many want Israel to be other than what it plainly is. They understand that this project of a bi-national state with Jim Crow segregation and disenfranchisement is a horrible fate. Jeffrey is as eloquent on this today as he has ever been: If Netanyahu has convinced himself that a Palestinian state is an impossibility, then he has no choice but to accept the idea that the status quo eventually brings him to binationalism, either in its Jim Crow form—Palestinians absorbed into Israel, except without full voting rights—or its end-of-Israel-as-a-Jewish-state form, in which the two warring populations, Jewish and Arab, are combined into a single political entity, with chaos to predictably ensue. But this is clearly the reality. The Obama administration was the last hope for some kind of agreement, and the Israelis have told the president to go fuck himself on so many occasions the very thought of accommodation is preposterous. With the acceleration of the settlements, and the ever-rising racism and religious fundamentalism in Israel itself, this is what Israel now is.
  • This is what really put Israel’s occupation and settlement of the West Bank in perspective for me: Israel has possessed the West Bank for almost precisely the same proportion of its national existence as the United States has possessed Texas and California. About seven-tenths
  • the United States would first have to become an existentially different nation before it would even consider peaceably permitting California and Texas to leave the union. Just so with Israel
  • Despite protestations otherwise, possession of the West Bank has become a fundamental and existential part of the character of Israeli nationhood. Possession of the West Bank is not temporary, it is not contingent, and it is not an exception to the general rule of the character of Israeli nationhood. Occupation and settlement are as central to the Israeli nation, its politics and culture, as burritos, Hollywood, and Sunbelt conservatism are to American politics, culture, and national identity.
  • It also helps distract from the fact that Hamas itself did not kill the three Israeli teens which was the casus belli for the latest Israeli swoop through the West Bank; that Netanyahu had called for generalized revenge in the wake of the killings, while concealing the fact that the teens had been murdered almost as soon as they had been captured; and that Israeli public hysteria, tapping into the Gilad-like trauma of captivity, then began to spawn increasingly ugly, sectarian and racist acts of revenge and brutality.
Javier E

Koch Brothers' Budget of $889 Million for 2016 Is on Par With Both Parties' Spending - ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-million-on-2016-campaign.html

campaign financing election GOP spending rich plutocracy

shared by Javier E on 27 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • The political network overseen by the conservative billionaires Charles G. and David H. Koch plans to spend close to $900 million on the 2016 campaign, an unparalleled effort by coordinated outside groups to shape a presidential election that is already on track to be the most expensive in history.
  • In the last presidential election, the Republican National Committee and the party’s two congressional campaign committees spent a total of $657 million.
  • The $889 million spending goal for 2016 would put it on track to spend nearly as much as the campaigns of each party’s presidential nominee.
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  • Now the Kochs’ network will embark on its largest drive ever to influence legislation and campaigns across the country, leveraging Republican control of Congress and the party’s dominance of state capitols to push for deregulation, tax cuts and smaller government.
  • While almost no Republican Party leaders were invited to the Koch event, it has become a coveted invitation for the party’s rising stars, for whom the gathered billionaires and multimillionaires are a potential source of financing for campaigns and super PACs
  • “It’s no wonder the candidates show up when the Koch brothers call,” said David Axelrod, a former senior adviser to Mr. Obama. “That’s exponentially more money than any party organization will spend. In many ways, they have superseded the party.”
  • At least five potential presidential candidates were invited this year, and four attended, including Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin. On Sunday evening, three of them — Senators Marco Rubio of Florida, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Ted Cruz of Texas
  • The Kochs are longtime opponents of campaign disclosure laws. Unlike the parties, their network is constructed chiefly of nonprofit groups that are not required to reveal donors.
  • As the three senators addressed the audience of rich donors — effectively an audition for the 2016 primary — they dismissed a question about whether the wealthy had too much influence in politics. At times they seemed to be addressing an audience of two: the Kochs themselves, now among the country’s most influential conservative power brokers.
  • Mr. Cruz gave an impassioned defense of his hosts as job creators and the victims of unfair attacks by Democrats, while Mr. Rubio suggested that only liberals supported campaign finance restrictions, so as to empower what he said were their allies in Hollywood and the news media.
Javier E

Biggest Scorer in World Cup? Maybe Univision - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...world-cup-maybe-univision.html

TV channel spanish

shared by Javier E on 13 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • During a private equity boom in 2007, his group acquired Univision for $13.7 billion in a bidding war orchestrated by the company’s largest shareholder and former chairman, A. Jerrold Perenchio. Mr. Perenchio, a onetime Hollywood agent, saw the potential of Spanish-language television in 1992, when he bought Univision for just $500 million.
  • Univision, which was started in 1955 as a local San Antonio TV station, is now a sprawling media empire based in New York, reaching nearly 100 million television households across the United States.
  • “We’re seen as a Spanish-language broadcaster that mostly competes with Telemundo,” the company’s chief executive, Randy Falco, said. “But in my view, we should be competing with the English-language networks because increasingly we will have an audience that will surpass them.”
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  • Mr. Ramos is also a co-host of Univision’s nightly news program, “Noticiero Univision,” which averages about two million viewers a night, a modest number compared with those of the Big Three English-language networks — but one that dwarfs those of cable news shows like CNN’s “The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer” or MSNBC’s “Politics Nation.”
  • the number of eligible Hispanic voters in 2016 will total 27.7 million, a 17 percent increase from 2012. “From the numbers that we have, we see 800,000 Latino kids turning 18 every year,”
Javier E

Megan McArdle - Authors - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/megan-mcardle

finance banking fee

shared by Javier E on 25 Mar 15 - Cached
  • Steve Pearlstein has a piece on bank compensation that points out something that I took on last year:  the absurdly high fees that investment banks charge to do deals. 
  • What we want to know is, why? Unless you know that, any project to put an end to these excess profits will stall out. 
  • There are standard answers that I find implausible, like "oligopoly".  Or rather, saying that they have a cosy anti-competitive club simply restates the question; it doesn't actually answer it.  Oligopolies aren't particularly stable--the Big Three persisted for so long arguably only because the UAW kept them from competing on labor costs. 
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  • Explanations I do find plausible, or maybe plausible:1.  The sums are so large and the stakes so huge that it doesn't make any sense to shop on price  This is what I focused on in my article.  Think of an IPO as the biggest, most expensive wedding ever planned, and you can perhaps grasp some of the price insensitivity.
  • 4.  The losses on the fees are too small for any one person to care This is a special case of number 1. 4% of an IPO is a lot of money in absolute terms.  But to whom is it a lot of money?  Not to the management, who are not going to risk millions over 4%.  Not to the stockholders, who do not care that much whether they pay $400 or $416 for their shares. 
  • it will probably persist for quite some time.  Individual markets will become more and more efficient as the assets are better understood--stocks used to be risky and complicated, and now they're mundane.  But finance as a whole, like Hollywood and professional sports, will continue to offer many opportunities to become obscenely wealthy.
katyshannon

E.P.A. Broke Law With Social Media Push for Water Rule, Auditor Finds - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-water-rule-auditor-finds.html

water social media push law rule lobbying auditor new york times epa clean obama politics US

shared by katyshannon on 15 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • WASHINGTON — The Environmental Protection Agency engaged in “covert propaganda” and violated federal law when it blitzed social media to urge the public to back an Obama administration rule intended to better protect the nation’s streams and surface waters, congressional auditors have concluded. From Our Advertisers .story-link { position: relative; display: block; text-decoration: none; padding: 6px 0; min-height: 65px; min-width: 300px; } .story-link:hover { background-color: #eeeeec; } .story-kicker, .story-heading, .summary { margin: 0; padding: 0; } .thumb { position: absolute; left: 0; top: 6px; } .thumb-hover, .story-link:hover .thumb-main { display: none } .thumb-main, .story-link:hover .thumb-hover { display: block } .story-body { padding-left: 75px; font-family: 'Source Sans Pro', sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 16px; font-weight: 400; color: #000; } .story-body .story-kicker { font-family: 'nyt-franklin', arial, helvetica, sans-serif; text-transform: uppercase; font-size: 11px; line-height: 11px; font-weight: 400; color: #5caaf3; } .story-heading { font-size: 13px; line-height: 16px; font-weight: 700; padding: 5px 0 0; } Bill &amp; Melinda Gates Foundation Changing Charity Younger donors are finding new ways to give. <noscript class=&quot;MOAT-nytdfp348531439194?moatClientLevel1=31074278&amp;amp;moatClientLevel2=343740158&amp;amp;moatClientLevel3=58584518&amp;amp;moatClientLevel4=94015704638&amp;amp;moatClientSlicer1=28390358&amp;amp;moatClientSlicer2=30706478&amp;amp;zMoatPR=n
  • The ruling by the Government Accountability Office, which opened its investigation after a report on the agency’s practices in The New York Times, drew a bright line for federal agencies experimenting with social media about the perils of going too far to push a cause. Federal laws prohibit agencies from engaging in lobbying and propaganda.
  • An E.P.A. official on Tuesday disputed the finding. “We use social media tools just like all organizations to stay connected and inform people across the country about our activities,” Liz Purchia, an agency spokeswoman, said in a statement. “At no point did the E.P.A. encourage the public to contact Congress or any state legislature.”
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  • But the legal opinion emerged just as Republican leaders moved to block the so-called Waters of the United States clean-water rule through an amendment to the enormous spending bill expected to pass in Congress this week. While the G.A.O.’s findings are unlikely to lead to civil or criminal penalties, they do offer Republicans a cudgel for this week’s showdown.
  • The E.P.A. rolled out a social media campaign on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and even on more innovative tools such as Thunderclap, to counter opposition to its water rule, which effectively restricts how land near certain surface waters can be used. The agency said the rule would prevent pollution in drinking water sources. Farmers, business groups and Republicans have called the rule a flagrant case of government overreach.
  • The publicity campaign was part of a broader effort by the Obama administration to counter critics of its policies through social media tools, communicating directly with Americans and bypassing traditional news organizations.
  • At the White House, top aides to President Obama have formed the Office of Digital Strategy, which promotes his agenda on Twitter, Facebook, Medium and other social sites. Shailagh Murray, a senior adviser to the president, is charged in part with expanding Mr. Obama’s presence in that online world.
  • White House officials declined to say if they think Mr. Reynolds or other agency officials did anything wrong.
  • Federal agencies are allowed to promote their own policies, but are not allowed to engage in propaganda, defined as covert activity intended to influence the American public. They also are not allowed to use federal resources to conduct so-called grass-roots lobbying — urging the American public to contact Congress to take a certain kind of action on pending legislation.
  • As it promoted the Waters of the United States rule, also known as the Clean Water Rule, the E.P.A. violated both of those prohibitions, a 26-page legal opinion signed by Susan A. Poling, the general counsel to the G.A.O., concluded in an investigation requested by the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works.
Javier E

History News Network | This Is What Oliver Stone's Movie About Nixon Got Right - 0 views

historynewsnetwork.org/...161187

nixon movie history politics

shared by Javier E on 17 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • When a Hollywood filmmaker portrays a famous figure from the past, critics often express outrage over the portrayal. They denounce the filmmaker for taking too many artistic liberties and distorting the historical record. Oliver Stone came under that kind of attack in 1995 when he released Nixon, a dark and disturbing portrayal featuring actor Anthony Hopkins as President Richard M. Nixon.
  • In the years following Watergate, Richard Nixon worked assiduously to improve his public image. To a considerable degree, he succeeded in shaping a revised perspective on his place in history. By 1995, many Americans remembered Richard Nixon as the architect of bold foreign policies and as a surprisingly liberal leader in domestic affairs, exemplified by his support of environmental reforms.
  • In view of the late President’s improved standing since his embarrassing resignation, Oliver Stone’s movie struck many viewers as heavy-handed and disrespectful.
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  • So much information has come out since 1995 about Richard Nixon’s responsibility for criminal conspiracies, expanding death and destruction unnecessarily in the Vietnam War, and much more, that Rutgers historian David Greenberg concluded the new evidence renders “the pro-Nixon hagiography of yesteryear a musty artifact.
  • Several important books resulted, analyses that describe a duplicitous politician. Kenneth Hughes’s Chasing Shadows describes Nixon’s interference in President Lyndon Johnson’s negotiations with North Vietnam shortly before the 1968 presidential election. The Nixon Tapes, edited and discussed by Douglas Brinkley (Rice University) and Luke A. Nichter (Texas A &amp; M University – Central Texas) shows diverse examples of mischief at the White House, and One Man Against the World by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Tim Weiner connects much of the President’s lying and criminal behavior to his struggles with the Vietnam War.
  • Some of the most intriguing evidence about Richard Nixon that fortifies Oliver Stone’s portrayal can be found in Bob Woodward’s recent book, The Last of the President’s Men. That publication is based on lengthy interviews with Alexander Butterfield, a Nixon aide
  • Butterfield characterizes the Nixon White House as “a cesspool.” He reports that the President encouraged sycophants to attack “enemies” (politicians, print and television journalists, and antiwar protesters, among others). Alexander Butterfield describes Nixon’s efforts to remove the “infestation” of portraits of John F. Kennedy in the staff’s offices (which backs up Stone’s speculation about the President’s obsession with the Kennedys). As for drinking and swearing, evidence from Butterfield and other sources indicates that the President was much more engaged in these excesses than biographer Stephen Ambrose recognized
  • Woodward said the recordings “depict a White House full of lies, chaos, distrust, speculation, self-protection, maneuver and counter-maneuver, with a crookedness that makes Netflix’s ‘House of Cards’ look unsophisticated.”
katyshannon

Drug C.E.O. Martin Shkreli Arrested on Fraud Charges - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...shkreli-fraud-charges.html

martin arrested fraud charges new york times US

shared by katyshannon on 18 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • It has been a busy week for Martin Shkreli, the flamboyant businessman at the center of the drug industry’s price-gouging scandals. From Our Advertisers quot;frameC
  • He said he would sharply increase the cost of a drug used to treat a potentially deadly parasitic infection. He called himself “the world’s most eligible bachelor” on Twitter and railed against critics in a live-streaming YouTube video. After reportedly paying $2 million for a rare Wu-Tang Clan album, he goaded a member of the hip-hop group to “show me some respect.”
  • Then, at 6 a.m. Thursday, F.B.I. agents arrested Mr. Shkreli, 32, at his Murray Hill apartment. He was arraigned in Federal District Court in Brooklyn on securities fraud and wire fraud charges.
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  • In a statement, a spokesman for Mr. Shkreli said he was confident that he would be cleared of all charges.
  • Mr. Shkreli has emerged as a symbol of pharmaceutical greed for acquiring a decades-old drug used to treat an infection that can be devastating for babies and people with AIDS and, overnight, raising the price to $750 a pill from $13.50. His only mistake, he later conceded, was not raising the price more.
  • Those price increases combined with Mr. Shkreli’s jeering response to his critics has made him a lightning rod for public outrage and fodder for the presidential campaign. His company, Turing Pharmaceuticals, and others, like Valeant Pharmaceuticals, have come under fire from lawmakers and consumers for profiting from steep price increases for old drugs.
  • But the criminal charges brought against him actually relate to something else entirely — his time as a hedge fund manager and when he ran his first biopharmaceutical company, Retrophin.
  • Still, for many of his critics, Mr. Shkreli’s arrest was a comeuppance for the brash executive who has seemed to enjoy — relish, even — his public notoriety. On Thursday, a satirical New Yorker column by the humorist Andy Borowitz said Mr. Shkreli’s lawyers had informed their client their hourly legal fees had increased by 5,000 percent.
katyshannon

'It was like an action movie,' neighbors say of El Chapo's capture in Mexico - LA Times - 0 views

www.latimes.com/...po-capture-20160109-story.html

action movie capture mexico la times el chapo sean penn

shared by katyshannon on 11 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • is house was nothing special, a single-story, tree-shrouded home in a middle-class neighborhood in this seaside city. And there the world's most sought-after drug kingpin hid for months until his capture in a deadly shootout.
  • Neighbors noticed his comings and goings, but without special attention. And then suddenly, the Mexican naval special forces descended Friday.
  • And with that, Sinaloa cartel commander Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman was captured, in a shootout that killed six of his associates. It was six months after he escaped from Mexico's maximum-security prison through a tunnel he dug under his cell.
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  • His ability to elude authorities was due in large part to the support he has among rank-and-file Mexicans. He was also able to pay off local government and military authorities and spread largesse.
  • “It makes us sad because he is a good guy and gives us security,” said Los Mochis resident Mariana Ocampo, 21.
  • In the end, it wasn't exhaustive Mexican detective work, nor sophisticated U.S. intelligence, that exposed Guzman's whereabouts. It was ego and a chance at Hollywood.
  • Mexican Atty. Gen. Arely Gomez said Guzman had been in talks to produce a movie about his life.
  • “He established communication with actors and producers, which has formed a new line of investigation,” she said in a late-night news conference as Guzman was being transported from Los Mochis.
  • One of those contacts was apparently actor Sean Penn, who revealed in an article he wrote for Rolling Stone, published Saturday, that he had held a secret interview with Guzman in October at his jungle hide-out in Mexico.
  • Surrounded by the drug lord's armed security troops, Guzman told Penn of his daring prison escape, in an interview translated by Kate del Castillo, an actress who had famously played a drug trafficker in a Mexican soap opera.
  • “I supply more heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine and marijuana than anybody else in the world,” he boasted. “I don't want to be portrayed as a nun.”
  • Gomez said authorities were able to track Guzman's meetings with lawyers and other associates and were close to capturing him in October, apparently after his meeting with Penn. He had been spied by helicopter, she said, but was accompanied by two women and a child, and so security forces decided not to engage.
  • Gomez also gave new details about Guzman's summer escape, saying his brother-in-law, two pilots and tunnel engineers were involved. Once he made it through the tunnel, on a motorcycle speeding over specially built rails, he was whisked to an airfield where his airplane and a decoy took off in the night.
  • In a statement Saturday afternoon, the Mexican government announced the beginning of extradition proceedings that would set the stage for Guzman to face trial in the United States.
  • The proceedings are in response to two formal extradition requests from the U.S. government for crimes including murder, money laundering and arms possession, according to the statement.
katyshannon

'El Chapo' faces extradition, talked to Sean Penn - CNN.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...el-chapo-captured-mexico

el chapo joaquin guzman faces extadition sean penn cnn politics US

shared by katyshannon on 11 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Mexico plans to extradite prison escapee Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman to the United States, where he faces drug trafficking charges connected to his cartel, authorities said.
  • "Since Guzman Loera has been recaptured, the beginning of the extradition proceedings should begin," the Mexican attorney general's office said in statement.
  • While on the run for the past six months, the notorious outlaw was not entirely living as a hermit.
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  • Mexican Attorney General Arely Gomez noted how the U.S. government sought Guzman's extradition as early as June 16, before he escaped for a second time from a Mexican prison in July.
  • The article posted online Saturday includes a blunt admission about his intricate dealings in the cartel world. "I have a fleet of submarines, airplanes, trucks and boats," Guzman told Penn.
  • He spent hours talking to actor Sean Penn, who interviewed him for the magazine during a secret meeting in the Mexican jungle. He answered followup questions several weeks later while still on the run, the magazine said. Guzman received the followup questions through an intermediary and answered them in a videotape he sent to Penn.
  • In an interview conducted for Rolling Stone magazine three months after he escaped from prison, he touted his drug trade, saying he "supplies more heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine and marijuana than anybody else in the world."
  • When he was not bragging about his drug trade during his time on the run, the kingpin was trying to make a movie deal.
  • Police and the military successfully hunted down Guzman and his henchmen this week partly because he or his representatives contacted filmmakers about making an El Chapo biopic, Attorney General Gomez said.
  • "Another important aspect that allowed us to pinpoint his location was having discovered Guzman Loera's intention to film a biographical movie through establishing communication with actors and producers, which formed a new line of investigation," Gomez said.
  • Hollywood will likely make a movie or even a series about El Chapo, as it has about other drug lords, such as Colombia's Pablo Escobar in "Narcos."But for now, Guzman won't have a direct hand in any.
  • His efforts to develop a biopic ends in a scene with an interesting twist: After six months on the lam, Guzman is now back in the same maximum security prison from which he escaped, according to a Mexican law enforcement official with knowledge of the case.
sgardner35

MLK Day turns 30: Why we observe it - CNN.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by sgardner35 on 18 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • This Monday, we commemorate the 30th anniversary of the federal holiday in honor of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.It's a holiday that thankfully has been gaining in recognition since Congress passed a bill and President Ronald Reagan signed it in 1983, designating the third Monday in January, starting in 1986, to honor the civil rights leader. For years, some states declined to participate in the holiday, and Arizona lost the opportunity to host a Super Bowl over it. In 2000, South Carolina became the last state to recognize the holiday.
  • Had an assassin's bullet not taken his life at the age of 39, King would have turned 87 on Friday.Read MoreHad he lived, I believe King would have continued to inspire hope and would challenge us to fulfill his dream of a more inclusive society -- where everyone would have an equal opportunity for "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
  • Not only are we reopening old wounds with regard to confrontation with law enforcement, we are also relitigating everything from voting rights to affirmative action. And now we confront, for the second year in a row, Hollywood -- which somehow ignores the talent of people of color when it comes to the Oscars.
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  • It was his faith, determination and hope, as much as his words, that sustained and inspired a generation to be actively engaged in the political process as voters -- and thus working to transform our nation by electing men and women of valor who sought to remove barriers and open once-closed doors to all. That was part of King's vision -- as he stated back in 1957 when he called on the country to "give us the ballot."King once said, "If you can't run, then walk. If you can't walk, then crawl. But whatever you do, you have to keep moving forward."
  • No one knew better than King of disappointment, yet he remained determined not to be discouraged. He saw in his own lifetime that racism was shifting from malicious, violent discrimination to softer means such as excluding people from voting, or from access to promotions in the workplace, or from access to certain careers, or from ever being able to rise above hand-to-mouth wages and salaries.
  • Finally, King believed in diversity. Diversity, the chorus of different voices, should be a song of harmony. As Americans, we cannot deny our heritage, our individual cultures, but rather we must continue to bring all that is good and just to the civic enterprise. King's legacy is action in the service of others. For he believed that "not everybody can be famous, but everybody can be great, because greatness is determined by service.
  • So, whether on the job or off, let's use this day to commit ourselves to service through acts of goodness and kindness. Let's continue his work in the vineyards of justice and equality for all. And let us begin to live in what King called "the fierce urgency of now."
johnsonma23

Oscars So White? Or Oscars So Dumb? Discuss. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...or-oscars-so-dumb-discuss.html

white new york times

shared by johnsonma23 on 18 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Oscars So White? Or Oscars So Dumb? Discuss.
  • Are these the whitest Oscar nominations ever? Or just the most recent Academy Award whiteout? For the second year in a row, the nominations failed to recognize any minority actors.
  • The black directors of each movie along with their nonwhite actors were shut out
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  • Last year, Vin Diesel boldly predicted that “Furious 7” would win the Academy Award for best picture, “unless Oscars don’t want to be relevant, ever.”
  • s “the economy of prestige”
  • whiteness of this year’s field of nominees exposes not only the myopia of the nominating body but also the deep structural biases of the industry that feeds it.
  • done a reasonably good job of recognizing black talent, belatedly making up for decades of neglect. “12 Years a Slave” won best picture.
  • I love that so many people are enraged at this year’s whiteout — anyone who yells at the Academy is a friend of mine — but I wish that this anger was being expressed 365 days a year and not when the nominations are announced
  • I mean, half of me really doesn’t care. There’s obviously a serious problem with regard to race, sexuality and gender in Hollywood. B
  • . The Oscars aren’t full-time jobs. To hear some voters talking about this time of year, it sounds like tax season or exam tim
  • In the case of both “Creed” and “Compton,” I just don’t think the campaigns were there for these movies. Just as I don’t think they were there for “Selma” the previous year.
  • But I don’t want to let the Academy and its members off the hook. Or rather, I want to broaden the indictment beyond the specific complaints that they ignored Mr. Elba, “Creed,” “Straight Outta Compton” and Will Smith’s excellent Nigerian accent in “Concussion.”
  • I think it’s when you get to that one that race sneaks back into the picture. The Academy, in its function as the culture industry’s upholder of the ideology of Quality, has for a long time been open to African-American talent and even eager to promote and reward it.
Javier E

Want to be a pundit, Jim Comey? Be careful what you wish for. - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...8-bcd5-9d911c784c38_story.html

Politics us trump crisis 2018 election Democratic party strategy

shared by Javier E on 24 Jul 18 - No Cached
  • What’s at stake in 2018 goes beyond control of the House, Senate and statehouses, important as that is. Up for grabs as well is our basic understanding of how American politics works now.
  • If you’re a Democrat and you attribute Trump’s victory to conventional causes, you might tend to rely on conventional campaign tools this year: Bank on Trump’s historically low approval rating, plus the fact that the president’s party almost always loses House seats in his first midterms, stake out a broad anti-Trump message and get your voters to the polls.
  • If, however, you’re a Democrat and you have a different theory — that Trump won because he offered voters a combination of unabashed white identity politics and magical cures to economic woes — your job gets simultaneously easier and harder.
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  • You’re liberated to offer voters Medicare for all, free college, a $15 minimum wage — the full Bernie — in the hope the goodies add “white working class” support to your base of women, Latinos, African Americans and the LGBT community
  • The problem: What if Comey is right, and that agenda is too radical for what he called “America’s great middle”?
  • If Democrats come up empty again in 2018, not even retaking the House despite so many “blue wave” forecasts, epic demoralization and desperation may set in.
  • On the Republican side, the dilemma is less acute, in that it’s increasingly clear to Republicans how to motivate the party base: Stick with Trump.
  • All that requires GOP candidates to do is sell out what’s left of their party’s principles. If these candidates lose, they will have sold out for nothing but at least will have recovered the chance for some independence from Trump
  • The 2016 election destabilized both political parties. The two institutions we have relied on, for decades, to vet candidates, formulate mainstream ideology and organize citizen participation were revealed as having lost their ability to perform those functions. Trump conducted a successful hostile takeover of the GOP, and Bernie Sanders came close in the Democratic primary.
  • This happened because the electorate itself had been destabilized by a 21st&nbsp;century marked by terrorism, war, financial crisis, media upheaval, drug addiction epidemics, mass immigration and rapid cultural change.
  • Political consultants don’t get paid to admit, publicly, that they’re at sea; that admission comes out only in private. Their predicament resembles that of the Hollywood moguls in screenwriter William Goldman’s memoir: “Nobody knows anything. Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess — and, if you’re lucky, an educated one.”
  • For now, the parties are making their guesses uneducated by anything but the results of the 2016 election, whose meaning, like the polls conducted since, remains open to interpretation. Was it an aberration or the start of a new normal? Fresh data, in the form of real votes, arrives on Tuesday, Nov. 6.
Javier E

The Peter Strzok Hearing and the Death of Shame - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...565415

decency Politics culture morality justice fbi

shared by Javier E on 19 Jul 18 - No Cached
  • Decency and the sense of shame that comes from violating standards of decency depend upon a tacit consensus on what it means to do right by others.
  • Decency is not justice; since the tacit consensus of the 1950s did not include full civil rights for African Americans, or for that matter virtually anyone who was not a straight white male, very decent folk all over the country lived with perfect complacency in a caste society
  • Yet it is only when behavior formerly seen as unexceptionable begins to become a source of shame that broader social change becomes possible. That is as true of sexual abuse today as it was of racism half a century ago.
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  • So yes, the social consensus of the 1950s depended on shrouding the most divisive issues in silence. Decency served as the nonpartisan virtue of that culture. Indeed, the supreme attribute of mid-century Hollywood films was the quiet, undemonstrative heroism of the decent man
  • Think of almost any film starring Henry Fonda. Twelve Angry Men doesn’t focus on Fonda’s politics any more than Mr. Smith Goes to Washington reveals Jimmy Stewart’s, but in the fortitude with which they stand up to prejudice, vitriol, ignorance, laziness, and impatience we recognize the mark of the decent man. No less do we recognize the substantive moral qualities of tolerance and fair-mindedness they embody.
  • In last week’s drama, it was the witness who stood up for the traditional American value of straight shooting, not to mention the moral authority of law enforcement. It was the United States Congress that played the rogue.
  • There was something genuinely astonishing in the spectacle of Republican representatives trying to reduce the FBI to the status of a fifth column, as McCarthy had tried to do to the Army
  • Ted Poe, another Texan—another representative, that is, of the law and order capital of America—turned to Strzok and said, “You’re going to act on your bias. You’re going to ‘stop’ President Trump. How do we know that’s not rampant through the FBI?” Strzok rejoined, “A judge asks jurors, ‘Are you able to set aside your personal opinions and render a judgment based on the facts?’ and I and the men and women of the FBI every day take our personal beliefs and set them aside in vigorous pursuit of the truth wherever it lies.
  • Peter Strzok stands for an FBI that, whatever its faults, serves the nation rather than a political master. G-men have become the Henry Fondas, the Jimmy Stewarts, of the present day—the true believers in an archaic code.
  • I was foolish enough to write at the time that Comey’s testimony might serve to remind Americans of the value of neutral institutions and principles. No such luck: Comey’s plea for impartiality came to be seen on the right as proof of partiality
  • The alternative explanation is that the collective sense of what constitutes decent behavior outweighs ideological affinity on the left, but not on the right. Elected Democrats lined up to denounce President Bill Clinton’s private behavior during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, though none deemed it worthy of impeachment. Donald Trump’s vastly more outrageous behavior has provoked far less opprobrium from his own party.
  • Republicans aren’t less decent than Democrats; rather, they have come to see political struggle in such apocalyptic terms that no merely personal form of shameful behavior can compete with the political stakes.
  • In 2008, the Democrats nominated, and the country elected, a young, lanky, even-keeled fellow who imagined that he could restore the tarnished ideal of national decency. That didn’t turn out the way things do in the movies; eight years of Barack Obama persuaded the country to elect the most shameless man who has ever occupied the White House
  • After Strzok finished reciting the true-blue virtues that he and his fellow FBI agents try to live by, Poe leaned into the microphone and said, “And I don’t believe you.” That’s where we are today.
Javier E

The moral rot is spreading - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...8-8fac-12e98c13528d_story.html

gop corruption

shared by Javier E on 23 Aug 18 - No Cached
  • Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) stood on the Senate floor Wednesday morning for his first public remarks since the seismic events of the day before: The president’s former personal lawyer pleaded guilty to fraud and breaking campaign finance laws, implicating the president in a crime; the president’s former campaign chairman was convicted on eight counts of financial crimes, making him one of five members of Trump’s team who have been convicted or have admitted guilt; and a Republican congressman was indicted, the second of Trump’s earliest congressional supporters to be charged this month.
  • McConnell’s counterpart in the House, Speaker Paul D. Ryan (Wis.), was equally cowardly. “We are aware of Mr. [Michael] Cohen’s guilty plea to these serious charges” was his office’s official statement. “We will need more information than is currently available at this point.”
  • What more do you need, Mr. Speaker? What more will it take, Republicans? It seems nothing can bring them to state what is manifestly true: The president is unfit to serve, surrounded by hooligans and doing incalculable harm.
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  • This intolerable silence of the Republicans — through “Access Hollywood,” racist outbursts, diplomatic mayhem and endless scandal — is what allows Trump and his Fox News-viewing supporters to dock their spaceship in a parallel universe where truth isn’t truth. At Tuesday night’s rally in West Virginia, Trump’s irony-challenged audience could be heard chanting “Drain the Swamp!” and “Lock her up!” (Hillary Clinton, that is), just a few hours after Paul Manafort’s conviction and Cohen’s guilty plea.
  • there doesn’t have to be collusion, or even speculation, to recognize that something is terribly wrong. There is no good answer to the question Cohen lawyer Lanny Davis posed after his client said under oath that Trump directed him to pay off two women to influence the election: “If those payments were a crime for Michael Cohen, then why wouldn’t they be a crime for Donald Trump?”
Javier E

James Holzhauer breaks 'Jeopardy!' single-game record with $110,914 haul - The Washingt... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...eopardy-record-childrens-books

quiz show record

shared by Javier E on 10 Apr 19 - No Cached
  • His secret? Those informational children’s books. “They are chock-full of infographics, pictures and all kinds of stuff to keep the reader engaged,” he told The Washington Post via email. “I couldn’t make it through a chapter of an actual Dickens novel without falling asleep.”
  • Holzhauer took “Jeopardy!” by storm over the past week, missing only four out of 133 questions as he cruised to smashing victories
  • He knew his ballpark cuisine, his country music, his 18th century science and Hollywood history. He even knew that “Sadie Lou” was a nickname for Sarah Lawrence College, because he and his wife had studied the etymology of the name “Sadie” while picking out baby names.
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  • He had been preparing for his run at “Jeopardy!” for a long time. A really long time. Holzhauer said he had dreamed of being on the show since he was a kid, back when the Chicago Cubs and “Jeopardy!” were about the only two things his family watched on school nights.
  • He had always been somewhat of a whiz kid. In high school in Naperville, a western suburb of Chicago, he was part of a team that won the Worldwide Youth in Science and Engineering state competition. He placed first in physics and second in mathematics — a background that would come in handy when “Physics Terms” was the Final Jeopardy category on Tuesday.
  • “I think it was a huge advantage that I don’t blink at gambling large amounts of money when I think I have a big edge,” he said. “I approach both sports betting and ‘Jeopardy!’ with the same attitude: What can I do differently than the average person to give myself an edge?”
  • It could be that he reads children’s books. It could also be his rigorous training watching back-to-back reruns of “Jeopardy!” on DVR for hours at a time — while standing in dress shoes, just so it feels real.
jayhandwerk

Open letter alleges sexual harassment in Illinois politics - News - The State Journal-R... - 0 views

www.sj-r.com/...arassment-in-illinois-politics

politics state harassment

shared by jayhandwerk on 25 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • An open letter alleging widespread sexual harassment in Illinois politics and urging women and their allies to come forward has been circulating around the state Capitol
  • the latest effort emerging from statehouses to address harassment and unwanted advances from men following the allegations against Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein
  • The letter describes incidents female legislators have faced when trying to negotiate bills or get legislation up for vote, like late night suggestive texts or unwanted touches.
knudsenlu

Reductress » I Believe Women, Unless They're Talking About Me - 0 views

reductress.com/...unless-theyre-talking-about-me

irony satire culture shift women US

shared by knudsenlu on 12 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • It has only been a couple of weeks, but 2018 is already shaping up to be the Year of Women. The #metoo movement of 2017 paved the way for so many women to finally come forward and publicly name their sexual abusers, and we’ve already started the new year with the Time’s Up initiative in Hollywood. I’m excited by this new era of accountability and I’m proud to say that I, a man, believe women when they share their stories with the public. Unless, of course, they’re talking about me.
  • they deserve our wholehearted support and respect. But not if the women are talking about me or something I did. In that case you should not listen to them. You can respect them but definitely don’t believe what they say about me because it’s wrong.
  • They say only 3% of sexual assault allegations are misreported each year.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • You see, “I believe women,” is really more of a sentiment than a fact, which is why you see so many men willing to say it out loud all the time. &nbsp; I’m always out there talking about how much I love and respect women, reminding people that I listen to women and telling women what an incredible ally I am. I’m one of the best allies I know. I guess sometimes women do lie – like when they say they don’t want to have sex me. Those women are also lying! I mean, look at me!
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