Peter Krupa

Scalia tweets.

I’ve been thinking for some time now that the greatest hypocrisy of fiscal conservatives is coupling a fundamentalist opposition to new social spending with ferocious support for the American Military Welfare State. Glenn Greenwald has a great post on the topic. I found this graphic to be enlightening.

It’s Saturday night, you shouldn’t be working anyway.

From No More Mister Nice Blog:

I don’t know if yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling is really going to lead to the apocalypse predicted by so many, or if the corporate influence on American politics is already at its absolute maximum and this is merely going to alter the number of tools in the fat cats’ political influence toolkit. (The ruling is awful, yet I lean toward the latter view — it seems to me that corporations have found a way to have as much political influence as possible already.)

But I find myself having the same naive reaction to the notion of “corporate personhood” that I’ve always had when it’s come up: If corporations are persons in the eyes of the law, why has no one pursued the argument that we can do to corporations what we routinely do to persons, namely imprison and execute them?

I posted this video earlier, but I think it’s worth posting again in light of the Masshole vote. It’s an interview with a Harvard health care economist on why we really, really need health care reform.

Rule Number One of tech journalism: Always find the iPhone angle.

From the New Yorker:

The enemy had gathered in a small copse upstream from our location. The decision was made to engage them in force. The assault would require a direct approach along the river, the only significant obstacle to attack being a small hillock approximately a hundred metres from our location. Sergeant Chandler led the way. Ames, Elder, Leonard, and Tracker followed, with Parker and me bringing up the heavy machine gun at the rear. The day was dry and clear.

Immediately upon leaving our position, we came under heavy enemy fire. Almost at once, Private Ames grew red in the face. Private Elder took Ames’s pack. But the pack was heavy, and Elder soon reported that his back was spasming. Also, his calves were burning. Elder joined Ames behind a small boulder, where the two men shared a Diet Coke.

Interesting bit in the New Yorker on covering earthquakes:

Upon repetition, covering earthquakes gradually became less pure. The reason is that as a newspaper correspondent, at least, one became schooled in the editor-feeding subgenres of earthquake coverage. These subgenre stories passed like months on a calendar across the twelve days that generally constitutes the entire attention span of editors, broadcast producers, and their audiences. Subgenre pearls which one can anticipate from Haiti but about which one should perhaps not be overly cynical include: The Late Miracle, approximately on day five, in which an improbable survivor is dug out by heroic search teams from a foreign country; The Interpretation of Meaning, a story to be filed on Sundays in Christian cultures and Fridays in Muslim ones, chronicling the efforts of religious leaders to explain God’s will in this instance (I recall sitting, riveted, on a press platform in Tehran, listening to Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani deliver a remarkable Friday sermon about science and Allah); and Heading to the Exits, in which the laundry-less journalist forecasts a slow recovery complicated by political fallout and imperfect relief efforts, while implying that he/she will return over the ensuing months to chronicle the full course of the recovery.

Newspapers reduce most of the news to a series of formulas. They turn it into a commodity that can be easily refined, shipped and stored: The disaster, the holiday travel, the underdog, the heinous criminal, the little-guy victim, the trend, the weather. Maybe it makes their readers feel safer. Eyes glaze over, turn the page, just another disaster.

Mikey Hicks, an 8-year-old from New Jersey, is on the terrorist watch list.

The first time he was patted down, at Newark Liberty International Airport, Mikey was 2. He cried.