This is a good start: Governor Commutes Sentence in Texas. But still, it’s embarrassing that the US is right up there with China, Saudia Arabia, and Iran, which collectively account for 94% of all state-sanctioned executions of their own citizens. Why do we prefer punishment over rehabilitation? According to some studies cited in Wikipedia, sending people to prison actually increases their risk of offending, while rehabilitation is the only effective way of reducing repeat offenses. I think that one reason the US government prefers punishment is because punishment helps keep the powerful in their places by keeping the poor politically disenfranchised (they can’t vote when their in jail) and by scapegoating the poor for the problems in this society. If we instead invested the resources into rehabilitating so-called “criminals,” we would have to confront the high costs of rehabilitation, which would then lead us to question whether it might be cheaper to address the deeper problems that condition poor individuals to adopt criminal behaviors, such as educational and economic inequality (poverty and poor education correlate very strongly with likelihood of criminal behavior). But again, such investigations would lead to a critique of the capitalist and anti-democratic institutions that keep the rich and privileged in power. It’s a vicious cycle that we can only pull out of by persistently and collectively criticizing and organizing against capitalists and their lifestyles of excess.

“fixed gears are for jerks and lesbians”

Someone came here based on that google search. Awesome.

Lifts one quarter of one percent of all boats.

M.I.A.’s new album, Kala, is hot. Check out this interview in which she confronts the haters…
“I find it kind of insulting that I can’t have any ideas on my own because I’m a female, or that people from undeveloped countries can’t have ideas of their own unless it’s backed up by someone who’s blond-haired and blue-eyed.”
…
“You know, hip-hop came out of having the right stuff, and you had to have a slavery and you had to have a war and you had to have all these things in order for Sean ‘Puffy’ Combs to be singing about fucking Bentleys. You had to have that journey. That takes a long time, and in America it took three generations for that to happen. And for me to come from a mud hut and to be here and shouting in front of a disco, it took me 15 years. And that’s all I represent. Everything boiled down is that, that’s all it is. If I get it back to Africa, this is what I’ve accomplished.” Link.

…leave your spirit of free inquiry at the door as we lobotomize our universities and take a banal ride back to the dark ages!

In this article, “Reverse the Firings: Purge of Professors Accelerates Suppression of Critical Thinking,” Reggie Dylan discusses the recent, politically motivated firings of two radical professors, Ward Churchill and Norman Finkelstein, and he connects these with another event: “the trustees of Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio—long known for its radical and open-minded approach to education—announced the school’s shutdown, despite fierce opposition from students, faculty and alumni groups around the country.” These events are all related to the general campaign of conservatives, particularly David Horowitz and Anne Neal, to redress a supposed “liberal bias” in universities. While Horowitz’s “Academic Bills of Rights” called for colleges to institute certain principles that state governments could enforce, Neal’s “intellectual diversity” acts generally require only that colleges report to legislative committees (see Scott Jaschik, “Intellectual Diversity or Intellectual Insult?”). Opponents, particularly the Association of American University Professors (AAUP), argue that such reports would create ideological litmus tests, since college administrators would feel pressured to classify professors, campus groups, and invited speakers as “conservative” or “liberal.” Such labeling encourages a simplistic, bipolar view of the world, in opposition to the more nuanced and subtle debates that we need for grappling with contemporary problems. Further, they argue that this is reminiscent of McCarthyism, and could have a similar type of chill effect on faculty.
But we can resist! - not by hiding in our disciplinary caves, but by militantly organizing into a democratic university… Read the rest of this entry »

I want a bailout!

Sometimes I feel like we get a little too pessimistic on this website (as do other leftist bloggers). So, I just want to remind us of some of the positive, progressive, creative things that people are doing, because they offer us glimpses of a better future (and we need to oppose the neoliberal utopian vision with our own utopias).
First, there’s lots of cool, progressive stuff going on in science, especially projects that integrate science with art and architecture, such as ‘crowd farms’
and ’sustainable dance clubs’. (Both of these are pursuing a similar principle as that of the ‘power-producing backpack’ (our friend Louis Flynn worked on this)).

Second, of course there’s a ton of cool stuff going on in art. For an example of a cross-over between found sound and found video, check out one of my favorite music videos: The Books - “Take Time.” (Also, “Smells Like Content” - both of these are from The Books’ new DVD, Playall - when they play their instruments at concerts, they project these images on a huge screen behind them - making for one of the most awesome concerts I’ve ever seen.)
Also, I think we need more coordination between art and politics (toward that end, check out The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest).

And lost. So I want the government to bail me out.

They really want to do this thing. God, I hope they don’t. I hope the congress can find a way to stop them.

San Francisco has problems. Housing is pricing everyone out (including the celebrated “creative class”), crime is up dramatically and the transit system is total crap. The second two problems are caused, for the most part, by underfunded city services. I the first problem I see a solution.

We should start taxing the crap out the people buying $2million plus homes. We should raise property taxes (currently illegal in CA, but this is a fantasy anyway) a lot until people stop buying these homes, because it seems like demand is so high that the prices won’t keep people away. The city could take the money raised and invest it in Muni, SFPD and figuring out ways to get people to stop converting to condos and start building more rental property.

The fact is that for some bizarre reason everyone is convinced that taxing the rich will take away their incentive to generate all this wonderful value. Larry Ellison makes $50 million a year. That is six hundred times as much as a rank and file engineer at Oracle (1200 teacher salaries). Would Larry quit and Oracle fall apart if we taxed him 80%? I think $10 million a year would be plenty, and $40 million is money better used improving the bay area for everyone, rather than building more fake japanese villages.