When I first got my landline in San Francisco, it was with PacBell. They got bought by SBC, who were bought by AT&T. When I first got a cellphone in 2006, my service was with Cingular. They got taken over by AT&T. I stuck with AT&T for a while, with plenty of gripes, before escaping to T-Mobile. I’ve been very happy with T-Mobile.

So, naturally, AT&T now intends to buy T-Mobile.
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Cities have always been centers of capital; I don’t think you can have cities without something (in our history, initially agriculture) to produce surpluses of goods that can (must?) be stored (hoarded? selectively distributed?), and the centralization that such storage encourages has always been a fundamental part of why cities exist.

I love cities. I love them for their concentration of people and culture (the modern form of which, it could be argued, arises out of the former), for the intermingling they encourage and for the aspects of cultural and social choice they provide. I’ve always disliked other aspects, however: the concentration of capital and the power dynamics this creates, and the shaping of cities as feeding/breeding grounds for capitalist/consumerist expenditure/exploitation. I don’t care that these dynamics have thus far been prime drivers for the existence of cities; an optimist (yes, really) about human potential, I believe it’s possible for us to reorganize cities to have the good without the bad. In any case, cities have always had this tension (among others) between capital and people, but they’re still understood largely as spaces for inhabitation—that is, as places for people.

This may be changing.
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I’ve actually asked the Pentagon whether or not the procedures that have been taken in terms of his confinement are appropriate and are meeting our basic standards. They have assured me that they are.

—Barack Obama. “News Conference by the President”. White House Press Office, 11 March 2011.

Obama was referring to Bradley Manning, who is being held in Quantico, in 23-hour-a-day isolation, who’s deliberately being deprived of sleep, and who has recently had even his boxer shorts taken away from him.
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Yes, it is torture. Glenn Greenwald, among others, has been bringing into the public eye the suffering inflicted upon him.
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This is amazingly ridiculous: “Tennessee Jumps on the Anti-Sharia Bandwagon”. That’s right, Tennessee State Senator Bill Ketron has introduced a bill that essentially equates the practice of Sharia law with treason. While it might not pass, and if it did pass it would pretty clearly not be Constitutional, it’s really sad that it’s even been proposed.
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Just in case you needed more evidence, here’s a particularly good demonstration that the drug war is racist and classist: “Mitch Daniels’ Disappearing Felony”.

Also, you really shouldn’t miss this proposal for a new illegal drug classification scheme.

Almost the first thing I did this morning was watch Al Jazeera and the scenes of celebration over Mubarak’s departure. I listened to one activist speak of her joy at the victory, at the change, at the possibilities now open that had been closed off before by the security state. It was deeply affecting, and I’m happy for the Egyptian people despite a near-total lack of personal ties to the country.

The popular toppling of a ruler is a difficult and momentous thing, and quite an achievement, and they should be joyous (as they are) and proud. I hope they really keep it going, though, and push for as true a democracy as they can. In a sense that means never letting things get back to “normal”, because “normal” is where the leaders aren’t nervous about mass insurrection, where they are able to get away with serving themselves and their cohort instead of the people—where they act like “leaders” instead of truly being humble and temporary representatives of the people. I would also like them to be allowed to get to wherever they choose with minimal interference from outside agents (such as the United States, for example), but I fear that’s unlikely indeed.

Regardless of all that, though, whatever happens next, what they’ve achieved already is a tremendous accomplishment and a reminder of what the will of the people can do.

Wow, this is fascinating: a Florida judge has prohibited, pre-emptively, the distribution of leaflets on jury nullification near courthouses, claiming that it amounts to jury tampering. According to my understanding of the law, jurors in the US have the right to acquit based not purely on the absence of guilt but also on their sense of the justice of the law—however, judges are free to bar anyone in their courts from informing the jurors of this right. The notion that they’re free to do so outside their courtrooms certainly seems like a stretch to me, and seems to obviously violate the First Amendment, but that’s not necessarily worth anything in terms of appeals rulings.

This is a post about humor, taste, rape, offensiveness/offendedness, and limits on discourse, all centered on a three-panel webcomic about video games.

It’s rather long; I meant it as a tighter, more abstract, discussion of the points above, but got pulled into a lot of the specifics as I went through them.
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Comedy gold. I think this guy might be funnier than Colbert.

I like the idea of public health care; in fact I think health care is one of the legitimate uses to which the state apparatus can be put. That being said, I consider Obama’s proposal to be a mockery of real public healthcare, and I find it reprehensible both in theory and in implementation. On top of that, in the context of American politics in particular, it’s also governmental overreach, and today’s court decision seems entirely reasonable to me:

If Congress can penalize a passive individual for failing to engage in commerce, the enumeration of powers in the Constitution would have been in vain.

—Kevin Sack. “Judge rules health care law should be invalidated”. San Francisco Chronicle, 01 Feb 2011.

That seems quite evidently true regardless of what one thinks of the Constitution’s relevance (or of the proposition that the Constitution’s enumeration of powers has been in vain).
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Martin Luther King, Jr., 4 April 1967: “I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today—my own government.”

Full transcript.

I think it’s it’s pointless to speculate about Loughner’s motivations at this point, especially since analyzing his online imprint seems like an exercise in reading tea leaves—is he a right-winger because he likes Ayn Rand, or a leftist because he likes The Communist Manifesto?
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“The story is told of a Chinese law professor, who was listening to a British lawyer explain that Britons were so enlightened, they believed it was better that ninety-nine guilty men go free than that one innocent man be executed. The Chinese professor thought for a second and asked, ‘Better for whom?’”

I came across this in Eugene Alexander Volokh’s “n Guilty Men”, which I was reading as a result of a longer post I was writing about the problems of dealing with allegations of rape; the question that the apocryphal Chinese professor is disingenuously raising (i.e. whether it’s really better for a society to err on the side of innocence in such matters) is quite central to issues arising out of trying to deal with rape, in evidentiary terms. I bit off a little too much in that post, which is why you’re not seeing it now.

There’s also the question of whether any kind of enforcement mechanism solves more problems than it causes, but rather than ponder that right now I’m instead pondering the injustice of my having to get up in the morning to play Twilight Imperium.

There’s a lot to chew on in the WikiLeaks/Assange rape allegations issue, but here are the points uppermost in my mind:

• While it’s certainly possible that the credibility of the WikiLeaks organization might suffer if Assange is in fact guilty of rape, the question of his guilt in that matter is entirely irrelevant to the morality of what WikiLeaks has done already and to its mission.
• It’s impossible to tell at media distance whether or not Assange is guilty.
• I strongly doubt the rape allegations are the result of a “CIA plot” (or equivalent). (Which is not to say that the allegations haven’t been put to use by similar actors, but that’s not the same thing.)
• It’s wrong to vilify (or out) the accusers.
• Regardless of the validity of the initial accusations, it seems clear that the legal machinery involved in pursuing Assange is operating quite differently than how it would if not for political considerations—clearly not every person accused of rape in Sweden is treated as he has been.
• Assange fighting extradition to Sweden is not an indicator of his guilt or innocence in this matter; the same applies to other legal maneuverings his defense team might undertake.
• Regardless of how this issue plays out, and of how central Assange may have been to the project so far, WikiLeaks clearly needs to decentralize its staffing; having one key figure who reputation is linked to that of the organization seems like too much of a weakness.

I so so so wish this were satirical.

I’m really at a loss for words with this one. It’s like someone made the Platonic ideal of the “piss Tadhg off” video.

The FBI, one of the most prominent domestic secret police agencies here, habitually kept anti-war activists under surveillance—and remember that this report only covers the incidents that another arm of the state brought into the open. In case you thought this could only happen during the dark days of the Bush administration, give up that fantasy: it’s still happening now.

Ah, but surely the terrorist threat is so grave that any “material support”—that sound you heard was the First Amendment being locked in the trunk of a car—or hint thereof must be investigated without concern for legal niceties? Clearly, which is why they have to resort to trying to create terrorist plots that they can then claim credit for “thwarting”. And on the subject of “terrorist plots”, there’s a strong push to designate WikiLeaks a “terrorist organization”—and that, if it comes to pass, will sound like the trunk opening and the First Amendment being repeatedly shot in the head.

I’ve been following the situation with WikiLeaks’ release of diplomatic cables fairly closely, and find it rather interesting as an effective use of the internet to fight government control of information. In that sense, it’s a hopeful sign, a demonstration that a relatively small group of people can still resist the forces of the powerful.

On the other hand, the reaction to the release, particularly in the mainstream press here, has been an appalling if unsurprising demonstration of the servility of our political culture.
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A New York City police officer blocks a bike lane in order to then issue tickets to cyclists for not using the bike lane.

Lots of food for anarchist thought in that scenario. I doubt many of my readers would try to justify the cop’s actions, but some of you might try to defend the state here, and more of you would likely defend the concept of the state.
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I’m perennially surprised at the names of the Washington Redskins and the Cleveland Indians, which are outrageous and somehow still haven’t changed.

I wondered which of the teams had the more racist name, and whether or not they were the most racist pro sports names in the US.
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The failure of Proposition 19, the attempt to legalize marijuana in California, isn’t quite as depressing to me as 2008’s passage of anti-gay-marriage Proposition 8. Mainly because I wasn’t that hopeful that 19 would pass—the sentiments behind the prevailing anti-19 vote are as repugnant as those behind the pro-8 vote.
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The US government has never been willing to let mere technicalities impede its actions, as has been evident since at least the reign of Andrew Jackson. Judges are both aware of this and unlikely in any case to fight too hard against the system that has put this in place, and so at the higher levels their job description is something like “convincingly rationalize why the government can do as it pleases”—as can be seen in this article on how much the “Federal Commerce Clause” covers.