America’s Biggest Publisher of Literature In Translation is Amazon
▻http://www.newrepublic.com/article/123150/americas-biggest-publisher-literature-translation-amazon
America’s Biggest Publisher of Literature In Translation is Amazon
▻http://www.newrepublic.com/article/123150/americas-biggest-publisher-literature-translation-amazon
Corn Wars | The New Republic
►http://www.newrepublic.com/article/122441/corn-wars
The farm-by-farm fight between China and the United States to dominate the global food supply.
On September 30, 2012, agents from the FBI contacted U.S. Customs and Border Protection at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago with an urgent request. They wanted bags from two passengers on an outbound flight to Beijing pulled for immediate inspection. The passengers didn’t track as dangerous criminals: Li Shaoming, president of Beijing Kings Nower Seed Science & Technology, a large Chinese agricultural company that develops corn, rice, cotton, and canola seeds, and Ye Jian, the company’s crop research manager.
#maïs #agro-industrie #semence #alimentation #ogm #webdoc
Evoqué là par @cdb_77 (merci) ▻http://seenthis.net/messages/412082
et déjà là ►http://seenthis.net/messages/399645 :)
Don’t Send Your Kid to the Ivy League
▻http://www.newrepublic.com/article/118747/ivy-league-schools-are-overrated-send-your-kids-elsewhere
The irony is that elite students are told that they can be whatever they want, but most of them end up choosing to be one of a few very similar things..
Elite schools like to boast that they teach their students how to think, but all they mean is that they train them in the analytic and rhetorical skills that are necessary for success in business and the professions. Everything is technocratic—the development of expertise—and everything is ultimately justified in technocratic terms.
Religious colleges—even obscure, regional schools that no one has ever heard of on the coasts—often do a much better job in that respect. What an indictment of the Ivy League and its peers: that colleges four levels down on the academic totem pole, enrolling students whose SAT scores are hundreds of points lower than theirs, deliver a better education, in the highest sense of the word.
At least the classes at elite schools are academically rigorous, demanding on their own terms, no? Not necessarily. In the sciences, usually; in other disciplines, not so much. There are exceptions, of course, but professors and students have largely entered into what one observer called a “nonaggression pact.” Students are regarded by the institution as “customers,” people to be pandered to instead of challenged. Professors are rewarded for research, so they want to spend as little time on their classes as they can. The profession’s whole incentive structure is biased against teaching, and the more prestigious the school, the stronger the bias is likely to be. The result is higher marks for shoddier work.
A middle-class kid from sixth grade through high school. As a proper bit of self-investing human capital, that child will be thinking at every turn — and many children, alas, are forced to do this or learn willingly to do this — How do I enhance my attractiveness to future investors? And future investors will be excellent, private high schools; or excellent colleges; or excellent employers.
Each thing the child does — whether it’s volunteering at a charity in order to build up the résumé in order to look like a good civic citizen, a hardworking, willingly civic human being; or whether it’s an unpaid internship where one is simply using the internship in order to enhance one’s appearance of experience and knowledge and networking — becomes a way of making herself more attractive to future “investors.”
I’m putting this into very concrete economic terms; but I have to say, whenever I talk about this with undergraduate classes, the groans are audible.
Why do you think that is?
They all recognize themselves. They all know that, at every waking moment, they are trying to figure out how to enhance their value so that their future value — what they are speculating in — becomes even greater. They all understand that this is the way they have been living at least since high school. They imagine that this is the way they will live forever.
They understand that they do it in their dating lives, they do it in their social lives, they do it in their fraternities, they do it in their choice of classes and in the way they deal with faculty, they do it in their choice of summer activities and summer jobs — they do it everywhere. They understand that this is the world they live in, even if they haven’t quite named it a practice of “self-investment” or a practice of “enhancing” their “human capital value.”
▻http://www.salon.com/2015/06/15/democracy_cannot_survive_why_the_neoliberal_revolution_has_freedom_on_the_rop
#neoliberalisme #wendy_brown
Paid Parental Leave Is Fueling Sweden’s Start-Up Boom
▻http://www.newrepublic.com/article/122605/paid-parental-leave-fueling-swedens-start-boom
Each week, Sweden’s national Twitter account allows a different Swede to take over tweeting and tell his or her story. Last week it was Louise Samet, a new mom and an employee of Swedish e-commerce giant Klarna. But unlike Amazon, where women only receive eight weeks of paid leave and men receive none, Klarna supplements 68 weeks of paid leave, which is split evenly between mothers and fathers. According to Samet, Sweden’s parent-friendly policies mean not only a better corporate culture, but also fertile ground for people interested in breaking into the start-up scene. I caught up with Samet to get a little more of a tech start-up insider’s view on paid leave, innovative business, and workplace culture.
I Had a Baby and Cancer When I Worked at Amazon. This Is My Story
▻https://medium.com/@jcheiffetz/i-had-a-baby-and-cancer-when-i-worked-at-amazon-this-is-my-story-9eba5eef297
Corn Wars | The New Republic
►http://www.newrepublic.com/article/122441/corn-wars
Meanwhile, at a different gate, Wang Hongwei, another Chinese national believed to be in the employ of Kings Nower [...] He was selected out for a search, which turned up 44 bags of corn seeds under his seat and in his suitcases, as well as a notebook filled with GPS coordinates and a digital camera containing hundreds of pictures of cornfields. Questioned by agents, Wang would say only that he had purchased the seeds from a man named Mo Hailong, the director of international business at the Beijing Dabeinong Technology Group (DBN Group), the parent company of Kings Nower Seed.
[...] Special Agent Mark E. Betten, a 16-year veteran of the FBI specializing in the investigation of intellectual property theft, had the seeds sent to an independent bio-diagnostic testing laboratory, which confirmed that they were proprietary, genetically modified hybrids. [...] The GPS coordinates were found to correspond with farms in Iowa and Illinois, where those companies were testing the performance of new hybrids.
#usa #chine #guerre_économique #propriété_intellectuelle #semences #graines #ogm #espionnage_industriel #agriculture
#Book: The Black Box Society
The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information
–- Frank Pasquale
▻http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674368279
Frank Pasquale exposes how powerful interests abuse secrecy for profit and explains ways to rein them in. Demanding transparency is only the first step. An intelligible society would assure that key decisions of its most important firms are fair, nondiscriminatory, and open to criticism. Silicon Valley and Wall Street need to accept as much accountability as they impose on others.
Articles:
– Seenthis:
@hubertguillaud
– Slate:
▻http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2015/01/black_box_society_by_frank_pasquale_a_chilling_vision_of_how_big_data_has.htm
As a lawyer, Pasquale looks at the problem from the outside in, considering the civil structure in which data-collection algorithms are embedded and how we could potentially regulate abusive and harmful uses of the data while still enabling beneficial “big data” studies.
– Times Higher Education:
▻https://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/books/the-black-box-society-the-secret-algorithms-that-control-money-and-information-by-frank-pasquale/2018918.article
This book’s subtitle could easily have been taken further: it is not just money and information that is at stake. The algorithmic control that law scholar Frank Pasquale eloquently and intelligently details and analyses goes beyond money and information and into almost every aspect of our lives. For this reason, although it might appear merely to be a book about technology and finance, The Black Box Society, ultimately, is a radical and political work that deserves wide attention.
– New Republic:
▻http://www.newrepublic.com/article/120987/pasquales-black-box-challenges-digital-sphere-run-algorithms
The Black Box Society is a tour of how computational intelligence has come to dominate three important parts of American life: reputation, search, and finance. Pasquale is invoking a couple different concepts with the title. Like a black box on an airplane, these algorithms take information from the noise around them; like a black box in computer science, they are hidden systems, only observable from the outside in terms of their inputs and outputs. But more like black holes, the algorithms are visible in their effects on their surroundings. Our economy—and the many vital life processes it manages—twists and turns based on the say-so of inscrutable mathematical processes.
– A very good interview in which Frank Pasquale talks about how his book came to be (it took 10 years to write it):
▻http://balkin.blogspot.be/2014/09/interview-on-black-box-society_19.html
As Google grew in the early 2000s, the primary policy question seemed to be: “how do we get law out of the way of this company so it can keep organizing the internet?”
▻https://www.law.umaryland.edu/faculty/profiles/faculty.html?facultynum=984
Et bien sûr voir aussi "La vie algorithmique : Critique de la raison numérique" d’Eric Sadin
Eric Sadin : « Il est impératif de contenir la puissance du technopouvoir »
▻http://www.liberation.fr/economie/2015/03/22/il-est-imperatif-de-contenir-la-puissance-du-technopouvoir_1226071
Une charge contre le « technopouvoir » emmené par les Google, Apple, Facebook et autres Amazon, qui capte tous nos faits et gestes via nos smartphones et objets connectés. Une marchandisation de nos existences au nom d’un « Big Data » orwellien, infaillible et tout puissant ?
Entre algorithmes et marchandisation : l’homme moderne face à la numérisation des sociétés
►http://www.slate.fr/story/101159/entre-algorithmes-marchandisation-lhomme-moderne-face-numerisation-des-societe
Éric Sadin se refuse à jouer la carte des technophobes alarmistes ou des technophiles adeptes de prophéties mélioratives.
Il parvient à poser les questions justes, celles qui permettent d’établir une véritable réflexion sur les enjeux présents et à venir des technologies issues du mouvement de numérisation à l’œuvre depuis une trentaine d’années.
Des enjeux qui nécessitent, selon ses écrits, une responsabilité politique ainsi que l’édification d’une « éthique de la technè contemporaine », afin de permettre aux hommes d’avoir un rapport intelligent à la technique, un rapport à travers lequel leur humanité demeure : « En cela, soumettre la vie algorithmique contemporaine à une critique en acte de la raison numérique qui l’ordonne relève d’un combat politique, éthique et civilisationnel majeur de notre temps ».
Le big data menace-t-il nos libertés ?
Sur France Culture
▻http://www.franceculture.fr/oeuvre-la-vie-algorythmique-critique-de-la-raison-numerique-de-eric-sa
et sur TV5 : (où il ne dit rien de vraiment nouveau...)
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9HSONAJpis
#Eric_Sadin
#GAFA
#marchandisation
#technopouvoir
#IoT
#gouvernementalité_algorithmique
« Cette gauche qui n’ose pas critiquer l’islam »
« Du Pakistan au Nigeria, mais aussi dans certains pays d’Europe, l’islam est aujourd’hui une religion capable d’inciter un grand nombre d’hommes et de femmes à tuer ou à mourir en son nom. Certains d’entre nous [des gens de gauche] tentent de répondre à cette situation mais, pour la plupart, échouent lamentablement. L’une des raisons de cet échec tient à la peur panique d’être traité d’ "islamophobe". L’antiaméricanisme et une forme radicale de relativisme culturel jouent également un rôle important, mais ce sont des pathologies anciennes. »
▻http://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2015/05/08/cette-gauche-qui-n-ose-pas-critiquer-l-islam_4630280_3232.html
La peur panique ? Vraiment ? Y sont où les poulets sans tête, j’ai du mal à les repérer !
Michael Walzer, célèbre pour avoir conseillé : « comment Israël devrait combattre le Hamas dans une guerre asymétrique » fin juillet 2014 :
▻http://www.newrepublic.com/article/118908/2014-gaza-war-how-should-israel-fight-asymmetrical-war-hamas
S’il identifie ici « cette gauche qui n’ose pas critiquer l’islam », lui-même en plein pendant les bombardements israéliens contre la population de Gaza, prodiguait ses conseils en arguant qu’il allait aussi critiquer Israël, « a little uneasily ». Ah, total respect pour cette gauche qui n’ose pas trop critiquer Israël mais qui ose critiquer l’islam…
The Aesthetic Failure of ’Charlie Hebdo’
▻http://www.newrepublic.com/article/121748/arrested-development-and-aesthetic-failure-charlie-hebdo
The strategy of using racism to fight racism itself can be questioned. Juice that gave energy to Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor has turned sour after more than four decades. Charlie Hebdo is the French counterpart of Robert Crumb, but the magazine is a Crumb that has never changed or evolved, that keeps using in 2015 an artistic strategy from the 1960s. The real sin of Charlie Hebdo is not so much racism but arrested development, a grave aesthetic failure because political cartoonists have to keep up with times and be mindful of the impact their images have.
Invisible Atheists: The Spread of Disbelief in the Arab World | The New Republic
▻http://www.newrepublic.com/article/121559/rise-arab-atheists
LAST DECEMBER, DAR AL IFTA, a venerable Cairo-based institution charged with issuing Islamic edicts, cited an obscure poll according to which the exact number of Egyptian atheists was 866. The poll provided equally precise counts of atheists in other Arab countries: 325 in Morocco, 320 in Tunisia, 242 in Iraq, 178 in Saudi Arabia, 170 in Jordan, 70 in Sudan, 56 in Syria, 34 in Libya, and 32 in Yemen. In total, exactly 2,293 nonbelievers in a population of 300 million.
Many commentators ridiculed these numbers. The Guardian asked Rabab Kamal, an Egyptian secularist activist, if she believed the 866 figure was accurate. “I could count more than that number of atheists at Al Azhar University alone,” she replied sarcastically, referring to the Cairo-based academic institution that has been a center of Sunni Islamic learning for almost 1,000 years. Brian Whitaker, a veteran Middle East correspondent and the author of Arabs Without God, wrote, “One possible clue is that the figure for Jordan (170) roughly corresponds to the membership of a Jordanian atheist group on Facebook. So it’s possible that the researchers were simply trying to identify atheists from various countries who are active in social media.”
Even by that standard, Dar Al Ifta’s figures are rather low.
L’article du 10 décembre 2014
Survey claims 866 atheists in Egypt, highest in Arab World | Mada Masr
►http://www.madamasr.com/news/survey-claims-866-atheists-egypt-highest-arab-world
According to press statements by religious authorities on Wednesday, Egypt has the highest number of atheists in the Arab World, amounting to 866.
This contentious figure was cited by Ibrahim Negm, advisor to Egypt’s Grand Mufti, based on an international survey, conducted by independent polling and survey group “Red C” in 2014.
Negm added that the country has witnessed a marked increase in atheism over the past four years, with a number of Egypt-based groups appearing online, including, “Atheists Without Borders,” “The Atheist Brotherhood,” and “Atheists Against Religions.”
L’original (?) arabe semble être ceci :
إلحاد وتطرف متوازيان في مصر !
▻http://elaphjournal.com/Web/News/2014/12/966377.html
ملحد وأفتخر
وأوضح نجم أن عددًا من الدراسات والإحصاءات أظهر أن الإلحاد في السنوات الأربع الماضية شهد نشاطًا كبيرًا، فسرعان ما ظهرت عشرات المواقع الإلكترونية على الإنترنت تدعو للإلحاد، وتدافع عن الملحدين، في مقدمة هذه المواقع الإلكترونية “الملحدين المصريين” و"ملحدون بلا حدود" و"جماعة الإخوان الملحدين" و"مجموعة اللادينيين" و"ملحدون ضد الأديان". كما ظهرت مواقع شخصية للملحدين، جميعها بأسماء مستعارة فظهر “ملحد وأفتخر” و"ملحد مصري"، و"أنا ملحد".
ووفقًا لدراسة أعدها مركز “ريد سي” التابع لمعهد غلوبال، فإن مصر تحتل المركز الأول بين الدول العربية في الإلحاد، وتضم 866 ملحدًا، ورغم أن الرقم ليس كبيرًا إلا أنه الأعلى فى الدول العربية. ليبيا ليس بها سوى 34 ملحدًا، أما السودان ففيها 70 ملحدًا فقط، واليمن فيها 32 ملحدًا، وفي تونس 320 ملحدًا وفى سوريا 56 ملحدًا، وفي العراق 242 ملحدًا، وفي السعودية 178 ملحدًا وفي الأردن 170 ملحدًا وفي المغرب 325 ملحدًا. بينما تقدر دراسة أجرتها جامعة ’’إيسترن ميتشيجان’’ الأميركية عدد الملحدين في مصر بمليوني شخص.
Le nom de l’Institut (Global Center Institute ?) est déjà un poème à lui tout seul : Red Sea transcrit en arabe (ريد سي), ce qui dans l’article anglais donne Red C…
Sinon, les deux articles en anglais disent bien poll ou survey la méthodo du sondage permet donc des estimations d’effectifs aussi petits à l’unité près. Chapeau !
Ça mérite quand même le #selon_une_étude_récente !
Netanyahu Wins by Blatantly Disrespecting the U.S. and the U.N. | The New Republic
▻http://www.newrepublic.com/article/121319/netanyahu-wins-blatantly-disrespecting-us-and-un
TEL AVIV— It was 10 p.m. and the rave beats were pumping at the Drive In Arena in north Tel Aviv. Recently built as the new home of the Hapoel Tel Aviv basketball club, on Tuesday it was the election night base camp of the center-left Zionist Union, led by Labor Party leader Isaac Herzog and Hatnua’s Tzipi Livni. Young people pogoed to the music and waved Israeli flags. Parents held their children aloft as crane cameras swooped past. A movie screen behind the arena stage flashed with stylized portraits of Zionist Union leaders set amid animated fireworks.
“What #ISIS Really Wants: The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse”
▻http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2015/02/what-isis-really-wants/384980 #salafism #Syria #Sham #Daesh
Merci d’avoir signalé ce texte important (long à lire mais je crois que ça vaut la peine. ça recoupe souvent les observations de l’article publié sur Médiapart par l’ancien président de MSF.
Les deux montrent le fonctionnement de la pensée, la « biodiversité » de ces mouvement, et les paradoxes :
The reality is that the Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic. Yes, it has attracted psychopaths and adventure seekers, drawn largely from the disaffected populations of the Middle East and Europe. But the religion preached by its most ardent followers derives from coherent and even learned interpretations of Islam.
Ce sont des millénaristes, ils veulent que le nouveau cadre légal soit ce qui se faisait au 6e ou au 7e siècle, mais ils utilisent efficacement les infrastructures des Etats nations et la technologie du monde moderne pour faire leur marketing, diffuser leurs idées et donner de leurs nouvelles... C’est pas vraiment comme les Amish.
A la fin de la lecture, on pense quand même que « si ce n’est pas seulement un groupe de psychopathes », il le sont quand même beaucoup.
Our failure to appreciate the essential differences between ISIS and al-Qaeda has led to dangerous decisions.
Et encore ce passage :
If the caliph consents to a longer-term peace or permanent border, he will be in error. Temporary peace treaties are renewable, but may not be applied to all enemies at once: the caliph must wage jihad at least once a year. He may not rest, or he will fall into a state of sin.
One comparison to the Islamic State is the Khmer Rouge, which killed about a third of the population of Cambodia. But the Khmer Rouge occupied Cambodia’s seat at the United Nations. “This is not permitted,” Abu Baraa said. “To send an ambassador to the UN is to recognize an authority other than God’s.”
Du même auteur, je trouve aussi ces deux contributions très intétessantes :
ISIS’s Three Types of Fighters | The New Republic
▻http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119395/isiss-three-types-fighters
By Graeme Wood
In February 2012, a young, beefy Egyptian named Islam Yaken took a shirtless selfie and posted it on a Facebook competitor called vk.com. The picture wouldn’t have attracted attention outside his circle of friends, were it not for the photos of himself he tweeted two years later. In that time, the Wahlberg wannabe with tidy, cropped hair had transmogrified into a bushy-haired hipster with heavy-rimmed glasses—who had gone to fight for ISIS. The jihadi accessories in his new photos included a Kalashnikov, a sword, and a bucket of Shia heads.
–—
ISIS: A History of the Islamic State’s New Caliphate in Syria and Iraq | The New Republic
▻http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119259/isis-history-islamic-states-new-caliphate-syria-and-iraq
By Graeme Wood
On June 29, 2014—or the first of Ramadan, 1435, for those who prefer the Islamic calendar to the Gregorian—the leaders of the Islamic State of Iraq and Sham (ISIS) publicly uttered for the first time a word that means little to the average Westerner, but everything to some pious Muslims. The word is “caliph.” ISIS’s proclamation that day formally hacked the last two letters from its acronym (it’s now just “The Islamic State”) and declared Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, born Ibrahim ibn Awwad ibn Ibrahim ibn Ali ibn Muhammad al-Badri al-Samarrai, the Caliph of all Muslims and the Prince of the Believers. For Muslims of a certain hyper-antiquarian inclination, these titles are not mere nomenclature. ISIS’s meticulous use of language, and its almost pedantic adherence to its own interpretation of Islamic law, have made it a strange enemy, fierce and unyielding but also scholarly and predictable. The Islamic State obsesses over words like “caliph” (Arabic: khalifa) and “caliphate” (khilafa), and news reports and social media from within ISIS have depicted frenzied chants of “The Caliphate is established!” The entire self-image and propaganda narrative of the Islamic State is based on emulating the early leaders of Islam, in particular the Prophet Muhammad and the four “rightly guided caliphs” who led Muslims from Muhammad’s death in 632 until 661. Within the lifetimes of these caliphs, the realm of Islam spread like spilled ink to the farthest corners of modern-day Iran and coastal Libya, despite small and humble origins.
« Combien faut-il de blancs pour ruiner une bonne blague ? » : sur les blagues sur "les blancs" et les humoristes blancs
▻http://www.newrepublic.com/article/120916/white-people-are-co-opting-black-peoples-jokes-about-white-people
Facebook Could Decide an Election Without Anyone Ever Finding Out
The scary future of #digital_gerrymandering—and how to prevent it | New Republic
▻http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117878/information-fiduciary-solution-facebook-digital-gerrymandering
On November 2, 2010, Facebook’s American users were subject to an ambitious experiment in civic-engineering: Could a social network get otherwise-indolent people to cast a ballot in that day’s congressional midterm elections?
The answer was yes.
Question d’actualité alors que la campagne pour les élections de mi-mandat bat son plein aux É.-U.
Arizona gun instructor accidentally shot and killed by nine-year-old girl with #Uzi
▻http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/26/arizona-girl-shoots-kills-firearms-instructor
Mohave County Sheriff Jim McCabe told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that Vacca was standing next to the girl when she pulled the trigger. The gun recoiled and it went over her head.
The paper reported that the girl had successfully fired the 9mm weapon several times in “single-shot” mode before Vacca changed the setting to “fully automatic” mode.
…after he was shot at the Last Stop outdoor shooting range.
Lors du service militaire, pour chaque passage au stand de tir, il y avait UN sous-officier derrière CHAQUE tireur avec pour mission précise d’éviter exactement ça. La « blague » qu’on racontait alors était celle de l’appelé dont le PM se bloquait en mode tir et qui se retournait, tirant toujours sa rafale, vers ledit sous-officier en lui disant : Chef ! c’est coincé.
Les sous-officiers étaient d’ailleurs, et de loin, les tout premiers à plat ventre en cas d’incident de tir.
In America Today, a 9-Year-Old Girl Can’t Play Alone in a Park But She Can Play With an Uzi
▻http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119255/girl-kills-az-shooting-range-instructor-parenting-america
In the summer of 2014 in America, a woman spent more than two weeks in jail for letting her 9-year-old girl play at a playground down the street from her job. Meanwhile, at the other end of the country, it was considered entirely acceptable—"Bullets and Burgers," the highlight of a tourist loop—for another girl of the exact same age to shoot a fully automatic weapon
Ça me rappelle une campagne de pub sur FB avec deux enfants, l’un tenant un oeuf kinder, et l’autre une arme lourde, avec une légende « devinez quel objet a été interdit car jugé dangereux pour nos enfants »
J’aime bien celle là aussi :
The 19th Century Map That Shows the U.S.’s Politicial Polarization | New Republic
▻http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119018/19th-century-map-shows-uss-politicial-polarization
We live in what is endlessly described as an era of unprecedented partisanship, with Americans polarized into red and blue camps and no convergence in sight. But much of the nation’s history was characterized by intense political rivalry, especially the late nineteenth century.
In 1876 the United States celebrated its centennial in the midst of a terrible depression sparked by the Panic of 1873. In some cities unemployment reached 25 percent, casting a significant pall over the celebration mounted in Philadelphia that spring. The mood worsened after the November presidential elections, which left Democrat Samuel Tilden in an electoral tie with Republican Rutherford Hayes. The atmosphere was chaotic, with accusations of voter suppression, rigged ballots, questionable returns, and eleventh-hour statehood for Colorado, which threw three crucial electoral votes to Hayes. The election was ultimately decided by a committee, which gave Republicans ongoing control of the White House.
The Border Is Not a Battlefield It’s more like a fortified check-in counter
Tall tales have always sprung from Texas, but the last few months have seen an uptick in their production. Beholding the procession of unaccompanied minors and young families arriving in the United States from Central America, Republican Representative Louie Gohmert, whose district is closer to Little Rock than the Rio Grande, likened the migrants to the Allied forces coming ashore at Normandy. Rick Perry, who has deployed 1,000 National Guardsmen to bolster the already sizeable law enforcement presence, dubbed the borderlands a “battlefield.” Measured by boots on the ground, that may be true, but in this case the other side lacks the element of surprise and has a habit of turning itself in. A war zone, it is not.
▻http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119030/border-crisis-inside-well-garded-rio-grande
The Most Wanted Man In The World
By James #Bamford
►http://www.wired.com/2014/08/edward-snowden
“I told the government I’d volunteer for prison, as long as it served the right purpose,” he says. “I care more about the country than what happens to me. But we can’t allow the law to become a political weapon or agree to scare people away from standing up for their rights, no matter how good the deal. I’m not going to be part of that.”
Trois jours avec l’homme le plus recherché au monde
►http://m.slate.fr/story/90975/portrait-snowden-wired-nsa
« J’étais l’expert en technologie référent d’un bureau de partage d’informations à Hawaï, explique ainsi Snowden à Wired. J’avais accès à tout. »
Et ce qu’il voit tout au long de sa carrière lui déplaît. Le #lanceur_d'alerte évoque plusieurs anecdotes qui l’ont marqué –pour certaines complètement inédites.
Ainsi, quand l’unité de #hackers de la NSA, le #TAO, a éteint par erreur l’ensemble de l’#Internet syrien en 2012 –une panne qui n’était pas passée inaperçue à l’époque, sans être toutefois liée aux services américains. Le TAO était alors chargé d’installer un programme au sein d’un équipement central de l’Internet syrien, afin de pouvoir accéder aux « emails et au trafic Internet de la plupart du pays ». Mais l’opération a mal tourné.
De même, Snowden s’inquiète de la #surveillance menée en #Chine :
« Tout le monde sait que nous hackons la Chine de façon très agressive. Mais nous avons dépassé les bornes. Nous hackons des universités et des hôpitaux et toute l’infrastructure civile au lieu de viser de véritables cibles gouvernementales et militaires. Et c’est un vrai souci. »
Autre motif d’inquiétude : le programme #Monstermind, sur lequel Wired revient également longuement. Un dispositif censé non seulement contrer des attaques informatiques de manière automatisée, sans intervention humaine, mais aussi lancer des représailles contre les auteurs supposés de l’attaque. Ce qui pose deux problèmes majeurs : d’un côté, l’origine de l’attaque peut être masquée et la contre-attaque de cibler des innocents ; de l’autre, ce dispositif impose, pour repérer les menaces, d’analyser tout le trafic Internet. « Pour tout le monde, tout le temps », précise Snowden.
Wired’s Edward Snowden Profile Is Public Relations, Not Journalism
▻http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119074/wireds-edward-snowden-profile-public-relations-not-journalism
Early in his profile, Bamford explains that he has come to Moscow to identify Snowden’s motivations, to uncover “what drove Snowden to leak hundreds of thousands of top-secret documents.” But Bamford spends very little time actually engaging this question. He doesn’t probe Snowden’s politics, general ideological outlook, or psychological profile. Instead he unhesitatingly accepts Snowden’s claim that his transformation from aspiring marine to anti-government mole was purely a product of encountering surveillance programs that he found disturbing. Of course, he hardly needed to travel to Moscow for that; he could have simply read anything by Glenn Greenwald. The reader is thus left wondering: Is Bamford really trying to understand “what drove Snowden,” or did he make up his mind before he ever sat down?
Pour énerver un négociateur israélien : sortir une carte.
How the Israel-Palestine Peace Deal Died
▻http://www.newrepublic.com/article/118751/how-israel-palestine-peace-deal-died
Molho—whom some of the Americans dubbed “Dr. No”—was particularly insistent that Israel never place any map on the table until the security conditions that would govern a Palestinian state were agreed upon. At one meeting, after he went to the bathroom, Indyk pulled out a map of Israeli settlements to facilitate a discussion about borders. When Molho returned, he became visibly unnerved, trying to figure out what Livni had said in his absence. “I go to the bathroom for five minutes and there are suddenly maps?” he groused.
Maps of San Francisco
Struggles over finite space are endemic to urban life, but in #San_Francisco the battles can be especially fierce. As a peninsular city, its geography alone limits its capacity to absorb newcomers, a constraint exacerbated by extensive regulatory obstacles to building new housing. Most recently, the influx of monied home buyers from Silicon Valley tech companies has transformed and gentrified entirely new areas of the city, such as the Mission District. The process has sparked more than a little tension as longstanding residents find themselves priced out.
▻http://www.newrepublic.com/article/118508/map-san-franciscos-chinatown-1880s-shows-brothels-opium-dens
#carte #cartographie #visualisation
via @ElisabethVallet (twitter)
Silicon’s Valley’s Brutal Ageism | New Republic
▻http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117088/silicons-valleys-brutal-ageism
An engineer in his forties recently told me about meeting a tech CEO who was trying to acquire his company. “You must be the token graybeard,” said the CEO, who was in his late twenties or early thirties. “I looked at him and said, ‘No, I’m the token grown-up.’ ”
Toujours aussi sympa, le jeunisme.
Un homme de 39 ans qui bossait chez Dior, le #DRH : « À votre age, vous n’êtes plus concept. »
#jeunisme #capitalisme #travail