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Ain't No Love in the Intertoobz

 

I'm on a mission of love here y'all. I swear that I am. But every time I see a Facebook post crying to the heavens about the end of net neutrality, all I feel is seething rage. So many people so upset over something they know nothing about. What's worse is that I see it coming from progressives, even self-described radicals. I see these people talking about how this new government decision has ruined the open Internet, and how hard it will make it for innovators, with seemingly no awareness as to how they've been parroting the talking points Republicans have been using since before Reagan.

Juiceboxxx Talks Nu American, Huffington Post and Business As Usual

 

 

I saw Milwaukee Rapper Juiceboxxx perform last year as an opener for Jeff the Brotherhood. He was wearing a denim jacket, and walked this line between Kid Rock and James Chance in terms of a rap-metal presentation that was somewhat grotesque but obviously literate in the cooler aspects of proto-punk rock and good Hip Hop. Almost in a manner that you either want to tell him to go take a piss, or go be his friend because you know you can completely relate to him.

Microtransactions Are Breaking Mobile Gaming

All the way back in 2007, Apple’s introduction of the iPhone seemed like it would revolutionize mobile gaming. Though Nokia had tried a hybrid phone/portable game console all the way back in 2003—the questionably-designed and forgettable N-Gage—there was a lot of promise for smaller game developers in a phone that happened to be smart enough to play video games, even if it wasn’t designed specifically for it. Prior to the modern smartphone, gaming away from a TV set meant buying a dedicated device for it, a market dominated by Nintendo. And while Nintendo did a lot of great things with portable gaming, it wasn’t an environment with much room for indie designers. The iPhone and subsequent Android smartphones let game designers sell their games to people who might not be “gamer” enough to own a Game Boy. And then, like so many other things, greed and market stupidity broke it. On the dedicated gaming side of things, a new game for the Nintendo 3DS costs $35-40. That’s fine if you’re the sort of person who would drop $200 for a dedicated portable game console in the first place—and cheap compared to the $60 price tag for new home console games.

THE WAR TO END ALL WARS

“Peace, as we have seen, is not an order natural to mankind: it is artificial, intricate and highly volatile. All kinds of preconditions are necessary.” — Michael Howard, The Invention of Peace And here comes World War I, wrapped in World War II, wrapped in the Cold War: tremors on one of Planet Earth’s human fault lines. We have enough angry, manipulable people on this planet to carry out the game plan of the political ideologues and war profiteers, who are always on the lookout for the next war, the one that’s too volatile and “inevitable” to stop. As David Swanson, author of War Is a Lie, put it: “The search for a good war is beginning to look as futile as the search for the mythical city of El Dorado. And yet that search remains our top public project.”

Possibly the Biggest Unknown Known Risks Exposure

 

 

A petition to the President and the Attorney General has just been posted by several organizations, including one I work for, asking that the Department of Justice stop threatening New York Times reporter James Risen with prison if he refuses to reveal a confidential source.

This story, among other stunning features, I think, threatens to expose an unknown known of the highest magnitude -- by which I mean, not something lying outside Donald Rumsfeld's imagination, but something that everyone paying attention has known all about for years but which would explode the brains of most consumers of corporate media if they ever heard about it.

Here's a great summary of the matter at the Progressive.  The focus there and in the petition is on the threat to freedom of the press.  But read this offhand bit of the explanation carefully:

Streamlined show launches annual short play fest

 

 

Theatre Roulette has always stuck to the same template: It consists of three collections of short plays, and each collection is rotated to a different day each week, thus giving the annual festival its name.

Beyond that, MadLab has been steadily honing the Roulette format. The shows once tended to be endurance contests, slowed down by lengthy scene changes and long-winded previews of the other nights’ offerings. Recently, though, MadLab has worked to streamline the product.

Open Book, the collection that launched this year’s festival, may be the most streamlined yet. Efficiently and competently directed by Jim Azelvandre, it wraps up its seven plays in a mere 70 minutes.

Are the plays worth the modest investment in time and money? It all depends on your taste and temperament.

THE AFTERMATH OF ELECTING A BLACK PRESIDENT IN AMERICA

 

 

For those of you who don’t know it, aftermath means: result, consequences, outcome, upshot, repercussion, and the after effects of an event or action. In other words…what happens after a thing occurs.

The aftermath of electing a Black President in America should come as no surprise to anyone. At least not to those who haven’t been wearing blinders to the fact that racism is and has been alive and well in America regardless of the outward appearances to the outside world and even they aren’t fooled.

The rise in the number of different hate groups in America has risen so much that, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, in 2012 the KKK chapters dropped from 221 to 152 in one year. Did you know that the Ohio-based Brotherhood of Klans was the second-largest Klan association in the country, with 38 chapters? And to think President Obama won Ohio electoral votes both times.

Mental Illness Advocate vs. Mental Illness Advocate

All advocacy involves a lot of debate. We live in a society that has yet to agree on whether the toilet paper goes over or under, so it isn't surprising that something as complex as mental illness advocacy brings out the claws. We only have to look to Facebook to see the anger that some folks show toward political candidates they disagree with. Democrats and Republicans will be in conflict from now until the end of time. And, without muddying the waters with political debate, that makes sense. Those two parties are on different sides, with sometimes wildly different views. But what about the massive disagreements of people that are, in theory, on the same side, who should have similar views? Mental health issues are serious. They are life-threatening. But more than anything, they are personal. The outcomes fill a spectrum from inspirational to devastating. I work in an industry where the typical advocate is either a person living with the illness or a person who has had a loved one, most often a child, die from this illness.

HEALTH INSURANCE CEO PAY SKY-ROCKETS IN 2013

Philadelphia, PA - May 1, 2014 - Chief executive officers at Fortune 500 health insurance companies, who have opposed new regulations under the Affordable Care Act, emerged this month as one of the ACA's greatest beneficiaries. Recently filed financial reports show that average compensation for these top nine health insurance CEOs rose by more than 19 percent in 2013, while several of the nation’s largest insurers more than doubled CEO pay.   The biggest winner was Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini, who received a staggering $30.7 million compensation package in 2013. This marks the largest payout to any health insurance executive since passage of the ACA and exceeded the compensation of the next two highest paid health insurer CEOs combined. The Bertolini pay package, which included a large “special one-time performance-based retention award,” represented a 131 percent increase over his $13.3 million compensation in 2012. (See table below.)  

Why Increased Fracking Means More Fatal Auto Crashes

States like North Dakota, Texas and Pennsylvania are among those that have experienced the biggest fracking booms in the U.S. They also have reported more auto crashes as a result. To the supporters of oil and natural gas extraction, correlating traffic collisions with fracking will likely sound like another attempt to bash their favorite means of obtaining energy. However, The Associated Press has the numbers to back it up—there are more fatal car crashes in areas of heavy fracking. Many more. “We are just so swamped,” Sheriff Dwayne Villanueva of Karnes County, TX told the AP. “I don’t see it slowing down anytime soon.” The AP’s analysis reveals alarming figures. For instance, the average rate of deaths per 100,000 people in North Dakota drilling areas grew by an average of 148 percent from 2009 to 2013, compared to the previous five years. For the rest of the state, that measure fell by 1 percent in the same time frame. Even in drilling areas where an increase was nowhere near that dramatic, it still tells the same story. In Pennsylvania drilling areas, traffic fatalities rose by 4 percent during that time frame. They fell by 19 percent everywhere else in the state.

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