Lawrence Lessig’s July 29, 2010, TEDxBoston talk. Why your vote matters less.My election day gift to the readers of smays.com
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Politics
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Respect My Authoritah | ||||
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That’s the title of a damning story in Rolling Stone by Tim Dickinson. The sub-title sums it up:
“The inside story of how Obama failed to crack down on the corruption of the Bush years – and let the world’s most dangerous oil company get away with murder”
There are so many depressing aspects to this story I don’t know where to begin.
“As BP was cutting corners aboard the rig, the Obama administration was plotting the greatest expansion of offshore drilling in half a century. In 2008, as prices at the pump neared $5 a gallon, President Bush had lifted an executive moratorium on offshore drilling outside the Gulf that had been implemented by his father following the Exxon Valdez. On the campaign trail, Obama had stressed that offshore drilling “will not make a real dent in current gas prices or meet the long-term challenge of energy independence.” But once in office, he bowed to the politics of “drill, baby, drill.” Hoping to use oil as a bargaining chip to win votes for climate legislation in Congress, Obama unveiled an aggressive push for new offshore drilling in the Arctic, the Southeastern seaboard and new waters in the Gulf, closer to Florida than ever before. In doing so, he ignored his administration’s top experts on ocean science, who warned that the offshore plan dramatically understated the risks of an oil spill and petitioned Salazar to exempt the Arctic from drilling until more scientific studies could be conducted.”
As a contributor to the Obama campaign in 2008, I’m on a shit-load of mailing lists and frequently get calls to contribute. I told the last guy, “No.” He asked why and I told him I was disappointed in so many of the president’s decisions (or lack of decsisions). The young man asked for specifics, ready with a screen-full of talking points and responses, but I declined.
He said something like, “In a democracy, nobody is going to agree with everything the president has to do. If you approve of 75% of his actions, that would be pretty good.” Not for me. Not if that 25% is symptomatic of the same old political shit that Obama promised to move beyond. Uh uh.
Am I sorry I voted for Obama? Not given the McCain-Palin option. Is Obama a better president that W? Yeah, probably, but so what. That aint much of a bar.
The Rolling Stone piece is lengthy but worth the read.
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Yesterday afternoon, Missouri Lt. Governor Peter Kinder called a news conference to announce that he was going to fight the newly signed health care bill. I thought it might be a good event to stream live from my iPhone, so I hopped in the car and headed for the Capitol.
My plan was to embed a video player on one of our websites (Legislature.com) and stream with TwitVid. Problem 1: TwitVid records video and posts but doesn’t stream live. Qik streams and so does USTREAM. I figured that out but not in time.
For backup, I recorded with the Casio Exilim. Here’s how that video looks posted on YouTube:
I was streaming the iPhone video to Qik, I just didn’t have the player embedded in the right spot. Here’s the archived Qik/iPhone video:
This is where having too many video apps comes in. TwitVid, Qik, USTREAM, and the buit-in video recording on the iPhone. Too many apps and too many embedded players and too many linked Twitter accounts.
I would have been smarter to just record the video with the built-in iPhone app, upload to YouTube and link from relevant Twitter accounts and blogs.
If it’s not an alien landing or Jesus returning… it doesn’t need to be live.
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Arianna Huffington makes some predictions of what comes next for the Internet and I sure hope she’s right. A few excerpts:
- “An online tool that makes it possible to instantly fact-check a story as you are reading it — or watching it on video. Picture this: It’s last summer and you are reading or watching a story about health care, and Sarah Palin or Betsy McCaughey is prattling on about death panels. Instantly, a box pops up with the actual language from the bill or a tape rolls with a factual explanation of what the provision in question really does. And this is a non-partisan tool. So when, in the midst of the legislative debate, President Obama says “I didn’t campaign on the public option,” the software will fire up and instantly show you where support for the public option appeared in his campaign plan, and clips of all the times he mentioned it in public after he got elected.
- A .com innovation that immediately provides a reader or viewer with the background knowledge needed to better understand the data and information being delivered as news. The powers-that-be — both political and corporate — have mastered the dark art of making information deliberately convoluted and indecipherable. For them, complexity is not a bug, it’s a feature.
- Our future tool will also automatically simplify needlessly complicated laws, contracts, and linguistic smoke screens. So when a politician or Wall Street CEO performs the usual verbal gymnastics in an attempt to befuddle and bamboozle us, his words will immediately be translated into clear and precise language. It will be Truth 2.0.
- In the future, software will be created that allows us to pull the curtain back on the corridors of power and see who is really pulling the levers. A great early iteration of this was provided by the Sunlight Foundation during the recent health care summit. During its live streaming of the discussion, the Foundation offered a dose of transparency by showing, as each of our elected officials was speaking, a list of his or her major campaign contributors. It was simple, powerful, and spoke volumes about the extent to which many players in the summit were bought and paid for.
I think this will happen because it can happen. I hope this scares the shit out of the politicians and power-brokers.
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