Possibly related to Hound Tall #5: Renegade History (with Thaddeus Russell, Greg Proops and Matt Kirshen) « Nerdist on Huffduffer

Transcript CHRIS: Hey, everybody. Thanks for listening to ShopTalk Show. We have an awesome show for you. As you know, this "season" we are doing topical based shows. The topic this week, oh, drum roll or something, I feel like is necessary. [Drum roll sound effect] CHRIS: Headless CMSs. What is a headless CMS? You're going to find out if you listen to this show. It's a very interesting concept. We have two sponsors for you. Braintree: Simple, secure payments, code that you can integrate in minutes. It's an API for taking money from people for your Web app kind of fundamental if you're building a Web app. The URL there is BraintreePayments.com/SHOPTALK. Please go to that URL to check it out. It's pretty cool. I don't think you're going to regret it. Fluent Conf, which is coming up in San Francisco March 7th through 10th, two days of intensive training on things like React, Node, CSS layout, followed by two days of sessions and that type of thing. Use the coupon code SHOPTALKS, when you register to save 30% off of that conference coming up in lovely San Francisco. That's going to be a fun trip for all of you all that bite on this and go. I don't think you're going to regret that either. For now, let's kick things off. [Banjo music] MANTRA: JUST BUILD WEBSITES! DAVE: Well, welcome to another episode of ShopTalk Show. I should actually be using my Halloween soundboard because today is a spooky, scary episode about headless CMS - woooo. CHRIS: If CMSs were people, it would be like Spooky Hallow indeed. DAVE: I'm Dave Rupert with Mr. Chris Coyier. Chris, who do we got here today? CHRIS: Hey! We have a pal on this. We have invited some people who have inspired me to think more about this subject and I'm sure have lots of say about this subject. Number one, we have Matt Dennewitz. Hey, Matt. MATT: Hello. CHRIS: Matt is VP of Product at Pitchfork.com, the most influential music site online. DAVE: Uh, I'd give it a 5.4. CHRIS: I don't know how to introduce Pitchfork. What do you say? What do you really do at Pitchfork? I'm sure that's what you really do, but you know what I mean. What do you really do? MATT: My team just builds the website. We build backend. We build the CMS. Kind of build anything that needs to be built and then make sure it stays running. CHRIS: Yeah, so code, servers, those things. MATT: You got it. Yeah. CHRIS: Nice. You've been there a long time, thus the VP thing, and you know the ins and outs of how the Pitchfork infrastructure works, including CMS stuff. MATT: So true. So true. CHRIS: Okay. Chicago, right? MATT: Mm-hmm, correct. Yeah. I've been here about 14 years. CHRIS: Yeah, so that's where Pitchfork is and where Matt Dennewitz is, those two things. Makes a lot of sense, really. MATT: Here in the heart of Logan Square. DAVE: If you were to draw a Venn diagram, they would be overlapping. CHRIS: I don't even think it counts when the two circles are the same circle. It's like a Venn "no-diagram." DAVE: Hmm. MATT: Isn't every circle a Venn diagram, really? CHRIS: Sure. Kind of. It's a half of one, anyway. I met Matt through an event called SNDMakes. SND is the Society for News Design, and our mutual friend and my girlfriend, Miranda Mulligan, runs it. It was pretty darn fun, I think. It's like this boutique hack-a-thon thing where, through this society or whatever, a bunch of cool, interesting, smart people come together and build stuff, and stuff. We did one of those in Austin, and then we did it again just recently in Chicago, and Matt was at both of them. It was pretty fun. MATT: Yeah, so were you. CHRIS: I was. I was totally there. We got to hang out for, like, an entire weekend at the Cards Against Humanity offices, and it was pretty cool. MATT: (Indiscernible). CHRIS: Yeah. I have lots of questions for Matt, and we're going to pepper him with stuff. Maybe we'll even talk about baseball for a minute. I don't know, though. Matt might get too passionate. We also have Jeff Eaton. We've never talked to Jeff before. Hey, Jeff. How are you doing? JEFF: I'm doing pretty good. It's great to be here. CHRIS: Yeah. Jeff, you are -- quoting from your page on Lullabot.com where you work -- content strategy, Drupal architecture, multichannel publishing, content modeling. Is it safe to say you care about CMSs a little? JEFF: I care to an almost unhealthy degree about CMSs, structured content, content reuse and, yeah, all that stuff. I love it. CHRIS: Okay. Cool. You are at Lullabot and stuff. Do you want to tell us about that, maybe a recent project or something? JEFF: Yeah. I've been working with Lullabot. We're primarily a Drupal architecture and development shop. We've been at it for about a decade. Actually, this January is our tenth anniversary, and I've been with Lullabot for a little over nine years, so I've been there for quite a while now. We do projects like the Grammy's website, MSNBC.com, a lot of NBC properties, Martha Stewart Living, the World Wrestling Entertainment Company, and we also work with a lot of small to midsize clients like educational institutions and stuff like that who aren't necessarily doing giant media enterprises, but a lot of our, like, tent pole projects, the ones that we sink a lot of time and energy into, are those media and content publishing businesses where it's a big part of what they do. It's not just an adjunct or part of their marketing or whatever. But, putting that stuff out is their business. CHRIS: Yeah. Interesting. Okay. Cool, cool. Clearly a big -- we hear -- sometimes we even get questions about little agencies who are like, "Should I specialize in a particular CMS or something?" It's like here's kind of proof that doing that isn't the worst idea in the world with a massive client base you have and still being kind of a Drupal focused shop. Just as a minor aside here, if some big contract came along that they wanted Lullabot to do, and they specifically didn't want Drupal, would you do it anyway, or are you that focused on Drupal that it wouldn't be--? JEFF: No. We actually do other stuff, like we've got people who are ramping up on Swift, and we've done React Node projects and stuff like that. I've done a bunch of Django stuff on the side just because I nerd out a lot. But, it's such a big part of the rhythm of the clients that we work with and stuff like that, that that's the majority of the stuff that we do. We enjoy doing other things, but usually it's as an adjunct to Drupal, large-scale Drupal projects, just mostly because of inertia and the kinds of clients that come in the door. CHRIS: Awesome. I don't think we've met, but this started, this concept in my head started as Dave and I -- there was even an episode of this. We were at an Event Apart. Were we in Chicago, Dave? DAVE: Chicago. CHRIS: Yeah, I believe we were. DAVE: State Street, it's a great street. CHRIS: I don't even know what's going on there. We were invited to that one to do a live ShopTalk Show, so that's why you couldn't hear it here. At that particular one, for whatever reason, this concept of headless CMS kept coming up over and over again. And so, I would like to define it before we get too much further along, or at least what we all think of when we think of it. Karen McGrane was there, who is another big content person. I also asked her to be on the show, but she is busy romping around New Zealand and said that the person that you have to absolutely talk to is Jeff Eaton, so that's why Jeff is here, not that I wasn't aware of you already, Jeff. But, it was a-- JEFF: It's okay. CHRIS: It's an amazing-- JEFF: I'm flattered. CHRIS: It was an amazing endorsement by Karen. While we are at it, this is what I think of it. I'm going to do a short one, and then I'm going to pass it off to you two because I kind of want to know what you think about when you think of headless CMS. I just think of some kind of maybe even a UI for a backend, but the UI just absolutely doesn't care about templating or what the front end of the site is going to look like. It is only concerned with accepting data being input and then its output is literally just APIs only, like json API, whatever. Hit this URL. I'll return you data that I'm storing within myself. Head refers, in my mind, to just templates only. A headless CMS would be a CMS that just doesn't have templates. What do you think, Matt? Is that anywhere near right? How do you think of this term? MATT: Yeah, I think you nailed it. The way I think of it is just kind of decoupling data delivery from any backend or front end. The backend just kind of becomes a permission to front end. Traditionally, the backend is thought of as the CMS, I guess at least where I come from. The advantage that gives you is you can put a lot of effort now into the data delivery and kind of marshalling who has access to that and refining it, and then you really don't need to care about who reads it, how it's read, or how it's fed back into, which lets you kind of decompose all of those concerns and spread them out to different teams who could maybe excel at the individual concern level rather than all together. CHRIS: Okay. That's already a benefit of it is, organizationally, you could split this thing at the concern level, so you could have teams that do different parts of this and not smash them together anymore. MATT: Yeah. CHRIS: That's a good thing. Let's hold off on that for a minute because that's a benefit of it. Let's define it first and then do the benefits thing. Jeff, what do you think about when you think about headless CMSs? JEFF: I think you definitely nailed it. I tend to think of headless CMSs as sort of existing on a continuum of decoupling. Headless feels like a very extreme version of a greater trend towards separating concerns, I think, ev

This week, Michael is joined by Thaddeus Russell (host of the Unregistered podcast, founder of Renegade University, and author of A Renegade History of the United States), for a heady conversation about post-modernism, truth and reality. Strap yourself in for this one (or don't, because reality is subjective and strapping in for you might be totally different to strapping in for me so how can we ever really determine with any accuracy what strapping in actually is?) Thaddeus Russell A RENEGADE HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES: https://amzn.to/2LqNfPo https://twitter.com/ThaddeusRussell http://www.thaddeusrussell.com/ https://www.facebook.com/RealThaddeusRussell/ Michael Malice Order THE NEW RIGHT: https://amzn.to/2IFFCCu https://twitter.com/michaelmalice https://instagram.com/michaelmalice https://facebook.com/MichaelMalice https://youtube.com/michaelmaliceofficial https://patreon.com/michaelmalice PLEASE VISIT OUR SPONSORS Need some gummies to calm you down? Go to http://www.infinitecbd.com and use promo code WELCOME15 for 15% off your purchase! You need a website, everyone. Go to http://www.letthatbeyourwelcome.com and follow the link for 10% off all WIX premium plans. The newest episode of "YOUR WELCOME" releases on iTunes and YouTube every Thursday! Please subscribe and leave a review. ... === Original video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCCHOb3WrBU Downloaded by http://huffduff-video.snarfed.org/ on Thu, 22 Aug 2019 10:02:38 GMT Available for 30 days after download

Denmark consistently ranks at or near the top of the U.N.’s annual happiness ranking. Is their secret generous social programs and high levels of social trust? (Photo: Mstyslav Chernov/Wikimedia Commons) Our latest Freakonomics Radio episode is called “How to Be Happy.” (You can subscribe to the podcast at Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or elsewhere, get the RSS feed, or listen via the media player above.) The U.N.’s World Happiness Report — created to curtail our unhealthy obsession with G.D.P. — is dominated every year by the Nordic countries. We head to Denmark to learn the secrets of this happiness epidemic (and to see if we should steal them). Below is a transcript of the episode, modified for your reading pleasure. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post. *      *      * Until a few years ago, Helen Russell was leading a seemingly happy life in London, working as an editor for the fashion magazine Marie Claire. True, she did feel restless at times; also true: she and her husband had been struggling with fertility treatments. That said, she had no intention of leaving the U.K. Helen RUSSELL: Until out of the blue, one wet Wednesday, my husband came home and told me he’d been offered his dream job working for Lego in Denmark. And we knew nothing about the country, as many people in other countries are fairly ignorant of Scandinavia. We couldn’t really have pinpointed it on a map. They decided to go for it. But as soon as they arrived — in a small town in the rural hinterlands of Denmark, in the dead of winter— she had regrets. RUSSELL: My husband left to go to work at 7:30 a.m. I didn’t know anyone. I didn’t speak the language. I was in this freezing cold, dark country all by myself. I did a lot of howling at the moon, thinking I’d made the biggest mistake ever. And I did a lot of eating danish pastries, because as a repressed Brit, I like to eat my emotions. But Russell had heard — as you may have heard — that Denmark is routinely at or near the very top of the annual happiness ranking compiled by the United Nations. And the other Nordic countries — Norway, Sweden, Iceland, and Finland — pretty much dominate the top 10. Russell naturally wondered: why? What are the causes, and consequences, of this alleged happiness epidemic? Was it for real? What are the downsides? She set out to answer these questions, in a book she called The Year of Living Danishly: Uncovering the Secrets of the World’s Happiest Country. Along the way, she asked nearly every Dane she met how they would rank their happiness on a scale of 1 to 10. A funny thing happened during this process: Russell herself became quite a bit happier. RUSSELL: I was maybe — I’d have said a 6 was a good day in London, and now I’m generally on that 8, and sometimes a 9, if I’m lucky. DUBNER: You’re practically Danish. RUSSELL: I’m practically Danish. Today on Freakonomics Radio: what causes all this happiness? Jeffrey SACHS: What it is, I think, is a kind of ethos of life. What’s keeping less-happy countries from copying it? Meik WIKING: The price tag. And: an economist who thinks we should worry more about well-being and less about traditional measures like GDP: SACHS: My God. Let’s get serious about the quality of our lives, and stop this nonsense of chasing such a poor indicator that is taking us actually farther away from our happiness. *      *      * I recently spent a few days in Copenhagen. There was one person I was very excited to meet. WIKING: So my name is Meik Wiking, and I’m the C.E.O. of the Happiness Research Institute here in Copenhagen. DUBNER: And is “Viking” a common surname here? WIKING: No. I think we’re a handful of people. My dad is called Wolf. I have a brother called Kenneth. I have a couple of nephews, one is called Max Wiking, so he needs to grow up big and tall. DUBNER: Do you do Halloween here, where you dress up as costumes? WIKING: I see where this is going. DUBNER: I’m just curious, were you a Viking every year when you were a child? WIKING: No. But there was one episode, yes. Wiking has a background in political science, economics, and sociology — all of which figure in understanding what’s called happiness. WIKING: One of the challenges we have with happiness is to define it and to measure it. And we should first and foremost acknowledge that it’s a wide umbrella term. So you have one understanding of what happiness is, and I have another one. So we need to break it down and look at different components. The first is an overall life satisfaction. And here you essentially ask your respondents to take a step back and evaluate their lives. Happiness researchers also track people’s moods in the moment. WIKING: “How happy are you right now? How happy were you yesterday?” And there we can see that weather, what day of the week it is, impacts our happiness levels. People are happier — no big surprise — on the weekend, than they are on Monday mornings. They also measure people’s sense of meaning. WIKING: That builds on what Aristotle thought the good life was. To him, the good life was the meaningful life. So here we try to understand, do people have a sense of purpose? A sense of purpose. A self-evaluation of life satisfaction. You may think all this sounds a bit squishy — especially to an economist, yes? SACHS: I’m going to answer anything you’re going to ask me. Okay, we’ll ask some questions. First one’s easy: would you please introduce yourself? SACHS: Jeff Sachs, a university professor at Columbia University. And I am special adviser to the United Nations Secretary General on the Sustainable Development Goals. One part of that is human well-being. And so I am a co-editor each year of the World Happiness Report. The World Happiness Report — that’s where Denmark and the other Nordic countries always come out on top. Jeff Sachs, just so you know, isn’t some woo-woo feel-good witch doctor. You may have heard him on our program before, talking about his work as an interventional economist for governments in crisis: SACHS: I worked in Poland and in Russia after the communist system collapsed. Also in Bolivia, trying to tame its hyperinflation. SACHS: And I worked in Latin America very extensively for several years after the work in Bolivia. The calls kept coming. SACHS: And then in 1995, another quite decisive turn for me was an invitation to go to Zambia and to see what this experience and these lessons might mean for Africa. Over time, and because of those experiences, Sachs came to believe that his fellow economists had left something out of their worldview. Something, in fact, quite vital. SACHS: The economics profession took a very bad turn roughly 150 years ago when it decided that since it wasn’t possible to measure happiness or to compare happiness across individuals, we would look basically at consumer preferences. The inspiration to incorporate happiness into economic modeling came from a rather unlikely source. SACHS: So back in 1971, the fourth king of Bhutan — who also brought democracy to the country — was an extremely, extremely wise leader, he raised the question already, why are we pursuing Gross National Product when we should be pursuing Gross National Happiness? You know it’s such a wonderful phrase. And GNH entered the vocabulary of a small niche of economists and a small niche of Buddhists, and others who are dreaming of this, already, decades ago. But Bhutan went ahead as a very poor country and actually set up the mechanisms for detailed survey measurement of dimensions of Gross National Happiness. It set up a Gross National Happiness commission. It ordered that all legislation should be an evaluated happiness benefit-cost ratio. Sachs began meeting with the king, and they brought more world leaders and economists into the happiness conversation. This ultimately led to the creation of the U.N.’s World Happiness Report. The concept was jarring to many of Sachs’s colleagues, particularly in the U.S. SACHS: Well, in our country, we don’t talk about almost anything else in the public space. It’s all about growth, GDP, incomes. Of course, there is a massive industry of happiness studies, self-help manuals, helping people to overcome all sorts of unhappinesses, trying to help people find meaning in their lives, trying to help people make better decisions about their lives. To Sachs, the booming self-help industry in rich countries like the U.S. reveals a disturbing paradox. SACHS: We have the paradox that income per person rises in the United States, but happiness does not. And it’s not that that’s because humans are humans. It’s because the U.S. is falling behind other countries, because we are not pursuing dimensions of happiness that are extremely important: our physical health, the mental health in our community, the social support, the honesty in government. And this is weighing down American well-being. Like the Danish happiness expert Meik Wiking, Sachs finds wisdom in the ancient Greek model. SACHS: I go with Aristotle — he’s my guy, my favorite philosopher. And he pointed out in the Nicomachean Ethics, 2,300 years ago, that to be happy requires the good benefit of having material needs met. So don’t deny those, he said. But he also said, only aiming for wealth, single-mindedly pursuing a higher wealth, is certainly no way to happiness and after a certain point of income, work on other things — work on your friendship, work on your mental health, work your physical health. Work on good governance, work on your charitableness. Because in this kind of world, a good life is a balanced and a virtuous life. Not a single-minded pursuit of income. Okay, if these are the factors that supposedly generate happiness — community, good mental and physical health, good governance — and since Denmark and the other Nordic countries top the happiness rankings, let’s take a look at how they address those

NERMEEN SHAIKH: The U.S. is intensifying its air war in Afghanistan. Over a recent four-day period, U.S. Air Force B-52s dropped what the Air Force described as a record-setting 24 precision-guided weapons on suspected Taliban targets. The bombings took place in the northeast province of Badakhshan, which shares a border with Pakistan, Tajikistan and China. Meanwhile, U.S. Central Command has announced it is shifting military resources from Iraq and Syria back to Afghanistan, where the United States has been fighting for over 16 years in the longest war in U.S. history. U.S. Air Force Major General James Hecker recently said Afghanistan has “become CENTCOM’s main effort.” AMY GOODMAN: The news comes after a particularly bloody period in Afghanistan. Last year, the United States said civilian casualties in 2017 had reached a record high in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, about 10,000 of Afghanistan’s security forces reportedly were killed over the past year. Despite the spiraling violence, President Trump recently ruled out negotiations with the Taliban, during a meeting of members of the United Nations Security Council. PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We’ll also discuss what more we can do to defeat the Taliban. I don’t see any talking taking place. I don’t think we’re prepared to talk right now. It’s a whole different fight over there. They’re killing people left and right. Innocent people are being killed left and right, bombing in the middle of children, in the middle of families, bombing, killing all over Afghanistan. … So, there’s no talking to the Taliban. We don’t want to talk to the Taliban. We’re going to finish what we have to finish. What nobody else has been able to finish, we’re going to be able to do it. AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to Steve Coll, a journalist who has reported on Afghanistan and the region for the past three decades. In 2005, he won a Pulitzer Prize for his book Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001. Well, now he’s just published a sequel looking at what has happened in Afghanistan since the 9/11 attacks. It’s titled Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Steve Coll is dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University and a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine. He joins us now in our studio. Welcome back to Democracy Now! STEVE COLL: Thanks, Amy. Good to be back. AMY GOODMAN: So, let’s start with your title, Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan. What is Directorate S? STEVE COLL: So, it’s the covert action arm of the Pakistani intelligence service, the main intelligence service called ISI. And it basically has supported the Taliban and other militant groups to pursue Pakistan’s idea of its foreign policy interests in its neighborhood, or at least the idea of its military, which is really in charge of ISI and Directorate S, and which is, you know, the strongest institution in Pakistan and has ruled the country for many of its years of independence. And, you know, the CIA knows all about Directorate S, because they worked with them during the 1980s to defeat the Soviet occupation. That’s the story of Ghost Wars. The story here is that after the United States went into Afghanistan, set up a constitutional government, led by Hamid Karzai initially, a few years after that, starting around 2005, Directorate S went back into action, this time not to defeat the Soviets, but to undermine the American project in Afghanistan. NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, could you say a little bit more, Steve Coll, for our listeners and viewers who don’t know very much about the history of Afghanistan during the Cold War, and of Pakistan—give us a sense of the expansion of Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan’s premier intelligence agency. What was it—the scope of it? I mean, now, in Pakistan, it’s come to be known as a state within a state. STEVE COLL: Yes. NERMEEN SHAIKH: How did it come to have the proportions it does now, and also influence over Pakistan’s foreign policy? STEVE COLL: Yeah, well, so, you start with the Army’s influence over Pakistan’s foreign policy which goes all the way back to the 1950s. But the growth of ISI really took place during the 1980s with funding from the CIA and Saudi Arabia to try to help ISI support the Afghan rebels against the Soviet Union in a Cold War proxy fight, right? So, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979. Afghans rebelled spontaneously against that occupation. Many of them fled to Pakistan. Gradually, Pakistan organized a resistance. And then the CIA and Saudi Arabia came in with billions of dollars. And essentially they contracted ISI to carry out this covert action. And Pakistan insisted on that. They said,”We don’t want a bunch of Americans running around on our frontier. You let us do the work. Give us the funds.” And gradually, they grew into this corrosive force within Pakistan. And they moved beyond supporting groups like the Mujahideen—and, later, the Taliban—into interfering in Pakistani politics, trying to shape media narratives, and essentially become a state within the state. AMY GOODMAN: So the U.S. and Saudi Arabia provided enormous support for Pakistan and, ultimately, the ISI, over the years. STEVE COLL: Yes, and directly to ISI, because the main—we had a long-standing alliance with Pakistan, tried to provide, you know, humanitarian aid and so forth, over the decades, but it was the Soviet war that really changed the character of the relationship by bringing ISI’s role in this kind of covert war to the forefront of the alliance. NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, I mean, there’s—it’s quite remarkable, the shift that happened in U.S. policy vis-à-vis precisely ISI. I mean, they used, as you’ve said, ISI to funnel all these funds and arms to the Mujahideen during the Soviet occupation. But in documents leaked in April 2011 by WikiLeaks, the U.S. government described the ISI as a terrorist organization on par with al-Qaeda and the Taliban. So, could you give us a sense of what accounts for this massive shift? STEVE COLL: Well, it was the experience of being on the receiving end of ISI covert action after the U.S.-led war to overthrow the Taliban in 2001. So, you know, the Taliban fell in December of 2001. The Bonn Agreement established a new constitutional government in Afghanistan. Hamid Karzai was elected president. A parliament was elected. Afghans came home from abroad. There were a couple of years of relative peace. And then the war started again. And initially, I think, the United States, which was distracted by Iraq, had gone off and invaded Iraq, was trying to turn—the Bush administration was trying to turn the war over to NATO allies. They didn’t really see ISI coming for a while. But, gradually, the Taliban revived. Gradually, it became apparent to U.S. officials, who would go over and try to study what’s going wrong with this war, that ISI was back in action, that the Taliban were receiving not just physical sanctuary inside Pakistan, but material support, maybe training, that they seemed to be getting more and more sophisticated. They started to attack Afghan forces. They started to attack Canadians and Brits and carrying out terrorist bombings in cities. And then the U.S. escalated the war, right? So, at the end of the Bush administration and then the first years of the Obama administration, we sent tens of thousands of U.S. combat troops back to Afghanistan to try to finish the war, much as you quoted President Trump saying he was going to do. You know, “This time we’re going to get it done.” And it was at that time—you were quoting this document from 2011—that the Taliban started to strike American soldiers, kill and wound thousands. And U.S. commanders became furious. They said, you know, “We’re giving all this aid to Pakistan, but ISI is supporting groups that are attacking and killing our own soldiers.” And that led to assessments like, well, they’re the enemy, they’re the terrorist organization. AMY GOODMAN: Before we break, I mean, Afghanistan cannot be looked at in isolation, in so many different ways, but how the U.S. engaging in the Iraq War, what that meant for Afghanistan, the first Bush war? So, can you talk about this moment, when the U.S. is focusing on Afghanistan, and then Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense, prevails upon Tommy Franks to divert attention from that to deal with Iraq? STEVE COLL: Yeah. There’s a scene in Directorate S where, after the fall of the Taliban, Rumsfeld insists on a light footprint. You know, “I don’t want a big military force there.” But it’s peaceful. There’s a task force. And some American generals come out to set up a kind of peacekeeping and “maybe we’ll chase al-Qaeda” terrorist-hunting operation, just outside of Kabul. And they’re getting themselves organized. They’re called to a conference. This is in 2002. And they go to Europe to this meeting, and they come back, and they say to their comrades, you know, “This war is over. We’re going to Iraq. We’re already going to Iraq.” And this was, you know, months before even the U.S. public first started to get hints that this planning was underway. And, of course, if you’re in the military or you’re in the intelligence services, you know, your career depends on being present at the next big war. So everybody’s attention shifted. And the U.S. basically abandoned Afghanistan in order to carry out the Iraq invasion. And then, of course, we know how well that invasion went, and it bogged down the U.S. for years to come. AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to go to break, and then we’ll come back to this discussion. The U.S. bombing Afghanistan, the beginning of it, October 7th, 2001, just weeks after the September 11th attacks. Many in the U.S. would think that those who piloted the planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were either Afghan or Iraqi. But, in fact, 15 of th

Live at this year's SF Sketchfest, it's a discussion on the dark history of San Francisco. From its inception to the gold rush, to the hippies, to the gay http://nerdist.com/hound-tall-8-dark-history-of-san-francisco/

#952. Thaddeus Russell is an author of A Renegade History of The United States. He is currently visiting faculty at Willamette University and the founder of Renegade University.

If the new generation can’t do better than their parents, is the American Dream dead? (Photo: Beth Rankin) Our latest Freakonomics Radio episode is called “Is the American Dream Really Dead?” (You can subscribe to the podcast at iTunes or elsewhere, get the RSS feed, or listen via the media player above.) Just a few decades ago, more than 90 percent of 30-year-olds earned more than their parents had earned at the same age. Now it’s only about 50 percent. What happened — and what can be done about it? Below is a transcript of the episode, modified for your reading pleasure. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post. And you’ll find credits for the music in the episode noted within the transcript. *      *      * [MUSIC: Joe Smith and the Spicy Pickles, “Dark Elixir” (from High-Fidelity)] Let’s start today with a pop quiz. Here we go: in 1970, what percentage of 30-year-olds in America earned more money than their parents had earned at that age? Adjusted for inflation, of course. That’s question No. 1. And question No. 2: what percentage of American 30-year-olds today earn more than their parents earned at age 30? I’ll give you a second to think it over. All right, you ready for the answer? The percentage of American 30-year-olds in 1970 who were earning more than their parents had earned at 30? Ninety-two percent. Isn’t that amazing? That, in a nutshell, is what we call the American Dream. And what’s the percentage now? It’s somewhere around 50 percent. Which has led some people to say this: Donald TRUMP: Sadly, the American Dream is dead! Donald Trump’s view of the American Dream – and his promise to revive it – had a lot to do with his getting elected president. According to Gallup polls, before the election more than 50 percent of Americans saw our economic conditions worsening.  And, in case you’re wondering, it’s not just cranky old people. A poll from the Harvard Institute of Politics found that nearly fifty percent of millennials think the American Dream is “dead.” We went out on the streets of New York ourselves to ask people if they thought the American dream was real, and achievable. [MUSIC: Texas Gypsies, “Guitar Twins” (from Café Du Swing)] VOICES ON THE STREET: MALE 1: Absolutely it’s real. Especially standing here in Battery Park you look at different people from all across nations that come to America to realize the American dream. FEMALE 1: I think that if you really work hard then you can do whatever you want in America. It might be a little difficult at first but you can still do it. MALE 2: I don’t think the American dream is achievable. I think it’s a motivator, to try to achieve it. FEMALE 2: The American Dream is something of a mythology for a way in which to advance and have a good life under what is essentially not just a capitalist system but a country founded on exploitation. FEMALE 3 : You put in some work, you put in some sweat, and you can definitely make the American Dream happen. MALE 3: Well, there’s a lot of cynicism now over the American dream. I am a product of it. My family, our families are refugees, came to this country 30 years ago. Had nothing. Was able to send all their kids to college, was able to have a house, was able to give a better future for myself and their children than they ever would have had back in Vietnam. A lot of the conversations we have these days about the American Dream are in political terms, or theoretical terms. Today on Freakonomics Radio: the actual, unvarnished economics of the American Dream. Which we will define, for the sake of today’s conversation, as this: [MUSIC: Tony Flynn, “Star Spangled Banner”] Raj CHETTY: If you’re born into a low-income family, do you really have a shot at rising up no matter what your background is? And we’ll discuss whether the American Dream is really dead – or maybe if it’s just moved a bit … north. CHETTY: You’re twice as likely to realize the American Dream if you’re growing up in Canada rather than the U.S. *      *      * [MUSIC: Luke Brindley, “American Dream”] James Truslow Adams, born in 1878 to a wealthy New York family, became a financier and, later, an author. He won a Pulitzer Prize for a history of New England; and later he wrote a book called The Epic of America. Even though it was written during the Great Depression, Adams took a fundamentally bullish view of the United States. His book was hugely popular, and as best as we can tell, it introduced the phrase “The American Dream.” Adams defined this as “that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement.”  The phrase caught on, and not just a little bit. Especially among our presidents: Barack OBAMA: The bedrock of our economic success is the American Dream. Richard NIXON: The American Dream does not come to those who fall asleep.   George W. BUSH: So every citizen has access to the American Dream Ronald REAGAN:They have lived the American Dream Bill CLINTON: The American Dream will succeed or fail in the 21st Century. Donald TRUMP: Sadly, the American Dream is dead! Raj CHETTY: The reason my parents came to this country was in search of the American Dream. That’s Raj Chetty. CHETTY: I was born in New Delhi, India, and came to the United States when I was 9 years old, and grew up mostly in the Midwest. Chetty is now an economist at Stanford: CHETTY: I study issues of inequality and opportunity and how we can use economic policy to improve people’s outcomes. Chetty was one of the scholars behind the research I cited earlier, about the massive drop in the share of 30-year-old Americans earning more than their  parents did. In fact, he is behind a lot of the most important research on income inequality, mobility, and the fragile state of the American Dream. His work is highly regarded by the people who give awards – he has won a MacArthur “Genius” Award and the John Bates Clark Medal. Politicians admire him as well. Senator Jeff SESSIONS: Dr. Chetty, thank you for your participation. Senator Bernie SANDERS: Dr. Chetty, what do you think? That was Senator Bernie Sanders and, before him, then-Senator Jeff Sessions, when Chetty testified at a Senate hearing on income mobility and inequality. Chetty is a favorite of Democrat Hillary Clinton. Hillary CLINTON: Some really interesting work being done by Professor Raj Chetty and his colleagues. As well as Republican Paul Ryan. Paul RYAN: Economists — you know, if you talk to Raj Chetty or others — they’ll tell you this is social capital. Chetty is the policymakers’ policymaker. The economists’ economist. Which means he tries to be, above all, empirical. Not ideological or political. CHETTY: One of my missions is to try and inject more evidence into these important policy debates because I think we’re making huge investment decisions with very little knowledge about exactly what is going to work. Stephen J. DUBNER: Do you vote? Are you a political participant? CHETTY: I’m independent. And so I’ve thought hard about this. I think it’s very difficult to keep yourself objective, which is very important to me. I mean it’s important to me that I have some findings that I think are more supportive of policies that Democrats are pushing, and there are some findings that are more supportive of policies that Republicans are pushing. DUBNER: Some academics I know whose work gets cited for political purposes have told me that the work is inevitably cherry-picked or cream-skimmed to suit the politician’s position.  CHETTY: I think while the big-picture focus might be chosen based on political views, there are lots of details that matter greatly, and I think science can be very useful there, in addition to perhaps guiding which areas we focus on — affordable housing versus tax cuts versus other things. For all his influence, Chetty is only 37 years old. CHETTY: I was actually the last person in my family to publish a paper. My parents are both in academics, and I have two older sisters who are in bioscience. Chetty went to Harvard as an undergrad but he didn’t spend spent much time undergradding: he got his Ph.D. at 23. CHETTY: Basically I did a six-year Ph.D. and didn’t go to college, in the sense that starting my sophomore year, I actually didn’t take any undergraduate classes. He taught at Berkeley, then Harvard, and in 2015, moved to Stanford. DUBNER: You are hardly the first economist from Harvard to go to Stanford in the last few years. There’s been quite a little exodus. CHETTY: Recently, as the field of economics is shifting towards big data and increasing use of modern statistical techniques, like machine learning, to think about economic questions, Stanford has tremendous strength in those areas and other fields. And of course we all know that the birthplace of much of modern computing is here in Silicon Valley at Stanford. DUBNER: Now, economists in particular, but social scientists more broadly, have in the past few years especially, just been being gobbled up by tech firms. Because they, too, have discovered that big data is potentially exciting and a number of academic economists, many of whom I’m sure you know well, are moonlighting or sidelining with tech firms, Uber and Facebook and on and on. What about you? Was that an appeal for you to be out there and are you doing any consulting, advising work on the side with these private firms? Or are you strictly an academic economist? CHETTY: Yeah, that is a very important trend. I myself am not doing any work with those firms directly, but what I am interested in is working with the data from firms like Facebook and Twitter, for instance, to think about social and economic policy questions. So, to give you a concrete example, I’m starting a project with my colleague Matt Jackson here at Stanford, and others at Facebook, where we’re explori

Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadPart 3 in the survey series, A Renegade History Course. This is the third discussion with historian Thaddeus Russell, the author of A Renegade History of the United States. Discussed Today: -challenging ourselves with new voices and ideas -smoking pot in the Crown Plaza Hotel: aggression? -Kevin Carson and property rights -Is offensive behavior forwarding freedom -the presentation of liberty activists -what brings change? -employers vs. workers -are employment "contracts" really voluntary? -the state/corporate web -Fabianism: the state's gradual war on all fronts -Is the public ready for topless women on the street? -Miley Cyrus, freedom fighter? -Super Bowl commercial sexism? -balancing pleasure with personal responsibility -the cultural demand for a nuclear family -Can we discuss morality without shaming? -Self-regulation for and against the state -Cultural imperialism and cause consciousness -Founding Hypocrites: Jefferson, Adams and Rush 2013 NH Liberty Forum Bumper Music: "Today" - Jefferson Airplane "Pass That Dutch (Instrumental)" - Missy Elliott "They Reminisce Over You" (Instrumental) - DJ Shoji "Party In the USA" Miley Cyrus Look Closer:Thaddeus Russell's Site - www.thaddeusrussell.com Thaddeus On Stossel - http://youtu.be/xpelVE7trK0 Kevin Carson - http://c4ss.org/content/author/kevin-carson http://schoolsucksproject.com/podcast-269-the-shame-debate-with-thaddeus-russell/

Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadPart 9 in the survey series, A Renegade History Course. This is a live discussion with historian Thaddeus Russell, the author of A Renegade History of the United States. Thaddeus addresses questions and objections from the audience regarding our previous shows. Carlos Morales (http://www.truthovercomfort.net/) and Wes Bertrand (http://www.completeliberty.com/) are the co-hosts. Discussed Today: Our entire discussion in this first half of the Q&A is built off Harold's question - "Do you agree with the correspondence theory, which states an idea is true if it corresponds with reality?" -What is truth? -Is it knowable? -Objectivism vs. Relativism Video: Bumper Music: "Express Yourself (Instrumental)" NWA "Big World" moe. Look Closer:Thaddeus Russell's Site - www.thaddeusrussell.com Previous School Sucks Show With Thaddeus Russell - http://schoolsucksproject.com/category/podcast/a-renegade-history-course-with-thaddeus-russell/ Please Support School Sucks Our Amazon Wish ListDonate With BitcoinOr Join the A/V ClubYour continued support keeps the show going and growing, which keeps us at the top of the options for education podcasts and leads to new people discovering this message. This subscription also grants you access to the A/V Club, a bonus content section with 200+ hours of exclusive audio and video. If you are a regular consumer of our media, please consider making a monthly commitment by selecting the best option for you... Join the A/V Club! $9.00/Month http://schoolsucksproject.com/podcast-310a-thaddeus-russell-qa-part-1-why-libertarians-should-absolutely-be-relativists/

THE HISTORY OF HIP HOP! Live from The Cynicave @ Lost Weekend Video in SF. Apologies for any audio wonkiness! This incredibly interesting and super duper funny http://nerdist.com/hound-tall-9-history-of-hip-hop/

Thaddeus Russell is an adjunct professor of American Studies at Occidental College, and also the author of "A Renegade History of The United States"

Thaddeus Russell tells a renegade tale to Lew Rockwell. Standard Podcast Play Now | Play in Popup | Download Professor Russell’s new Renegade History of the United States speaks volumes to the eternal conflict between those who hold power and all the ordinary peoples. The Founding Fathers wanted the British regime without the King. The wonderfully anarchic culture in the colonies alarmed them to the core. The abolitionists, who were deeply Puritanical, felt that slaves were too free in some ways, and Reconstruction was the first Afghanistan – the push of New England to control the entire world. Thad Russell sees Obama as the throwback to the worst of the Progressives, desiring total control over peoples’ lives. Meanwhile, the regular left misses or ignores the dark side."Thaddeus Russell has broken free of the ideological prisons of Left and Right to give us a real, flesh-and-blood history of America, filled with untold stories and unlikely heroes. No waving incense before the sacred personages of Washington, D.C. here. This wonderful book follows the best American traditions of iconoclasm and – what is the same thing – truth-telling." ~ Thomas E. Woods, Jr., author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History Thaddeus Russell website Thad on facebook     https://www.lewrockwell.com/podcast/184-the-founding-fathers-a-revisionist-look/

Dr. Joe Schwarcz, last year's "Skeptic of the Year" and pseudo science debunker joins Moshe, Fortune Feimster, Jen Kirkman and Reggie Watts on a live from http://nerdist.com/hound-tall-12-pseudo-science-and-snake-oil/

Johnny: Self Publishing podcast episode number 144.This episode of the Self Publishing podcast is brought to you by 99 designs, the online marketplace that helps you get outstanding book cover designs at an affordable price. Start your custom design today at 99designs.com/SPP, and enjoy a free power pack upgrade valued at 99 bucks. Welcome to the Self Publishing podcast where if you want something done right you’ve got to do it yourself and now here are your hosts three gaffs who spend most of their time up in the trees Johnny, Sean, and Dave. Johnny: Hey everyone and welcome to the Self Publishing podcast, the podcast that follows three full time authors as we attempt to change the face of indie publishing. Join us and our trailblazing guests as we shove aside boundaries freely experiment, and occasionally screw up. I’m Johnny B. Truant and my co hosts as always are Sean Platt and David Wright. Free styling it today I decided to see like do I know that intro well enough yet since we revamped it you know only like six months ago and the answer was yes I do. Sean: It’s very… Dave: On Better Off Undead. Johnny: Well because I’m leaning, I’m doing– I’m operating the controls because that’s how pro we are. Dave: He’s on the edge man. Johnny: Yeah so if I sit back… Sean: That is so… Johnny: Normally, I’m normally like this. Sean: You’re living dangerously. Johnny: Wow you’ve never seen. I do that every single week. Sean: No I think you were just hovering there longer and… Dave: Sean can’t see the computer screen over his nose. Jonny: He doesn’t know what he’s doing; he doesn’t know at all what he’s doing. Today will be an interesting crossing of worlds for me today just for me. Maybe for you guys too, Matt Gartland is going be our guest today, and Sean knows him as master networker guy who does some stuff with author landing pages. It’s really awesome and original founding member of Sterling and Stone, but I know him as Matt, the guy I met at BlogWorld and clicked with and talked about completely different things about, so this’ll be fun. Sean: Yeah I don’t know want to tell the Sterling and Stone story yet because well save that juice for when he’s on, but Matt’s just like he’s just one of those guys that is impossible not to like. He’s a really hard worker and he’s just a really good guy and he knows a lot of people, and he’s smart and we actually have we have Matt to thank for… Dave: Matt and I have that in common– impossible not to like. Sean: We have Matt to thank for… Johnny: For matt it’s about whether or not people like him, you find it impossible to like, that’s about you and your outward projection. Sean: We have matt to thank for Monica Lionelle. A couple of years ago he taught her to check out the podcast and so a couple of years later, she’s our writer and she’s awesome. So I just found that out a couple of weeks ago, but that’s pretty awesome. You just you never know, I mean that’s, and that’s exactly what I was saying about– he’s just a really good networker. He just knows a lot of people and you never know when those intersections are going to come, and I’m very grateful for Monica. Johnny: I feel like I almost want to tell a story that’s very pertinent to networking, but I don’t think I’m allowed to tell it yet. I think that that’s the next week thing. We just dropped something very cool on our platinum readers like seconds ago and its super-secret. That’s the insider club like they can’t talk about it because it’s our secret for all of us, but that there’s networking involved in that too, kind of is who you know and who you make yourself known to, not like who you knew pre-existing but that’s everything that I’ve done is Johnny 1.0, is who I am today, the fact that this podcast exists is all about personal connections, so that… Sean: Yeah its funny when Johnny and I first started it was after we had– we were already rolling with the SPP completely and but we hadn’t written anything together, so Unicorn Western may have just been a joke from Dave at this point. We’re still just talking about like things that we may do in the future, and Johnny referred to me as a great networker or a natural networker or something of that to that effect and I disagreed with him. Johnny: I don’t remember that at all. I must have gotten to know you better. Sean: And I said no, I said I don’t feel like that’s accurate at all. I really-really don’t like networking. I don’t… what Dave? Dave: People? Never mind. Johnny: Wow, Dave weighing in everybody. Sean: I’ve bought it twice and then he disappears, look at that. Johnny: I know what he does. Sean: Cowering in shame over that. Johnny: So what was the end of that statement? Sean: So yeah I never ever thought of myself that way, but I do know reasonable amount of people and I think that the best way to go about networking and I’m sure we’ll talk to Matt about this later is to not really network. It’s just to be yourself and be your most genuine self and you put yourself out there when you can and always offer help when you can. Johnny: Networking with a capital N, I mean everybody reacts to it differently and it must work or they wouldn’t teach these things, but I find it really obnoxious and there are some things that are like signatures. You can tell when somebody is asking to know about you in a way that they clearly don’t give a shit and don’t know anything, but they aren’t like hey I’m curious about you. It’s more like Hey I’m curious about you, let me ingratiate you know and there’s this really false sort of thing that people do. And when I went to my first public event, my first thing where I was meeting people was South west South West in like 2009 or something I don’t remember exactly when that was, and I hung out with a lot of cool people. And I think somebody at a camp said at the end something about networking or whatever. And all I did was hang out with people I didn’t have business cards, no-no-no I had some print up because just commons yelled at me and said you need to have business cards. So I made up farcical business cards that had me being one of the authors of trust agents instead of Chris Brogan and but so I had those but it’s– I don’t think networking needs to be with a capital N, I think it’s more about who you know, and who you like and we’ve seen that over and over again. A good example is and this isn’t really the same thing, but we do work with Monica and Amy now and it’s because we hung out with them, like in person and we got to like them. It’s not that they impressed us with their acumen although they are impressive ladies, but it wasn’t like they gave us a Rolodex and said here is a resume, so I don’t know… Sean: No it wasn’t like that at all and the thing is it takes– I mean people all come in different flavors right, so my friend Lori who we’ll talk about later because she was the other original third of Sterling and Stone. One of her sayings is your network is your net worth and for her like that, that’s totally true, that works. Her Rolodex is insane but she and I are wired very differently and we travel together a lot, and we would go to two events or to masterminds and she would make sure she talked everyone in the room. She would make sure that that she had at least her ten minutes a rattle off with this person and rattle up with this person, and it was almost like a mission and for me I’m the opposite. When I going to room I figure whoever I talk to that’s the way it’s supposed to be and that’s great, and so you know it’s different. And I think that you have to really get the most out of networking and to keep it from being a capital end situation. I think that it’s best if you are just yourself, if you know okay I’m an introvert and I’m only going to have three conversations this whole thing, but they are going to be great conversations and I’m going to have a relationship with these people after the event. I think that’s how you want to look at networking. It’s not– you can go there with like a checklist because then you do the things that Johnny was talking about where you are just asking questions because it’s a checklist. Johnny: Tell me all about you. How can I help you? Who asks that question, how can I help you right away? Sean: Right, right it’s just you just don’t– you want to be that guy at all, ever under any circumstances or that girl. Johnny: So I do have. We did have two questions; do we want to discuss those that they were sent in, remember that? Sean: Yeah we totally do. Johnny: And I should also mention the– and I don’t know when we’re going to have cut off for this, but I’ll just mention briefly the colonist Summit. There are now five places left, if you’re interested in joining us the payment plans are now in full effect. You don’t have to pay in a lump sum and that’s sterlingandstone.net/colonist. So there’s that and there are five slots left, and all right so questions. These were two things that were sent in; people who couldn’t use the voicemail or couldn’t figure it out, or are they just merited more discussion on the show, so I guess I should just read this right? Sean: Yeah. Johnny: Yes in the absence of response I will indeed just read them. So the first one is from Yohan who says I am a film editor from South Africa with a keen interest in writing a television series and I watched your beats course on Udemy. I’m writing to you because I– well I don’t need to say why he’s writing to us, but I need to have– I just have a few questions, when do you do the single sentence rough story arch arc and simple synopsis only after the beats, so this is a process question about our beats process. So when you do that Sean since that’s your thing? Sean: It totally depends on the project actually, sometimes I have the sentence and the sentence kind of helps me figure out where I’m going with the story, and I expanded from there, but I think with Axis it was actually the oppo

Print this transcript Transcript:  ARGUMENT OF MICHAEL A. CARVIN, ON BEHALF OF THE PETITIONERS Chief Justice John Roberts: We'll hear argument this morning in Case 14-114, King v. Burwell. Mr. Carvin. Michael A. Carvin: Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the Court: This is a straightforward case of statutory construction where the plain language of the statute dictates the result. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Mr. Carvin, will you please back up, because before we get to a question of statutory construction, as you know, each plaintiff, or at least one plaintiff, has to have a concrete stake in these questions. They can't put them as ideological questions. And we have as -- four plaintiffs. As to two of them, there is a declaration stating "I am not eligible for health insurance from the government," but there's a question of whether they are veterans eligible for coverage as veterans. Michael A. Carvin: Yes. One of those is Mr. Hurst who would have to, if -- I would refer you to Joint Appendix at PAGE 42, where this is the government's recitation of facts where they make it clear that Mr. Hurst would have to spend $750 of his own money as a -- because of the IRS rule. Mr. Hurst was a veteran for 10 months in 1970. He is not eligible for any veterans service because if you've served such a short -- health services. If you serve such a short -- Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: I -- I'll ask the government if they agree that -- Michael A. Carvin: And I should point out that the government has never disputed this, and I'd also like -- Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: But the Court has an obligation to look into it on its own. Michael A. Carvin: That's true, but of course there has been fact-finding by lower courts in an adversarial system. I don't believe the Court does its own -- Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: I don't think it was ever brought up in the lower court that these -- these two people were veterans. Michael A. Carvin: If I could just make one further point on this, Justice Ginsburg. Even if he were technically eligible, which he is not, there is an IRS Rule 26 C.F.R. 1.36B-2(c)(ii), which says -- Justice Antonin Scalia: Ah, yes. Michael A. Carvin: With the usual clarity of the IRS code, making clear that you are only disabled from receiving subsidies if you have actually enrolled in a veteran's health services and it's undisputed that -- Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: That's the government that's -- Michael A. Carvin: -- Mr. Hurst did not. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: -- that's deposition to. And then there were the two women, I think one of them was going to turn 65 in June, which would make her Medicaid-eligible. Michael A. Carvin: She will turn 65 in late June. She's obviously subject to the individual mandate well in advance of that. By virtue of the IRS rule, she would have to spend $1800 per year for health insurance by virtue of the IRS -- Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Per year? Michael A. Carvin: Excuse me? Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: But you said she will turn 65 in June. Michael A. Carvin: Late June, yes. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: So that takes care of 2015. Michael A. Carvin: No. Right now she is obliged under the individual mandate to have insurance. You -- you have to have insurance for 9 months of the year and so as of April 1st -- Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Then -- Michael A. Carvin: -- she will be subject to the penalty which will be alleviated only by -- Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Again, I'll ask the government if they agree with you on that. And then I think for the fourth plaintiff, there's a question whether she would qualify for a hardship -- hardship exemption from the individual mandate even if she received the tax credit, in which case the tax credits would be irrelevant. Michael A. Carvin: That's true. Again, I'll refer you to the Joint Appendix at 41. That was the government's argument below. We didn't want to get into a factual dispute about it because we had such clear standing with respect -- Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Yeah, but you have to -- Michael A. Carvin: -- to -- Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: But you would have to establish the standing, prove the standing. Michael A. Carvin: Well, as -- Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: If this gets beyond the opening door. Michael A. Carvin: Fair enough, Your Honor, but -- but it's black-letter law that only one plaintiff needs standing, and for the reasons I've already articulated, both Plaintiff Hurst and Plaintiff Levy have. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Okay. I don't want to detain you on this any more but I will ask the government what their position is on standing. Michael A. Carvin: Thank you. Returning to the merits, the only provision in the Act which either authorizes or limits subsidies says, in plain English, that the subsidies are only available through an exchange established by the State under Section 1311. Justice Stephen Breyer: If you're going to elaborate on that, I would appreciate your -- in your elaboration, I've read that, and this statute is like the tax code more than it's like the Constitution. There are defined terms, and the words you just used concern a defined term. As I read the definition, there's a section, Definitions, and it says, quote, The term "Exchange" means, quote, an exchange established under 1311. And 1311 says, An Exchange shall be a government agency, et cetera, that is established by a State. Those are the definitions. So then you look to 1321. And 1321 says, if a State does not set up that Exchange, then the Federal, quote, secretary shall establish and operate such Exchange. So it says, "The Secretary is to establish and operate such Exchange," the only kind of Exchange to which the Act refers, which is an -- quote, "an Exchange established by a State under 1311." That's the definition. So the statute tells the Secretary, set up such Exchange, namely, a 1311 State Exchange. Michael A. Carvin: Correct. Justice Stephen Breyer: And there's nothing else in this statute. Michael A. Carvin: Correct. Justice Stephen Breyer: So that's throughout what they're talking about. So what's the problem? Michael A. Carvin: As Your Honor just said, it tells the Secretary to establish such Exchange. Justice Stephen Breyer: Yes. Michael A. Carvin: And what 36B turns on is whether the State or the Secretary has established the Exchange. Justice Stephen Breyer: No, it uses the same terminology that it's used in -- 15 times in this statute, namely, the terminology in the definition is "an Exchange established by a State." Michael A. Carvin: Under -- Justice Stephen Breyer: That's the phrase. Michael A. Carvin: Well, under 1311, that is the phrase. And if 1311 created some -- the definitional section created some ambiguity as to whether HHS was establishing a 1311 or 1321 Exchange, that is immaterial because 36B does not say all 1311 Exchanges get subsidies, it says Exchanges established by the State under Section 1311 -- Justice Elena Kagan: Mr. Carvin. Michael A. Carvin: -- not established by HHS under Section 1311 -- Justice Elena Kagan: Mr. Carvin. Michael A. Carvin: -- so it eliminates any potential ambiguity created by the definitional section. Justice Elena Kagan: Can -- can I offer you a sort of simple daily life kind of example which I think is linguistically equivalent to what the sections here say that Justice Breyer was talking about? So I have three clerks, Mr. Carvin. Their names are Will and Elizabeth and Amanda. Okay? So my first clerk, I say, Will, I'd like you to write me a memo. And I say, Elizabeth, I want you to edit Will's memo once he's done. And then I say, Amanda, listen, if Will is too busy to write the memo, I want you to write such memo. Now, my question is: If Will is too busy to write the memo and Amanda has to write such memo, should Elizabeth edit the memo? (Laughter.) Michael A. Carvin: If you're going to create moneys to Will for writing the memo and Amanda writes the memo and you say, the money will go if Will writes the memo, then under plain English and common sense, no, when Amanda writes the memo -- Justice Elena Kagan: Gosh -- Michael A. Carvin: -- but now -- Justice Elena Kagan: -- you -- you run a different shop than I do if that's the way -- (Laughter.) Justice Elena Kagan: Because in my chambers, if Elizabeth did not edit the memo, Elizabeth would not be performing her function. In other words, there's a -- a substitute, and I've set up a substitute. And then I've given -- I've given instructions: Elizabeth, you write -- you edit Will's memo, but of course if Amanda writes the memo, the instructions carry over. Elizabeth knows what she's supposed to do. She's supposed to edit Amanda's memo, too. Michael A. Carvin: And -- and in your chambers, you're agnostic as to whether Will, Elizabeth or Amanda writes it. But the key point is here under Section 1311, Congress was not agnostic as to whether States or HHS established the Exchange. It's -- Justice Samuel Alito: Well, Mr. Carvin, if I had those clerks, I had the same clerks -- (Laughter.) Justice Samuel Alito: -- and Amanda wrote the memo, and I received it and I said, This is a great memo, who wrote it? Would the answer be it was written by Will, because Amanda stepped into Will's shoes? Michael A. Carvin: That was my first answer. (Laughter.) Justice Elena Kagan: He's good, Justice Alito. Michael A. Carvin: Justice Kagan didn't accept it, so I'm going to the second answer, which is you are agnostic as between Will and Amanda, but this -- Justice Elena Kagan: Ah, but that's -- Michael A. Carvin: But Congress was not agnostic as between State and Federal Exchanges. Justice Elena Kagan: Yes. That's a very important point, I think, because what you're saying is that the answer to the question really does depend on context, and it depends on an understanding of the law as a whole and whether they were agnostic. I agree with tha

This is a special episode. I was on stage at the Upright Citizen's Brigade theater in Hollywood with comedians Moshe Kasher, Nicky Glazer, and Nick Kroll. I think the idea was roughly to make fun of me and my wacky theories for an hour. I had a blast, as you'll hear, and gave them plenty of material to work with. Download the hilarity. http://chrisryanphd.com/tangentially-speaking/2014/10/18/95-hound-tall-moshe-kasher-friends

Part IV: Freedom's Future A talk given by Eben Moglen at Columbia Law School on December 4th, 2013 Previously in this series: Part I: "Westward the Course of Empire", Part II: "Oh, Freedom", and Part III: "The Union, May it Be Preserved". Good afternoon. We must now turn our attention from what Mr.Snowden has taught us concerning the scope of our problem to what, with his assistance, we may do to conceive our responses. We have seen that, with the relentlessness of military operation, the listeners in the United States have embarked on a campaign against the privacy of the human race. They have across broad swathes of humanity compromised secrecy, destroyed anonymity, and adversely affected the autonomy of billions of people. They are doing this because they have been presented with a mission by an extraordinarily imprudent national government in the United States, which having failed to prevent a very serious attack on American civilians at home, largely by ignoring warnings, decreed that they were never again to be put in a position where they should have known. This resulted in a military response, which is to get as close to everything as possible. Because if you don t take as close to everything as possible, how can you say that you knew everything that you should have known? The fundamental problem was the political, not the military, judgment involved. When military leaders are given objectives, they achieve them at whatever collateral cost they are not prohibited from incurring. That is their job. And if you apply General Curtis Le May to a situation and you get havoc, well, that s what you called General LeMay in for. General LeMay was correct when he said that, if the United States had lost the Second World War, he and his staff would have been tried for war crimes. From General LeMay s point of view that meant he was performing his job. It is not for them, the soldiers and the spies, to determine for themselves when their behavior is incompatible with the morality of freedom. That is why we regard democracy as requiring, among other things that are sine qua non, civilian control of military activity. When an especially imprudent US Administration abandoned the rule of law with respect to the listeners leaving behind only a simulacrum in the form of an appointed court operating in secret the consequences were not for the military listeners to judge for themselves. As we have seen, Mr.Snowden insisted that it was for democracy to impose the limits on that behavior. And democracy here Mr.Snowden agrees with Mr.Jefferson, and pretty much everybody else who has ever seriously thought about the problem requires an informed citizenry. Therefore, Mr.Snowden sacrificed his right to everything that we hold dear our privacy, our security, our future in order to inform the citizens of the United States and the world. What we are facing, as we have seen, is an environmental calamity. It has been produced by the collateral damage of that military listening, undertaken with relentless efficiency, by people who have more resources than all the rest of the world s listeners put together and whose task one that they were given by imprudent government authority they could legitimately consider as empowering them, indeed instructing them, to steal as close to everything as they could. Thus they have corrupted science, they have endangered the security of commerce, and they have destroyed the privacy and anonymity of people who live under despotic governments, who are in mortal danger for what they believe, as a consequence of their destructive behavior. And, as long as it is still called wartime, as far as they are concerned, they are still doing their jobs. We have, as with any other environmental calamity facing the race, no simple answers to any of the questions that are posed. No one thing works. It doesn t even work somewhere, let alone everywhere. On the contrary, we face a problem which, because it is an environmental calamity, calls upon us to perform, as we do at our best, by thinking globally and acting locally. That is to say, by locating the principles that need to be applied with respect to this privacy environmental cataclysm we are living through, and acting in our locales. Each of us must act as befits the role we play and the place we are in, recognizing that collectively we are trying to save freedom of thought and democracy for humanity, which cannot be otherwise saved. Because, as we have seen, pervasive relentless surveillance destroys freedom of thought. And without freedom of thought, all other freedoms are merely privilege conceded by government. In such a situation we will have, in all the places that we work, political and legal as well as technical measures that we will need to apply. In one sense merely to prevent the problem from growing worse, and in another to begin the process of political reversal, as the people of the world signify, in all the places where they are entitled to self-government or the registration of their opinion, that they wish not to be spied on. Mr.Snowden has shown us the immense complicity of all governments even those adversarially located with respect to the United States government on many issues with the United States Government s listening. They benefit from the fruits of the research conducted, to the extent that the United States government by agreement or generosity is willing to share them. They have turned a blind eye to the corruption of their communications operators, the infrastructure acquisition of the Americans, sometimes under intimidation, sometimes under partnership. All of these are relationships which, as Mr.Snowden has shown, extend in many cases back to the period immediately after the end of the Second World War. They have merely grown with time. The technical facilities that were covered by the arrangements went from telegraph to telephone, through rebuilding of the communication network destroyed in Europe by the Second World War. Now they embrace the world-wide instant-on Net we currently live within, and which we will extend if we do nothing to stop the expansion, further into the one neural system connecting all of human kind in one great big network later in the 21st century. Mr.Snowden has shown, in other words, that everywhere everywhere where citizens are entitled to a voice in the making of policy the policies the people want have been deliberately frustrated by their governments. First, they wish to have a government that protects them against outsiders spying. It is the fundamental purpose of government to protect the security of the people on whose behalf it acts, and so it is evident that government must protect citizens against spying from outside, everywhere. And everywhere where citizens are entitled to an expression of their will with respect to the government that conducts policing and national security surveillance at home, it is the will of citizens that such national security surveillance and policing should be subject to the rule of law, under whatever the local institutions for robust protection against government overreaching may be. Everywhere it is possible to levy those two political requirements by citizens of democracies against their governments. Everywhere. Now. You are not a government if you are not protecting our security, and our security includes not being spied on by outsiders. And, as you are a State that claims to be governing us under the rule of law, you must also subject your listening, both your national security listening and your criminal investigations listening, to legitimate legal review. In the United States it will be necessary for us to add a third fundamental political demand to our activity. The United States is not I mean we the people of the United States are not ready to abandon our role as a beacon of liberty to the world. We are not prepared to go out of the business of spreading liberty around the world and to go instead into the business of spreading the procedures of totalitarianism. We never voted for that. The people of the United States do not want to become the secret police of the world. If we have drifted there because an incautious political administration empowered military men to do what military men do which is full speed ahead damn the torpedoes -then it is time for the people of the United States to register their conclusive opinion on that subject. In the meantime, the President of the United States has the only vote necessary to end the war. All of this is possible because it is wartime or rather because of the myth that it is wartime. Disregarding the civil liberties of Americans for national security purposes is possible in wartime only. Declaring that everybody who uses the American telecommunications network who doesn t have our passport is subject to no civil liberties protection at all is only possible in war time. And the idea that we can abandon the morality of freedom and spread the procedures of totalitarianism around the world in order to achieve security could only be possible in wartime. This cannot be our vision of a peaceful society. The fundamental imprudence was the use of a debateable constitutional privilege to go to war without congressional declaration to create wartime in the United States without end. The people who did that will be harshly judged by history. So will the people who refused to stop it. The President of the United States has one vote and that vote can end the war. Our distinguished and honorable colleagues, the Supreme Court Justices of the United States, have nine votes that can restore the rule of law. No doubt they are reluctant to apply them, for a variety of reasons some of them I think all of us who are constitutional thinkers will agree are serious. But the time is coming when they must act. All of us who have ever served the Federal Government, and I am one, have taken an oath to prese

Part I: Westward the Course of Empire A talk given by Eben Moglen at Columbia Law School on October 9th, 2013 Good afternoon. There is no introduction. After 26 years in this place it feels ridiculous to me to pretend that anyone is especially honored by my presence here. If I am to be frank about it, I invited myself. Not in the way that Edward Snowden invited himself to Sheremetyevo Airport. Nor in the way that Julian Assange invited himself to the Ecuadorian embassy in London. Surely not in the way that Chelsea Manning invited herself to 35 years in Fort Leavenworth. No, law professor-like I have assigned myself no onerous duties. I undertook nothing more than to come here and to tell you the truth. I don't wish to force my ideas on anybody, but the truth is that I feel forced to speak myself. No one will remember much of what I have to say, but of the things about which I came here to speak—both those that have been done and those that remain to be done—I must say that they will never be forgotten. In the third chapter of his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon gives two reasons why the slavery into which the Romans tumbled under Augustus and his successors left them more wretched than any previous human slavery. In the first place, Gibbon said, the Romans had carried with them into slavery the culture of a free people—their language and their conception of themselves as human beings presupposed freedom. And thus, Gibbons says, oppressed as they were by the weight of their corruption and military violence, the Romans yet preserved for a long time the sentiments, or at least the ideas, of a freeborn people. In the second place, the empire of the Romans filled all the world, and when that empire fell into the hands of a single person, the world was a safe and dreary prison for his enemies. As Gibbon says, to resist was fatal, and it was impossible to fly. The power of that Roman Empire rested in its control of communications. The Mediterranean Sea, which was the transit hub of every western civilization, was their lake. And across their European empire, from Scotland to Syria, they pushed the roads—roads that fifteen centuries later were still primary arteries of European transportation. Down those roads which, as Gibbon says, rendered every corner of the Empire pervious to Roman power, the Emperor marched his armies. But up those roads he gathered his intelligence. Augustus invented the posts: first for signals intelligence, to move couriers and messages at the fastest possible speeds; and then for human intelligence. He created the post-chaises, so that, as Gibbon says, those who were present when dispatches were written could be questioned by the Emperor. Using that infrastructure for control of communications, with respect to everything that involved the administration of power, the Emperor of the Romans made himself the best informed human being in the history of the world. That power eradicated human freedom. "Remember," says Cicero to Marcellus in exile, "wherever you are, you are equally within of the power of conqueror." The empire of the United States, the global empire that followed from victory in the Second World War, also depended upon control of communications. Possibly the greatest military lesson of the Second World War was that he who has access to his adversaries' military communications prevails. At every level, from the tactical artillery duel to the greatest strategic naval confrontations in the Pacific, the new pace of warfare gave victory to the one who knew the other side's plans first. This was all the more obviously crucial in the development of the power to rule the world when, a mere twenty years later, the empire of the United States was locked in a confrontation of nuclear annihilation with the Soviet empire—a war of submarines hidden in the dark below the continents, capable of eradicating human civilization in less than an hour in an imperial confrontation whose rule of engagement was "launch on warning." Thus it was that the Empire of the United States came to have precisely the same view of the effort to render everywhere pervious to American power that had been the view of Emperor Augustus. And our listeners aspired to everything. Now, the structure of listening which came out of the Second World War—the spying on signals, the stealing of signals and the breaking of codes—this was, under everybody's understanding of the new order of power in the world, the crucial center of it all. And, while it has been commonplace to recognize since the end of the Cold War that the United States has spent for decades as much on its military might as all other powers in the world combined, it has not necessarily followed in people's consciousness that we applied to the stealing of signals and the breaking of codes a similar proportion of our diligence. That system of listening, which had at its center the same reality of power, that system which grew up under the National Security Act and its successor legislation in the United States, had a particular systemic form: listening was under military command, controlling large civilian workforces. That structure, of course, presupposed precisely the foreign intelligence nature of the activity. Military control was both a symbol and a guarantee of the nature of the activity being pursued: everybody understood that if you had put such activity domestically under military control you would have violated the fundamental principle of the civilian control of the government of the United States. Instead what we had was a foreign intelligence service regarded as the most important basis of American power, responsible to the chief executive of the United States as commander-in-chief, and based in military control and military integrity. Because, of course, integrity was the other side of this coin. Military control ensured absolute command deference with respect to the fundamental principle which made it all "all right," which was: "No Listening Here." The boundary between home and away was the boundary between absolutely permissible and absolutely impermissible—between the world in which those whose job it is to kill people and break things instead stole signals and broke codes, and the constitutional system of ordered liberty. There's lots to be said—and we will need to say it as our time together goes by—about the morality of that assumption. But I must ask you to keep in mind that it also was accompanied by the reality of communications in the twentieth century, which were hierarchically organized and very often state-controlled. When the United States Government chose to listen to other governments abroad—to their militaries, to their diplomatic communications, to their policy-makers where they could—they were listening in a world of defined targets. As to which they were roughly entitled to their favored assumption, which was that everybody else was listening back at them on those targets pretty much just as hard as they could, which was of course way less hard than we, because we were the Empire. On this basis, we formed fundamental alliances with the other English-speaking societies in the world for a complete cooperation of signals intelligence, based around two fundamental predicates: the listeners in each of the English speaking societies were not listening at home, and they were not spying on one another. Therefore they and we stood back to back in their listening against the world. And on that basis, in the era of the digital computer, we began to be capable of taking everything. "Everything" was defined as all signals in the electromagnetic spectrum and its copper wire accessories. The basic principle was: hack, tap, steal—where the roof of every US embassy, and every American naval asset at sea, and every other place that we could cram antennas held the ones that we wanted to have there. And where every deal that we could make for exchange of signals intelligence among parties committed to listening gave us everything. Thus we could get what we needed, and we felt we needed it all. In the beginning we listened to militaries and their governments. Later we monitored the flow of international trade as far as it engaged American national security interests. But there is this about the weapons of war: In 1937, bombing civilian populations from the air was an innovation in the criminality of war, and Pablo Picasso found it worthy of his work. Less than a decade later, dozens of the greatest cities in the world lay in rubble and United States Government had dropped nuclear weapons on cities in Japan. Now the United States Government considers aerial bombardment to be the cleanest form of war. In the beginning we listened to armies, embassies, diplomats, government officials. Then we listened to the global economy. Now we are being told that spying on entire societies is normal. The regime that we built to defend ourselves against nuclear annihilation, in a world where access to the other fellow's signals is what makes victory, came at the end of the twentieth century under two forms of profound social restructuring. In the first place, the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union dissolved. An entire establishment of national security—which continues to absorb more resources in the United States than in all the rest of the world put together, and I am including the listeners—an entire national security structure re-purposed itself, not to spy upon an empire with twenty-five thousand nuclear weapons pointed down our throats, but at the entire population of the world in order to locate a few thousand people minded to various kinds of mass murder. In the second place, the nature of human communication changed. The system that they built, with all of its arrangements, was dependent as I said upon fixed targets: a circuit, a phone number, a license plate, a locale. The question of capacity was about

Part III: The Union, May it Be Preserved Video: (WebM) (mp4) also available here Audio: (mp3) (ogg) (spx) Print: (pdf) A talk given by Eben Moglen at Columbia Law School on November 13th, 2013. Previously in this series: Part I: "Westward the Course of Empire" and Part II: "Oh, Freedom". Good afternoon. Since we were last together, Mr. Albert Gore Jr.—once Vice President of the United States, and the man who got the most votes in the presidential election of 2000—said, in a public speech in Montreal, that Mr. Snowden had disclosed evidence of crimes against the United States Constitution. Senator John McCain—who has never gotten the most votes in a presidential election—immediately came out, and said that General Alexander—whose departure has been scheduled, as we discussed last time—should be fired for allowing Mr. Snowden, who was a mere contractor, access to classified information. This sudden and unprovoked attack on the business model of Booz Allen Hamilton, and many of his campaign contributors was, of course, a beautiful example of the misdirection, misleading, and sheer lying we were talking about last time. Mr. Gore—who was famously a journalist rather than a lawyer before he went into politics, which may account for his occasional love of truthfulness—was of course exercising layman’s privilege in talking about crimes against the United States Constitution. Much in the way that liberty has been taken with the law when people attack Mr. Snowden as a “traitor.” But Mr. Gore is using layman’s privilege. Many of the people who have abused the language with respect to Mr. Snowden are lawyers, and should have known better. But for all that Mr. Gore was substantially closer to the truth than Senator McCain, it is Senator McCain’s comment which leads us closer to the heart of where we need to focus our attention now. Our remaining time together will be short and in it we must attend to the solutions to some to the problems we have been living with. In order to think about those solutions we must be sure that we understand the full breadth of the problems. Senator McCain, in referring to the contractors, brought us face to face with the crucial role of the private surveillance market in the world, the data-miners and the listeners of commerce. Both those who are officially part of the intelligence establishment and those who aren’t. Senator McCain of course knows the vast surveillance-industrial state which has grown up since 2001—which was so beautifully documented by the Washington Post in its “Top Secret America” series in 2010—is impossible to imagine, the surveillance behemoth we now have in government cannot be conceived, without the contractors. That’s the center of that story. But it is in itself another layer—one might say a superstructure raised atop another structure altogether, one might call a base—which is the great data-mining industry that has grown up in the United States, to surveil the world for profit, in the last fifteen years. There we must pay our central attention before we discuss how to fix things, because there is the center of the problem. The government abuse of the systems of surveillance and listening which have threatened to fasten the procedures of totalitarianism on everyone in the world without a US passport, this form of pervasive spying on societies which has come into existence, results from a larger environmental and ecological crisis brought on by industrial overreaching. It is not the first, the last, or the most serious of the various forms of environmental crisis brought on in the last two centuries by industrial overreaching. Industrial overreaching has begun to modify the climate of the whole earth in unexpected and damaging ways. Against that enormity this is merely an ecological disaster threatening the survival of democracy. So we need to understand the ecological harm done underneath, before we can begin to restrict the listening of government to its appropriate sphere, and abate those violations of the constitution to which Mr. Gore referred. Now I spoke last time of the way in which we can decompose “privacy,” the concepts that we float around under that word, into three more specific parts: First, secrecy: that is, our ability to have our messages understood only by those to whom we intend to send them. Second, anonymity: that is, our ability to send and receive messages, which may be public in their content, without revealing who said and who listened or read what was said. Third, autonomy: that is, the avoidance of coercion, interference, and intervention by parties who have violated either our secrecy or our anonymity and who are using what they have gained by those violations to control us. I would ask you also—in thinking analytically about this substance “privacy” whose continuation I am asserting is essential to democracy’s survival—I would urge you also to consider that privacy is an ecological rather than a transactional substance. This is a crucial distinction from what you are taught to believe by the people whose job it is to earn off you. Those who wish to earn off you want to define privacy as a thing you transact about with them, just the two of you. They offer you free email service, in response to which you let them read all the mail, and that’s that. It’s just a transaction between two parties. They offer you free web hosting for your social communications, in return for watching everybody look at everything. They assert that’s a transaction in which only the parties themselves are engaged. This is a convenient fraudulence. Another misdirection, misleading, and plain lying proposition. Because—as I suggested in the analytic definition of the components of privacy—privacy is always a relation among people. It is not transactional, an agreement between a listener or a spy or a peephole keeper and the person being spied on. If you accept this supposedly bilateral offer, to provide email service for you for free as long as it can all be read, then everybody who corresponds with you has been subjected to the bargain, which was supposedly bilateral in nature. If your family contains somebody who receives mail at Gmail, then Google gets a copy of all correspondence in your family. If another member of your family receives mail at Yahoo, then Yahoo receives a copy of all the correspondence in your family as well. The idea that this is limited to the automated mining of the mail, to provide advertisements which you may want to click on while you read your family’s correspondence, may or may not seem already louche beyond acceptability to you, but please to keep in mind what Mr. Snowden has pointed out to you: Will they, nil they, they are sharing all that mail with power. And so they are helping all your family’s correspondence to be shared with power, once, twice, or a third time. The same will be true if you decide to live your social in a place where the creep who runs it monitors every social interaction, and not only keeps a copy of everything said, but also watches everybody watch everybody else. The result will not only be, of course, that you yourself will be subjected to the constant creepy inspection, but also that everybody you choose to socialize with there will be too. If you attract others to the place, you’re attracting them to the creepy supervisory inspection, forcing them to undergo it with you, if they want to be your “friend.” The reason that we have to think about privacy the way we think about the other ecological crises created by industrial overreaching is that it is one. It’s that we can’t avoid thinking about it that way, no matter how much other people may try to categorize it wrongly for us. This is a particular problem for the lawyers. Because the lawyers are attracted by the shininess of transactional behavior. It gives them benefits and causes them—if they are professors—to lunch, and—if they are practitioners—to dine in elegance. So they are always delighted to discover a transaction that can be facilitated for a reduction of friction monetized as legal fees. Therefore lawyers are among those around the world most likely to be inclined to imagine that this nonsense about the transactionality of privacy is true. The important element in this is that what is transactional can be consented to, and so we get a lot of law about consent. Which, if correctly understood, is totally irrelevant and indeed fundamentally inappropriate. We do not, with respect to clean air and clean water, derive the dirtiness of the air and water from the degree of consent. You can’t consent to expose your children to unclean or unsafe drinking water in the United States, no matter how much anybody pays you. Because the drinking water must be provided at a socially established standard of cleanliness, which everybody has to meet. Environmental law is not law about consent. It’s law about the adoption of rules of liability reflecting socially determined outcomes: levels of safety, security, and welfare. When you take a subject which has previously been subject to environmental regulation and you reduce it to transactionality—even for the purpose of trying to use market mechanisms to reduce the amount of pollution going on—you run into people who are deeply concerned about the loss of the idea of a socially established limit. You must show that those caps are not going readily to be lifted in the exhilarating process, the game, of trading. But with respect to privacy we have been allowed to fool ourselves—or rather, we have allowed our lawyers to fool themselves and them to fool everybody else—into the conclusion that what is actually a subject of environmental regulation is a mere matter of bilateral bargaining. A moment’s consideration of the facts will show that this is completely not true. Of course we acquired this theory not by accident. We acquired this theory because tens of billions of dollars in wealth h

The always hilarious Greg Proops comes on the show to talk all sorts of things with Chris. They discuss history, appropriate man luggage, and social censorship!