[Marxism] Capturing the Facebook Obsession
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == NY Times October 15, 2010 Capturing the Facebook Obsession By JOE NOCERA Ben Mezrich is the kind of nonfiction writer we used to call a hype artist. He takes relatively mundane subjects — counting cards in Vegas, derivatives trading, the New York Mercantile Exchange — and turns them into high-octane page-turners, replete with sex, skullduggery and plot twists worthy of James Patterson. His protagonists — invariably young, testosterone-fueled men — are real, and he bases his books on true-life events, but he amps those events up to the point where the final product is an indistinguishable blend of fact and fiction. “In some instances,” he writes in a typical Ben Mezrich author’s note, “details of settings and descriptions have been changed or imagined.” The phrase “never let the facts get in the way of a good story” could have been coined to describe Mr. Mezrich’s approach. His most recent book is “The Accidental Billionaires,” which he describes on his Web site as “the high-energy tale of how two socially awkward Ivy Leaguers, trying to increase their chances with the opposite sex, ended up creating Facebook.” The two Ivy Leaguers are Mark Zuckerberg — widely hailed as the 26-year-old billionaire founder of Facebook — and Eduardo Saverin, his former Harvard classmate and Facebook co-founder, who originally owned 30 percent. The book is told through the prism of both Mr. Saverin and two other Harvard graduates, Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, all of whom believe that Mr. Zuckerberg deprived them of their rightful share of Facebook’s billions. “The Accidental Billionaires” also serves as the foundational document for the new movie “The Social Network.” Written by Aaron Sorkin, the creator of “The West Wing,” it is a brilliant film, possibly the finest movie about business ever made. (Sorry, Oliver Stone.) Although people associated with the film insist that Mr. Sorkin did his own research — and although his take on Facebook is far more sophisticated than Mr. Mezrich’s — he nonetheless aligns his script in most important ways with the facts as they’re presented by Mr. Mezrich. (Mr. Sorkin and I were unable to connect before my deadline.) Mr. Saverin is by far the most sympathetic character in the movie. Mr. Zuckerberg is presented as an arrogant, aloof, socially inept computer nerd, who eventually tricks Mr. Saverin into signing documents that diminish his stake in Facebook to near-nothingness. Lots of dramatic license is taken, inevitable in a two-hour movie that spans a number of years. All of which flies in the face of yet a third account of the origins of Facebook. “The Facebook Effect” is a book by an old Fortune magazine colleague of mine, David Kirkpatrick, written with the full cooperation of Mr. Zuckerberg, and published in June. Mr. Kirkpatrick, a business journalist of the old school, would never take the kind of dramatic liberties taken by Mr. Mezrich and Mr. Sorkin. In fact, they horrify him. So Mr. Kirkpatrick has been waging a kind of war against “The Social Network,” decrying it in speeches, and in columns in The Daily Beast and elsewhere. “A lot of people come out of the movie believing they have seen the true take,” he complained to me the other day. He added, “It is testimony to the power of Hollywood and a well-crafted movie. It is disturbing.” For his part, Mr. Kirkpatrick believes that Mr. Zuckerberg is a visionary, who started Facebook — at 19! — out of a “truly intellectual motivation about an impactful new form of communication.” Late in his book, he approvingly quotes Mr. Zuckerberg as saying that he built Facebook to create something “that actually makes a really big change in the world.” Well, maybe. But after seeing “The Social Network” and reading the two books, I couldn’t help wondering whether Mr. Kirkpatrick, for all his emphasis on “the facts,” had really gotten any closer to the truth about Facebook’s beginnings than Mr. Mezrich and Mr. Sorkin. I have my doubts. • At bottom, “The Social Network” is a movie about obsession. That is a large part of the reason I’m so smitten with it: that same obsession that caused Bill Gates to drop out of Harvard to start Microsoft, that drove Steve Jobs to build the first home computer in a garage, that motivated Marc Andreessen to create the first commercial browser while still in school — that’s the story of Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook too, at least in Mr. Sorkin’s telling. And that obsessional quality is what Mr. Sorkin has captured better than anyone before. Though Mr. Zuckerberg starts Facebook while still taking a full course load at Harvard, he spends most of his waking hours on his new company, not his schoolwork. He can’t help himself. Realizing he
Re: [Marxism] Obama gets input from war criminal
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == On Sat, Oct 16, 2010 at 9:55 AM, Louis Proyect l...@panix.com wrote: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101015/ap_on_re_us/us_obama_rice Obama, Rice huddle on arms treaty, other issues Fri Oct 15, 10:15 am ET --- Friday, Oct 15, 2010 11:16 ET A political culture free of accountability By Glenn Greenwald http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/10/15/accountability/index.html Wolf Blitzer, CNN, January 10, 2003http://articles.cnn.com/2003-01-10/us/wbr.smoking.gun_1_smoking-gun-nuclear-weapons-hans-blix?_s=PM:US : Last September 8, I interviewed President Bush's National Security Adviser, Dr. Condoleezza Rice. I was pressing her on Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's nuclear capabilities. . . . We know that he has the infrastructure, nuclear scientists to make a nuclear weapon, she told me. . . . Dr. Rice then said something that was ominous and made headlines around the world. The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud. ABC News, April 9, 2008http://abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/LawPolitics/story?id=4583256page=1 : *Sources: Top Bush Advisers Approved 'Enhanced Interrogation'* In dozens of top-secret talks and meetings in the White House, the most senior Bush administration officials discussed and approved specific details of how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency, sources tell ABC News. The so-called Principals who participated in the meetings also approved the use of combined interrogation techniques -- using different techniques during interrogations, instead of using one method at a time -- on terrorist suspects who proved difficult to break, sources said. Highly placed sources said a handful of top advisers signed off on how the CIA would interrogate top al Qaeda suspects -- *whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subjected to simulated drowning, called waterboarding.* The high-level discussions about these enhanced interrogation techniques were so detailed, these sources said, *some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed* -- down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic. At the time, the Principals Committee included Vice President Cheney, former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, as well as CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft. As the national security adviser, *Rice chaired the meetings*, which took place in the White House Situation Room and were typically attended by most of the principals or their deputies. . . . Then-Attorney General Ashcroft was troubled by the discussions. He agreed with the general policy decision to allow aggressive tactics and had repeatedly advised that they were legal. But he argued that senior White House advisers should not be involved in the grim details of interrogations, sources said. . . . According to a top official, Ashcroft asked aloud after one meeting: Why are we talking about this in the White House? *History will not judge this kindly.* The Principals also approved interrogations that combined different methods, *pushing the limits of international law and even the Justice Department's own legal approval in the 2002 memo*, sources told ABC News. *Then-National Security Advisor Rice, sources said, was decisive.* Despite growing policy concerns -- shared by Powell -- that the program was harming the image of the United States abroad, sources say *she did not back down, telling the CIA: This is your baby. Go do it.* Associated Press, todayhttp://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101015/ap_on_re_us/us_obama_rice : *Obama, Rice huddle on arms treaty, other issues* WASHINGTON -- President Barack *Obama is meeting with former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to talk about a pending arms treaty with **Russia**and other issues . * A White House official said Rice and Obama have a cordial relationship, and the president looks forward to Friday's meeting covering a range of foreign policy topics. In other words: *Prosecute Bush officials who broke the law and instituted a worldwide torture regime?* *Please. I'm doing the opposite: I'm going to select some of them to occupy the highest positionshttp://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2008/11/16/brennanin my administrationhttp://original.antiwar.com/vlahos/2010/07/12/the-dark-legacy-of-gen-mcchrystal/and then meet with others in order to drink from the well of their wisdom on a wide range of foreign policy matters.* I realize this is very childish, shrill
[Marxism] Overview of Economic Crises
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == I just uploaded another YouTube talk on the overview of economic crises. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6h9xpmM14BU -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 530 898 5321 fax 530 898 5901 http://michaelperelman.wordpress.com Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] American Science's Racist History Still Haunts the World
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == American Science's Racist History Still Haunts the World By Michelle Chen Colorlines October 10, 2010 Early in America's crusade to spread the wonders of modern medicine, a group of researchers in Guatemala did something unspeakable in the name of science. Documentation of the project is just now coming to light, more than 60 years later, and it reads like a horror novel: Hundreds of men systematically infected with syphilis and other sexually transmitted diseases in an effort, endorsed by both the U.S. and Guatemalan governments, to research the effectiveness of drug treatment. Researchers exposed men to disease with varying degrees of intent. At first, Guatemalan health official Juan Funes selected prisoners in Guatemala City as subjects because prostitution at the penitentiary would likely yield fresh infections. But the researchers used more invasive tactics as well. The Washington Post reports, 'in other cases, doctors put infectious material on the cervixes of uninfected prostitutes before they had sex with prisoners.' When they needed more infections, they took more aggressive measures-'direct inoculations made from syphilis bacteria poured into the men's penises and on forearms and faces that were slightly abraded - or in a few cases through spinal punctures,' according to the research of the historian who broke the story, Susan M. Reverby (interviewed recently on Democracy Now!). Many, but not all, of these people-who included prisoners, soldiers and mental patients-were given penicillin to test its effectiveness as an after-sex treatment of syphilis, a disease that that can result in blindness or death. Medical personnel carried out similar studies on gonorrhea, which can lead to intense pain and infertility, and chancroid, which causes genital ulcers. The archival documents suggest the experiments didn't raise significant ethical qualms in Washington. The surgeon general at the time was quoted as saying, 'You know, we couldn't do such an experiment in this country.' Well, in a way, they could. A bizarre element in the story is the connection to another shameful chapter in the history of American medicine. The man behind the infection of incarcerated Guatemalans, Dr. John Cutler, had a hand in the infamous Tuskegee experiments as well. full -- http://colorlines.com/archives/2010/10/human_subjects_guatemala_and_the_history_of_racism_in_experimental_medicine.html Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] WikiLeaks' Biggest Document Dump Yet Coming Monday:
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == On Monday, the whistle-blower website WikiLeaks will release nearly 400,000 pages worth of classified U.S. Army documents on the war in Iraq, making it the single largest military leak in U.S. history. http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?llr=iqnuv6babet=1103789235038s=109652e=001SOVm23hMDvI7WCACFCFxUf3mAEoAZMLdCeSS6F15DMbr-timw5buJtSqwXs0HS2BxzBaPOhXd0wSTSyBjB1JdqWTe5DZ4IkRTVpIDdCVv7zGL2sbhJcA3mI8Ifle1FXzwp052Ci0mJyU_luC_Ij9AqvVArqAOPVi //www.informationclearinghouse.info/article26612.htmhttp://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?llr=iqnuv6babet=1103789235038s=109652e=001SOVm23hMDvI7WCACFCFxUf3mAEoAZMLdCeSS6F15DMbr-timw5buJtSqwXs0HS2BxzBaPOhXd0wSTSyBjB1JdqWTe5DZ4IkRTVpIDdCVv7zGL2sbhJcA3mI8Ifle1FXzwp052Ci0mJyU_luC_Ij9AqvVArqAOPVi Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
