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Fires, how do they cease?

There’s a netherworld aspect to living in the box that won’t allow for observation. The nuclear decay device – in this case, purported enriched uranium, actual nuclear weapons-making stuffs – occupies both the need and raisin debt at the center of the conflict. Learn from one thing to understand another, not just another party trick but try it at home. Impress your friends:

On Thursday the White House released long-anticipated draft regulations that, if enacted, would give political appointees the final word on federal research grants and other funding across government agencies.

Scheduled to be officially published in the Federal Register on Friday, the 412-page proposal on federal spending rules would centralize Office of Management and Budget (OMB) control over releases of government funds, including for scientific research grants.

The new rules would mandate political appointees at scientific agencies to sign off on all research awards for compliance with presidential priorities, including those on race and gender.

And at scientific agencies, the proposal states that “senior appointees must conduct these reviews and apply specific principles when evaluating proposals,” a departure from past practice whereby apolitical expert review committees approved research grants.

Many people are saying a clown moved into a palace doesn’t become a king – the palace becomes a circus. This lack of pretense for caring to understand, readily transferable to all policies foreign and domestic, constitutes an undoing and should be acknowledged as such in the strongest terms available. Put people in charge who don’t know what they are doing are defiant in pushing back clocks to yesteryears and suddenly we are all looking around for someone to push back on the madness, to explain in gentler terms that will shake the comfortable from their stupor. The unwelcome news: You are the someone.

The welcome news: you’re more ready than you think. The groundhog day coup d’etat where we wait for new explanations of what’s happening from people media who don’t want one did not emerge from a rift in time. Its origins are a dereliction of responsibility, an allergy to action, against uncomfortable words and calling out ignorance, racism, and misogyny. The Strait won’t open because the vandals handed-over the handle.

Fire with fire, friends. Unless or until then, it’s cognitive tests all the way down.

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Define torture

It’s Friday and there was hefty competition between this great Taibbi piece on Zero Dark Thirty (go read it) and the general media foulness staining all of our souls this week. I’m going with the latter, but only because I think I’ve never before linked to M.S.S. :

Structurally speaking, an advertorial should provoke no shock or disgust. This website—and the suite of Gawker websites—posts sponsored articles clearly marked as sponsored. (Full disclosure: I played the Old Spice video game where Dikembe Mutumbo shot space aliens.) Many news websites you read feature them as well. There are sponsored links in your Facebook feed. If you open almost any newspaper or magazine, you will eventually find an advertisement that’s just a tweaked font style or size away from looking identical to a regular article. The New Yorker devotes pages to faux articles about its New York symposia. You know what all these are. Ads appear next to original creative content everywhere. You show up 15 minutes late for movies in the theater. You don’t click on the Youtube for AWOLNATION’s “Sail” and think, “Huh, I guess when I listened to it on the radio I missed the first 30 seconds that were about how skateboarders need Powerade.”

A Scientology advertorial provides a specific non-systemic target. It’s easier to rail at it than the ugly funding of a magazine when your magazine might have ugly funding of its own. It also provokes less hand-wringing about whether writers are themselves mouthpieces for specific lobby agendas.

Take the Atlantic. As Alex Pareene notes in his annual Hack List, the Atlantic is run by the brother of a senator and the son of a former CIA spook to produce mainstream beltway bilge for a magazine that is much less lucrative than the “Work Summit” symposia it sponsors. Here’s one such “Work Summit,” focusing on future jobs and how to train the workforce for them (i.e. how to gut and modify education). Guests included Obama’s chief school-privatization pimp Arne Duncan, as well as school reform celebrity Michelle Rhee—the subject of a recent PBS expose about how the revolutionary gains her schools made on the sorts of paid-for standardized tests sold by wealthy private companies might have been the result of cheating.

Of course, go read the whole thing.