Partial Readings: NYPD Blues; the Environmentalist Threat; Steve Jobs, Mind and Body
Partial Readings: NYPD Blues; the Environmentalist Threat; Steve Jobs, Mind and Body
Partial Readings: NYPD Blues; the Environmentalist Threat; Steve Jobs, Mind and Body
Think of the NYPD When You Turn off the Lights Tonight
With every passing week, a new NYPD story emerges seemingly designed to send shivers down the spines of civil libertarians?and, like clockwork, Mayor Michael Bloomberg responds with a high-handed press conference. On Tuesday, General Bloomberg addressed recent reports that his ?army? had been baselessly spying on Muslim students in New York City and beyond (including sending an undercover officer on a rafting trip) with characteristic panache:
The only whitewater rafting that I’ve done I did with my daughter. I don?t think she had a lot of information that I was interested in in terms of her political views. It was a long time ago?I?m not sure at that time she had political views. She certainly does now….
We have to keep this country safe. This is a dangerous place. Make no mistake about it. It?s very cute to go and to blame everybody and say we should stay away from…intelligence gathering. The job of our law enforcement is to make sure that they prevent things and you only do that by being proactive….
Remind yourself when you turn off the light tonight, you [reporters] have your job because there are young men and women who have been giving their lives overseas for the last 200 plus years so that we would have freedom of the press. And we go after the terrorists. We are going to continue to do that and the same thing is true for the people that work on the streets of our cities.
At the risk of pointing to too obvious a hypocrisy, we remind the reader that the United States dropped down twenty-seven spots on the Press Freedom Index last year, in large part because of the dozens of journalists who were arrested by New York?s finest while covering Occupy Wall Street.
The Times has also recently reported on the NYPD?s growing biometric database. While arrestees can opt out of having their irises photographed by the police, they can expect to have their stay in jail extended for the trouble: ?Opponents have renewed their objections and accused officers of sometimes pressuring people to submit to the photographs?which are supposed to be optional?by keeping those who do not comply in custody longer.? Meanwhile, the NYPD continues to expand the list of crimes that require the collection of DNA; as Capital New York reports,
Each time the program has been enlarged, reformers have tried to use the expansion to push for simultaneous new guidelines that they believe would reduce the risk of wrongful convictions. And, each time, they’ve lost; the database has been expanded, without the reforms, over their objections, with a nod toward doing something to address their concerns next time around.
Now, with Governor Andrew Cuomo aggressively advocating the full expansion of the database, which would make New York State the first to collect samples from all crimes, reformers see this as their last, best chance to achieve something meaningful.
The NYPD has long acted as if it were above political criticism, but this may change during next year?s mayoral election. The Times reports that opponents of stop-and-frisk policing will band together to try to put an end to the race-based policy. ?We will make it impossible to run for citywide office in New York City without taking a position on stop-and-frisk.?
Radical Satanists and Other Threats to the Homeland
It seems that everywhere Rick Santorum looks, he finds radical leftists with secret plans (and allies in the underworld). In relatively under-reported recent comments, for example, Santorum shrugged off critiques of hydrofracking in his home state of Pennsylvania as a new environmentalist ?boogey man.?
[T]hey?re preying on the Northeast, saying, ?Look what?s going to happen. Ooh, all this bad stuff?s going to happen. We don?t know all these chemicals and all this stuff.?…Let me tell you what?s going to happen. Nothing?s going to happen, except they will use this to raise money for the radical environmental groups so they can go out and continue to try to purvey their reign of environmental terror on the United States of America.
These remarks come at a moment when conservatives are once again pushing state-level legislation to overhaul how science is taught in public schools. And this time, as Katherine Stewart reports for the Indypendent, the theory of evolution isn?t the only target:
The Oklahoma bill isn?t properly speaking just an ?anti-evolution? bill; it is just as opposed to the ?theory? of ?global warming.? A bill pending in Tennessee likewise targets ?global warming? alongside ?biological evolution.? These and other bills aim their rhetoric at ?scientific controversies? in plural, and one of the New Hampshire bills does not even bother to specify which controversies it has in mind.
To those who doubt that there is very much controversy to teach when it comes to global warming, look no further than this alternative explanation for disappearing ice caps: entrepreneurs are stealing the ice!
Steve Jobs Likes Bauhaus, Dislikes Virgins
Lately, the news about Apple has shifted from remembrances of Steve Jobs to discussions of work conditions at Apple?s contractors in China, especially the infamous FoxConn facility, which just announced a 25 percent pay raise for its employees. But a couple new reviews of Walter Isaacson?s biography of Jobs show that the conversation on the man behind the apple continues.
Evgeny Morozov?s latest essay in TNR takes stock of the ideas that helped shape Apple, most prominently the influence of post-Bauhaus German design and the idea of ?consumer engineering.? ?Jobs wanted every household in the world to have an Apple product so that he could teach the bastards proper aesthetics,? writes Morozov. ?[T]his was emancipation from the top down. It is a strange way to promote empowerment.? Morozov argues that these ideas help explain why Apple, unlike Google, has a consistent policy of disengagement from the public sphere:
Apple, with its total fixation on the user and its complete disregard of the community in which that user is grounded, does not seem well-equipped to identify and evaluate the threats that it poses to the Internet, let alone do something about them. You would be hard-pressed to see Apple?the largest technology company in the world?sponsor events, festivals, think-tanks, books, or any other kind of research or debate about technology. It is as if they are convinced that the intellectual justifications of their work are all self-evident. After all, why re-visit truth?
Maureen Tkacik, in her review of the Jobs biography, explores more corporeal matters, like the experience of putting 4,000 stickers on iPads every day. We also learn of Steve Jobs?s low opinion of virgins and those who haven?t tripped on LSD.
