4 Notes

Americans Elect 2012: Will it work?

The Colbert Report Wednesday night featured Elliot Ackerman as a guest, promoting a simple, utterly obvious idea - let people directly decide a Presidential candidate through the internet, without involvement from political parties or special interests. Ackerman’s first moment that struck me: “Technology and social media have opened up all facets of our lives…Politics is one of the few places where you still have to decide between Brand A and Brand B.” I love the attempt by AmericansElect.org to alter the 2 party system without government involvement in election reform. How many elections have been a decision between the lesser of two evils? Any cause working to solve that dilemma is a noble one. The other great moment (he got a nice audience cheer from this line): ”What we want to do is leverage our newest technologies to get us back to some of our oldest values, which is letting every voter participate in a meaningful way in a primary.” What’s not to like?

Ackerman’s website, AmericansElect.org, is still in its early stages, but the ball is rolling, and the Colbert Bump will help. The site goes through 4 stages:

  1. Define your priorities
  2. Shape the debate
  3. Choose the candidates
  4. Cast your vote

Right now you can only interact with #1. You define your priorities among the following broad subjects: social issues, education, foreign policy, healthcare, economy, immigration, and energy. I put the economy, education, and energy as my top priorities. What follows is a simple, seemingly unbiased questionnaire helping to define your beliefs. Currently there are 64 questions, and I rocketed through them in about 10 minutes. You can’t change your answers, but that will probably change soon, as the large feedback tab on the side of the screen allows you to submit ideas for the developers to implement.

I’m cautiously optimistic about the website. Not because of the website itself — the design is appealing, it incorporates “badges” (always a fun way to encourage involvement), and it promotes independent thinking about the issues facing our country. What most concerns me is nationwide support for the idea. While they are close to getting their candidate on the ballot in every state, I’m concerned the media/political elite/special interests will suppress knowledge of this candidate. They’ll be relegated to 1-2% of the total vote, and nothing will change.

865 Notes

Dylan Ratigan, Mad as Hell: His Epic ‘Network’ Moment

I’m not the first to reblog this rant, but I also hope I’m not the last. The amount of passion and honesty in this 5 minute clip is more than I’ve seen from any real politician in my life. 

Via megrobertson:

We’ve got a real problem…this is a mathematical fact. Tens of trillions of dollars are being extracted from the United States of America.  Democrats aren’t fixing it, Republicans aren’t stopping it — an entire integrated system, banking, trade and taxation, created by both parties over a period of two decades is at work decimating our entire country right now. MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan took it all on in this epic rant from his show today.

6 Notes

Anyone with half an interest in anything can find at least 1 TED talk that makes your brain jump, and reminds you that the mind is capable of far more than we give it credit for. Sarah Kay’s eyes remind me of the childlike wonder my favorite professor asked us to instill in our poetry. He once asked some young kids he was teaching, “What smells good?” They came up with answers instantly. “Cookies!” one said. It seems so obvious. Of course cookies smell good! We laughed at the answer’s simplicity, until we tried to answer ourselves. 

One of the sadnesses of adulthood is we lose that instant connection to our senses. I look at a cloud and see a cloud, or worry about storms — remember when you saw everything in clouds? I once lay on a beach and listened to Dark Side of the Moon, and tried to remember when cumulonimbi looked like firetrucks, seahorses, and owls. Then I lost my wallet in the ocean and the frothy waves of adulthood crashed saltily back in. 

Some great ideas in the speech:

  • Jean-Luc Godard’s quotation: “A good story has a beginning, a middle, and an end, although not necessarily in that order.” 
  • 3 Steps : 1. I can do this thing. 2. I will do this thing. 3. There are things specific to you, and if you focus on those things, the weirder your poetry gets, but the more it feels like you. Later she says that step 3 never ends. 
  • 3. “And here’s what happens, and here’s what you would discover too if we all started sharing our lists out loud. At a certain point, you would realize that someone has the exact same thing, or one thing very similar, to something on your list. And then someone else has something the complete opposite of yours. Third, someone has something you’ve never even heard of before. And fourth, someone has something you thought you knew everything about, but they’re introducing a new angle of looking at it. And I tell people that this is where great stories start from — these four intersections of what you’re passionate about and what others might be invested in.”
  • “I use spoken word to help my students rediscover wonder, to fight their instincts to be cool and unfazed and, instead, actively pursue being engaged with what goes on around them, so that they can reinterpret and create something from it.”

(Source: ted.com)

The Spread of Good Ideas.

I’ve always seen connections cross-discipline, multi-subject. What I’m going to write about are good ideas. Ideas transcend labels and disciplines. Poetry is the personal creation of ideas, finding truth (or intriguing lies) in words. Fiction is full of ideas draped with narrative and story. Without ideas, we are not human. Even if your ideas suck, they’re still something you came up with on your own and could infect people with. The crazy thing about the modern era is the spread of ideas is fantastically effective. A great idea can within a day be enjoyed, shared, and spread even further by millions of people. The meteoric rise of “Fuck You” by Cee-lo is one such example. Imagine: you release a song on the internet, and have 2 million people see it over the course of 2 days, and become the hit of the summer inside of a week. Promotion can happen that fast, if the idea/content is good. The only memorable ad from last year’s Superbowl? Old Spice guy. Why? Well-written, visually appealing, well-acted, and absurdly excellent marketing. Good ideas made that ad.

I’ve encapsulated my taste in music recently, when people ask me what I listen to. I’ve been incorporating more and more genres into my listening repertoire as the years go by, but what I’ve ultimately boiled it down to is that the music I most enjoy is music that sounds like nothing else. My current favorite band is TV on the Radio — their name defines their music — multimedia, boundary expansion. No other band incorporates as many disparate genres and sounds and still remains listenable. Try a Pandora station of them — it will fail you utterly.

I don’t want to always be right. I want to say stupid shit and be punished for it. But I’ve spent a long time trying to avoid this punishment — I’ve been flight, not fight. Let’s fight.

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