RIP Steve Jobs

Despite his constant struggle with pancreatic cancer, it is still hard to believe that technology giant, founder of Apple Computer, and one of the most brilliant innovators of the modern age has passed away at the age of 56. 

I keep seeing links to YouTube videos of his commencement address at Stanford a few years back, and truer words have never been spoken:

Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love, and that is as true for work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work, and the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking, and don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it, and like any great relationship it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking. Don’t settle. 

[...] 

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Very inspirational. 

Foreign Aid - the "Good" Kind

Pundits have endlessly been comparing recent legislative battles to those of their counterparts in the 90s, both in terms of similarity and because that was the last time we had a Democratic administration and a Republican House. Here’s another unfortunate similarity:

The Horn of Africa region has been parched by the worst drought in 60 years and the United Nations now estimates that 12.4 million people are facing severe food shortages and are in desperate need of aid. 

But while the U.N. says $2.5 billion is needed to alleviate the suffering only a little over $1 billion has so far been committed by donor nations. On Monday the U.N.’s humanitarian chief, Valerie Amos, called on the international community to do more. 

“A little less than two weeks ago, we declared a famine in two regions of Somalia,” said Amos, the Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator. 

“Unless we see a massive increase in the response, the famine will spread to five or six more regions. Tens of thousands of Somalis have already died, and hundreds of thousands face starvation,” she told a press conference at U.N. headquarters in New York.

Somalia doesn't look much different now from when we attempted to intervene in a similar situation 19 years ago. Ending foreign aid consistently polls well with the public as a means of reducing the deficit and government spending, even though it accounts for an infinitesimally small portion of the federal budget. And I get it – why should we spend money abroad when we can’t even fix our own problems at home? But crises like endemic famine in Somalia are the very types of things that we ought to be seeking to end with these funds (see this New York Times story for an idea of just how far the country has deteriorated). Pissing $3 billion a year down a hole so that Israel - a nation with a flourishing economy and universal healthcare no less - can buy freedom bombs and tanks and Apaches from US defense contractors? Not so much.

You Liked 'Egyptian Revolution'

Frank Rich sums up the exact reason why I have paid virtually no attention to the revolution in Egypt:

The live feed from Egypt is riveting. We can’t get enough of revolution video — even if, some nights, Middle West blizzards take precedence over Middle East battles on the networks’ evening news. But more often than not we have little or no context for what we’re watching. That’s the legacy of years of self-censored, superficial, provincial and at times Islamophobic coverage of the Arab world in a large swath of American news media. Even now we’re more likely to hear speculation about how many cents per gallon the day’s events might cost at the pump than to get an intimate look at the demonstrators’ lives.

Perhaps the most revealing window into America’s media-fed isolation from this crisis — small an example as it may seem — is the default assumption that the Egyptian uprising, like every other paroxysm in the region since the Green Revolution in Iran 18 months ago, must be powered by the twin American-born phenomena of Twitter and Facebook. Television news — at once threatened by the power of the Internet and fearful of appearing unhip — can’t get enough of this cliché.

The vast majority of the coverage I have seen has obsessed over boiling down the events into a handful of talking points of "What does this mean for the US?" And when they're not fawning over how a nation of 83 million people struggling for justice and true democracy may end up being a bad deal for the US and Israel because you never know who will fill the power vacuum when or if Mubarak resigns and we may not be fortunate enough to get another US/Israeli friendly sock puppet in his place, we get breathless commentary about the role that Facebook and Twitter-twat are playing in the revolution. And they did the same thing with the Iranian elections not so long ago, which gave us amazingly retarded slogans such as, "The revolution will be tweeted," and dipshits turning their blogs green to show solidarity with people hundreds of thousands of miles of which they know absolutely nothing of their day to day lives or struggles.

Frank makes another good point about the dismal coverage - that the one network that is in a position to give any meaningful coverage or context, Al Jazeera, is the target of a de facto ban in the US due to its insufficiently deferent coverage of the effects of US foreign policy on the middle east. US administrations, Republican and Democratic, do not tolerate media that is not effectively state run.

So that's really all I have to say about that. In the meantime, I will wait on baited breath to find out from our stalwart media if Mubarak is asking for recommendations on LinkedIn.

Really F-ing Excited

Just picked up two tickets for my wife and I to go see Bill Maher later next month. I have been wanting to see him live for some time now, but I didn't think the opportunity would come anytime soon as Arizona is pretty much the brunt of a number of his jokes on Real Time.

I think I must have given my wife a heart attack when I saw the billboard advertising his show. She thought I was freaking out and trying to warn her of some unseen danger/accident. Nope. Just an ad for Bill Maher in AZ. That the two events might provoke a similar reaction in me is simply beyond my control.

This Never Gets Old

It's been years since I've watched/checked up on this YouTube series, but it still makes me laugh as hard as the first time I watched it.