Tag Archives: lincoln

Honduran President Decides That Going to an Event Called "Disrupting Democracy" Isn’t Such a Good Idea

Mother Jones

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On Monday, Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández was expected to appear in San Francisco to talk about his efforts to cede a chunk of his impoverished Central American nation to an international group of investors who want to create an autonomous, self-governing, libertarian paradise. There was one problem, however: His talk was part of a speaker series called Disrupting Democracy, which may be a better venue for someone like Rand Paul than the beneficiary of a military coup who won office using funds allegedly embezzled from the national social security system.

The brief, quixotic history of DIY micronations

Hernández and his deputies skipped Disrupting Democracy due to “civil unrest,” according the event’s organizers. On Sunday, 8,000 protesters had marched through the capital city of Tegucigalpa calling for his ouster.

“Before we begin, I would like to apologize for some confused messaging,” said panelist Randy Hencken, who directs the Seasteading Institute, which promotes the creation of floating technoutopian nation-states and cosponsored the event. “Here in Silicon Valley, when we want to improve something, we say ‘disrupt,'” Hencken continued. “Nobody in Honduras approved or even knew about that whimsical title, which, when translated from English into Spanish, could easily be construed in a negative and unintended light.”

At least a dozen anti-Hernández protesters showed up oustide the event, which was held at the South of Market headquarters of Lincoln Labs, a tech incubator cofounded by a former Mitt Romney campaign staffer.

The first Disrupting Democracy event, held in May, featured Paul discussing the growth of “a new generation of voter engagement.” Any subject that appeals to both libertarians and techies appears to interest Lincoln Labs, which was founded in 2013 to serve “liberty advocates living in Silicon Valley”—”a forgotten community that felt ostracized with no home.” Other Lincoln Labs events include its Reboot conferences and hackathons focusing on the technology of political campaigning.

Everyone at Monday’s event seemed to agree that the Honduran scheme, known as Zones for Employment and Economic Development, or ZEDEs, now seemed imperiled—a discouraging turn, given Hernández’s close cooperation with antitax crusader Grover Norquist and high-ranking representatives of the libertarian Cato and Hayek Institutes.

Yet the seasteaders were undeterred, even emboldened. If Honduras didn’t want to create a Hong-Kong style city on its coast, maybe it would host a floating city in its territorial waters. “That gets rid of complaints of ceding over large portions of land,” noted Seasteading Institute member Mike Doty, who had a long gray beard and a pirate-skull-patterned bandanna. “On the Pacific side, there’s a large bay there…They’ve done the engineering studies, the feasibility studies. We’re pretty far along.”

One thing that can never be disrupted, it seems, is the vision of a technolibertarian.

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Honduran President Decides That Going to an Event Called "Disrupting Democracy" Isn’t Such a Good Idea

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America Uses Fahrenheit. The Rest of the World Uses Celsius. America Is Right. The Rest of the World Is Wrong.

Mother Jones

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Vox has a post up called “Why Americans still use Fahrenheit long after everyone else switched to Celsius.” In it Zack Beauchamp sides with the standard line that America should jump on the Celsius train and leave Troglodyte Station.

The bizarre measurements commonly used in the US, including Fahrenheit, are bad for its scientific establishment, its kids, and probably its businesses.

Susannah Locke lays out the case for Celsius and the rest of the metric system very persuasively, but here’s a brief recap. The simpler metric scales make basic calculations easier and thus less error-prone. American companies incur extra costs by producing two sets of products, one for the US and one for the metric using world.

American parents and caregivers are more likely to screw up conversion rates when they give out medicine, sending some children, who are more susceptible to overdoses, to the hospital. Further, American students have to be trained on two sets of measurements, making basic science education even more difficult.

Going back to Jefferson there have been many movements to get the US to metricate. Lincoln Chaffee wants to get the US to adopt the metric system, too.

But I am a red-blooded American boy who likes listening to Tom Petty and riding motorcycles and wearing blue jeans and using Fahrenheit so Vox‘s post made me think of this great chart from the wonderful site isomorphismes which explains why our temperature measurement system is the best temperature measurement system.

“Fahrenheit uses its digits more efficiently than Centigrade” isomorphism

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America Uses Fahrenheit. The Rest of the World Uses Celsius. America Is Right. The Rest of the World Is Wrong.

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Yes, Joseph Gordon-Levitt Will Marry You

Mother Jones

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Joseph Gordon-Levitt is only 32, but it seems like that kid from 3rd Rock From the Sun has been in everything since.

Among other roles, he played a DIY detective in Brick, Robin to Christian Bale’s Batman in The Dark Knight Rises, Leonardo DiCaprio’s business partner in Inception, Abe’s son in Lincoln, and a womanizing porn addict opposite Scarlett Johansson in last year’s Don Jon—which he wrote and directed. He also plays piano and guitar—and sometimes even belts out some blues. But his true passion is hitRECord, initially a side project he co-founded in 2005 with his older brother Daniel, who died in 2010. Their quirky production company takes art (short films, drawings, writings, original music) pitched by amateurs from around the globe, and packages it as YouTube clips, online galleries, a mini-book series, and live variety shows. Now you can catch Gordon-Levitt hosting HitRECord on TV, a program on Participant Media’s Pivot channel that showcases these far-flung talents via vignettes, visual artistry, and live performance.

Mother Jones: How long have you been a bluesman?

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Yes, Joseph Gordon-Levitt Will Marry You

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