Chris Peterson

The WordPress iOS app is amazing.

That is all.

On Wednesday, I was happy to attend a conversation with Assistant SecState PJ Crowley at the MIT Center for Future Civic Media. On Saturday, I was saddened to learn that as a result of that conversation – specifically after characterizing the inhumane conditions of Bradley Manning’s detention as “ridiculous, counterproductive, and stupid” – Mr Crowley resigned his office.

The C4 meeting was intended to be an informal conversation between top-flight academics and a leading government official about social media and state policy. Mr Crowley was candid and forthright in his remarks. He provided wonderful insights about his challenges at State. And, when he agreed at the end of the talk that his informal comments could be on record, he did so presumably so that those not fortunate enough to physically attend could still profit from his wisdom and experience.

Mr Crowley’s job is was to represent the opinions of the Obama administration. And he did not do so accurately in this discussion. Some have argued that this discrepancy justifies his allegedly encouraged resignation.

However, Mr Crowley also stated clearly that these were his personal, not professional, beliefs. Candid, forthright discussions between policymakers and their constituents are a necessary condition for a functioning republic. All law may be politics, but not all policy need be positioning. And if a public official can’t speak honestly in a conversation with leading academics at MIT’s center for civic media, then there is no safe space left for honesty in governance.

Accordingly, I have added my name to an open letter issued by attendees in support of Mr Crowley. Will it accomplish anything? Probably not. But the least I can do to support someone who as candid as Crowley is to be just as forthright on his behalf. Because, under the circumstances, the resignation of PJ Crowley is ridiculous, counterproductive, and stupid.

(tldr: read this)

If you’re visiting this page it’s probably because you’ve come here to read my post about the impact of commodity speculation on oil prices.

This post is gone now (although much of it has been mirrored in many places around the Internet, including here). I decided to take it down from my blog because I was no longer satisfied with it. What I thought would be the ending point of a polemic became the starting point of a very helpful discussion in the comments of my site, reddit, different messageboards, etc.

While I am still convinced that the primary reason for the volatility and height of oil prices is speculative, manipulative behavior on Wall Street and not the freedom fighters in the Middle East, I also realized that my post was conceptually incomplete and analytically insufficient.

Fundamentally the point I was trying to make required much more information than I could contain in a blog post. And though the discussion, as I said, has continued in many disparate places, in a way that I find satisfying, all of that information was not contained here, in this space, and I didn’t want to maintain the illusion of completeness here any longer. Put another way, I was very happy with the conversation that had continued, but it had continued in so many disparate places that my post had essentially become only a single outpost of a much larger enterprise.

However, most of my post was simply excerpts from the following articles, so if you read them, you will understand what I was talking about.

• How Goldman Sachs Created the Food Crisis by Frederick Kaufman in Foreign Policy. This is a short article that came out after my post but is functionally very similar; if you came here to read my post, read this one instead.
• The food bubble: How Wall Street starved millions and got away with it by Frederick Kaufman in Harper’s Magazine.
• Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America by Matt Taibbi, specifically chapter 4, which dealt squarely with the commodities bubble in oil and gas.
• JPMorgan Hires Supertanker for Storage, Brokers Say from Bloomberg News.

If you read these articles then I believe you will come to the same conclusions that I did – again, in part because much of my post was simply excerpting and synthesizing the information contained within these works.

I apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you – but hopefully, it will encourage you to go read the same things I read and found so helpful and illuminating.

Edit 6/13/2011: Also, this revelation from Wikileaks that the Saudis warned of speculative behavior as well.

Punchy quote, from the Internet:

“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.”

I love hamburgers.

But sometimes, when I’m burgin’, I don’t know where the nearest, best burger place is.

Decisions like this are too important to be left to chance.

So I made a thing.

That thing is BurgerMap.

BurgerMap runs off of the Ushahidi platform. Ushahidi has been deployed in dozens, perhaps hundreds, of conflict areas all over the world. In its history it has documented violence in the aftermath of the disputed 2007 Kenyan elections, anti-immigrant violence in South Africa, eyewitness reports from Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, and cholera outbreaks in post-earthquake Haiti.

Thus, it was a natural choice to deploy in the most pressing crisis first worlders often find themselves in, namely where to find a good burger.

BurgerMap is very easy to use. Simply click on the “Submit A Report” link and fill out the form. Include the name of the burger joint, a description of its merits, and its location. You should be able to use the integrated Google Local search in the “Find A Location” section; if that fails, just drop a pointer as close as you can and enter in the street address.

Please, take a moment to contribute your favorite burger place to our burgeoning burger community. And post any suggestions for how to make BurgerMap better.

Just coming up for air to say that if you haven’t read Ben McGrath’s piece Does Football Have A Future in last week’s New Yorker, you must. It is the most informative, insightful, and chilling look at the history of the game, its culture, its injuries, and practices that I have ever read. McGrath blows me away with every article he writes, but this was in another realm.