Congressional Oversight Smackdown

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WASHINGTON -- On Wednesday, Rep. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), a veteran of the Iraq War, dramatically chastised a federal contractor who claimed that a high school sports injury had rendered him a service-disabled veteran. [See video below.]

Speaking during a hearing of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Duckworth vividly described to a committee witness, Braulio Castillo, how she lives in near constant pain after losing both of her legs during her service as a combat pilot.

Castillo cited his foot injury, suffered at a military prep school, as the basis for his IT company's application for special status as a "service-disabled veteran-owned small business." The application was granted, and his company, Strong Castle, was given preferential treatment in federal contract bids.

Read full article here:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/26/tammy-duckworth-strong-castle_n_3504531.html

http://youtu.be/rPOKm20wP4s

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June 26, 2013 – A Historic Day for Equal Rights in America

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For 19 years I hid my attraction to guys – both from myself and the rest of the world. While a sophomore at Indiana University in the fall of 1970, a kind, patient Navy veteran (Jerry) opened my closet door and out I came. It was a different world in 1970. And 1970 was a different world for the millions of gay people who came out decades before me. Never did any of us imagine the Supreme Court of the United States ruling in favor of equal rights for gay people. Frankly, we never imagined gay equality becoming a national issue. Who’d’ve thunk it way back then? I think of my many friends from college and NYC struck down by AIDS who’d be stunned to see where gay people stand today in American society.

Why are equal rights for gay people such a big deal? Same reason that equal rights for Black people were a big deal. However, contrary to our Supreme Court deeming Black people to be property not citizens (Dred Scott v. Sanford), the very concept of gay people having nationally recognized equal rights wasn’t even contemplated. Gay folks were (and still are) scorned, denigrated, mocked, beaten and murdered. One wonders why gay people usually have such a tough time accepting their sexuality. Easy answer: tough to accept being someone historically and traditionally despised by society. Years ago, God help anyone speaking up in favor of fags and dykes.

We are who we are as you are who you are. In a brilliant youtube video (http://youtu.be/QJtjqLUHYoY), straight people were asked when they decided to become straight. Most people looked at the interviewer as if he had 3 heads. Gay people don’t choose their sexual orientation any more than straight people do. Black people don’t choose their skin color any more than Caucasians do. Women don’t choose their gender any more than men do. As Lady Gaga says, we’re “Born This Way”.

On June 26, 2013 the United States Supreme Court decided United States v. Schlain (holding DOMA to be unconstitutional) and Hollingsworth v. Perry (effectively overturning California’s Proposition 8 banning gay people from being married). The legal niceties, language parsing and media dissection is all over the web, cable news and in the two articles below. I’m not so presumptuous as to offer a new take on those. What I have to say is summed up in three words: “It’s about time!”

Now let’s get back to opening the hearts and minds of those still refusing to afford equal rights to all. (Get that New Jersey Governor Chris Christie?)

HAPPY PRIDE!

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Victory for Equal Rights

by THE EDITORIAL BOARD

JUNE 26, 2013

Today’s two Supreme Court rulings involving same-sex marriage were a huge and gratifying victory in the long struggle to end government-sanctioned discrimination against gay and lesbian Americans. It is sad, this deep into the national conversation about equal rights, that five justices were not willing to recognize a constitutional right for all couples to marry, regardless of the state where they live or their genders. But the momentum for marriage equality seems unstoppable, and such a breakthrough will eventually come.

The first ruling struck down the central provisions of the Defense of Marriage Act, the odious 1996 federal law that denied federal benefits to same-sex couples married in jurisdictions that permit such unions. The second decision will nullify Proposition 8, California’s voter-approved ban on same-sex marriage. Both decisions are huge victories for the gay rights movement that propels the nation toward greater fairness and full equality.

However, as many observers predicted, the Roberts court failed to deliver the larger verdict that the Constitution calls for in its equal protection clause: a broad ruling establishing a nationwide right of same-sex couples to wed. The court missed a historic chance to correct a longstanding injustice and left gay people in much of the country relegated to an inferior status that a growing majority of Americans knows is wrong.

The court may have believed that the country is not ready for such a sweeping approach. If so, it has overestimated the issue’s divisiveness and underestimated the human costs of further delay.

In the first case, United States v. Windsor, a 5-to-4 majority overturned a portion of the Defense of Marriage Act that defined marriage as a union only between a man and a woman for the purposes of more than 1,000 federal laws and programs. The plaintiff in the case, a New York octogenarian named Edith Windsor, brought her challenge after she was required to pay some $360,000 in federal estate taxes from which opposite-sex spouses are exempt. The Defense of Marriage Act did not allow the Internal Revenue Service to treat Ms. Windsor as a surviving spouse following the death of Thea Clara Spyer, the woman with whom she lived for more than 40 years and married in Canada in 2007.

The Defense of Marriage Act was “unconstitutional as a deprivation of the equal liberty of persons that is protected by the Fifth Amendment,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the majority opinion that was joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

By seeking to injure the class New York had sought to protect by allowing same-sex marriages, the act “violates basic due process and equal protection principles applicable to the federal government.” The law’s insidious provisions were the last in federal law to require discrimination against gay people. The majority was right not to seize upon the odd procedural posture of the case — the Obama administration sought Supreme Court review although it had stopped defending the Defense of Marriage Act and won a lower federal court ruling finding it unconstitutional — in order to avoid reaching the merits, as the court’s other four justices favored.

In the Proposition 8 case, Hollingsworth v. Perry, a differently composed 5-to-4 majority led by Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. avoided ruling on the merits of the constitutional challenge to the discriminatory ballot measure by finding that its proponents lacked standing to appeal. Nevertheless, on a hugely positive note, the court’s feint clears the way for same-sex marriages in California.

The dismissal of the Proposition 8 challenge leaves intact the sound 2010 ruling by a now-retired federal trial judge in San Francisco, Vaughn Walker. Following a much-publicized three-week trial, he found that same-sex marriage caused no harm whatsoever to the state or society but substantial harm to same-sex couples by depriving them of their rights to equal protection and due process. With California joining a dozen other states and the District of Columbia already in the marriage equality column, roughly 30 percent of Americans live in places where same-sex marriage is allowed.

Americans’ acceptance of same-sex marriage, and the legal and political support for it, have come very far, very fast in the four years since two prominent lawyers on opposite sides of the 2000 Bush v. Gore case, Theodore Olson and David Boies, filed the challenge to Proposition 8 that culminated on Wednesday.

But there are miles yet to travel on this civil rights journey. The new marriage rulings leave behind an unsupportable state-by-state patchwork that threatens valid marriages when state lines are crossed. Cases already in the pipeline could give the Supreme Court another chance to fully confront the harm to real people’s lives and establish marriage equality nationwide. Soon, we hope.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/27/opinion/the-same-sex-marriage-rulings.html?hp

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The Long Road to Marriage Equality

by GEORGE CHAUNCEY

JUNE 26, 2013

NEW HAVEN — THE Supreme Court’s soaring decision to strike down the core of the Defense of Marriage Act as unconstitutional is a civil rights landmark, but the history leading up to it is poorly understood. Marriage equality was neither inevitable nor, until recently, even conceivable. And the struggle for it was not, as is commonly believed, a natural consequence of the gay liberation movement that gained steam in the late 1960s.

It was not until the 1980s that securing legal recognition for same-sex relationships became an urgent concern of lesbians and gay men. Decades earlier, such recognition was almost unimaginable. In the 1950s, most states criminalized gay people’s sexual intimacy. Newspaper headlines blared the State Department’s purge of homosexual employees during the McCarthy-era “lavender scare.” Police cracked down on lesbian and gay bars and other alleged “breeding grounds” of homosexuality.

The lesbian and gay liberation movements of the early 1970s did not make marriage a priority — quite the opposite. Activists fought police raids, job discrimination and families’ rejection of their queer children. Most radical activists scorned the very idea of marriage. But a handful walked into clerks’ offices across the country to request marriage licenses. State officials suddenly realized that their laws failed to limit marriage to a man and a woman; no other arrangement had been imagined. By 1978, 15 states had written this limitation into law.

A “traditional family values” movement arose to oppose gay rights and feminism. Anita Bryant and other activists took aim at some of the earliest local anti-discrimination laws, and by 1979 they had persuaded voters in several cities to repeal them. Subsequently, in more than 100 state and local referendums, gay-rights activists had to defend hard-won protections. This, not marriage, consumed much of their energy.

It was the ’80s that changed things. The AIDS epidemic and what came to be known as the “lesbian baby boom” compelled even those couples whose friends and family fully embraced them to deal with powerful institutions — family and probate courts, hospitals, adoption agencies and funeral homes — that treated them as legal strangers.

Hospitals could deny the gay partner of someone with AIDS visitation privileges, not to mention consultation over treatment. He couldn’t use his health insurance to cover his partner. He risked losing his home after his partner died, if his name wasn’t on the lease or if he couldn’t pay inheritance taxes on his partner’s share (which would not have been required of a surviving spouse).

When two women shared parenting and the biological mother died, the courts often felt obliged to grant custody to her legal next of kin — even if the child wished to remain with the nonbiological mother. If the women separated, the biological mother could unilaterally deny her ex the right to see their children.

Couples used wills, powers of attorney and innovative new legal arrangements like domestic partnerships and second-parent adoption to try to get around these injustices, an astounding achievement given the reigning conservatism of the ’80s and early ’90s. But for all their virtues, none of these arrangements could provide the Social Security, tax, immigration and other benefits that only marriage could bestow.

The marriage movement emerged out of this maelstrom, but it was always about more than legal benefits. Historically, denial of marriage rights has been a powerful symbol of people’s exclusion from full citizenship. Enslaved people in America did not have the right to marry before the Civil War; Jews did not have the right to marry non-Jews in Nazi Germany. In 1948, the United Nations enshrined the freedom to marry as a fundamental human right. That same year California’s highest court became the first in the nation to overturn a state law banning interracial marriage.

As attitudes toward homosexuality changed in the 1990s, before accelerating ever more rapidly over the last decade, antigay activists — who had already fought gay teachers in schools, gay-student groups, gay characters on TV, domestic partnerships and anti-discrimination laws — redoubled their fight against marriage equality. In 1996, when it appeared that Hawaii’s courts might let same-sex couples wed, Congress passed DOMA, which declared that no state needed to give “full faith and credit” to another state’s same-sex marriages. It also denied federal recognition and benefits to such marriages — the provision struck down on Wednesday. As Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the majority: “DOMA’s principal effect is to identify a subset of state-sanctioned marriages and make them unequal.”

When Massachusetts became the first state to let gay couples marry, in 2004, it unleashed opposition as well as euphoria. That year, 13 states amended their constitutions to ban such marriages (12 had already done so legislatively). Ultimately, California and 40 other states acted to limit marriage to one man and one woman by constitutional amendment, legislation or both; in 30 states, the amendments are on the books. As a result of another Supreme Court ruling on Wednesday, California will soon join 12 states (and the District of Columbia) in permitting same-sex marriage, but the state-by-state battle will grind on elsewhere.

The intensity of the backlash against marriage equality eventually produced its own backlash. Many heterosexuals sought to distance themselves from the antigay animus it expressed. Young people, who grew up in a cultural universe different from their parents’, began to wonder why marriage was an issue at all. Political figures as different as Barack Obama and Rob Portman described how their children had affected their thinking.

Federal benefits will dramatically improve the lives of countless people, from the lesbian widow who needs her wife’s Social Security benefits to hold onto her home to the gay New Yorker whose foreign husband will now be able to live with him in America. Couples will no longer suffer the indignity of having the government treat their marriages as inferior.

Urgent problems still confront lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, including the endemic bullying of queer students, discrimination in housing and employment and the surge in new H.I.V. infections among young gay and bisexual men. Marriage equality has singular legal, cultural and practical significance. Nonetheless, it was not the first issue to animate the struggle for equality and dignity — nor will it be the last.

George Chauncey, a professor of history and American studies at Yale, was an expert witness in both of the same-sex marriage cases decided Wednesday.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/27/opinion/the-long-road-to-marriage-equality.html?ref=opinion

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Syrian Refugees

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Individual Rights vs. National Security

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Blowing a Whistle

by THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

JUNE 11, 2013

I’m glad I live in a country with people who are vigilant in defending civil liberties. But as I listen to the debate about the disclosure of two government programs designed to track suspected phone and e-mail contacts of terrorists, I do wonder if some of those who unequivocally defend this disclosure are behaving as if 9/11 never happened — that the only thing we have to fear is government intrusion in our lives, not the intrusion of those who gather in secret cells in Yemen, Afghanistan and Pakistan and plot how to topple our tallest buildings or bring down U.S. airliners with bombs planted inside underwear, tennis shoes or computer printers. 

Yes, I worry about potential government abuse of privacy from a program designed to prevent another 9/11 — abuse that, so far, does not appear to have happened. But I worry even more about another 9/11. That is, I worry about something that’s already happened once — that was staggeringly costly — and that terrorists aspire to repeat.

 I worry about that even more, not because I don’t care about civil liberties, but because what I cherish most about America is our open society, and I believe that if there is one more 9/11 — or worse, an attack involving nuclear material — it could lead to the end of the open society as we know it. If there were another 9/11, I fear that 99 percent of Americans would tell their members of Congress: “Do whatever you need to do to, privacy be damned, just make sure this does not happen again.” That is what I fear most.

That is why I’ll reluctantly, very reluctantly, trade off the government using data mining to look for suspicious patterns in phone numbers called and e-mail addresses — and then have to go to a judge to get a warrant to actually look at the content under guidelines set by Congress — to prevent a day where, out of fear, we give government a license to look at anyone, any e-mail, any phone call, anywhere, anytime.

So I don’t believe that Edward Snowden, the leaker of all this secret material, is some heroic whistle-blower. No, I believe Snowden is someone who needed a whistle-blower. He needed someone to challenge him with the argument that we don’t live in a world any longer where our government can protect its citizens from real, not imagined, threats without using big data — where we still have an edge — under constant judicial review. It’s not ideal. But if one more 9/11-scale attack gets through, the cost to civil liberties will be so much greater.

A hat tip to Andrew Sullivan for linking on his blog to an essay by David Simon, the creator of HBO’s “The Wire.”  For me, it cuts right to the core of the issue.

“You would think that the government was listening in to the secrets of 200 million Americans from the reaction and the hyperbole being tossed about,” wrote Simon. “And you would think that rather than a legal court order, which is an inevitable consequence of legislation that we drafted and passed, something illegal had been discovered to the government’s shame. Nope. ... The only thing new here, from a legal standpoint, is the scale on which the F.B.I. and N.S.A. are apparently attempting to cull anti-terrorism leads from that data. ... I know it’s big and scary that the government wants a database of all phone calls. And it’s scary that they’re paying attention to the Internet. And it’s scary that your cellphones have GPS installed. ... The question is not should the resulting data exist. It does. ... The question is more fundamental: Is government accessing the data for the legitimate public safety needs of the society, or are they accessing it in ways that abuse individual liberties and violate personal privacy — and in a manner that is unsupervised. And to that, The Guardian and those who are wailing jeremiads about this pretend-discovery of U.S. big data collection are noticeably silent. We don’t know of any actual abuse.”

We do need to be constantly on guard for abuses. But the fact is, added Simon, that for at least the last two presidencies “this kind of data collection has been a baseline logic of an American anti-terrorism effort that is effectively asked to find the needles before they are planted into haystacks, to prevent even such modest, grass-rooted conspiracies as the Boston Marathon bombing before they occur.”

To be sure, secret programs, like the virtually unregulated drone attacks, can lead to real excesses that have to be checked. But here is what is also real, Simon concluded:

“Those planes really did hit those buildings. And that bomb did indeed blow up at the finish line of the Boston Marathon. And we really are in a continuing, low-intensity, high-risk conflict with a diffuse, committed and ideologically motivated enemy. And, for a moment, just imagine how much bloviating would be wafting across our political spectrum if, in the wake of an incident of domestic terrorism, an American president and his administration had failed to take full advantage of the existing telephonic data to do what is possible to find those needles in the haystacks.”

And, I’d add, not just bloviating. Imagine how many real restrictions to our beautiful open society we would tolerate if there were another attack on the scale of 9/11. Pardon me if I blow that whistle.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/12/opinion/friedman-blowing-a-whistle.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130612

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How to Safely Install Programs

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Installing software safely and with minimal impact

by Leo Notemboom

May 26, 2013

I’d wager that the number one cause of system stability issues, disk space loss, unexpected behavior, and even malware is the software that we actually invite onto our machine.

I’m not talking about opening the accidental attachment. That’s bad when it happens, but it’s not as prevalent as what I’m discussing.

No, I’m talking about the stuff that we actually ask to download - the stuff we seek out.

I’m talking about the software that we explicitly and intentionally install on our computers.

Installing software safely is all about taking a few steps to minimize the impact of what we’re about to do to our machines.

Avoid it if you can

My number one recommendation for keeping your machine clear of cruft* is to think carefully before installing anything.

[Ed. Note: * Cruft is commonly used to refer to the mess left inside of software as it is revised and updated. Cruft is also occasionally used to refer simply to poor quality hardware or shoddily produced software, which might be referred to as “crufty”.]

I’m not really talking about updates. Those are things that you almost always want. I’m talking about new programs, add-ons, plugins, and other things that so often vie for our attention and play on our curiosity.

I’m also not saying to never install anything. That kind of defeats the purpose of having a general purpose computer or computing device.

What I am asking you to do is think about whether you really need whatever it is you’re considering installling. Is it something you’ll actually use or is this idle curiosity? Do you understand why someone or something is even suggesting that you install some random tool that you’ve never heard of? If you’re ever not sure, just wait until you find out more. You can always install something later if you find that you have a need and use for whatever it is.

But remember: a program that’s not installed can do you no harm.

Do your testing elsewhere

Sometimes, we just don’t really know if the software we’re looking at is something worthwhile. In fact, we won’t know until we actually try it out – perhaps it’s a trial version or it’s just a package that we’re installing, because we really need to play with it a bit before we decide to invest further.

As you might imagine, this happens to me all the time.

One approach to testing software safely is to use what you might call a “sacrificial machine” – one that you don’t really care about or isn’t particularly important.

If you don’t have a second physical machine available for that, one solid approach is to use a virtual machine. This is nothing more than a software simulation of PC that runs within a window on your desktop. I actually have several virtual machines that I’ve set up here on my main desktop machine: one each for Windows XP, Vista, 7, and 8. When it’s running, it’s like having a completely separate PC except that it’s running on my single desktop.

Testing your software elsewhere allows you to avoid having any of the side effects of that software from appearing on the machine that you do care about – the one that you use every day. Once you determine that the software is indeed going to be useful, you can then install it “for real” on your main machine. That test or virtual machine can be left alone, reformatted, restored from a backup, or completely discarded depending on your own desires.

Of course, if you decide that the software is not what you had in mind, then you’ve come to that conclusion without putting your most important machine at risk.

Choose custom – always

As a way to be helpful and ensure that software is installed with the most appropriate set of optional components, many setup programs will offer you a default installation. Essentially, this is a set of decisions made for you that ideally install the application in a comfiguration that’s ready to go for the most people. It’s been a convenience and an easy way to get software installed quickly without needing to spend a lot of time understanding obscure details.

Unfortunately, in recent years, the default choice is very often the wrong choice.

As we’ve seen, many software vendors, particularly those whose products are free, are including in their default installations unrelated additions. More often than not, that comes in the form of an additional toolbar that will later appear in your web browser, but this “foistware“  (as it’s sometimes referred to) can actually run the range from the benign to the downright malicious.

A case where a (fairly reputable) software package actually tries to discourage the “Custom” installation path.

The only way to avoid it for many software installations is to select the Advanced or Custom option, if it’s offered during the setup process. That typically exposes all of the optional choices that you might have, including whether or not to accept the unrelated software that you probably really don’t need.

Un-check options you don’t need

Regardless of whether you needed to select Custom or Advanced to expose them, many software installers – particularly for larger packages – include an array of options that allow you to pick and choose what parts of the product you actually want to have installed on your machine.

Regardless of what type of package you’re installing, if there are options exposed, it’s worth having a look and seeing whether the additional components are indeed items that you need. If not, consider un-selecting them, so that they’re not installed. Not only does this reduce the amount of disk space that the install will take, but it typically also reduces the impact on system resources (like the registry) and reduces the number of components that may need to be updated in the future.

Opt out of unrelated options

As mentioned earlier, software packages will often include components that aren’t even a part of the software that you’re installing. Typically, this is a source of additional revenue for the software vendor, but in general, it simply adds confusion and unnecessary software to your machine.

Custom installation option revealing items actually unrelated to the software being installed.

The most common additional and unrelated items are things like toolbars or limited trials of more powerful paid versions of the free software that you’re installing. Unwanted changes aren’t always limited to software, but they will also often include unexpected changes to browser search engines and home pages.

Opt out. Just say no. Or, at least make it a decision on your part that you actually want whatever it is that’s being offered.

My guess is that saying no will keep your machine cleaner and your experience less frustrating.

Start when Windows starts isn’t always needed

Many programs install components that want to start running every time you reboot or log in to Windows.

In some cases, it’s the right thing to do. You want your anti-malware tools to always run without having to think about them, so having them start when Windows starts is a pretty clear choice.

At the other end of the spectrum are utilities that just don’t need to run right away, period, yet the installer (or rather, the developers who created the installer) feel that their program is just so important that it must run always and as soon as possible.

And of course, many programs are somewhere in the middle. If used often, it makes sense that they start automatically, but if used only occasionally, it might make more sense to free up the resources and speed up the boot time by only starting them when actually needed.

When you encounter a setup option relating to automatically starting, think twice. It’s very possible that you don’t need the program to do so, and as a result, you’ll end up with a slightly faster boot time, and more system resources like CPU and RAM available for the things that you really do want to run. (It’s sometimes worth reviewing the options or preferences for programs you already have installed that start automatically and turning it off for those for which it makes sense.)

Summary

I’ve presented a few recommendations when it comes to installing software to keep your machine running as clean and as fast as possible. 

Those are:

> Don’t install software unless you actually know you need it.

> When simply testing software for fit, try to do so on something other than your primary or most important machine.

> Always choose the “Custom” or “Advanced” installation path so as to see all available options.

> Uncheck options that you don’t want or need.

> Uncheck options that are actually unrelated to the software that you are installing.

> Think carefully about whether the software actually needs to start with Windows, if that’s an offered option.

http://askleo.com/installing-software-safely-and-with-minimal-impact/?awt_l=8FLnJ&awt_m=IhMSG_CwHZdfbL

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America – Obsessed with Celebrities

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Celebrating Inequality

by GEORGE PACKER

MAY 19, 2013

THE Roaring ’20s was the decade when modern celebrity was invented in America. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Great Gatsby” is full of magazine spreads of tennis players and socialites, popular song lyrics, movie stars, paparazzi, gangsters and sports scandals — machine-made by technology, advertising and public relations. Gatsby, a mysterious bootlegger who makes a meteoric ascent from Midwestern obscurity to the palatial splendor of West Egg, exemplifies one part of the celebrity code: it’s inherently illicit. Fitzgerald intuited that, with the old restraining deities of the 19th century dead and his generation’s faith in man shaken by World War I, celebrities were the new household gods.

What are celebrities, after all? They dominate the landscape, like giant monuments to aspiration, fulfillment and overreach. They are as intimate as they are grand, and they offer themselves for worship by ordinary people searching for a suitable object of devotion. But in times of widespread opportunity, the distance between gods and mortals closes, the monuments shrink closer to human size and the centrality of celebrities in the culture recedes. They loom larger in times like now, when inequality is soaring and trust in institutions — governments, corporations, schools, the press — is falling.

The Depression that ended Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age yielded to a new order that might be called the Roosevelt Republic. In the quarter-century after World War II, the country established collective structures, not individual monuments, that channeled the aspirations of ordinary people: state universities, progressive taxation, interstate highways, collective bargaining, health insurance for the elderly, credible news organizations.

One virtue of those hated things called bureaucracies is that they oblige everyone to follow a common set of rules, regardless of station or background; they are inherently equalizing. Books like William H. Whyte’s “Organization Man” and C. Wright Mills’s “White Collar” warned of the loss of individual identity, but those middle-class anxieties were possible only because of the great leveling. The “stars” continued to fascinate, especially with the arrival of TV, but they were not essential. Henry Fonda, Barbara Stanwyck, Bette Davis, Jimmy Stewart, Perry Como, Joe DiMaggio, Jack Paar, Doris Day and Dick Clark rose with Americans — not from them — and their successes and screw-ups were a sideshow, not the main event.

Our age is lousy with celebrities. They can be found in every sector of society, including ones that seem less than glamorous. We have celebrity bankers (Jamie Dimon), computer engineers (Sergey Brin), real estate developers/conspiracy theorists (Donald J. Trump), media executives (Arianna Huffington), journalists (Anderson Cooper), mayors (Cory A. Booker), economists (Jeffrey D. Sachs), biologists (J. Craig Venter) and chefs (Mario Batali).

There is a quality of self-invention to their rise: Mark Zuckerberg went from awkward geek to the subject of a Hollywood hit; Shawn Carter turned into Jay-Z; Martha Kostyra became Martha Stewart, and then Martha Stewart Living. The person evolves into a persona, then a brand, then an empire, with the business imperative of grow or die — a process of expansion and commodification that transgresses boundaries by substituting celebrity for institutions. Instead of robust public education, we have Mr. Zuckerberg’s “rescue” of Newark’s schools. Instead of a vibrant literary culture, we have Oprah’s book club. Instead of investments in public health, we have the Gates Foundation. Celebrities either buy institutions, or “disrupt” them.

After all, if you are the institution, you don’t need to play by its rules. Mr. Zuckerberg’s foundation myth begins with a disciplinary proceeding at Harvard, which leads him to drop out and found a company whose motto is “Move fast and break things.” Jay-Z’s history as a crack dealer isn’t just a hard-luck story — it’s celebrated by fans (and not least himself) as an early sign of hustle and smarts. Martha Stewart’s jail time for perjury merely proved that her will to win was indomitable. These new celebrities are all more or less start-up entrepreneurs, and they live by the hacker’s code: ask forgiveness, not permission.

The obsession with celebrities goes far beyond supermarket tabloids, gossip Web sites and reality TV. It obliterates old distinctions between high and low culture, serious and trivial endeavors, profit making and philanthropy, leading to the phenomenon of being famous for being famous. An activist singer (Bono) is given a lucrative role in Facebook’s initial public offering. A patrician politician (Al Gore) becomes a plutocratic media executive and tech investor. One of America’s richest men (Michael R. Bloomberg) rules its largest city.

This jet-setting, Davos-attending crowd constitutes its own superclass, who hang out at the same TED talks, big-idea conferences and fund-raising galas, appear on the same talk shows, invest in one another’s projects, wear one another’s brand apparel, champion one another’s causes, marry and cheat on one another. “The New Digital Age,” the new guide to the future by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen of Google, carries blurbs from such technology experts as Henry A. Kissinger and Tony Blair. The inevitable next step is for Kim Kardashian to sit on the board of a tech start-up, host a global-poverty-awareness event and write a book on behavioral neuroscience.

This new kind of celebrity is the ultimate costume ball, far more exclusive and decadent than even the most potent magnates of Hollywood’s studio era could have dreamed up. Their superficial diversity dangles before us the myth that in America, anything is possible — even as the American dream quietly dies, a victim of the calcification of a class system that is nearly hereditary.

As mindless diversions from a sluggish economy and chronic malaise, the new aristocrats play a useful role. But their advent suggests that, after decades of widening income gaps, unequal distributions of opportunity and reward, and corroding public institutions, we have gone back to Gatsby’s time — or something far more perverse. The celebrity monuments of our age have grown so huge that they dwarf the aspirations of ordinary people, who are asked to yield their dreams to the gods: to flash their favorite singer’s corporate logo at concerts, to pour open their lives (and data) on Facebook, to adopt Apple as a lifestyle. We know our stars aren’t inviting us to think we can be just like them. Their success is based on leaving the rest of us behind.

George Packer, a staff writer at The New Yorker, is the author, most recently, of “The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/20/opinion/inequality-and-the-modern-culture-of-celebrity.html?pagewanted=2&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130520&pagewanted=all

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Call Me Maybe - Carly Rae Jepsen (Chatroulette Version)

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A lip synch to Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe” – not your usual performance. Dual screens – watch the reactions on the left.

http://youtu.be/KAQhG59zqZc

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