Gusalmighty.com: A Leaded Perspective

Democracy in Action: Parents stymie military recruiters.

The New York Times is reporting that parents are counseling their kids not to enlist. It's about time that the American public is standing up to this war, considering that they let themselves get mislead during the buildup to it and then didn't have the balls to vote Bush out last fall. The US needs to get out of Iraq and a weakened military might be the only way to force them to get other countries to pick up the slack. Iraq obviously still needs help, but the US presence is more of an irritant than a healing factor.

Edit: I just had to add this quote.

"They don't realize that they have a role in helping make the all-volunteer force successful," said Col. Slotwinski, who retired in 2004. "If you don't, you're faced with the alternative, and the alternative is what they were opposed to the most, mandatory service."

I see, sir. Opposing my child's recruitment is going to end up getting everyone drafted, so I should shut up, eh? Sir! Yes! Sir!

John Gilmore fights to uncover secret law that requires you to provide papers to travel

John Gilmore has sued John Ashcroft to discern the constitutionality of secret laws requiring us to provide ID to travel. This is one of the most important suits to have developed in the wake of the terror attacks 3 years ago. I am a firm believer in the notion that the United States must not sacrifice those elements of its society and structure that define it as American lest the terrorists accomplish their goals. "Destruction of America" is not limited to the collapse of the nation or death of all citizens. When we no longer protect the freedoms and as citizens are not able to live the lives we used to cherish, we would be vanquished.

Security is essential, no doubt about it. But security is never absolute; it is always a tradeoff. I for one would not trade away the aspects of America that make it so wonderful for anything. Many of the measures introduced as security really don't accomplish all that much as far as make us safer and some of them step beyond the line in preserving life for Americans.

Take 5 minutes and click that link and read the first couple pages. It is short and easy to read and does an excellent job of explaining his position. This is a vital issue to the future of our country and I am behind Gilmore all the way.

Comments?

Forget Fahrenheit: Go see Fog of War

I admit I haven't seen Fahrenheit 9/11 yet but it is well known to be a anti-war, anti-Bush, documentary cum propaganda film that is engaging the nation in dialogue about the war in Iraq, the course of our nation, and most importantly the leader who chose that course for us. It is also well known that the film is specifically crafted to bolster the effort to unelect the President and I feel safe in saying, even though I haven't seen it yet, that the film is less about the war in general than it is about the problems with the president. To those ends, the film deserves to be seen.

But Fog of War is a film that accomplishes so much more and stands on much firmer ground. Fog of War: 11 lessons from the life of Robert S. McNamara is a documentary in the true sense of the word: it documents McNamara's recollections of his life and perspectives following his involvement as Secretary of Defense during the Kennedy and Johnson presidencies during the Vietnam War. McNamara has been demonized for his part in that saga but he surprised many by coming forward a few years back and "admitting" that Vietnam was a mistake.

Production on Fog of War began even before the attacks on 9/11 and the subsequent military excursions undertaken by the United States in the so-called War on Terror. It is not an anti-Bush or anti-American movie in any sense. But after watching it, it does have the effect of making the mistakes of the current U.S. administration stand out in glaring relief.

The movie is educational in exploring what was going on during the Vietnam War with McNamara and the presidents. I learned a lot about that chapter in our country. The main message of the film transcends Vietnam and seeks to redeem the mistakes made there by highlighting the educational opportunities provided by them. I've often mentioned that I don't have many regrets in life even though I've done my fair share of boneheaded maneuvers because some of the most important lessons I've learned and knowledge I've acquired came about as part of the mistake-making and recovery process.

Making mistakes gives us the experience of crossing the line and dealing with the pain of the aftermath; explicit knowledge of where those lines are, what the consequences of transgression are, and real world experience in charting a path to the edge and beyond (and thus knowledge about where not to go in the future) is priceless. Without such experiential reference, all we have are hypothetical arguments and thought experiments. These are useful and important, to be sure, but they are subject to subversion to our own self-interests; we tend to believe that the most likely outcomes are those that coincide with our desired course of action. Ultimately, it can prove worthless and obscures quality grounded decision making.

The lessons discussed by McNamara (the movie is primarily him, 85 years old at the time, talking, overlaid with film of the era) are so incredibly relevant that I was continually amazed at how elegantly they highlighted problems in the campaign in Iraq. It is tragic at the same time, since the whole purpose of McNamara's coming forward and of the film is to make those lesson explicit and help us to avoid making the same mistakes made during that debacle. Yet the points made by in the film were multiply violated in Iraq.

This is not a partisan film or partisan argument. I challenge anyone to dispute the lessons put forward by McNamara and the flim makers in general. Just try to argue that those are not accurate or suggest why they ought not be followed. I cannot imagine anyone would dissent with the message before 9/11 at all, which leads me to conclude that anyone who would do so now is more a victim of their desire to maintain their position in support of the President or in opposition to terrorists, as if avoiding the mistakes of the past would somehow make us more susceptible to destruction by terrorists.

See this movie. It is very very good. It is visually very beautiful as well, cinematically orchestrated with a haunting soundtrack that reminisces the Qatsi films in their unspoken commentary on the human condition. Highly recommended, as it is uncontroversial, relevant, and educational.

Feel free to comment on this post.

Ride through a space shuttle crash

A rather detailed yet thoroughly readable description of the last moments of the Columbia has been posted. An excellent read. It is somber and absorbing and really puts you in the astronauts' position as their ship disintegrates beneath them. It had almost as much an impact on me, perhaps more even, than watching them fall to Earth.

Share your commiseration here.

Amorphous Hydra Enemy

I'm reading "In Athena's Camp: Preparing for conflict in the information age" these days and was immediately struck by their analysis. It's an older book, published in 1997 but stemming from RAND papers from the previous five years or so. (I actually have 3 or 4 tomes in this vein and am reading them in chronological order.) It's very prescient though and essentially predicts a future conflict like we are currently waged in with Al Qaida.

One of the big themes is that of networks vs hierarchies. Immediately we see the relation to Al Qaida and the US power command structures. The big question (or one of, at least) that needs to be asked (because the current trend is to assume an answer that is far from assured) is can the US win the fight? We all want to defeat terrorism, but we all want to be able to fly like Superman too. I absolutely believe that we can build a world where the solutions offered by terrorism are not competitive with solutions offered by other courses of actions, but I'm not convinced that can come about by direct violent conflict. I'm actually kind of afraid that direct violent conflict will actually serve nothing other than to ensure that the conflict endures ad infinitum, like a stock market bubble that runs out of control.

The internet came about because of AM radio. Wait, back up. In the 1950s, U.S. military commanders began to worry about the susceptibility of hierarchical communication structures to decapitation. They went to the engineers and they came up with the AM radio system that used a dispersed noded system to ensure that no matter who or what or where got hit, there would be a way to get communications from point A to point B. I'm paraphrasing this history based on what I remember from George Dyson's history of computing and evolution of intelligence "Darwin Among the Machines" and my memory isn't so great because I have sleep apnea, so go read his book for accurate details. But anyway, from this, the ARPAnet evolved and we all know (or should know) the rest.

The Internet is the network that everyone knows the best. You may not know how incredibly resistant the network is to attack though. A few months ago (maybe over a year now), there was a very serious attack aimed at one of the 6 super-nodes on the internet. If I remember correctly, this attack pretty much took this node offline. The cool thing is that no one noticed, at least no regular internet users. Of course the technicians in charge of the node noticed; that's how the story got out. But the internet didn't suffer noticably at all. Such is the power of a network.

No matter how powerful the force that one can focus on a network node, its just too dispersed to cut out completely. Military assault on terrorists networks will not eradicate the threat of terrorism. Direct violent assault may have its place in the total arsenal we bring to bear on the terrorism problem (which is essentially a criminal problem at root), but it just doesn't have the power to do the whole thing.

So what do we do? We can use the Internet as an example here as well. The direct frontal assault on an Internet node didn't work, but every so often we do see large portions of the net brought down by virus attacks. To translate this kind of thing into the terrorism network, think of virus as a mentality to go on strike. If this mentality takes root in a group of people and spreads, everyone walks off the job and the company grinds to a halt. Same thing with terrorism. If we can develop a different way of thinking that spreads throughout the populations of terrorists and would-be terrorists, they can and will make choices for action that is non-terrorist.

So how do we do that? First we need to find out why people are becoming terrorists, or put a better way, why people are becoming the types of criminals who's primary aim is to do as much damage to civilian targets of the enemy as possible. We shouldn't accede to terrorists demands but we most definitely should seek to remedy any fundamental problems that contribute to people choosing to become murderous and suicidal sociopaths.

Basically we have to build a world that is good enough to make would-be terrorists happy. Because it seems fairly clear to me that the reason people choose to become terrorist criminals is because that offers them a better life (or at least a better outlet) than the lives they were living before.

Until we see a GREATER effort put into this type of collective endeavor, I don't expect to see any major improvements or advances in the war against terror. And if the reliance on military tactics ends up contributing to the expansion or creation of terrorist-producing environments, we are actually making things worse.

Short sighted on shortness treatment?

Last July, the USFDA approved pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly's application to administer recombinant Human Growth Hormone (rHGH) to healthy children who happen to be in the bottom 1% of their age group for height. (Okay, this is a bad pun, but unavoidable. Can't really describe them to be in the top 1%, can I?) I find this to be a horribly disturbing action that speaks volumes to the deficiencies in our society.

Maybe I'm not being fair and I just don't realize how hard it is being short. This isn't entirely true, as I was kind of short in middle school due to my unfortunate combination of being younger than everyone else in class as well as hitting puberty at a later age than average. But even my shortness at that time wasn't anything compared to the 1% of kids who want this stuff. According to the Washington Post, some of the kids are smaller than kindergarteners when they are in second grade and suffer during gym class because they are so small. These are people who are predicted to grow up to be less than 5' tall.

rHGH has been given to people suffering from natural deficiencies in their ability to produce the hormone, but the new ruling clears the path for kids who have no abnormalities or disfunction to receive treatments. These treatments can cost up to $40,000 a year and can require 6 injections a week, just to gain up to 4 inches in final height. Improvements are not guaranteed and some people don't respond at all.

This whole issue is disappointing. I know its kind of naive to expect children not to pick on short kids, but just because kids seem naturally inclined to be jerks doesn't mean we should abandon efforts to educate them. The hypocrisy of it reeks: can't have genetic manipulation of our DNA but we can subject children to these kinds of chemical interventions without running afoul of God? C'mon!

The health risks aren't clear either. In the 1950s, women who received hormone therapy to stunt their growth got messed up reproductive systems as a bonus. Of course there is no reason to assume that rHGH is going to cause problems, but there is no reason to assume that it won't either. It's safety has been established in problematic patients so far, but we don't what effect it could have on an otherwise perfectly functioning system. Overloading a body with more HGH than it makes could drive the natural mechanisms to shut down, for instance, forcing the kids to continue the treatments much longer than otherwise would have been necessary. HGH is needed all through life, just in lower doses. It really isn't a growth hormone as much as a metabolizing hormone, and thus is needed all through life.

Our nation's fixation with physical attributes and our willingness to invest massive sums of resources in the pursuit of some media-inspired ideal form is disheartening. Of course people are welcome to do whatever they want in life, to pursue a life of crass consumerism and superficial materialism till the cows come home. But shouldn't we ask for more? Shouldn't we strive to become a society more at ease with who and what we are inherent of our own rather than one that seeks to destroy (a process that consumption relies upon)?

Elderly Welfare

I read yesterday that the average annual bill for prescription medicine among the retired elderly is about $3,100, and some people have annual bills of over $13,000 for medicines necessary to keep them alive. For anyone other than the filthy rich this is a staggering amount of money, all the more so when you consider that old people don't have earned incomes. I can sympathize with their call for federal prescription drug benefits to help ease this burden.

But although I sympathize, I'm not sure I support such a call. I don't know if I like the idea of using tax dollars to buy drugs for old people, especially when we don't use tax dollars to provide basic health benefits to the general non-elderly population and the law prevents us from buying particular recreational drugs as we may desire, even when these drugs are just plants and fungus. I'm not trying to turn a cold shoulder to old people here, but it just doesn't seem to be appropriate.

I like old people. I think they are pretty cool and I wish the nation as whole took greater pride in and care of our older generations. Their experiences over the last century are unique in the history of the universe and it is a shame to not capitalize on their wisdom and experiences more. Old people are a national treasure, a resource to be cherished and honored.

But when your time comes, your time comes. The human body isn't supposed to last for a 100 years, especially considering the stress we put it through in the environments we live in. Bodies wear out, plain and simple. I don't think it is the best idea to use our collective financial resources paying for kidney dialysis and hypertension pills.

This is a difficult opinion to hold though becuase it feels so heartless. I think that part of it rests with our collective fear of death and shame associated with the passing of a life. Death is a nasty thing, hidden away and treated as an enemy that we have to combat with the aim of conquering. This leads us to despise death instead of embracing it as the final chapter of the incredible rollercoaster ride of life. Death is inevitable, and if we recognize this and life our lives with an eye to it, we may instill a new sense of purpose and accomlishment, not to mention better health habits.

In a nation of overweight, diabetic, underexercised, smoking couch potatoes, the idea that we should spend our tax money on financing life past its due date strikes me as wrong, as a way of running away from facing up to moral responsibility and a perpetuation of the nasty habit of focusing on treating the systems instead of teh causes of a problem.

I'm not suggesting that we shouldn't offer health benefits or insurance coverage to people. I DO support that idea. I'd even support providing chemical crutches to people below the average life span. But once you beat the odds and pass the average age, no more subsidies and welfare. Life with dignity and allow the nation to collective invest in the next generation, providing benefits for children and those still in the prime earning and caregiving years.

But if my opinion on this would be adopted by a majority, it would have to be accompanied with a sense of respect and gratitude to the elderly, for we are choosing to force them to continue to provide for themselvse long after they have given of themselves to others. It's a tough position to take, and I am not really excited to hold this opinion, but I can't help it.

Then again, maybe shunting some of the billions (that is thousands of millions) of dollars we spend on building weapons would solve the problem. I'd be happiest if this were to happen, but the realist in me knows that the (current, at least) powers that be would never concede to the value of that.

Stuffing the electronic ballot box?

I used to think that electronic voting was a needed killer app for modern democracy. I felt it would empower the masses and bring democracy back into the people's hands, away from the representative system we have here. My idealism yet again fell victim to the reality of computer systems, as the security mandates involved in massive online voting fall short in so many ways.

But now it turns out that the dangers from the outside are being usurped by the dangers from the inside. Get this: the people who are making the electronic voting machines are ardent Republican supports and the head of Diebold has been quoted as saying that he is commited to delivering electoral votes to the incumbent President next year.

Not only that, but the machines themselves are black boxes. We, the public, don't have any access to how they work and what they do when votes are tallied, processed, and sent. Apparenlty, the machines are also being used to count the votes as they come in, a legal no-no. Votes are only countable after voting has closed (but polling of voters after they've cast their ballot is okay).

This is a bad thing brewing here. We've got courts upholding the use of hokey punch-card machines in California, Supreme Courts denying recounts of ballots to determine Presidents, and now big money contributors to particular parties are put in charge of voting mechanisms with no public oversight? C'mon people!

More pessimism...

What kind of world do we want to live? Are we even having a dialogue dealing with this issue? I find so frustrating that we, as a species, are so incredible complex and capable in so many absolutely stunning ways, yet we still act like imbecilic trolls most of the time. In spite of all of our advances, have we progressed? Technologically, progress is undeniable. Politically, we've transformed the nature of human society many times over. But do these circumstances warrant the designation of progress?

Technological progress is mostly a matter of accident. We are a curious animal and started poking around and asking some good questions at a certain point and slowly developed a body of knowledge allowing us to manipulate the world in incredible ways. But so what? What have we done with it? Longer survival rates for citizens in developed nations? Stood on the moon? Figured out faster way to communicate over longer distances? What else? Technological advances primarily come in two forms: military or economic. Neither of these are really good candidates for gauging progress. One is designed to kill and destroy and the other is based on selfish material cultivation. Not really species advancement. Just doing the same old shit with fancier methods and bigger explosions.

Politically its not really any better. As our technology developed, more people were living longer so we were forced into developing better methods of dealing with them. But its always been about lowest common denominators. What is the minimum that those in power have to do to stay in power? Look at a group and answer that question and you'll be able to predict what their society and government looks like pretty accurately. It may appear to have gotten better over the last 100 years, but it hasn't. A few societies have better educated masses so the minimum needed to keep them satiated has risen a few notches, so the advancements don't really reflect an actual change in thought and behavior, just a tweak on the old system.

I don't think this is due to an inescapable aspect of human nature though. Human nature isn't really all that behavior specific in the strictest sense. We have a lot of default modes of perceiving, organizing behavior, and acting on the world, but this can usually be updated and overridden by symbolic thought. We see it all the time in particular cultural expressions, education, and philosophy.

Where am I going with this? I dunno, to be honest, but it was on my mind and I want to keep some activity on here. Sorry for the incomplete thought. Hopefully more on this sooner than later.

Implementation of FCC regs postponed!

The changes in FCC regulations that relaxed limitations on concentration of media ownership were supposed to have gone into effect last week but were blocked, as a whole, by a judge who ordered a suspension of the implementation until after the resolution of a suit filed by a group of radio stations against the FCC.

From the CNET article:

The rules that were blocked by the court include one that would permit the same company to own newspapers and broadcast stations in the same city and another that would allow a company to own as many as three television stations and eight radio stations in the same market.

The article doesn't really explain exactly what the radio stations were suing over, but apparently their suit is based on a derelection of duty charge of sorts against the FCC. The view that the changes weren't appropriate seems to be popular in Washington, at least when one considers that both the House and the Senate have introduced legislation aimed at undoing some of the rule changes.

I just don't accept the argument that the internet is the great equalizer of media access. For one, the internet is only accessible to those people who have computers, internet access, and are sitting at the computer in order to read news on a computer screen. Radio is media in transit, and the TV is community passive reception. A newspaper is portable and easy to read. Combined, I find it hard to believe that they don't constitute a majority of media exposure for a majority of people. Allowing a single company to control nearly half of a market, much less a monopoly of all three outlets in a city, just isn't healthy. It isn't inherently dangerous, but it is just too risky. One's opinion of the value of Fox News aside, the impact of the ownership on the editorial slant of the network is indisputable. Do we want a system that permits Murdoch (or even a liberal clone) to control all the news a group of people get?

Yay for democracy!

Regulations intended to restrict political statements drive Sci-Fi channel to programming that makes policital statement

ArsTechnica has an interesting news tidbit observing some of the fallout from the California recall debacle. FCC rules require stations to give equal face time to candidates (excluding paid commercials, obviously) to prevent networks from plugging preferred candidates by featuring them on programming. Because of this, the Sci-Fi network has cancelled a scheduled run of Schwarzenegger movies to avoid being legally obligated to give equal air time to the other 35 candidates.

The best part, though, is that the are substituting a run of movies featuring California getting obliterated and destroyed. I love it when a sense of humor shows up in circumstances like these. The world needs a better sense of humor all the way around. (I'm not really capable of delivering it, but Suckful does a fair job most days.

The source of our woes

I wonder if hypocrisy hasn't become so pervasive in American political and popular culture that we've forgotten not only what it means, but the impacts that it can have on others. We've come to accept hypocrisy as a natural state, and while we don't condone it per se, it isn't a shortcoming we hold people accountable for. We learn to live with it, making do and giving wiggle room as needed. This broad acceptance eventually facilitates incorporating skills for dealing with hypocrisy (both as creators and observers) into daily life.

This hypocrisy is rotting our culture from the inside. When we accept hypcocrisy in politics, we do condone it, because whatever we don't restrict is permissible. This encourages it, for it becomes canonical. More dangerous, though, is that hypocrisy in politics entails a lack of accountability. When we encourage behaviors that promote a seperation between actions and repercussions, let not a person be surprised when undesirable actions come to dominate. Politics becomes free from accountability and free from its responsibility to enact the people's will. The risk's of bringing bull to a china shop are well known.

But it doesn't stop there. Once a political body realizes how enjoyable it is to operate free from accountability to the opinions of its constituents, the intents of its founders, and even its own stated propositions, it is unlikely that it will easily distinguish between domestic and international areas of activity. Double speak and admonitions to "do as I say, not as I do" are accepted at home, the thinking goes, so why not abroad? Not only does this fail to recognize that domestic audiences have a voting connection to the government, but makes the fatal Is-Ought error: We are number one on the big dog pile, which means it is natural, intended, inherent, (even preordained!).

So now we are looking at a government body with no connection to the beliefs or opinions of its constituents or its neighbors. It doesn't even feel an obligation to remain true to its own stated goals, purposes, precepts, and notions. While it may still care enough about the electoral opinion to refrain from directly ignoring it, it doesn't actually listen to what is being said and take such opinions into consideration in the process of fulfilling its constitutional mandate of providing governance for, of, and by the people. Nay, it seeks to use the tools available to coerce opinions into line. Say it loud enough and long enough and everyone will eventually believe you. Now we have a government for the government, made up primarily of a small slice of the populace with access to the ears and wallets of the powerful, all provided by the discretionary budgets of massive corporations.

Why does the world hate us, we wailed following the first foreign civilian attacks on American soil. (Remember that we were attacked by an American, a soldier no less (dare to question his patriotism?), who was digusted with the un-American behavior of the government. Too bad his message was so easy to ignore because he killed so many children.) The answer to this question is easy, and I'm sure obvious to anyone who has read this far:

Hypocrisy

America is patholologically hypocritical. I say pathological because it has reached epidemic proportions and become so entrenched that it defines us, permeates ever nook and cranny of our thinking, an infection that precludes us from seeing it. Hidden right in front of us, we are incapable of seeing it, but more importantly, of seeing what it is doing to us.

Everyone is hypocritical to a degree. I know I am. It is difficult to live life according to our beliefs and without failing to uphold things we said. But the difference is that most people are aware of their hypocrisy (then again, maybe not). But even if they aren't, a hypocrite whose trangressions include smoking and drinking while telling their kids not to doesn't really do much but hurt the parent and perhaps condemn the kids to a life like theirs. But for the most part, the majority of people's actions are not hypocritical. We live good lives and generally can relied upon as role models.

Not the United States. I realized only recently that the country that I love and uphold as the greatest country in the world doesn't really exist outside of my beliefs. The ideas and morals that America was founded on are excellent, without reproach, and I'm proud to be alive to witness and experience life under the best political system primates have ever developed.

But the America that I believe doesn't exist in the real world. Our government and citizens act extremely un-American msot of the time. That is one of the great things about what American stands for though: you can do whatever you want, believe whatever you want, think whatever you want, hold whatever opinions you want, and we will still be here for you. So to point out that many Americans are not tolerant, free-speech loving people doesn't really matter as far as the constitutions (small c) of America goes.

But I will question their patriotism. Patriotism, in my mind, is more than just love for the country, and it sure as hell is NOT just support for the government. Patriotism is a commitment to the standards of what our country stands for, a commitment to condemn hypocrisy and actions that pervert these standards, and a willingness to criticize (and be criticized) that which you hold most dear. Patriotism is political toughlove, perhaps.

I intended to write about how American hypocrisy in Iraq is dooming our effort there, but I've run out of time and probably gone on too long to hold the attention of the 3 people who read this site. I'll try to get to that soon. It's a great example of how America's inability to see its own hypocrisy practically ensures our continued unpopularity and pattern of foreign policy failure.

Depleted Uranium alternative close at hand?

A report that the government is looking into a non-radioactive "liquid metal" tungsten alloy to replace depleted uranium for military ordinance. DU is an ultra-heavy metal extremely efficient at penetrating armor, hence its popularity. Although the government insists it is not a health hazard, this is not entirely assured. Researchers claim that vaporized DU and polluted soil can cause cancer and other diseases. A non-radioactive alternative would be nice, but I still think it would be best if we just stopped manufacturing and using these weapons at all. Is there really a need? Really?

None of us can fly on British Airways if we label ourselves for what we are

Holy Bajoly, this is so relevant. John Gilmore has sued the government over their new rules created under the guise of security from terrorism that don't really provide any security but do end up making America a very un-American place to live. (Go read the Free to Travel FAQ for more). He refuses to fly within the United States because he rejects the notion that we have to provide identification to the system. At first I felt this stance was a bit extreme, perhaps too extreme to even be granted a hearing by Joe Public, but this guy has his head on straight.

He recently tried to fly to England for a vacation (he doesn't object to international passports, presumably because they are part of a non-American system of rules. ) He was wearing a "Suspected Terrorist" button on his lapel, but once airborne, a stewardess noticed it and notified the captian. When he refused to take it off (as well he should have, as it is a political statement pointing out that we are all considered terrorists), the captain turned the plane around, took him back to the US, and kicked him off the plane.

He then had a very interesting conversation with a British Airways employee about flying on their airline and his reasons for wearing the button. I won't go into everything here, but I really encourage you (actually I'd demand it, but you won't listen to me) to go read it. It isn't a long story, but it is really really important.

In his experience, we can see how society has changed in the worst ways following 9/11 and the USGov't's response to it. As painful as it is to realize these changes and know that they didn't have to happen, it is therein we find the silver lining and motivation to keep at this, namely, these changes can be undone. We must engage people though. One of the reasons media consolidation is so dangerous is that people don't talk abotu stuff anymore, at least not this kind of thing. We watch the pundits talk about it instead, never realizing that they aren't just having proxy conversations and discussions for us, but are imparting THEIR opinions on us while making us feel like we were partners in the argument. We need to, as a nation and population, talk about these things with each other. Maybe we need homework assignments...

House of Representatives smacks down FCC consolidation

This happened over a week ago, but the US House of Representatives (I love that name, if only the Senate felt the same way) has passed a bill that essentially overrides the recent changes proposed by the FCC that would allow media companies to control up to 45% of a single TV market. There is a CNET story here.

From what I gather, this new bill doesn't address the relaxation of limits on cross-ownership which will allow a single media organization to control multiple media outlets such as TV, radio, and newspaper. I also seem to remember reading somewhere else that this was actually a rider on a larger bill, so the 400-12 vote count may not be reliable with regard to the opinions of the HoR voters. Furthermore, this bill needs to pass Senate and Oval Office muster and there are legitimate voices (legitimate in the eye's of the President, that is) advising him to veto it. We'll see what happens.

People really need to be more aware of how their attitudes and opinions are influenced by the media. The 4 people who read this blog are probably pretty well aware and the changes to the media landscape that big business is trying to bring about won't affect us that much. But geeks are a small, small percentage of the nation (at least small % of TV viewers, notice how the geek-loved shows like Futurama and Farscape didn't last) and we need to be worried about the greater percentages who just live their lives in consumer ignorance, blind to the subtle pressures that the media puts on them. Remember that 50% of the US population (assuming we can trust polls, something I'm beginning to question) thought that Iraq was involved in 9/11. Pure media manipulation, that, and it woulkdn't have happened if we had a free press in our country.

Murder by another name is what, exactly?

The NYTimes recently ran an article looking at the current administration's unabashed policy of assassination as a tool of diplomacy. Personally I think it is a bad policy, and not just because I'm a tree-hugging hippy. It just isn't becoming of a nation of our stature and it sets a bad standard. 'Do as I say, not as I do' just doesn't fly as foreign policy.

The article pointed out that "hunting people down, however it plays in films, excuses murder by calling it something else." This is a good point: it's chickenshit to spin murder by construing it as anything but. Assassination needs to be condemned wholesale, even if the your target tried to have your dad assassinated. Making assassination acceptable delegitimizes the assassin's role as enforcer as well. If someone really is so bad as to deserve to be killed, catch them, try them publicly, and then kill them. But to appoint oneself as judge, jury, and executioner, especially with regard to a head of state (and of the country you just invaded, to boot) seems to be asking for more trouble than it can possibly be worth.

But if assassination isn't acceptable because it whitewashes murder, how can we accept capital punishment? It is murder in every sense of the word. How can we believe that killing people who kill people to show that killing people is wrong is an adequate and efficient way of preventing future murders? Maybe if we had public executions their deterrent value would be increased.

If we didn't have the death penalty, the Taliban would have turned Bin Laden over to us after 9/11. They were willing to give him to the EU (because they ban capital punishment) but the US refused that offer. Justice or revenge there? That is telling, and indicative of the US way of dealing with the world.

It is such a shame that we squander the power and potential we have.

Presidential campaigning takes too frickin' long

Here it is, July 2003, and the next US presidential election is a full 16 months (almost 500 days) away, and we've already seen campaigning ramping up. Of course I understand that a national campaign of this magnitude takes serious foresight and planning and the insane amounts of money needed to run for the office of POTUS can't be raised overnight. So I expect candidates to begin wooing donors and establishing an awareness of their intents, but there is so much time between now and then that its almost pointless to begin contemplating what is actually going to happen. Howard Dean seems to be coming on strong as a Democratic contender (I might vote for him, the only current Democratic hopeful that I'd even consider), but can anyone maintain a credible lead when dealing with fickle American attitudes? Americans in general are so faddish that they'll buy TheNextBestThing™ just because it is new. Getting a lead early on in an election campaign runs the risk of losing novelty and freshness and permitting an upstart to steal your thunder.

Japanese politics are pathetically corrupt and ineffective, a veneer of democracy at best. In no way whatsoever do I endorse Japanese style of governance. That being said, the one good thing that I've seen is that they have a very brief campaign period, on the order of weeks. Prior to this time its illegal to campaign on the street. It's a good thing, this law, because a lot of Japanese campaigning is conducted by speaker cars that drive around and spout off slogans basically pleading for votes. The candidates themselves get on the horn and talk about stuff, sometimes parking a van on a street corner to clamber up on top and scream into a microphone. It's horridly annoying, these speaker cars. Regulations restrict the times when its permissible to do this from 8 (or was it 9?) AM to sometime in the evening. I don't really notice when they stop, but son-of-a-bitch I notice when they start up, especially when they jump the gun by 10 minutes. These cars are LOUD and they drive right by my window. Good thing I don't have a shotgun....

Anyway, the point is that there is a very brief period of intense campaigning. I wish it was like that in the US as well. Personally organized rallies and stuff like that are fine for as long as one wants to put in the effort, but television campaigning should be restricted to 4 or 6 weeks prior to an election. This focuses everyone's attention as well as candidate's efforts. People get tired of the long campaigns, contributing to voter apathy I think. If its focused in a whirl-wind month of activity, people may be more likely to pay attention and get out the vote as a result.

While I'm talking about TV ads, I'd like to mention that I also think that negative advertisements should be taxed too. Candidates can run whatever kind of ads they want, but if they are going to waste valuable airtime talking trash instead of selling themselves (or are they only telling me that they aren't as bad as their competitor?!?), they should have to pay extra for it. That extra then should be funneled into a fund for helping smaller parties pay for airtime to get a plurality of voices involved.

I have lots of other ideas about how to go about strengthening the potential for democracy in the US (one idea: in case of a statistical tie in voting like we saw in Florida last time, why not just defer to the national popular vote?), but I don't want to go into them now. Consider yourself warned though.

At least they tried...

As probably everyone knows by now, these twins, conjoined at the head for 29 years, died yesterday when the surgical attempt to separate them failed. They died from massive hemorrhaging within 2 hours of each other.

Some claim that the surgery was irresponsible. The ladies did have some trouble finding doctors willing to attempt the surgery, but they had a chance. I couldn't imagine what it would be like to live like that and not at least try. Sure, there are some conjoined twins who like it, or at least don't have a desire to separate, but if you did want to be apart....

Who are we to suggest that it was a bad decision. The women knew what they were risking, and they took it willingly. I don't think the doctors should be criticized or condemned for trying. We have amazing technology at our disposal, and what is it for? There are bound to be failures and attempts to reach a goal that fall short, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't make the attempts.

If these had been children whose parents forced the surgery on them or if a rogue doctor had discovered them and pushed for the surgery, things would be different. But these women didn't want to live together any longer. It is sad that they achieved that by dying, but I applaud their courage and the courage of the doctors. Perhaps next time will be a success.

On a slightly different note, I wonder what it would be like to have fundamental differences of opinion with regard to lifestyle when you are conjoined. Reading and listening media are fairly easy to distinguish, but you'd have to agree on TV at least. You have to compromise on where to go for recreation as well.

But what about drinking? They share a blood supply, so if one gets drunk or stoned, the other surely feels it. And what if only one wants to be separated? What then? We'll have to bring this up next time we get together for beers.

And finally, here is a thread over at AsylumNation about an African baby born with 4 legs, 3 hands, extra kidneys and other stuff. She's predicted to live normally once they excise everything. There is a picture too.

How to recoup losses that never occured

This poor guy got hit with a $180,000,000.00 fine for trying to build a device that would intercept and decrypt digital satellite television broadcasts. He didn't succeed, but the industry predicted they would have lost loads of money had he done so, and the courts then punished him according to that formula. I'll repeat that: no theft occured, a working device was never built, yet this guy has to pay for the potential losses according to a formula set by industry itself.

The whole idea of losses to electronic theft is questionable. If someone steals a book or a car from a dealer, that is an unquestionable loss. But theft of electronic media isn't lossy theft, its just unauthorized duplication or access. So now losses are defined as income they didn't receieve for the disbursement of their product. In the case of the car or book theft, the product is now missing and thus the seller loses the chance to sell it. But with eletronic theft, the original is still there. If someone pirates a satellite feed, it doesn't impinge on the service to everyone else. It costs the company the same amount of money to broadcast the signal regardless of how many subscribers or pirates are tuning in.

The article linked above mentions that the industry currently loses $4,000,000,000 a year to the 3,000,000 or so people who use illegal devices to unscramble subscription satellite signals. This calculation is questionable from the start if you try to break it down: for 3 million people to provide 4 billlion in income, each person would have to subscribe to $1000 in services a year. I don't know anyone who pays that much. Even if I were to get the complete satellite package offered by SkyPerfect! here in Japan, its only about $65/ month, or just under $800/ year.

The broadcasters must be calculating these "losses" by summing up the subscription cost of each channel independently instead of calculating prices as if sold in a discounted package set. That's just weak.

But even before we get to this point, we need to consider if these are actually losses. It's only a loss if the people stealing the broadcast would pay for it under normal circumstances but are stealing it. If the people stealing the feed wouldn't subscribe to the service if there was no theft-enabling devices available, the streams they steal shouldn't be considered losses. I'm not suggesting that the industry just accept this or that people who can't afford satellite should be condoned for stealing it, but at the same time, you can't honestly say that the industry would be $4,000,000,000 richer if the hotboxes hadn't been built.

This is kind of what is so stupid about the RIAA's current MO of charging downloaders $350,000 per downloaded song, seeking to punish thieves and copyright violations. Only thing is that most of the stuff downloaded by people wouldn't have been bought anyway, so how can it be losses?

Movie Studios finally "get it." Will the RIAA ever?

Here is a great article exploring how movie studios have come to recognize the power and utility of fan websites. In the early days of the internet, fan sites were typically smacked down with cease and desist letters (which seems to me to be the mark of doing something right) but now many fan sites are getting tacit and explicit support from directors and movie producers.

This is significant. Denizens of the the internet have long known that the free flow of information is a good thing, even when it may at first glance appear to be detrimental to a product or issue that relies on profit taking. The RIAA's brain-dead approach to dealing with online music sharing indicates what happens when a body gets trapped in the latter manner of thinking. And since CD sales are down, they have a data set they can flout to support their argument.

What is missing from this equation is a recognition that during Napster's heyday, before they got sued, music sales were going up and up annually. Napster was big, and so was sales. Then the music industry started bullying people around and sales tanked. No, I'm not saying that is the sole reason, but I'm fairly confident it was a significant factor. Add in such facts as a downturn in the US economy, the growing popularity of DVDs, the resistance of music producers to reduce prices, the smaller number of titles released by music studios, and an uninspiring line-up of new artists built on the same mold used in the last decade, and the contribution of freely available music files begins to look less malignant. Undoubtedly there are theives who steal music just for the sake of it, but most online music trading isn't done in the spirit of theft or something for nothing. It seems to me that it was more indicative of a public that loves music. Too bad the RIAA didn't see it that way.

Etree is a good example of what happens when musicians embrace free music. Thousands of bands allow fans to tape their live performances and trade them freely (they stipulate no commercial use). This enamors fans to the bands and helps to generate interest. I have abotu 500 live concerts, maybe 50 different artists. Of that list, I had only heard of and listened to maybe 7 or 8 of the artists; etree exposed to me to so much more great stuff. Now I listen to these bands, buy their gear and albums, go to their shows. Free exposure works.

Another good example of how freely available information doesn't have to hurt the economics of distribution. The Matrix: Reloaded was available for download via BitTorrent prior to its release, and lots and lots of people downloaded it. But it still did very very well at the box office, didn't it?

As unintuitive as it seems, the more open we can keep the internet and society, the more robust and healthy it will be.

And that's a good thing.

The public domain may be freed!

It's so wonderful when I get to write something positive here. A couple of congressmen have agree to sponsor the Public Domain Enhancement Act, also dubbed the the Eric Eldred Act after the guy who got the whole issue of the problem of copyright into the courts and thus public consciousness. Essentially what this bill does is rectify the current problem with our atrocious copyright laws. As it stands, copyright lasts for 70 past the death of the author and for 90 years in the case of corporate copyright holders. The reason this lengthy copyright was established was to preserve the monopoly on information that copyright offers and allows copyright holders to financially capitalize on their works.

The problem is that only a tiny percent of copyrighted works are financially viable. This means that literally hundred's of thousands of copyrighted materials are locked away from the public. This is undesirable because it squanders the fruits of our collective intellectual labors. It's especially bothersome with regard to early film and audio recordings that languish on decaying media and will be unrecoverable by the time the copyright on them expires (assuming no more extensions).

This argument for relinquishing ideas and information to the public domain isn't about piracy or trying to profit from other people's work. It strikes to the fundamental core of what it means to be a cultural species: our success, in biological and technological terms, can be solely attributed to our capacity for building on the ideas, work, and overall progress of our predecessors, like a ratchet. When ideas are locked away, there are no shoulders of giants to stand upon.

The Public Domain Enhancement Act fixes this problem by setting copyright to 50 years for all works. After that, those that want to maintain their copyright have to pay a very small tax, like $1 a year. This allows even the littlest person to keep their own copyright if they wish. If this copyright extension fee isn't paid for three years in a row, the copyrighted work then passes into the public domain for perpetuity.

I think this is perfect. Those big dogs who want to keep their copyright can, but the majority of work, for much of which the actual copyright holder is unknown, can pass into the public domain to serve as a springboard for further innovation or just plain exposure.

Of course there are other copyright alternatives for those who are aware of the benefits of free flowing information, as intuitive as it seems sometimes. The content of this site, for example, is copyrighted under the terms of a Creative Commons license and is intended to provide my thoughts, ideas, and knowledge for you to build on. All I ask is that you give me credit for the things I say (as I try to give credit to those who say the things I talk about) and that you don't use my stuff to profit from (as if you could). By making it legal for others to use my copyrighted material, I not only enhance my exposure to others but provide a point of progress for others to build on. We can only improve as a result.

I just hope this bill passes. I can't see any reason why it wouldn't, but who knows what kind of FUD Congress will buy into.

God bless the Librarian

I suspect I'm probably not alone in harboring a less-than-flattering image of librarians. Not that I think they are evil or mean, but its just that librarians are typically old women who like to bust kids' chops for talking or having candy in the library. I've never really considered them as defenders of our nation, but I'm beginning to realize that is exactly what many of them are.

Libraries are neat. One of my proudest possessions (beyond my nearly complete collection of Bionicle) is my personal library. I have a lot of good books and music that offer serious enrichment to a person, and real libraries are uh, way better, for lack of an appropriate descriptor.

The sad thing is that the wonder that is a library is under attack by, yup, you guessed it, the United States government and a bunch of well-intentioned imbeciles who are leading us down the highway of ruin. A long time ago, someone (I don't know who, actually, but I know it was a politician in DC) tried to force libraries to install internet filtering software on all of their public computers in order to protect and "think of the children!" or risk losing funding. Librarians stood up to that and refused, winning appeals and generally making good sense in their argument that filters restrict free speech and not only block out naughty sites like Stile Project and the White House sex pages, but also useful health sites dealing with sex, venereal disease, pregnancy, and pathological anal stimulation.

Sadly, the Supreme Court struck down their challenge to the law, ruling that it is constitutional to tie funding to public libraries to their willingness to install filtering software. They seem to think that the inclusion of an opt-out provision in the law whereby a library patron can ask a librarian to unblock a censored website makes it all okay. If I was trying to figure out what the green ooze I found in my underwear was, I sure wouldn't want to draw attention to the fact that I was researching it. It just shows that the SC justices still believe that we are total idiots. If they can corrupt and pre-empt the election of a US president without the nation getting upset, there is no reason to expect them to uphold a lot of the other notions that my country used to stand for either, I suppose.

But there are librarians out there not willing to give up the fight for the purpose of libraries. This Lancaster, Ohio library has decided that it will forgo $9,000 in funding and continue to provide unfettered access to the internet. Although that is but a small portion of their $3,000,000 budget, it still isn't chump change. Power to them, and all other libraries!

I always end up writing so much more than I intend to. I also wanted to mention that the PATRIOT Act gives the FBI the power to check your activity at a library but the librarians cannot legally tell you that you have been investigated. Slashdot links #1 and #2, as well as some general info on the FBI and privacy from EPIC.org.

However, some librarians have put up signs indicating that the FBI may be checking your records in their library but they can't tell you about it. A real nice form of resistance. I couldn't find the link though. Will maybe try later.

Anyway, the whole point of this is that librarians = good. I go slep now.

Read, and grow strong

As if I wasn't busy enough the presentations this month and teaching, my in-laws bought me a new computer which I had to spend some time on to set up. Things are mostly running good now though. OS X is pretty easy to set up. Can't get fink running though and haven't set up my FTP yet either. Not that this really interests anyone who might be reading.

Checking out one of my favorite smart sites, I discovered that The Edge has a books section chock full of neat stuff. It's all cutting edge ideas and issues, and if anyone is interested in reading something substantial, check it out. When I say substantial though, I'm referring to topic matter and not writing style. Most if not all of those writers are enjoyable to read and have a very easy-going style that makes learning about technology and our future (with the exception of perhaps George Dyson's history of Project Orion, a nuclear bomb power space ship that almost made it).

Stimulating, relevant stuff indeed.

Is Moore's Law an enemy of the people?

Phil Zimmerman, author of PGP encryption software, recently stated in a couple interviews (#1, #2) that Moore's Law (the observation that computing power doubles every 18 months while halving in costs) runs a serious risk to people's privacy, especially the way we are carrying on today. It's an interesting hypothesis, one that can be applied to other regions of current human development.

"The human population does not double every 18 months, but its ability to use computers to keep track of us does," Zimmerman said, referring to what he sees as the threat to privacy from the increased use of high-tech surveillance cameras. "You can't encrypt your face."

We are all aware (or should be) that the world is increasingly digitized. Everything we do exists in a computer. All the information that defines us as a citizen is in a computer. Economic information, health information, demographics, personal communication. The last is often ignored or unrealized, but we communicate online via open letters. Email is naked, akin to sending a letter without an envelope where the Post Office makes a copy of it at every transit point, from pick-up to delivery. PGP is an application that allows you to put an envelope on your communications so that people aren't able to read it, either now or later.

For the most part, due to the immense amount of data being carried over our networks and the weak ability to sift through this data, most of us are protected via obscurity. The biggest danger today is only if someone slices through our anonymity and begins to target you. If that happens, its very easy for them to read everything you send (and in many cases to access your computer directly. Secure those WEP networks!). And consider the zealousness of the current law adminstration in the US, it doesn't take much to garner unwanted attention. (Bruce Schneier at Counterpane has an excellent analysis on how a national criminal registry database will undoubtedly snare many more innocent people than criminals.)

But even for those of us basking in security through obscurity, Moore's Law is working against us. The geometric acceleration of computing power (both in terms of hardware and software) dictate that it is only a matter of time until everything that is digitized is easily accessible. So even though we can escape undue (or minimally unwanted) attention and harassment now, it won't be the case in the near future. And it isn't just email. RFID tags in your clothing, face scanners, fingerprint readers on elevator buttons... it's coming.

What can we do about it? We need to first recognize the potential dangers. We need to adopt an attitude that places first and foremost a consideration of even though we CAN do it, does that mean we SHOULD do it? And once we do something, we need to consider fully what the implications of the advanced technology are, and be wary to ensure that important legal, social, and political obstacles are created to prevent abuse.

As fun and easy as it is to get all hostile towards governments and craft intricate conspiracy theories, I think that modern governments are, in general, well-intentioned. The problems stem from the inevitable development of a sense of superiority of ideology, as if being the power-holders automatically imbues one with wisdom and an inability to be wrong. The government is also self-interested, something that will never be abolished and thus we just have to learn to live with it. So when we take a powerful, self-interested body that believes it knows what is best for the people (and itself), we run serious risks of well-intentioned efforts having disasterous consequences. For this reason, we need to take care to establish strong, robust privacy laws.

But even more than laws, we need to cultivate a national sense of the importance of privacy and transparency in government. We need to keep the government beholden to the people (of, by, and for, remember?). When people lose faith in that, they wilt, and concede powers that they need not. They begin to believe the government when it says that it knows what they want, even though what the government is advocating doesn't really seem to be what they want. It is easy for a powerful body politic to convince people that privacy is a weakness and transparency is insecure, but that is an illusion. Just as our current security through obscurity is a weakness, so is the opacity of the government.

You don't know what you got, till its gone

They did it.

Can someone explain to me how relaxing (already generous) limits on how much a company can control access to TV, radio, and print media will result in any situation remotely like the one portrayed by FCC Chairman Michael Powell:

"Our actions will advance our goals of diversity and localism," Powell said..

Shit. I guess I must be a stupid as I look. I find it insulting to every American that he has the gall to say that when there is no indication whatsoever that the legislation passed will have that effect and rather substantial and credible indications that the opposite will happen.

I think perhaps one reason many people fail to comprehend the importance of this change is because so many people live in big cities which naturally can support multiple TV, Radio, and newspaper outlets. But what about the one-newspaper small towns with AM access? You might think that they don't really matter, but they do.

Consider for example that Democratic voters dominate the rural areas of the US (this is not a partisan argument, btw). Now consider what happens when a major media company buys up local media outlets and can shape content according to its editorial preferences. I'll point out here that conservative talk shows out number liberal talk shows 100-0. Well organized, planned, and executed programming can shape public opinion in these rural areas, and with control locked up by major companies, it will be very difficult if not impossible for other (smaller?) voices to break back into the market.

I'm not suggesting a right-wing conspiracy here (although I admit its tempting, and would be rather fun). But I am arguing that these changes are much much more relevant than I think most people understand. Those who control the access to media control our thoughts (please try to understand that in a non-alarmist way) and these FCC changes really offer an opportunity for major media organizations to consolidate the hearts and minds of the American public, especially in smaller (democratic) regions.

Just to stress, this isn't a partisan argument but a plea to preserve the diversity of thought that is essential to the vibrant and robust functioning of this nation.

Shamless Slashdot rip-off of FCC links

/. poster Michael deserves credit for these. If you haven't read anything about this yet, take 20 minutes and read this stuff. It's relevant.

Really.

William Safire at the International Herald Tribune

Everyone loves what the Register says.

The Brits take a crack at it.

AP, one of the generic news orgs

Washington Post has a hat in the ring.

And a bit perhaps brighter news, the telcoms have publicly announced a commitment to running phat phiber to the home in the US, although there is no longer mandatory sharing, so it may not end up being as great as it seems. Nevertheless, a serious competitor to cable internet is a good thing, as the damn cable companies are poised to really begin to muck things up.

WMD in Iraq, nigga what?

In case you missed, alpha-primate Wolfowitz confirmed that the government was lying to us in order to get us to support the invasion and subsequent occupation of a sovereign nation. I found a link here but don't know of links to the VanityFair article or Pentagon transcript that is referenced. I did read a good column in Time magazine that, although mainly pointing out Bush's word games with regard to ownership of taxes (don't be fooled!), does remind us that Rumsfeld and company created a special department in the Pentagon that provided a large amount of the info that was fed to us about WMD.

Meh, as if anyone believed it...(did you know that a pre-war poll indicated that over 50% of Americans thought that Iraq had something to do with the events of 9/11? Say it loud enough and long enough and they'll believe anything!)

Have you heard anyone on TV talking about the upcoming FCC changes?

The changes will radically alter the restrictions on how much control any single company can have of the media in any market, including cross-ownership of TV, radio, and newspapers (see this comic.)

Yet none of them are discussing it. If these changes were really as good for the public as they claim, wouldn't it be reasonable to think that they would be patting themselves on the back and strutting around as champions of the public interest, at least on their own stations?

Their choice to keep this issue off the airwaves is exactly the issue. I don't begrudge them the choice not to cover it. It's a free country, right? But once the rules change, they'll control everything, and those who DO want to cover news that doesn't get covered by the big guys just won't be able to, which means that the general public never finds out about it. I know about it because I make an effort to follow news at the intersection of politics and technology, but most people don't, and likely never will.

What will we (well, you. I'm in Japan) be missing once these changes go into effect?

"Economics" of political truth?

Dr. Glen Newey from some obscure British university has recently published a report that suggests lying by politicians is a natural consequence of democracy. No, no, this isn't yet another case of social scientists discovering truths that we all hold to be self-evident; he actually has an interesting take on the issue.

Basically he claims that
Demands for openness and accountability create a culture of suspicion which makes it even more likely that politicians will resort to evasion and misrepresentation. These demands often arise because of increasing alienation by voters from the political process that they democratically control. Yet the greater the demands for truthfulness, the less autonomy we give to our democratic institutions and the harder it is for democracy to function effectively.

He goes on to argue that there are times and circumstances when, in order to achieve a particular public benefit, deception must occur in order to bring about the public good. It boils down to a tightening noose of sorts, where we demand more openess but that openess makes it more difficult for the government to do its job.

Now I don't know if this analysis is really all that accurate. Politicians are self-serving as well, which is a fine motivator for mendacity (that's a new word I learned from that article!). But I actually didn't want to talk about this article per se (his final conclusion is basically we are damned if we do, damned if we don't, so its really not that valuable of a finding).

I was stricken by the economic language employed to describe the lying and deception of politicians. Case in point:

But the more the electorate expects from the politicians they elect, the more likely it is that politicians will be economical with the truth [this means lie about stuff --Nute]," says Dr Newey. "Such deception where it is in the public interest may be the price of a healthy democracy.

For some reason, when I first read the press release, this language of economics with regard to truth, deception, and democracy just struck me as odd and a bit sickening. I'm not breaking new ground by pointing out how money and economics has radically changed our world and how everything we think and do is aligned with economics (to a detrimental and entirely undesirable degree, in my opinion), but now we are using economic lingo to discuss dishonesty in democracy? It just didn't sit right.

But I admit that as I wrote this up, it didn't seem to have quite the impact that I originally thought. Maybe I was just in an emotionally tender state after having been scarred after watching that lame American Beauty knock-off Monster's Ball. What a joke that movie was.

Security Choices

This week's Cringely is kind of scary. He talks about specific technologies that exist and are in place (or being put there) that essentially link surveillance cameras into a single network that not only keeps records of everything it sees (most/many security cameras don't have permanent backups) but is also capable of iris identification through sunglasses.

I've heard so much about the wonders of automated biometric identification that have inevitably fallen flat that I'm skeptical about the claims that he makes, but even if Cringely is overestimating what the tech is capable of today, there is a very good chance that it will be able to do what he says and more by tomorrow.

Fortunately for us Cringely is a smart man and avoids overreacting to this stuff. He points out that it isn't a recipe for a "Minority Report" future (yet...) but that this stuff is likely going to be here to stay. What is more chilling to me though is not the security tech so much as the database integration WITH GOVERNMENT. It's one thing for an airport, bank, corporate research center, or even convenience store chain, to have a high tech security system with all the bells and whistles he describes, but did you know that the FBI has increased its use of private sector databases in intelligence gathering by 9,200% since 1992?

We all know that the government is falling over itself trying to integrate its departments' information services, say between the CIA, FBI, and IRS. But they are also sticking their thumbs into every private database they can get their hands on. Considering the recent pro-corporation swing of American political climate, its unlikely that the corporations are going to bite the hand that feeds (or is it the government that is being fed? Hard to tell these days.)

All of this sounds a bit paranoid, and I admit it is. But we are a lot closer to living in Will Smith's Enemy of the State world that than we realize. Not that the actual expression of that world is an absolute, but the conditions that make it possible (likely?) are quickly falling into place.

More implications of Media Consolidation

I've railed against the proposed changes in regulations of media ownership before the FCC (voting in a few weeks). I've tried to argue that media consolidation is inherently bad, since it means that more and more of what we see, read, and hear are controlled by smaller and smaller numbers of people.

But there is another incredibly important implication of increased control by cable companies. Cable internet is the most popular way to get high-speed internet (DSL, satellite, and fiberoptic are the the others). If a cable company is able to consolidate ownership, they essentially consolidate ownership of the pipes for connecting to the internet.

And if this happens, there is nothing stopping them from interfering with your access to the internet. The internet as we know it depends on private hardware, neutral software, and specialized content, but the key element was that anyone could use it and no one could control it. But once someone, say, a cable company, has a monopoly on access, they can control your use of it. They can filter sites, and indeed have already begun limiting costumer's ability to use the outgoing pipe freely. 200K down and 15K out? Hello!

The Internet as a network will likely always be around, but the freedom of the internet is withering and dying. Soon the internet will be controlled by media companies. This is not Chicken Little talking, this is an entirely plausible and highly likely development. Once the Microsoft-led consortium for so-called "trustworthy computing" get their hardware controlled systems on the market, you will no longer have the ability to access information the way you would like to.

They will control the hardware in your house, the pipes, and the content. Enjoy.

You are what you think

I found the following quote online the other day:

"The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do."

-- Samuel P. Huntington

At first I thought this was a great quote. It had a nice lefty ring to it that tries to demonize our agressiveness and drop-kick our moral arrogance into the dirt.

Then I realized it was a bunch of shit.

First of all, its rather rediculous to try to separate "ideas, values, and religion" from the behavior that these beliefs induce (in this case "organized violence"). The West's (Europe's) ability to apply organized violence is a direct outcome of the beliefs held in Industrial Age/ Imperial Europe. The success of the econo-military campaigns that brought European ideals to the rest of the world (a process still in progress, of course) is a direct result of the ideas and values of the people.

And organized violence is just a mean-spirited word for human behavior. Our species, for better or worse, naturally falls prey to a cognition that defines the world and our place in it via violence. Combined with our innate social proclivities, and there you go: instant organized violence.

It's no coincidence that our greatest technological advances are byproducts of organized violence; it's what we do best. The West won precisely because of our ideas and values. Of course it wasn't a democratic consideration of those values and they weren't accepted/ didn't come to dominate because they were inherently more attractive to the people of the world, but make no mistake: Europe dominates the world because of the way that Europeans and their ilk from the last 500 years think.

Organized violence isn't the exclusive domain of Europeans and their decendants. There was plenty of violence throughout the world prior to the colonial exodus of the Europeans. It was just that, due to the patchwork network of countries and monarchs in 16th Century Europe who were constantly at war with each other, the Europeans are the best at fighting. Remember how warfare drive technological advancement? Constant warfare among the Europeans (along with a few fortuitous inventions and discovers and a nice geographic hand to play) led to them developing highly organized and technologically advanced armies and techniques of warfare, economics, and social advances.

A glance at the status of the world leading states 500 years ago would suggest that the Chinese should rule the world today, with Europe at the bottom. China had all the technology and knowledge, from ships to maps to astronomy to explosives. Europe was a bunch of backward illiterate yoinks going nowhere fast. The Americas had larger empires than Europe, but they never got into the whole metal thing. Africa had bad geography, a north-south orientation that spans latitudes. This made it harder to export technology and methods to different climates. Even travel was difficult with the desert in the way.

Then the Europeans started fighting and getting better at it. Population and economic growth drove them from their homelands in search of new places to export people to and markets to exploit.

And that is why the West won. It didn't have anything to do with an inherent attractiveness of their ways of thinking and believing, but it sure as hell had everything to do with what they thought and believed (and knew, for that matter).

So that quote is full of shit, no matter how attractive it may seem to some at this point in history. The site I got the quote from is kind of intriguing. Apparently a blog written by someone inside Iraq. After skimming through it, I'm skeptical, but I don't know why. I guess I just feel that Iraq is too destitute to support a blogger like that.

Have your heard? FCC to change the rules!

Who controls what you think?

No more football on broadcast TV

The radio is programmed for money revenue, not listener interest

The NYTimes covers the story here

and Paul Krugman has some great analysis here.

Take time to read some of these articles. The flow of information, more specifically, the choices of the types of information that get flowed, are likely to be drastically reduced in the near future. Good bye to independent content and creative outlets, hello to programming guided solely by its ability to sell advertising.

Please pardon me while I puke.

On the brighter side though, they are also considering freeing parts of the spectrum to the public domain. Click here and here to read up on why this is a good thing.

Echoes of importance.

I've talked about this recently but it bears mentioning again (and again and again). I found another good article about the upcoming changes to FCC regulations against media consolidation. If the changes proposed by the industry are accepted, you'll be getting your news and entertainment from even fewer sources, and new sources will have a harder time getting entry.

Here are some examples of who own what right now (and expect these lists to grow substantially if the FCC changes the law):

(complete lists are available at the Columbia Journalism Review's Web site, www.cjr.org/owners):

-- AOL Time Warner: The largest Internet service provider (37 million customers), the second largest cable company, HBO, CNN, TNT, TBS, the WB Network, Warner Bros. Studios, Castle Rock Entertainment, New Line Cinema, music labels Atlantic, Rhino, Elektra and Warner Bros., book publishers Little Brown & Co., Time Life, and Book of the Month Club, and the largest U.S. magazine company, publisher of Time, People, Sports Illustrated, Fortune, Money, Entertainment Weekly, and many others, and the Atlanta Braves, Hawks and Thrashers sports teams.

-- Viacom: CBS and UPN networks, MTV, VH1, Showtime, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, BET; Infinity, the second largest radio network (including KCBS, KLLC and KITS in the Bay Area); 34 television stations (including KPIX-TV, Channel 5 in the Bay Area); Paramount Pictures, Simon & Schuster book publisher, Spelling Entertainment, and other entertainment and publishing holdings.

-- News Corp.: The Fox network and Fox News Channel, 22 television stations, 20th Century Fox film and television studios, TV Guide, the Weekly Standard, the New York Post (and other newspapers in England and Australia), book publishers Harper Collins and William Morrow, the Los Angeles Dodgers, with stakes in the Los Angeles Kings and Lakers and New York Knicks and Rangers sports teams.

-- Walt Disney Corp.: ABC television network, 10 television stations and 53 radio stations (including KGO TV and radio in the Bay Area, and KSFO-AM); Disney Channel and stakes in A&E, ESPN, the History Channel, Lifetime and other cable channels; Walt Disney Pictures, Touchstone Pictures, Miramax Films; Buena Vista Music Group; Hyperion and Miramax books; theme parks and a cruise line.

-- Hearst Corp., the owner of The Chronicle, is among the companies that have asked the FCC to ease restrictions. Privately held Hearst owns 12 daily newspapers, 17 U.S. magazines, 27 television stations, and stakes in A&E, ESPN, the History Channel, Lifetime and other cable channels, among other media holdings.

If you care to offer your input on trying to prevent this, check the links I provided in the first article or check out MoveOn.org, another grassroots effort to mobilize people to action calling for the FCC to fulfill its mandate to set policy that benefits the public interest.

Time-lapse air travel

Click the pic to download a 14 MB time-lapse video of 24 hours of air-traffic in the continential US. Neat stuff. You think it's Bruce Willis's jet parked in North Idaho until the early afternoon?

Care to make a difference?

As you probably don't know (since no one knows), the FCC is going to reconsider some of its rules next month. Right now, they are only listen to the big media conglomerates, not because the FCC is corrupt, but because the conglomerates are the only ones talking. As a result, they will likely change the rules preventing high degrees of media concentration with the result that TV media will become highly concentrated in a few companies. The rules prevent companies from owning too much stake in a market or from buying up too many other companies.

This is a bad thing. This will put the control of entertainment and news programming in the hands of a few. Diversity is a good thing. Media concentration is not diverse.

If you wish to have your government work for you instead of business interests, take a few minutes to go to the Media Reform site for some info about why media concentration is a bad thing and what you can do about it. Don't just send email though, but print out the letter and sign, stamp,and send it. Paper mail gets much more attention. Give them a phone call if you have time to burn.

I'm not being paranoid, just pragmatic here. I'm not coming at this issue from a "corporations are evil" or "the government is corrupt" perspective either. Corporations are self-interested and I can't blame them for that. I can fight them and be disgusted with them for that, but its only natural to be self-interested. And the government just does what its told; if the corporations are the only ones who make their voices heard, their opinions shape policy.

Make your opinion heard. This really is an important issue that really will affect your life. You can make a difference.

If you are interested in other ways the government and corporations are shaping the world we live in, check out the Electronic Frontier Foundation. These are the people that successfully defended the P2P networks from corporate assault. Good people. They have an EFF Action page if you want to get involved. Electronic Privacy Information Center is another good place to find out how technology, business, and government are changing our lifes, mostly by restricting what we can do with information.

You think you are tough?

This guy cut off his own arm with a pocketknife to free himself from a boulder that fell on him while climbing.

I have nothing but respect for this person. I honestly don't know if I could make that decision and carry it out. May he recover fully (or as fully as a person can recover, both physically and mentally, after cutting off your own arm with a pocketknife, I suppose).

Time Capsule for sale

50 years ago, a grocery store in Montana closed up shop following a death in the family and has never been opened. They are holding an estate action now and selling off all this pristine 50's stuff. They found a speakeasy in the basement as well. Pictures are offered for perusal and they accept silent and over-the-phone bids.

It would have been kind of cool if they offered the property and contents as a package though.

What's a vote for?

Last election, I waffled for a long time between voting for Al Gore or Ralph Nader. I was drawn to Gore because I wanted my vote 'to count' and I was having trouble breaking out of the hood that blinds us to the realities of our current "two-party" system. I then realized that both the Democrats and Republicans are funded by the same companies and, at the time, were both centrist governments. Remember that Bush and Gore said pretty much the same thing during their campaign, with Bush talking about staying out of such ventures as "nation building" and wotnot.

So I had woken up to the farce that is the two-party option in American politics but was still considering voting for Gore simply to help ensure that Bush didn't get elected. I felt that Bush was an emotional child without any entitlement for his position and not even a sense of what it takes to run the nation in this day and age. It just didn't feel right.

Then I realized that my vote should be used to express my opinion regarding who I think the best candidate is (or I could use the write in option to vote for who I think would best lead the country). A vote isn't to be used to elect someone you don't really have faith in, I told myself, just in order to oppose a different candidate. It seemed a violation of the sanctity of a vote and even a bit unfair. Voting is a popularity contest, and giving votes to someone you don't like isn't playing by the rules.

So I voted for Nader. I didn't have the integrity to research other third party candidates (although I knew I didn't want to vote for Buchanan) and I should have done a bit more followup on Harry Browne and the Libertarian party. But I didn't, and I voted for Nader. Gore was expected to win and even if Bush did, I figured I could live with it. I knew that my candidate wasn't going to win the election, but it felt good to vote for someone that I would be happy with if they did. And I knew that my vote did help advance the growth and involvement of 3rd parties, an essential part of the process of reforming our current system. If everyone who didn't vote spread their votes over the 3rd party candidates, we'd have a true multi-party system in no time.

Now we are faced with an even greater dilemma. We now know how horrible a president Bush is: neo-imperial unilateral expansionism riding a wave of massive military buildup with the stated intention of brandishing it as a cornerstone of foreign policy, civil liberties under assault, massive deficits and cuts in government programs to pay for a tax cut for the richest minority of the nation (which otherwise could be used to pay for the military buildup), the obvious religiousification of the government. This is not a good situation.

So 2004 is a big deal. It shouldn't be hard to beat Bush, as long as someone isn't afraid to call a spade a spade. The only thing the incumbent has going for it is the ability to twist the opposition into a corner by arguing if anyone opposes them, they are in cahoots with terrorists, etc., kind of like they tried to demonize opposition to the war as support for Saddam. As if.

But I won't support someone like Daschle or Kerry, dolts without an ounce of integrity. Daschle is a pathetic whiny partisan bitch and Kerry is a spineless dweeb without any independent principle. We need someone like Paul Wellstone, rest his soul.

As it stands, I'll probably vote Libertarian or Green this time around, unless a Democrat I can believe in stands up and stomps. I've changed my opinion on the use of a vote though. A vote isn't just for voting for someone, its a powerful tool that can be used to vote against someone too. I think its sad that we don't have candidates appealing enough to vote for or incumbents so horrible we need to abandon hopes of voting who we believe in in order to get them out of office, but voting your conscience reserves the right to use one's vote in whatever manner needed to ensure the best possible for the country.

It's never to early to start talking about these things. It will be very very important that people vote in the next election. Start reminding people how far Bush has brought us from the country we all believe in. The United States is not about locking up citizens without trial, is not about invading countries in order to establish a military precendent, is not about further developing a nuclear arsenal, is not about support research into chemical and biological weapons, is not about cutting funds for education and health care in order to fund the largest military buildup in the history of humanity, is not about cutting taxes for the wealthy when running massive deficits (although I'd generally agree that if one cuts taxes, those who pay the most should get a generous portion of the return), is not about granting government positions to convicted criminals and political scum, is not about selling its soul to the highest bidder.

We might be Idawhores around these parts, but the nation is not a crank slut. Time to slap that dirty dealer in the White House down.

Has NPR fallen to The Dark Side??

One of the *many* benefits of being a mac user (beyond the obvious benefit of not risking life and limb zooming around the Internet at Ghz+ speeds) is iTunes and Quicktime streaming. Actually QT isn't a Mac OS only (get it here; it does audio and (some) video) and is a nice alternative to crap like Windows Media Player and that corporate sludge of code known as RealPlayer. Don't ever install RealPlayer on your computer. Ever. Ever ever ever ever ever! I don't even think I'd install it on most of my enemies computers.

Quicktime is cool though. It has a nice little interface and can play audio streams. I usually listen to SomaFM's Groove Salad or NPR. At least until today, when I fired up the NPR link and found a generic QT window of sorts indicating that the QT-TV selection has changed and that I should update my software to see the latest options. I wasn't exactly sure what that meant since I have the most up to date software and ignored it and went about my web browsing for the morning.

Then I discovered a new headline awakening an awareness that had lain dormant: NPR dropped Quicktime support. My initial reaction was to get pissed off at Apple. Their QT-TV selection has slowly faded over the last 18 months or so. It used to kick all sorts of ass, including live video feeds of BBCWorld and other stuff. There are still lots of links to content on the Apple QT Content page and the move trailers page is very cool. But the substantive comment like NPR and BBC will be missed.

Reading the comments at slashdot reminded of something though: QT is free. The Quicktime Streaming Server is open source and freely downloadable (hell, even the Darwin OS to run it on is free as well) and there are no fees to stream from it once you set it up. It looks like the decision to drop a QT stream was purely economic in the sense that NPR wanted Apple to pay (or keep paying) them to keep streaming.

Factor in a consideration of the current platforms being streamed by NPR (WMP and Real) and suspicions deepen even more. Microsoft may have pressured NPR into dropping the QT support. I have a hard time believing that Real paid NPR, but maybe my sense that Real isn't making much money is off the mark.

Regardless of what happened, I'm severely disillusioned by this. NPR is public radio and should be expected to offer its broadcast as widely as possible, especially when that broadcast doesn't cost them anything (bandwidth maybe, but that equivocal regardless of the streaming platform). They don't even offer mp3 streaming or downloads of shows and programs (but Pacifica offers downloads of its DemocracyNow! program, an interesting listen-to.).

Corporate encroachment is becoming worse and worse these days, and I fear its becoming critical. Critical in the sense of critical mass, where we no longer feel that it is wrong or undesirable or that other options exist and thus we just accept it and quit thinking about its consequences on our lives. Even though it may feel pointless in the face of corporate power or obvious to the point that you may feel it doesn't even warrant being pointed out, don't accept it. Be aware of it and talk about with other people.

Just as in class, when you shouldn't be afraid to ask questions because other people likely have the same question as you, talking about issues of concern is important because many other people are likely upset about the same stuff. But if no one brings it up, we end up as a mass of silent accomplices in our own demise.

I kind of meandered off-track here at the end, and there is no proof that NPR was bought out by Microsoft, but its decision to stop hosting a stream on QT is clearly not rational by the expected standards of a National Public Radio station. Perhaps I can find a net-radio station that rebroadcasts NPR. Haven't had luck with that so far though. Please let me know if you know of any.

Trendsetting the American Way

India announces that it has the right to "pre-emptively" strike at Pakistan to protect itself.

Pakistan asserts that India is a "fit case for pre-emptive strikes" like the US launched against Iraq.

Lessig on the RIAA suits against students

I'm a big fan of Lawrence Lessig and his analysis of the current state of information control initiatives and their likely effect on the future of ideas.

He had a nice little entry on his blog a while ago that bears repeating here, as it saves me the time required to think up an entry and helps expose his ideas to a wider audience (I think there are 2 people who read this blog).

on what we need courts for

They say I'm a pessimist about the future of freedom on the net, and they've got two books of mine to prove it. But the report that the RIAA has now filed suit against four students for sharing content over a university network is a moment of hope. If we work hard to report the details and reality of this suit, then the extremism of the RIAA's tactics will finally get through.

Let this extremism finally force recognition of the best response to this problem for now: a compulsory license with a large carve out for non-commercial "sharing." Napster proposed as much in 1998. Had Congress listened, then we would have had just as much sharing over these last 5 years, but artists would have 5 years of income, and fewer of our children would now be felons. Instead, Congress did nothing (except pass the Sonny Bono Act and the DMCA), and 5 years later, artists are no better off, our kids are now "terrorists" (such is the rhetoric of the other side), and the cartel of the RIAA is only stronger.

What politicians need to remember is that Congress has always adjusted the rules by which creators get paid as a response to new technology. That's just what they should be doing today. Never before has the law been used to force new technology into old way of doing business. Every time before this, it was the law that adjusted to assure artists got paid given the new technology.

There are any number of proposals floating about just now for a compulsory license for content [Ed Felten has a nice post on this; my favorites are William Fisher's from Harvard, and Neil Netanel's from Texas] ' a way to free content while assuring that artists get paid. All of them would also have the salutary effect of leaving our courts to deal with real criminals (can anyone spell Enron anymore?), and leaving the internet to do what it does best (making content broadly and efficiently available).

It's time for Congress to turn its attention to constructive ways to assure that artists get paid without destroying the extraordinary freedom of the internet. This has been Congress's role in the past. It needs to get beyond the distortions of a bunch of lobbyists if its to play its proper role in the future.