Category: politics

The Guardian is admittedly a liberal news organization, but in no way is it to be considered politically radical in its opinions.

It’s front page lede:

Manning ‘forced to sleep naked’

WikiLeaks suspect made to relinquish boxer shorts for about seven hours due to ‘situationally driven’ event’.

It’s comment:

Bradley Manning and the stench of US hypocrisy

The US condemns human rights abuses abroad yet appears to be allowing the psychological torture of Bradley Manning.

I assert that the civilian is an order of magnitude more powerful than the militian but we do not live in a time of these.

1) Canada’s broadcasting regulator prohibits the dissemination of false or misleading news.

Thereby, 2) Fox News is prevented from broadcasting in Canada.

Take Back The Tubes.

CNN’s foreboding story, among many similar:

For all that the unrest in Egypt tells us about the power of networked media to promote bottom-up change, it starkly reveals the limits of our internet tools and the ease with which those holding power can take them away.

But Dave Winer, pioneer he’s been, forefather of blogging and creator of RSS, will not allow the Internet to be switched off at the whim of tyranny! He’s making it easy for home users to become web servers, far away and too numerous to be vulnerable to central commands.

There is no creed or constitution that’s good for people and also good for arrogant and cruel agents of government. No agency or corporation should control humanity’s knowledge or communication, nor hoard this knowledge, nor put it in silos easily metered, sold in mercantile chunks, nor shut off.

WebMonkey explains:

A centralized web is brittle web, one that can make our data, our communications tools disappear tomorrow.

Winer wants to demystify the server. “Engineers sometimes mystify what they do, as a form of job security,” writes Winer, “I prefer to make light of it… it was easy for me, why shouldn’t it be easy for everyone?”

Winer isn’t the only one who believes the future of the web will be distributed systems that aren’t controlled by any single corporation or technology platform.

Remove centralized bottlenecks !

To be free of corporate blogging silos and centralized services the web will need an army of distributed servers run by hobbyists, not just tech-savvy web admins, but ordinary people who love the web and want to experiment.

Mike Masnick comments on an opinion piece by Douglas Wood asserting ‘The Party of We’ is already in control.

…and the least understood in many of the discussions around what’s happening online. In the past, with traditional systems, if you didn’t agree with something, you would just protest.

But if you look at what’s been happening lately, when the public doesn’t agree with something -official secrecy, draconian copyright laws, censorship, privacy violations, etc.- rather than just protesting, they’re simply routing around those things. It’s an incredibly important point. They’re not protesting by saying “this will not stand”. They’re protesting by saying “your laws don’t matter, because we can simply route around them”. That’s a hell of a lot more powerful than most people realize.

Angela Natividad hoists that all the way up the pole: It’s a battle for the soul of all of us.

“When you read this, take into account that there’s no room left to behave as if human equality is a subjective thing. There is no more space in an increasingly connected world to say that what a tyrant, a tyrannous government or a tyrannous enterprise does with its dependents is its own business.

“Faster communications makes territory less important and distances insignificant. That means institutionalized repression and blows to free thinking, to the liberty that sparks innovation, becomes everybody’s business. The world is now too small for this.

“I’m going to say something cheesy now, but I think it has to be said this way. Technology is where it is today because of higher numbers of ever more ambitious hackers fighting odds, rigid corporate standards, suspected limitations and attempted castrations of the Internet’s liberty. They are dogged, they self-organize and recognize no authority but the merits of what works, cutting away what doesn’t, and we have all advanced because of it.

“In this world and tomorrow’s, that hacker culture belongs to everyone: people with access to the tools to fight governments, self-organize and speak out against human injustices without having to go through prescribed channels.

“The channels that matter now belong to us. Use them wisely, tirelessly and fearlessly. United, able and armed with knowledge, we can make civilization a kinder, more efficient machine, worthy of its name and richer because of the dynamism that serves one god: freedom. The freedom to think, be educated, feel safe, ask hard questions and decide our destinies.

“This is what Egypt, Tunisia, Jordan, Yemen and other countries, newly inflamed, are fighting for now. This is what we should be defending every day, even if we feel like it’s not our fight.

“It’s always our fight.”

In this world and tomorrow, live and uncensored:

“Christians protect fellow Muslim protesters as they prostrated themselves to pray is worth bearing in mind while Mubarak talks his nonsense about not being able to leave lest the roiling mob destroy the country.”

I was there! they placed newspapers and towels on the floor so we wouldn’t pray on the hot asphalt. I love Egyptian Christians and although I am Muslim I would die defending any one of them.

Folks in Seattle do stuff to foil the unjust.

The day we delivered my demand letter was one of the happiest days of my life, I felt so supported and strong. With our strength and persistence we have shown, and will continue to show, bosses can’t get away with abusing their workers.

“A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.” -Martin Luther King Jr.

Getting elected is about finding a hook, a slogan to spur a teetering worry.

Yes — it’s not about evidence, it’s about finding an excuse to implement an ideology.

The recession got in the way of those efforts until the idea that austerity is stimulative came along. Thus, “austerity is stimulative” is being used very much like “tax cuts increase revenues.” It’s a means of claiming that ideological goals are good for the economy so that supporters in Congress and elsewhere have a means of rationalizing the policies they want to put in place. It’s the idea that matters, and contrary evidence is brushed aside.

Oh the vanity of it. Our era is sociopathic opportunism and that’s that.

Ineffectual theory is pilfering our pockets by misappropriating our good sense.

Our candidates steer us wrong.

Of course they do.

Aggrandizing is the only trick done. The result is our sad sad slipping. We’ve been slipping for decades.

Worry and confusion will defeat us until we choose better.

It’s not their ideology will take us forward. It’s projects which transform our poisons and waste and depletion and dumb extracting. When platforms discuss real things, efficient things, gifts we’re bringing home to fix our sloppiness and repair our solvency, only then we will see we’re choosing well.

More political rage will be storms we’ll see ahead, nothing to stop it; weather jolts and climate change seem abstract compared to resource depletion, OIL, and population crush, to these we have no adequate response. Our prowess is a clamor to grab riches, stumbling over shoulders to secure private solace, far too little achieving of better solvency! Folks get worried, launch Armageddon in degrees of organic tomatoes or penthouse annuities;  just silly when we should be declaring our communities are being transformed, one and then another, another, another, until we look over entire regions, i.e. Sweden’s shift from oil, and say, “Oh, we’re safe again. Can we help you?” That’s exports we could use. F* exporting pork-barrel tear gas to the middle east.

We’re in a long era of dread captured by brigands. There’s the nub behind the rage, this rage in all continents, France a few months ago, Iceland whomped its banks already, every continent offers more to come, we haven’t seen merely Iran/Eqypt/Jordan/upcoming youth vs. entrenched ol’ guard, we haven’t seen what’s coming yet, folks are pissed, the globe is pissed, and history is showing this grand trend increasing every year.

“A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.” -Martin Luther King Jr.

How Can Rage Not Increase? Until organizations stiffen to the tremendous change of installing working structure that feeds and pleases, we’re heading into history much more disruptive than any milestone.

It’s exciting. Because there’s only one answer: Better. Yes. But 40% of your brothers and sisters are sunk like rocks in superstition, finds the Gallup Poll. That’s a climate needs a change!  Who IS the quintessential ‘hard-working American’? It’s not The Teabagger saying they never need government. We need it now, good government to bridle pirates and restrain the takings, to steer awhile.

The current situation in Egypt is, as they say, fluid. There is the remote possibility that the Egyptian people will achieve their apparent ends relatively peacefully, without further loss of life.

But while the power of authority arrayed against them—the police, internal security apparatus, and perhaps the army—relies for its ultimate effectiveness upon the credible threat of violence, the power of protest and resistance relies in the last instance upon a people’s willingness to die for their cause.

This is what it means to be courageous: to place yourself in the path of irresistible force, certain of your own destruction, for a cause higher than yourself and your petty concerns. Flesh arrayed against bullets, bodies against tanks. Lives willingly offered for beliefs and aspirations.

Without sacrifice or the threat of sacrifice, there is no courage.

Succinct is always nice. Succinct that says it all is dynamite.

I can’t say I was surprised by a single Wikileak … they all seemed so deja vu and utterly timeless, as if they could have been intercepted letters, hand-written by Napoleon-in-exile to his cohorts on the mainland.

Humorzo noticed this great line by Sylvia Paull.

Oh, if we had goals and targets too.

[link]

So why isn’t there more agreement? Certainly some smart people out there must have figured out the “right way” or the “best solution”… right? Well, NO.

See, that’s the problem that so many of us make, and definitely one that the legislators and zealots make A LOT. There is no single right way, no single best solution. Each of us has different goals, different skills, different resources, and different motivations; and that doesn’t even take into account different cash flow and different climates and different environments. Given all the unique factors that an individual must take into account, how can we expect to have a single right answer? We simply can’t, it’s just not realistic. We each need to figure out what we need to do for our desired situation and then determine how to best achieve it based on our individual parameters.

Charles Sullivan:

Corporate power expanded.

Driven by the religion of market fundamentalism, capitalists championed the deregulation of industry and markets.

Money triumphed over people.

With deregulation the disparity between rich and poor reached historic proportions. Corporations ostensibly created to serve the public interest mutated into a malignancy eroding liberties and killing the planet.

The duplicitous meanings of democracy are used interchangeably by the plutocracy, leaving the American people ambivalent and confused. This was an engineered bait and switch that went virtually unnoticed by a naïve and somnolent public.

And thus capitalism, the very antithesis of democracy, became synonymous with representative government in the public mind. Few people have bothered to question, much less challenge, the secular matrimony of capitalism with democracy.

Democrat Congressman Frank Pallone read the natural born Citizen clause of the U.S. Constitution on the House floor, Section 1 of Article Two of the United States Constitution.

A woman seated in the front row of the public gallery shouted out, “Except Obama! Except Obama! Help us, Jesus!”

Unlawful conduct, disruption of Congress; processed and released by the Sergeant at Yarns.

Jeepers. This copy from the Washington Post’s Q&A with China’s Hu Jintao struck me as a laundry list of central government action, although merely a list, perhaps insufficient, perhaps better than nothing, yet definitely more assertive than the perpetual arguing in our politics. I threw in a numbered count while wondering if any US political party could manage the complexity on our plate.

Question #3;

What lessons do you think can be drawn from the 2008 international financial crisis? What effective measures did China adopt to counter the impact of the crisis?

Hu Jintao answers #3:

 

“Which makes one wonder: if it were transported back to 1787, would the Tea Party have rejected the Constitution that today it professes to love and defend? Most likely, yes.”

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Satisfaction with Life?

Well being correlates most strongly with health, wealth, and basic education, yet some feel that managing economic pilfering will destroy American achievements.

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Above the Sea of Fog.

He who hopes to grow in spirit will have to transcend obedience and respect. He will hold to some laws but he will mostly violate both law and custom, and go beyond the established, inadequate norm. Sensual pleasures will have much to teach him. He will not be afraid of the destructive act: half the house will have to come down. This way he will grow virtuously into wisdom. —C.P. Cavafy

…a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions

…humanity hanging from a cross of iron

In less than 10 years, our military and security expenditures have increased by 119 percent.

Even after subtracting the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the budget has grown by 68 percent since 2001.

50 years later, we’re still ignoring Ike’s warning, by Susan Eisenhower:

I’ve always found it rather haunting to watch old footage of my grandfather, Dwight Eisenhower, giving his televised farewell address to the nation on Jan. 17, 1961.

“There is a reoccurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties,” he warned.

Plundering our own ease ! So thus reports Economic Undertow:

Our grandchildren will harvest what, exactly?

Both Eisenhower and King grasped the same insolvency metaphors, acknowledging the possibility of a bankrupt notion of progress; that the human race and its embrace of the American-style ‘dream’ would soon enough harvest the bitter crop of its strip-mining, the use of which is vacant of any real possibility.

Thermodynamics is relentless and cannot be negotiated with.

And as Umair Haque says. “If there’s one phrase I might use to describe the global economy’s malaise, it’s ‘values of little worth‘, a criticism that might be applied to nearly every moribund industry under the sun.”

On the matter of civility:

A) Feed and educate every child on Earth for five years, $465 billion.

B) Invade Iraq, $3 trillion.

Words matter. Billions matter. [link]

Near the site of the Tuscon shooting, Rush Limbaugh’s billboard.

Brit electoral advice:

There is one simple way, I suggest, to make the language of our politicians more accurate and understandable, and that is to insist that the implementation of election pledges be compulsory by law (and may be broken only in exceptional circumstances after a successful appeal to the judiciary).

Would you like a cliché with that ?

Secret Service Alert: 2008

The attacks provoked a near lynch mob atmosphere at her rallies, with supporters yelling “terrorist” and “kill him” until the McCain campaign ordered her to tone down the rhetoric.

But it has now emerged that her demagogic tone may have unintentionally encouraged white supremacists to go even further.

The Secret Service warned the Obama family in mid October that they had seen a dramatic increase in the number of threats against the Democratic candidate, coinciding with Mrs Palin’s attacks.

Michelle Obama, the future First Lady, was so upset that she turned to her friend and campaign adviser Valerie Jarrett and said: “Why would they try to make people hate us?”

She was not asked about her incendiary rhetoric against Mr Obama. She said:

“I consider it cowardly. It’s not true. That’s cruel, it’s mean-spirited, it’s immature, it’s unprofessional and those guys are jerks if they came away taking things out of context and then tried to spread something on national news that’s not fair and not right.”

Eight months after the earthquake, 280,000 buildings shook down, Haiti is out of the headlines, life for the victims is getting worse, a million live in tent cities “where rape gangs and disaster profiteers roam“.

But what about the government or the UN? What about Bill Clinton’s Interim Haiti Recovery Commission, the billions pledged by governments and given to charities?

A snippet to accompany mismatch and brutishness these days:

The US used roughly six billion bullets between 2002 and 2005 —that’s 250,000 to 300,000 bullets per terrorist.

Can large complex systems create new kinds of future, or are the winds of fate far too strong? Can we predict decline, change it, improve things, create order out of chaos?

What do our scientists believe?

Wull, they’re not Republican.

“What power has law where only money rules?” —Petronius, 66 AD

From Economist’s View, to break the lock that big money has on politics:

• “Political corruption in America is staggering.”

• “Powerful forces, many of which operate anonymously under US law, are working relentlessly to defend those at the top of the income distribution.”

• “The Republican Party’s real game is to try to lock that income and wealth advantage into place.”

With help from golfing buddies in elected office, over the last 25 years more than 90 percent of the total growth in income went to the top 10 percent.

Only 9 percent of income growth is divvied up among the lower 90 percent.

About 25 percent of the newly elected Republicans are millionaires. 261 members of Congress are millionaires, and 55 are worth more than $10 million.  Wealth in the Senate grew 16 percent, from $2.27 million to $2.38 million in 2008 alone.

In 1973, the average U.S. CEO was paid $27 for every dollar paid to a typical worker. Three years ago, the ratio had ballooned to $275 to $1.

“The real rulers in Washington are invisible, and exercise power from behind the scenes.'” —Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter 50 years ago.

Lawrence Lessig:

America’s economic future depends upon restarting an engine of innovation and technological growth.

Corporate America has come to believe that investments in influencing Washington pay more than investments in building a better mousetrap.

That will only change when regulation is crafted as narrowly as possible. Only then can regulators serve the public good, instead of private protection.

We need to kill a philosophy of regulation born with the 20th century, if we’re to make possible a world of innovation in the 21st.

In the Walnut Street Jail, no windows would distract the prisoners with street life; no conversation would disturb their penitence. Alone with God, they would be rehabilitated.

There was a small problem. Many of the prisoners went insane.

Lynn Parramore:

The placement of human beings in solitary confinement is not a measure of their depravity. It is a measure of our own.