One Stop Thought Shop

At the Whitehouse to pay tribute to Tony Blair, Condoleezza Rice made a comment about ‘how we view historic events before and after they happen’:

“At the time, it seems impossible…to future generations it will always seem just inevitable.”

In what seemed to be a reference to Iraq, Dr Rice said that it was

“good to have an example of people overcoming their differences” in a place where “differences were a licence to kill”.

Although this post by UK journalist Toby Harnden is discussing other matters, primarily Tony Blair’s domestic legacy, I thought these quotes from Secretary Rice reveal a part of the policy thinking and personal conviction behind current war policy.

First revealed by the Aspen Times a month earlier, the ‘Arkansas Democrat’ newspaper published the cause of global warming April 16, 2007.

Watts at NorCalBlogs covered the news flash, but major media outlets have failed to syndicate the piece, although it’s recently been authenticated by Snopes Verfication.

In the long view, the big picture, the overall, everything sucks.

“Who Are the Merchants of Fear?”
“These are multibillion-dollar computer modeling bureaucracies as intent on self-preservation and budgetary enhancement as cognate nuclear bureaucracies at Oak Ridge and Los Alamos.

[link from watts]

Good goal, bad policy.

In fact, ethanol will do little to reduce the large percentage of our fuel that is imported (more than 60%), and the ethanol policy will have widespread and profound ripple effects on other markets.

Corn farmers and ethanol refiners are ecstatic about the ethanol boom and are enjoying the windfall of artificially enhanced demand. [see tongue-in-cheek Corn Cartel post]

But it will be an expensive and dangerous experiment for the rest of us.

…it is no surprise that the price of corn has doubled in the last year — from $2 to $4 a bushel. We are already seeing upward pressure on food prices as the demand for ethanol boosts the demand for corn. Until the recent ethanol boom, more than 60% of the annual U.S. corn harvest was fed domestically to cattle, hogs and chickens or used in food or beverages. Thousands of food items contain corn or corn byproducts.

…any sort of shock to corn yields, such as drought, unseasonably hot weather, pests or disease could send food prices into the stratosphere.

…adding ethanol raises the price of fuel because it is more expensive to transport and handle.

Our politicians may be drunk with the prospect of corn-derived ethanol, but if we don’t adopt policies based on science and sound economics, it is consumers around the world who will suffer the hangover. [LA Times]

A new breed of caudillo – political authoritarian – is coming to power across South America.

More or less fairly elected, operating a coup from within, the whole of South America, with the sole exception of Colombia, is now in the hands of the populist Left.

They have a number of characteristics in common.

First, they are anti-yanquista, opposing trans-American free trade.

Second, they are big spenders…

Third, they are demagogues…

Fourth, these new authoritarians have genuine charisma.

Fifth, they are anti-politician politicians: Bonapartists, if you like.

Six: They are nationalists, railing against the international order.

Why does any of this matter to us?

For two reasons, one immediate and the other more abstract.

The immediate problem is that Latin America is ceasing to be part of what we think of as the Western World. Chávez and Morales in particular have aligned their countries with our enemies: their closest friends overseas are Iran, China, North Korea, Cuba and, to a lesser extent, Belarus.

Second: Democracy can easily be taken down. During the 1990s, with the partial exception of Fujimori’s Peru, every state in the region was a stable, liberal democracy. Now, bit by bit, that is ceasing to be true.

Our media has been ignoring analysis of the changes in South America for the most part, but Daniel Hannan, a seasoned journalist covering South America, writes a clear summary in The Telegraph imploring us to wake up before it’s too late.

My watch is one thousand million times more accurate than your watch.

Galileo satellite navigation and GPS satellites carry two types of clocks.

One will keep time with an accuracy of around one nanosecond (one one-thousand-millionth of a second) in 24 hours – equivalent to losing or gaining a second in 2.7 million years.

The other onboard clocks are accurate to 10 nanoseconds per day. In comparison, an ordinary digital wristwatch has an accuracy of about one second per day.

The 10 year Galileo program is a constellation of thirty satellites. It will be the first civilian positioning system to offer global coverage. Their accuracy will provide meter-wide positioning by measuring radio waves. Travelling at about 300 million meters per second, the radio wave covers a distance of around one-third meter in one nanosecond. [ScienceDaily]

An upcoming mercury clock is accurate to one second in about 400 million years – give or take a systemic perturbation or two.

Wealth was not determined by how much you had,
but by how much you had to give away.

The Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwakiutl) are an Indigenous nation, numbering about 5,500, who live in British Columbia on northern Vancouver Island and the mainland.

The picture is Wawadit’la, also known as Mungo Martin House, a Kwakwaka’wakw “big house” with a totem, used for ceremonies known as potlatch.

Within the potlatch, hierarchical relations within and between clans, villages, and nations, are observed and reinforced through the distribution of wealth, dance performances, and other ceremonies. Status of families are raised by those who do not have the most resources, but distribute the resources. The host demonstrates their wealth and prominence through giving away the resources gathered for the event, which in turn prominent participants reciprocate when they hold their own potlatches.

Their society was highly stratified, with three main classes, determined by heredity: nobles, commoners, and slaves. Their economy was based primarily on fishing, with the men also engaging in some hunting, and the women gathering wild fruits and berries. Ornate weaving and woodwork were important crafts, and wealth, defined by slaves and material goods, was prominently displayed and traded at potlatch ceremonies. European diseases drastically reduced the population during the late nineteenth-early twentieth century.

I’m not excited about the prognostications of power utility firms.

Since the ‘Lightbulb in Every Farm’ program of Westinghouse, through the graft battles of industrial and suburban rates and metering, while voting public bond after bond to underwrite coal, nuclear, natural gas and Jet-A machinery plus building their infrastructure, power utilities have only been innovative while sending us a fatter bill or using price to push innovation or conservation costs onto regional business and private consumers.

Over many years, power utilities have merely entertained us with futurist pledges that have never been delivered. I’ve heard it all before. A link to my previous rant.

Power Utilities remain entrenched in a psuedo-market. Our best hope is that a new grid of ‘distributed power generation’ will belong to its owners, alternative power producers that are kept at least an arms length from utility managers.

Our energy farms, our rooftops and hilltops, our upcoming regenerative ‘hybrids’, our future diversity must never to managed or regulated by these firms. The intertie challenges are not so great that a new marketplace is impossible.

I recommend that we keep the utilities restrained or we remove their privileges until they are deregulated in an open marketplace.

I wrote this post as a comment to reporting by Jon Lebowski at WorldChanging of a 2007 energy firm conference.

The power grid is frozen.

If power utilities were farmers, we would be both poor and malnourished.

The Clean Energy Venture Summit included a session on the Utility of the Future where a panel that included Austin Energy, Pacific Gas and Electric, Green Mountain Energy, IBM and others discussed installing systems for monitoring and regulation [of course] and optimizing overall efficiency. [worldchanging]

While reading the Summit’s results, weak and self-serving responses to our energy challenges, I noticed a tone and style I’ve heard many times before: 1) Moaning about complexity and overhead. 2) Burden-shifting to the consumer. 3) Delivery of little but a plea for more funding.

Power utilities remain an entrenched position adept at extra billing and fees.

“It won’t be easy to implement – it’s a complicated problem to combine an energy bus and an IT bus for every structure.

“There’s also major load swings we’re just beginning to understand…

“…such as load reduction through pervasive implementation of energy-saving light bulbs

“…and load increase as pluggable hybrids start appearing.

“…once we’ve solved the problem of energy storage.

Our utilities are not prepared. After decades of readiness, this is all we can expect???

How many times have we heard utilities prognosticate? How many pledges have failed? How poorly does this sector perform next to peers in other parts of the economy?

If a new light bulb is needed, it’s needed to brighten up our power companies.

About 1978 I organized seminars for Sacramento’s SMUD power utility and PG&E that introduced remote tiered metering, demand management systems, conservation management for commerce and consumer, as well as separate sessions to explain photovoltaic and wind power options.

After applause and coffee, one decade, two, three pass by.

Time and again, our utility firms have been invited to the game. Time and again, they’ve polished the brass and failed to blow the horn. Optimizing overall efficiency, indeed!

Be forewarned. Let’s not replace our lightbulbs all at once! Our utilities can’t stent the load reduction!

A French bulldog has been nursing a baby tiger as its own at Shirotori zoo in Japan.

[more pics at Reuters]

The answer to this question
will determine whether you are
over the legal limit or not.

Was Mickey Mouse a cat or a dog?

Arun Maira, the chairman of the Boston Consulting Group who is one of India’s foremost leadership gurus, set out three scenarios for how India might end up in this, the Asian Century….

1) Wallowing Buffaloes:
India becomes like a group of buffaloes, wallowing in the mud. Everyone is doing their own thing, making great show of movement and energy, but not actually going anywhere.

2) Peacocks and Wolves:
Quoting an old saying, that ‘when the peacocks have fed we hope there is enough left for sparrows’, Mr Maira made the point that India needs not a ‘trickle down’ of wealth but a flood. The wolves in this analogy are the Naxalite rebels and the increasingly restless disenfranchised poor who are left prowling dangerously on the margins of society.

3) Fireflies:
…the insects can be seen swarming round trees at night in rural India, like natural fairylights. An amazing natural phenomenon. In this world “millions are working together, moving India from darkness into light.”

Peter Foster in New Delhi for The Telegraph asks, “Which, I wonder, will it be?”, and continues, “I’m going to have one final word on the nature of Indian democracy…”

“The fact that India’s impoverished millions vote out incumbent parties every five years because they’ve failed to improve their lives is not an expression of power, or even a demonstration of true ‘democracy in action’.

“On the contrary. Since the people feel that their lives don’t seem to be improving, and that the previous lot of politicians is no better than the next lot, it is the ultimate expression of powerlessness.”

“It’s certainly a lot more likely that Microsoft violates patents than Linux does,” said Linus Torvalds, holder of the Linux trademark.

“If the source code for Windows could be subjected to the same critical review that Linux has been, Microsoft would find itself in violation of patents held by other companies.” [Information Week]

Alternative payment systems seek to cut out credit card companies [and high bank fees].

Though they face formidable competition in the form of the cards’ ubiquity and convenience,

…one company is seeking to overcome that by turning people’s driver’s licenses into debit cards .

Users link their bank account to their driver’s license number and make purchases at participating retailers using the license and a PIN code. (via Payments News)

[via Techdirt]

One of the phenomena of the last many years is evaluating our society by pondering vast systems of economic and government policy. It’s become a populist game of game complexity. But for our economy and our society, what we measure and the policies we argue are increasingly not helping us.

Lately we try to insert perhaps immeasurable factors into social theory such as climate, population, old age, healthcare, religion, resource extraction, globalism, corporatism, elitism, terrorism, corruption, and war.

We revive hero’s invigoration from Adam Smith to Milton Friedman and his sidekick Frederich Hayek. We disdain market intervention where it hits the ground as if laissez-faire will release a random invention to save us like a lottery will relieve us.

We assure our correctness by citing periods of growth or decline in terms of a government’s memorable clumsiness or predictive wit. We argue that Rome was not in a day, nor America’s centuries, nor China’s revival, nor migrants crushing over walls. To smooth charts and re-draw irregularities, we look to rules and law not to inspire principals but to sink pirates, as if preserving intellectual property can collect the cash we need in our crowded world.

I think our risk may swing on these armchair abstraction.

As we tweak economic algorithm to save our West, we look to succeed with more than widgets by designing more widgets, by promoting widget propriety, or, Orwell forbid, by enforcing widget pedigree. But none of these are fundamental to where we walk with our widgets along the boulevard of our lives.

To compete with a billion scholars overseas, we will not succeed by trading acres of expensively trained personnel explaining digital services to movie and media consumers. Nor will we sufficiently grow by grabbing a theory in science or a breakthrough in a lab, even if we cajole every genius and savant from every agriculture in our schools. Nor will we sufficiently entice the world to support us by selling only loans, leverage, audits or insurance; nor automated stock acquisition, automated traffic compliance, automated window cleaning.

These approaches are merely trading 19th Century factory industrialism with 21st Century centrist institutionalism. As China and India and others grow, while we are scurrying against terror, we fail to admit to ourselves that the day to day fashion of leaders in the West is to merely worry where our diplomats will be pleasantly greeted.

Most of us are building and rebuilding the wishes we can reach – a workable economy of our own local and regional arrangements. It’s from here where we can build a more effective economy. It is not, I assert, organizing ourselves in a stadium of human waves to compete on behalf of company or government whim. It’s from where we stand that we can support a greater economy worldwide.

There are so many challenges to answer, but before we evaluate our tasks, we should know our targets. When we talk economics and government, we too easily omit our day to day living where we must invent a workable if not pleasant human community.

This recommendation doesn’t ignore macro activity but propels increased activity where it’s acutely required. Most of us have not abandoned usefulness to each other. Most are employed in teams that are smallish and active and smallish and changeable. Most are willing participants in our future.

For us nearby, and for all around us, our new infrastructure makes new economy possible. A better economy may follow a broader understanding of our potential but a less wide way of managing it. Social initiative and healthy community may be our best policy and the first requirement of education.

Our next economic opportunity may be to invent more attractive living. Now, that’s something we can sell!

Each can reach,
so reach to each –
the best restitution
for any institution.

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I was a founder of Community Renewal, Inc., a small 501(c)3, that encouraged county and municipal leaders to focus their efforts less to complying with larger entities and instead to helping their communities reach their potential – to discover and create “the dream” of residents.

From the Journal of the American Medical Association:

“If a politician declares that the United States has the best health care system in the world today, he or she looks clueless rather than patriotic or authoritative,” Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, a prominent ethicist at the National Institutes of Health.

The U.S. spends $6,000 per person per year on health care, an amount that is more than 16 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product and more than any other country.

Americans’ average life expectancy of 78 ranks 45th in the world, behind Bosnia and Jordan.

And the U.S. infant death rate is 6.37 per 1,000 live births, higher than that of most developed nations.

President Bush frequently has said Americans have the world’s best health care system. Democrats and Republicans alike have made the “world’s best” claim. [story]

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The U.S. does not have the best health care system in the world – it has the best emergency care system in the world.

Advanced U.S. medical technology has not translated into better health statistics for its citizens; indeed, the U.S. ranks near the bottom in list after list of international comparisons.

Americans are the most dissatisfied with the quality and quantity of their health care. Of the 10 largest industrialized nations, the U.S. ranked dead last in health care satisfaction, with an approval rating of only 11 percent. [more analysis]

The World Health Organization’s ranking of the world’s health systems places France at the top; the USA at #37.

“Freedom dies of too many lies.”

Bill Moyers composes a rhythm in his rant:

Many young reporters thought it inconceivable that a government would lie or manipulate intelligence to go to war.

Why is America forsaking its own revolution?

…we have seen the rise of an ideological partisan press that is contemptuous of reality, serves up right-wing propaganda as fact, and attempts to demonize anyone who
says otherwise.

We are desperate today for cool thinking and clear analysis. What kind of country is it that wants its politicians to play tricks with faith?

What would I say now? Fire the ideologues and assign them to scrub the floors at Guantánamo for penitence. Stop confusing neocon pundits with Old Testament prophets. Read the Bible for humility’s sake, but for policy’s sake commit to memory the report of the Iraq Study Group. Don’t sacrifice any more soldiers to prove you’re in charge; get the soldiers out of the line of fire between Sunnis and Shi’ites. And remind your hirelings of Winston Churchill’s definition of democracy as the occasional necessity of deferring to the opinions of other people.

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National humility
If our nation’s commitment to human rights at home and abroad is to be reinvigorated after the dark era we are now living through, it will have to be, as it has been in the past, by Americans acting in cooperation with one another, and with the rest of humanity.

Canada is urged by more than 1,500 scientists from more than 50 countries to strengthen protection of the increasingly threatened boreal forest, a key component in the planet’s battle with climate change.

Only 10 per cent of Canada’s forest is currently protected and the spread of logging, mining and oil and gas operations into Canada’s large northern forest is putting at risk the largest carbon storehouse on Earth.

Russia is harnessing natural resources to create an economic superpower.

Russia’s oligarchs may be trying to buy respectability and shed their robber-baron image by buying into public companies overseas.

Sales from Russia’s enormous reserves of oil and gas have pushed its economy to heights unseen since its dramatic post-communist collapse. From the brink of bankruptcy in 1998, Russia’s foreign reserves, estimated at roughly $330-billion are second only to those of China and Japan.

To my surprise, Chrysler was very close to becoming part of a Russian expansion into western markets.

Toronto’s Globe & Mail is one news source, of only a few I’ve found, that attempted to look closely at the sale of Chrysler.

Why did DaimlerChrysler in effect pay Cerberus to take Chrysler off its hands?

Was there an effort to search for a more preferred buyer? Days before Cerberus stepped over home base, Magna was the top contender. Magna is North America’s largest auto parts consortium. And Magna had recently invited Russian players to join their operations.

Enter stage left: 39-year-old oligarch Oleg Deripaska bought a $1.54-billion piece of car parts giant Magna International Inc. and its dream of acquiring DaimlerChrysler’s U.S. operations.

Deripaska, whose empire includes Russia’s No. 2 auto maker and UC Rusal, the world’s leading aluminum producer, needs foreign technology to build his Russian auto-making company and diversify geographically.

Where is the profit in the automobile sector? Another under reported feature of the Chrysler swap is that Cerberus becomes the nation’s largest finance company for vehicles.

A lot of kids suffer in silence.
http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/saliva-clue-chronic-bullying-13226.html

Hormones in children’s saliva may be a biological indicator of the trauma kids undergo when they are chronically bullied by peers, according to researchers who say biological markers can aid in the early recognition and intervention of long-term psychological effects on youth.

“Bullying is mainly self-reported either by students or observed by teachers,” said JoLynn V. Carney, associate professor of counselor education at Penn State.

Carney and Richard Hazler, professor of counselor education at Penn State, looked at the hormone cortisol in students’ saliva to evaluate its validity as a reliable biomarker in assessing effects of precursors to bullying. In humans, this hormone is responsible for regulating various behavioral traits such as the fight-flight response and immune activity that are connected to sensory acuity and aspects of learning and memory.

“A lot of kids suffer in silence. When you hear of school shootings, or students who commit suicide as reaction to chronic peer abuse, those are kids who are not coping with the abuse by seeking appropriate support,” said Carney. “They keep their anger and frustration within and fantasize either how they are going to escape the abuse through suicide or how they are going to get revenge on their abusers.”

When a person senses a threat, the cortisol level spikes and learning and memory functions are negatively impacted, Carney said. The body basically focuses the bulk of its attention on surviving the threat. The longer such a spike continues, the more damage it can do to various aspects of a person’s physical, social, and emotional health.

However, when a person undergoes a lengthy period of stress similar to the chronic bullying experience, researchers have found less than normal cortisol reactions that are related to a decreased sensitivity to stress, a sort of numbing or desensitizing effect.

This hypocortisol finding, Hazler noted, has serious physical and psychological implications for kids – both victim and bystander. Research with adults exposed to repeated stressful events has linked hypocortisol with conditions such as chronic fatigue syndrome, chronic pelvic pain, and post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

The Penn State researchers tested the saliva of 94 sixth grade students between ages 9-14, along with a questionnaire on their experience on being bullied or watching someone being bullied, and additional measures of anxiety and trauma.

Since cortisol has a predictable daily pattern of highest levels in early morning and declining levels throughout the day, researchers collected samples of saliva when the students first arrived at school and then again before lunch.

“Lunchtime is one of those less supervised periods when kids are more likely to be bullied. One of the things we are trying to measure is not the reaction immediately following a bullying event, but instead the anticipatory anxiety that takes place with the approach of situations where bullying is more commonly occurs. Even kids who are not bullied suffer from such anticipatory stress because they anticipate watching their friends getting bullied and worry that they might be next,” said Hazler.

“It is this anxiety that we believe is most dangerous because that anxiety stays with you. It is not dependent on the bullying happening on a continual basis,” he added.

Results from the study suggest that while bullying is directly linked to trauma and anxiety, it is indirectly linked to cortisol levels.

“This confirms our theory that while exposure to a one-time or very rare bullying episode might cause higher cortisol levels, exposure to bullying on a chronic basis would be associated with hypocortisol levels,” said Carney and Hazler who recently presented their findings at the American Counseling Association Convention in Detroit.

The Penn State researchers liken their research on bullying to the study of depression, which used to be solely about psychiatric observations and behavioral tests until researchers began to find biological changes.

“All of a sudden depression was not simply a psychological phenomenon, but it also has a physical aspect with potential medication treatments to support counseling,” they noted.

Study ties unfair thoughts to heart health
A study headed up by a London epidemiologist has found that thoughts of unfair treatment can directly lead to a greater risk of coronary problems.

Self-Compassion May be More Important Than Self-Esteem in Dealing With Negative Events, New Studies Show
Why do some people roll with life`s punches, facing failures and problems with grace, while others dwell on calamities, criticize themselves and exaggerate problems?

office space has been shrinking for individual workers. Regardless of overall office size, the amount carved out for you and your colleagues is getting smaller. In 1987, the average executive office was 291 square feet. As of last year it was down to 241 square feet. A “senior professional” is now given an average of 98 square feet to work with, and those poor call centre workers only warrant 50 square feet, according to the International Facility Management Association.

The IFMA said the shrinking trend has slowed a bit, but as of 2006 over half of workers (59 percent) spent their days in a cubicle. Only 7 percent of folks work in open areas with no partitions.

“There has been a strong overall trend to reduce square footage and most companies that had the opportunity, through drivers such as relocations or major reorganizations, have taken advantage of this,” said Melodee Wagen, president of Workspace Strategies Inc., when the data was released. “However, space reduction can only be taken to a certain point and have the individual workspace remain functional.”

Report: Tech’s Gender Gap Widened by Uninviting Workplace

In Technology

New research may shift the view of the gender gap in the tech workplace away from a lack of interest among females to the work environment itself, which women rated as unfavorable.

The opposite sex is much more interested in your face than your body.

The first study to assess how much faces and bodies contribute to attractiveness, by Marianne Peters from the University of Western Australia, shows that it’s not the body that attracts a mate.

For women rating men, attractiveness is 52 percent face rating, 24 percent for bodies.

When men rated women, attractiveness is 47 percent from her face, 32 percent by her body.

[short blurb at New Scientist]

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When asked what traits they look for in a mate, men and women agreed on the top nine traits. However, men ranked good looks and facial attractiveness higher whereas women placed greater emphasis on honesty, kindness and dependability. [from a national BBC study of more than 450,000 people.]

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Women are better at remembering faces than men, probably because they’re more interested in social aspects of the world than men are. [link to blurb]

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Some women are wary of men who are both attractive and wealthy. A rich, good-looking man seeking a wife might do well to play down his wealth. [link to blurb]

One hundred women meet at a wine bar to recycle unused clothing.

Fun, adventurous, practical.

Offering to help organize events, the Swishing website says its purpose is to help “rustle clothes from friends”.

“The Art of Swishing involves getting your friends together to swap gorgeous clothes and party at the same time.” [story]

A Marine was deployed to Afghanistan.

In a letter from his girlfriend, she explained that she had slept with two guys, wanted to break up, and asked for pictures of herself to be returned.

The Marine asked his buddies for unwanted photos of women and mailed about 25 pictures of various women to his ex-girlfriend with the following note:

“I don’t remember which one you are.
Please remove your picture and send the rest back.”

The Z Backscatter Van is mobile X-ray.

BoingBoing caught the announcement of the Z Backscatter Van that can “slowly drive around and generate real-time x-ray images of cars, revealing weapons, explosives, drugs, and stowaways.”

Wow!

Judges and lawyers in this nation will be grappling with search rules for years and years.

American Science & Engineering asserts on their website that the vehicle reveals:

• Car and truck bombs
• Explosives, plastic weapons, and other organic threats
• Radioactive threats, including nuclear devices and dirty bombs
• Illegal drugs
• Stowaways, such as illegal immigrants and terrorists
• Trade fraud items, such as alcohol, tobacco, and other legal goods smuggled to evade duties

and adds that in ‘Stationary Scan Mode’, operators may elect to scan the occupants of the subject vehicle.

I wonder how surveillance, sovereignty and sensibility will shape our world.

The phrase “may elect to scan” will bother our legal framework for at least a generation.

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The Beatnik Robot Fights Back

There’s new hope to restrain the tyrant, the autocrat and the zealot.

What can minority radicals do if copies of subversive literature are returned to lists of contraband? Where is a hiding place for Mao’s little red book or a diary of vulgar terms or vault of patent drawings that may topple an industry?

There’s one possibly temporary but countervailing solution to the error of broad surveillance equipment.

The Beatnik Robot has been re-discovered. The device was developed by prescient beatniks of the 1960s. The robot “ferrets out the undesirables, including censors, book-burners….”

The LA Times has opened several photo archives [link] which included this anti-jingo, anti-supression robot.

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Wiretap the Internet Day

Today, Monday May 14, is the day that all US network operators are required by US law to install back-doors to make it easier for cops to snoop on their traffic. This has been the law for voice switches for over a decade, where it represents a potential holiday for dirty cops who don’t have warrants use these back-doors (and criminals and corporate espionageists who want to eavesdrop on sensitive calls). Now it’s part of our data infrastructure as well. Nice one, America.

“May 14th is the official deadline for cable modem companies, DSL providers, broadband over powerline, satellite internet companies and some universities to finish wiring up their networks with FBI-friendly surveillance gear, to comply with the FCC’s expanded interpretation of the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act.”

To restart the public’s investigation of the principles protecting free individuals and their social stature, island.org points out that “The Hippies Were Right All Along” published in San Francisco’s Chronicle.

It was, always and forever, about connectedness.

It was about how we are all in this together.

It was about resisting the status quo and fighting tyrannical corporate/political power and it was about opening your consciousness and seeing new possibilities of how we can all live with something resembling actual respect for the planet, for alternative cultures, for each other.