Grounded: Millionaire John Gilmore and Privacy in the US

Grounded: Millionaire John Gilmore stays close to home while making a point about privacy: "Gilmore is asking just how much citizens are giving up when they hand their driver's licenses to a third party, in this case an airline, where it is put into a database they cannot see, to meet a law that, as it turns out, they are not allowed to read."

The object of the objection to showing one's ID is that the request to show it comes from either a false authority, or an authority that will not show its face, and is therefore not open to inspection. More closed government action to watch the population. This happens without discussion. Most don't know enough to care. Those who might are disorganized and unconnected. The Beast is the system, not any of the individuals in it, however mulish or conniving some might be. We must examine our systems in the daylight. We must rewrite the bad ones to protect ourselves against them. Long before machines can rise to enslave future human populations, those populations and their machines will be enslaved by simple paper constructs: the corporation;the self-perpetuating and self-protecting law. Like some abstract parasite they are introduced by some half-witted lawyer and his wealthy handlers for some short-term gain, and then left to graze on the commons of the peoples freedoms, to the woe of all.

Neither Manpower nor Money

BBC NEWS | Europe | Differences define allies' rhetoric: "The Europeans appeared unwilling to pick a fight and willing to look forward. They reckon Mr Bush has neither the manpower nor the money to fight another major war so they could accept his overtures with some grace."--BBC News World Edition

Heartless greed and sub-cultural superiority complexes must act as a sort of Kryptonite to our Super Powers.




American Hegemony

Free Mojtaba and Arash Day

Free Mojtaba and Arash Day Official Post
http://hauntedinkblog.blogspot.com/2005/02/bbc-news-free-mojtaba-and-arash-day.html

Free Press : Community Internet

Free Press : Community Internet: "Pennsylvania is one of 14 states with laws on the books restricting municipal broadband. In the face of burgeoning public opposition, the telecom and cable companies are moving quickly to write their monopolies into law. Corporate front groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) have even created model anti-municipal legislation for sympathetic state legislators to copy."

Even when the people are aware, there's little we can do about corporate control of governance. Once again we see that small government means little social help, little representation of the people, huge governmental interest in our private lives, and huge governmental leverage for corporations.

Stephen's Peace and Human Rights Blog: Christian Fascism in America

Stephen's Peace and Human Rights Blog: Christian Fascism in America

Hitler embarked on his world-transforming mission depicting himself as devout God-fearing man; in Mein Kampf he refers repeatedly to "the Lord," "the Almighty," and Jesus as "the great founder of a new doctrine." "I am fighting for the work of the Lord," he declared, and a whole lot of German Christians, Protestants and Catholics, believed him. Soldiers for the Wehrmacht wore belt buckles with the slogan Gott mit uns (God is with us).

BBC NEWS | "'Free Mojtaba and Arash Day'"

BBC NEWS | Technology | Global blogger action day called: "'Free Mojtaba and Arash Day'"

Interesting concept. Without a little research (and a little research is far more than an average person will do) it's not clear what the Accused are imprisoned for, but the suggestion seems to be that they have been imprisoned for expressing their opinion. http://tinyurl.com/6n9l8.
[More can be found here: http://tinyurl.com/6uqt8.]

In the interest of the US First Amendment (being washed away in the acid rain of pseudo-religious nationalism), this site posts this notice.

As we examine the political landscape in the US, we see that there are no countries that have more villainous characters than we. No Afghanee warlords, no fatwah brandishing maniacal imams, no goebbels or goering*, no molotov or stalin, no pol pot who is worse than our own home-grown madmen. As we look around, we see that truth or falsehood is no test. We see that consistency, clemency, and sophistication are of no import. We see that being right, being most important, being richest, being strongest, or at least being all these things in our minds as we blather into our bullhorns, we see that these are all. If we simply repeat "We are the greatest," somehow it will be true. This is the absurdity of the half-educated. This is the dream-state of the masses and their pudgy, demoniacal representatives, a pallid pudding of treacly goo studded with bits of anger and topped with fear. Imagine the surprise and betrayed anger of the masses (bit by bit, one slice of the demographic pie at a time) as the people whose totalitarian ideas they support in favor of their own half-baked philosophical positions use their new found powers over the general mass to turn on THEM, and then they will cry out for the protections they have helped to remove so that they could squash the scary OTHERS down the street and across town. And it will be too late. And they have seen this message 10,000 times in the movies, in the press, in magazines and books, and they have nodded sagely each time, oh, yes, the importance of our freedoms, ohyes our bill of rights, ohyesthecommunityofman, yes. Oh, but not the fags. Not the muslims. Oh, certainly not people who have abortions. Not people who have no jobs! No. NO! Not the elderly who lost their pensions to CEO sharks! NO NO NO! Free enterprise! No government meddling! Teach a man to FISH!! Yes! That's it. Survival of the Fittest, that's what god designed. That's Jesus's message. God helps those . . . . Yes. Yes.


*"Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger."

-- Herman Goering at the Nuremberg trials http://www.snopes.com/quotes/goering.htm

FDA panel: Keep Vioxx--Educate Masses post hoc

CNN.com - FDA panel: Keep Vioxx, Celebrex, Bextra on market - Feb 18, 2005: "Meeting Chairman Alistair J.J. Wood of Vanderbilt University Medical School said it is important to find some way to help the public better understand the nature of risk.

'People worry about crime and then drive drunk,' he said, indicating they don't really understand relative risks."

Well, yes. And how do we intend to do that while we undermine education economically, and dilute it intellectually? We're cutting funds; we're dismissing science as optional; we're hoping for the best from our teens, whilst keeping them ignorant. We're enshrining profit and ownership, power and "success" at the expense of sustainable, neighborly business and farming practices and open public government, public oversight, and public discourse.

But by all means lets find a way to help the public at large understand what most of our educated professionals and government representatives don't seem to grasp, the nature of statistics, and the moral calculus of medicine. Sure. Maybe in the funny papers we can start.

ChoicePoint tricked into disclosing info on 140,000 people - Feb. 17, 2005

Alpharetta, Ga.-based ChoicePoint maintains personal profiles of nearly every U.S. consumer, which it sells to employers, landlords, marketing companies and about 35 U.S. government agencies.

and

'The irony appears to be that ChoicePoint has not done its own due diligence in verifying the identities of those 'businesses' that apply to be customers,' said Beth Givens, director of the [3]Privacy Rights Clearinghouse. 'They're not doing the very thing they claim their service enables their customers to achieve.'"--from Slashdot e-mail

Don't forget, Choice Point was involved in the 2000 Election Poll Scrubbing in Florida.
http://www.apfn.net/messageboard/11-16-04/discussion.cgi.3.html

The mad rush to install unverifiable computer voting is driven by the Help America Vote Act, signed by Bush last year. The chief lobbying group pushing for the act was a consortium of arms dealers -- those disinterested corporate citizens -- including Northop-Grumman and Lockheed-Martin. The bill also mandates that all states adopt the computerized "ineligible voter purge" system that Jeb used to eliminate 91,000 eligible black voters from the Florida rolls in 2000. The Republican-run private company that accomplished this electoral miracle, ChoicePoint, is bagging the lion's share of the new Bush-ordered purge contracts.

A hireling, a fraud and a prostitute

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Sidney Blumenthal: A hireling, a fraud and a prostitute: "'In this day and age,' said press secretary McClellan, waxing philosophical about the Gannon affair, 'when you have a changing media, it's not an easy issue to decide or try to pick and choose who is a journalist.' It is not that the White House press secretary cannot distinguish who is or is not a journalist; it is that there are no journalists, just the gaming of the system for the concentration of power."

Even with what we know about the duplicity and incompetence of the current leadership, this is astounding.

NYT Scientist at Work: Origami as the Shape of Things to Come

The New York Times > Science > Scientist at Work: Origami as the Shape of Things to Come

And since Dr. Demaine's proof shows that you can get as many shapes as you want, "in theory you could produce the complete works of Shakespeare with a single cut," said Dr. Robert Lang, a former laser physicist and professional folder who is collaborating with Dr. Demaine on a major origami math project.

Hmmmm.

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Bush's Sex Scandal

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Bush's Sex Scandal:

Other developed countries focus much more on contraception. The upshot is that while teenagers in the U.S. have about as much sexual activity as teenagers in Canada or Europe, Americans girls are four times as likely as German girls to become pregnant, almost five times as likely as French girls to have a baby, and more than seven times as likely as Dutch girls to have an abortion. Young Americans are five times as likely to have H.I.V. as young Germans, and teenagers' gonorrhea rate is 70 times higher in the U.S. than in the Netherlands or France.

But then, the people behind the plan don't care about any individuals affected, they care about presentation, perception, piety, and power. They want to avoid the "appearance" of evil. That is paramount. I'm beginning to think it's innate.

Oddly the group who promote such perfection-of-behavior ideas are the same people who assure us over and over again that nothing can be done, the earth is inherently evil.

Greenspan sees success in gradual rate hikes policy - Feb. 16, 2005

Greenspan sees success in gradual rate hikes policy - Feb. 16, 2005

Notice the same response we always hear: will private accounts be expensive, will we have to borrow to cover them? YES! Will they alleviate the problem? NO! But I'm for them anyway!

Why? Why are you for them? You're for them because you want to dismantle SS, and then all the other systems we have to insure the poor. You want a nice, violent, consequence-loaded playing field in which the poor will literally starve to death and be gone from the game, so you and your superior genes can be passed on to future generations. Whether you're Randian Greenspan, or Neo-super-race Bush, or Knee-jerk average American wannabe, what you're asking for is permission to lord it over those you deem less worthy, sometimes on merits, usually on bloodlines, always on bank accounts.

Bloodthirsty Social Darwinism is just a simple animal trait we share with every species down to the bacteria, and as such it is not a thing to be sought after but to be overcome in our reach to be more than other animals, not just to outlast them as a genetic line.

When Fascism Comes to America - Maureen Farrell at BuzzFlash.com

When Fascism Comes to America - Maureen Farrell at BuzzFlash.com

A nice taste of the current political situation in the USA. The masses are abdicating responsibility in favor of food and television, and the masters are tightening their grip on our freedoms in preparation for total victory. But eat up. Relax. Watch some TV. It can't happen here.

Consumption Mania

The general impression I have of the typical American of the late 20th century is of a slightly addled scion of an arriviste industrialist, ignorant of how he got here, where he is, where he's going, and especially of the aspects of life not immediately apparent to his physical perceptions, but who is at the same time charmingly obsessed with his pseudo-pragmatic toys: phones, guns, televisions, and most especially cars and trucks. I think the world has room enough for one such retarded child. I think 200 million is more than we should be forced to take. If the disease spreads, as it looks likely to, then four to five billion will surely spell the end of the human experiment, so far.

The missing trust fund

The opponents of aid to strangers keep saying there's no money left for Social Security, that it's all been spent, thus essentially denying the solvency of the US and undermining its credit status, since all that money we've saved is supposed to be on loan to ourselves via the US Government and its treasury, payable when SS runs a deficit. Mr. Marshall asks, not for the first time, is it really gone? And what does that mean? And specifically, the architects of the trust fund surplus, what do they have to say, especially Mr. Greenspan, since he can be considered an advisor of the current administration.

So here's our question: Does Alan Greenspan think there's a Trust Fund? Does he believe those bonds are backed up by the full faith and credit of the United States government? Does he think they will and should be paid back? If he doesn't, he's got a hell of a lot of explaining to do since it was under his guidance that we came up with this whole idea.

Or how about Sen. Bob Dole? He was on the Commission too. What does he think? Does he agree? Or the recently-retired House Ways and Means Chairman Bill Archer (R). He was on it too.

Let's ask all of them ...

In addition, when I read through comments on other blogs and snippets in the media, I have a sense that most people would like to modify SS, that they want to invest in the market, that they want their children to invest in the market, etc. I find this odd. Do they somehow think that SS as it is prevents them from investing? One woman quoted on TPM said she wanted to modify SS so it would be there for her son, and I just thought, why don't you do what all the republicans are telling you to do, get a good job, and invest $10k in a Roth IRA or other available shelter for your kid? In 60 years, according to all the armchair randian pundits out there the "miracle of compound interest" will do the job and your kid can take or leave SS. Why don't you do that? I'll tell you why. Because you want to spend the money now, and you don't want to do the research. And nobody else does it either. And so in 50 years with private accounts, a majority of the population will be broke and you'll have to pay for them anyway, in spite of the fact that you've eviscerated SS, or you could just let them starve on the other side of the wall of your gated communities. Perhaps that's the fantasy that the republicans are actually selling best. A true victory for the Meritocracy, and absolute punishment for the failed.

One more time, so you can't say you weren't told

Mr. Krugman goes over the numbers for the Social Security privatization paradox again:

They can rescue their happy vision for stock returns by claiming that the Social Security actuaries are vastly underestimating future economic growth. But in that case, we don't need to worry about Social Security's future: if the economy grows fast enough to generate a rate of return that makes privatization work, it will also yield a bonanza of payroll tax revenue that will keep the current system sound for generations to come.

Now, I know the right would like to dismantle social security and all other social support plans, and you know it, but we also know that this is not a serious, practical run at the job, just a bright flag waving in the prevailing wind, distracting us from real foreign policy failures, and from myriad domestic activities designed to undermine the power of the people. The administration waves the banner of the moral big brother, saying that as long as you're after money in a nice suit, anything goes, but you can forget any freedoms that lead to independence of thought, independence of vote, independence from monopolies, independence from parasitical organizations such as private insurance agencies, and any other type of independence that will remove you from their power.

Don't think your own.
Don't read your own.
Don't grow your own.
Don't brew your own.
Don't own your own.

You belong to the machine, and when you're broken, the machine will discard you.

If the right has its way, we'll need to dig up Upton Sinclair and start raking serious muck. Because serious muck is what our greedier, shallower compatriots are making for us to live in.

Rationality in law needed

Perhaps its the jurors, and perhaps its the jurists, but we need an uptick in rational evaluation in the legal arts. This has been a topic for many years/centuries. How can it be that we have made so little progress? Possibly for the same reason we have made so little progress in other areas--rationality is scorned by the general mass.

This article provoked this post.

A jury has awarded $15.6 million to a man whose image was used for years without his permission on Taster's Choice coffee labels.

You can say what you will, but the net appears to be that a man who did two hours of work, work that was not critical to science or general advancement, not pivotal or likely to produce more than its share of good for the community, was awarded a prize of $15 million for said work because the company that he did it for declined to pay him for it. If the company had been the local gas station, and the employee had been an attendant, and somehow it had got into court, the award would have been wages plus court costs, if any. Maybe. But since its a matter involving our two favorite things, a wealthy company with deep pockets and a person who puts his image out in public for a living, we settle it in grand style.

Deep pockets seems to mean to the average person that no one is going to get hurt. The absurdity of this position is demonstrated every day in this country in a thousand ways. Deep pockets in most cases means someone has already been hurt, and if you deprive the DP Co. of some of its spoils, it will do more hurting to replace them.

As for the worship of surfaces, graven images, shallow-badly-told stories, etc. this is a typical symptom. A society that interviews models on television and relegates Nobel Laureates to the back pages of obscure print media is a society that shows no rationality in the human sense, but only pragmatic selfishness in the animal sense.

Laws with unintended consequences

The legalization of prostitution in Germany has provided a way to force unemployed women to turn tricks for money:

http://tinyurl.com/3mtd2

A 25-year-old waitress who turned down a job providing "sexual services'' at a brothel in Berlin faces possible cuts to her unemployment benefit under laws introduced this year.


Prostitution was legalised in Germany just over two years ago and brothel owners – who must pay tax and employee health insurance – were granted access to official databases of jobseekers.

Not intended to delve into the complex area of the law and sexuality, this post is only to serve as a reminder of unintended consequences as well as the sort of thing that happens to the working class when unemployment rises and they lose the power of choice. In essence, capital can simply starve labor out of power and then demand anything it wants, including their wives and daughters.