Shrub has finally gotten his wish and been invited to the World League of Despots. You can read all the details at the Guardian. I would have to agree that between his insistence on torture, unsupervised spying, arbitrary detention without trial or legal counsel, abducting innocent people and sending them to third countries for interrogation and deciding what laws he will choose to disregard he has definitely earned it.
We’ve now had five years of the shrub doctrine. The US military went into Afghnistan with a skeleton crew and relied on the local insurgents to displace the Taliban. Notice I didn’t say defeat! They were displaced in power, but almost none of the leaders were captured and most of the fighters just blended back into the populace to bide their time. The Taliban is now very close to regaining control of the country and there probably isn’t anything the US can do about it. The US then invaded Iraq, and three and a half years later, people are dying at a faster rate than ever, and we are spending over $2 billion a week!. All this from a country that didn’t even have any big weapons.
Now Iran continues it’s march to developing nuclear weapons, and North Korea has reportedly conducted it’s first nuclear test. So clearly the strategy of preemption has not been effective and with the struggling economy that has resulted from all the corruption and financial cronyism, we have no hope of getting enough strength to actually make preemption viable. Thanks to the disastrous escapade in Iraq, the US military is no longer taken seriously as a detterent. The policies of the republicans in recent years have been a complete and utter failure. We have not been attacked on American soil but terrorists can afford to bide their time. If we maintain our current direction we will surely create enough new enemies that at some point we will almost certainly be attacked.
On top of all this the Christian-Fascists running the show right now have repeatedly demonstrated that being a bible thumper does not make you ethical, moral or righteous. Their foreign policy seems geared toward bringing on the end of the world because they believe in biblical prophecies. Now that religious leaders have demonstrated that they are not fit to be trusted with political power, maybe it time to let some secular leaders to take a shot at it. We need leaders who believe that we should live a good ethical life now, taking care of the world and preserving it for future generations.
When I was a kid, the year after the release of the first Star Wars movie, a television series appeared called Battlestar Galactica. The show was not much of a success at the time. The effects were not particularly impressive, the dialog made George Lucas’ writing look good and beyond the basic premise of the pilot there wasn’t much of a plot. The basic premise revolved around a civilization of humans who lived on a group of 12 planets. They had created machines known as Cylons, The Cylons had rebelled and broken away from the humans. The Cylons attacked the humans and attempted to exterminate the humans. The rest of of the original series consisted of the surviving humans, escaping in a rag-tag collection of space ships led by one battlestar, the Galactica going in search of the mythical 13th colony known as Earth. All the remaining episodes consisted of the chase with the humans always making a narrow escape. Nothing particularly compelling.
Then came 2003 and the Sci-fi channel which had been showing re-runs of the old Galactica. They decided to create a new mini-series based on the original plot but with some distinct differences. The new mini series did well enough that they decided to extend it into a regular series. Unlike the original, the plot went way beyond the basic chase, battle and escape. In the new series the Cylons had evolved and some of them had taken human form. They were actually hybrids that were virtually indistinguishable from full humans. As such they were able to infiltrate and attack the humans from within. Unlike most such stories, the new Galactica actually included a lot of self examination. The characters are complex and flawed. The humans aware of the fact that they had created the Cylons, who were now trying to exterminate them, began to look at what they had done. They were at least partly responsible for their fate. The writers actually asked a question which few other shows dared to ask. Should the human race survive.
Galactica has become an allegory for the world around us today. The survival of the species is under direct threat from something created by the actions of the the threatened. In addition as the series enters it’s third season this week we find that the the Cylons are now not just machines but god-fearing religious extremists. They had been trying to eradicate the heathen humans, but now as they occupy the planet that the humans thought would be their new sanctuary they are telling the humans they no longer want to destroy them but rather they want to co-exist in peace. However, as in the world we live in today, the religious extremists regardless of their creed, while professing a wish for peace actually want assimilation. They will live in peace with us as long as we accept what they say as the one true word. We can live together in harmony as long as we accept their variation of god as the true one. Those who resist simply disappear. Arrested, detained, never charged, never given independent legal counsel, never tried. Much like they did in Argentina, in the 80s or in Chile under Pinochet, or as they do today in Iraq, or the United States.
The new Battlestar Galactica, is an exceptionally well executed television series. But it also asks some very important questions. Can humans survive? Should humans survive? Can they overcome a threat of their own making? Should they?
It’s so nice to the republicans imploding. They blame everyone else for the own faults and now it’s all coming back to bite them in the ass. They come out make statements about democrats using this Foley mess for partisan political gain. But they are the ones who suppressed the whole story for somewhere between months and years. For a group that makes so much noise about standing on principle, trying to crack down on indecency in the media, passing legislation to try and ban social networking sites like myspace in schools, they waited a long to due anything about an obvious sexual predator in their midst. Now we just need to make sure that they get their asses handed to them next month at the polls. The current crop of republicans in all three branches (and contrary to shrub believes there are three branches that each have an active role to play even if they abdicate their responsibilities) are utterly corrupt and unworthy to serve in government, especially the likes of John McCain and John Warner who made such a big dela about standing up against torture and then utterly caved to the White House demands. Defend the Constitution and turn them all out!
I went over to the Detroit Free Press site and saw this headline 
from Shrub’s speech at the UN General Assembly today. The statement that “My country desires peace” I think is definitely true. The problem is that George Bush is so far out in right field and has always made clear that he doesn’t care what the American people think, so clearly the statement doesn’t apply to himself. If only we could impeach Bush and remove him and all of supporters from office we might be able to make progress toward peace.
There was a time not so long ago when if someone produced a creative work such as a book, movie, a piece of music or any number of other types, they were able to register a copyright on that work and have a monopoly on profiting from that work for a limited number of years. This concept was set down in the US Constitution. This was a good idea, because it encouraged creators to produce new works. They could make a living by producing and selling new works without having to find a patron to support them like artists did prior to that time. By limiting the time of the copyright they were also encouraged to produce new works, because they couldn’t live off the old ones forever. Once the copyright expired, the work would become part of the public domain and anyone could copy it and produce derivative works without seeking permission. This is all perfectly reasonable. However, over the last half century more and more of the creative works have come to be owned and controlled by an increasingly small number of increasingly large companies. Because of their size these companies such as Sony, TimeWarner, Disney, NewsCorp and others have the resources to fund political campaigns and lobbyists. In the last three decades this has resulted in the gradual strangulation of the media commons and the public domain.
They have gotten the copyright laws changed from and opt-in regime to an opt-out regime. Previously a work was public domain unless the creator registered a copyright. Now a work is automatically copyrighted unless the creator puts it into the public domain. The terms of copyrights are now extended beyond all reason as well. At one time, a copyright owned by a company would last for 14 years. The most recent extension in the late ninties has brought that up to 95 years. Individual authors have their lifetime plus 70 years. Coincidentally the last two extensions have occured just as the Disney copyright on Mickey Mouse was about to expire and only after intense lobbying by Disney in congress. These extensions mean that few of the works created in the past century are moving into the public domain. Disney has spent enormous sums of money to strangle the public domain while profiting handsomely from it. Animated movies such as the Hunchback of Notre Dame and Treasure planet are based on stories that are in the public domain.
In an attempt to reverse this trend a few years ago Stanford University Law professor Lawrence Lessig came up with the concept of the creative commons license. A copyright holder has the right to license their works to others while they still control the copyright. What Creative Commons does is provide a series of graduated licenses with various restrictions that creators can use and apply to their works. If someone creates a song or short film, they can apply a creative commons license to it and give it away or sell or do whatever they want. For example you can use the non-commercial, share-alike, attribution license. In this case other people can share your work but they can’t sell or use it for commercial purpose without permission, and they have to provide attribution to where it came from. They can also create derivative works without permission but under the same set of restrictions. If you release a song under this license someone else can remix and share it under the same license but they have to provide attribution to the original creator. There is also a no derivative license, or you can skip the share-alike which allows others to re-distribute derivatives under a different license and so on.
There is one common element to all the creative commons licenses though. If you are redistributing someone else’s work, you cannot add any copy restrictions that weren’t originally there without the creators permission. That means you cannot take a band’s creative commons licensed song and add DRM without asking. This is where the Microsoft Zune that I wrote about the other day comes in. The song sharing feature that will be the main selling point of the Zune explicitly violates the creative commons license. When one Zune owner sends a song to another Zune, a new layer of DRM automatically added to the file before it is sent. This is what prevents the recipient from listening to the song more than three times or for more than three days. It doesn’t matter what the source of the original song was, this DRM layer is added. If I send a song from the band Lorenzo’s Music to another Zune player, DRM is added. About a year ago, the band decided to license all of their music under Creative Commons and make MP3s available for download from their site. It is a violation of their license to added DRM before sharing their music. Of course the RIAA doesn’t care if you violate someone else’s license as long as you don’t even think about violating theirs.
A lot of bands have decided give away their music for free under creative commons because they have realized they can get more fans and exposure and ultimately make more money if more people hear their music. I urge you to find creative commons music and other works and support these artists, and don’t give your money to Microsoft.
I’ve written a couple of previous posts about electronic voting machines that you can find here and here. Yesterday Professor Ed Felten of Princeton University along with two of his grad students released a new study that they did on these Diebold Machines. They found that under realistic voting conditions it would be very easy for a malicious hacker to manipulate the machines and modify the vote counts in under a minute. The site has a video demonstrating how these machines can be manipulated to affect election results tha you can see here. There is also a PDF file of there report available. I urge you to at least watch the video and then call your elected federal representatives and demand that these machines and any others that do not use open source software and provde a paper ballot be immediately banned from use in all elections. Our democracy depends on it.
Objects in the mirror may not be what they appear to be. It’s been said that a picture is worth a thousand words and also that the camera doesn’t lie. Although pictures can be worth many words, they won’t necessarily be the same words to everyone. More importantly a picture can easily be manipulated to express radically different words than what actually happened. The story told by a photo can and often does have no relationship to the event that was captured. For a prime example of why should always question everything you see and hear, especially when it comes from a politician check out these photos and more from DailyKos.
Here is the image that the mainstream media wants you to see
Here is the wider image of the same scene
Go see the page for more angles and other images.
Tonight instead of watching the propaganda piece that ABC/Disney is broadcasting as the story of 9/11, just turn off the TV and go to Google video instead. There you can find a BBC special called the Power of Nightmares. It is in three parts that you can find here, here and here. It tells the parallel stories of Leo Strauss and an Egyptian scholar who led what became the modern radical islamist movement. You can also find it here at Archive.org and also get a DVD iso file that you can download and burn to a dvd to watch on tv.
These stories look at how governments have come to use the power of fear to manipulate their citizens. This is a much more important program than the one on ABC.
Over the last few days I have repeatedly heard the question asked “Where were you on 9/11?” Who the hell cares. If you weren’t there, your location is utterly irrelevant. What happened, happened. Why do people insist on dwelling on such trivial shit? Americans in particular seem to love wallowing in the past. People who where alive at the time still think about where they were when JFK died 43 years ago. It is important to be aware of history and learn lessons about what to do and not to do so you don’t repeat the same mistakes. But it is even more important to live in the present. Replaying the video of past events ad naseum is neither helpful nor productive. It just contributes to the urge to wallow. We all know what happened. We all saw it. Let’s look at what is going on around us today. By watching the past over and over it just feeds the climate of fear. By keeping people afraid, it makes it easier to persuade people to give up their freedoms. The reality is that the chances of being a victim a terrorism are so infinitesimally small that it really isn’t worth being afraid of, not to mention fomenting fear is the whole point. If you live in fear you are more willing to tolerate the government watching you all the time, listening to your private phone calls, make you show your ID all the time. You might be willing to let people in power send your kids off to fight and die in a foreign land for now apparent reason. You might not be able to read or write what you want. You might even tolerate people being arrested and locked away indefinitely without trial or charges.
Hey people! Start living in the present and pay attention to the gutting of the constitution! Take a minute to remember on Monday, but then when the replays come on, turn off the TV and the radio and go for a walk and think about why you want to protect freedom. Then get write or read something that you might not be able to do without freedom. Don’t let politicians convince you to give up freedom to save it. If you give it up now it is already lost.