BlackOut — SOPA’s Choice
Filed Under Bullshit, Orwellian, Technology | 1 Comment
(Illustration found here).
Today is a kind of watershed moment when the Internets respond to attempts to censor shit by banging down the back door, but a load of ‘Net peoples have chosen instead to go black.
Daily Kos has an action line to protest the twin online-control orbs SOPA ‘Stop Online Piracy Act,’ (US House) and PIPA ‘Protect Intellectual Property Act” (US Senate), which reportedly are designed to shut down access to overseas websites that traffic in stolen content or counterfeit goods, but like a lot of other surveillance-state-of-affairs, there’s more than just bullshit flying.
Copyright law can be a step away from censorship: “Like many other tech companies, we believe that there are smart, targeted ways to shut down foreign rogue websites without asking U.S. companies to censor the Internet,” a Google spokeswoman told Reuters on Monday.
And today (Wednesday) Google has a black band over its name on its search site, and Wikipedia leads to a Gothic-looking spot which proclaims “Imagine A World Without Free Knowledge,” in protest of the upcoming Congressional bills.
Along with Wiki, Reddit and Boing Boing, among others were also going black for awhile to protest.
Even HuffPost had a huge, black box at the top of his home page (where a photo/headline usually appears) early Wednesday, and supplies a factoid page here.
All authority hates freedom — one wonders how the popular uprisings in the Middle East, even the Occupy movement here in the US would fare under these laws, and how would freedom really be effected because as it is now, the real freedom is in the ability to get the truth out there.
Even in the most totalitarian regimes on earth, a little iPhone camera can change the outlook of the whole, entire world — in a real sense, currently there can’t be a total news black out and we need to keep it that way.
An understanding via the LA Times:
Sascha Meinrath, director of the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Initiative, said the bills set “a horrendous precedent globally” and that much of the content users put online — such as open publishing, crowd-sourced information gathering or comments sections — could all become “incredibly dangerous” if the bills passed.
“We would end up in a situation where we’re trying to do needlepoint with harpoons,” he said.
“You can’t target only pirated information, content or media without getting tons of collateral damage that removes entirely legal content.”
As a screenwriter, East Hollywood resident Steven Darancette, 40, uses Wikipedia often for background information. But he isn’t too concerned about the website going dark Wednesday, saying he supports the protest.
“If I need to get research, I’ll just Google,” he said.
“There are also these things called books.”
The way-big problem, though, is once that door is opened, then locked back again by SOPA/PIPA there’s no going back, the freedom of pure communication will be lost in an Orwellian influenced society, and that ain’t good at all.
Floating Dreams
Filed Under Cloud gazing, Everything, Musings | Leave a Comment
Modern life isn’t what we figured a generation ago.
The world is way-more high-strung, more anxiety-filled and dangerous.
Just yesterday a couple of horrible tragedies — in Texas seven people were found shot to death in an apartment: The seven, believed to be related, were apparently in the process of opening Christmas gifts or had just finished doing so in the apartment’s living room area, said Grapevine police Sgt. Robert Eberling.
One of those dead is believed to be the shooter.
Meanwhile, in Connecticut a woman lost her parents and children in a house fire: “It is a terrible, terrible day,” Mayor Michael Pavia told reporters at the scene of the fire. “There probably has not been a worse Christmas day in the city of Stamford.”
(Illustration found here).
Some bad things are worse than others, but as the world continues to construct its own coffin, the news in the immediate future won’t be pretty.
Maybe its the high-level ability to communicate anything really quickly — there’s no hush, hush any more, not for any length of time any way, and the pulse of life will only quicken as the days grow shorter, quicker.
Technology might have made it too easy to fail.
And be driven crazy.
From the San Francisco Chronicle:
A 1-year-old boy survived on Christmas after being thrown out of a second-floor window in San Jose by his mother, who then leaped out after him, police said.
…
Baby and mother were rushed to Santa Clara Valley Medical Center.
The baby, whose name is being withheld, is in fair condition in the pediatrics unit where doctors are checking for possible brain injury, said Donna Etchell, a nursing supervisor.
He is expected to survive.
…
“We are exploring the possibility that she does have some mental health issues,” he (Sgt. Jason Dwyer, a police spokesman) said.
“It’s not something we can talk about at length, but we do believe that did have something to do with the motive and why she took the actions that she took today.”
…
“Everybody’s going to put their heads together and try to figure out the best thing to do,” he said.
“It’s not the kind of call we want to go to ever, especially on Christmas Day.”
Or maybe any other day.
Close with Mark Twain: Truth is mighty and will prevail. There is nothing the matter with this, except that it ain’t so.
Not by humans, anyway.
Happy Monday!
Monday Time
Filed Under Cloud gazing, Economy, Health | Leave a Comment
Yesterday, all US peoples — with the exception of peoples in Hawaii or Arizona, and maybe some parts of Indiana — lived through another piece of worthless tradition that really doesn’t do anything other than aggravate.
Mankind has been living via daylight since forever, up at sunrise, down at sunset and work like a mad bull in between.
Once we started burning coal in machines, however, clock-shit hit the time-fan.
A good, good-night’s sleep for hundreds of years: Agrarian cultures built their societies around sunlight, waking up with the sun to toil in the field and heading home as the sun lowered beneath the horizon. But the industrial revolution brought with it the freedom to unshackle us from nature’s clock.
Now madness.
Early Monday morning here on California’s north coast, bright and clear, and cold.
Rained all weekend, but cleared yesterday evening and now we’re in for a couple of nice days and then back to rain again.
Daylight Saving Time is another attempt by mankind to have complete control of his/her environment, but no one turns their back on nature, it rules the show.
One of the biggest problems facing life in 2011 is the arrogance of man.
This morning it’s hard to focus.
Arduous to even type, much less filter a topic to run with and express facts and whatnot.
During the weekend news stuff kept happening, people did shit, some of it real dumb and events kept creating ripples in all kinds of different directions without a plan, without a scheme.
Big news on the CBS News early loop is the horror at Penn State — none of the reporting indicated this Sandusky guy was even married, children, or nothing.
If he wasn’t married, and at his age, there’s a clue, sherlock.
A sick-ass news story to start the week (although the story broke on Saturday).
Then there’s the protest at the White House yesterday on President Obama’s upcoming decision regarding that literal snake in the grass, the Keystone XL pipeline, but no matter what the public feels like, Obama will decide as he has the last three years — on the side of the 1 percent.
So mega-depressing to have follow the very-worst president in US history by one so, so disappointing and so useless in the long run — people shouldn’t vote for him ever again, but wait!
Who to vote for then?
The entire GOP presidential field is bat-shit crazy, and really don’t give a shit — as witnessed by Herman Cain’s coasting uphill even after all the sexual-harassment issues.
Neither Cain nor GOP voters seem to care — or the media, especially after that Cain slap-down Saturday, which in days of yore would have made every journalist worth his salt go after the guy tooth and nail.
Nowadays, though, he’s a star on ‘Meet the Gregory.’
Planet earth and all its inhabitants are in a most-terrible fix.
And who the livin’ f*ck gives a fat-goat’s ass to what happens to this Kim Kardashian?
Via Emily Dickinson’s ‘A Clock Stopped‘
A clock stopped — not the mantel’s
Geneva’s farthest skill
Can’t put the puppet bowing
That just now dangled still.An awe came on the trinket!
The figures hunched with pain,
Then quivered out of decimals
Into degreeless noon.It will not stir for doctors,
This pendulum of snow;
The shopman importunes it,
While cool, concernless NoNods from the gilded pointers,
Nods from seconds slim,
Decades of arrogance between
The dial life and him.
Good Monday, to ya!
Flogging the News Biz
Filed Under Media | Leave a Comment
Not only do politicians spew forth much bullshit, the organization that’s supposed to separate shit from bull is itself full of crap.
US peoples don’t trust journalism:
Only one-quarter of those surveyed say news orgs get the facts right, a new low since 1985 when the question was first asked.
Two-thirds (66 percent) say stories are often inaccurate, a new high.
And nearly three-quarters of Americans believe that journalists try to cover up their mistakes, rather than admit them.
(Illustration found here).
Also in the Pew Research survey: …and 80 percent say news organizations are often influenced by powerful people and organizations.
And local news are trusted more than those national organizations — 69 percent vs 59 percent.
No wonder the US (and the world) is going to shit in a wire basket — much better information, and less biased information can be gathered from the foreign press, at least from what I’ve gathered.
In an example from The Daily Howler on the execution of Troy Davis last week — no real details on evidence were presented by anybody, including the fabled Gray Lady:
The headline on Wednesday’s editorial called the impending execution “a grievous wrong.”
Among other things, you read this:NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL (9/21/11): Seven of nine witnesses against Mr. Davis recanted after trial.
Six said the police threatened them if they did not identify Mr. Davis.
The man who first told the police that Mr. Davis was the shooter later confessed to the crime.
There are other reasons to doubt Mr. Davis’s guilt: There was no physical evidence linking him to the crime introduced at trial, and new ballistics evidence broke the link between him and a previous shooting that provided the motive for his conviction.Say what? The man who first told the police that Mr. Davis was the shooter later confessed to the crime? And Davis was executed anyway?
What happened to the guy who confessed? The editors didn’t say.
Some mess there.
A mega-major problem is media attention span.
Firedoglake on Sunday looked at the nearly-unreported dust-up on Wall Street last week via an interview with Paul Weiskel, a photographer who has been taking photos of the occupation.
Weiskel talks reality:
They had to continually bring in more people and towards the end I honestly felt like it was very close to a police state.
I’ve been very hesitant to say the phrase “police brutality” because we don’t live in Syria.
We don’t deal with that type of police repression but today the New York Police Department did violently crack down on peaceful protesters, who definitely have legitimate claims, and I was flat out disgusted.
And the media interest tends to be non-so-called professionals:
I think with the increase in technology the ability to exchange this news, what’s going on, is pretty much equal if you look at the quality of video coming out, if you look at the quality of pictures coming out—if I could say that.
The main difference is the audience that you have.
There were a lot of tweets saying that right now CNN is running a segment on have dating rules changed in the best decade while people are getting pepper sprayed and beaten by cops on street corners in New York. So, it is a very orchestrated blackout by the media but once we get the audience they’re going to see the images and they’re going to be very high quality and very thought-provoking images.
And black outs?
One must remember that if the national media don’t want you to know something, you won’t know it.
Case in big point: In 2008 the New York Times ran a massive expose on those TV “military analysts” who gave most-wonderful commentary in the opening days of the Iraqi war and how they were in fact on the payroll of the Pentagon in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance.
The NYT even won a Pulitzer Prize for the story, but a vast, huge chunk of US peoples haven’t a clue — the TV news outlets, CNN, ABC, NBC, Fox, etc., all blacked out the story — and the only news report on the expose was a segment on PBS.
In the mid 1970s when I started at the Montgomery Advertiser in Montgomery, Alabama, right out of J-school into the entry-level slot of police reporter, journalism was in its golden age buzz.
On the strength of Watergate, us news room types were a proud bunch as we thought what were doing was not only the neatest job in the whole-wide world, but we were there for the public’s right to know and understand.
That was way-long ago and really far, far away.
Goin’ on Holiday
Filed Under Cloud gazing | Leave a Comment
Today starts the first official vacation I’ve had in years — the last a near-decade ago while working for a newspaper — and the feeling is already weird.
I’ll not be posting again until most-likely next weekend as this ‘vacation‘ is the first time I’ve been disconnected from the online world for any length of time for nearly four years.
And how will I feed my news and info addiction — smoking more cigarettes, how else?
(Illustration found here).
In the reckoning of things, this is a massive news cycle I’m leaving for awhile as everything is hitting the fan, from the US and world economies, to weather, to war, and even a well-received revival of the ‘Ape’ movies.
The news will just have to cease for at least five days.
I’m traveling via AmTrak to central California to visit with three of my daughters — one coming from Tennessee — and hopefully it should be a good time had by all.
And to the scant handful of peoples who visit this site on any kind of regular basis — please don’t forget me.
Have an awesome week!