The Crisis in our Nations Pants

Okaaaay... we have recently had a revelation of a Congressman trying to have sex with the Pages who come to the Capital as youngsters to work in Politics. But this Congressman was hooked on having sex, and being a homosexual Congressman wanted sex with young men. This scandal has been grabbing a whole lotta attention in Washington DC and in the news media. As creepy a story this is, should we be distracted by it from other stories of more importance such as nuclear proliferation?

Jon Stewart (The Daily Show) has a funny bit here on this crisis. And a very illustrative look, through satire, on the real issues facing the country.

Such as the destruction of our liberties and American way of life by the Bush Administration.

I previously wrote a shocked and horrified post about this sex scandal. Today I'm seeing this in a larger perspective. Every so often a bit of news comes along which crashes the real news off the front page, and instead causes a mania about whatever fake news event is being promoted that week.

The real news right now? Congress destroyed Habeas Corpus! The NSA and other government agencies are illegally spying on Americans! The war in Iraq is illegal, was launched under false pretenses, has been continued under false pretenses, and is totally failing! The Taliban are regaining Afghanistan! Pakistan (our supposed ally) was involved with proliferating nuclear technology to North Korea and Iran, both of which countries we are threatening with military action!

All that going on, those extreme failures of the Bush Administration, and we have a sex scandal rocking the boat instead??????

Americas coming robotic army

America's robot army covers the growing number of robotic equipment being deployed or developed for use by the American Military.

The scenario being developed is where Robots replace infrantry troops, where networked surveillance equipment is able to track everything moving in whole cities, etc. Rather than place flesh and blood troops at risk, it will be the machines instead.

One thing that strikes me is this is an utter violation of Azimov's Rules of Robotics. Okay, Azimov was a science fiction writer, so maybe that doesn't give his opinions a lot of weight. But he was prescient enough to see the possibility of self directed robots. As computer power grows, so does the processing capabilities that can be built into a robot, and the greater degree of self autonomy can be programmed into that robot.

At what point does that robot become so autonomous that you can simply shout an order to the robot "Kill the enemy" and the robot is in charge of determining just who the enemy is? We humans have a tough enough time determining who the "enemy" is, that is determining which people on the battlefield should die or live. That's what "collateral damage" is, a failure of adequately determining the proper enemy.

What hope do we have of adequately programming a robot to do this well?

The article also discusses surveillance equipment of scary proportions. Under development is a whole range of small video devices, for example, that can be scattered throughout a city to blanket the city with surveillance. Once a city is blanketed with surveillance equipment, every movement is visible and trackable. Then, Human ID At A Distance is a project which would allow identification of people from that surveillance (HIAAD was part of the Total Information Awareness project).

The article discusses its use in war zones. Suppose it is deployed in the home grown war zone? American cities, that is.

Technology is technology, and it is a matter of the humans who deploy the technology to determine its use.

Re: Fascism: Are we there yet?

At antiwar.com is the question Fascism: Are We There Yet? Hmmm... I suppose if I'd taken more political science courses in college I might have an understanding of the meaning for fascism and totalitarianism but, like Democrat and Republican and Liberal and Conservative, these are just words which, to me, seem more like the name of a team rather than an ideological anything. I'd written before from the quest to understand what fascism is. There's a lot of people who'll declare Bush is a Fascist, but it doesn't seem to me they understand the meaning any better than I do. The Nazi party in Germany was Fascist, but what does that mean?

All that aside, the article linked above does make for an interesting (and alarming) case. There's clearly a growing capability within the U.S. Government to establish ubiquitous screening of all activities. Their justification is to find terrorists, and to find terrorists they'll capture records of all our activities and then deploy a zillion computers to sift through that data to find suspicious patterns.

When the plan was more public it was called Total Information Awareness ... while that project name was canceled and closed by the DoD, the individual projects were continued to be developed. For example document analysis, tracking telephone calls and more. Again the article linked above has other examples of TIA projects continuing onwards.

As he points out - the administration officials promised us they weren't spying on us. They've also said that revealing the existance of surveillance programs would give "the terrorists" too much information. And they promised the wiretapping that was revealed in 2005 was "it", and that the surveillance they were doing was targeted carefully and did not track domestic phone calls. But the most recent program revelation showed those were all lies. The most recently revealed program is tracking all phone calls, even domestic. Why are we not surprised they lied to us again?

The most interesting thing I found through the above linked article is a discussion of totalitarianism: Lecture 10, The Age of Totalitarianism: Stalin and Hitler ... this is part of a series of lectures about history, so it's mostly about events that happened in Eastern Europe and other European countries in the 1900's. There were many regimes during that period with brutal governments, brutal supression of the people, and which are called totalitarian.

What I gather is totalitarianism is a government practice of having total control over the people that are being governed.

Several times in the article it said totalitarianism required sufficiently fancy technology to make total control effective.

As I've discussed in other blog entries, what is enabling a vision like Total Information Awareness is the increasing capability of computer systems.

So, it's worth pondering how it could be that a database of phone calls leads to totalitarianism? The Fascism article makes a claim it does, but to understand what he's getting at lets try and reason it through.

It's clear that by itself a database of phone calls doesn't tell very much. Especially as, supposedly, the database doesn't have peoples names in it, just phone calls. The most you can do with just a list of phone calls is to build up a map of connections between phone numbers based on who is calling whom.

Building up a map of connections between phone numbers is interesting, but without a connection to people it's not terribly useful. You know phone A called phone B, but that carries little information. If you can add to that the names of the caller and callee, that adds a lot of information. If you can record the phone call, that adds even more, especially if you can automatically translate the voices to text.

By the way, one of the projects in the TIA was specifically to automatically translate any voice into text.

With that in hand you have information. Information about connections between people based on the phone calls between them. There are databases showing the owner name for a given telephone number, and since the phone companies are apparently willing to cooperate with the government to give them access to the phone calls being placed, it's not too far a leap to think they might also share with the government the owner names for each phone number.

But, where is the totalitarian control?

I think it gets to the stereotype of the totalitarian regime. That "spies are everywhere", and that there's a file of your activities being kept by the secret police. Except, in this case the ubiquitous spies are being built into the computer equipment that's running our society, and the files are being kept in a database.

I'm pondering away and keep coming back to this: Collecting data is one step. The totalitarian control comes when the government acts on that data.

An example of likely legal U.S. spying inside U.S.

With the recent hubbub over domestic syping by U.S. spy agencies, here's an example that's probably legal.

Spy Agency Watching Americans From Space

The article is about the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.

Their work is described this way:

Geospatial intelligence is the science of combining imagery, such as satellite pictures, to physically depict features or activities happening anywhere on the planet. A part of the Defense Department, the NGA usually operates unnoticed to provide information on nuclear sites, terror camps, troop movements or natural disasters.

...

With help, the agency can also zoom in. Its officials cooperate with private groups, such as hotel security, to get access to footage of a lobby or ballroom. That video can then be linked with mapping and graphical data to help secure events or take action, if a hostage situation or other catastrophe happens.

Privacy advocates wonder how much the agency picks up — and stores. Many are increasingly skeptical of intelligence agencies with recent revelations about the Bush administration's surveillance on phone calls and e-mails.

Among the government's most closely guarded secrets, the quality of pictures NGA receives from classified satellites is believed to far exceed the one-meter resolution available commercially. That means they can take a satellite "snapshot" from high above the atmosphere that is crisply detailed down to one meter level, which is 3.3 feet.

In other words their job is similar to the Google Earth service. But it's likely that, because they're the military, the resolution on their images is much better.

The images available through commercial services are, by law, limited to a resolution of 1 meter. Meaning the smallest object that can be identified is 1 meter in size. So we wonder what their resolution is. For example if you have a habit of having sex in the back yard, the commercial images won't recognize what you're doing, but what about theirs?

The article raises a big question. Just what are they doing spending most of their effort looking inside the U.S. territory? What are they looking for? An obvious use leaps to mind, that this service could help locate marijuana fields and the like. It might also help locate illicit airfields, such as used by drug smugglers.

I expect one strategic service they provide is finding new construction. This would require some fancy image analysis, but with a whole world full of images detecting new construction would be very labor intensive. However a computer, with fancy image analysis, might be able to identify changes between pictures taken at different times. The tricky part of course is the pictures will never be at the same angle or lighting conditions, hence the required fancy image analysis.

My thought is that if "change" is detected in a series of pictures, then a flag could be raised to send those pictures to an analyst for further study. It may be benign, but it may be an illicit nuclear weapons construction facility.

In any case the current hubbub is over domestic spying. Earlier in this I suggested this is probably legal. My reasoning is pictures taken of the outdoors are, by definition, public spaces. A warrant is not required for anybody to take a picture of the outside of a building, nor is one required to take a picture from above. That's all they're doing.

Where it becomes a little tricky is they have made arrangements with building owners to incorporate video from surveillance cameras. Where are those surveillance cameras pointing? Inside or outside buildings? Are they pointing into private spaces or only public ones?

Massive privacy violation by U.S. government

The revelations of privacy violation by the U.S. Government keeps going on. The latest is news that the NSA has a huge database recording the "envelopes" of most telephone calls made in the U.S. This is following the wiretapping scandal from last year, and I see a lot of hubbub in the news.

NSA has massive database of Americans' phone calls USA Today, May 11, 2006

Anger grows over NSA surveillance report C|NET News, May 11, 2006

NSA Sweep "Waste of Time," Analyst Says, DefenseTech.org May 12, 2006

"Every Call Ever Made" in NSA Database DefenseTech.org, May 12, 2006

NSA's data mining explained, CNET News, May 12, 2006

The system in the latest revelation relies on cooperation from the telephone carriers. The telephone carriers worked with the NSA to install equipment in their switching systems, and the equipment extracted certain information from the telephone switching systems, and transmitted that information back to NSA headquarters.

The claim is the data is simply the telephone numbers involved with every phone call. This is known as "envelope" information, as it is akin to the addressing on the outside of an envelope sent through postal mail.

The way I understand this, each individual telephone call doesn't give much information. But by collecting a huge number of phone calls one can build a map of associations between telephone numbers. That is, if person A at phone number N regularly calls person B at phone number Z, that's an association.

Each call sets up a relation between the phone numbers involved in the call.

If, by other means, the spooks have determined that phone number T is used by nefarious individuals, then any phone call to/from that phone number should be of interest to the spooks. Calls to/from that phone number associates the other phone number with those nefarious activities done by the owner of phone number T.

Since the system only records the envelope (supposedly) all phone calls have equal significance. Suppose the nefarious people at phone number T decide to make an innocent phone call? For example someone might come to their door saying "my car broke down, can I call my brother". Now the brother of this innocent bystander has now become associated with the nefarious people. Who knows what method the spooks have for detecting innocent bystanders and weeding them out.

This system is obviously a followon to the Total Information Awareness system. I recorded the status of the TIA back in 2002: DARPA's Information Awareness Office, The Total Information Awareness System; Or, Big Brother in-carnate

It's important to point out that the discovery by the public of the TIA caused a privacy hubbub, which then caused the Congress people to make enough hubbub that the Department of Defense "cancel" the program. What they actually did was cancel a couple of the programs, and then migrate the rest of the programs to other directors.

Among the TIA projects existant in 2002, there are two which are obviously related to this.

Evidence Extraction and Link Discovery (EELD) involved detection of interesting correlations and connections between specific elements in large sets of data. The discussion I wrote above about the relations between telephone numbers by tracking the calls between phone numbers would fit very well with EELD.

Genisys describes a data collection and storage system that would be very useful to EELD.

I think it's very important to interpret this relevation within the larger context. It's clear that the U.S. Government wants a very intrusive system that watches everything that we do. The revelations last year of wiretapping, and the current revelations of collecting the phone numbers of every phone call, these are not isolated incidents.

The prior existence of the Total Information Awareness system tells us what they are interested in. They will not have lost interest in their goal, instead they will have moved the projects around putting them behind cloaks of secrecy and more.

Again I find myself thinking -- is this the world we want to create? Does this match the core values of America? Or is this representing a government that has diverged itself from American values?

I think this is divergent from American values. If this is true, then why are we, Americans, sitting on our hands and not doing anything about this?

UPDATE: William Arkin with the Washington Post just posted Telephone Records are just the Tip of NSA's Iceberg which gives more details of the existing programs being developed by the government. Included in this posting is a list of 500 software tools that have been developed by government agencies for intelligence data gathering and mining.

Of course it makes sense for the government to be employing advanced software tools. As technology advances, shouldn't the government make use of it?

Well, okay. But, the issue is how often are they going to make mistakes, and whether the systems are intrusive or not.

Disease Warning

32% of the population is still "infected" with this new strain of STD....be sure to read the whole msg....

ATLANTA The Center for Disease Control has issued a warning about a new virulent strain of Sexually Transmitted Disease. The disease is contracted through dangerous and high-risk behavior. The disease is called Gonorrhea Lectim and pronounced "gonna re-elect him." Many victims contracted it in 2004, after having been screwed for the past four years.

Cognitive characteristics of individuals infected include: antisocial personality disorders, delusions of grandeur with messianic overtones, extreme cognitive dissonance, inability to incorporate new information, pronounced xenophobia and paranoia, inability to accept responsibility for own actions, cowardice masked by misplaced bravado, uncontrolled facial smirking, ignorance of geography and history, tendencies towards evangelical theocracy, categorical all-or-nothing behavior. Naturalists and epidemiologists are amazed at how this destructive disease originated only a few years ago from a bush found in Texas.

The President ignoring the law?

In his Huffington Post blog, Cenk Uygur writes about The Shadow Government ... that is, he's claiming that President Bush has declared his administration will ignore over 750 of the laws that have been passed during his tenure in office. And further that we know his administration is ignoring FISA, a law passed long before his tenure in office, which raises the question of how many other laws the administration is ignoring.

Because the administration is engaging in wholesale ignoring of the laws of this country, he says the government we think we have governing us doesn't exist. In it's place is a shadow of the government we think we have.

So, what's he talking about? As always it helps to understand the facts behind the story that's being presented. Fortunately in this case we can get to them.

He's pointing to this Boston Globe article: Bush challenges hundreds of laws President cites powers of his office

That article discusses the practice known as "Signing Statement". I don't know how common signing statements were before G.W. Bush, but under Bush they are very common. The signing statement is published at the same time as when a new law is signed by the President. The law that's being signed comes from Congress, as always, but the signing statement comes from the Administration. The signing statements I've seen detail how the Administration will interpret the law the President is signing.

Unlike Cenk Uygur's hype about this, the signing statement does not commit the administration to ignoring the entirity of the law. Instead the signing statements I've seen discuss certain provisions in the law, and detail how that provision will be interpreted.

This might sound like a benign practice. After all, most laws are full of strange legalese and could stand for some interpretation help. But in actuality these signing statements are, in effect, rewriting the intent of the law in drastic ways.

This is one of the examples cited by the Boston Globe article:

March 9: Justice Department officials must give reports to Congress by certain dates on how the FBI is using the USA Patriot Act to search homes and secretly seize papers.

Bush's signing statement: The president can order Justice Department officials to withhold any information from Congress if he decides it could impair national security or executive branch operations.

The actual signing statement is on the whitehouse.gov site and is itself full of legalese. Including that troublematic "unitary executive" phrase.

In any case it's alarming that on the one hand Congress is requiring the Administration to hand over certain information, and the Administration is saying they'll decide what information they'll hand over. This is an administration which has repeatedly picked out select portions of intelligence reports, for example to "justify" the invasion of Iraq when the actual evidence to justify that invasion was nonexistant. Under their signing statement they'll be able to continue cherry-picking the data they send to Congress, to continue puffing out smoke to obscure what they're really doing.

As Cenk Uygur says: Wrong information equals wrong decisions. People can't be blamed if they don't know. It is the job of the press to let them know. The 2006 elections are the last chance to check this imperial presidency. If the press fails our democracy at this critical juncture and the electorate doesn't know what we know by the time they step into that voting booth, we will have done great damage to our country and its principles.

So, if the Administration is free to send select information to Congress, then how is Congress to have a clear picture of what's actually happening in the world? But, there's nothing new here. Wars have been launched before based on falsified evidence, the most infamous being the Gulf of Tonkin incident that led to the Vietnam War.

As I've kept coming to in my blog entries ... is this the country we want? Is this the country we thought we had? If not, then what are we going to do about this?

If we let these events continue without challenging them, then our country of freedom will become another dictatorship.

Building pressure for a world war to secure oil supplies?

What are we fighting in Iraq for? What are we fighting in Afghanistan for? Why are we threatening Iran?

Think it's about ephemeral things such as establishing democracy and freedom? Think again. There are dozens of freedom-hating countries around the world that we don't threaten with our military. Some of those freedom hating countries had their leaders installed by the U.S. We aren't threatening those countries, only the ones in the Middle East.

This article outlines the growing danger of a world war fought to secure oil supplies: A battle for oil could set the world aflame International powers will do everything to protect their access to dwindling resources. We are mad not to have an alternative strategy (Will Hutton, Sunday April 30, 2006, The Observer)

The key piece is twofold. First is the incontrovertible fact that the U.S. and China both have very little domestic oil supplies. What has allowed our modern societies to flourish isn't technology, it's that the technology has cheap energy to drive it. We could have the same dazzling array of technology, but if the energy to drive the technology wasn't available the technology would be useless. And, this is a situation we all may be facing in a few years.

The U.S. imports over 60% of its oil needs. In the 1970's there were two oil embargo crisis, at a time when the U.S. imported only 35% of its oil needs, and which drove the U.S. into a recession. What would happen today if the supply of oil to the U.S. were to dry up?

At the same time China is experiencing rapid economic growth, which is in turn causing rapid growth in its energy demands.

The article discusses China's role in both the Sudan/Darfur fiasco, and the showdown against Iran. In both cases China has made oil deals with the countries in question, and at the same time are expected to veto any UN Security Council actions against those countries. Further, Iran and China have an oil deal, part of which is shipping oil from Iran to China via a pipeline through Central Asia. Such a pipeline is a strategic move that would keep the U.S. from enforcing anything against that oil, because our Navy is useless in reaching Central Asia.

Bush Administration proposes labeling for web sites with sexually explicit content

Attorney General Gonzales is proposing a mandatory labeling requirement for web sites publishing sexually explicit material. A web site operator not labeling their sexually explicit web site would face imprisonment.

See Gonzales calls for mandatory Web labeling law and U.S. attorney general calls for 'reasonable' data retention

This kind of discussion is not new, and the articles above give a history of the previous efforts along these lines. The big bugaboo that has people scared, of course, is will their children accidentally stumble across these sites. I've looked at some of those sites, and the raunch people engage in and look at it simply astonishing. Some of that stuff is clearly not for children, and it's quite possible to stumble across it.

e.g. "A second new crime would threaten with imprisonment Web site operators who mislead visitors about sex with deceptive "words or digital images" in their source code--for instance, a site that might pop up in searches for Barbie dolls or Teletubbies but actually features sexually explicit photographs."

One issue mentioned in the article is concerns by search engines. For example the government might decide to make a law requiring that search engines correctly index sexually explicit sites, and then correctly return results based on the sexually explicitness of the query. But, as the search engines pointed out, it's rather difficult to determine whether something is sexually explicit or not. And, in some cases, the raunchy crowd will reuse innocent words to have raunchy meanings.

The whole issue raises a whole range of freedom of speech considerations.

The people who publish and read/view the raunchy material certainly have a right to do so. That's called freedom of speech, but there's a principle I heard a few years ago that's very apropos. Your freedom to swing your fists stops at my nose.

Should their freedom to publish raunch stop somewhere before it reaches childrens eyes?

But, wait, there's more ..

For example, how can this preserve the right of medical researchers to discuss Breast Cancer?

For example, the Dirty Old Mens Association Intermational (DOMAI) exists to publish photographs of naked women. You might think, oh, they'll fall directly into this sexually explicit category. But, I challenge you to look through their site and find sexual explicitness. The purpose for that site is the celebration of beauty, specifically the beauty of the feminine form. They don't publish sexual pictures, but instead the pictures are of naked women in their beauty. Often the sexually explicit pictures are, to my eye, very degrading as it presents a naked woman purely as a sexual object. On the DOMAI site their pictures are very affirming of beauty and femininity.

I will say the proposed law is interesting by explicitly naming the kind of content which must be labeled.

In the past there was always a question over whether something is, or is not, pornographic. Like I said about the DOMAI site, there's a long tradition of non-pornographic artwork depicting naked women as beauty.

They are borrowing definitions from existing federal law: sexual intercourse of all types; bestiality; masturbation; sadistic or masochistic abuse; or lascivious exhibition of the genitals or pubic area of any person. Clearly those categories are easy to verify and enforce, unlike prior standards which.

The second article linked above is a little more chilling. It concerns requirements proposed to be placed on "internet service providers" requiring that "data" be retained for 90 days. They are claiming that the "failure" of ISP's to retain data is hampering investigations into criminal activity, including "gruesome sex crimes".

This may be very innocent and above board, but it also may be coming from the existing government plans to create a ubiquitous spying apparatus akin to Big Brother.

Again, there is a privacy consideration. In this case the "data" is our activities on various web sites, email we send and receive, even chatroom transcripts. The requirement is for that "data" to be retained, so that it can be handed over to government investigators.

Hurm...

"You can be a victor without having victims"

"You can be a victor without having victims" is what surfaced in my fortune cookie today. This presents an odd conundrum.

To be the victor, well, that implies "winning". Whenever you "win" that means someone else "lost". At least that's how it typically goes.

My first pondering about this goes ... can you be a victor without being the "winner"? Let's set aside the question of whether winning means there's a loser, and the loser has to be a victim.

What's come to mind is a way of being strong, of having power, but not using that power or strength to dominate others. That's a way of living I've been exploring for awhile. It's very clear this is a different way of having power than typical.

The stereotype for a powerful person is one who easily dominates or kills their opponents, and revels in the strength. But it seems to me the standing warrior pose, to pick an example, is meant to train one in a different kind of strength/power.

The standing warrior pose is all about presencing yourself right here, right now, being you in this moment in all that means to be you. This presencing of yourself is the you which cannot be destroyed. It's the you which can withstand the crashing of ocean waves and not be moved.

If you cannot be defeated, aren't you a victor?

Which gets us back to the other half of this. If you are a victor, does that make someone into a loser/victim?

So, if you cannot be defeated, and your victorhood came through not being defeated, then what happens to the person who wanted to defeat you? It seems they would not have been vanquished, because all you did was to be the part of yourself that you cannot be defeated. Being undefeated does not require that the other lose.

Being undefeated simply means you weren't defeated. No victims or losers are needed in this picture.

The coming world oil disruptions

I was in my young teens in the early 1970's when the oil embargo was used against the U.S. In the second oil embargo I was in college. Those two events really affected me and is what's driving me today to study energy supplies.

Stanford EMF: 80% Probability of Major Oil Disruption in Next Ten Years covers a study done by Hillard Huntington, Executive Director Energy Modeling Forum (EMF), Stanford University, which discusses the probabilities of another oil disruption.

Thinking about it now, this shouldn't be surprising. For example we are threatening Iran right now which could easily turn into a major oil disruption. And generally speaking, OPEC did it before (staging oil disruptions) so why wouldn't they do it again?

The thing that's really alarming is what the effect would be.

In the 1970's the recessions we had then were likely triggered by the oil embargo's. Those oil embargo's caused the price of oil to rise pretty high. Remember Carter's Windfall Profits Tax? President Enron nor Vice President Halliburton nor Secretary of State Chevron are likely to push for such a tax, but we have the same conditions today that occurred in the 1970's that prompted that tax.

In the 1970's the U.S. imported 35% of its' oil needs. Today we import 70% of our oil needs. If there were another oil disruption today, the effect on the U.S. would be far more dramatic than the effect in the 1970's.

Should Donald Rumsfeld be charged with Genocide alongside Saddam Hussein?

Will Any Americans Be Charged As Accomplices in Saddam's Genocide Trial? raises an interesting point. Saddam Hussein has been charged for Genocide based on stuff done in the early 1980's. At that time the U.S. government was actively supporting the Iraq government, U.S. officials knew all about the Iraqi use of chemical weapons, the U.S. officials knew Iraq was violating the treaty against chemical weapon use, and despite that those same U.S. officials continued supplying money, armaments, intelligence, etc in Iraq's war against Iran.

That makes Rumsfeld just as culpable in the "Genocide" as is Hussein.

Or, that's what the article says. Like I said, that's an interesting thought.

Utopia? Maybe...

I just listened to an National Public Radio piece that presents one mans concept of utopia. Namely, individuals or small scale organizations working on small scale work projects.

The guy is a University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds, also happens to oversee a blog, a music label and a microbrewery. He's written a book An Army of Davids : How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths, which I haven't read. But I am living what he's talking about, so with that let me write a few things.

In the NPR piece the situation is described thusly.

Up until the Industrial Revolution humans did most things on a small scale. A few people running a farm, or running a mill, etc. These were very human scaled organizations, he claims.

Then the Industrial Revolution happened and suddenly the scale of organizations had to expand dramatically. A cost effective factory for that time was huge, and employed thousands of people. To go along with it was the rise of huge corporations.

But, today, technology has come full circle to being able to enable individuals to work on small scale organizations.

An example is what I do with my web sites. I have a "day job" in a large corporation, but I also am a web site publisher and earn a tidy side income at that. Additionally I see a way to totally divorce myself from the large corporation, and instead operate several small operations each of which would provide part of my income.

In the interview they gave some more examples.

For example all the people making a living (partial or not) via sales through eBay.COM. He exemplified eBay as a wave of future business style. Another example was someone making custom guitars at home, and he uses eMachineShop.com for parts production.

The way eBay makes their money is through taking advantage of others doing what they want to do. This is drastically different from the large corporate style organization, where the organization exists to tell thousands of people what to do. There are dozens of companies making money through enabling others to do what they want. Google, for example, makes a lot of money from individuals like me who run AdSense advertising on their web sites.

I think, though, he's selling a bit of a pipe dream.

These individuals making their small organizations are riding on the back of some very large organizations. An individual selling stuff through eBay is absolutely dependant on eBay, as well as the package delivery industry (FedEx, UPS, DHL, etc). These are all very large companies who operate in the top-down style of telling their employees what to do.

Let's take another example. Suppose you have a great salsa recipe and you want to make and sell salsa. Go to any farmers market and you'll find several people living a similar dream. It's relatively simple, you need to pass health inspections, be able to operate a healthy kitchen and production facility, find FDA certified packaging, get a FDA certified label made showing the ingredients, etc. One could launch a salsa business with a small group of people, and then go to farmers markets or local Whole Foods stores to sell your product. If you keep working at it, you might eventually have national distribution and so on.

But, let's get back to the beginning. Where does your packaging come from? Are you going to make the packaging, or are you going to buy that? How big is the company who makes the packaging? Where do you buy the ingredients? The local farmer, or from an agribusiness?

What I'm getting at is that this utopia Glenn Reynolds holds out in front of us won't be there for all of us. Some of us will have to work in large organizations like UPS so that others of us can run our humanely-sized home businesses. And that's probably okay, because not everybody is inspired to do this. Many people seem content to go to work and be told what to do with their lives. If that's what they want to do, then more power to them.

UAV's coming to the U.S. for more spying on U.S. Citizens

Okay, that's possibly the most alarmist title I could have chosen. But this is what the government is moving to doing.

What's a UAV? Unmanned Air Vehicle, a.k.a. Drone. They are being used widely in Iraq and Afghanistan against "the terrorists". There's pointers to various articles at the end of this. This has been a long time coming, and it clearly fits into the general government strategy to install broad surveillance.

My first thought is -- the C|NET and AOPA articles (linked below) are only looking at regulatory issues. One example is a tiny surveillance aircraft, that weighs all of 14 pounds, and was used to buzz a couple biker rallies in North Carolina. A point in one of the articles is that an airplane hitting a bird causes a lot of damage to the aircraft (and kills the bird), so what would this thing, at 14 lbs weighing much more than the typical bird, do to an aircraft? These things don't carry transponders, so how are pilots going to detect them and avoid running into them? They are unmanned, and so won't have an in-built ability to avoid other aircraft.

So, yeah, there's some clear air safety considerations. The AOPA is doing their job in raising those concerns.

But, that's as far as they're going. I get the impression that if the FAA enforces some set of rules against UAV's the AOPA will be happy. But what about the rest of us, the ones who are going to be spied upon?

On the one hand the government and industry representatives are portraying this as being used for border security. Again, the danger of terrorists lurking in every corner ready to kill us if we don't deploy eternal vigilance. But on the other hand these were used to monitor a biker rally. It was used to watch for "unruly behavior". Yeah, you can expect "unruly" behavior at a biker rally alright, but does that warrant spying on the people?

It seems that yet again I'm coming up with the same question that's turned up before.

Technology is giving us more and more capabilities. But is the world that's being created around us the one we want to live in?

Is the technology getting away from us and creating a monster that will be difficult to reign in?

Resources and articles

Drone aircraft may prowl U.S. skies discusses regulatory concerns about the depoloyment of UAV's in the U.S. for border surveillance, detection of marijuana crops, and buzzing biker rallies.

AOPA acts to keep unregulated UAV operation out of navigable airspace and AOPA questions FAA's 'stealthy' UAV TFR on Mexican border discussing actions by the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association to cause the FAA to review UAV usage for safety considerations.

Electric airplane (UAV) stays aloft for 48 hours and High Altitude Long Endurance (HALE) - 'Eternal Planes' to watch over us and Aerovironment tests a hydrogen powered airplane -- my previous UAV coverage.

Not Optional - a nice rant about the oil situation

Not Optional by Jim Kunstler with Clusterfuck Nation is right on the money, so far as I can see. Enjoy -- warning, it gets a little ranty.

The topic he's writing on is collective blindness on several angles. For example, how can the people really believe we can just pull out of this misbegotten war in Iraq. Regardless of how illegal that war is, we started a total mess there and pulling out now would only make matters worse.

The other blindness is about oil. The war is for oil, despite the protestations of the Administration. The Bush Administration has taken lying to the public to a fine art, and for that I must applaud them.

It's about oil because Iraq has a huge chunk of it, and the U.S. has very little. In order to keep our standard of living, which is one of the meme's the Bush Administration keeps mouthing, we must grab the oil wherever it is.

The problem is this is a fools quest. There's not that much oil left in the world anyway, and there are plenty of alternatives. The better route is to invest in alternative energy research in a big way. Not these piddly little bits here and there the Administration has been throwing out to keep the environmentalists happy. There's a real problem here, and with the direction the Bush Administration is leading the country the only result is a kind of world described in the Mad Max movies.

Theocracy in America, an "Unholy Alliance"?

Kevin Phillips is one of the political operatives who helped bring the Republicans into power in the 1960's and 1970's. He's billed as a Republican Strategist, and eventually worked in the Reagan White House. With that as background we have a very interesting book from him, warning of the danger of the neo-Theocracy we find ourselves with today in the United States.

Here's some resources:

American Theocracy : The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21stCentury

Interview with Democracy Now, March 21, 2006

The Unholy Alliance Kevin Phillips believes the U.S. is threatened by a combination of petroleum, preachers and debt

This gives a sense of where the book is going:

AMY GOODMAN: Kevin Phillips, you talk about radical religion, about debt, and about oil, about this being an oil war. You also talk about peak oil. That's not talked about very much in the mainstream. Explain.

KEVIN PHILLIPS: The peak oil idea is that just as the United States oil production peaked in 1971, that we have a limited amount of oil globally, and that it’s something that can't be re-created. It’s running out. And the expectation of some is that the oil production of the non-OPEC countries will peak at some point during the 2010s, and that then the production of OPEC itself will peak in the 2020s or 2030s. Now, some people think that Saudi production has already peaked.

Now, if you believe this, and it’s possible, then we face an enormous convergence, again under specific oil-related circumstances, of a global struggle for natural resources as the price of oil climbs, as we turn the armed services into a global oil protection service, which has been happening, and as we see the administration refuse to grapple with the need to really curb oil consumption in the United States, which is mostly through transportation and especially motor vehicles.

And I just have a sense, as many others on the conservative side do, this administration has no strategy to deal with these converging problems, be they foreign policy, military, oil, debt. They are like the three little monkeys on the old jade thing – the one sees no evil, one speaks no evil, and one hears no evil. Do they know anything? You know, that's an open question.

But, it just goes on and on. Such as an assertion that: "that the Bush electorate is probably 50 to 55% people who believe in Armageddon and probably more or less the same numbers who believe that the Antichrist is already on earth. And when you have this backdrop and you have a president who got his start in national politics as his father’s liaison with the religious right back in 1987 and ‘88, you just have an enormous exposure to this whole psychological context and an awareness on the part of people in the White House that this huge constituency interprets the Middle East in this very unusual way."

Archbishop of Canturbury backs evolution over creationism

Archbishop of Canterbury backs evolution ... Apparently the Intelligent Design quandry has been raised in England as well as here in the U.S. I shouldn't be surprised since it's clear the political strategists behind this are international in scope. In any case it's interesting how Pope John Paul II, Pope Benedict XVI, and Dr Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canturbury, have all announced that it's a mistake to teach creationism in schools, and how we should accept evolution into religious peoples view of the world.

The Intelligent Design crowd are fundamentalists who seem to be at odds with leading religious figures. Hmmmm.... Interesting.

Here's the Guardian article: Archbishop: stop teaching creationism ...or...

"I think creationism is ... a kind of category mistake, as if the Bible were a theory like other theories ... if creationism is presented as a stark alternative theory alongside other theories I think there's just been a jarring of categories ... My worry is creationism can end up reducing the doctrine of creation rather than enhancing it," he said.
The debate over creationism or its slightly more sophisticated offshoot, so-called "intelligent design" (ID) which argues that creation is so complex that an intelligent - religious - force must have directed it, has provoked divisions in Britain but nothing like the vehemence or politicisation of the debate in the US. There, under pressure from the religious right, some states are considering giving ID equal prominence to Darwinism, the generally scientifically accepted account of the evolution of species. Most scientists believe that ID is little more than an attempt to smuggle fundamentalist Christianity into science teaching.

It's clear these religious leaders aren't saying to ignore the Creation story and only look at Science and Evolution. The Archbishop's words seem to center on guarding the specialness of the Biblical Creation story.

In my eye the story isn't as simple as Evolution is superior over Intelligent Design. And, for that matter, its disturbing that the Archbishop seems to be saying we shouldn't be questioning or debating the validity of the Creation story.

First, consider this: Establishing control over a society ... the gist is that religion is easily be used to control the beliefs of society. The Intelligent Design debate is precisely an example of religious claims being pushed by political operatives to establish some control over society. And, further, it's an example of the people in society being expected to suspend their power of critical thought just because their church tells them to do so.

Why shouldn't the claims of religion be tested? We have the power of critical thought. We have the power of independant reasoning. Why not examine spiritual practices, experiences and beliefs?
Okay, one problem with that leaps immediately to mind. Scientists have regularly tried to test religion and ended up bashing religion, largely because they're testing it in the wrong way. Religious folk are expected to lean on "faith" and to not ask questions, leading to a dependency on something other than rational critical thought for making decisions. Scientists, on the other hand, are expected to trust only logic and equations and critical thinking, and to distrust subjective experience.

The problem is the nature of the religious claims. God is said to be something which created the universe and everything within it. God is said to be everywhere. How can a scientist hope to measure such a claim? The proof of God comes from subjective experience, the thing scientists are taught to distrust.

For example, when you pray what happens? Do you feel good when you pray? Most do. Is that a subconscious thing firing off some brain chemicals, and that because you believe God is helping you feel nice when you pray, therefore the chemicals your subconscious fires off will help you feel good? Or is there a divine presence that reaches inside you?

What about miraculous healing? What about prayer for someone who's sick? It's been shown in several studies (double-blind etc) that intercessionary prayer helps the ones who are prayed for.
It seems to me the critical mind, the dependence on logic, can easily go too far. And that the dependence on logic interferes with subjective experience. That the way to experiment with the divine is to operate with both subjective experience, and the critical mind. Subjective experience is not to be pushed away but to be embraced. Just as we are wired for the critical mind so are we wired for subjective experience.

Hmmm... I seem to have strayed from Intelligent Design versus Evolution. Sorry....

Establishing control over a society

I want to share a realization that recently came to me. It is a way of establishing control over a society, allowing you to bend them to your will. However in practice this will take generations to really lodge into society, so you probably won't have direct benefit but your heirs will.

Step 1: Beg, borrow, steal or forge a set of spiritual writings

Step 2: Present those writings as the Word of God

Step 3: Present the writings as being the infallible source of truth

Step 4: Appoint a group of people as the official interpreters of Gods Infallible Words as written in those writings

It helps to have an authentic spiritual guru deliver the writings you are going to start with. That's not an absolute requirement. The other steps serve to separate the individuals in the society from their own authentic ability to determine the truth.

The other steps make it so Truth is determined only from the spiritual writings, and that Truth is so difficult to understand that only the select anointed ones can tell what's right or wrong. Hence when someone has a question, they won't be able to answer it for themselves but instead have to turn to the official interpreters of Gods Infallible Words to tell them the truth.

Once the official interpreters of Gods Infallible Words are established with credibility, then can claim literally any idea as being Gods Infallible Truth. Of course this assumes the official interpreters become corrupt, and no longer be serious students of spiritual truth.

In the ideal the priesthood's role is to explore the divine and to have the freedom to devote their lives to authentic spiritual practice. But we can think of dozens of religions throughout history where it began as an authentic spiritual practice, then devolved into corruption and power mongering.

I believe we all have access to divine truth. There are many spiritual teachings which say so, and which say we can look within for the divine truth. They tend to encourage us to explore and experiment for ourselves divine truth. In my experience the confidence this gives is stronger than "faith".

Inside the US's regime-change school

For a couple years the Bush Administration has been rattling war against Iran (and Syria). (see here, here, here, and background material for the Iraq war for some of my previous coverage).

The justification is said to be Iran's plan to build out nuclear weapons ability. Except Iran says their plans are for peaceful nuclear power production, just for electricity. And, in any case, Iran is a Non Proliferation Treaty signatory and apparently they haven't done anything to violate that treaty. It's more than a little contradictory that on the one hand we are threatening Iran, who has yet to violate the NPT, while we are making a broad deal with India to support their nuclear power program, and India has never signed on to the NPT and is known to have (today) nuclear weapons.

Logic has never been a strong suit of the Bush Administration. And given their clear goal of toppling Iran after toppling Iraq we shouldn't be surprised to have them invent some kind of justification for launching a new war.

Inside the US's regime-change school offers an interesting glimpse into a "regime change school". It's clear to me the article isn't highly verifiable, instead it's an account of one person who "accidentally" attended a secretive U.S. backed program to train activists in methods that can be used to topple a government.

The "school" was a week-long session held at a Holiday Inn in Dubai. Sessions were led by members of the Otpor democratic movement that overthrew the late Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic in 2000. And, given the secretive nature of the "school" the hotel advertised them as "Griffin Hospital".

In class, the Serbian instructors organized role-playing games in which the participants would assume the personas of characters such an Iranian woman or a Shi'ite cleric. Throughout these exercises in empathy and psychology, stress was laid on the importance of ridiculing the political elite as an effective tool of demythologizing them in the eyes of the people.

"They taught us what methods they used in Serbia to bring down Milosevic," Nilofar said. "They taught us some of them so we could choose the best one to bring down the regime, but they didn't mention directly bringing down the regime - they just taught us what they had done in their own country."

Hurm... your tax dollars at work, I suppose.

Later in the article Nilofar described the activists as mahrum, a Farsi word for deprived. Apparently the ones inside Iran most clamoring for change are "lower-class families who have been deprived of everything and now they've decided to overthrow the government".

A meditation on the speed limit

Who was it that sang "I can't drive 55"? A Meditation On the Speed Limit is a project launched by a group of college students who wanted to prove 55 is a ridiculous speed limit.

I like this because I myself do the same thing, which is to drive the speed limit regardless of what speed the nutballs behind me want to drive. They are in Atlanta, and did this on the perimeter highway, getting four cars together to cooperatively drive the speed limit. And by cooperatively driving the speed limit, they could block all lanes and keep everybody at the speed limit. And, they filmed everything posting the result to the web.

They wanted to prove 55 is a ridiculous limit, but for me I think highway speeds are ridiculously fast. My thought is that at highway speeds death can come very quickly. Which just shows I'm in a different place than they are.

What was astonishing (well, not really) is the offensive reaction they got and the dangerous driving others got into. Apparently american drivers are addicted to driving fast on the highway. Watch the video for more details.