Neither America nor any other country are Businesses .. We are not electing a CEO

Perhaps this is a sign of the corporatization of American government.  That it's the next step after the Supreme Court's Citizen United ruling saying that Corporations had unlimited ability to spend money in politics, and there was surely a step before that which looked like an egregious example of the corporatization of our Politics and Government.  What I'm concerned about is a tagline attached to Herman Cain's 2012 Presidential campaign, where he is campaigning to become America's CEO.

Perhaps he'll be bowing out of the race later today due to sexual misconduct.  But for the moment let's just ponder this on its face.  The Cain campaign released a video today, an advertising pitching a not-quite-accurate line of reasoning about jobs creation, and featuring Cain saying "I've spent a life time creating jobs, and if you make me Americas CEO…" which just clicked in my mind as WRONG.  So here I am, writing about how WRONG this is.

Countries and Businesses are different animals, and most importantly play different roles and have different goals.  It is wrong to run a Country as if it were a Businesses.

I'm not entirely sure if there is a canonically correct list of attributes of companies versus countries but this list illustrates what I have in mind.  Perhaps a debate is in order about this sort of thing to make it clear what the differences are.

In fact there is a debate related to this - happening via the Occupy protests and some other organizations like Slow Money, Slow Food, Transition Towns, Resilience Circles, and other groups where we the people are gathering with the idea to recreate our society in a way that works for all of us.

Are we going to continue living under the government that was constructed by and serves the elite, or are we going to create a government that is truly our common body of all of us acting as a united whole?

Businesses are:

• Purpose is to be profitable - highest revenue possible
• Current business practice is the "growth at all costs" mantra that's completely unsustainable
• Based on a web of contracts where people make bargains for money that remove their rights --- for example employees sign employment contracts that in part remove their right of free speech, because employees are required to not speak publicly about corporate proprietary knowledge
• Businesses are essentially top-down dictatorships with, for example, Management holding rights to fire people as a threat to keep everyone in line with corporate dictates
• Formed by getting a permit (business license) from a Government

Countries are:

• Purpose is to maintain a piece of land for the betterment of the people living there
• Purpose is to maintain common resources and well-being
• Collects money through fees and taxes
• Does not have shareholders - instead, in effect, governments are in the ideal mutually owned by the people
• Is not expected to maintain a profit - indeed many politicians have claimed that when a government runs a surplus, that's a sign of the government taking too many taxes, and that's a reason for a tax cut (but such tax cuts later cause government deficits leading to government borrowing and government debt causing a wastage of government resources)
• Is not expected to grow faster than the rate of population growth - indeed many politicians decry overly large government (some of whom hypocritically create massive expansions of government)

 

British and American lawyers debate: Was the US Declaration of Independence legal, or not. WTF?

The BBC (British Broadcasting Corp) recently ran a news magazine article about a debate, held at Philadelphia's Ben Franklin Hall, over the legality of the U.S. Declaration of Independence.  Was it legal for America to declare itself independent or not.  It's interesting to think about this in the context of current events with the Arab Spring and now the Occupy Wall Street movements where the population is standing up to demand change.

To start with there can easily be a WTF reaction to there even being a question whether the Declaration of Independence is illegal or not.   (if you don't know what WTF means, you simply don't get out enough)  Let's start there … how could there even be a debate on this.  The U.S. is a fully legal country, recognized as a country everywhere, so how could there be a question that its founding moment was illegal.

The British case against the Declaration of Independence goes thusly: (Is the US Declaration of Independence illegal?)

The Declaration of Independence was not only illegal, but actually treasonable. There is no legal principle then or now to allow a group of citizens to establish their own laws because they want to. What if Texas decided today it wanted to secede from the Union?

Lincoln made the case against secession and he was right. The Declaration of Independence itself, in the absence of any recognised legal basis, had to appeal to "natural law", an undefined concept, and to "self-evident truths", that is to say truths for which no evidence could be provided.

Further they claim the grievances cited by the Founding Fathers were pretty minor things.  That's the British point of view mind you, and while I'm not entirely in agreement it does give interesting food for thought.

If a population has proper grievance against their rulers, what are they to do?  Lodge a complaint with the powers that be?  Vote them out of office come next election?  Run a recall election to boot them out of office right away?  Rise up in mass protest to demonstrate the ruler has no support and should therefore resign?  Pull your guns out of the closet and start fighting?

Those are a number of possible reactions and you can surely think of a few examples of each path.  For example Arnold Schwarzenegger became Governor of California when a group of citizens started a recall effort against Gray Davis, booted Gov. Davis out of office, installing Schwarzenegger in his place.  In Egypt the Mubarak regime was toppled by a mass protest that was relatively peaceful.  However in LIbya the Qaddafi regime required a massive civil war, fighting from city to city, bloodshed, and outside intervention, before the regime fell. (http://politics.7gen.com/2011/10/libya-real-us-drone-war.html and http://politics.7gen.com/2011/10/will-economic-hitmen-undo-political.html)

I suppose from the viewpoint of the leaders of Egypt, the massive protests that ended up toppling the Mubarak government were illegal and perhaps treasonous.  From the viewpoint of the protesters, it was the government that was illegitimate, brutal, dictatorial, and had to go.  Would there have been a "legal" way for the Egyptians to change their government?  Apparently there wasn't because that government rigged the system to disallow any change.

In the case of Libya that leadership promised to crush any its own population who dared defy the regime.  Clearly Qaddafi thought the Libyan protesters (rebels) were illegal and treasonous.  Hence the Libyans who sought change had no choice but to battle for change, because Qaddafi wasn't going to allow peaceful change.

In other words it's all nice and proper to say populations who secede from their rulers are illegal and treasonous, what is a population to do when the rulers in question give no meaningful method for the population to peacefully create change?

Biden announces $5 billion expansion of Advanced Energy Manufacturing Tax Credit « Climate Progress

A $5 billion expansion of clean energy manufacturing tax credits for wind, solar and electric vehicles is exactly what the doctor ordered. Vice President Biden announced today that the $2.3 billion of tax credits currently available under in the ARRA stimulus package’s section 48C Advanced Energy Manufacturing Tax Credit program will be expanded with an additional $5 billion. The additional funds will leverage $15 billion in private investment, work immediately to create new clean energy manufacturing jobs, and boost the America’s competitiveness in global clean tech innovation. This is great news for American workers, manufacturers, and technology developers. The effects on the clean-tech manufacturing sector will be deeper and more systemic than traditional jobs spending. By bringing $15 billion of private capital “off the sidelines,” the program will work to build capacity, experience, and relationships between investors and companies within the US clean-energy manufacturing sector.

Source: http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2009/12/17/205204/biden-announces-5-billion-expansion-of-advanced-energy-manufacturing-tax-credit/

Homeland Security Embarks on Big Brother Programs to Read Our Minds and Emotions | Rights and Liberties | AlterNet

Half-baked Homeland Security is spending millions to develop sensors capable of detecting a person's level of 'malintent' as a counterterrorism tool. The program is right out of the supposedly canceled Total Information Awareness program aka big brother incarnate. The idea is to detect (at a distance) physiological cues of malintent, enabling police to arrest people based on malintent before they can act on it. Conceived as a cutting-edge counter-terrorism tool, the FAST program ("Future Attribute Screening Technologies") will ostensibly detect subjects' bad intentions by monitoring their physiological characteristics, particularly those associated with fear and anxiety. FAST includes include "a remote cardiovascular and respiratory sensor" to measure "heart rate, heart rate variability, respiration rate, and respiratory sinus arrhythmia," and other sensory stuff.

Source: http://www.alternet.org/story/144443/homeland_security_embarks_on_big_brother_programs_to_read_our_minds_and_emotions

Copenhagen climate summit: Gordon Brown says 'future of humanity' at stake - Telegraph

Arriving in Copenhagen, Mr Brown said: "Over the next three days the leaders of almost every nation on earth will gather in Copenhagen. Their role; their opportunity; their responsibility: to shape the future of humanity. It is a defining moment." To win around developing nations who are resisting limits on their carbon emissions, Mr Brown could back a deal for rich countries to give more money. He is now preparing to make Britain pay into another international fund to help poor countries limit the amount of their forests they cut down for logging and agriculture. Increasing Britian’s “green” spending is controversial because of the size of the Government’s deficit. As he arrived in Copenhagen, Mr Brown, painted an apocalyptic picture of the consequences of failure at the summit, saying that the world economy would suffer an unprecedented “catastrophe” if temperatures rise too far.

Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/copenhagen-climate-change-confe/6819390/Copenhagen-climate-summit-Gordon-Brown-says-future-of-humanity-at-stake.html

Is Government Action Worse Than Global Warming? - Reason Magazine

Man-made global warming occurs as a result of burning fossil fuels is a negative externality—a spillover from an economic transaction that harms parties not directly involved in the transaction. In this case, the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere is thought to be boosting temperatures, raising sea levels, and having other effects on the climate that people must adapt to (by using more air conditioning, switching crops, and so forth). Ideally, once the full costs of man-made global warming are calculated, consumers, businesses, governments, and international agencies can adopt policies that take those burdens into account. But, do we have time to wait to figure out all the details of accounting to calculate this to the nth degree? The goal of both approaches is to make polluters pay for the costs they impose on others. But they work only if those costs can be accurately assessed. In the real world things are never so simple.

Source: http://reason.com/archives/2009/09/08/is-government-action-worse-tha

Federal Reserve celebrates 100 years of dominating America

This week is the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Federal Reserve.

It was formed during a meeting held, 100 years ago this week, at Jekyll Island in Georgia. To honor the 100th anniversary they are holding a meeting at the same Jekyll Island resort.

The video below starts at that point but goes on to rant a bit about how the Federal Reserve was invented to enslave the U.S. with a mountain of debt. That may be, or might not be. It is true that the U.S. is saddled with a mountain of debt but it's plausible the debt could be paid off if everyone were to focus on doing so. That is, including the Fed.

The system as it is seems geared to continue the debt situation. The people who make megabucks by loaning money to the federal government will want the current system to continue. The Federal Reserve is the largest entity to be making money by loaning money to the federal government. Clearly they want the current system to continue.

As it stands a huge portion of the national income (taxes etc) is siphoned directly into paying INTEREST on the national debt. When the Bush Administration (both of them) participated in raising huge amounts of debt, this directly benefited the bond holders, the largest of which is the Federal Reserve.

What it means is that a huge portions of our lives are wasted on paying the interest on the national debt. Paying interest on debt does nothing other than enrich the bond holders.

New FTC guidelines on advertising affects bloggers

The U.S. Fair Trade Commission has recently released new rules on advertising that appears in the form of endorsements and testimonials. This is one of those "the times they are a changing" moments given that these guidelines were last updated in 1980, my how the world has changed since then. There are many ways endorsements & testimonials show up which aren't so clearly ethical and the new technologies being developed offer new ways for us to communicate with each other. If the FTC were to remain limited by the old rules written before the Web was invented how would the FTC be able to regulate this new medium?

Let's think a moment about bloggers and endorsements.

Obviously some bloggers spend their blogging time writing about products and either tracking product press releases or doing reviews about products. There's nothing new about that and many magazines revolve around a similar vein of writing.

For decades there has been concern about slanted magazine reviews. That's why the original FTC guidelines came into being, right?

If the principle is "Caveat Emptor" it is up to the customer to decide whether or not to believe a given product review, right? But if payments or freebies provided by the manufacturer are not disclosed then how is the customer to know whether to take the review with a grain of salt? Requiring the reviewer to disclose stuff provided by the manufacturer makes for transparency.

For bloggers the FTC press release has this to say:

The revised Guides also add new examples to illustrate the long standing principle that “material connections” (sometimes payments or free products) between advertisers and endorsers – connections that consumers would not expect – must be disclosed. These examples address what constitutes an endorsement when the message is conveyed by bloggers or other “word-of-mouth” marketers. The revised Guides specify that while decisions will be reached on a case-by-case basis, the post of a blogger who receives cash or in-kind payment to review a product is considered an endorsement. Thus, bloggers who make an endorsement must disclose the material connections they share with the seller of the product or service. Likewise, if a company refers in an advertisement to the findings of a research organization that conducted research sponsored by the company, the advertisement must disclose the connection between the advertiser and the research organization. And a paid endorsement – like any other advertisement – is deceptive if it makes false or misleading claims.

Some examples about online payola:-

Belkin’s Online Review Payola Plot Thickens: "A Belkin employee was recently busted offering payment for positive reviews of a Belkin network router—whether or not the reviewer had even seen one"

NBC Analyst Admits Receiving Tech Payola: About a 2005 "payola scheme by NBC tech analyst Cory Greenberg surfaced Wednesday, in which he was receiving upwards of $15,000 a piece from technology companies to positively promote their products on NBC's Today Show."

Links: 

FTC to bloggers: Fess up or pay up

Links: 

FTC Publishes Final Guides Governing Endorsements, Testimonials

Links: 

FTC Plans to Monitor ‘Blogger Payola’

Links: 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payola

War Is a Government Program

The article claims that many "Conservatives" are claiming "Progressives" (or else those 'damn liberals') are causing political leaders to subordinate military considerations to political control. The article then dives into a long and truly excellent discussion of the appropriate role of political leaders and military leaders.

In the U.S. Constitution it is very clearly stated, that military decisions are subordinated to civilian authority. If one is to value the U.S. Constitution then one should practice what it says.

But, says the article, there is a deeper consideration: "those who make this complaint seem willfully blind to the nature of war. At its most fundamental level, war is no more a military phenomenon than it is a scientific phenomenon. True, militaries fight wars, and military tactics is a meaningful discipline. But war also requires weapons that make use of the principles of physics. Does that mean wars are fundamentally the province of scientists? No, and neither are they fundamentally the province of generals. Wars are political phenomena. You’d think the armchair generals and word-processor pilots would know that. "

Article Reference: 

War Is a Government Program

extvideo: 

City of Bloomington, Indiana, adopts Peak Oil Resolution

City of Bloomington, Indiana, adopts Peak Oil Resolution: On July 19, the Bloomington, Indiana City Council passed a resolution acknowledging That the global peak of petroleum production is “an unprecedented challenge” for society, and recognizes that the city must prepare for its inevitability. Bloomington is the 7th largest city in Indiana, home to Indiana University, and has a population of 70,000 residents plus a 40,000 student population. The resolution supports a global depletion protocol, such as the one drafted by Colin Campbell and Richard Heinberg. ... read more at the link above

U.S. Government to start sending emergency alerts to cell phones

Is the new mantra reach out and frighten someone?

Wireless devices to get emergency alerts: Discusses plans cooked up during the "Cold War" but never used. These plans are that cell phones will become a device to which the government can send warnings of national emergencies.

It does sound useful, doesn't it? If there's an emergency, the government needs to send out instructions. For example where shelters are, escape routes from hurricanes, etc. It would be like the emergency broadcast system on the radio, but more ubiquitous. It's known that people carry their cell phone with them all the time, basically as often as they carry their keys. A warning system that reaches cell phones should be more effective than other kinds of warnings.

But the current administration has a history of sending out frightening messages that have little real content. It seems the current administration wants to frighten the populace rather than inform us.

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.

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.

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.

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".

Our right to privacy, killed by the Bush administration? Or was it inevitable?

It's easy to lay the blame for loss of privacy on the Bush Administration. It is while the Bush Administration was in power when massive privacy invasion by the government was disclosed. While I'm quick to lay blame on the Bush Administration, in this case there's a heavy dose of inevitablity.

Let's consider these articles which make an interesting juxtaposition.

No longer can the right of privacy be expected in any walk of life -- an editorial in a local newspaper in Hagerstown Maryland.

Invasion of privacy must stop -- An editorial in a local newspaper in India

Taking Spying to Higher Level, Agencies Look for More Ways to Mine Data - A New York Times article by John Markoff

The first two take the opinion that we have a "right to privacy". As the Hagerstown editorial mentions, a right to privacy wasn't written into the U.S. Constitution, but that was because the Founders assumed privacy was such an obvious right as "breathing" or "eating" that they didn't bother to discuss it. But little did they have a clue of the sort of technology which would be developed.

The article from India is interesting because of the expression of fear which comes up just with a hint that any of our phone conversations could be tapped.

The NY Times article just demonstrates how the government is continuing to look for more and more surveillance and privacy-destroying tools. It discusses an NSA visit to Silicon Valley looking for data mining tools. Which just makes me think of the Total Information Awareness project.

Data mining is widely used by corporations. For example credit card companies data-mine transactions looking for possibly fraudulent activity. In the article they discuss a prison which used data mining of telephone call records to discover a drug smuggling ring.

The point is technology creates new possibilities. The digitization of "everything" makes privacy invasion so much easier to do. Which gets to the inevitability.

Even if it's inevitable, that doesn't mean "we the people" should just allow it to happen without protest.

RenewableEnergyAccess.com | Alaskan Senator Threatens to Halt Cape Wind Project

The cape wind project intends to install dozens of wind towers off Cape Cod. This project has drawn a ridiculous storm of criticism with "Not In My Back Yard" (NIMBY) style protests from people who normally support ecological initiatives, but call this a blight. er... The huge cities are ecological blights, but how are wind towers a blight?

Alaskan Senator Threatens to Halt Cape Wind Project discusses a proposed ammendment by Alaska Congressman Don Young which would change the buffer requirements around offshore wind tower projects. There's more details in the article, the gist being that the current standard is a 500 foot zone around each wind tower and any shipping lanes. Further the current standard has the Coast Guard reviewing these plans. The proposal arbitrarily sets a 1.5 mile buffer zone, and removes the Coast Guard from review.

Fortunately this is only a proposal to put an ammendment on in committee. But it's a dangerous sort of thinking that's clearly intended to scuttle offshore wind projects.