AT&T willing to spy for NSA, MPAA, and RIAA

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070613-att-willing-to-spy-for-nsa-mpaa-and-riaa.html?bub

So if they can't win the net neutrality argument, they'll just start labeling certain technologies as "encouraging illegal piracy." They can then route this through their filters and effectively slow down and/or harrass users -- thus essentially creating a two-tiered system; one for those who pay and one for the rest of us.

So contact your congress-critters and tell them that they should tell businesses to keep their grubby paws off of the PUBLIC Internet. We shouldn't be treated as guilty until proven innocent. The only effective solution is social NOT technical. Otherwise this will turn into an arms race that cannot be won, just like the failed war on drugs -- the cost of which is greater than any positive outcome both in terms of money and lives ruined. Ah yes, but there's money to be made and that appears to be the only thing that matters to both businesses and politicians. We need to change this.

Some things just stay funny

I'm getting scared

...that politicians are willing to spout such bald-faced lies -- especially when we have documented facts to the contrary:

http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/20080429_bush_passes_the_buck/

Once again, they think that they can rewrite history by repeating a lie long enough to make people believe it to be true. Unfortunately, this probably works only too well, considering how little actual real news most people see (or allow into their brains).

Is religion a threat to rationality and science?

A recent debate tackled this subject -- more info here. Here's how it starts:

If religion isn't the greatest threat to rationality and scientific progress, what is? Perhaps alcohol, or television, or addictive video games. But although each of these scourges - mixed blessings, in fact - has the power to overwhelm our best judgment and cloud our critical faculties, religion has a feature of that none of them can boast: it doesn't just disable, it honours the disability. People are revered for their capacity to live in a dream world, to shield their minds from factual knowledge and make the major decisions of their lives by consulting voices in their heads that they call forth by rituals designed to intoxicate them.

This imperviousness to reason is, I think, the property that we should most fear in religion. Other institutions or traditions may encourage a certain amount of irrationality - think of the wild abandon that is often appreciated in sports or art - but only religion demands it as a sacred duty.

It used to be the case that we tended to excuse drunk drivers when they crashed because they weren't entirely in control of their faculties at the time, but now we have wisely inverted that judgment, holding drunk drivers doubly culpable for putting themselves in that irresponsible position in the first place. It is high time we inverted the public attitude about religion as well, finding all socially destructive acts of religious passion shameful, not honourable, and holding those who abet them - the preachers and other apologists for religious zeal - as culpable as the bartenders and negligent hosts who usher dangerous drivers on to the highways. Our motto should be: Friends don't let friends steer their lives by religion.

37 Lessons to Help You Live a Life that Matters

Following on the earlier thread of "living a life that matters" here's a few items from the list at LifeOptimizer of 37 different ways to help you do something we should all strive for -- to matter more. Click the link to see them all.

• Discover what matters to you
• Have the courage to do what matters
• Don’t rely on others’ approval
• The real definition of success is a life and work that bring personal fulfillment and lasting relationships and makes a difference in the world
• Be sure you do what you love
• Check whether you’re on the right track
• Never retire from what you love
• Have integrity to do what matters to you
• Be yourself
• Have passion, determination, and skill
• Make a difference with your knowledge
• Earn opportunities through expertise
• Have the right attitude toward difficulties - "Having many difficulties perfects the being; having no difficulties ruins the being" (Lao Tzu).
• Make failure your friend
• Always make new mistakes
• Manage your weaknesses
• Earn your luck through focus and knowledge
• Have a prepared mind
• Have clear goals
• Think about your relationships as long term
• Align your intentions, words, and actions

In reading through these again, I'm pleased to see how many of these we stress in my Hwa Rang Do martial arts academy training our students to become strong, accountable, self-reliant individuals.

Pentagon secretly manipulates the press

Yesterday, the New York Times exposed a secret Pentagon campaign to infiltrate the media with pro-war propaganda. The scheme reaches all the way to the Bush White House, where top officials recruited dozens of "military analysts" to spread favorable views of the war via every major news channel -- without revealing they were working from Pentagon scripts and often lobbying for major military contractors.

Spreading "covert propaganda" is illegal under federal law.

The more than 75 analysts exposed by the New York Times have become fixtures of war coverage on CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, Fox News Channel and MSNBC. The front-page article reveals the many ways that the Pentagon fed them pro-war talking points and misinformation. The White House even has a name for these covert propagandists: “message force multipliers.”

The pundits trade on their access to the media and the White House to secure high-paying jobs as lobbyists, consultants and contractors -- vying for hundreds of billions of dollars in military business generated by the war.

An administration secretly forcing favorable views via the press is not a partisan issue. This is a violation of every conceivable standard of journalism -- and possibly of federal law.

Free (your) Culture

I've started reading Free Culture, by the great Stanford Law Professor Lawrence Lessig, and have already decided that this material shouldn't just be read by everyone but it should be part of a mandatory course taught to all high school students. I haven't decided what to call it but it should include all the topics that are key to maximizing personal freedom -- basically, to see that you're being ripped off and how to stand up for your rights. Things like understanding the importance of civics, freedoms (as in 1st Amendment), right to privacy, protecting our secular democracy, balance of power, stopping the corporate rip-off of the public for private gain.

This is becoming more and more important as various powerful factions are gutting our freedom for the sake of profit and control -- from the government removing habeus corpus and politicizing the judicial branch to the multinational corporations that neuter our ability to get unfiltered news or even decimate the environment. An uninformed citizenry will not be able to sustain democracy. As it is, we are rapidly becoming a plutocracy.

So back to Free Culture, which I just started now that I finished Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials Trilogy -- also recommended, by the way.

You can get your own Creative Commons copy of Free Culture in various formats including PDF, HTML and others. Here's a little blurb:

Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology And The Law To Lock Down Culture And Control Creativity by Lawrence Lessig. Site for the book is here, Lessig's site is here. Lessig is the one who argued (unsuccessfully, alas!) the Eldred v. Ashcroft case before the US Supreme Court, the case being about the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. This book includes a detailed account about that in chapters 13 & 14, but in general is a great primer on all the things wrong with the system today, how it got there, and what we can do about it. Lessig walks the talk and puts his money where his mouth is: the book was published under a Creative Commons License.

Get it now, while it's still free -- and so is your culture, although less and less so!

South Park now online?

This clip is hilarious -- if you're enough of an Internet geek like me to know who these characters are.

Amazingly, this site also lists full episodes for every season but it's not quite working (on my PC). The site does say that it's still in beta so maybe....

Early opinions on the Pope's visit

Pope blames society for sex scandal

THE Pope yesterday berated US bishops for their poor handling of the child sex scandal that has rocked the Catholic Church, but laid part of the blame on the breakdown of values in US society.

He told a gathering of bishops they had "sometimes very badly handled" the problem of pedophile priests.
But, rather than blame the church, he pointed to a breakdown in the values underpinning society. "What does it mean to speak of child protection when pornography and violence can be viewed in so many homes through media widely available today?" he said.

He praised the bishops' efforts to heal the wounds from the scandal, angering victim support groups.
Barbara Dorris, from Survivors Network for those Abused by Priests, said: "Five years ago, US bishops begrudgingly adopted some minimal promises on paper.

"There's no evidence to suggest they have had any real impact."

more at http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,23557180-663,00.html

Her full comments are available here http://www.msmagazine.com/news/uswirestory.asp?ID=10947

Victims Call on Pope to Appropriately Address Sex Abuse Scandal
A support group for victims of clergy sex gathered in Washington, DC for the pope's visit to demand that he hold bishops and cardinals accountable for concealing sex crimes committed by priests. Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) denounced the pope's speech in which he criticized the way the scandal was handled. SNAP says that the pope's criticism is not enough; he must act.

Barbara Dorris, SNAP outreach director, issued a statement saying, "Five years ago, US bishops paltry, begrudgingly adopted some minimal promises on paper. There's no evidence to suggest they've had any real impact and it's terribly naïve to assume that's the case. Child sex crimes and cover-ups have plagued the church for decades, and the church is an ancient, rigid, secretive, all-male hierarchy that moves at a glacial pace. No one who truly understands institutional behavior could believe that centuries-old patterns can be undone in a few short years."

Victims are demanding a change in Catholic canon law requiring priests who commit crimes against children to be immediately defrocked. They are also demanding disciplinary action against bishops and cardinals who enable abuse to continue by covering it up.

Anne Barrett Doyle, co-director of the website Bishop Accountability, told the New York Times, "Rather than shifting attention to pedophile priests, he needs to focus on the culpability of bishops. The crisis occurred because many U.S. bishops were willing to hide their priests' crimes from the police with lies."

Another good comment:

David Clohessy, national director of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests said the sex abuse crisis is not over. "The pope must focus now not on soothing words and vague pledges, but on tangible action to prevent abuse," he said. "Saying pedophile priests are bad fixes nothing. Disciplining complicit bishops prevents more abuse."

And, correct me if I'm wrong but I thought that Ratzinger was complicit with the Vatican protecting some priests, including continuing to shelter Cardinal Bernard Law so that he can't be extradited back to the US to face trials. CBS covered the story years ago here http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/08/06/eveningnews/main566978.shtml

The 40-year-old confidential Vatican document, obtained by CBS News, lays out a church policy that calls for absolute secrecy when it comes to sexual abuse by priests - anyone who speaks out could be thrown out of the church.

As one commenter on these sites so succintly put it:

If any country leaders had a spine, they would charge the Catholic Church as a criminal organization with conspiracy to commit child abuse.

I guess at this point, I need a little humor to help take the edge off http://www.videosift.com/video/Bill-Maher-New-Rules-April-11-2008

...<snip>
And, finally, New Rule: Whenever you combine a secretive compound, religion and weirdos in pioneer outfits, there's going to be some child-f*cking going on. In fact, whenever a cult leader sets himself up as "God's infallible wing man" here on earth, lock away the kids.

Which is why I'd like to tip off law enforcement to an even larger child-abusing religious cult. Its leader also has a compound. And this guy not only operates outside the bounds of the law, but he used to be a Nazi and he wears funny hats. [photo of the Pope shown]

That's right. The Pope is coming to America this week, and, ladies, he's single! Now, I know what you're thinking: "Bill, you can't be saying that the Catholic Church is no better than this creepy Texas cult! For one thing, altar boys can't even get pregnant."

But, really, what tripped up the "little cult on the prairie" was that they only abused hundreds of kids, not thousands all over the world. Cults get raided. Religions get parades. How does the Catholic Church get away with all of their buggery? VOLUME, VOLUME, VOLUME!

If you have a few hundred followers and you let some of them molest children, they call you a cult leader. If you have a billion, they call you "Pope."

It's like if you can't pay your mortgage, you're a deadbeat, but if you can't pay a million mortgages, you're Bear Stearns, and we bail you out. And that's who the Catholic Church is, the Bear Stearns of organized pedophilia. Too big to fail.

When the - when the current Pope was in his previous Vatican job as John Paul's Dick Cheney - he wrote a letter instructing every Catholic bishop to keep the sex abuse of minors secret until the statute of limitations ran out. And that's the Church's attitude: "We're here, we're queer, get used to it."

Which is fine. Far be it from me to criticize religion. But, just remember one thing: if the Pope was, instead of a religious figure, merely the CEO of a nationwide chain of daycare centers where thousands of employees had been caught molesting kids and then covering it up, he'd be arrested faster than you can say, "Who wants to touch Mister Wiggle?"

FOX News' Journalistic Integrity?

Outsourcing the government is a BAD idea

Yes we know about the horrors of Halliburton and Blackwater but many don't realize how much our government is being "privitized" -- aka. sold to the highest bidder. Not only do no-bid contracts guarantee that we are overpaying but we are doubly blessed with lesser service that comes with virtually no accountability.

As the Washington Post recently reported:

Government auditors issued a scathing review yesterday of dozens of the Pentagon's biggest weapons systems, saying ships, aircraft and satellites are billions of dollars over budget and years behind schedule. The Government Accountability Office [GAO] found that 95 major systems have exceeded their original budgets by a total of $295 billion, bringing their total cost to $1.6 trillion.

$295 billion wasted. To put in perspective, Bush vetoed more health insurance for kids supposedly because $35 billion -- $7 billion a year over 5 years -- was too much to spend.
Presiding over a wasteful defense budget is not a "strong on defense" position. It is, however, a conservative position.

Part of the problem is rooted in the fundamental conservative belief that government is bad, and key government functions should be privatized.

UN says "Human Rights, not important"

Incredibly, spines are hard to come by in today's society. Case in point, the UN has allowed themselves to be ruled by convenience and fear of economic consequence by allowing Islamic states to rule that Freedom of Expression will no longer protect anyone who, for example, dares speak out against Sharia laws that require women to be stoned to death for adultery or young men to be hanged for being gay, or against the marriage of girls as young as nine, as in Iran. They must have a different meaning of the word "Freedom" -- something meaning quite the opposite. There's more here but here's a sample:

Don't exercise your right to freedom of expression because your opponents may become violent. For the first time in the 60 year history of UN Human Rights bodies, a fundamental human right has been limited simply because of the possible violent reaction by the enemies of human rights.

The violence we have seen played out in reaction to the Danish cartoons is thus excused by the Council – it was the cartoonists whose freedom of expression needed to be regulated. And Theo van Gogh can be deemed responsible for his own death.

Freedom of expression is that right which – uniquely – enables us to expose, communicate and condemn abuse of all our other rights. Without freedom of expression and freedom of the press we give the green light to tyranny and make it impossible to expose corruption, incompetence, injustice and oppression.

George Carlin - Fear of Germs

It's sad how wimpy Americans have become, especially when it comes to any risk whatsoever -- take germs, for example (you can listen along here):

Where did this sudden fear of germs come from in this country? Have you noticed this? The media constantly running stories about all the latest infections? Salmonella, E-coli, hanta virus, bird flu, and Americans will panic easily so everybody's running around scrubbing this and spraying that and overcooking their food and repeatedly washing their hands, trying to avoid all contact with germs. It's ridiculous and it goes to ridiculous lengths.

In prisons, before they give you lethal injection, they swab your arm with ALCOHOL. Wouldn't want some guy to go to hell AND be sick.Fear of germs, why these fuckin' pussies. You can't even get a decent hamburger anymore they cook the shit out of everything now 'cause everyone's afraid of FOOD POISONING! Hey, wheres you sense of adventure? Take a fuckin' chance will you? Hey you know how many people die of food poisoning in this country? Nine thousand, thats all, its a minor risk.

Take a fuckin' chance bunch of goddamn pussies.Besides, what d'ya think you have an immune system for? It's for killing germs! But it needs practice, it needs germs to practice on. So if you kill all the germs around you, and live a completely sterile life, then when germs do come along, you're not gonna be prepared. And never mind ordinary germs, what are you gonna do when some super virus comes along that turns your vital organs into liquid shit?! I'll tell you what your gonna do ... you're gonna get sick. You're gonna die and your gonna deserve it because you're fucking weak and you got a fuckin' weak immune system!

Let me tell you a true story about immunization ok. When I was a little boy in New York city in the nineteen-forties, we swam in the Hudson river. And it was filled with raw sewage! OK? We swam in raw sewage, you know, to cool off. And at that time the big fear was polio. Thousands of kids died from polio every year. But you know something? In my neighborhood no one ever got polio. No one! EVER! You know why? Cause WE SWAM IN RAW SEWAGE! It strengthened our immune system, the polio never had a prayer. We were tempered in raw shit!

So personally I never take any precautions against germs. I don't shy away from people who sneeze and cough. I don't wipe off the telephone, I don't cover the toilet seat, and if I drop food on the floor I pick it up and eat it!Even if I'm at side walk cafe! IN CALCUTTA! THE POOR SECTION! ON NEW YEARS MORNING DURING A SOCCER RIOT! And you know something? In spite of all the so called "risky behavior ".... I never get infections. I don't get em. I don't get colds, I don't get flu, I don't get headaches, I don't get upset stomach, And you know why? Cause I got a good strong immune system! And it gets a lot of practice!

My immune system is equipped with the biological equivalent of fully automatic military assault rifles, with night vision and laser scopes. And we have recently acquired phosphorous grenades, cluster bombs and anti personnel fragmentation mines.

So, when my white blood cells are on patrol reconnoitering my blood stream seeking out strangers and other undesirables, and if they see any, ANY, suspicious looking germs of any kind, THEY DON'T. FUCK. AROUND. They whip out the weapons, they wax the motherfucker and deposit the unlucky fellow directly into my colon! Into my colon. There's no nonsense! There's no miranda warning, there's none of that three strikes and your out bullshit. First defense, BAM! Into the colon you go!

-- George Carlin

Friday Flotsam

First some humor to take the edge off:
http://www.955klos.com/messagewall.asp?id=4118

The 9 Manliest Names in the World
http://www.cracked.com/article_14982_9-manliest-names-in-world.html

It's tough being a veterinarian in Taiwan:
from http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-12/06/content_7209538_12.htm

--------------------------

YIKES!

Hacked Through The Heart And You're To Blame
Researchers have demonstrated that implantable defibrillators and pacemakers can be hacked from the outside leading to all manner of undesirable outcomes.

It's not surprising that implantable devices such as these are programmable through a wireless interface. Allowing a physician to do so is far preferable to opening the patient up just to change settings. But it's also not surprising that the wireless interfaces and programming protocols were not sufficiently hardened against deliberate attack. Such attacks could, theoretically, either cause the device to shock or mistime, but also could deplete the battery.

The researchers also studied potential defenses against such attacks and is encouraging about them. They also stress repeatedly that these are theoretical attacks and that patients with such devices should not be concerned at this point.

The authors of this study did the hard research, but the basic approach to body hacking was suggested by Gadi Evron far earlier. As Evron suggested, devices like pacemakers are just the primitive foot in the door of our bodies. In 2040 we may be much more bionic, and we'll need to know that our electronic parts are secure.

A Life That Matters

Ready or not, someday it will all come to an end. There will be no more sunrises, no minutes, hours or days. All the things you collected, whether treasured or forgotten, will pass to someone else. Your wealth, fame and temporal power will shrivel to irrelevance. It will not matter what you owned or what you were owed. Your grudges, resentments, frustrations, and jealousies will finally disappear.

So, too, your hopes, ambitions, plans, and to-do lists will expire. The wins and losses that once seemed so important will fade away. It won't matter where you came from, or on what side of the tracks you lived, at the end. It won't matter whether you were beautiful or brilliant. Even your gender and skin color will be irrelevant.

So what will matter? How will the value of your days be measured? What will matter is not what you bought, but what you built; not what you got, but what you gave. What will matter is not your success, but your significance.

What will matter is not what you learned, but what you taught. What will matter is every act of integrity, compassion, courage or sacrifice that enriched, empowered or encouraged others to emulate your example. What will matter is not your competence, but your character. What will matter is not how many people you knew, but how many will feel a lasting loss when you're gone. What will matter is not your memories, but the memories that live in those who loved you. What will matter is how long you will be remembered, by whom and for what.

Living a life that matters doesn't happen by accident. It's not a matter of circumstance but of choice. Choose to live a life that matters.

Michael Josephson