Category Archives: Politics

Rather Than Fix The CFAA, House Judiciary Committee Planning To Make It Worse… Way Worse | Techdirt

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Rather Than Fix The CFAA, House Judiciary Committee Planning To Make It Worse… Way Worse | Techdirt.

This is wretched and wrong. The TL;DR here is that there is a law already on the books called the Computer Fraud And Abuse Act and this bill is seeking to amend the law on the books and take it in very wrong and upsetting new directions. One of the biggest things that I spotted on that really has me upset is the redefinition of talking about an offense as equal to actually completing that offense. If you say you are going to do something that breaks this law, save your bus fare, you’re already guilty of committing the crime! The other part is even more insidious and that is even if you are given authorization to access a machine, if you use it for a different purpose, then the authorization is void and you are committing a crime.

This makes my work more complicated. Now I have to be careful about what I say, as this bill, if passed would curtail my first amendment rights to free speech and then that second bit would legally prevent me from noticing anything else wrong with a computer if I was just fixing something adjacent or unrelated to the original problem.

What a mess. Encourage your congress-critter to vote no on this bill!

Goodbye Carl

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Carl Levin is not going to run for office in 2014. For the guy that pushed NDAA (AKA American Citizens as Enemy Combatants) and said nothing in 2000 when all it took to prevent George W. Bush from being president was one single senator… Goodbye Carl. Don’t let the door hit you on the ass on the way out!

Now we can think about getting a real honest democrat in that seat. NDAA. *cough*

Empty Nests

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I’ve given up on Twitter. I won’t be removing my account as Twitter still has some use to for browsing the stream but there really isn’t any compelling interactions on that service for me any longer. The only things that will end up on Twitter really are links to blog posts and maybe the one-off comment.

Ever since Twitter enabled the data download feature on my account, I took advantage of it. I downloaded the entire archive and discovered to my pleasure that Twitter stored all my tweets as plain text in a CSV file. I spent the last months migrating my old Tweets into my Day One application. I will hand one thing to Twitter, it did keep me “logging” along for a long time. I’m switching that impulse over to Day One. It’s impressive just how much of my past I have recorded. It turns out to be about 2600 days, or about 7 years of my past – recorded and in some ways with a lot of resolution. For that I will always be thankful for Twitter. However…

The reason why I am leaving Twitter is because it is too exposed. I didn’t feel it was useful to have a private Twitter account, so I left it public and this decision was made with a devil-may-care attitude, that anything I tweeted wouldn’t matter. As it turns out, it does. Mostly this is because of my workplace, in that I do not trust them or anyone who works there. It’s not really anything meant to be hurtful or anything, but I can’t risk my job and I certainly feel that sharing on Twitter threatens my employment. For as far as I trust Western Michigan University, it starts and ends with the partitioned, compartmentalized version of me that works there professionally. Not the true honest authentic me. Being honest and sharing freely would just upset everyone and lead to needless drama at work, so I unfollowed a bunch of coworkers and people whose tweets would have gone to waste on an ignored account.

Another problem with Twitter is the loss of engagement and dimensionality. Everyone on Twitter is a three-dimensional person with all the complexities that come with being alive. Twitter’s relationships seem stuck in a one-sided mode of conversation. This very thing struck me most powerfully as I was migrating Tweets into my Day One app. I caught out of the corner of my eye tweets that I had made to people who were popular or famous. They were wasted messages. At first this concerned me, but then I realized that what was really going on was that the people who had thousands and thousands of followers were so far beyond their social horizon (that 150 limit I’ve written about before) that they simply cannot socially relate to anyone beyond their subset coterie of social contacts. It’s not that they are mean or being ignorant, but they just cannot process that level of interaction – it’s more about how our biology is colliding with our technology. So for the really famous, the really popular, that’s where the dimensionality comes in. A regular person is three-dimensional. The others are one-dimensional. They are human billboards. They stand there and output information and you stop thinking of them as individuals and start relating to them as “sources” instead. Robbing them of their inherent humanity. They don’t have feelings, as billboards don’t have feelings.

So, we’re all done with that. Twitter will still be a link-dump for my blog. Most of my actual sharing will start in Byword, then be copied to Day One, then from there shared to Facebook under my “Sharing” security model. If you don’t see lots of things on my Facebook wall, that’s because you aren’t in “Sharing”, and mostly that’s because I can’t allow my honest self to interfere with my work. — Gosh, writing that out felt wrong, but at least I’m honest.

If you follow me on Twitter and want to keep your lists tidy and unfollow me, I won’t even notice you leaving. So go in peace.

 

 

No Forgiveness for BP

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I just saw a BP commercial play on CBS, as part of the Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. I DVR the show and watch it when I like, time shifting it to a more pleasant hour than when it’s on, so it’s always an old program, which I’m fine with. But the BP commercial does irritate me. In it, a talking head for BP explains, almost plaintively, that they have spent 23 billion dollars in cleanup efforts in the Gulf of Mexico. He then talks up all the wonderful opportunities and great tourism of the area and then segues into how many Americans BP employs.

How dare you! How dare your company! Your greed and ignorance are only met with your petulant arrogance. You think there is any forgiveness for you? There is no forgiveness possible for an amoral company such as BP. Companies are not people. You cannot possibly expect people to treat you like you are asking them to. You poisoned the Gulf of Mexico with your greedy incompetence!

I still maintain that the right and proper punishment for what BP did in the Gulf of Mexico was to have all their American property seized, liquidated and be banned from doing any commerce in the United States. That’s a fitting punishment, not 23 billion dollars. It’s chump change to what you did in the Gulf of Mexico. The fact that BP wasn’t eliminated from the United States is clear proof that there is still quite a lot wrong with our world and how we manage it.

Shame on you BP. Shame on you forever.

House Judiciary Chair Introduces Unconstitutional Bill To Permanently Abolish The Income Tax | ThinkProgress

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House Judiciary Chair Introduces Unconstitutional Bill To Permanently Abolish The Income Tax | ThinkProgress.

This headline was hilarious. How do these people think they will be paid? If there are no taxes then there is no money to pay these politicians for their ‘service’ to the country. Will they work for free? The bill was co-signed by 69 others, so that means that 70 congresspeople are technically willing to work for free. So, since each one of them earns roughly $174,000 a year (not bad for being worthless schmucks) then that means if they all worked for free, like their bill would eventually end up making them, that’s roughly $12 million dollars a year right there! We could just take that money and fund PBS or maybe find some nice things to do with that money at the EPA or perhaps NASA, where it’ll make more sense to spend it.

I think we all should write a letter of thanks to every one of those cosigners to this particular bill and thank them for their brave sacrifice to work for free in Congress.

PAD 1/31/13 – Burnt

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“Remember yesterday, when your home was on fire and you got to save five items? That means you left a lot of stuff behind. What are the things you wish you could have taken, but had to leave behind?”

What would fire consume? Everything. That’s what insurance is for. There are things I would miss. Things that weren’t saved because there is just too much of it, it’s too difficult to rescue or move in time. What kind of things would I miss? My wardrobe, Scott’s comic books, our extensive entertainment library with both DVD’s and books. So much would be lost, but that’s one of the reasons why there is safety equipment at home and fire extinguishers, but even then, disaster could strike.

There is something about living simply which bears here I think. The wisdom that if you have a lot of things in your life that in certain ways, you don’t own the stuff, but rather the stuff owns you. Reducing the amount of stuff you own is likely a wiser move, but it runs so much against American culture, that you own or rent a residence and then fill it full of treasure and then keep it. Adding to it and never reducing it. I’ve read so many articles online about radical simplification and there is something in it. I cannot deny the wisdom in living simply and rejecting the consumer culture that abounds here in America. Always having more stuff and adding more stuff to that just doesn’t make much rational sense.

This works a lot like greed in a certain way as well. People are driven by greed to always increase the amount of money they have, to earn more, corner the market, whatever it takes to maximize your fiscal health. I don’t think I could be any more left-leaning if I tried. I’ve said before and I still believe this that the irrational accumulation of stuff is just as silly as the irrational accumulation of wealth. It runs directly against capitalism which pushes us all towards making as much money and keeping it as possible, even beyond rational understanding. I think that you should earn what can make your life comfortable and anything beyond that is actually wrong. I’ve thought long and hard about this and I put the limit on personal wealth at $75,000 a year. Beyond $75,000 and the money does less and less for you. Eventually that money means nothing and it starts to injure you. Look at the filthy rich, they lead lives of plenty with endless funds and they are miserable human beings. They are sad, they abuse drugs or alcohol, they act irresponsibly and generally are poor little rich people, devoid of true happiness. Sometimes, when I’m feeling very liberal I do spend time considering the forceful redistribution of individual wealth, where everyone’s wealth is capped at $75,000 and those who don’t earn enough to reach that limit are given money so that they can reach it, on the backs of the rich who, lets face it, wouldn’t even notice the money being gone. This of course would upset anyone who is a capitalist and would brand me as a socialist – why stop there, why not just go all the way to communism? Yes, I write this out of mean spite. I don’t really think the world will ever be like this idea in my head, but after years of watching the poor, the children, and the disadvantaged suffer while the rich build their obnoxious residences and waste their money on worthless endeavors, it’s actually a great reaction. Consider it not in terms of capitalism but rather in terms of suffering. How much suffering could be alleviated by forcefully redistributing the wealth of the richest people amongst us? I think it’s a worthy to consider a world like this, because to me, this seems to be something that Jesus himself would likely smile at and approve of. It has always struck me as odd, how people can maintain the wealth disparity in our society with their self-professed belief in Christianity.

I look forward to your spirited responses to this idea. 🙂

Corporate Personhood

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During the last presidential election one of the topics that was bandied about was the concept of “corporate personhood”. Companies are people and therefore can enjoy the same abilities and protections afforded to people. Many on the left, where I stand, see corporate personhood as a particularly upsetting vestibule to fascism and is really not a good thing.

I’ve been thinking about the social extents of humanity as it currently exists in the 21st century and the magical number is 150. Any one person can only maintain meaningful social interactions with a general maximum of 150 other people. Beyond that and there just isn’t brainpower, time, attention, or will to treat all of them equally. I use this figure of 150 as an honest limit in many parts of my life and while writing some previous blog posts the idea about the moral and ethical capacity of companies came up. When it comes to social networking this number of contacts limit I think is important. People who follow more than 150 others are doing them a disservice and people who are followed by more than 150 others are likewise doing them a disservice. You simply cannot maintain an equal amount of attention beyond this limit and it’s unfair and in the end one could argue that it’s socially abusive to the 151st and further people connected to you.

So we get to corporate personhood. I think that once a company of people start accumulating there are ranges based on this number of 150. Very small companies with less than 150 members may still be able to maintain some moral and ethical understanding, but the relationship is asymptotic as the company approaches the horizon of 150 members. The more people join a company, the less each member feels responsible for the actions of the company. Many companies spread way beyond 150 into the thousands or even more than that and I think that the further along they go from 150, the less human they are when they are all added together. The individuals are all conscientious and compassionate human beings, but it’s when they are added up in a new context that they stop behaving as such and you see things like mob mentality and groupthink. The bigger the company the more these negative forces start to manipulate the membership. So what does this limit of 150 have to do with corporate personhood? I think it’s a bad idea to give any organization the rights and powers of a person when they lack the moral and ethical bearings of regular individuals. It’s like making a Frankensteins monster. Just because the monster is walking and maybe talking doesn’t mean you want it caring for the elderly or working in an infant ICU. Companies beyond 150 members, I would argue have the same moral and ethical understanding of a dead inanimate object, to say, none at all. So perhaps a law that perhaps graces organizations with personhood as long as their maximum membership does not exceed 150 is a wise thing. Companies (or organizations even) that exceed 150 cannot be considered “persons” because they are beyond the human capacity for moral and ethical behavior.

I honestly don’t think that there will ever be any laws where this limit of 150 is used, but I do think that understanding the human limits for socialization is important, especially when you are trying to understand the behavior of some of these large organizations and why they behave with such callousness and disregard for the moral and ethical compasses which regular people are compelled to follow.

In many ways, this 150 limit could also be the functional barrier for The Golden Rule. That people who have more than these social contacts, or organizations with more than this number of members cannot successfully comprehend the wisdom of The Golden Rule. In this light, I would argue that organizations over 150 members be subject to laws that add force to The Golden Rule, if such wisdom cannot come from within then it must be applied from without by laws and regulations.

PAD 2/7/13 – Right to Health

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“Is access to medical care something that governments should provide, or is it better left to the private sector? Are their drawbacks to your choice?”

 This is the central question of socialism. What things, if any, are appropriate for society to bear versus private citizens or companies? I think that this question has several parts actually, how big is the topic being considered, does it have any ethical or moral implications, and is there any need for democratic oversight? When it comes to health care I argue that it’s a human topic, it’s vast and universal and it’s incredibly expensive. I think that  when it comes to healthcare, that society can best provide coverage more than private companies and that as a member of society I would be willing to underwrite the costs of covering every American so that none of us have to endure catastrophic loss because of a health issue. I also argue that companies are inherently amoral and unethical. Companies that are publicly traded have shareholders and the promise of good behavior is not for those receiving the healthcare but rather the welfare of the shareholders themselves. Even if a company is not publicly traded, greed still overwhelms the greater good and renders companies amoral and blind to ethics. Companies are not people, companies have no conscience, they have no compassion. They are a mindless thing, sometimes the best thing you can say is that a company that doesn’t rape, pillage, and plunder is about as moral and ethical as they can get. I think “rape pillage and plunder” is a natural expression for a company because when you add people together in masses beyond 150 members, their ability to understand the consequences of their behaviors drop precipitously to zero. It is also vital that there be some public (democratic) oversight of the entire structure and so in this last condition I think it’s best that government do the work as ultimately government can be taken to account for their activities through the judicial branch of government.

There is a sidelight to all of this, that America has a problem and that is we have celebrity career politicians. This, I believe, has to end. We have term limits for many parts of government and I think it’s vital to extend this to the legislative and judicial branches of government. I think that a congressperson should serve for a maximum of four years and then be barred from future service in that branch. They can pursue other branches if they wish, but that’s where it ends.

So that is my answer to this question. Best that healthcare be done by society and done universally. Single payer, nationalized, social.

PAD 1/15/2013 – Arguments

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“It’s never a good idea to discuss religion or politics with people you don’t really know.” Agree or disagree?

 Without a doubt this is the one piece of advice that has taken me the longest time to learn and I had to learn it all by myself, which of course is the most difficult way but what you learn is honestly yours. I used to engage in arguments with my family over religion and politics and those arguments just upset me, or irritated me, and the central thing that really got to me was that nobody was really listening. They weren’t listening to me and I wasn’t listening to them. It was easy for me to not listen to them because in both situations they were preaching from their comfort zone and since they were family I knew for years and years the extents of those arguments. Nothing they said impressed me or had value to change my mind. Either the arguments were self-referential and circular, as in the religious arguments – not discussing how things might be but rather arguing over the shape and form of scripture that was already established. I was questioning everything from the beginning and the family member I was arguing with never questioned those parts but started all their arguments from what was written down and starting from there. Honestly I think we could never actually have a good conversation on religion because I had dismissed the pretext of their entire religious argument. With politics it’s quite the same, instead of scripture it was a political playbook which was constantly being spooled against me. Thinking really wasn’t a part of the argument as it was mostly scripted shorthand being flung at me and blanket protestations that anything but the way that my family member saw the world was the correct way.

Politics, Religion, Climate – these are the toxic pillars that people really shouldn’t discuss. That’s why faith, at least in America is a very private thing and I am fine with people practicing whatever faith they have as long as they keep it out of the public space. Months ago, during the Christmas season we went to the local mall and a church group was leading a Christmas sing-a-long in the public space of the mall. The violation of that space, a public pluralistic space which suddenly was filled with singing with lyrics that included “Fall on your knees” and references to Christ abounded. I don’t have any problems if those things are sung in church or private homes or even in public spaces when I see that I am walking into that situation. What I walked into was a passionate christian sing-a-long powered by a flashmob. I started to get jumpy and uncomfortable, it was awkward and embarrassing and irritating. Politics is only slightly less upsetting in public spaces, in this vein. Working in a public institution of higher learning you have to accept that sometimes you’ll run into political or religious crazies on campus with a bullhorn trying to convert or accuse students of impure living or wrong political thinking. Even where I work the space is different, it doesn’t upset me because you sort of “expect the unexpected” in a college or university setting. Even in that space it’s more of a sideshow entertainment than a space for actual discourse. I don’t think that discourse is possible, so these topics really should be a matter of personal self-contemplation and secret ballot. You should vote secretly and you should seek out spaces where your religious pursuits match those of those around you as close as possible. Anything else invites disaster.

To other people considering this very question I would tell you that you should just skip it. Don’t engage in the battle. People aren’t really interested in modifying their positions when it comes to religion or politics so it’s best to remain silent and nudge any incoming arguments that touch on these topics to other less upsetting subjects. In many ways, much like the Golden Retriever in Disney’s “UP” movie, sometimes the best response to a political or religious argument is “Squirrel!”

Friends: Man shot dead after pulling into wrong driveway | www.wsbtv.com

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Friends: Man shot dead after pulling into wrong driveway | www.wsbtv.com.

Do we need gun control in America? After reading that article how could you say anything else? How exactly is this sort of response even defensible? What really upsets me is that I’ve been known on occasion to also pull into random driveways, mostly so I can wait for traffic to clear and turn around with a K-turn. Even more than how this could happen to me, or happen really to anyone at all the segment of this story really gets me:

Thomas has also learned Sailors is a war veteran and a former church missionary. Sailors’ attorney told Thomas that the man believed he and his wife were being attacked.

So apparently they were churchgoing folk as well. It doesn’t do anything to calm my nerves as it appears that not even having the church dominate your life the notion of “Thou Shalt Not Kill” seems to not apply in these people. In this case, at least how it seems, it’s kill trespassers without provocation. Malice of forethought indeed.

Why do we need gun control? Why should there be limits on guns? I think the now-not-happening future of Rodrigo Diaz should be enough, but then again, all the now-not-happening futures of the kids in Newtown, the people in Aurora, or anyone else who was killed with a gun. So much potential squandered, so much lost.

That’s what I want to know. At what point does the loss-of-potential run up against our love affair with the gun? When is it enough that we should as a society temper the second amendment with the very regulations that the text of the amendment itself actually demands?

How much death, how much blood, how many lost lives? To quench this paranoid delusion that if we don’t have guns that somehow the government is going to swoop in and ruin our lives. That’s what gets me so much – this unfocused paranoid fear that citizens having guns is the only thing, the only single pillar that keeps our society functioning. If citizenry didn’t have weapons then obviously… what? No really. WHAT? What would happen? Would Township Supervisors rape your pets? Would Congresspeople attempt to cannibalize your children? What is this fear, where does it come from?

I don’t think it comes from anywhere really. I think people have fallen in love with guns and they love to kill. They love murder and bloodshed and the Church with all it’s high and mighty pronouncements are worth absolute bollocks. It’s got very little to do with securing liberty and everything to do with ensuring that you can kill effectively at a great distance with the minimum of effort. It’s the worst thing imaginable. It’s murder and laziness, the pinnacle of both. The second amendment has more to do with greed and lust for death than it does with any lofty “protect the womenfolk from marauding interlopers”. I seriously need to know at what point the body count, all the blood, and all this death will ever be enough to satiate the lust these people have for their beloved guns. It disgusts me and I am ashamed of what America has become because of this failure to well-regulate the militia.