Virtual Thought

It might be too much to hope for, but since the Democrats only need three more seats as of right now (11:48 pm) to take back control of the Senate.

• Virginia—won’t be decided for days… recount city here we come!
• Montana
• Missouri

So, c’mon you little states! You know what to do!

And, as a side note, he is now the former Senator Santorum... so maybe the real definition (the frothy mix of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex) will gain name recognition.

It seems that recently I’ve only been putting funny stuff online. This time, I’m talking about something more serious… a little something called network neutrality.

Prior to a few days ago, the physical infrastructure of the internet was just a bunch of wires that transmitted everyone’s data equally. However, the big telecom companies want to skew this level playing field based on which companies pay them the most. This is where Save the Internet comes in.

Do you like visiting my blog? I probably couldn’t afford to compete with Blogger, or Yahoo, or any other blogging service… and what would happen when I don’t pay? Would my voice be marginalized due to some external market force introduced to pay for a resource that has already been developed and is easily maintained with the current schedule of fees that nearly everyone pays?

I don’t want that to happen. If you don’t either, check out Save the Internet and see what you can do, too.

[tags] Save_The_Internet [/tags]

Hey fellas, have you heard the news…

So it seems that Libby says that Cheney told him that Bush told Cheney that it was okay to leak Valerie Plame’s name. Let’s examine the various conclusions this leads us to:

• When Bush had said before that he wanted the investigation to end so we would know the facts what he meant to say was, “I know the facts but I’m not going to reveal them at this time.”
• When Scott McClellan said previously, No one wants to get to the bottom of it more than the president of the United States, what he meant to say was, “The president knows what happened but is being hush-hush for now.”
• When Joseph Wilson insisted that his wife’s exposure was an act of political retaliation that ended her career the decision to endanger her life and end her career came from the President.
• When Bush said, I want to know the truth. If anybody has got any information inside our administration or outside our administration, it would be helpful if they came forward with the information so we can find out whether or not these allegations are true and get on about the business, he, at that point, knew that he was lying.

Of course, maybe Libby was lying. So that’s perjury. But isn’t he already charged with that?

Here’s some speculation:

• Cheney didn’t talk to Bush about declassifying this information… Cheney, by virtue of releasing the info to Libby, went over the President’s head! And then lied about it!
• The President forgot he did it in the first place!
• Libby is, in secret, a Democrat who hates America and doesn’t support our troops and that’s why he is attacking the President!

Of course, the CIA isn’t doing such a good job at protecting the names of employees anyway… and maybe we should take a look at that?

Where would I be without my faithful news outlets dutifully reporting that cats like birds?

Okay, that’s not entirely true… the article is about the recent cat death in Germany. The cat had eaten a bird infected with H5N1 bird flu and consequently sickened and died.

But with photos like these, I just had to poke fun:

Yes. Thank you. I know cats like birds.

In this struggle to have up-to-the-minute news coverage of every little detail because of the transparency afforded by electronic, “new” media I think our more traditional news outlets are flailing and flapping around like flu-addled birds trying to provide us with the detail they think we want. Heck, maybe we think we want it.

I get really nervous when we apply supply-and-demand economics to the news… is it really okay to give us what we want, all the time? Isn’t that how we get Jerry Springer-style sensationalism that focuses entirely too much on couples whose names abbreviate is cute ways (Bennifer, Brangelina, Jessinick… I made that last one up) instead of real issues like the horrible, unjust war in Iraq, the corruption that is increasingly evident in the highest echelons of government, the global warming we brought upon ourselves that we are still denying?

Cats like birds indeed.

Jesus Christ! It seems that the electronic voting machines in Flordia were illegally accessed during the presidential elections. Anyone else find it extremely, incredibly fucking odd that voting discrepancies are happening in a state where one of the candidate’s family members runs things?

We knew this would happen. There were people saying this over and over before the elections. And, look, they’re right. Good job.

In this article discussing Bush’s comments about the democratically elected Hamas party he says the following:

“On the other hand, I don’t see how you can be a partner in peace if you advocate the destruction of a country as a part of your platform,” Bush added. “And I know you can’t be a partner in peace if you have a, if your party has got an armed wing.”

Excuse me? What did we do in Iraq, exactly, if not destroy their country? Wasn’t that exactly what President Bush was campaigning on?

I like this headline: Google bows to great firewall of China

So Google’s motto is “Don’t be evil” while, at the same time, it is a multinational corporation ultimately responsible to its shareholders for maintaing a steady rise in profits. Which motivation won out here?

On the one hand I think they weren’t evil here: At least Chinese citizens have access to the Internet’s far-flung resources that Google provides. I truly believe in the transformational power of availability of information and I know for a fact that no matter how good a filter Google puts in place they won’t be able to filter out everything the Chinese government wants them to. Maybe they’re banking on that fact.

On the other hand, Google has to watch out for its bottom line and it’s the shareholders and the Board who determine how evil Google is. Corporations, as a rule, need to profit from their actions as a survival strategy. That is the economic system that we have set up currently.

I would love to see the deliberations from Google at the highest level. What were they talking about? What were the pros and cons from their point of view? Again, could they come out and say, “Yes, we’re filtering content at Google.cn but, don’t worry, we know that we can’t filter 100% of the controversial content so Chinese citizens still have access,” without pissing off the Chinese?