[Was this what drove Carmen Ortiz nutz? -fp-]

“Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You’ll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.

There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future. Everything up until now will have been lost.

That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It’s outrageous and unacceptable.

“I agree,” many say, “but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights, they make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it’s perfectly legal — there’s nothing we can do to stop them.” But there is something we can, something that’s already being done: we can fight back.

Those with access to these resources — students, librarians, scientists — you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not — indeed, morally, you cannot — keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world. And you have: trading passwords with colleagues, filling download requests for friends.

Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by. You have been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the information locked up by the publishers and sharing them with your friends.

But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It’s called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn’t immoral — it’s a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy.

Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they operate require it — their shareholders would revolt at anything less. And the politicians they have bought off back them, passing laws giving them the exclusive power to decide who can make copies.

There is no justice in following unjust laws. It’s time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture.

We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that’s out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.

With enough of us, around the world, we’ll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge — we’ll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us?”

The University will seek not merely to turn out men as engineers, scientists, doctors, merchants, theologians but also as men of high character, probity and honour, whose conduct through life will show they bear the hall-mark of a great University. A teaching university would but half perform its function if it does not seek to develop the heart-power of its scholars with the same solicitude with which it develops their brain-power. Hence it is that the proposed university has placed formation of character in youth as one of its principal objects.

Malaviya ji was a partner in the life of noted theosophist Annie Besant. I am reminded of this because every time I am just gaining some headway untangling the spaghetti that is this blog’s code, Mr. Paynter will wander in and ask me some awkward question about Jiddu Krishnamurti or Paramahansa Yogananda or Theosophy, etc. I do my best to respectfully respond to these extraneous and irrelevant queries and then I find it takes me precious minutes to regain my concentration and focus on matters involving microformats and HTML5. At the end of a day at work, I am used to feeling tired but fulfilled. Since I came to this place the enjoyment of work has gone out of me, replaced by some nameless dread.

Just this afternoon Mr. Paynter asked me my opinion on the twitter exchange between Paul Ford and Anil Dash vis-à-vis scripts and APIs. I didn’t know how to answer him. Clearly he is ignorant of any browser vendor commitments relating to W3C standards. I was in the middle of crafting a style sheet that would add some font beauty and goodness to this execrable hell-hole Mr. Paynter calls his blog, and he interrupts me regarding some social media teapot tempest that has no meaning for him or for me. Then, rather than excuse himself gracefully, he had the temerity to ask if he could bring me some dinner from Swami’s Cafe. I don’t know whether he was joking, pulling my chain as it were, or simply offering to do me a favor. I’m on contract here, my services provided through a contracting firm. I don’t know how to share my disquiet with my agent. I am concerned that any complaint I might make would be bad for my reputation. Perhaps I will discuss it directly with Mr. Paynter when he returns from Encinitas.

…most of us do not yet understand that news is to the mind what sugar is to the body. News is easy to digest. The media feeds us small bites of trivial matter, tidbits that don’t really concern our lives and don’t require thinking. That’s why we experience almost no saturation. Unlike reading books and long, deep magazine articles (which requires thinking), we can swallow limitless quantities of news flashes, like bright-colored candies for the mind.

Fighting off the urge to rant and rave yet again about the breadth of Wisconsin corporate/Republican idiocy, I’m declaring a truce to get the tape off the walls and air out the stench left by Scott Walker and the Fitzgerald brothers. Yes, I know that Scotty Walker and the Fitzgerald Brothers sounds like the name of some wannabe motown white-boys seventies garage band from Mequon, and–in fact–it is. But that’s not what I’m on about here this morning.

This morning I’ll skip all that about teacher lay-offs, and school budgets capped by property tax limits, and why it’s good for corporations to turn the US into a third world economy; and, rather, I’ll simply share this information. I’ve lifted it from Paul Kedrosky’s Infectious Greed. Paul abstracted the list from a great paper titled Avoid News, Towards a Healthy News Diet by Rolf Dobelli:

Fifteen reasons why news is bad for you:

1. News misleads systematically
2. News is irrelevant
3. News limits understanding
4. News is toxic to your body
5. News massively increases cognitive errors
6. News inhibits thinking
7. News changes the structure of your brain
8. News is costly
9. News sunders the relationship between reputation and achievement
10. News is produced by journalists
11. Reported facts are sometimes wrong, forecasts always
12. News is manipulative
13. News makes us passive
14. News gives us the illusion of caring
15. News kills creativity

In that spirit, a few weeks ago the Republican Party of Wisconsin cobbled together a web video supposedly documenting the “angry rhetoric coming from pro-union protesters in Madison.” The idea behind the video is that we all do it, no side has a monopoly on excessive use of metaphor when political passions are high. (Note my own identification of corporate investors as vultures in the preceding paragraph. I thought about “seagulls circling a garbage dump,” but we’re not there yet, no thanks to Walker.) The New York Times did a meta-narrative blog piece on the video…

Eugene Robinson, a liberal columnist for the Washington Post, is shown saying that “Violent political rhetoric and the threat of political violence in this country comes almost exclusively from the right.”

That is followed by a sign from the Wisconsin rallies showing Mr. Walker’s picture with a gunsight crosshair over it and the words: “Don’t retreat. Reload. Repeal Walker.”

In all the hours I’ve spent on the Capitol square I haven’t seen that sign. One person might have made it and carried it to a rally, but I doubt it. The visual context of the sign in the Republican advertisement is a narrow shot, with no crowd of demonstrators around it. As an advertisement it’s effective, but it’s a lie. It’s a lie, but it was broadcast as straight news without attribution on the Fox network. It’s a lie, but white supremacist Haley Barbour referred to it on Meet the Press as if it was emblematic of a Democratic mind-set.

A lot of the video in question is “real.” Early in the struggle, there were plenty of signs comparing Walker to Mubarak. Most of us thought that was a pretty dumb comparison. I imagine that tonight there will be some Walker = Gadaffi signage. That’s even dumber. But unless it’s created by a provocateur, I am almost certain there will be no sign tonight with cross-hairs on Scottie. The whole Sarah Palin “kill them to get them out of the way” metaphor is the dumbest of all. We ain’t that dumb!

Astroturf? Whazzat? Take a look at this excerpt from a letter filed with the FCC by the “Arkansas Retired Seniors Coalition,” a group that leaves no trace of itself on the web:

Astroturf is worse than boilerplate. All of our favorite causes gather strength from organizing people to send boilerplate letters urging political action of one kind or another. Astroturf raises the bar by adding deception… letters are sent from fictional people and fictional groups.

Corporate broadband, if it belongs anywhere, belongs in the national-regional high-speed bulk transport business. Middle mile and last mile services should be publicly owned and operated, like they do in Reedsburg and countless other communities across the USA.

Long ago the Wisconsin Public Service Commission was subverted by the endless pressure and litigation by private companies that control the natural monopolies of the public service markets. The situation is described like this in Wikipedia:

Regulatory capture occurs when a state regulatory agency created to act in the public interest instead acts in favor of the commercial or special interests that dominate in the industry or sector it is charged with regulating. Regulatory capture is a form of government failure, as it can act as an encouragement for large firms to produce negative externalities. The agencies are called Captured Agencies.

For public choice theorists, regulatory capture occurs because groups or individuals with a high-stakes interest in the outcome of policy or regulatory decisions can be expected to focus their resources and energies in attempting to gain the policy outcomes they prefer, while members of the public, each with only a tiny individual stake in the outcome, will ignore it altogether. Regulatory capture refers to when this imbalance of focused resources devoted to a particular policy outcome is successful at “capturing” influence with the staff or commission members of the regulatory agency, so that the preferred policy outcomes of the special interest are implemented.

Citizens, customers of the monopolists that have freed themselves of regulation, as individuals have little motivation to influence government about specific complicated regulatory discussions. The monopolists themselves are highly motivated to remain free of public oversight and regulation so they manipulate the market using lobbyists and public relations campaigns to keep the regulators off balance.

Here are some links to information about a few of the astroturf groups identified by freepress.net:

American Consumer Institute
Dick Armey’s “Freedom Works”
David Koch’s “Americans for Prosperity”

Hearings were also held today to hector and harass the CEO of Toyota, an honorable man who traveled to the US to express remorse for his product’s recent spate of defects and the deaths that resulted. It’s alleged that Blackwater contractors were flat out murdering people in Iraq and Afghanistan. If I was producing the evening news I’d want at least to balance the Toyota hearing with the Blackwater hearing, even if it meant I had to cut another story short. The Littleton, Colorado school shootings used a lot of air time. Maybe the eyewitness testimony of the precocious 12 year old Littleton eighth grader could have been edited.

For me the Toyota brand is all about quality, dependability and integrity. The mats in the luggage area of the hatchbacks have bound edges. The comparable Ford economy hatchback has die cut mats with rough edges. I’ve never been stranded due to a mechanical failure. The sales and service people have always dealt with me honestly.

I bought my first Toyota Corolla in 1973. Drove it from San Francisco to an Association for Institutional Research gathering in Michigan. I didn’t see many Japanese cars in Michigan. After the meetings, I circled out through New Hampshire, then back home to San Francisco via Wisconsin where I tore out the backseat to make room for gear and to improve the reclining angle for better sleeping. Left the backseat in the cellar at dad’s cabin on Jordan lake and journeyed onward home. Homeless actually. I was between apartments, working a day job at UCSF, showering at friends’ houses and sleeping nights in the Toyota in Golden Gate Park.

A year or so later, that little car was totaled on Highway 101 northbound near the East Blithedale exit in Mill Valley when the traffic came to a sudden stop but the truck behind me didn’t. There were a bunch of people in the car, but no back seat. Happily no one was hurt. After a brief meeting with the Highway Patrol officer who was trying to untangle the pile-up, I limped on to Novato where I discharged my passengers in Bonnie Peterson’s driveway. An onlooker would have thought we were rehearsing a circus act: clown car. I left that car in Bonnie’s driveway for the insurance adjuster’s perusal, and then had it hauled away to the junk yard.

I was living in a nice little place on Castro Street at 18th, above the all night donut shop across from the theater. Buses roared outside my windows 24 hours a day and I needed a car because I was consulting at the Stanford med school, a lengthy commute down Highway 280. I bought a Fiat, an awful car. In the years since then I’ve owned a lot of cars and pick-up trucks. That Fiat was one of the worst, and the Toyota was one of the best. I’ve lost count of how many Toyotas we’ve owned, but they have always been flawless.

Right now we have a Toyota Matrix and a Rav4 in the driveway. I expect them to last for a long time, longer than the rude and abusive congress-critters I saw on the news tonight. Oddly enough, Fox News has a fair and balanced story on Akio Toyoda’s testimony before congress today. It’s worth reading.

Since a time before the centuries of failure of the British imperialists to subdue “the wily Pathan”, since the time of Hasan bin Sabah and before, a time stretching back to the second millenium BCE when the Pashtun people were forged in the fire of tribal conflicts and invasions, continuing through the present day, the tribesmen of the Hindu Kush have not made life easy for outsiders seeking to control them.

American and allied forces, mercenaries, and irregulars controlled or directed by clandestine services and armed with the latest high tech weapons are hard pressed to eke out the slightest progress in the campaign against the Taliban. The geography and the close knit cultural ties among the Pashtun people counterbalance the tools of modern warfare.

Mark Mazzetti in the lede to his New York Times story yesterday observed:

The deaths of seven Central Intelligence Agency operatives at a remote base in the mountains of Afghanistan are a pointed example of the civilian spy agency’s transformation in recent years into a paramilitary organization at the vanguard of America’s far-flung wars.

Since the days of the OSS, America’s intelligence services have performed paramilitary operations. The news of CIA casualties in the south Asian conflict while tragic is certainly no surprise. What is perhaps surprising is the agency’s visibility and the public nature of this loss.

*Statement on Prosecution of Former High Officials *

We urge Attorney General Eric Holder to appoint a non-partisan independent Special Counsel to immediately commence a prosecutorial investigation into the most serious alleged crimes of former President George W. Bush, former Vice President Richard B. Cheney, the attorneys formerly employed by the Department of Justice whose memos sought to justify torture, and other former top officials of the Bush Administration.

Our laws, and treaties that under Article VI of our Constitution are the supreme law of the land, require the prosecution of crimes that strong evidence suggests these individuals have committed. Both the former president and the former vice president have confessed to authorizing a torture procedure that is illegal under our law and treaty obligations. The former president has confessed to violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

We see no need for these prosecutions to be extraordinarily lengthy or costly, and no need to wait for the recommendations of a panel or “truth” commission when substantial evidence of the crimes is already in the public domain. We believe the most effective investigation can be conducted by a prosecutor, and we believe such an investigation should begin immediately.

Drafted by The Robert Jackson Steering Committee
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/robertjackson

Signed By:

Center for Constitutional Rights
http://www.ccrjustice.org

The National Lawyers Guild
http://www.nlg.org/

After Downing Street
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org

American Freedom Campaign
http://www.americanfreedomcampaign.org

Ann Wright, retired US Army Reserve Colonel and US diplomat http://www.voicesofconscience.com/

Backbone Campaign
http://www.backbonecampaign.org

Brad Blog
http://www.bradblog.com/

Cities for Peace
http://citiesforprogress.org/

CODE PINK: Women for Peace
http://www.codepink4peace.org

Daniel Ellsberg, Truth-Telling Project
http://www.ellsberg.net/

Defending Dissent Foundation
http://www.defendingdissent.org/

http://www.delvalvets4america.org
;
Democrats.com
http://www.democrats.com/

Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space
http://www.space4peace.org/

Gold Star Families for Peace
http://www.cindysheehanssoapbox.com/

Grandmothers Against the War
http://www.grandmothersforpeace.org/gatw

Grassroots America
http://www.grassrootsamerica4us.org/

High Road for Human Rights Advocacy Project
http://www.highroadforhumanrights.org

Iraq Veterans Against the War
http://ivaw.org/

Justice Through Music
http://www.jtmp.org

Marcus Raskin, co-founder of Institute for Policy Studies, member of editorial board of the /Nation/, member of the special staff of the National Security Council in the Kennedy Administration

Media Freedom Foundation/Project Censored
http://www.projectcensored.org/

Naomi Wolf, author of /End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot/, and /Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries/
http://naomiwolf.org/

National Accountability Network

Northeast Impeachment Coalition
http://www.neimpeach.org/wp/

Op Ed News
http://www.opednews.com/

Peace Action
http://www.peace-action.org/

Peace Team
http://www.peaceteam.net/

The Progressive
http://www.progressive.org/

Progressive Democrats of America
http://www.pdamerica.org/

Republicans for Impeachment
http://republicansforimpeachment.com/

United for Peace and Justice
http://www.unitedforpeace.org/

Velvet Revolution
http://www.velvetrevolution.us/

Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/vips

Veterans for Peace
http://www.veteransforpeace.org/

Voters for Peace
http://votersforpeace.us/index2.html

War Crimes Times
http://www.warcrimestimes.org/

Wisconsin Impeachment/Bring Our Troops Home Coalition
http://www.impeachwi.com

World Can’t Wait
http://www.worldcantwait.net

He’s taken an appointment at Harvard Law School and accepted the Directorship of Harvard’s Safra Center.

Timely. We have to start somewhere building ethics back into our cultural framework. Why not start now, as the economy is crashing around us and people are reminded that the greed is good crowd deserve jail sentences, not applause.