Telecom reform moves forward / House panel OKs measure favored by phone companies:

A House subcommittee handed phone companies a victory Wednesday by voting 27-4 to advance a bill that would make it easier for them to deliver television service over the Internet and clearing the way for all Internet carriers to charge more for speedier delivery.

The lopsided vote was a defeat for Internet and technology firms like Google and Microsoft, which had hoped to amend the bill to enforce a principle called network neutrality and preserve the status quo under which all Internet traffic is treated equally

This was last week. Looks like the internet is on its way to losing this one. Suxxors. No word on this from any of the players I know of. I have a creeping suspicion that business as usual will bear down. Until Google, Yahoo, and some kind of aggregator of internet participants start handing out big checks, I don't think many Congresspeople will take the time to "get it."

Maybe I'm just in a cynical mood.

Last Saturday afternoon Mark and I took a little drive over to Patrick's Point Park a few miles North of Westhaven, hiked out along the rim trail for a mile or so. Great vistas, even with a windy drizzle on. For those of you who haven't been to the Pacific Northwest, there's really nothing like it in terms of raw natural power in a coastline. I suggest you take it in before you die.

It was a good chat. The crisis of meaning is an everpresent first-world problem. Those of us who ascend Maslow's Pyramid of Human Needs, we get past the basiscs of survival and safety and living within a society, and then we're buggered by things like having a social circle that esteems us, and finding that inner source of purpose and reason.

And we're not getting any younger. Mark's 27. I'll be there in another month. We can joke all we want about the 35-to-55 sweet spot for having a family, but the truth is if you want to get there in style there's groundwork to be laid.

(On a related note, I came home to find the only mail that had piled up was wedding-related, from friends. Everyone goes through this, I'm sure, but it sure is new and interesting to me.)

But groundwork. Where and how to begin? I await revelation, listening to the wind and to my guts, searching for way to call down lightning, sniffing around for signs and wonders.

My ability to plan my life has always been somewhat light. What is a plan? A list of things that probably won't happen. Surely I can make decisions, pursue goals, change courses through the exercise of will -- I believe in all that -- but all the Great Things that have ever happened to me came through synchronicity and luck.

I'm an accidental person, embracing the unexpected. It is written in my soul, my genesis. I maneuver into the moment and channel my talents and instincts based on the situation. It all sounds more hippy-dippy on paper than it feels to me inside. I still have great expectations and outlandish ambitions, and I really believe this kung-fu is the best way for me to get shit done. So it's not as though I'm a lost soul or one of those Tolkienesque wanderers. The internal compass and gyro units still run strong, but how this squares with putting together a whole stable life remains unknown.

Awaiting revelation the question rattles: do I settle down and start playing by the rules, or do I persist in my alternative/outlaw style. Instinctually the choice is clear -- I'm an outlaw baby; a ramblin' man -- but the suit grows around me through fear of the unexpected: something demanding medical insurance, a death in the family, who knows what might happen. "Be prepaired," a certain voice says. Ironic: what's the difference between these unexpected events that I should settle down in preparation of and my long-awaited sign from heaven? It's in the eye of the beholder I suppose.

I need to get out from under the weight. This is why I want to get to California for the summer. This is why I want to stop working for political groups and start working in politics. This is why I want to tear down this old website and get back to my roots.

The square world isn't going anywhere. That's one of the nice things about it. It's high time to hew to the ethos.

It's apparently full-on spring here in New York. That's fun.

The immigrant groups killed it. They have shown more political savvy in the past month than the entire non-establishment Left has in the past six years. Getting up and reciting the pledge of allegiance? Oh snap; a protest that works.

I saw some anti-immigration lady in Phoenix on, nice-seeming at first, kind of looked like Maria Schreiver, except then she got the crazy-eyes and started calling this "the genocide of America." Hey there, cryptoracistcrazy-pants.

This one's over, as it should be. People who think this is going to be the end of America sound about as dated as people who said the same when the Irish came to New York.

Sy Hersh:

A government consultant with close ties to the civilian leadership in the Pentagon said that Bush was “absolutely convinced that Iran is going to get the bomb” if it is not stopped. He said that the President believes that he must do “what no Democrat or Republican, if elected in the future, would have the courage to do,” and “that saving Iran is going to be his legacy.”

One former defense official, who still deals with sensitive issues for the Bush Administration, told me that the military planning was premised on a belief that “a sustained bombing campaign in Iran will humiliate the religious leadership and lead the public to rise up and overthrow the government.” He added, “I was shocked when I heard it, and asked myself, ‘What are they smoking?’ ”

Holy crap. This article is terrifying. I heard Drudge debunking it by overplaying the bit where Hersh notes that some plans call for tactical "bunker busting" nukes, but that's a bit of a red herring. In fact, it scares me all the more that no one really denies that there's a good chance that some attack will happen.

Attacking Iran would almost certainly have catastrophic consequences. However, if the debate is between "they're going to get the bomb!" and "well, maybe they won't get it for another six years," I think the war pigs will win. It seems like both sides are spoiling for conflict. Hope I'm misreading everything.

This is what happens when I try to go on vacation: inevitably a server goes down or a deal falls through, or both, and then I have to get on Mark's dialup and deal with stuff, and I get the crazy eyes:

After the unpleasantness, it was quite a great weekend. We got out to see the ocean and stuff, had some excellent breakfasts. Satuday night we caught The Devil Makes Three down at the 3030 club, which was a rockin' good time. Your $7 admission also gets you the right to tailgate in the parking lot, where the action moves from beer to whisky to hash to psychadellic mushrooms to BBQ sausages, and then piling into the warehouse to jump and dance and sing along. What more could a man ask for?

I think I'm going to head out there to live for the summer. The Summer of Jefferson, we'll call it. Oh hells yeah.

Interesting.

Apparently, downloading a torrent tracker file is cause for copyright infringement. That's weird. A torrent file isn't copyrighted. It doesn't contain any content. Under the INDUCE laws, one could probably argue that it's meant to gain access to infringing material, but those laws are meant to crack down on producers, not downloaders.

So basically, this is legally kind of FUD, but it's enough to get ISPs het up, and that's all taht matters.

Anyway, this isn't very smart on the part of content creators. Their legal fees and staff costs to try and figure out who's downloading what an lean on people to stop is going to vastly outweigh any increased HBO subscriptions or DVD sales.

People really don't get it. A comment from that post:

How about paying $10 a month or less? How about not stealing? Is that so crazy?

It's not stealing. There's nothing to "take." It's information, not property. When I get it, you don't loose it.

Furethermore, if I wasn't going to pay for it anyway, then there's not even any profit loss. In fact, there's a loss in profit in preventing me from downloading because then I don't tell my friends that show XYZ is awesome and get them excited about watching it. I'm also less likely to watch it and then shell out for the DVD because I'm tired of trying to be a database manager and buy hard drives to store all the media I enjoy.

Idiots.

Is it pathetic that I get an enormous jolt out of reading my own archives?

Now, I know I can communicate, and I know I have a few ideas. I spend a lot of time straddling strange gaps, trying to deploy my mind in two areas at once. Sometimes I'm successful. It took me about two weeks to rack up 50 karma points on /. just speaking my mind, mostly about the politics of business and the business of creativity and the creativity of politics. I know I'm a smart kid, but I intensely fear ending up one of those arrogant hipster dudes who's so into the coolness of the things that he does that there's not much he's actually doing. I'm too reserved as it is: people see me as cold when I would say I'm shy. I don't want to retreat into a shallow lonlely shell of ego: I want to truly become and remain humble. I want to retain the ability to regularly be overcome by all the truth and beauty in the world, as I have many times this week. I want stike a deal with the universe that grandfathers in that that delightful sense of childlike surprise I get at strange weather or the syncopated rhythm of my music and the pedals of my bike.

I was reading Justin's Links just now, and today's entry really brought around the emptyness of what I've been working on this week. I think I've found something I can do for a while in consulting, but it's a world so frightfully awash in bullshit I don't know if I can handle it for the long haul. Every day the urge to let fly and speak real language with real meanings, even at the risk of offending someone's ego, grows stronger. What I need to do is amass a little nut and then stake out an enterprise of my own. Actually, this has been mine and Peter's plan all along. It's just that the nut-getting part is so insipid and banal. I hope I have the chutzpa to see it through.

Fuckin' A. I used to really have some mojo.

Outlandish, four years ago, feels a lot cooler than this semi-pro crap I've got going on now.

Fuckin' a, man. My blog used to be awesome! What the fuck happened? Must resist the creeping growing up...

It's time baby. I'm gonna really rip this shit down and put some new shit up. For reals. Gonna happen. Semi-pro nonsense gets its own zone and this url goes back to being all outlandish all the time. I'm gonna start doing video too. Hells yeah.

On an unrelated note... According to the most recent studies, more than 25 Million Americans willingly admit to using marijuana in the past year. About half of those are over the age of 25. Time to end that prohibition ya think?

No surprise here, but still:

The first data to document the effect of President Bush's tax cuts for investment income show that they have significantly lowered the tax burden on the richest Americans, reducing taxes on incomes of more than $10 million by an average of about $500,000.

We now officially have a regressive tax structure, even on the income tax. The interesting thing is that it's the runaway ultra-wealthy (earners of $10M or more) who screw the sorta-wealthy (earners of between $200k and $10M) who are actually paying a higher rate than the uber-right. People in the middle class on on the bottom also get fucked becase social services are deteriorating -- causing myriad other costs to emerge -- and their share of the tax burdin, while still less than those above them, is on the rise.

This also doesn't take into account the effects of sales taxes and property tax, which proportionally fall more heavily upon working and middle class folks.

With this, and the end to inheritance taxes, it looks like we're on our way towards that post-capitalist crony kleptocracy we've always wanted. Huzzah!