Death With Dignity wins in the Supreme Court. Roberts, Scalia and Thomas dissenting. There's little doubt this would have been a 5 - 4 with Alito on the court instead of O'Conner, part of the reason hard-core conservatives want him in the game.

This is something I know a bit about since my mom worked on the campaign in Oregon, where the law was passed. It's a good victory for state's rights, compassion, and rationality. Die-hard conservatives see this as a slippery slope at the bottom of which is some kind of soylent green dystopia, but frankly that's quite farfetched. It seems rather straightforward to me that in a free society, one should be free to determine the time and place of their dying, and that if a doctor feels it is within their professional ethics to make that choice as painless and safe as possible, there's nothing wrong with that.

I find it strange that a state can legislate to allow you to kill yourself but not to allow you to smoke pot, even if both freedoms are restricted to the very very ill. I think laws against suicide are silly, ditto the prohibition of marijuana, but then I suppose I'm a little ahead of the curve. Or behind it maybe. Time will tell.

From the windup of the below-linked speech by Albert Gore today:

It is particularly important that the freedom of the Internet be protected against either the encroachment of government or the efforts at control by large media conglomerates. The future of our democracy depends on it.

Missed that before. Good fucking point. Bears repeating. Here's some video highlights, about 6 minutes. It's a shame this guy let his robot body double run for president in 2000.

Quicktime or Windows Media

Worth watching.

From the windup of the below-linked speech by Albert Gore today:

It is particularly important that the freedom of the Internet be protected against either the encroachment of government or the efforts at control by large media conglomerates. The future of our democracy depends on it.

Missed that before. Good fucking point. Bears repeating. Here's some video highlights, about 6 minutes. It's a shame this guy let his robot body double run for president in 2000.

Quicktime or Windows Media

Worth watching.

Text of Gore speech, January 16, 2006

On this particular Martin Luther King Day, it is especially important to recall that for the last several years of his life, Dr. King was illegally wiretapped-one of hundreds of thousands of Americans whose private communications were intercepted by the U.S. government during this period.

The FBI privately called King the "most dangerous and effective negro leader in the country" and vowed to "take him off his pedestal." The government even attempted to destroy his marriage and blackmail him into committing suicide.

At barcamp, there was a kind of doofy guy who was arguing (more for the sake of argument, it seemed) that the G-man had the right to tap all international calls as an extension of the practice of x-raying your luggage or search you at the border. This is not a strong argument for two reasons:

1) There's an important difference between searching good and searching information. Searching information amounts to seizure, especially in a digital context. It's one thing to search a shipping container for drugs or plutonium (something we're currently not doing, BTW). It's quite another to read a letter. The contents of a communication, once searched by a government agent -- whether it's a secretary reading a letter or a server archiving an email -- has effectively been seized. The State is now in posession of that data.

2) You can make a case that this should be allowed, that the State should be a party to all international communications. That can be debated on fundimental merits, but what cannot be debated is the notion that this should be an informal process outside any legal channel without oversight, checks and balances. You cannot sustain a democracy if the State is allowed to secretly monitor the Public's communications with impunity.

Unfortunately, in spite of Al Gore's efforts and everything else, I'm not optimistic about the federal government. The Democratic Party is not an organized enough institution to effectively defeat the GOP, even in their scandal-plagued state. Retaking congress, the only real hope for checking the Bush administration's abuses of power, is unlikely from a mechanical perspective. Furthermore, it's unclear that the individual personalities who would attain positions of authority should such an unlikely event come to pass would have the political will to resist the Bush agenda, much less launch the necessary investigation of past abuses. The performance of the Senate Democrats around the Alito hearings has been extremely dissapointing.

There's still a narrow window of opportunity for things to change, but the lack of any real leadership among the Democratic Party makes it unlikely the institution will focus and act in time to sieze the moment.

Well, in spite of my skepticism, BarCamp got my juices flowing.

Mass Power

See, the internet is only getting more popular, and no one out there is really doing shit (or going to do shit) with it in the 2006 cycle. It's all lessons learned from three years ago, finally penitrating the establishment. That's nice because there's money to be made. That's also nice because it means there's opportunity in all that unclaimed territory.

Just look at this, this and this and let's do some quick math.

• 27.8 Million Americans between the age of 18 and 24 voted in 2004
• About 17 Million of them voted for Kerry
• Basically all these kids (90%+) are online
• The population wave on its way through is going to peak on voting age in 2008

No one is really doing anything to capture these people. What would it take to build a mass-membership organization with 1.5 million members between the age of 16 and 26? An organization that could get a minumum of $10 from all its members?

Personal Publishing

Well, it's high time I made the move with my own publishing enterprise. This old URL is getting an overhaul. Here's the plan:

1. Outlandishjosh.com -- New Front Page which aggregates the latest and greatest from all of my endeavors below; internally maintains my own wiki (which is what the broken sub-sections of this site really want to be).
2. Outlandishjosh.com/blog -- personal publishing and gonzo journalism.
3. Trellon.org -- Professional blogging for the nerds; open source technology, the internet, campaigns and organizations. The new art and science of participation.
4. As-Yet-Unnamed Online Venture -- New center for professional writing on the subject of politics. Not blogging (although a blog may be employed) so much as content creation aimed at Book-type ends.
5. I Preach A Dark Future -- Working title for an artistic endeavor to create audio drama for distribution over the internets.

I think all that can be set up in the next few weeks. Especially if I get the internets in my home.

Censoring the Internet: the International Herald Tribune runs an Op Ed about the number of American High Tech companies who are helping. This is not only troubling because, hey, it's kind of wrong to make the internet into an arm of the police state -- even if you're doing it in China -- but also because it begs some rather troubling questions:

[S]hould we care what Chinese are reading on the Internet? John Palfrey of Harvard is blunt: "The ramifications of this censorship regime should be of concern to anyone who believes in participatory democracy. How the Chinese government restricts its citizens' online interactions is significantly altering the global Internet landscape."

Americans who think that in any event China is far away may be jolted by this suggestion from Rebecca MacKinnon, a former foreign correspondent in China now specializing in Internet censorship: "If these American technology companies have so few moral qualms about giving in to Chinese government demands to hand over Chinese user data or censor Chinese people's content, can we be sure they won't do the same thing in response to potentially illegal demands by an over-zealous government agency in our own country? Or will we all sit there like frogs in water being brought very slowly to a boil?"

This is a theme that's only going to become more prominant. It's a moral issue.

Censoring the Internet: the International Herald Tribune runs an Op Ed about the number of American High Tech companies who are helping. This is not only troubling because, hey, it's kind of wrong to make the internet into an arm of the police state -- even if you're doing it in China -- but also because it begs some rather troubling questions:

[S]hould we care what Chinese are reading on the Internet? John Palfrey of Harvard is blunt: "The ramifications of this censorship regime should be of concern to anyone who believes in participatory democracy. How the Chinese government restricts its citizens' online interactions is significantly altering the global Internet landscape."

Americans who think that in any event China is far away may be jolted by this suggestion from Rebecca MacKinnon, a former foreign correspondent in China now specializing in Internet censorship: "If these American technology companies have so few moral qualms about giving in to Chinese government demands to hand over Chinese user data or censor Chinese people's content, can we be sure they won't do the same thing in response to potentially illegal demands by an over-zealous government agency in our own country? Or will we all sit there like frogs in water being brought very slowly to a boil?"

This is a theme that's only going to become more prominant. It's a moral issue.

Desert Dog Dauter has written a summary of Economic Sociology for the Encyclopedia of Governance, it's much better than what's currently in the wikipedia, so I'm encouraging him to update that page.

Basically it boils down to the recognition that Groups matter as much in economic analysis as Individuals, and that the State and the Market have a symbiotic, rather than opposing, relationship.

In the academic realm, the Free Market Fundimentalists have more or less been proven wrong. In the political realm, you're still liable to be labeled a socialist if you don't take the Chinese line -- "The Customer is God and the Market decides Everything" -- but I think bringing this new consciousness to the debate is important to rehabilitating the role of government in our civilization.

Desert Dog Dauter has written a summary of Economic Sociology for the Encyclopedia of Governance, it's much better than what's currently in the wikipedia, so I'm encouraging him to update that page.

Basically it boils down to the recognition that Groups matter as much in economic analysis as Individuals, and that the State and the Market have a symbiotic, rather than opposing, relationship.

In the academic realm, the Free Market Fundimentalists have more or less been proven wrong. In the political realm, you're still liable to be labeled a socialist if you don't take the Chinese line -- "The Customer is God and the Market decides Everything" -- but I think bringing this new consciousness to the debate is important to rehabilitating the role of government in our civilization.