Pakistan, Burma, Iran, Iraq, Sudan, sub-prime madness, a mad president (choose the sense of that word that befits your politics), recession, wildfires, climate change. the news ain't good.

before casting your lot with those ready to usher in the apocalypse, consider how easy it is to effect meaningful change; among all these stories the bbc reported one other this morning: that 12 and 14 year old girls in natal province are walking long distances to fetch water, and consequently are unable to walk the long distances needed to get to school. that's a problem we (meaning Homo sapiens, not Americans) can solve using fiscal, political, social, and technological resources available in south africa. all it needs is a little nudge from the developed world.

bono is right, people (even according to Jesse Helms). so go to it: click your mouse a few times and buy the latest (product)red™ thing, or quit your job to go forth and be the change.... Maybe just blog an uncapitalized but inspi(red)™ post from your cellphone and spam all your friends with it.

just don't throw your hands up in the air and wail that times are dark and getting darker still. they aren't; we're just far more interconnected, and informed, despite ourselves. 21st century growing pains aside, that's a good thing, folks! To use uniquely 21st century jargon: ubuntu is umami.


Photo: Time Magazine.

I wonder if sourceforge has a DRM project that implements DRM as a sort of socially monitored nagware? Originally from a myspace comment i made:
people confound two aspects of dl-ing: (1) it allows people to share their musical tastes with friends, put the word out about unknown music, lets new artists or established artists with new work to get heard outside of mainstream radio. (2) it lets people steal other people's creativity.

The technology is the same in both cases, and that's why people confuse them. When I grew up, my friends and i would trade music on cassettes. Then we would go out and buy more records from the bands we liked. That's how it should work. But with peer-to-peer and mp3s, you don't have to spend 180mins recording two albums onto a tape to share it with one friend: you click your mouse 5 times or so, and hundreds of people can listen to your whole music collection. Since the technology no longer limits how much you share, *people's* own ethics should.

To me it's a no brainer: download and listen to stuff you are curious about. Delete it if you don't like it. Keep it if you think it's ok, and you might want to listen to it a couple of more times. *BUY IT* if you end up putting it on your i-pod and listening to it every other day. *BUY IT* if you like it enough to share it with your friends. *BUY IT* if you're going to remix it or sample a lot of it and then share the result on the web. "IT" doesn't have to be the exact tracks you downloaded, but at the least should be some more tracks from the same artist, or concert tix, or their live DVD or whatever.

I think established artists should move to a voluntary payment system. Instead of DRM that prevents copying, DRM should do something like nag you with "suggested donation $0.99 if you like this track", and perhaps keep a count of your ratio of things you've taken/shared for free vs. what you payed for. That way "good citizens" who pay more get bragging rights.

Sometimes skating makes me feel so effing hot! Not in the sense that I think I'm terribly good at it, but rather it just makes me feel so strong and competent and fast. When this happens, it's a consequence of how my body experiences the thrilling interaction of gravity, momentum and curved-steel cutting through ice. I don't have to be "on" as a skater, and indeed tonight I was rather shaky after a two-week layoff. But it felt like being incarnated as the searing voice of a powerful singer sliding and twirling through the harmonies of her backing instruments. (Out of left field metaphor? Not really, I just bought and am listening to "Yes, Virginia" *grin*).

Should I choose a noble occupation?
If I did I'd only show up late and sick
And they would stare at me with hatred
Plus, my only natural talent's wasted on
My alcoholic friends

~ "My Alchoholic Friends", The Dresden Dolls

I'm not yet sure what Amanda's singing about there, but OMFG(oddess) I love her for it!

peace out, my lovelies.

Brian Lehrer reports that the US, after participating strongly in some aspects of the negotiations, is not expected to sign the UN convention on the rights of persons with disabilities.

The US pushed negotiations to, among other things, remove any language pertaining to "occupied territories", and to excise any explicit reference to abortion when talking of the right to health services.

If we can't sign this convention, what *can* we sign? Instead, apparently, the US pointed out that it has existing legislation in the Disabilities Act, which other countries are invited to emulate. In other words, human rights for the rest of the world, American rights for Americans. The US seems to wish to politically secede from the Human race.

Worse, we wish to retain veto-power or just plain bully-power over the rest of humanity. Perhaps it's the done thing in UN negotiations, but it strikes me as rather sinister that the US participates in shaping an international instrument that it plans not to join. I could be wrong, but this doesn't seem like a case of negotiations having been made in good faith, only to fail to live up to some sine qua non that the US needs in order to sign on. I find it hard to believe that the US could not have negotiated for a palatable treaty on disabled rights, seeing as the US does indeed have advanced national laws in the area already.

We also haven't signed certain other human rights convections such as the convention on the rights of the child, and the convention against discrimination of women. (Moral failiures which may or may not have been originally committed by previous Presidencies, but obviously upheld by the current one).

Shame on us. Again.

Police using tazer against a non-compliant subject in UCLA library in November:

The ensuing discussion at youTube is quite interesting.

Knowing that several people were killed in Iraq during the course of that blog-discussion is even more interesting.

There's an LA times article floating around somewhere about the incident. http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-taser18nov18,0,4080498.story?coll=la-home-headlines

"Get up, Stand up" Isn't that a line, ironically, from a Bob Marley song?

And before screaming police brutality, take a gander at this next video. Admittedly not the same kind of weapon and the shocks are very brief. But people do take this kind of pain for fun. Lack of consent makes all the difference. You can run both vids simultaneously for a VERY interesting effect.

And there's always the remix version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmRoNM_dzcU

A few hasty words on the Foley scandal, in which representative Foley resigned from the House after being accused of sending inappropriate electronic messages to Congressional pages:

Age of Consent?

As much as the US pretends to have zero-tolerance for child sexual abuse, we are awfully confused about the issue. I have no idea what state ages of consent for sex are, but until recently (and for all I know, even now) they are not uniform. "Legal" is not necessarily 18, *as far as state law goes*. When it comes to homosexual acts, consent may not be allowed at the same ages as for heterosexual ones. In some states of course, homosexual sex is still technically illegal. AFAIK, the military code bans sex with those under the age of 16 (which makes sense since many soldiers are just out of high-school). Don't know if this applies whithin the US or only outside of it.

I notice that news reports today (BBC and WNYC) are careful to use the word "teenager" in response to the Foley issue, while reports on saturday said "children". A journalist erroneously used the word "pedophillia" on WNYC.

Statutory Rape

I'm not sure what exactly Foley did or said, but if it was limited to asking a 16 year old if his messages "makes you horny", or asking for a picture, lets please *not* call that pedophillia OK? The behavior may well have been illegal under federal laws that Foley himself sponsored. But that doesn't mean that they were blatently evil acts that should be implicitly compared to child abuse.

Corrupting a minor

Sexual messages between adults and minors are regulated on the internet. However, nothing prevents adults from hyping up, glorifying, and encouraging teenage sex via the popular media. As usual, we Americans are horribly confused about sex. Influential adults are screaming "BUY! SEX! BUY!" to kids, and yet interactions between adults and sub-eighteen year olds are supposed to be strictly platonic.

Sexual Harrasment

Foley was a congressman. He should *not* have been sexually fraternizing with underlings, be they underage or not. As they were indeed underage, he ought to have been that much more sensitive to the issue.

Hypocrisy

Democrats are going to fall over themselves to condemn Foley's hypocrisy for having sponsored internet child-protection laws, and for having been critical of President Clinton's "sexual addiction". They are going to cry foul about the Republican leadership, including Speaker Hastert, for having permitted and covered-up Foley's behavior. Fine. But I hope they don't get holier-than-thou and adopt the Republican's moral agenda, in this one expeditious case, and call for fire-and-brimstone against Foley and Hastert for acts of perverted homosexual pedophilia. Verbal irony intended.

It's a cliche of science that nature abhors common sense. ( This is seen in the utterly bizarre... ) In social science, the cliche rears its head in the all pervasive notion that the only way to achieve public welfare is to allow individuals the freedom to pursue their own interests. Regulate and ye shall waste; unleash greed and ye shall heal.

I've been reading though a site that descries the unintended consequences, waste and institutional inefficacy of public decisionmaking, and that extols the merits of property rights and the invisible brain of the free market. You'd think the world learned of all this ever since President Reagan's words "Mr. General Secretary, tear down this wall," were telecast. But not all of us have taken economics, ( and many of us, myself included, squandered their college years )

In a way the economists' prescription to leave things up to individual liberty runs contrary to the deterministic newtonian model of science that old folks like me were taught in grade school. (  The world is too complex to understand, economists might say )

Is it ethically wrong to commandeer resources away from an efficient marketplace in misguided attempts to do good? ( The answer isn't something that should depend on one's party affiliation ).

Markets are not panaceas of course, and it is notoriously hard to assign property rights to some of the resources that are involved in global environmental or economic justice problems.

I also have no fucking idea where this train of thought is taking me, except that I want to write an essay along similar lines for an essay contest that's sponsored by an entity that seems to have been spawned by or at least involves Mr. Sachs (and therefore, by guilty association, U2's Bono). Yeah! Go Rock Star economics for the 21st century! [EDIT: abetterearth.com might not be a Jeffrey Sachs Joint™ -- while it shares with Sachs a penchant for the slick marketing of academic theory, it seems rabidly free-market, whereas Sachs would probably pay lip service to government action. abetterearth´s article about full spectrum lighting (FSL) hypes the as yet scientifically murky idea that FSL, rather than just plain light, is what prevents SAD]

meh. This post had about as mixed a result as tonight's skating lesson, in which I learned to ungracefully skate forwards on figure skates, something I could already do on hockey skates with no help. :/

[copied from my posting on the spiral]

I personally think spying without court authorization should be legal. However, evidence so gathered should be inadmisible in court.

I often wonder how many of the folks who claim to be concerned about privacy bother to routinely encrypt their e-mail and other electronic comunications? ( it's easy to track people these days )

I tend towards favoring liberty when it comes to not unecesarily regulating behavior. Call me insane or un-American though, I really don't care that people check up on me to see that I *do* in fact follow the law. So long as such espionage doesn't unduly burden me. Having my e-mails sniffed, for example, doesn't keep me from going about my business. Being stoped on the road every 10 blocks to have my bag searched does. The latter might easily be considered unreasonable search and seizure. The former, I'm not so sure about.

And yes, there has to be an expectation that the govt doesn't share or sell the information it gathers about us. Bringing the process out into the open can only help ensure that.