"The future masters of technology will have to be lighthearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb." -- Marshall McLuhan, 1969
Feingold, who today flat out called the program illegal and who last March... went on to attack Gonzales for a speech he made in November, where he said that critics of the government's warrantless wiretapping program believed in a definition of freedom that was "superficial" and a "grave threat to the liberty and security of the American people."
Feingold took issue with that and asked who in the country actually believed that terrorists should not be wiretapped.
Gonzales said he knew that it wasn't Democrats and his real targets were blogs, where you can find people who don't see that the government is trying to protect them.
Unfortunately, this is the closest thing I can find to coverage of this hearing. Transcripts do not seem to be available. If anyone has the exact quote from Gonzales, please post it. I DO have the exact quote and context for his statement in November.
Some people will argue nothing could justify the government being able to intercept conversations like the ones the Program targets. Instead of seeing the government protecting the country, they see it as on the verge of stifling freedom.
But this view is shortsighted. Its definition of freedom – one utterly divorced from civic responsibility – is superficial and is itself a grave threat to the liberty and security of the American people.
As Justice Robert Jackson remarked in the case Terminiello v. City of Chicago, “The choice is not between order and liberty. It is between liberty with order and anarchy without either. There is danger that, if the Court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact.”
The central quote was decontextualized and passed around in the media. Of course, you can find crazy people on the Internets, but the people out there who "will argue nothing could justify the government being able to intercept conversations like the ones the Program tagets," and I have never, ever seen anyone make that argument, but they are clearly too far and inbetween to constitute "a grave threat to the liberty and security of the American people."
Gonzales is almost Chomskesque in his careful use of language which simultaneously means many things and nothing. If you support the idea that the executive need not get court approval for domestic surveillance, what you hear... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]
Pew: 14 Million Online Political Activists in U.S. Today | Personal Democracy Forum
Topic: Blogging
3:52 pm EST, Jan 18, 2007
That translates into about 14 million people who were using the 'read-write Web' to contribute to political discussion and activity," the study's authors Lee Rainie and John Horrigan write.
Pew's findings again suggest that the much-feared "Daily Me" balkanization and creation of self-reinforcing echo-chambers doesn't appear to really be a problem. Folks online are probably exposed to as much, or more, information that challenges their point of view as anyone else.
This is a good run down of the results from the Pew study.
Some really nice infoporn over at The Big Picture right now. The linked chart compares the assets of various nations organized into geopolitical buckets.
Notice that Asia, for all its mindshare, is still relatively tiny, and the U.S., despite her plethora of self-inflicted woes, remains globally dominant.
In other words, America can screw up an aweful lot for a long time before international competitors are really a threat to her economic position. (Although a commenter in the thread observes that U.S. asset prices may be unfairly high due to foreign currencies being pegged to the dollar.) Also worth a look is this chart which vaugely compares the GDP of various nations with various U.S. States. I'm sure you're heard before that California has roughly the GDP of France (and half the population) but I didn't know that Texas has a comparable GDP to Canada. And Georgia, oh Georgia, if only your ski slopes were as nice as your GDP...
Its worth comparing top lists for GDP between 1995 and 2005. There have been some significant changes. For example, Canada appears to be falling behind in international terms, although I don't know if that is due to failings on her part, or simply that far more populous countries are starting to get their acts together. Brazil is rocketing up, but they have 6 times the population of Canada. Canada's population is comparable to California, but it is spread out over a far wider area, which probably makes it less efficient. (I also think that weather plays a role. Snow plows cost money.)
As various countries begin to figure out how to operate effective economies and stable politics you'd think that these charts would normalize toward a reflection of population differences, with some effects due to geographic constraints such as those I mentioned for Canada. Of course, I'm describing a vision for world peace. I think we're a long way off, but it appears progress is being made.
A longer term investment in ETFs targetting countries that have moved significantly between 1995 and 2005 might be a very sound idea if coupled with a reasonable understanding of and monitoring of the political and economic stability of the countries in question. Of course, I'm not an economist, so take that with a grain of salt.
Our recent update went out with a bug that sometimes cropped up when replying to posts which resulted in a 500 server error. This bug has been addressed. Please let us know if you see anything odd with the site.
has been re-enabled! Post away. We've tested on IE, Firefox, Safari, SideKick and Nintendo Wii, and the feature seems to work on all of these platforms. We still have some bugs we're still tracking with the most recent update, but we should have those cleared up over the course of Sunday...
Bumping Cypherghost's link through to BoingBoing, but this burning Elmo video is one part of a three part series that starts with this video. Watching the chared, burning robot flailing its metal limbs against the ground and laughing manically evokes some of the moredisturbing scenes from the Animatrix. The future is machines that don't break down, they die.
Nanochick wrote: I think its about time that the Memestreams Community and the people who work hard coding Memestreams in their free time get the recognition they deserve. Therefore, I have nominated memestreams for a "Weblog Award", and I hope others in the community will do the same.
Thanks Nano! I don't think anyone has nominated us for a Bloggie before. Frankly, if everyone who regularly reads this site nominates us, we stand a reasonable chance to get past the first round. That would certainly be fun. Apparently you can nominate a blog to multiple categories. I think "Best Community Blog" and "Best Kept Secret" are probably the best two for us, but I won't discourage other nominations. :) Just do it quick. Voting closes on January 10th.
Attack of the Zombie Computers Is a Growing Threat, Experts Say - New York Times
Topic: Computer Security
4:13 am EST, Jan 7, 2007
Rick Wesson, left, is chief executive of the data-gathering company Support Intelligence; Adam Waters is chief operating officer. “We are losing this war badly,” Mr. Wesson said of the growing threat from botnets.
Awesome! I have not spoken to Adam in years. It's a real trip to see him pop up in the NYT.
