mellowtigger

The famous American intellectual Noam Chomsky has endorsed Jill Stein, my chosen candidate. I'm happy to see someone of his caliber agree that great progress is still possible within our current political system.  It gives me hope.  I'm also pleased that he chose the same opportunity that I did.  I'm looking forward to casting my vote for her tomorrow.

I admit that I'm doing less research for all of my other decisions this year than I have in previous elections. I may let party affiliation of the candidates (rather than their history and their published platform) determine my choice more than usual this year. I've been tired, as usual. And distracted. I've been much more worried this year with the integrity of the election process than the integrity of the candidates themselves.  I've been directing my attention to that problem.  More on that topic in later weeks, I hope.

Prognosticators are trending toward an Obama victory tomorrow.  The recently famous Nate Silver is forecasting an Obama second term.  He predicts only a 50.9% chance of Obama winning the popular vote, but a 92.2% chance of Obama winning the electoral vote.  InTrade contracts are forecasting an Obama victory by 67.4%.  Not to be left out of the fortunetelling, the GayGamer forum predicts an Obama win by 72.9%.  I don't understand why gay people vote Republican, but there are gay sexists and dark-skinned racists, so I guess anything is possible.



I'm still worried that the electoral wins may be too close tomorrow to depend upon, so we won't really know who is president until the Electoral college votes on December 17th.  How is anyone supposed to celebrate when the apocalypse is just 4 days later?  ;)

Minnesota residents are losing access to free online education courses.  Coursera (which includes classes from Stanford) is already prohibited by official notice from the state government.  Next may be Udacity (where I've already signed up for 2 classes next spring), Khan Academy, MITx, MIT's OpenCourseware, edX, and so many more.  We have a Democratic governor, yet the state's Office Of Higher Education has decided to enforce a decades-old law that makes any education illegal in Minnesota without the state's explicit approval.  Coursera has already updated its terms of service:

"Notice for Minnesota Users

Coursera has been informed by the Minnesota Office of Higher Education that under Minnesota Statutes (136A.61 to 136A.71), a university cannot offer online courses to Minnesota residents unless the university has received authorization from the State of Minnesota to do so. If you are a resident of Minnesota, you agree that either (1) you will not take courses on Coursera, or (2) for each class that you take, the majority of work you do for the class will be done from outside the State of Minnesota."

This absurdity has been published in the news by the Chronicle Of Higher Education, Forbes, and Slate.  I'm so glad that I'm not beholden to Democratic politicians.  I chose a 3rd-party candidate for governor during the last election, and I'm definitely not voting for Mark Dayton (D) next time.

Plutocrats protecting their monied interests are exactly what's wrong with USA government at every level, and I'm very very annoyed.  Education is big business, and Minnesota has just forged new legal ground in protecting that business from free alternatives.

You can view tonight's presidential debate at... apparently... only a single url.  It will feature presidential candidates Jill Stein (Green) and Rocky Anderson (Justice) as they answer the same questions posed to Barack Obama (Democratic) and Mitt Romney (Republican).  The viewer count is bouncing up and down, but it's currently at 12,468 people for this first-of-its-kind presidential debate.  Too bad the livestream is not cutting from Jim Lehrer after he poses a question.  The video feed is almost all Obama/Romney instead of Stein/Anderson.

An interesting panel of people are assembled to discuss the official broadcast debate between Obama and Romney.  I thought these were the people who would be posing questions to the 3rd-party presidential candidates.  I was wrong, sorry.  It's actually an unrelated 3rd simultaneous event on this night.
Prior to the debate, some people marched in Denver to protest the 2-party lock-in by the corporate Commission For Presidential Debates.  I thought it would be staged outside the location of the official debate, but I can't tell where it happened.
Color me disappointed.  Apparently I won't get my opportunity to hear presidential candidates discuss meaty issues.

*SIGH*



NOTE: This post was edited repeatedly as new information became available.  Last edit at 8:29pm.

Our postal service borders on insolvency, even though they are sitting on a proverbial gold mine.  I keep telling people that data is valuable, but the postal service seems not to listen to me.  They have two services that they could sell cheaply and still earn great quantities of money.

1. Address verification
2. Address geocoding

Plenty of third-party companies charge a lot of money for these services.  Technically, there are also free services available (like Google, Yahoo, and others), but their free access is encumbered by usage restrictions in their license.  I've investigated several of them for the non-profit organization where I work, and we were prohibited from using all of these services either by their licensing or their fees.

The USPS would need to invest in a programming interface to their valuable database.  Afterwards, though, if they charged only a small fee, they could still rake in lots of cash.  They could compete with all of the 3rd-party offerings, and they could outperform on both cost and legal restrictions.

How will the U.S. government punish me for being too poor to afford healthcare?

The U.S. Supreme Court has broadly upheld our new health care law (generally called "Obamacare" among those who disapprove).  The most controversial provision of the law was its individual mandate.  All Americans must pay for healthcare insurance.

I don't care about the politics of anything else.  I only want to know how this mandate will be enforced.  As I understood it last year, there was a multi-thousand-dollar penalty charged to anyone who failed to purchase healthcare.  I, like a great many Americans, cannot afford that much money.  So, again, I ask the only question that really matters.

How will the U.S. government punish me for being too poor to afford healthcare?

The good news is that economic equality improves many societal problems. The bad news is that America is not on any path to recovery.

Richard Wilkinson gave a great lecture at TED last year. He showed some amazing correlations that he found between income inequality and a wide range of measures for societal health: lifespan, mental illness, homicide, literacy, trust, social mobility, and more. The same trends held true across nations of different backgrounds and also across the states within the USA. This 17-minute video is well worth your time.


Our politicians will not take the steps necessary to improve wealth equality in America. Everything "liberal" has become so thoroughly demonized that it's impossible to have bipartisan discussions on real issues any more. For example, somebody murdered a political leader's cat and scrawled "Liberal" on its corpse. That's the level of discourse that we have nowadays because evidence-based reasoning is ridiculed.

Meanwhile, the economic hard times continue. Daily life is not getting better, regardless of what the pundits are claiming about the economy. I go to the gas station convenience store, and I see an old man digging in the trash can for food. I talk to college students (and recent graduates) who are barely holding things together. I talk to people my age who cancel annual vacation plans because they can't afford it. I know my former boss is still unemployed after job hunting for an entire year, and I know others who are also unemployed.

Outsiders are finally beginning to see past the published lies and the political rhetoric. This recent BBC presentation documented the kind of America that I'm seeing.


One woman in that documentary tells her husband who needs surgery, "What are they going to do if we can't pay the bill? They can't come eat us. They can't kill us and eat us." And that's how far America has fallen. The rich seem to know it too, since they arm themselves in case the peasants finally decide to eat the rich. The politicians seem to know it, since they have already assembled the obvious data. Instead of addressing the issues, however, they divert us with the reliable distractions of birth control, union organizers, gay marriage, military deployments, and oil development.

Go back to that TED video, and tell me what evidence-based reasoning would suggest that we follow as a useful legislative agenda for solving our social problems? If we can't do those things, then we'll continue killing cats and eating rats.

Technology gives us the global telepathy that biology failed to provide. Copyright showcases our failure to adapt. The problem is easy to express. In fact, the Buddha stated it plainly over 2,500 years ago.


People try to lay claim to the immaterial rather than the material. The effort to "own" the insubstantial is what leads to a multitude of problems. Technological telepathy will require you to make a decision about whether there can be such a concept as "intellectual property" when somebody else claims ownership over your own memories. Personal liberty and freedom of expression are concepts that will run directly into the wall of corporatism, profiteering, and ownership.

We should sidestep the distraction of the various recording technologies (cameras, tape recorders, page scanners) by acknowledging immediately that humans themselves have always functioned as recording devices. Recording cannot be prevented reasonably, so who owns these human records now?  Sounds reach my ears, sights reach my eyes, and experiences in total are stored in my memories. The technology is already in development that will allow me to directly share my experience. My auditory experience can be shared. My visual experience can be shared. My memories can eventually be stored outside of my body and shared with others. Are my memories "mine", in total, or are they not? Why should anyone have authority to prevent me from sharing the history of my life experience, even when a moment of it incorporates somebody's copyrighted work?

I see only three beneficial solutions: we end intellectual property, we recognize benefaction rather than ownership, or we seize intellectual property for the commons. In all three cases, plagiarism is still possible (as a false claim of original authorship) but not theft.

Keeping our existing laws is ghastly; it will soon mean that someone else owns your memories.

Solution #1: Eliminate Intellectual Property

It would be foolish to share something then demand that every recipient is now bound by a code of silence forever, but that's exactly how copyright works today. You are not allowed to share your experience of a concert or movie except at the lowest fidelity by transcribing your audiovisual experience into mere words that describe your recollection. If the original experience was already in the realm of words alone (reading a story, for example), then additional restrictions apply.

The easiest solution is to eliminate copyright altogether. End intellectual property. I prefer this method for its simplicity. Immaterial ideas could be owned as private property only if they remain private. Taking ideas or experiences from the mind of the sole individual who harbors them would indeed be theft.

Solution #2: Eliminate Ownership

An alternative is to end "ownership" of ideas but instead recognize "benefactors" of creative works. If there is ever any benefit (money or services granted) for a creative development, then the original author may lay claim to that benefit. So someone can freely use any image, video, audio, or text on their website, but if they earn any money from the publication, then the original author(s) can claim a portion of those collected fees.

I already endorse this approach. If you look at the source code for my personal webpages, you see this notice in the meta tags. It is the closest version of benefaction that I can easily achieve on my own with current laws.


I think this approach is encouraged by the efforts of the Pirate Party. I notice that scientists also seem to favor this approach, as they abandon strict journal ownership of articles in favor of peer review through easily shared sources.  Authorship is important, but ownership is not.

Solution #3: Seize Public Property

I mention this idea only to be thorough in my examination of possibilities. It relies on government actively working to benefit people, which no government should be trusted to do continuously. Government could counterbalance the intellectual property problem by asserting the community's ownership of its ideas. Government could place a movie or book in national archives where everybody could use it. Government could take a patent and make it publicly owned.

When was the last time you heard of a government claiming "imminent domain" rights over intellectual property? Yeah, me neither. Government is so beholden to corporations that it is actively stealing from the public commons to benefit the private corporations. It does so already with limited physical resources. The U.S. government now also has permission from the Supreme Court to take items out of public domain and return them to copyright protection.

The easiest solution is still to end copyright.

Government figures claim one thing but act differently. Is this what it will be like during the next year until the election on November 2nd in 2012?

Minneapolis city claims to support its Occupation, but it prohibits tents.

Hennepin county commissioner Mike Opat claims to care for the poor and disabled and to help the chronically homeless, but he works to prohibit sleeping or placing posters at the Occupation outside his office.

Will it be a whirlwind of hypocritical claims of solidarity with the Occupation movement while secretly (or not so secretly) working to inhibit the protest?

I advocate that "information is always free". I don't fully understand people who claim privacy or copyright to information, events, or depictions (written recollections or photo recordings) that should rightfully belong either to someone else, to no one, or to everyone at large. Paranoia about keeping some kinds of truths hidden or controlled is a strange twist of human psychology.

Here in Minneapolis I've heard paranoid objections from people regarding the recording of discussions. Yes, we livestream our activities. Why would it matter if someone records? Yes, the local Sheriff's office has tried to characterize this group as dirty vandals who cost taxpayers money. At first, local media tended to "take the bait" and accept the Sheriff's authority on the topic. I think they might be growing wise to the Sheriff's lack of impartiality. Indeed, local media performed much better during an incident this week with a box of riot gear. Someone left a box at our kitchen table. The box included bricks and a sign that read:


Gee, is there anything obvious about that obvious obviousness?

Justified:  Occupiers notified officers on site about the man. An officer questioned the man at the light rail station then let him go. Yes, they let him just ride away. Later, the Sheriff's office released a statement about the box that led to full-blown hyperbole from the local NBC station that seems merely to reproduce their statement for them. The Independent and even FOX were much more thoughtful in their evaluation. Previously, (or so I'm told) officers gave someone a $700 ticket for smoking a cigarette on the plaza, and they gave him a notice of trespassing to make sure he doesn't visit the plaza again. A man drops off a box of "riot gear", though, and they let him go. Do I detect something incongruent in these responses?  Fertile ground for paranoid theories.

Just sad:  Similarly, Bob Carney Jr., a local Republican advocate, attends our nightly general assemblies and then publishes statements about this Occupation such as, "Communists, "hooligans on the left" seek to shape Occupy agenda. Carney has observed extensive involvement in the on-going Minneapolis event by leftist, socialist, and Marx/Lenin Communists." Sure, there are Socialists involved. I've told you so myself, but I also point out the presence of a wide variety of opinions. I try to avoid relying on tired old dichotomies just for their scare value.

Just a WTF:  Considering these experiences with journalists, maybe some healthy amount of paranoia is justified? But the Oakland group had gone so far as to actively chase away (sic a dog on someone) their local media! So we shouldn't be totally surprised when television stations then turned their backs on the protesters as the police launched their militarized assault. Sure the stations can be rightfully offended, but their dislike should never have led them to abandon their 4th branch role in government. Media is necessary to ensure public accountability from government, if media is functioning properly. The Washington Post, however, had the gall to stage a "pet the dog" defense of the assault in Oakland with their "pet the kitten" front page photograph.

Anyway... I try to resist the paranoia machine. I record, I write, I collect online, and I share what I encounter. This event-in-the-making belongs to everyone. I make no money from my efforts. My interest in blogging is entirely for bringing issues to light for proper discussion.

No problem can be solved if it remains ignored. I disapprove of secrets. Information wants to be free. :)

Republocrats serve the plutocracy, not the electorate.  Doubt any commentary from pundits of the left or the right who try to frame the Occupation using the terms of traditional political parties.  I personally think that it's time to end both major parties so that true democratic representation can begin again.

Whatever it was that motivated the beginning of the Tea Party protest, their effort was quickly co-opted as just a new "brand name" of the Republican party similar to the Moral Majority of the 1980s.  I fervently hope that we can keep the Occupation movement from becoming a similar tool for the Democratic party.

Consider the following commentary from a leftist website:

The False Divide

A joke making the rounds on the Internet goes like this:

There's a plate of 12 cookies sittng on a table. The rich take 11 cookies leaving only 1 cookie left on the plate. They then turn to the Tea Party and say ‘Those unions are trying to take your cookie.'

This works about equally well with Republicans vs. Democrats.

It's why Republicans versus Democrats is largely a false divide. The monied interests would rather have us arguing Republican vs. Democrat (50/50 split) than Rich vs. Everyone Else (1/99 split).

- http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/10/10/1024591/-99:-A-Warning-to-OWS-and-the-Rest-of-Us

So please consider, when reading any commentary, how an opinion could serve the interests of corporations to keep the electorate divided into their current and ineffective Republocrat camps.  The 99% are larger than either political party, and it's time we worked together to solve the problems that undermine our democratic process.

Here's a sign from #occupyMN that belongs to a small political party in Minnesota.  As it happens, I was one of only a few thousand Minnesotans who voted for them during the last election.  If this ongoing Occupation fails to deliver any change at all except the formation of many, many new political parties, then it still will have served an important role in changing the course of American history and improving our existing political process.

Regardless of your political stripes, please try to find those issues being discussed by Occupiers that you also support.  Add your voice to the chorus asking for change on those issues.  Leaving America to the whims of its politicians (bought by lobbyist money) is what got us into this mess.  Help us demand something new.