I think Glenn Greenwald has nailed the current OWS situation. The protests are being met with force to make Americans think twice about voicing disagreement with the status quo. Who wants to be pepper sprayed just to express an opinion that things aren't going the way they should? Who wants their child beaten with a club just because she wants to complain about the way her future looks? It's safer to stay home. I completely fail to see how a group of students sitting around a campus quad constitute a threat to safety. Perhaps, University of California Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi could explain that. So far she hasn't.

I just think it's interting that many US citizens feel it is necessary to take to the streets in large numbers in order to get the attention of those in power. My guess is that those in power, govenment at various levels, businessses, etc. are paying attention but don't get it and will react without integrety.

This essay sums up some of the reaction to the horrible shootings in Arizona. Go to the forums of any left-wing web site and you'll hear it. Go to any right-wing site and you hear it. Let's all join hands and blame each other.

Maybe, I dunno, people speaking in public should try to be a tiny bit more constructive and little less inflammatory. There are a lot of people with guns who have trouble holding firmly onto reality.

My friend Nancy Smith, 78, has been sentenced to 6 month in federal prison for trespassing at a protest at the School of the Americas (SOA) aka Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHISC or WHINSEC). The SOA has trained tens of thousands of Latin American military and police, many of who have been accused of human rights violations. What I find particularly disturbing about Nancy's case is the severity of the sentence for what was essentially a symbolic act of protest. It's telling that Nancy worked for NGOs in some of the most repressive places on earth, Somalia and Taliban Afghanistan, and was never harmed, but here in the Land of the Free she is sentenced to prison for a nonviolent symbolic act. I don't know if this country is still the land of the free, but as long as there are people like Nancy, it will be the home of the brave.

Operator precedence: parenthesis, exponentiation, multiplication, division, addition, subtraction

There are a lot of musicians that I respect. However, there are two geniuses that i respect above all others, John Coltrane and Don Van Vliet, aka Captain Beefheart. I was immensely sadded to hear of his death yesterday. Others will give elegies the Captain. I'll just go and listen to Trout Mask Replica.

"At COMPANY _______ we value your privacy a great deal. Almost as much as we value the ability to take the data you give us and slice, dice, julienne, mash, puree and serve it to our business partners, which may include third-party advertising networks, data brokers, networks of affiliate sites, parent companies, subsidiaries, and other entities, none of which we’ll bother to list here because they can change from week to week and, besides, we know you’re not really paying attention.

We’ll also share all of this information with the government. We’re just suckers for guys with crew cuts carrying subpoenas.

Remember, when you visit our Web site, our Web site is also visiting you. And we’ve brought a dozen or more friends with us, depending on how many ad networks and third-party data services we use. We’re not going to tell which ones, though you could probably figure this out by carefully watching the different URLs that flash across the bottom of your browser as each page loads or when you mouse over various bits. It’s not like you’ve got better things to do.

Each of these sites may leave behind a little gift known as a cookie -- a text file filled with inscrutable gibberish that allows various computers around the globe to identify you, including your preferences, browser settings, which parts of the site you visited, which ads you clicked on, and whether you actually purchased something.

Those same cookies may let our advertising and data broker partners track you across every other site you visit, then dump all of your information into a huge database attached to a unique ID number, which they may sell ad infinitum without ever notifying you or asking for permission.

Also: We collect your IP address, which might change every time you log on but probably doesn’t. At the very least, your IP address tells us the name of your ISP and the city where you live; with a legal court order, it can also give us your name and billing address (see guys with crew cuts and subpoenas, above).

Besides your IP, we record some specifics about your operating system and browser. Amazingly, this information (known as your user agent string) can be enough to narrow you down to one of a few hundred people on the Webbernets, all by its lonesome. Isn’t technology wonderful?

The data we collect is strictly anonymous, unless you’ve been kind enough to give us your name, email address, or other identifying information. And even if you have been that kind, we promise we won’t sell that information to anyone else, unless of course our impossibly obtuse privacy policy says otherwise and/or we change our minds tomorrow.

We store this information an indefinite amount of time for reasons even we don’t fully understand. And when we do eventually get around to deleting it, you can bet it’s still kicking around on some network backup drives in somebody’s closet. So once we have it, there’s really no getting it back. Hell, we can’t even find our keys half the time -- how do you expect us to keep track of this stuff?

Not to worry, though, because we use the very bestest security measures to protect your data against hackers and identity thieves, though no one has actually ever bothered to verify this. You’ll pretty much just have to take our word for it.

So just to recap: Your information is extremely valuable to us. Our business model would totally collapse without it. No IPO, no stock options; all those 80-hour weeks and bupkis to show for it. So we’ll do our very best to use it in as many potentially profitable ways as we can conjure, over and over, while attempting to convince you there’s nothing to worry about.

(Hey, Did somebody hold a gun to your head and force you to visit this site? No, they did not. Did you run into a pay wall on the home page demanding your Visa number? No, you did not. You think we just give all this stuff away because we’re nice guys? Bet you also think every roomful of manure has a pony buried inside.)

This privacy policy may change at any time. In fact, it’s changed three times since we first started typing this. Good luck figuring out how, because we’re sure as hell not going to tell you. But then, you probably stopped reading after paragraph three."

Thanks to Dan Tynan

A little less than a year ago, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that a "new information curtain is descending across much of the world." She also said "In an interconnected world, an attack on one nation's networks can be an attack on all," But that was about China. It's different now.

Wondering what to do to help. This says it better than I can.

I wonder what's in the Wikileaks security file. Given the current government and corporate freak out, lost of folks must be very worried.

From that lover of freedom Joe Leiberman

In an interview with Fox News on Tuesday, Sen. Joe Lieberman suggested that the U.S. Department of Justice should charge Julian Assange with espionage and said that federal prosecutors should conduct a "very intensive inquiry" into the question of whether or not news organizations had committed a crime by publishing leaked documents obtained and distributed by WikiLeaks.

This sounds like Joe is trying to intimidate the news media just like he did to Amazon.

Just as prisons, military, security, and a number of other function that were formerly the domain of governments, the actions of PayPal, Amazon, and MasterCard, among other against Wikileaks show that suppression of dissent and other unpopular actions has been privatized. Court actions and laws are no longer needed to suppress unpopular ideas. They can be eliminated by corporate fiat.

Wikileaks has not been convicted. It has not been outlawed. It is a legal organization. While leaking secret documents is a crime, publishing them is not. No one except Pvt. Manning has been convicted of anything. Yet, PayPal, Amazon and now MasterCard have taken it upon themselves to cut off Wikileaks' access to their services. Here in the US, we often talk about the "rule of law." In the past, many business, universities and public institution would not serve people because of the color of their skin. Now, many corporations will not serve people because of their politics, despite the fact that nothing that Wikileaks is doing is illegal.Are we now in a situation where corporations are enforcing the laws that the government is unable to enforce?

At our Quaker Meeting on Sunday, there was a discussion about the American flag. I have a great respect for the flag as a symbol and I love this country's ideals, the land, and the people. However, I'm becoming more and more fearful of and angry at the corporatocracy that it is becoming. I really thought the Bush years (9/11, illegal wars, Guantanamo, Abu Grahb etc.) were a low point for this nation, but I fear we're headed for darker times.

The people who run this world want to run it in secret. Things like Wikileaks interfere with their plans. The US government is currently working hard to shut down Wikileaks and intimidate anyone in government employment who reads the leaks, even though the NYT and other news services are reporting the leaks. The government has intimidated Amazon into shutting off access, EveryDNS and Paypal have denied access to Wikileaks. It's unknown whether the latter two succumbed to direct or indirect pressure. It's my guess that the Wikileaks incident will be used by the government to take more control over the internet and further restrict freedom of information. Support Wikileaks. Follow Wikileaks on Twitter to see where it's still available.

I've been watching Mad Men. Is that how grownups acted in 1960? It's not how we act now. We're a lot younger, even though we're much older than the characters in that show.

...to a CD. With the idiocy going on these days about burning the Koran, it's interesting that the top download at the Internet Audio Archive is the Koran.

The US seems to have gone Muslim crazy. First the mosque controversy and now book burning. Personally, I think burning a Koran, Bible, I Ching or any book is reprehensible, but is protected by the 1st amendment. It may be stupid, but having the right to be stupid is a good thing. If we defend the right of Muslims to worship in their own mosques near the site of the former World Trade Center, I think we also have to defend the rights of morons to express themselves in ugly ways. Unfortunately, all burning someone's holy book will do is upset people and prove nothing except that you can do it. It serves no good purpose and will infuriate more weak minded people to take other destructive actions. The best thing would have been to ignore this Rev. book burner. He's an attention whore and has now succeeded getting the world's media to look at his antics. He's the balloon dad, but not as clever.

BTW, it seems that Mayor Bloomberg agrees with me or I agree with him.

It doesn't really want to be anything, but you want it to be free and lots of it is. Two great sources of free music are the Free Music Archive and the Internet Audio Archive. The latter has much more than just music. It's loaded with news, radio programs, lectures etc. Two recent discoveries from the Internet Archive are Noir and French Afrocentric by Twin Muses both from Dusted Wax Kingdom.

Noir is acid jazz like and Twin Muses remind me of Portishead. Dusted Wax Kingdom is a Bulgarian label.

Maybe it's too soon to tell, but the alliance of Google and Verizon seems a bit fishy to me.

Fifth, we want the broadband infrastructure to be a platform for innovation. Therefore, our proposal would allow broadband providers to offer additional, differentiated online services, in addition to the Internet access and video services (such as Verizon's FIOS TV) offered today. This means that broadband providers can work with other players to develop new services. It is too soon to predict how these new services will develop, but examples might include health care monitoring, the smart grid, advanced educational services, or new entertainment and gaming options. Our proposal also includes safeguards to ensure that such online services must be distinguishable from traditional broadband Internet access services and are not designed to circumvent the rules. The FCC would also monitor the development of these services to make sure they don’t interfere with the continued development of Internet access services.

Sixth, we both recognize that wireless broadband is different from the traditional wireline world, in part because the mobile marketplace is more competitive and changing rapidly. In recognition of the still-nascent nature of the wireless broadband marketplace, under this proposal we would not now apply most of the wireline principles to wireless, except for the transparency requirement. In addition, the Government Accountability Office would be required to report to Congress annually on developments in the wireless broadband marketplace, and whether or not current policies are working to protect consumers.

This sounds quite a bit like a tiered net and a lot like cable TV with its premium channels and pay-per-view. It sure doesn't sound like net neutrality.