2013q4
Still living in what I consider to be a dark future world. You know, even in those science fiction dystopia novels, people still live on, and even while their homeworld crumbles, they lead lives, engage in conversation, drink.
One of the "look on the bright side" comments came from saskboy, who pointed out that things are better now than when the last great time of transformation occurred. One of the things about the Fire of London is that it provided a temporary repreive from the plague, which up until that point, had cursed urban man and lead to a sizeable dip in the amount of homo sapiens alive. Today we face a similar threat, albeit not yet materialized, in the end of antibiotics. It is doom, that we are looking, as a species in the eye. Which is notable because it was not long thereafter that I was proscribed some, due to an infection that puffed my hand right the hell up. There was no other antibiotic to proscribe, I was on the last layer of defence before drastic measures(possibly including losing my dominant hand?). Even so, being on antibiotics that reacted badly to me was down right scary, and doubly so because I knew that not only is the alternative worse, but that it is no longer more or less guaranteed to even work, and may not work at all, had I gotten the infection not too long afterwards.
I might be something of a reluctant protagonist. My choice, daily, is to give in to depression, or to drag this carcass up from the temporary comfort of dispair and fumble with what's left of the universe I do have control over into something that might yet weild better.
Another horseman beckons -- The Harper Government is playing with nuclear hellfire, with other players being Monsanto, Barack Obama, and Vladamir Putin. Russia has threatened war if the US does not stop killing the bees with a certain class of pesticide -- a pesticide that The Harper Government is choosing whether to legalize(and is looking like it's going to). Especially in the age where homosexuals and others face violence and persecution in Russia, we are choosing not to work with them to resolve our differences and to help soothe their internal problems, but instead are choosing to ratchet up selfishness and ignorance to the brink of global destruction.
The vacation mode wore off earlier, and I ended up actually working fairly hard for the first part of this quarter. It didn't matter, in the end most of it fell apart. The only consolation is I have not fallen far, as of yet.
Yet another one of the women close to me got raped. I am more or less completely powerless to do anything about it. The best I can do is realize that there's a connection between this continuing to happen, and my arguments with Eden and Natasha, and to look to preventing this from happening in the future in some way, somehow.
I did learn a little bit about the Rule of Law, though. And since so much of our lives involve law, as a formalized gateway into involving other people, one particular aspect of law common to my life, and yours, being copyright, I've had light shown upon. I choose somewhat arbitrarily between Copyright Maximalism and moderate, pro-user or other approaches. I do make that choice, but it is based on technical, rather than ethical grounds. I have to remember to relinquish some furvour, not that it isn't unjust, but becuase the choice is more complicated.
And, just as last quarter, you might expect some more details on where the hell I am, what I am doing here and how things have been going. It *still* doesn't matter. What matters is
Stopping The Trans-Pacific Partnership
"Negotiated in secret, the proposed text is bad for access to knowledge, bad for access to medicine, and profoundly bad for innovation."-keionline.
What matters is that you are being lied to by the Harper Government, and that there are negotiations under way right now that seek to strip you of a lot of what you have left. What matters is that I have not made any visible progress in stopping this, and though I am now in a place with an MP hopefully sympathetic to stopping the federal government, it isn't enough.
And it's no wonder sites like Upworthy flourish; real news happens and journalists are locked out of it, often by force of militarized police. The real news is happening, they are just not allowed to cover it to anything other than a skin deep level.
This isn't even a question of the ethical and technical benefits of what they are offering. They aren't offering anything. They are meeting as far away from where you and I can verify what they are up to as they can, and making plans for us. They are conspiring take away our ability to control the basic mechanisms for the world we live in - our right to even manage L1 Cache -- every level of computing is threatened, and with that every level of society, of every nation involved, which given the parallel TTIP treaty in the atlantic, is practically everywhere. History itself is under threat.
I know I talked about this last quarter, and the one before that, but it is a persistent, long term threat that continues to creep up on us. And I mean us -- this isn't a local problem, it's a problem for most everyone reading this, regardless of country you happen to live in. The shroud of secrecy that envelops it envelops it equally in tokyo to ottawa. Thankfully we have the EFF to at least be left out in the cold so we can know that something is going wrong.
Canada was pressured to agree to whatever the outcome was on a condition of joining. And to the Harper Government's benefit, they did actually try to
bring some sanity to the treaty. But they have, from what we know, caved early on. For what benefit? We don't know. It's completely secret. Could be an envelope of cash for all we know. All we know is that it's mostly the US which is pushing it. A number of other countries involved in negotiating, including Australia, were not, as Canada was, required to agree before joining negotiations. So they are able to dissent and, at the very least negotiate. The Harper Government just rolled over for nothing. Like in Canada, in Australia, the Greens are among those trying to do something about it, further showing how it's no just locally that the people who actually know what's going on in the world are marginalized into small third parties.
And yet even the US government itself seems to be having internal problems defeating this treaty. Like the NSA, the USTR seems to have a mind of its own, in favour of big business, and not in any way accountable to what even americans want. They've gone so far as to keep the US congress in the dark of what they are doing, and the kinds of laws that they are not only going to be requiring US citizens be forced to endure, but that of its northern neighbours and the entire rest of the trading area. Either self proclaimed threats to public health and economy of Americans and Canadians are not enough of an incentive to do anything about it, or they are powerless. The treaty has shown clearly what side the Republicans are on, even after all the tea party hot air -- this reversal of priorities in the US is really interesting. At the top though, the priority does seem to be: get this through and agreed on as soon as possible, before the world figures out what's going on, and keep transparency minimal or nonexistent.
"[The TPP] would allow customs officials to seize medicine shipments on the suspicion of trademark infringement while they are in transit from an exporting country to their destination. Unjustified seizures disrupt the supply of critical medicines, which can have serious public health consequences, since they can lead to the unavailability or interruption of treatment. They also undermine the work of organizations like UNITAID, and could even affect countries that are not party to the TPPA."-UNITAID In other words, here's yet another example of Malaria and HIV being stymied by Microsoft(as it's one of the prime movers behind the TPP).
One of the things to come out this quarter is how the Tobacco industry is involved. Like Ford, it seems like the Tobacco industry has simply no place in deciding whether or not we have the ability to use computers freely in the future, or whether or not our ISPs are going to be required to spy on us. But because of the unaccountability of these secret negotiations their pushing their unhealthy requirements to keep governments from doing anything about their product actually does make it more likely that the TPP is going to go through, and is going to be pushed down the throat of smaller, developing nations. Not to mention how many lives are going to be lost to cancer because we can't more directly prevent them, due to this treaty restricting how governments can deal with tobacco. Tobacco is one of the low hanging fruit for increasing global health, right up there with malaria nets.
And by the way, as a former guy who would be responsible for making some of the technology to spy on you,and keep you from having your voice heard I'm kind of glad that I quit, knowing this is coming. I don't want to have any part in this. Not on any level. And I hope you would do the same, or at the very least stay on the inside and aid the rest of us in knowing what's going on via wikileaks.
In addition to some arguably stupid restrictions, such as the inability to market certain cheeses under certain names. Oh and the ability to play and the rules involved with certain games. Imagine if the concept of a FPS had been patented in '92. We would have just as of this year been able to get out of the 'wolfenstein' era.
Another facet of the TPP which is growing more clear with time is the increasing corpolitical movement towards unaccountability in the boardroom, in effect creating a class of people and entities that are above any national law. While this is true in practice for a few corporations already, especially in regards to smaller countries, this would codify fealty into the law of countries like Canada to the corporate masters. Democracy would be a joke, afterwards. If they don't like a law, they can simply have it removed, with no consequences. This is the end of the US, and Canada for all practical purposes. The rest is just window dressing, similar to the differences between a real culture and the cultures put on display at mosaic and folk fest. The US Constitution itself is being threatened here, along with the environment on every level.
The TPP is just yet another example of the culture of secrecy the Harper Government has been pushing down on us. Not only is our government forbidden from giving us information, but we're forbidden from even knowing that they are intending to incorporate censorship right into the very internet and all of our computer hardware that we own. Which sounds a little radical until you realize how far *surveillance* has gone on the lately. This treaty enables very, very dark outcomes, such as criminal punishments for something a process running your computer without your knowledge is doing. ie, they'll be able to lock you up for life with no recourse, even if you have a trial, which you may not have because the right to a trial is one of those things that national courts have but which will be subject to the whims of the corporations at the higher level tribunals.
"The next 'trade' treaty will be the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). This is a huge treaty with only a small part covering trade. Most of the agreement (according to leaks) sets down a new kind of regulatory structure [what does that mean?] for the giant corporations that would supersede the ability of any country to rein them in. The treaty is being negotiated in secret with only business interests “at the table.” Representatives of others with a stake in the outcome are not part of the process. Groups representing the interests of consumers, labor, human rights, the environment, democracy or even smaller and innovative companies that might want to compete with the giant multinationals are not part of the negotiations."-Campaign for America's Future
Things like Google's projects with books, are threatened. Like the Library of Alexandria, our access to the worlds books, digitized(and likely thrown out, thereafter), is about to be burned. Books will be stopped at borders, and if you are reading something the government doesn't like, or even if the border guard doesn't like, it will be stopped from reaching you. These are not the way open and free societies treat books. No wonder your local chapters is stocked mostly with fluff.
Patents on surgical methods. People are going to die, unnecessarily. Despite enough growing evidence that Patents are not promotive of innovation as other methods, the TPP would create a class of them so that some doctors can prevent other doctors from treating patients. Just wrong.
Another facet is that it's not a treaty about trade, but 'imagined trade' and 'imaginary property'. Profits that 'could' happen, if they fail to happen, the government can be sued. Have a bad day? Sue the government. Bank fails and needs a bailout? Get a bail out and then sue the government. All to protect preconceptions of who owns what imaginary property.
The treaty locks in bad law in the US, and makes it the standard in the pacific.
Like the US government, the Australian government isn't even allowed to know what is being negotiated on its behalf. The Harper Senate presumably hasn't got the ability to even complain.
Some prominent people who might be counted on as a voice of reason, including this guy who wrote the textbooks that taught me economics, doesn't seem to get that this isn't about trade, and it's the non-trade aspects of this that are dystopian. The "non-trade barriers to investment".
The revolving door between US government and industry has been pointed out before, but the TPP shows it in full force.
The enclosing of the public domain continues, with even public domain work, if DRM locked, will be protected by law against our using it or having access to it. This is a good way to kill a culture, between that and history, and libraries(being killed elsewhere, via budget cuts and DRM restrictions).
like many parts of the UN is affected, UNESCO being but one example, for those of you sympathetic or who work for the UN.
Thanks at least to wikileaks we can know this is going on and what is being negotiated but...with our own government against us, and having already caved things are pretty late in the game at this point. By the time of the next election, assuming Mr. Fixed Elections has it when we think it's going to be, it will be too late -- the treaty will have been passed, and the law might have even been included in the next omnibus bill or two, with scarcely any debate. All we can do is reach out to those of us in countries still not yet decided on the TPP(I know you're out there).
While we do have a voice, and a large assortment of groups could be mobilized, it's not looking good.
If you know someone in Brunei, Chile, Japan,Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam. Canada & the US and to a lesser extent Mexico and Australia are kind of lost causes, but if you can reach someone in one of those other countries, please try to help them understand that our governments are organizing against them. To crush creativity and innovation in their countries so that the lazy incumbants in the US can maintain global hegemony.
A small consolation, however, in these dark times. There is an end to all of it
and though I keep forgetting, I'm going to start calling this end ' home'.
One of the "look on the bright side" comments came from saskboy, who pointed out that things are better now than when the last great time of transformation occurred. One of the things about the Fire of London is that it provided a temporary repreive from the plague, which up until that point, had cursed urban man and lead to a sizeable dip in the amount of homo sapiens alive. Today we face a similar threat, albeit not yet materialized, in the end of antibiotics. It is doom, that we are looking, as a species in the eye. Which is notable because it was not long thereafter that I was proscribed some, due to an infection that puffed my hand right the hell up. There was no other antibiotic to proscribe, I was on the last layer of defence before drastic measures(possibly including losing my dominant hand?). Even so, being on antibiotics that reacted badly to me was down right scary, and doubly so because I knew that not only is the alternative worse, but that it is no longer more or less guaranteed to even work, and may not work at all, had I gotten the infection not too long afterwards.
I might be something of a reluctant protagonist. My choice, daily, is to give in to depression, or to drag this carcass up from the temporary comfort of dispair and fumble with what's left of the universe I do have control over into something that might yet weild better.
Another horseman beckons -- The Harper Government is playing with nuclear hellfire, with other players being Monsanto, Barack Obama, and Vladamir Putin. Russia has threatened war if the US does not stop killing the bees with a certain class of pesticide -- a pesticide that The Harper Government is choosing whether to legalize(and is looking like it's going to). Especially in the age where homosexuals and others face violence and persecution in Russia, we are choosing not to work with them to resolve our differences and to help soothe their internal problems, but instead are choosing to ratchet up selfishness and ignorance to the brink of global destruction.
The vacation mode wore off earlier, and I ended up actually working fairly hard for the first part of this quarter. It didn't matter, in the end most of it fell apart. The only consolation is I have not fallen far, as of yet.
Yet another one of the women close to me got raped. I am more or less completely powerless to do anything about it. The best I can do is realize that there's a connection between this continuing to happen, and my arguments with Eden and Natasha, and to look to preventing this from happening in the future in some way, somehow.
I did learn a little bit about the Rule of Law, though. And since so much of our lives involve law, as a formalized gateway into involving other people, one particular aspect of law common to my life, and yours, being copyright, I've had light shown upon. I choose somewhat arbitrarily between Copyright Maximalism and moderate, pro-user or other approaches. I do make that choice, but it is based on technical, rather than ethical grounds. I have to remember to relinquish some furvour, not that it isn't unjust, but becuase the choice is more complicated.
And, just as last quarter, you might expect some more details on where the hell I am, what I am doing here and how things have been going. It *still* doesn't matter. What matters is
Stopping The Trans-Pacific Partnership
"Negotiated in secret, the proposed text is bad for access to knowledge, bad for access to medicine, and profoundly bad for innovation."-keionline.
What matters is that you are being lied to by the Harper Government, and that there are negotiations under way right now that seek to strip you of a lot of what you have left. What matters is that I have not made any visible progress in stopping this, and though I am now in a place with an MP hopefully sympathetic to stopping the federal government, it isn't enough.
And it's no wonder sites like Upworthy flourish; real news happens and journalists are locked out of it, often by force of militarized police. The real news is happening, they are just not allowed to cover it to anything other than a skin deep level.
This isn't even a question of the ethical and technical benefits of what they are offering. They aren't offering anything. They are meeting as far away from where you and I can verify what they are up to as they can, and making plans for us. They are conspiring take away our ability to control the basic mechanisms for the world we live in - our right to even manage L1 Cache -- every level of computing is threatened, and with that every level of society, of every nation involved, which given the parallel TTIP treaty in the atlantic, is practically everywhere. History itself is under threat.
I know I talked about this last quarter, and the one before that, but it is a persistent, long term threat that continues to creep up on us. And I mean us -- this isn't a local problem, it's a problem for most everyone reading this, regardless of country you happen to live in. The shroud of secrecy that envelops it envelops it equally in tokyo to ottawa. Thankfully we have the EFF to at least be left out in the cold so we can know that something is going wrong.
Canada was pressured to agree to whatever the outcome was on a condition of joining. And to the Harper Government's benefit, they did actually try to
bring some sanity to the treaty. But they have, from what we know, caved early on. For what benefit? We don't know. It's completely secret. Could be an envelope of cash for all we know. All we know is that it's mostly the US which is pushing it. A number of other countries involved in negotiating, including Australia, were not, as Canada was, required to agree before joining negotiations. So they are able to dissent and, at the very least negotiate. The Harper Government just rolled over for nothing. Like in Canada, in Australia, the Greens are among those trying to do something about it, further showing how it's no just locally that the people who actually know what's going on in the world are marginalized into small third parties.
And yet even the US government itself seems to be having internal problems defeating this treaty. Like the NSA, the USTR seems to have a mind of its own, in favour of big business, and not in any way accountable to what even americans want. They've gone so far as to keep the US congress in the dark of what they are doing, and the kinds of laws that they are not only going to be requiring US citizens be forced to endure, but that of its northern neighbours and the entire rest of the trading area. Either self proclaimed threats to public health and economy of Americans and Canadians are not enough of an incentive to do anything about it, or they are powerless. The treaty has shown clearly what side the Republicans are on, even after all the tea party hot air -- this reversal of priorities in the US is really interesting. At the top though, the priority does seem to be: get this through and agreed on as soon as possible, before the world figures out what's going on, and keep transparency minimal or nonexistent.
"[The TPP] would allow customs officials to seize medicine shipments on the suspicion of trademark infringement while they are in transit from an exporting country to their destination. Unjustified seizures disrupt the supply of critical medicines, which can have serious public health consequences, since they can lead to the unavailability or interruption of treatment. They also undermine the work of organizations like UNITAID, and could even affect countries that are not party to the TPPA."-UNITAID In other words, here's yet another example of Malaria and HIV being stymied by Microsoft(as it's one of the prime movers behind the TPP).
One of the things to come out this quarter is how the Tobacco industry is involved. Like Ford, it seems like the Tobacco industry has simply no place in deciding whether or not we have the ability to use computers freely in the future, or whether or not our ISPs are going to be required to spy on us. But because of the unaccountability of these secret negotiations their pushing their unhealthy requirements to keep governments from doing anything about their product actually does make it more likely that the TPP is going to go through, and is going to be pushed down the throat of smaller, developing nations. Not to mention how many lives are going to be lost to cancer because we can't more directly prevent them, due to this treaty restricting how governments can deal with tobacco. Tobacco is one of the low hanging fruit for increasing global health, right up there with malaria nets.
And by the way, as a former guy who would be responsible for making some of the technology to spy on you,and keep you from having your voice heard I'm kind of glad that I quit, knowing this is coming. I don't want to have any part in this. Not on any level. And I hope you would do the same, or at the very least stay on the inside and aid the rest of us in knowing what's going on via wikileaks.
In addition to some arguably stupid restrictions, such as the inability to market certain cheeses under certain names. Oh and the ability to play and the rules involved with certain games. Imagine if the concept of a FPS had been patented in '92. We would have just as of this year been able to get out of the 'wolfenstein' era.
Another facet of the TPP which is growing more clear with time is the increasing corpolitical movement towards unaccountability in the boardroom, in effect creating a class of people and entities that are above any national law. While this is true in practice for a few corporations already, especially in regards to smaller countries, this would codify fealty into the law of countries like Canada to the corporate masters. Democracy would be a joke, afterwards. If they don't like a law, they can simply have it removed, with no consequences. This is the end of the US, and Canada for all practical purposes. The rest is just window dressing, similar to the differences between a real culture and the cultures put on display at mosaic and folk fest. The US Constitution itself is being threatened here, along with the environment on every level.
The TPP is just yet another example of the culture of secrecy the Harper Government has been pushing down on us. Not only is our government forbidden from giving us information, but we're forbidden from even knowing that they are intending to incorporate censorship right into the very internet and all of our computer hardware that we own. Which sounds a little radical until you realize how far *surveillance* has gone on the lately. This treaty enables very, very dark outcomes, such as criminal punishments for something a process running your computer without your knowledge is doing. ie, they'll be able to lock you up for life with no recourse, even if you have a trial, which you may not have because the right to a trial is one of those things that national courts have but which will be subject to the whims of the corporations at the higher level tribunals.
"The next 'trade' treaty will be the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). This is a huge treaty with only a small part covering trade. Most of the agreement (according to leaks) sets down a new kind of regulatory structure [what does that mean?] for the giant corporations that would supersede the ability of any country to rein them in. The treaty is being negotiated in secret with only business interests “at the table.” Representatives of others with a stake in the outcome are not part of the process. Groups representing the interests of consumers, labor, human rights, the environment, democracy or even smaller and innovative companies that might want to compete with the giant multinationals are not part of the negotiations."-Campaign for America's Future
Things like Google's projects with books, are threatened. Like the Library of Alexandria, our access to the worlds books, digitized(and likely thrown out, thereafter), is about to be burned. Books will be stopped at borders, and if you are reading something the government doesn't like, or even if the border guard doesn't like, it will be stopped from reaching you. These are not the way open and free societies treat books. No wonder your local chapters is stocked mostly with fluff.
Patents on surgical methods. People are going to die, unnecessarily. Despite enough growing evidence that Patents are not promotive of innovation as other methods, the TPP would create a class of them so that some doctors can prevent other doctors from treating patients. Just wrong.
Another facet is that it's not a treaty about trade, but 'imagined trade' and 'imaginary property'. Profits that 'could' happen, if they fail to happen, the government can be sued. Have a bad day? Sue the government. Bank fails and needs a bailout? Get a bail out and then sue the government. All to protect preconceptions of who owns what imaginary property.
The treaty locks in bad law in the US, and makes it the standard in the pacific.
Like the US government, the Australian government isn't even allowed to know what is being negotiated on its behalf. The Harper Senate presumably hasn't got the ability to even complain.
Some prominent people who might be counted on as a voice of reason, including this guy who wrote the textbooks that taught me economics, doesn't seem to get that this isn't about trade, and it's the non-trade aspects of this that are dystopian. The "non-trade barriers to investment".
The revolving door between US government and industry has been pointed out before, but the TPP shows it in full force.
The enclosing of the public domain continues, with even public domain work, if DRM locked, will be protected by law against our using it or having access to it. This is a good way to kill a culture, between that and history, and libraries(being killed elsewhere, via budget cuts and DRM restrictions).
like many parts of the UN is affected, UNESCO being but one example, for those of you sympathetic or who work for the UN.
Thanks at least to wikileaks we can know this is going on and what is being negotiated but...with our own government against us, and having already caved things are pretty late in the game at this point. By the time of the next election, assuming Mr. Fixed Elections has it when we think it's going to be, it will be too late -- the treaty will have been passed, and the law might have even been included in the next omnibus bill or two, with scarcely any debate. All we can do is reach out to those of us in countries still not yet decided on the TPP(I know you're out there).
While we do have a voice, and a large assortment of groups could be mobilized, it's not looking good.
If you know someone in Brunei, Chile, Japan,Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam. Canada & the US and to a lesser extent Mexico and Australia are kind of lost causes, but if you can reach someone in one of those other countries, please try to help them understand that our governments are organizing against them. To crush creativity and innovation in their countries so that the lazy incumbants in the US can maintain global hegemony.
A small consolation, however, in these dark times. There is an end to all of it
and though I keep forgetting, I'm going to start calling this end ' home'.