So for the past three days, for almost 12 hours on the hour a sleazy-ass telemarketing firm has been calling my phone hawking bogus lotteries. It’s a different person on the phone each time (and you can hear the factory’s worth of souless bastards in the background). Every time I tell them to take me off the list, and an hour later I get the same call.

Normally the number is blocked, but there was an error in the caller ID last time and I got their number.

Here it is: 651-829-3110

Have fun with it Internets. Give ‘em hell.

I’ve been posting a ton of content on G+.

It’s easy.

It’s convenient.

It gets more engagement.

However, there’s always that elephant in the room that gets ignored. The content is being generated on a platform that could be locked down or taken away tomorrow. In other words, I don’t own it there. Same goes for Facebook, or Twitter or any other service.

Up to now trying to post something on a WordPress blog that is more complicated than a wall of text has been virtually impossible without accessing the web interface. Mobile apps, or even the email plug-ins just don’t work right.

So here’s hoping it doesn’t bite me in the ass later…

How numbers have shaped the past week or so in the news.

Interesting to see what could have been. Maybe this would help drive home the cost of not letting the Bush Tax cuts expire.

Remember Bristol Palin? She makes more money than you preaching worthless information about abstinence (here’s a hint, studies say it’s a horrible form of birth control in the real world).

She’s like every other televangelist out there. Spewing bullshit and bilking money.

This is the number of bills aimed at restricting women’s health options introduced in the first quarter of 2011 across 49 states. 916 -let that sink in. There is a war on women being waged by the GOP. This is the party that campaigned on fiscal responsibility and job creation. What they’ve spent their time doing instead is trying their best to legislate ultimate control of every vagina in America.

The amount of money Harold Camping spent advertising his prediction that May 21st would be the Rapture. Another 100,000,000 reasons to realize that Christianity takes otherwise smart people and dulls their brain into believe crap like this could ever happen. But one needs to also  understand, this just wasn’t one looney sect of Christians preaching the end of the world:

According to a 2010 Pew Research Center survey, “41 percent say Jesus Christ will return within the next 40 years.” In other words, almost half of the American public is confident that Jesus will appear on Earth (or at least in the clouds above Earth) sometime before 2050.

Almost half of America laughed off the Rapture, not because it was an insane idea, but because they thought it was the wrong date.

Though it has been quiet, lobbyists are still forcing ACTA on countries like an international date rape fest. If you’ve forgotten about ACTA I blogged about it previously here.

This is just one battle on many fronts put up by the RIAA and MPAA. They’re hitting at the international and national levels. Their latest attack on the US comes on the form of a new bill called PROTECT IP. This is a rebirth of last year’s COICA bill that died.

The upshot here is lobbyists continue to saturate the legal channels with heavy handed bills that, as usual, end up hurting thousands of innocent people in order to target a few individuals that pirate.

And given the latest studies why do people pirate? Because the music and movie industry continues to operate under old business models that restrict ways to access their content that people would otherwise pay for if it was reasonably available!

The best example being Netflix, which is closing in on being the major bandwidth user across the US, allowing easy access to full movies without worries of malware. There has been a noticeable decrease in P2P traffic, which is usually associated with piracy levels, as Netflix gains users.

Not surprisingly, the cable and movie companies continue to fight against Netflix in order to preserve (you guessed it) their old business models.

To date, the RIAA and MPAA have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to preserve these old business models, they bring about wrongful law suits, and they lobby our government to enact draconian bills to shut down swathes of internet address, and blacklist users.

In short, they’re assholes of the top caliber.

This just goes beyond the pale.

Nothing says, “Have at it boys, fuck personal responsibility, fuck it if she says, “no” – you gotta play ball and you will get cheered. You are a star! It’s your god damn right as a red-blooded male American!

Texas high school cheerleader who was kicked off the squad for refusing to chant the name of a basketball player – the same athlete she said had raped her four months earlier – lost a U.S. Supreme Court appeal Monday.

A federal appeals court ruled in September that the cheerleader was speaking for the school, not herself, and had no right to remain silent when called on to cheer the athlete by name.

The Supreme Court denied review of the case Monday without comment.

Read the rest of this disgusting verdict here.

What does this teach? If you assault women you still get to play on sports teams.

If you refuse to cheer on your attacker, you get kicked off the cheer leading squad.

This perfectly frames the continuing double standard women have to put up with. She’ll be the slut who asked for it and then was a bitch about it.

He’ll be just fine.

Fucking bullshit.

A publishing company has seen fit to rework not only a master’s literary piece, but a seminal work of American lit in its own right.

As reported by Publisher’s Weekly:

“The idea of a more politically correct Finn came to the 69-year-old English professor over years of teaching and outreach, during which he habitually replaced the word with “slave” when reading aloud. Gribben grew up without ever hearing the “n” word (“My mother said it’s only useful to identify [those who use it as] the wrong kind of people”) and became increasingly aware of its jarring effect as he moved South and started a family. “My daughter went to a magnet school and one of
her best friends was an African-American girl. She loathed the book, could barely read it.”

It’s sick sort of romance to think words are powerful and must be handled gingerly or even expunged as Gribben has done here. Ideas are where the power lays and words are but one means of expressing an idea. One could very well use art or music to achieve the same result.

“This is not an effort to render Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn colorblind,” said Gribben”

Except that’s exactly what Gribben has done. So, he’s swapped in the word ‘slave’ as a placeholder. Slave is about as generic and colorblind as you can make it. Slave is a concept that’s been about for many millennia and transcends skin color. Nigger and injun are particularly American. It’s our particular societal baggage and it does a great disservice to dress it down, shuffle it around, and pretend that it doesn’t exist to save some uncomfortable feelings. Ideas like this need to be in the open, need to be discussed – it’s
what creates healthy discourse.

What Gribben has done here is promoted himself to the role of thought police. By removing the words nigger and injun from the texts he hopes to treat a psychological symptom – uncomfortable confrontation of societal ideals of a certain point in history.  Being able to hold a painful idea in your head, tear it apart layer by layer, and rationally analyze it is what leads to understanding, knowledge, and growth. That is the only real cure.

Otherwise, we’re doomed to hide from words – and how fucking stupid is that?

Of course, leave it to Twain to sum up the mind-numbing hypocrisy of it all:

“But the truth is, that when a Library expels a book of mine and leaves an unexpurgated Bible lying around where unprotected youth and age can get hold of it, the deep unconscious irony of it delights me and doesn’t anger me.
- Mark Twain in a letter to Mrs. F. G. Whitmore, 7 February 1907 “

As the story continues to unfold, some rather disappointing facts are coming to light that are quickly cheapening the calls for Net Neutrality.

Comcast’s toll that Level 3 so publicly and vociferously decried actually is turning out to be the blow-back from an existing peering arrangement between the two.

Peering is when two entities allow each the use of the other’s broadband infrastructure at significantly reduced rates or for free. The catch is that the bandwidth usage needs to be about even on both sides. Given Level 3′s deal with Netflix, Comcast was going to find itself overly burdened carrying the extra traffic.

So, it appears Comcast wasn’t wholly out of line in asking for some compensation from Level 3.

Level 3 has cried wolf on a very sensitive issue. This will undoubtedly be fodder for those against Net Neutrality.

Regardless, things still stink. One thing we have learned from all this is that the concept of the open Internet hangs in a fragile balance. Comcast has shown how easy it would be for them to effectively turn-off Netflix for their subscribers.

While Comcast may be in the right on this particular issue with Level 3, there is still the elephant in the room. The broadband infrastructure in the US is shit. Telecoms and Cable companies were given over $200 billion dollars throughout the 1990′s, as well as having the FCC reclassify the Internet from phone to information service (which removed many restrictions and regulations) in exchange for what was supposed to be massive broadband build-out.

That build-out never appeared. The telecoms and cable companies got everything they wanted.

The consumer got nothing.

Today we’re effectively held hostage inside each fiefdom the ISPs have built for themselves. Even though I pay monthly for a connection to the internet who knows what my ISP will decide to block tomorrow – and no one can stop them.

ISPs have set themselves up to the be the Robber Barons of the 21st Century.

Comcast has levied a threat that they will throttle Netflix streaming unless a toll is paid.

While this may be psychosomatic, some Comcast customers have already appeared on Twitter wondering why their Netflix has stopped working.

This is why people have been clamoring for Net Neutrality.

This is why the internet needs to be regulated like a utility. No one company should  hold hostage content and access you have already paid for in an effort to bloat their own profits.

I speak of the internet, which is truly an engine of awesome. Think for a moment how it enriches your life, bequeaths knowledge, entertains and interconnects.

It is a device for which none compares.

It is also a threat, a disruption of power and status quo. It removes control from those that have traditionally been able to direct the populace. Yes, it may sound a foolishly romantic notion, but it’s true. One only has to look at how hard governments like China or those in the Middle East fight so hard to maintain a fragile, fleeting control over the content and ideas stored in simple ones and zeros, spread globally across an ephemeral network of computers.

The assault on the internet by government and corporate interest, to regain and assert control over content and ideas has been in overdrive for the past few years. First ACTA (which is still floating out there) and now COICA.

In short, COICA allows the US Attorney General to create two lists. One is a blacklist that must be enforced by ISPs. The other is a suggested list that web sites could end up on, for any reason or bias, that ISPs are recommended to block. This is censorship at its worst.

COICA was unanimously passed by the Senate Judiciary Committee on November 18th.

Unanimously.

That word has never looked uglier.

Enter one Senator Ron Wyden (D) of Oregon. He may very well have saved the internet by placing a hold on the pending bill. I have no idea what Wyden’s record is on anything else, but for this act he should be thanked.

It’s alarming just how close we run to losing one of the most fantastic methods of communication developed by our species. In the words of Maxwell Smart, “Missed us by that much.”

What the hell. LA Times reports:

It would “severely damage law enforcement” if the nation’s top law enforcement official could be held liable for abusing his authority.

The ‘it’ in this case is a lawsuit by the ACLU brought against former Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft in regards to actions he took under the Bush Administration.

The Old Boy network in full effect. Cover each other’s asses so there never has to be any accountability. This is neither hope nor change.

This is why our government is shit.

The question now is will the Tea Party rage against this government irresponsibility?

Doubt it.