Category: U.S. Politics
Before Google went evil
Google wasn’t always a carrier-humping, net-neutrality, surrender money, and TechCrunch has video to prove it:
For those who don’t follow tech news, Google pulled a stunning about-face on net-neutrality this week, teaming up with Verizon, the very company it pilloried on the issue, in an agreement to abandon the concept of neutrality for fast-growing wireless portions of the Internet, and for whatever new transmission technologies happen along in future.
The do-no-evil company’s reversal stunned the tech world. Unabashed Google admirer Jeff Jarvis, author of What Would Google Do, called it a Munich Agreement, a description Josh Marshall of TPM Media said was “a bit inflammatory, but pretty much captures it.” Added Jarvis: “Pass the sauerkraut, Herr Chamberlain.”
Wired’s Ryan Singel, too, offered trenchant analysis, and dug out this ringing declaration from a 2007 Google blogpost:
The nation’s spectrum airwaves are not the birthright of any one company. They are a unique and valuable public resource that belong to all Americans. The FCC’s auction rules are designed to allow U.S. consumers — for the first time — to use their handsets with any network they desire, and and use the lawful software applications of their choice.
Google defended itself, weakly, in a blog post by Richard Whitt, Washington Telecom and Media Counsel.
To underscore the totality of Google’s reversal, TechCrunch produced this letter to Google users by none other than CEO Eric Schmidt.
A Note to Google Users on Net Neutrality:
The Internet as we know it is facing a serious threat. There’s a debate heating up in Washington, DC on something called “net neutrality” – and it’s a debate that’s so important Google is asking you to get involved. We’re asking you to take action to protect Internet freedom.
In the next few days, the House of Representatives is going to vote on a bill that would fundamentally alter the Internet. That bill, and one that may come up for a key vote in the Senate in the next few weeks, would give the big phone and cable companies the power to pick and choose what you will be able to see and do on the Internet.
Today the Internet is an information highway where anybody – no matter how large or small, how traditional or unconventional – has equal access. But the phone and cable monopolies, who control almost all Internet access, want the power to choose who gets access to high-speed lanes and whose content gets seen first and fastest. They want to build a two-tiered system and block the on-ramps for those who can’t pay.
Creativity, innovation and a free and open marketplace are all at stake in this fight. Please call your representative (202-224-3121) and let your voice be heard.
Thanks for your time, your concern and your support.
Eric Schmidt
Google has been a huge force for consumer rights in this incredibly important field. Its defection is a blow that will force defenders of an open Internet to organize.
Lest we forget Omar Khadr
Canadian-born child soldier and torture victim Omar Khadr, the only citizen of a western democracy still held in the US Government detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, went on trial this week in the first war crimes prosecution of a child soldier in US history.
Under Stephen Harper, Canada is the only western country not to ask for the release of its nationals from the illegal prison camp. The Harper government has flouted court orders requiring it to take action in support of Khadr’s civil rights.
The U.N. Special Representative on Children in Armed Conflict warned Monday that the legality of Khadr’s trial is doubtful, and his prosecution sets a dangerous precedent that endangers child soldiers worldwide. Radhika Coomaraswamy asked the United States to halt the trial.
Jennifer Turner, Human Rights Researcher in the American Civil Liberties Union’s Human Rights Program, sums up the background to Khadr’s prosecution:
Khadr, then 15 years old, was taken to Bagram near death, after being shot twice in the back, blinded by shrapnel, and buried in rubble from a bomb blast. He was interrogated within hours, while sedated and handcuffed to a stretcher. He was threatened with gang rape and death if he didn’t cooperate with interrogators. He was hooded and chained with his arms suspended in a cage-like cell, and his primary interrogator was later court-martialed for detainee abuse leading to the death of a detainee. During his subsequent eight-year (so far) detention at Guantánamo, Khadr was subjected to the “frequent flyer” sleep deprivation program and he says he was used as a human mop after he was forced to urinate on himself.
In closing arguments before the judge’s ruling, Khadr’s sole defense lawyer, Lt. Col. Jon Jackson, told the judge, “Sir, be a voice today. Tell the world that we actually stand for what we say we stand for.”
The military judge trying Khadr, Col. Patrick Parrish, dismissed the motion without explanation.
It’s the economy, stupid
A column in the UK Guardian by BC writer Douglas Haddow predicts trouble for Canada’s economy if an upcoming referendum in California succeeds in legalizing pot this November.
[Y]ou may have noticed that Canadians have been behaving uncharacteristically uppity of late. This new-found swagger is a result of Canada having the dubious distinction of being the “least-bad-rich-world-economy” – an honour that would be rather unimpressive if the rest of the G8 wasn’t so persistently gloom-stricken….
But beyond the chorus of self-congratulatory backslapping coming from Ottawa, there has emerged a new and immediate threat of economic crisis that is being willfully ignored by Canadian politicians.
This November, in an effort to increase tax revenue, California will hold a referendum on whether or not to legalise the cultivation and use of marijuana. If passed, the change in law would be devastating to the Canadian economy, halting the flow of billions of dollars from the US into Canada and eventually forcing hundreds of thousands into unemployment.
BC Business estimates that province’s marijuana annual marijuana crop alone at $7.5 billion, most of it exported to the US. The magazine puts BC’s pot labor force at 250,000, while Nova Scotia’s entire labour force was less than twice that in July.
Ironically, support for legalisation is stronger in Canada than it is in California. Canada’s most prominent rightwing thinktanks have long supported legalisation, as do the majority of Canadians.
And yet… and yet…
But since the Conservative prime minister, Stephen Harper, formed a minority government in 2006, drug reform has been wiped off the agenda and the gears have grinded into reverse. In a bizarre twist that defies all rational thought, the Conservatives have decided they want to go in the opposite direction of the Canadian voter and emulate outdated Republican drug war policies that have already proved catastrophic in the US.
The Conservatives have proposed legislation that would introduce mandatory minimum prison sentences for marijuana producers. If passed, the legislation would result in spending billions in order to put more people in prison – the exact scenario that lead California into severe debt and towards legalisation. Even more stupefying, police in Montreal recently raided a “compassion centre” that legally distributes medicinal cannabis, and Conservative politicians have started calling for medicinal centres to be shut down across the country.
Ah, but the Harperites only masquerade as Conservatives. They actually represent the Authoritarian Party.
Snow globe plot – foiled
The US Transportation Safety Administration now keeps airspace safe from attack by snow globes, as well as toothpaste, mouthwash, and hair gel.
A blog post by Patrick Smith, the airline pilot who posted this photo to his Flickr account, bores into the core irrationality of the phoney security restrictions citizens have acquiesced to since 9/11. Money quote:
Conventional wisdom says the [9/11] terrorists exploited a weakness in airport security by smuggling aboard boxcutters. But conventional wisdom is wrong. What they actually exploited was a weakness in our mindset — a set of presumptions based on the decades-long track record of hijackings. In years past, a takeover meant hostage negotiations and standoffs; crews were trained in the concept of “passive resistance.” What weapons the 19 men possessed mattered little; had boxcutters been on the contraband list, the men would have smuggled something else or fashioned their weapons from items on board. It didn’t matter. The success of their plan relied not on weaponry but on the element of surprise. And in this respect, their scheme was all but guaranteed not to fail.
For a number of reasons, most notably the awareness of passengers and crew, just the opposite is now true. Before the first of the Twin Towers had fallen to the ground, that element of surprise, and the boxcutters that went with it, were no longer a useful tool. Paradigm over. Hijackers today would face a planeload of frightened people ready to fight back, and thus an unaffordable probability of failure. The September 11th scheme is kaput.
Surprise has vanished by the time hijackers took over the fourth plane. Its passengers understood they had to take action, and did so, foiling the plot to use their plane as a weapon, albeit at the cost of their own lives.
Hat tip: Andrew Douglas
The Bloomberg Remonstrance
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s stirring defence of the Muslim community’s right to build a mosque not far from the destroyed World Trade Centre is widely available on the Internet. But it embodies such rare eloquence in a principled, conservative defence of human freedoms and tolerance, it bears repeating here.
First an excerpt:
We may not always agree with every one of our neighbors. That’s life. And it’s part of living in such a diverse and dense city. But we also recognize that part of being a New Yorker is living with your neighbors in mutual respect and tolerance. It was exactly that spirit of openness and acceptance that was attacked on 9/11, 2001.
On that day, 3,000 people were killed because some murderous fanatics didn’t want us to enjoy the freedoms to profess our own faiths, to speak our own minds, to follow our own dreams, and to live our own lives. Of all our precious freedoms, the most important may be the freedom to worship as we wish. And it is a freedom that even here — in a city that is rooted in Dutch tolerance — was hard-won over many years.
In the mid-1650s, the small Jewish community living in lower Manhattan petitioned Dutch governor Peter Stuyvesant for the right to build a synagogue, and they were turned down. In 1657, when Stuyvesant also prohibited Quakers from holding meetings, a group of non-Quakers in Queens signed the Flushing Remonstrance, a petition in defense of the right of Quakers and others to freely practice their religion. It was perhaps the first formal political petition for religious freedom in the American colonies, and the organizer was thrown in jail and then banished from New Amsterdam….
This nation was founded on the principle that the government must never choose between religions or favor one over another. The World Trade Center site will forever hold a special place in our city, in our hearts. But we would be untrue to the best part of ourselves and who we are as New Yorkers and Americans if we said no to a mosque in lower Manhattan.
Let us not forget that Muslims were among those murdered on 9/11, and that our Muslim neighbors grieved with us as New Yorkers and as Americans. We would betray our values and play into our enemies’ hands if we were to treat Muslims differently than anyone else. In fact, to cave to popular sentiment would be to hand a victory to the terrorists, and we should not stand for that.
Watch the video here. After the jump, the full text of Bloomberg’s speech. Read more »
Statscan v. US Census Bureau
Contrarian reader Wallace McLean noticed something else about those maps:
[T]he US Census Bureau seems to generate unemployment data for the 3,140 counties and “county-equivalent” units of geography below state level, with an average population of under 100,000.
Statistics Canada only provides (roughly) comparable data for 73 “economic regions” within Canada, with no sub-provincial/territorial data for PEI or the territories. The 73 regions have an average population of over 450,000.
Even if you could get free and up-to-date data out of Statscan, it’s not nearly as fine-grained as what they seem to have in the States. There would seem to be some fundamental methodological difference in how the two stats agencies approach measuring employment and unemployment.
The choropleth problem
Before a reader draws me up short on Monday’s link to an interactive map showing explosive growth of unemployment in the US, I should acknowledge the choropleth problem. James Fallows introduced the issue, and the word, in a blog post about the same map Tuesday.
The problem is that geography does not equal population. A choropleth map depicting social trends (unemployment or election results) can mislead if its geographical units (states or provinces) vary widely in population. (The word derives from Greek terms for “area/region” + “multiply.”) Fallows gives the example of the razor thin 2004 US presidential election, in which the Democratic candidate outpolled the Republican, but a state-by-state choropleth gives the impression of a Republican landslide, because lower density Republican states take up most of the room. Maps that resolve to a county-by-county level (as opposed to state-by-state or province-by-province) greatly reduce but do not eliminate the distortion.
Cartograms are maps that attempt to solve the choropleth problem by distorting their geographical units to reflect the numerical value being measured. The county-by-county cartogram of the same election (at left) distorts boundaries but reflects the results more accurately. More here, here, and here. My earlier, much-complained about post about altitude maps depicting crime in San Francisco, relied on a special category of choropleth known to cartobuffs as a prism map.
Visual data: The American unemployment explosion
A simple interactive graphic brings home the recession’s impact on US jobs.
Youtube version here. Who wants to make a Canadian version? Oh, right, you have to have a government that makes data readily available in machine readable formats. And if it’s survey data, you need a random sample.
Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan
Snollygoster revival
Taegan Goddard wants to revive the political term snollygoster, n., classically defined by a passage from the October 28, 1895, edition of the Columbus Dispatch (as cited in the OED):
[A] fellow who wants office, regardless of party, platform or principles, and who, whenever he wins, gets there by the sheer force of monumental talknophical assumnancy.
Harry Truman sparked a previous revival in 1952, when he used the word in a whistle-stop speech at Parkersburg, W. Va., complaining about about politicians who make a show of public prayer:
I wish some of these snollygosters would read the New Testament and perform accordingly.
Alas, the OED has entries for neither talknophical or assumnancy, although the University of Windsor English Department once sponsored a poetry series by that name, which it described as, “until now, a nonce phrase with the one known recorded instance of 28 October 1895.”
Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan
Kansas finds a bed
At the Valley Motel, somewhere east of Manistique, on Michigan’s Northern Peninsula, the peripatetic Jane Kansas talked Dave, the proprietor, into a cut rate of $30 for this beauty. Later, Dave and his twin daughters showed up with a dinner of steak, real fries, shrimp, rice, cheese, and olives.
“We thought on your walk you might not get many home cooked meals,” Dave explained.
Before bedtime, the girls returned with a banana and a doughnut for dessert.
To the people Jane encounters on her epic walk across the American Midwest, she must seem the oddest of strangers: a short, sunburned woman in late middle age, pushing her travelling gear in a wheeled cart across half a dozen US states – big ones, smack in the heartland. By any normal standard, it’s a cockamamie venture.
And yet, again and again, as Jane documents in her blog at The Coast’s website, people you might expect to have nothing whatever in common with a wandering eccentric respond with a combination of curiosity, concern, and kindness that quickly morphs into friendship. They give her meals, rides, beds, advice, lore, places to camp. She responds with her trademark witty banter and the sort of genuine interest in her hosts’ lives that cannot be faked.
Jane is on the Northern Peninsula in quixotic hopes of catching a ferry to Drummond Island, and then caging a lift across North Channel and the Canada-US border to Manitoulin Island, where her sister has a summer cottage.
The guy at the fish store assures her this is impossible. The guys on the ferry share his opinion.
But an elderly couple in a golf cart direct her to a guy named Tom, whose boat isn’t in the water, but who suggests she try the Thomases or the Zelnicks, just down the road. Tom also gives her a place to camp for the night. At the Zelnicks, next morning, she meets Helen, who invites her in for coffee, and husband Dave. They send her next door to see Jim, and before you can say, “Homeland Security,” Jim, Jane, Helen, and Dave are in Jim’s powerboat, gunkholing along the bays and islands of northeastern Michigan en route to Richard’s Landing, Ontario, and a brunch of eggs over easy, home fries, bacon, and toast. Simple as that. Simple and astounding.
