Deregulating GPS...and the Internet

Sometimes people just plain blow a good thing.  Take one of the most powerful symbols of the last 70 years, the so-called “Doomsday Clock” of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists --  

“It is 3 minutes to midnight." In a statement released today during a press conference in Washington, DC, members of the Science and Security Board said: "The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists does not move the hands of the Doomsday Clock for light or transient reasons."

Of all the stupid, stupid, stupid misuses of good symbolism, this one takes the cake.  In order to make a sanctimonious “dire warning” this month, this week, they have used up their wad, made it impossible to point to trends that might happen later on… in the… um… I think it's called the future.

I was so impressed when, in the early nineties, after one of the post-Cold War treaties, an earlier and vastly more savvy set of BULLETIN editors actually cranked back the minute hand on the clock, all the way to 17 minutes-till.  By grabbing that opportunity, they gave themselves space to then be able to focus public attention on subsequent dire warnings. Many times, if necessary.

All these dopes have done is wrecked their credibility and wasted a symbolic tool that was of some real value to us all.

== On Libertarians and Conservatives ==

To all you (Rand/Rothbard) libertarians out there. (Not Smithian ones, like me.) Please... I realize you know you cannot defend the Republican Party, nor do you want to.  But the most perverse mental ailment among libertarians -- fostered at great expense by Forbes and the Kochs and Cato and the rest - is a well-watered fixation that somehow the GOP is "home.” Sure they have been corrupted. But if only the republicans would just offer a glimmer of hope, then they’ll be the default go-back-home for millions of libertarian-minded citizens.

Year after year, election after election, it takes so little. The oligarchs chuckle and cast their flies. For example, if Rand Paul gets the VP nomination, or some high position then - despite the fact that he is a raving loony - the Randians will flock back to the GOP, crying "all is forgiven!"

Of course this is perfect proof of insanity… doing the same thing, over and over again, expecting different results.  Take the standard libertarian nostrum that “Democrats favor freedom in the bedroom, but Republicans fight for freedom and competition in the marketplace.” 

Yes! And pixies fly off my keyboard while I am typing this!

Fine. Show me one industry that the GOP ever de-regulated, other than Wall Street/Finance. (That one industry they “free-up” every time, in order for banking lords to rape us. ) 

Name another. Go ahead, wise guy. NAME an industry that the Republican Party, during its long stretches of complete political power, freed from the shackles of government bureaucrats. Name one! You who swallow their preening rhetoric, without ever demanding results or looking at actual effects and outcomes.

Now dig this.  Read it as many times as it takes to sink in.

(1) Democrats can be persuaded to deregulate. as they did with (now keep count!) trucking, telecom, airlines, rails, and many others... as well as the greatest deregulatory act in human history — unleashing the free and open Internet upon the world. (Al Gore's bill).

Let’s add in Bill Clinton’s deregulation of the GPS system (over GOP opposition), freeing it for use by all, everywhere in the world.  

READ THAT LIST AGAIN. Look up the Interstate Commerce Commission and the horrid-captured Civil Aeronautics Board, then ask yourself why the “free competition” GOP never erased them, but the dems did.  

Ponder who deregulated GPS and the Internet and the Trillions of competitive wealth that those two acts unleashed.  Fool.

Plus… blue states are the only ones easing out of gerrymandering. 

They were the ones who ended prohibition in the 1930s, under FDR, and who are now legalizing pot in some blue states, easing out of Drug War insanity. Name for me ANY red state where gerrymandering or the Drug War are even being questioned. (And don’t tell me “morality” is involved!  In states that lead the nation in teen sex, teen pregnancy, STDs, domestic violence, divorce, molestation etc etc etc etc…..)

Okay okay... Alaska for pot and Idaho for Gerrymandering. I will willingly admit exceptions. Which only put the burden on you to exlain the overall trends.

The final refuge of the intelligent conservative or libertarian, nowadays is to sneer “they’re all the same!” But chuckling and rubbing their hands, Steve Forbes and the Kochs and Murdochs and Saudis love that cynical mantra! Because, come election time, it leads YOU to hold your nose and “come on home” to the Republicans.

To accept whatever pablum excuse — or lies about the DP candidate — will let you rationalize slavish dovotion to a party that betrays every single thing you stand for.

== Realities of Economics ==

Several cities in the Seattle region went much farther than Washington State’s recent moderate-boost to the minimum wage. “In January, the town of Seatac, Washington, put in to effect a new $15 per hour Minimum Wage. No ramp ups, no tiered implementation. One day it was the state standard, the next, the highest minimum wage in the nation. The Koch Brothers sank a fortune to fight this measure,” prediction it would result in massive job losses and layoffs.

Funny thing, the exact opposite has happened, everywhere minimum wages went up. (At best, they are still proportionately way below their 1979 value.) 

This is an example of failure of prediction that matches the absolutely perfect record of Supply Side Voodoo Economics (SSVE) to never -- not once, ever -- get a single forecast right. Ever, even once. At all.  

Which pushes us to ask – is the frantic inability to adapt to unexpected outcomes ever going to prompt sane conservatives to re-evaluate?  The way that Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley and Billy Graham were once willing to do?

== Controlling the Internet ==

Concerns about the potential Balkanization of the internet rose to public view when Russia’s parliament passed a bill requiring all technology companies to store the personal data of their Russian users in the country. If implemented the rule could move Russia closer to the state of the internet in China and Iran. Both already control online information through  heavily censored domestic information and pervasive filtering of foreign information. The law is scheduled to be signed into law in September of 2016 by President Vladimir Putin. Mr. Putin was a former KGB officer and has described the internet as a conspiracy invented by the CIA.

”The next few years are going to be about control,” said Danah Boyd, noted Internet thinker and a researcher at Microsoft. Survey respondents told Pew that trust in open communications technologies will continue to evaporate in the wake of revelations about government and corporate surveillance.

Dig it. Al Gore's 1988 bill (I know some of his staffers who wrote it) that unleashed a perfectly unregulated Internet upon the world was probably the greatest jiu jitsu move by enlightenment civilization since the U.S. Constitution.  It rocked every tyranny, forcing them to deal with a myriad awful, individualist headaches.  But they are getting the knack of it, now. They think they can corner, control and use the web as a tool of oppression...

...which is why the new satellite web systems... ViaSat, then Google and SpaceX... offer some promise to be the next judo move. the next side-step... if they design it right!  And if there are many side paths.

== Growing Inequality ==  

This page and two graphics absolutely do it.  They show that the one and only effect of Supply Side Economics was to favor the rich.  LOOK at these graphics. The blatant before and after, clocking from 1930 to the present how well the middle class has done vs. the oligarchy. This is not socialist-leftist talk.  There was never an entrepreneurial market capitalism more healthy and vibrant than the one left to our parents by FDR, Truman and Eisenhower.

What these charts show is what Adam Smith said, all along and also F. Hayek and anyone with any sense.  That we get the benefits of competition when it is flat-open-fair and when no one's advantages are so huge that they can cheat.  "Conservatism" and "libertarianism" used to understand this. They grudgingly understood the need for some regulation to keep competition flat-open-fair.

The one and only sole purpose of today's confederacy is to bring the plantation lords... I mean oligarchs... back to their rightful place atop the 6000 year feudal hierarchy.  

But we were and remain a revolution!  A revolution of moderate, pro-flat-open-fair-competition, pro-science, reasonable people who, for the first time, ever, stymied recurring feudalism.

LOOK at these charts and tell me the enemy isn't winning a round!  So far.  But the revolution of moderate reform is strong.  It had better be.  Or the lords will face another kind.

== Around the Globe ==

Wow, an over-the-top rant in The Independent makes you wince… and yet suggests a number of topics for your own followup wiki and book reading, about the middle-eastern family that has a plan for our future. And that plan is not based on… er… western values.

Yipe too plausible!  And deeply scary. As China rises and Russia's population declines, will China cast its eye right next door… on Siberia?  "Siberia – the Asian part of Russia, east of the Ural Mountains – is immense. It takes up three-quarters of Russia's land mass, the equivalent of the entire U.S. and India put together. It's hard to imagine such a vast area changing hands. But like love, a border is real only if both sides believe in it. And on both sides of the Sino-Russian border, that belief is wavering." Indeed, increasingly, Chinese-owned factories in Siberia churn out finished goods, as if the region already were a part of the Middle Kingdom's economy.

Is "Davos a Corporatist racket?" Daniel Hannan is a Conservative Member of the European Parliament who represents a British style of "conservatism that used to be typical in the U.S., one that is capable of separating the health of competitive markets from the health of oligarch monopolist lords. A distinction that is extinct from the minds and thoughts of today's American right

The political network overseen by the conservative billionaires Charles G. and David H. Koch plans to spend close to $900 million on the 2016 campaign, an unparalleled effort by coordinated outside groups to shape a presidential election that is already on track to be the most expensive in history. This oligarch-meddling and puppeteering will match spending by each of the major parties. Be proud, you confederates. Say yassa to your plantation lords.

Maine may become the 1st state to use preferential balloting, which tends to give third parties a chance... while also reducing overall radicalism.  Actually, Australia has used the system for ages... as has the sci fi community for its awards.

"The majority of business for "Las Vegas" companies now comes from Macau, the only city in China where gambling is legal.  Even MGM Resorts, owner of the Bellagio, MGM Grand and Mandalay Bay, is China focused. Its Macau business now takes in more cash than those three Vegas casinos combined.  With a population around 600,000, Macau is the fastest-growing city in the world, according to the Brookings Institution, and its casino industry is roughly seven times the size of Las Vegas'."

Ponder this.  The one place in China and the one industry that China allows foreign investors to hold big ownership stakes and to rake up big take-home profits is....

Work it out.  What better way to launder massive amounts of cash that can then be funneled into the US political process?  When US citizens like Sheldon Adelson - who happen to be Macao gambling tycoons, receive vast, un-audited "profits," and thereupon pour hundreds of millions of dollars into American electoral campaigns, do you really think he is doing it with HIS money?

And nothing about this whole arrangement seems... fishy?