Sunday, October 28, 2007

Fight Monopolized Media (They're at it again)

From Common Cause:

"

They say that politics makes strange bedfellows. That was definitely the case yesterday when Senators Byron Dorgan (D-ND) and Trent Lott (R-MS) stood together at a press conference to denounce the FCC's plan to relax media ownership limits.*

Speak out today.

Don't let Congress adjourn without holding media ownership hearings!

In case you haven't heard, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is threatening to vote, as soon as mid-December, to allow massive consolidation of media outlets. These new media ownership rules are likely to give a single company the right to own multiple television stations, numerous radio stations and the biggest newspaper in your town - effectively controlling almost all of your local news!

Worse, the FCC wants to approve the new rules without giving the public a fair chance to voice their concerns.

Ask Congress to act now to stop the FCC's massive giveaway to Big Media!

Stopping the FCC's effort to allow more media consolidation is something we can all support. We won this fight in 2003 because groups ranging from National Rifle Association to the National Organization for Women joined together to oppose the FCC's plan for more consolidation.

And we can win again. If thousands of us speak out for more diverse media, speak out for more local control of television and radio programming, and speak out for more viewpoints and better journalism, Congress and the FCC will have to listen .

Contact your Representatives today.

Let them know that you oppose the FCC's plan, and demand that they hold immediate hearings on the issue of media consolidation - before the FCC moves ahead with its planned December 18 vote.

"

Thursday, October 25, 2007

To Protect and Defend


found at http://2millionthweblog.blogspot.com/2007_07_01_archive.html

Monday, October 22, 2007

A Glimpse at the Root of the Problem

neoliberalism,... what is it,..?
A 9-minute film (in English)discussing neoliberism with a beat and latin american graffiti and cartoons.
9m33s

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jD59ue8t94

Saturday, October 20, 2007

Want Al Gore to Run?

Many of you have already chosen your Democratic candidate for 2008, and we respect them all. But if you'd like Al Gore to run, please sign our petition:
http://democrats.com/run-al-gore

Thank you, Pete Stark

Thank you, Pete Stark, for showing some intestinal fortitude in defense of justice.

-- Mark Frankenberg

HEAR the MUSIC. Read the BOOK. Get the T-Shirt.
get a FREE "Just Say NO to Fascism" Bumper Sticker
http://www.AmericanWisdom.org

Friday, October 19, 2007

Open Thread 19oct07: What do YOU think?

Open Thread 19oct07: What do YOU think?

-- Mark Frankenberg

HEAR the MUSIC. Read the BOOK. Get the T-Shirt.
get a FREE "Just Say NO to Fascism" Bumper Sticker
http://www.AmericanWisdom.org

Thursday, October 11, 2007

Regarding Nancy Pelosi and Impeachment.

Regarding Nancy Pelosi and Impeachment.

{
Look. We have democratic majorities in the House and Senate right now because we Americans are fed up with the Bush Administration, its recklessness, its abuses of power and its illegal war. We are now becoming fed up with the Democratic Party and Nancy Pelosi for their cowardly accommodation of the radicals in the Executive Branch (and their agents in congress), and for the failure of the Democratic Party to do what needs to be done:

Cut the funding for the illegal war in Iraq.

Impeach Bush, Cheney and their cohorts.

I can find enough information to support both things in 5 minutes.

Knock off the bullshit and do what we hired you to do.
}

Congress needs to hear from all of us today . Email your Representatives to demand impeachment, not immunity:
http://www.democrats.com/peoplesemailnetwork/114

If you have time, call your Representative and Senators at 202-225-3121 and politely express your outrage and your demand for impeachment, not immunity, for Bush's illegal wiretapping.

-- Mark Frankenberg

HEAR the MUSIC. Read the BOOK.
get a FREE "Just Say NO to Fascism" Bumper Sticker
http://www.AmericanWisdom.org

Wednesday, October 10, 2007

FlyBots!

FlyBots!

At the next protest, you might want to take a net with you.

In Dan Brown's novel, "Deception Point" the claim is made that tiny government robots already exist.

That "fly on the wall" might be remotely operated by some fool who doesn't know what the 4th amendment is.

Thanks, Vox Fairy.

http://answer.pephost.org/...
"

Is the government using small flying surveillance devices on the antiwar movement?

Washington Post reports on flying surveillance devices at Sept. 15 Mass March and Die-in

Washington Post reports on:
Flying surveillance devices at Sept. 15 Mass March and Die-in

Dragonfly spies
A prototype of a flying surveillance device still under development

Today's Washington Post carries a major article about the government's creation of small flying surveillance devices that look somewhat like dragonflies. As the article below discusses, there have been credible independent reports about sightings at ANSWER's recent September 15 mass March on Washington of 100,000 people. According to the article, the government has been working through many agencies to perfect this spy technology. As also mentioned below, the Partnership for Civil Justice has recently filed a series of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests with different government agencies regarding use and deployment against the public.

Vanessa Alarcon, who was working backstage at the Lafayette Park rally, and who is quoted in today's Washington Post article, reported that the strange-looking devices were hovering above the backstage area where speakers were waiting to take the stage and organizers were holding meetings in preparation for the mass march and die-in. Others reported that they saw the devices elsewhere at the demonstration.

The government's efforts to surveille the growing movement against the war in the United States are neither new nor are they effective in preventing the antiwar movement from gaining momentum everywhere. The government fined ANSWER $40,000 for putting up antiwar posters, suppressed and arrested the speakers at a pre-march press conference, spent large amounts of money to mobilize right-wing pro-Bush supporters, and yet all of these efforts failed to stop an exceptionally powerful action from taking place on Sept. 15. The protest culminated in a die-in of thousands led by Iraq war veterans and 200 arrested by riot police.

Following September 15th, the ANSWER Coalition, along with other national and local coalitions and organizers from around the country, are mobilizing for October 27th regional actions. This will be another powerful sign that the antiwar movement is growing, not diminishing as claimed by the corporate-owned media.

While there are those who would like to dismiss the implications of such spying, the fact is that if the government is intentionally conducting secret photographic or audio surveillance targeting people because they are engaged in public protest and First Amendment-protected activities, this would be a significant constitutional rights violation.

While we do not know that such bizarre spy technology was deployed at the September 15 demonstration, if anyone saw these "dragonflies," we'd like to hear from you.

Take a stand against government repression. Help this movement grow. We will not be intimidated. Please make an urgently needed donation today.

-- For more information, go to ANSWER Coalition (http://www.answercoalition/). To receive updates about the Partnership for Civil Justice's FOIA request, go to http://www.justiceonline.org/.


Washington Post

The story below is available at:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/08/AR2007100801434.html

Dragonfly or Insect Spy? Scientists at Work on Robobugs.

By Rick Weiss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 9, 2007

Vanessa Alarcon saw them while working at an antiwar rally in Lafayette Square last month.

"I heard someone say, 'Oh my god, look at those,' " the college senior from New York recalled. "I look up and I'm like, 'What the hell is that?' They looked kind of like dragonflies or little helicopters. But I mean, those are not insects."

Out in the crowd, Bernard Crane saw them, too.

"I'd never seen anything like it in my life," the Washington lawyer said. "They were large for dragonflies. I thought, 'Is that mechanical, or is that alive?' "

That is just one of the questions hovering over a handful of similar sightings at political events in Washington and New York. Some suspect the insectlike drones are high-tech surveillance tools, perhaps deployed by the Department of Homeland Security.

Others think they are, well, dragonflies -- an ancient order of insects that even biologists concede look about as robotic as a living creature can look.

No agency admits to having deployed insect-size spy drones. But a number of U.S. government and private entities acknowledge they are trying. Some federally funded teams are even growing live insects with computer chips in them, with the goal of mounting spyware on their bodies and controlling their flight muscles remotely.

The robobugs could follow suspects, guide missiles to targets or navigate the crannies of collapsed buildings to find survivors.

The technical challenges of creating robotic insects are daunting, and most experts doubt that fully working models exist yet.

"If you find something, let me know," said Gary Anderson of the Defense Department's Rapid Reaction Technology Office.

But the CIA secretly developed a simple dragonfly snooper as long ago as the 1970s. And given recent advances, even skeptics say there is always a chance that some agency has quietly managed to make something operational.

"America can be pretty sneaky," said Tom Ehrhard, a retired Air Force colonel and expert in unmanned aerial vehicles who is now at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a nonprofit Washington-based research institute.

Robotic fliers have been used by the military since World War II, but in the past decade their numbers and level of sophistication have increased enormously. Defense Department documents describe nearly 100 different models in use today, some as tiny as birds, and some the size of small planes.

All told, the nation's fleet of flying robots logged more than 160,000 flight hours last year -- a more than fourfold increase since 2003. A recent report by the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College warned that if traffic rules are not clarified soon, the glut of unmanned vehicles "could render military airspace chaotic and potentially dangerous."

But getting from bird size to bug size is not a simple matter of making everything smaller.

"You can't make a conventional robot of metal and ball bearings and just shrink the design down," said Ronald Fearing, a roboticist at the University of California at Berkeley. For one thing, the rules of aerodynamics change at very tiny scales and require wings that flap in precise ways -- a huge engineering challenge.

Only recently have scientists come to understand how insects fly -- a biomechanical feat that, despite the evidence before scientists' eyes, was for decades deemed "theoretically impossible." Just last month, researchers at Cornell University published a physics paper clarifying how dragonflies adjust the relative motions of their front and rear wings to save energy while hovering.

That kind of finding is important to roboticists because flapping fliers tend to be energy hogs, and batteries are heavy.

The CIA was among the earliest to tackle the problem. The "insectothopter," developed by the agency's Office of Research and Development 30 years ago, looked just like a dragonfly and contained a tiny gasoline engine to make the four wings flap. It flew but was ultimately declared a failure because it could not handle crosswinds.

Agency spokesman George Little said he could not talk about what the CIA may have done since then. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Homeland Security and the Secret Service also declined to discuss the topic.

Only the FBI offered a declarative denial. "We don't have anything like that," a spokesman said.

The Defense Department is trying, though.

In one approach, researchers funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) are inserting computer chips into moth pupae -- the intermediate stage between a caterpillar and a flying adult -- and hatching them into healthy "cyborg moths."

The Hybrid Insect Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems project aims to create literal shutterbugs -- camera-toting insects whose nerves have grown into their internal silicon chip so that wranglers can control their activities. DARPA researchers are also raising cyborg beetles with power for various instruments to be generated by their muscles.

"You might recall that Gandalf the friendly wizard in the recent classic 'Lord of the Rings' used a moth to call in air support," DARPA program manager Amit Lal said at a symposium in August. Today, he said, "this science fiction vision is within the realm of reality."

A DARPA spokeswoman denied a reporter's request to interview Lal or others on the project.

The cyborg insect project has its share of doubters.

"I'll be seriously dead before that program deploys," said vice admiral Joe Dyer, former commander of the Naval Air Systems Command, now at iRobot in Burlington, Mass., which makes household and military robots.

By contrast, fully mechanical micro-fliers are advancing quickly.

Researchers at the California Institute of Technology have made a "microbat ornithopter" that flies freely and fits in the palm of one's hand. A Vanderbilt University team has made a similar device.

With their sail-like wings, neither of those would be mistaken for insects. In July, however, a Harvard University team got a truly fly-like robot airborne, its synthetic wings buzzing at 120 beats per second.

"It showed that we can manufacture the articulated, high-speed structures that you need to re-create the complex wing motions that insects produce," said team leader Robert Wood.

The fly's vanishingly thin materials were machined with lasers, then folded into three-dimensional form "like a micro-origami," he said. Alternating electric fields make the wings flap. The whole thing weighs just 65 milligrams, or a little more than the plastic head of a push pin.

Still, it can fly only while attached to a threadlike tether that supplies power, evidence that significant hurdles remain.

In August, at the International Symposium on Flying Insects and Robots, held in Switzerland, Japanese researchers introduced radio-controlled fliers with four-inch wingspans that resemble hawk moths. Those who watch them fly, its creator wrote in the program, "feel something of 'living souls.' "

Others, taking a tip from the CIA, are making fliers that run on chemical fuels instead of batteries. The "entomopter," in early stages of development at the Georgia Institute of Technology and resembling a toy plane more than a bug, converts liquid fuel into a hot gas, which powers four flapping wings and ancillary equipment.

"You can get more energy out of a drop of gasoline than out of a battery the size of a drop of gasoline," said team leader Robert Michelson.

Even if the technical hurdles are overcome, insect-size fliers will always be risky investments.

"They can get eaten by a bird, they can get caught in a spider web," said Fearing of Berkeley. "No matter how smart you are -- you can put a Pentium in there -- if a bird comes at you at 30 miles per hour there's nothing you can do about it."

Protesters might even nab one with a net -- one of many reasons why Ehrhard, the former Air Force colonel, and other experts said they doubted that the hovering bugs spotted in Washington were spies.

So what was seen by Crane, Alarcon and a handful of others at the D.C. march -- and as far back as 2004, during the Republican National Convention in New York, when one observant but perhaps paranoid peace-march participant described on the Web "a jet-black dragonfly hovering about 10 feet off the ground, precisely in the middle of 7th avenue . . . watching us"?

They probably saw dragonflies, said Jerry Louton, an entomologist at the National Museum of Natural History. Washington is home to some large, spectacularly adorned dragonflies that "can knock your socks off," he said.

At the same time, he added, some details do not make sense. Three people at the D.C. event independently described a row of spheres, the size of small berries, attached along the tails of the big dragonflies -- an accoutrement that Louton could not explain. And all reported seeing at least three maneuvering in unison.

"Dragonflies never fly in a pack," he said.

Mara Verheyden-Hilliard of the Partnership for Civil Justice said her group is investigating witness reports and has filed Freedom of Information Act requests with several federal agencies. If such devices are being used to spy on political activists, she said, "it would be a significant violation of people's civil rights."

For many roboticists still struggling to get off the ground, however, that concern -- and their technology's potential role -- seems superfluous.

"I don't want people to get paranoid, but what can I say?" Fearing said. "Cellphone cameras are already everywhere. It's not that much different."


"
http://answer.pephost.org/...

-- Mark Frankenberg

HEAR the MUSIC. Read the BOOK.
get a FREE "Just Say NO to Fascism" Bumper Sticker
http://www.AmericanWisdom.org

Thursday, October 04, 2007

The Problem With Voltaire

The Problem with Voltaire

I found some quotes from Voltaire I liked because they support my favor of rationality over unexplainable mysticism, and my suspicion that unexplainable mysticism can be a chink in a person's armor that makes a person susceptible to the forces of evil (I.E. nihilism, paranoia, hatred, corruption, irresponsibility and all other manifestations of that which is FALSE, FOUL and FOOLISH).

I was thus intrigued with indications that Voltaire was an adamant critic of the church of his day.

I see many instances where "the church" is part of the mindset that enables evils like the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, Witch-hunts (Salem, McCarthy, FOX/O'Reilly, take your pick), Slavery and Segregation and other bigotry, Cold War and Vietnam War and Iraq War and Drug War; and in addition to such evils it promotes orthodoxy over critical thought, shame over creative endeavor, and blind obedience to authority.

I part ways with Voltaire when it comes to the government of our human community. He apparently liked the idea of a benevolent dictator. There are hints that he bought into the idea that the "not-rich" were incapable of governing themselves effectively.

There is a point that if people are super poor and live in polluted environments and have lousy schools, then certainly the odds of many of them becoming outstanding members of the community are reduced. The answer to that is equal opportunity. There are and have been many who tend to think, consciously or not, that they are somehow superior to the poor and deserve more. I got a whiff of that with Voltaire and in my book that makes him a snob.

I prefer functional republic. I just called Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, My Rep and Senators and told them that they need to step up to the plate and help me save our republic. The executive is grabbing excessive power what with all this FISA/NSA Wiretapping Big-Brother nonsense. I encourage YOU to step up to the plate and make similar calls.

-- Mark Frankenberg

HEAR the MUSIC. Read the BOOK.
get a FREE "Just Say NO to Fascism" Bumper Sticker
http://www.AmericanWisdom.org

Wednesday, October 03, 2007

On Compromising Values

On Compromising Values

I don't agree with all that is Ayn Rand, but I do agree with the following passage by Ayn Rand:

http://www.geocities.com/rational_argumentator/freedomtooffend.html
"
There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil. The man who is wrong still retains some respect for truth, if only by accepting the responsibility of choice. But the man in the middle is the knave who blanks out the truth in order to pretend that no choice or values exist, who is willing to sit out the course of any battle, willing to cash in on the blood of the innocent or to crawl on his belly to the guilty, who dispenses justice by condemning both the robber and the robbed to jail, who solves conflicts by ordering the thinker and the fool to meet each other halfway....

When men reduce their virtues to the approximate, then evil acquires the force of an absolute, when loyalty to an unyielding purpose is dropped by the virtuous, it's picked up the scoundrels---and you get the indecent spectacle of a cringing, bargaining, traitorous good and a self-righteously uncompromising evil.
"
http://www.geocities.com/rational_argumentator/freedomtooffend.html



-- Mark Frankenberg

HEAR the MUSIC. Read the BOOK.
get a FREE "Just Say NO to Fascism" Bumper Sticker
http://www.AmericanWisdom.org

Monday, October 01, 2007

I'll Take Voltaire

I'll Take Voltaire

Regarding philosophy, in a hypothetical debate between Pascal and Voltaire (ain't happenin'.. Voltaire was born after Pascal died), I'd go with Voltaire.

Regarding Pascal, Here's my take on it:

http://www.christianitytoday.com/history/special/131christians/pascal.html
"

...on November 23, 1654, Pascal experienced a "definitive conversion" during a vision of the crucifixion:

"From about half-past ten in the evening until about half-past twelve … FIRE … God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, and not of the philosophers and savants. Certitude. Certitude. Feeling. Joy. Peace."

...

Voltaire and other scholars denounced Pascal as a cheerless fanatic. Cheerless or not, he did live most of his life with a frail body, and his many illnesses finally took their toll at age 39.


"
http://www.christianitytoday.com/history/special/131christians/pascal.html

One of his illnesses could have caused that night of hallucinations.


Here's a Voltaire quote I find especially meaningful:

"The truths of religion are never so well understood as by those who have lost the power of reason."
--Voltaire

Here's another one I like:

"Prejudices are what fools use for reason."
--Voltaire

The Age of Reason Produced The United States of America. The United States of America is still the theoretical revolution of Reason against the Tyrannies of Religious Dogma and the idea of Blind Obedience to Authority, both Real and Imaginary.

The Forces of Stupidity are still Trying to Destroy it.

To those who value mindless emotion over rationality, I ask you.. please do us all a favor:

WISE UP!

-- Mark Frankenberg

HEAR the MUSIC. Read the BOOK.
get a FREE "Just Say NO to Fascism" Bumper Sticker
http://www.AmericanWisdom.org

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