Category Archives: Internet

UPDATED: Net Neutrality Odyssey

Business, Constitution, Fascism, Free Markets, Internet, Private Property, Technology

If they are not, the FCC’s new Net Neutrality rules sound awfully like price fixing, or a kind of Internet Civil Rights Act, where everyone must be allowed access to everything without discrimination based on, well, what and how much you purchase.

Ruled by regulators we certainly are.

Article I, Section 1, of the United States Constitution, provides that:

All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.

So what is the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) doing regulating the Internet? Nothing out of the ordinary is the answer. The FCC is just doing what all America’s extra-Constitutional government agencies do: manage all aspects of American life. Hence the term “The Managerial State.”

ROBERT M. MCDOWELL, a Republican commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission, calls the FCC’s unconstitutional power grab a “jaw-dropping interventionist chutzpah”; a bypasses of “branches of our government in the dogged pursuit of needless and harmful regulation.”

Let us not forget that the Net Neutrality odyssey began with that bastard Bush. As Wired reports, “In 2005, then-FCC chairman Michael Powell issued a set of principles, the so-called Four Freedoms, which said that internet users had the right to use the lawful software and services they want to on the internet, access their choice of content, use whatever devices they like, and get meaningful information about how their online service plan works.”

Note the Bush boy’s UN-like language: “Four Freedoms.”

This is important: “Both wireless and fixed broadband service providers will have to explain how they manage congestion on their networks. Cable and DSL companies will have to let you use the applications, online services and devices that you want to. Meanwhile, wireless companies will be prohibited from blocking websites and internet telephony services like Skype. Cable and DSL providers would be barred from ‘unreasonably’ discriminating against various online services.”

An Internet Civil Rights Act of sorts.

The one thing that bothers me is this: Is Comcast, for example, not a franchise (“a privilege or right officially granted a person or a group by a government”)? The kind of areal monopoly they enjoy and less-than-optimal service they provide in the market seems to suggest that possibility.

Franchise status might also explain why, as Wired observed, “There was one group … which seemed content with the new rules: the nation’s cable and telecommunications companies, including AT&T, Comcast and Verizon. They’ve been making the rounds in recent weeks signaling their support for Chairman Julius Genachowski’s compromise deal.”

UPDATE (Dec. 22): GREAT MINDS. Michelle Malkin also finds Civil Rights language to be the appropriate source of metaphor to describe the impetus of laws that’ll mandate equal Internet access to all irrespective of the cost of a product or service.

Under the FCC’s new regime, the market will be fattened and socialized and the price system sundered. This means worse service for all paying customers as the incentive to innovate are removed. When will Out “Overlords Who Art in DC” UNDERSTAND that the price and profit system is the key to prosperity? The correct answer is “never.”

VIA MICHELLE:

Undaunted promoters of Obama FCC chairman Julius Genachowski’s “open Internet” plan to expand regulatory authority over the Internet have couched their online power grab in the rhetoric of civil rights. On Monday, FCC Commissioner Michael Copps proclaimed: “Universal access to broadband needs to be seen as a civil right…[though] not many people have talked about it that way.” Opposing the government Internet takeover blueprint, in other words, is tantamount to supporting segregation. Cunning propaganda, that.

“Broadband is becoming a basic necessity,” civil rights activist Benjamin Hooks added. And earlier this month, fellow FCC panelist Mignon Clyburn, daughter of Congressional Black Caucus leader and Number Three House Democrat James Clyburn of South Carolina, declared that free (read: taxpayer-subsidized) access to the Internet is not only a civil right for every “nappy-headed child” in America, but essential to their self-esteem. Every minority child, she said, “deserves to be not only connected, but to be proud of who he or she is.”

UPDATED: Warbot Wants to Kill WikiLeaker

Free Speech, Intelligence, Internet, Just War, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Military, Propaganda, Republicans, War

One warbot at least wants to kill the WikiLeaker. The military runs Jihadi protection programs which recruit and shield deficient sorts like Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the Jihadi who committed fratricide at Fort Hood. Or like Private Bradley Manning, clearly not military material. He is charged with helping to leak classified military documents to the whistleblower website WikiLeaks.

Now, as HuffPo reports, “U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) says that execution would be an appropriate punishment for Manning.”

The uncritical US military-industrial-congressional-media complex is so reckless. The politicos, and now even the generals, preach the practice of left-liberalism at its most extreme in every structure of the military and the government. And then, when it appears that their affirmative recruits are crappy—they can’t abide by a code of secrecy (or by a contract); or are unable to refrain from killing their colleagues—then their bosses suddenly turn bigoted and want to kill them.

These are the same generals and politicians who campaign for free and open sex for hets and homos in the military. What do they expect? Disciplined buttoned-up soldiers?!

You can’t run a liberal organization—structurally and philosophically—and expect your members to behave themselves. Left-liberalism is about license and lenience.

It’s interesting that, and I repeat myself, that Republicans don’t give a damn about the alarming truths that have come to the fore due to the leak. All they discuss is quashing WikiLeak and killing the leaker. How they love freedom. Creeps.

The tartlet brigade on tv screams about the information endangering our troops. (Gosh they’re original!)

LET ME SEE IF I GOT THIS STRAIGHT: IT IS VITAL TO CONCEAL THE NUMBER OF TOOTHLESS PASHTOONS (MYRON’S MONIKER FOR AMERICA’S MOST MENACING ENEMIES) AMERICANS ARE KILLING IN ORDER TO SAFEGUARD THEIR KILLERS.

What whores.

Needless to say that for those who seek the truth, the leaks are very good indeed.

UPDATE (Aug. 8): “Anti-War Activists Rally in Support of Soldier Accused of Leaking Documents,” reports FoxNews.

I think it’s obvious from my post that I don’t support a lack of discipline per se. From the material that Manning, “a 22-year-old intelligence analyst,” leaked, it would appear that he was acting as a whistle blower. Perhaps this is exactly what we need in the military—courageous whistle blowers who will pull back the curtain to reveal what the military monstrosity is doing in our name (sorry, “for our freedoms,” to parrot the warbots).

Update II: A Sprinkling Of State Star Dust (Behold: A Commission)

Barack Obama, Business, Debt, Economy, Energy, Free Markets, Government, Internet, Liberty, Socialism, Taxation, The State

In the introduction to F.A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, the late economist Milton Friedman put his finger on the backdrop to the growth of collectivism: “The argument for collectivism is simple if false; it is an immediate emotional argument. The argument for individualism is subtle and sophisticated; it is an indirect rational argument.”

Friedman best articulated why idiots don’t understand freedom.

Obama is an idiot. The guy really doesn’t comprehend how it is that he can’t create jobs. He keeps sprinkling state star dust, but nothing happens. He honestly believes that as the head of an entity that only consumes wealth and has no means of producing it, he should, nevertheless, be able to generate viable jobs. Indeed, BO’s bewildered, because his are the economics of voodoo..

If it is to expand, nuclear power should be privately financed. But, as explained, BO has a hard time with the market place, being too dim to understand its workings. So today, instead of lifting the 40-year-old restrictions on the construction of nuclear plants and leaving the rest to an industry with skin in the game, BO has decided “to back the construction of two nuclear reactors with $8.3 billion in federal loan guarantees.”

By BO logic, a wave of the wand is bound to bring into being a viable industry.

Not quite.

“We are missing a historic opportunity to expand nuclear power the right way [through private financing] and instead settling for a handful of government-subsidized reactors,” says Jack Spencer, a research fellow for nuclear energy policy at the conservative Heritage Foundation.

The same species of dimness inflicts the First Lady. When Michelle O launched her Fat-Based Initiative, the FLOTUS showed that she too is inured to the workings of the market. MO was challenged as to whether she was not interfering in the lives of Americans, to which she answered that she agreed government should not meddle. Seamlessly, she went on to explain that “We,” as in the Royal We, needed to offer parents options… and educate them, etc.

MO had drawn a complete blank; unable was she to even fathom how information would disseminated outside the purview of government.

Update I: STIM TURNS 1 TODAY. Obama understandably defends it, but so do the Keynesians—proponents of centralized banking—at the Wall Street Journal. As I wrote, “How much to hand out; who to hand it to; which handout makes the best use of taxpayer money…—that’s the depth of the ‘philosophical’ to-be-or-not-to-be among Republikeynsians.”

No premise of central banking is more honored than the idea that the system needs a lender of last resort, without whom holders of good collateral can go belly up in a liquidity panic

[Holman W. Jenkins Jr., WSJ]

Obama’s defense has far more credibility, given that he is a central planner, and the WSJ poses as pro-market:

Obama, in a White House speech, said he believed the stimulus will save or create 1.5 million jobs in 2010 after saving or creating as many as 2 million jobs thus far.
His point was to show that the stimulus, while admittedly unpopular, had the effect of keeping the U.S. economy from plunging into a second Great Depression.
‘Our work is far from over but we have rescued this economy from the worst of this crisis,’ he said.

Update II (Feb. 18): BEHOLD A COMMISSION. “Government commissions are where accountability goes to die.” It is for reason that “President Barack Obama named a bipartisan panel on Thursday to tackle exploding U.S. budget deficits and promised it broad leeway to recommend ways to put the country on a path to fiscal responsibility.”

A commission can do absolutely nothing about the debt and the deficits this president, like his predecessor, has wracked-up. What it can do is put distance between the president and the “tough decisions” the country he is bankrupting must make.

Taxes will be raised, despite Obama’s promise “during his campaign that families making less than $250,000 would not face tax increases.”

Fishy accounting, in the final analysis, will allow this smooth, slippery president to claim that he has tackled a problem Bush created and he exacerbated.

Quote: “There’s no doubt that we’re going to have to also address the long-term quandary of a government that routinely and extravagantly spends more than it takes in.”

Question: Are Americans the kind of meatheads that’ll accept BO’s version of events whereby he and his Big-Spender Government are two different entities, never the twain shall meet?

Updated: WikiLibel (Pitfalls Of Populism In Data)

Africa, Free Speech, Internet, libertarianism, Propaganda, Pseudo-history, South-Africa

Wikipedia is the Southern Poverty Law Center of online “resources.” It is an example of why populism in data is a piss-poor idea. Any rightist who’s had to fight that outfit for the removal of libel and lies knows of what I speak.

In short, Wikipedia is the encyclopedia of and for the Age of the Idiot. (And the malevolent.) Of course, libertarians love it—and their motives are lefty, as is often the case: Behold spontaneous order! (More like disorder.) The fact that millions of people have mastered enough technology to post online falsities masquerading as fact about those they dislike is no more significant to freedom than the fact that billions of humans have a bowel movement every day. So there!

And, as Derb demonstrates, Wikipedia makes “correcting” very difficult indeed. personally, I’ve opted for letters c/cd to a lawyer (and when I obtain proof traceable to the woman I suspect of saucing up the barely true tales posted about me … it won’t be pretty).

Truth in advertising is the issue here. Wikipedia needs to be labeled differently. It cannot be allowed at once to post lies and pose as a purveyor of truth. Right now, it uses its credibility as an encyclopedia to damage the good name of a person and present it as fact. Think of the debate over holocaust denial. Free speech always. The only question vis-a-vis denial is how and where you file it. In the library, the Dewey Decimal Classification for denial ought to be “Pseudo-history.” Right now Wikipedia bios fuse fact with fiction, yet this amalgam is filed as fact. This dubious syndicate needs to be “reclassified” itself. (Ideas?)

So far generalities. Now to more particulars. Today I was researching Dr. Mangosuthu Buthelezi for a section of my interminable book. Without going into detail, the Zulu chief is one of the good guys of South Africa; Mandela’s mafia—the ANC—is the bad element. Of course, Buthelezi being a free market man, who fought for the devolution of power rather than its concentration in a dominant-party state (the endgame of the ANC and its Anglo-American buddies)—he was tarred as the bad guy by the same axis of evil.

And by WikiLibel. As far as I know, “necklacing,” the indigenous practice of placing a car tire around a putative offender’s neck and igniting it with gasoline, was invented by the ANC as a method of punishing collaborators. Nelson’s wife, Wini Mandela, was an avid practitioner. No, I’m not claiming there was never any cross-fertilization in the ethnic war between the Xhosa (ANC/Mandela) and the Zulu (Buthelezi). However, the ANC should take credit for inventing and perfecting this technique.

But not according to our falsifiers, who give Buthelezi the good old WikiLibel treatment.

Update (August 3): AGGRESSION AGAINST NON-AGGRESSORS. A syndicate poses as a transmitter of immutable fact. The outfit’s process allows for the repeated trashing of vulnerable individuals in its bio section—vulnerable because mass support is not behind them. Individuals enjoying the support of the masses and their crooked cognoscenti are spared. All this under the guise of truth and objectivity.

As I predicted, those whose life’s work is in undermining ordered liberty, and elevating the virtues of populism and anarchy, rush to the defense of this bully pulpit. I speak of libertarians, naturally.

Their analytical tools? Accuse the “little woman” (moi) of personalizing the matter, sulking, and not being willing to, periodically, forfeit her good name and the integrity of her record on the alter of the Collective Good—namely data disseminated by the masses.

Predictable.

It doesn’t take much mental acuity (entirely lost in the herd instincts of my interlocutors) to distill the argument of this post. All one has to do is READ IT. Again.

What moved me to write was not my ongoing libel by Wikipedia, but the blatant, malicious, cunningly embedded slander in the bio of Prince Mangasutu Buthelezi. The latter is one of the good guys of South Africa, RIP. Yet the Zulu royal has been tarred over the decades by westerners—from the state department, to the New York Times to every petty diplomat blindly doing the business of democracy in that part of the world.

In their support for Saint Nelson and the revolutionary ANC—Acorn with machetes—the majority of libertarians (not all, mind you) have been as zealous as the neoconservatives. So sure, they’d dismiss my motives for writing this post. What do these plebs, every bit as ahistoric in their sympathies as the neoconservatives, know of Buthelezi?

According the WikiLibel, the grisly tradition of necklacing (see above), originated with the prince and his political party. Wrong. Necklacing was invented and perfected by the Saint’s syndicate and put to use by his wife.

If you’re not really famous—anointed by the intellectual monopoly in the Age of the Idiot—and WikiLibel doesn’t look too shabby if it lies about you; then they’ll sanction your maligning. Good luck in trying to remove the libel. Read Derb’s experience, one among many. Otherwise you, a non-aggressor, is aggressed against and it’s up to you to keep fending off attacks you did not provoke. How excellent

Some anarchists have no problems with libel, and even advance arguments for it. Free speech baby. Fist in the air; power to the pitchfork wielders.

I predicted libertarians would ooze all over this particular spontaneous bowel movement. I was right.