is what i do

Is that being alarmist? Maybe. The story is in the Washington Post, and it’s chilling.

The big telcos, headed by Bell South and AT&T, are promoting the idea that they should be able to control the Internet traffic that flows through the channels they control, to deny access to services that compete with services they offer, and to charge big content providers, like Google and Yahoo, to give their traffic priority over traffic of small content providers, like this blog.

It’s not hard to see that such a scheme would mean the end of the Internet as we know it, which is the Internet that many of us have come to consider indispensible. Lest we miss the point, Smith gives us another example a little later in the article:

This is not a theoretical discussion. There’s legislation in the Energy and Commerce Committee of the House right now that would give Smith what he wants—legislation, need we add, whose passage through Congress is being liberally greased by contributions from the telcos and cable companies.

There’s a pretty powerful coalition of interests opposing the legislation as it’s written, including Amazon, Google and Ebay, but it’s unlikely that they own as many legislators as the network providers, being so new to that game. And given the various other things happening on the national scene these days, something like this could gain a good deal of momentum before the public in general, or even most legislators, become aware of it.

It’s probably not too early to drop a note to your congressfolk to let them know that you are aware of what’s going down, and that you are mighty disturbed by this attempt to hijack the Internet, and that you will be watching their response to the legislation. It’s probably also a good idea to get to know Public Knowledge, a digital rights advocacy group that has been quick to speak out against the so-called “pay-for-performance” concept, and even to give them a contribution to help them with their good works.

Thanks to The Progressive Blog Alliance and Blogonymous for the heads-up on this one.

Hunter, in the Daily Kos, reports that Bush feels betrayed by his father, believing him to be behind Brent Scowcroft’s devastating interview in The New Yorker, and by Karl Rove, because he lied to the President about the Plamegate affair. Even in the best of times, this President is dangerously isolated from anyone who would tell him the truth about what’s going on in the world. Now these reports, coming on top of other recent reports about his resumed drinking and other erratic behavior, are really frightening. And Hunter points out that the new stories are coming from bedrock Republican sources, e.g. The Washington Times and Matt Drudge.

Nobuo Masataka, a primate researcher at Kyoto University, has written a book which argues that proliferation of mobile phones has resulted in a population of young people in Japan who behave more like chimpanzees than humans. He calls this group “dearuki-zoku (out and about tribe)” and claims that their reliance on mobile phones and text messaging has caused them to lose the distinction between public and private space, to become more emotional, less able to express their feelings in words, and more likely to lash out in sudden, unprovoked attacks.

My tendency is to dismiss this sort of speculation as publicity-seeking behavior, with virtually no relationship to genuine science. And I distrust my own old-fart tendency to see the behavior of young people and other alien cultures as a tolling bell for the doom of civilization. Still, this one has resonance; there’s something going on among those young people who have such a symbiotic relationship with such an intimate and seductive gadget, and it doesn’t feel comfortable or even, as Professor Masataka points out, quite human. I think it may be something we’ll be hearing more about.

Gasoline is expected to hit $4/gallon sometimes soon. (Who will monitor the global oil industry’s profits pre- and post-Katrina?) That’s bearable, for us. We have some measure of control over the amount we drive; we don’t drive far; our cars are relatively thrifty; and we’re rich, by current standards. For some, in the virtual absence, in most parts of the country, of effective public transportation, $4/gallon will be enough to push them over the edge, further skewing those current standards. And I suspect that gas prices will never go down, and may, in fact, peak at much more than $4.

But the discomfort created by high gasoline prices pales compared to the damage to the national and global economies that will be the inevitable result of the loss, for months at least, of the Port of Southern Louisiana. Charles Stross gives an overview of what’s at stake. The Port, which stretches for 50 miles north and south of New Orleans, is the largest port in the United States, and the fifth largest in the world.

Stross quotes a report from StratFor:

Stross estimates that the economic cost of closing the Port of Souther Louisiana for up to three months may equal 5% of the US balance of trade with the rest of the world; the cost, he says, is likely to be an order of magnitude higher than the $25-35 Billion in probable insurance claims, and may be more than the cost of the Iraq war to date. He asks, “What are the likely consequences (locally and globally) of blowing a 5% of GDP sized hole under the waterline of the US economy?”

Iraq has been draining the resources of the country, pushing people deeper into poverty, ripping gaping holes in what’s left of a public safety net, and putting many areas that have relied on federal programs to survive in jeopardy (including New Orleans; one probable reason for the break in the levees was the huge cuts suffered over the past several years by the engineering efforts structured to maintain the levee system.) Now double that drain.

The levees have been breached. It’s hard to see how we will be able to keep our heads above water.

In the American Prospect, Chris Mooney does some calm and penetrating analysis of what’s going on in Kansas. In his article Creating a Controversy, Chris points out that it’s not just evolutionary theory that’s under attack there, but the whole foundation of science as a reality-based enterprise, one whose purpose is the pursuit of objective truth.

This is terrifying stuff, which will inevitably lead to a cloud of stupidity pouring out of the heartland to darken the country’s communications channels and classrooms. Once they’ve driven the wedge into science through the crack they perceive in evolutionary theory, they will go after the Big Bang, e.g. the current consensus on cosmology. They will attach every branch of science that is not easily susceptible to laboratory experimentation, because they can use the same appeal to ignorance:

1. It’s only a theory
2. theory == guess
3. guess == uncertainty
4. God == certainty

And we need to be certain about this, because we certainly don’t want our children led into error.

God help us.

In case you’ve been somewhere else for the past couple of months, you already know about Kenneth Tomlinson, the new Republican Chairman of PBS, who has been busily working to disembowel (as in remove what remains of the guts of) what may be our last bastion of solid investigative (as in question the powers that be) journalism. Working without the knowledge or consent of his own board, Tomlinson has hired Mary Catherine Andrews, the director of the White House Office of Global Communications, as a senior staff member, and he is pressing to replace the corporation’s president, whose contract was not renewed, with Patricia Harrison, a former co-chairwoman of the Republican National Committee.

Jesus’ General has a nice review of the new lineup of PBS shows under Tomlinson’s regime. Here’s a sample:

Another one of those funny-if-it-weren’t-so-tragic items; they’re coming fast and furious these days.

In his Random Thoughts, Nicholas Weaver reports today on what he found when he dug a little more deeply into a rule change proposed by the Commerce Department.

Note that this is not a major news item; Nick can’t even remember where he read about the rule change. But the implications are startling, and scary. How much of this is going on, just slipping by in the flurry of bureaucratic actions coming hourly out of Washington?

Over at Whiskey Bar, the smart and tireless billmon has posted the first in what promises to be a series exploring the coming global economic crisis. In the first of the series, he reviews an article from Nouriel Roubini’s Global Economic Blog that discusses the Rashomon-like nature of our current situation; what’s happening is so complicated, so wide-ranging in its implications and diverse in its causes, that every economist who tells the story gives it a different plot, different heros and villains, and a different moral.

But, as billmon argues persuasively and knowledgably, it doesn’t matter who’s exactly right here; everything points to a coming crash, of massive proportions:

In concluding this first article, billmon says that “when this thing finally blows up, the yolk will definitely be on us – even if it’s the boys and girls at the Fed who end up wearing it all over their faces.” That raised, for me, a spectre that’s been haunting my dreams for some time now. In my comment to billmon’s article, I wrote:

I hope I’m wrong.