In this brouhaha over the recent Supreme Court decision as discussed in my previous post John Roberts Didn’t ‘Eviscerate’ Campaign Finance Law, But He Should Have, the people who decry the removal of campaign finance restrictions aren’t remembering recent history.  In that previous post, I didn’t think to raise the issue.

To get the background you may be missing because you are too young to have lived through it, read the WikiPedia articles on Joseph McCarthy and McCarthyism.

People’s lives were ruined by what McCarthy did in vilifying them publicly with false accusations and with tying people to the Communist Party in any part of their life’s history.  McCarthy is one of the reasons Pete Seeger was banned from television until the Smothers brothers had the courage to fight the ban after many years of its enforcement.  Many of the best authors and playwrights could only get published if they used pen names to disguise the name of the author.

If the First Amendment had been strictly enforced or highly regarded at the time, much of what McCarthy did and much of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings would have been avoided or at least cut short.

If we allow our side to run rough shod over the First Amendment because of political activities we do not like, we could eventually suffer the unintended consequences of losing that protection for ourselves.

So, hard as it might be, now is the time to stand on principle lest the tables be turned on us at some future time.  We may rue the day we fought to have the First Amendment be ignored for what we thought was a good cause.

Mitchell Baker has made the blog post Brendan Eich Steps Down as Mozilla CEO.  Here are a few words from the beginning of the post.

Mozilla prides itself on being held to a different standard and, this past week, we didn’t live up to it. We know why people are hurt and angry, and they are right: it’s because we haven’t stayed true to ourselves.

We didn’t act like you’d expect Mozilla to act. We didn’t move fast enough to engage with people once the controversy started. We’re sorry. We must do better.

Brendan Eich has chosen to step down from his role as CEO. He’s made this decision for Mozilla and our community.

Mozilla believes both in equality and freedom of speech. Equality is necessary for meaningful speech. And you need free speech to fight for equality. Figuring out how to stand for both at the same time can be hard.

There are a few things that Mozilla has done recently that left me wondering.  The reaction described in the blog post makes me feel a lot better about continuing to be a fan and supporter.

Forbes has the article John Roberts Didn’t ‘Eviscerate’ Campaign Finance Law, But He Should Have.  I have been looking for a vehicle for me to use to kick off my comments on this topic on my blog.

It is very unfortunate that money plays such a big role in our elections.  I have a strong distaste for Mitch McConnell and many of the other politicians who have been on his side of the argument that campaign spending limits violate the First Amendment of our Constitution.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

For the most part, I am a strong supporter of the politicians (except John McCain) who have had a hand in writing campaign finance reform laws.

I dislike most of the Supreme Court rulings of the five justices that were in the majority here.  I favor most of the rulings favored by the four justices who were in the minority.

However, from the very beginning of my awareness of this issue, I have never been able to figure out how you could limit a person’s efforts to elect the politician of their choice without violating the First Amendment.  Political speech is the most important kind of speech that the writers of the First Amendment should have wanted to protect with their free speech clause.

You can argue all you want about your desire to place such limits, or how you think it would improve the government, or how the majority of Americans agree with you,  or whatever other argument you want to make, but there just does not seem to be a way to get around the violation of the First Amendment embodied in the current campaign finance reform  laws.

Who is strong enough to join me, step away from what you desire to be able to do, and objectively look at what the Constitution says you are permitted to do in this situation?

Think about the wording of a Constitutional amendment that would accomplish what you think needs to be done.  I’d like to see some proposals.  I think it  is going to be darned difficult to create such an Amendment that targets only how you think the First Amendment freedom harms the country and yet not trample on any rights that are an essential part of our democracy.  I cannot say it is impossible to do.  I can only say that I have not figured out how to do it.

I think the real issue is the bribing of our politicians.  There are laws against bribery already.  However, it is very difficult to prove that some of the harmful things that lobbyists have accomplished actually violate the laws against bribery.

While attacking bribery is where I think the efforts should start, I still don’t see how to word an amendment that would separate what we think ought not be allowed from what has to be permitted in order to protect our human rights.

The Wall Street Cheat Sheet has the article 10 States Most Dependent on the Federal Government.

The political rhetoric between red and blue states is not likely to end anytime soon. According to a new report, residents in red states are more likely to receive help from the federal government, which helps them keep local tax bills lower compared to blue states.

10. Arizona
9. South Dakota
8. West Virginia
7. Tennessee
6. Montana
5. Maine
4. Louisiana
3. Alabama
2. New Mexico
1. Mississippi

The rankings are a weighted average of three factors as explained in the article.  You’ll have to read the article for the details of each of the factors for each of the states.  Now you understand why some states hate the Federal Government so much.  Some of them seem to be the ones that are most dependent on it.  Maybe the neocons are right that dependency only breeds dislike.

April 21, 2014

Whereas the National Geographic Channel’s web site seems to go out of its way to obscure the sequence of episodes, I have found a WikiPedia article Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey that lists the episodes in numerical order.

I am hoping that this list will enable me to break through the barrier of confusion of The NatGeo web site that is preventing me from finding out if there is an online video for the episode that I missed.

No, Charter Subscribers are still not allowed to watch the recent videos online, even though Charter carries The National Geographic Channel on its cable service.

April 9, 2014

I have discovered that you need to use a valid cable TV subscription to view the videos on the Web.

I have such a subscription with Charter Communications, but Charter is not one of the cable providers that NatGeoTV supports.

March 31, 2014

I have finally found the links to the episodes of Cosmos on the National Geographic web site.  I found that the first episode that I watched last week was episode 3.

So here is the list of episodes already aired.

The first episode will only be on the web site for the next 30 or so days, so you’d better look at it now.  I just watched this episode on my computer.  Watching it without commercial interruption is a blessing.

The upcoming episodes on the National Geographic Cable TV channel are shown in the next table.

I think the following table lists all the remaining episodes.

I have questions to think about after watching these episodes. I don’t see a good forum for talking about those questions on the web. Perhaps this post as echoed on my Facebook page will form that place for a few of us.

The UK Express has the story Malaysian plane: 20 passengers worked for ELECTRONIC WARFARE and MILITARY RADAR firm.

Freescale Semiconductor, which makes powerful microchips for industries including defence, released the powerful new products to the American market on March 3.

Five days later, Flight MH370 took off from Kuala Lumpur for Beijing with 239 people on board including 20 working for Freescale.

Twelve were from Malaysia, while eight were Chinese nationals.

This is not the most incendiary rendition of this story I could find, but it may be close.  Of course, if you go directly to the conspiracy theory websites, you’ll find even more breathless prose.

You can compare this telling of the story to the Austin, Texas Statesman story Freescale mum on new Malaysia Airlines reports.

Now, I wouldn’t even present this if Roger and João hadn’t goaded me  into it 🙂

Naked Capitalism has the post Cokie Roberts Picked a Fight With Alan Grayson on the TransPacific Partnership. Guess Who Won?  There are several links and commentary by Yves Smith in the post.

One of the links is to Alan Grayson’s rebuttal Cokie Roberts Attacks Us: This Is How DC Works. Warning: The links in the quote below take you to the page for contributing to Alan Grayson’s campaign.

Recently, ABC infohack Cokie Roberts, doyenne of the D.C. Establishment, attacked me in her nationally syndicated column. Why? Because I dared to speak the truth about the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a so-called “free trade agreement” that has lobbyists and Washington insiders alike clamoring to stuff their pockets with corrupt corporate cash. And because I dared to speak the truth about “Fast Track,” legislation whose sole purpose is to cram TPP and other corporate rip-offs down our throats.

I am not sure the size of the trade deficit in and of itself is quite as big a problem as Grayson makes it, but that is really a minor quibble with what he has to say. The problems the trade deficit causes are certainly something to worry about.  Grayson explains them very well.

By the way, I have long since given up listening to Cokie Roberts and Steve Roberts.  Her penchant for ignoring truth in order to make her point became more than I could take.  Her husband, Steve, was a little less obvious in his biased approach to “reporting”.

New Economic Perspectives has the article MMT and Social Movements.  If you can get through the following excerpt, I ought to give you a bronze medal.  If you actually read the article, you get silver.  If you read the discussion in the comments, you get gold.  If you come away from this with the hint of an understanding of what this conversation is all about, you get platinum.  These rewards are all virtual and you are on the honor system in specifying the level of award you claim.

The Nature of Social Movements

Since relying upon the historicist political ideology is a core source of oppression, pausing to examine the actual dynamics of progressive social movements is worth their description. When I researched this process, for historical examples, for theoretical statements which seem to satisfy adequacy, applicability, validity, and reliability relative to my direct experience doing community organizing, the best summation I found was in “Beyond Revolution,” by Daniel A. Foss and Ralph Larkin (1986). The core statement they made was in a somewhat dense paragraph, found on page 143:

“The difference between a social movement and episodic dissidence is that it builds upon itself in a process of intensification, wherein the hegemonic (dominating) ideology (world view) is rendered problematic (challenged) by dissidents. This “reinterpretation of reality” provides the subjective basis for further- and more drastic- action. As social reality is reinterpreted in the struggle, movement participants attempt to reclaim those aspects of human subjectivity that have been alienated from themselves as part of their socialization to positions of social subordination. So long as these three aspects of a social movement are a mutually reinforcing totality – intensification of a conflict, reinterpretation of social reality, and the redefinition of the self and its capacities – a social movement is ongoing. Their fragmentation signals the point of the incipient decline has been reached, Such phenomena must be viewed as a whole, since there are often temporary defeats and retreats within the process of intensification of a social movement, as well as phases of overt conflict alternating with cultural (or subjective) intensification” from Foss and Larkin, Beyond Revolution (1986).

The most effective social movement of the 20th century at least in the US was the US Civil Rights movement. It is also offered as a historical model worth emulating, though its interpretation most often focuses upon the oratory of Martin Luther King Jr. The actual back-story closely fits Foss and Larkin’s description in “Beyond Revolution” of a social movement. Martin Luther King Jr. was himself a participant in training for community organizers that was offered by the Highlander Folk School, later known as the Highlander Research Center. The training offered there was led by Myles Horton and Septima Clark. Prior to the establishing of the national significance of the US Civil Rights movement the Highlander Folk school “trained” some 40,000 people who were distributed mostly across the southern states.

I claim at least gold and perhaps a tad of platinum for myself.

Here is a very interesting interview, 3-17-2014 Voice of Russia Interview with Field McConnell, that was buried in one of the links in my previous post Boeing wins patent on uninterruptible autopilot system.

OK, so now have I gone completely wacky to be following this trail and presenting it to you?

I know this sounds wacky, but I decided to Google it anyway.  Here are a few of the hits that I read or watched.

Something called Homeland Security Newswire had the article Emergency landing round-up: Boeing wins patent on uninterruptible autopilot system published 4 December 2006.

New technology can be activated by the pilots, government agencies, even on-board sensors; not even a tortured pilot can give up control; dedicated electrical circuits ensure the system’s total independence

The UK Daily Mail had the article New autopilot will make another 9/11 impossible published 3 March 2007.

The so-called ‘uninterruptible autopilot system’ – patented secretly by Boeing in the US last week – will connect ground controllers and security services with the aircraft using radio waves and global satellite positioning systems.

After it has been activated, the aircraft will be capable of remote digital control from the ground, enabling operators to fly it like a sophisticated model plane, manoeuvring it vertically and laterally.

A threatened airliner could be flown to a secure military base or a commercial airport, where it would touch down using existing landing aids known as ‘autoland function’.

After it had landed, the aircraft’s built-in autobrake would bring the plane safely to a halt on the runway.

Boeing insiders say the new anti-hijack kit could be fitted to airliners all over the world, including those in the UK, within the next three years.

Then I found the CNN report Remote Controlled Autopilot Boeing Patent.

So what’s wrong with these reports? Snopes has nothing to say about this.

If you keep looking you run across things like the story from Before It’s News MH370 $MultiBillion Patent Passengers: Pilot Warned About Crisis, Gagged, Speaks Out.  I guess the only thing to keep in mind is that Faux Noise makes up stories all the time that millions of people believe.  That doesn’t mean that this one is necessarily untrue.

Obviously we ought to check the US Patent Office to even see if there truly is such a patent.  7,142,971 System and method for automatically controlling a path of travel of a vehicle.

The method and system for automatically controlling a path of travel of a vehicle include engaging an automatic control system when the security of the onboard controls is jeopardized. Engagement may be automatic or manual from inside the vehicle or remotely via a communication link. Any onboard capability to supersede the automatic control system may then be disabled by disconnecting the onboard controls and/or providing uninterruptible power to the automatic control system via a path that does not include the onboard accessible power control element(s). The operation of the vehicle is then controlled via the processing element of the automatic control system. The control commands may be received from a remote location and/or from predetermined control commands that are stored onboard the vehicle.

Assignee: The Boeing Company (Chicago, IL) , Filed: February 19, 2003

2017/06/04

Disabled the link to the U.s. Patent office above because of suspected malware at the link.