As a published author I’m happy to have the government enforce copyright laws so that I get paid for my work. But the current proposals are heavy-handed attempts by the entertainment industry to stack the deck in their favor. I’m tired of this. I want copyright protections to make sense both socially and technologically. I want due process when someone’s web site is threatened with closure.

The location is both a church and a designated polling place for the next-day election.

A row of parked cars indicated a meeting in progress. When we wandered past later, the meeting had broken up. Cooler and wiser heads must have prevailed, since the sign had disappeared.

When we were fighting Communism, no one imagined that we would win by mixing more religion into our politics. The Communists repressed all religions with ecumenical zeal, and we took pride in our ecumenical tolerance. On the other hand, Communists preached (without practice) that all races were equal as workers of the world. No doubt this helped shame our country into embracing equal rights in the 1960s.

Now that we’re fighting religious extremists, weak-hearted people think Al Qaeda must be right: religious extremism is the path to strength. So political activities worm their way into religious venues.

They still don’t care about customers, except as a revenue stream. This is again clearly highlighted by their plan to send spam to newer HP printers (Computerworld). They’ve outfitted the new printers with Internet connections, presumably to provide automatic support and updates. They’re also planning to use the link to automatically print advertisements on these printers.

As noted in Slashdot, they send the ads, collect the income, and we pay for the paper and ink.

Some commentators suspect that HP’s plan will run afoul with Federal Trade Commission rules against unsolicited fax transmissions. Maybe, or maybe they’ll say it’s a form of email, and that the email (advertisements) are part of an existing business relationship.

HP wasn’t always that way.

When the industry was young, people prized the products of Hewlett-Packard. They managed to field some of the best equipment in the industry. I fondly remember their high speed oscilloscopes and digital logic monitors. Alex likes to gleefully show his friends his ancient Laserjet, which still works, never jams, and uses $30 toner cartridges.

Then came Carly Florina. She became CEO in the late ’90s. She ejected everything that had made HP great and systematically drove the company into the ground in her quest for “shareholder value.”

I expect a similar degree of sensitivity and acumen if California is foolish enough to elect her Senator.

When I look at Google News, what I most often see are 1,200 copies of locally-published articles that are in fact Associated Press stories. These are classic “straight news” reports: announcements by officials describing crimes, legislation, accidents, celebrity activities, and so on. It is in fact rare for Google News, or any other news source, to produce the sort of in-depth reporting that might vie for a Pulitzer.

Yes, the traditional funding sources of such things are drying up. Yes, they play an essential role in self-government. But somehow we’ll find a way to pay for these things. Maybe Google will trip over a new business model as they blunder about, or maybe someone else will.

The Atlantic article makes several observations I agree with:

• Newspapers are in huge trouble.
• It’s silly to blame Google News for the free-fall of newspaper income.
• If anything, Google drives traffic to these news sites, instead of stealing their content.
• We need a new business model to fund Pulitzer-deserving coverage.

Neither the Atlantic, nor the other articles I’ve read, have singled out Pulitzer-appropriate coverage as the sort of reportage that’s in trouble. But that’s how I see it. Most news reporting pretty much consists of repackaging news releases. War correspondents sit around in military-managed press pools waiting for a colonel to give them the daily briefing. Ditto with the White House press corps. Yes, some reporters take the time and trouble to seek out individual newsmakers and get interviews, but a lot of stuff is just recycled announcements.

It’s the journalists who make the extra effort who will be the ones we want to keep. The others can be replaced by simply delivering the press releases directly to the Associated Press or the general public instead of filtering them through reporters.

This suggests the death of national news organizations embedded in local news outlets – why should the Minneapolis Strib repackage AP stories if everyone can get them directly from the AP? At present, the local news outlets simply provide a ‘voting’ function – if an AP story is interesting enough to republish, that increases the story’s perceived importance in Google News. If the Houston paper’s republication of the AP story finds itself atop Google’s news listing, then they get the most hits, but it’s a lottery.

I hadn’t appreciated the role of forests in causing relocation of native American settlements on the US east coast. Or the role of wood fires in making traditional Christian teachings of Hell sound like nonsense (where would they get enough trees to keep everyone in Hell burning forever?).

My daughter in law, with her recent graduate degree in environmental policy, may already be aware of this sad story. The rest of us should read it, too.

I also enjoyed the way the author trotted out Frederick Engels (sidekick of Karl Marx) as another critic of deforestation.

What did the Spanish planters in Cuba, who burned down the forests on the slopes of the mountains and obtained sufficient fertilizer from the ashes for one generation of highly profitable coffee trees, care that the heavy tropical rains later washed away the now unprotected upper stratum of the soil and left only bare rock behind?

From his Dialectics of Nature.

Does anyone else appreciate a faint echo of Adam Smith in all this?

I always see economics as a subject closely tied to the Circle of Life sort of ideas promoted in ecological circles. The “good news” cycle looks like this:

• A farmer grows a crop and harvests it
• The farmer sells the crop for more than it cost to produce
• The farmer buys things to make his life and work better
• The money from the farmer pays for factories to build labor-saving devices
• The labor-saving devices help the farmer produce more food for less money
• The farmer makes even more money and buys more things

And the “bad news” cycle looks like this:

• The farmer takes every shortcut possible to grow and harvest a crop
• The farmer sells his crop and makes money
• The farmer buys things, growing the local economy
• The next year, the farmer repeats what he did in previous years
• The worn-out farmland yields a fraction of previous years’ output
• The farmer goes bankrupt
• The community goes bankrupt

This is the same sort of justice we see in the environment when the low level forest is wiped out by a fire. Yes, the strong parts of the forest eventually regrow while the weak things die out. The analogy gets weird when we start talk about people suffering. Even worse, people often starve during financial “downturns,” and this is the sort of thing where a humane society steps in. But it’s tricky to figure out how to help people in a practical way without propping up rotten bits of the economy.

The point, which is getting lost in weird examples, is that economic problems often have the same structure as ecological problems. Environmental changes make species die, just like social, cultural, and economic changes make products, services, and companies die. You can’t preserve a species just by keeping a few in cages – it’s much more expensive and difficult than that. Rebuilding a species is costly, painstaking, and it doesn’t always work. Likewise, you can’t keep an industry healthy just by propping it up with public subsidies.

The overwhelmingly political nature of the subsidy process should be obvious when we realize that the oil industry – clearly one of the most profitable there is – continues to get subsidies from many governments, including the US Government. You’d think that decades of small-government conservatives could have stemmed that tide, except that those politicians get ample donations from – who else – the oil industry.

I find it particularly ironic that the Cato Foundation, which is supposed to operate on an independent, even ethereal, plane of rational libertarian thought, was founded with a huge donation from an oil company mogul. I hope that hasn’t affected the Cato Institute’s researches when it comes to oil subsidies.

At least Paul understands what he believes, whether the rest of us agree with him or not.

“There’s no liberal Rush Limbaugh, because most liberals don’t have a taste for cruelty as entertainment or political sport.”

I think she’s right, though such high-mindedness does pose a challenge for progressive and/or liberal people. I think that good causes can be promoted with humor and the sharp side of the tongue. Florida Rep. Alan Grayson gave a great example when he argued that opposition to health care reform was “pro death.”

I hope that some day soon our own humorist-turned-Senator Al Franken can find his voice.

I’m proud of Franken’s clever trick of putting the anti-rape provision in the defense bill: he inserted a rule forbidding contractors from forcing employees into arbitration if they suffer a rape while in their employ in a lawless region (Iraq, for example). Those foolish enough to speak against it quickly found themselves on the wrong side of the issue. And it highlighted the legal – and moral – hazard our nation faces when hiring mercenaries (oops, I mean “contractors”) to do our fighting (oops, I mean “security”) instead of our soldiers.

Franken is smart, highly educated, and an adept entertainer. So I’m looking forward to some entertaining – and effective – political rhetoric from him one of these days.

Now I find that Bear is likewise reading reading Eight Cousins on her smart phone.

This is particularly interesting because the womens’ roles in Alcott’s fiction tend to be super-traditional, while Bear’s politics are “progressive” to put it mildly. I generally agree with both Bear’s attitude on womens’ rights and her attitude towards Alcott: who cares if her female characters are so traditional!

I think we both appreciate Alcott’s underlying themes: the pursuit of moral ideals over superficial values (despite the difference in moral values) and the fundamental rights of women to self-determination (despite the different view of womens’ roles). Alcott portrays “strong minded” women as positive role models despite the negative reactions of conventionally attractive male characters.

I like to call Bear our “professional rabble rouser” since she’s almost always had a job where she promotes progressive causes – president of NOW New Jersey, deputy state Attorney General for civil rights, working on youth rights for the Southern Poverty Law Center, public defender – and so on. I don’t think she’s ever had a “high paying attorney job” in her life, despite her law degree and bar memberships. Her progressive credentials need no further proof.

I admit I take some personal pride in Bear’s smart phone habit. A few years ago, she inherited my old Palm Treo with its library of Alcott, Montogmery, bits of Bronte, and examples of boarding school fiction. She seemed mildly interested in my collection, but the interest has clearly blossomed.

As far as I know, neither Bear nor I read anything that costs money. Everything I have, and everything she mentions, is copyright-free. I get most of my fiction from Gutenberg, though some sources have additional titles.

My only struggle is to get the books onto my Palm in readable form. Gutenberg will convert just about any of their books to Mobipocket format, but that format seems to work poorly on the Mac.

If Verizon ever gets the iPhone, I might jump over to an iPhone myself. Meanwhile, my current Treo is alleged to not work with the latest Mac OS X. So I’m not upgrading until I find a new smart phone.

So now we’ve eliminated a few hundred billion of spending on missile defense shields that don’t work. There’s a reason we called ballistic missile defense “Star Wars” back in the 1980s: it’s never been more than science fiction. At least Newsweek is getting it right – it may look good on a TV news graphic, but that’s not the same as working in the Real World.

I’m glad that President Obama has the courage to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the the real war fighters in the Pentagon against the chicken hawks of Congress and the right wing media.

Somewhere along the line the general public bought into the notion that war is profitable on a national level. It’s like the economic “broken window fallacy” – everyone profits from a broken window, since it makes work for the window repairer and draws attention to the victim, possibly improving the victim’s own business. In fact, the money spent paying for the broken window (or the pork barrel defense spending) is less money spent paying for productive economic activity (or paying down debt).

The economy never could afford to give the Pentagon a bottomless piggy bank. We tried to do it during the Reagan era and ran up record deficits. We did the same thing during Bush II, and now we’re paying for it, in addition to paying for careless, unregulated speculation on Wall Street.

One side effect in Gulf War II was that we spent extra money hiring mercenaries instead of increasing the size of our military forces. This dramatically increases costs while putting our defense in the hands of high-priced and poorly managed “contractors.” The focus on mercenaries (oops, I should say “contractors”) reduced the pressure on military personnel, since that’s been a political hot button. On the other hand, it introduced us to the hideous circus of trusting these unreliable and unaccountable contractors to defend our embassies and interrogate suspects. Boy, has that been a failure.

This is one of those arbitrary ballot challenges that can probably apply to anyone. It makes me wonder if absentee ballots are a wasted effort for activist college students. A knowledgeable campaign worker may know of her political leanings and disputed the signatures on that basis.

How do we prevent such things from happening? Is this an authentication problem? How arbitrary are the challenges made against absentee ballots?

It’s an interesting question. I think it’s reasonable to challenge the validity of absentee ballots. The voting system requires one vote per person, and that votes can’t be bought or sold. The cumbersome absentee procedure tries to address those risks.

However, if any absentee ballot can be challenged on something arbitrary, like the closeness of a match between written signatures, doesn’t this disenfranchise people whose political biases are well known?

Maybe the whole absentee balloting process needs to be reviewed and overhauled. Individual ballots should not be subject to arbitrary challenges.