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…conducted by Francis Fukuyama, about America’s current trajectory. Thiel co-founded PayPal and is a venture capitalist; he was an early investor in Facebook. In 2010 he created a fellowship with the mission of awarding $100,000 each to 20 people under 20 years old in order to spur them to quit college and create their own ventures. Fukuyama is a political scientist and writer best known for his book The End of History.

Link to the interview

I think this point made by Thiel is particularly worthy of note:

One regulatory perspective is that environmentalism has played a much greater role than people think. It induced a deep skepticism about anything involving the manipulation of nature or material objects in the real world. The response to environmentalism was to prohibit scientists from experimenting with stuff and only allow them to do so with bits. So computer science and finance were legal, and what they have in common is that they involve the manipulation of bits rather than stuff. They both did well in those forty years, but all the other engineering disciplines were stymied. Electric engineering, civil engineering, aeronautical, nuclear, petroleum—these were all held back, and attracted fewer talented students at university as the years went on. When people wonder why all the rocket scientists went to work on Wall Street, well, they were no longer able to build rockets. It’s some combination of an ossified, Weberian bureaucracy and the increasingly hostile regulation of technology. That’s very different from the 1950s and 1960s. There’s a powerful libertarian argument that government used to be far less intrusive, but found targeted ways to advance science and technology.

Read the whole thing.

Link via Isegoria

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Predictions about the year 2000 made by Robert Heinlein in 1952.

via Newmark’s Door

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The first stored-program electronic computer capable of doing useful work was the EDSAC, built at Cambridge University and commissioned in 1949. It supported research in several scientific disciplines as well as the development of software techniques until being scrapped as obsolete in 1958. There is now a project to rebuild this pioneering computer: the reconstructed version will be made as close as possible to the original, with one exception…and the reasons for the exception, I think, are perhaps more related to social history than to the history of technology.

EDSAC used vacuum tubes (valves, in Britspeak) for its arithmetical and logical functions; for memory, it used something called a mercury delay line, an idea borrowed from WWII radar technology. (EDSAC=Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator.) information to be stored was introduced at one end of a tube of mercury, down which it traveled in the form of pulses of sound. About 1 millisecond later, at the other end of the tank, the pulses were picked up, amplified, and emitted again at the starting point, with the whole train of information bits in the line thereby being kept in continuous circulation as long as the power was on.

Can you guess how the reconstructed EDSAC is going to differ from the original version?

That’s right…no mercury. “Health and safety regulations” have led to a decision that mercury cannot be used in the rebuild.

Certainly, mercury can be hazardous when not handled carefully–see the material safety data sheet. But it’s not plutonium. It’s not even nitroglycerin. Is it perhaps an overreaction to ban the use of this substance, which would be contained in metal tubes, in a one-of-a-kind museum piece?

Now, much of the EDSAC rebuild work will be done by volunteers–maybe even in the absence of government and/or insurance regulations, the team would have preferred to avoid the cumbersomeness of working with mercury. And I’m sure they’ll do as good a job as possible in coming up with an alternative non-mercury approach to the machine’s memory. (Maybe gin for a delay medium, as was suggested by Alan Turing for the original machine.)

My concern here isn’t really mainly with the rebuild project per se, but rather a more general one–the growing timidity of our western societies, often enforced by regulations of one kind or another. A couple of years ago, I wrote about the Congressional suppression of passenger service on the historic steamboat Delta Queen, on fire-safety grounds–despite the fact that the vessel has been outfitted with fire detection and suppression systems, is never more than a mile or so from shore, and surely provides a vacation experience which is significantly safer than most other things people could do with the same amount of time. And throughout the US, many kinds of playground equipment…swings, jungle gyms, merry-go-rounds, for example…have been removed on safety grounds. See the boys and girls in the plastic bubble…see also, via a commenter at that post, this story about the fate of space-program-themed playgrounds constructed in the 1960s.

The pros and cons of safety-related tradeoffs can of course be debated for individual cases, whether we’re talking about playground equipment or a computer reconstruction. But it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the general level of timidity in our societies has increased substantially, and that there is some level of such timidity that leads to individual psychological harm and to social dysfunction.

Some countervailing forces to the drift toward timidity have arisen…see for example the free-range kids movement created by Lenore Skezany. But I’m afraid the general trend is much in the other direction.

The EDSAC rebuild project site is here.

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The IRS has a proposed new regulation which would prohibit charter-school teachers from participating in state retirement plans. (At present, all of the states which authorize charter schools permit, and in some cases require, the charter-school teachers to participate in these plans.) Furthermore, the new regulation would apparently apply retroactively and would cause the teachers to lose the state contributions to their accounts which have been accrued, and on which they were no doubt relying, unless they give up their employment. More here.

Today, February 6, is the last day for public comments on this issue under IRS procedures.

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I got a Kindle a few months ago, and have been very pleased to discover lots of old and largely-forgotten but very worthwhile books available for download, often for free or for 99 cents. In this and future posts, I’ll be giving some focus to these neglected but worthy books and their authors.

Rose Wilder Lane, born in 1886 in the Dakota Territory, was the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the “Little House on the Prairie” books. Lane is best known for her writings on political philosophy and has been referred to as a “Founding Mother” of libertarianism; she was also a novelist and the author of several biographies.

In her article Credo, published in 1936, she describes her political journey, beginning with the words:

In 1919 I was a communist.

She was impressed with the idealism of the individual Communists she met, and found their economic logic convincing. But when she visited the Soviet Union in the 1920s, she became disillusioned. And, unlike many visitors to the USSR, she did not conclude that Communism was still a great idea but had just been carried out poorly; rather, she began to grasp the structural flaws with the whole thing.

In Russian Georgia, the villager who was her host complained about the growing bureaucracy that was taking more and more men from productive work, and predicted chaos and suffering from the centralizing of economic power in Moscow. At first she saw his attitude as merely “the opposition of the peasant mind to new ideas,” and undertook to convince him of the benefits of central planning. He shook his head sadly.

It is too big – he said – too big. At the top, it is too small. It will not work. In Moscow there are only men, and man is not God. A man has only a man’s head, and one hundred heads together do not make one great big head. No. Only God can know Russia.”

This man’s insight prefigures Hayek’s writing about the role of knowledge in society, not to be published until 1944. His comments, her other observations while in the Soviet Union, and her own thinking about the way that economies actually work convinced her that:

Centralized economic control over multitudes of human beings must therefore be continuous and perhaps superhumanly flexible, and it must be autocratic. It must be government by a swift flow of edicts issued in haste to catch up with events receding into the past before they can be reported, arranged, analyzed and considered, and it will be compelled to use compulsion. In the effort to succeed, it must become such minute and rigorous control of details of individual life as no people will accept without compulsion. It cannot be subject to the intermittent checks, reversals, and removals of men in power which majorities cause in republics.

Her political and economic ideas are summarized in her 1943 book The Discovery of Freedom. This work draws on her analysis of history and her personal experiences while traveling and living in Europe. She was particularly impressed, in a negative way, by the wastefulness of the French government bureaucracy she encountered while living in that country, which included the necessity for officialdom to become involved in the purchase of a single spool of thread in a department store and the vastly complicated process involved in importing an ordinary Ford car and getting permission to operate it…including the requirement to provide 12 photos of the car–a process that might have made some slight sense when cars were individually crafted, but had lost any point at all now that cars were mass-produced.

A few excerpts…

The costs of bureaucracy:

In modern Europe, some years of every young man’s life are consumed in training for war. But a far greater loss of productive energy is in the attempt to control productive energy. All their lives, all workers pour an enormous amount of energy into producing food, clothes, shelter, light, heat, transportation, all the necessities and comforts, and mountains of paper, pens, ink, stamps, filing cases, and acres of beautiful buildings, all to be used by men in Government who produce nothing whatever.

Contrasting the differing colonial strategies of France and Spain, on the one hand, and Britain, on the other:

The Governments gave them (in the case of the French and Spanish colonies–ed) carefully detailed instructions for clearing and fencing the land, caring for the fence and the gate, and plowing and planting, cultivating, harvesting, and dividing the crops…The English Kings were never so efficient. They gave the land to traders. A few gentlemen, who had political pull enough to get a grant, organized a trading company; their agents collected a ship-load or two of settlers and made an agreement with them which was usually broken on both sides…To the scandalized French, the people in the English colonies seemed like undisciplined children, wild, rude, wretched subjects of bad rulers.

How central planning demands the categorization of people:

Nobody can plan the actions of even a thousand living persons, separately. Anyone attempting to control millions must divide them into classes, and make a plan applying to these classes. But these classes do not exist. No two persons are alike. No two are in the same circumstances; no two have the same abilities; beyond getting the barest necessities of life, no two have the same desires.Therefore the men who try to enforce, in real life, a planned economy that is their theory, come up against the infinite diversity of human beings. The most slavish multitude of men that was ever called “demos” or “labor” or “capital” or”agriculture” or “the masses,” actually are men; they are not sheep. Naturally, by their human nature, they escape in all directions from regulations applying to non-existent classes. It is necessary to increase the number of men who supervise their actions. Then (for officials are human, too) it is necessary that more men supervise the supervisors.

The temptations of power and the importance of the Constitution:

If he wants to do good (as he sees good) to the citizens, he needs more power. If he wants to be re-elected, he needs more power to use for his party. If he wants money, he needs more power; he can always sell it to some eager buyer. If he wants publicity, flattery, more self-importance, he needs more power, to satisfy clamoring reformers who can give him flattering publicity.

Lane offers an interesting analysis of Biblical/Jewish history, and argues that the Ten Commandments were a major advance specifically because of their negative nature, and that this attribute made them a particularly appropriate corrective for a people emerging from slavery. She sees the Jews as having been the historical carriers of the idea of individualism, and believes that anti-Semitism on the part of traditional European regimes was largely motivated by the connection of Jews to the idea of freedom.

This is an interesting, thoughtful, and well-argued book that contains a lot of historical references. The history can’t always be accepted without further checking–for example, her assertion that Moslems invented the magnetic compass is probably incorrect, although they may have served as intermediaries in the diffusion of this technology. There are other examples of questionable or incorrect historical assertions. Also, Lane’s dislike of Europe (surely not uncommon in a midwesterner of her era) is so palpably strong that is inhibits a balanced view of the contributions of that continent to civilization. These criticisms aside, The Discovery of Freedom is very much worth reading.

In addition to her political writing, Lane was a very successful journalist and in the late 1920s was reputed to be one of the highest-paid female writers in America. In 1965, at the age of 78, she was reporting from Vietnam for Woman’s Day magazine. She was also a novelist–I’ve read her 1919 book Diverging Roads. It is partly autobiographical–the protagonist, Helen, like Lane herself, begins her working life as a telegrapher, and, also like Lane herself, marries a real-estate developer and works with him closely on land sales. (Neither the fictional marriage nor the real one was successful.) Some excerpts…

The opening of the book, in Helen’s home town:

THERE is a peculiar quality in the somnolence of an old town in which little has occurred for many years. It is the unease of relaxation without repose, the unease of one who lies too late in bed, aware that he should be getting up. The men who lounge aimlessly about the street corners cannot be wholly idle. Their hands, at least, must be busy. The scarred posts and notched edges of the board sidewalks show it; the paint on the little stations is sanded shoulder-high to prevent their whittling there. Energy struggles feebly under the weight of the slow, uneventful days; but its pressure is always there, an urge that becomes an irritation in young blood.

Helen, falling for her Bad-Boy real-estate developer, who has just described the immense project he is planning:

He was full of radiant energy and power. Her imagination leaped to grasp the bigness of this project. Thousands of lives altered, thousands of families migrating, cities, villages, railroads built. She felt his kiss on her lips, and that old, inexplicable, magnetic attraction. The throbbing music beat in her veins Like the voice of it. He smiled at her, holding out his arms, and she went into them with recklessness and longing.

And, a few years later, some of Helen’s intellectual friends in San Francisco talking about the shortage of good men:

Dodo sat up, sweeping her long, fine hair backward over her shoulders.

“Of course not. Jim ‘s all right to play around with—” But when it comes to marrying him — exactly. There are only two kinds of men, strong and weak. You despise the weak ones, and you won’t marry the strong ones.”

and

“Willetta ‘s right, just the same,” Dodo declared through their laughter. “It ‘s the money that’s at the root of it. You don’t want to marry a man you’ll have to support — not that you’d mind doing it, but his self-respect would go all to pieces if you did.And yet you can’t find a man who makes as much money as you do, who cares about music and poetry and things. I’m putting money in the bank and reading Masefield. I don’t see why a man can’t. But somehow I’ve never run across a man who does.”

Not a great novel, but a good one, set in an American in which the horse is still a vital part of the transportation system but with a surprisingly modern view of the relationship between the sexes–indeed, the above scene could have been lifted from a recent issue of Atlantic Monthly, or perhaps from a more intellectual version of Sex and the City, not that I’ve ever actually watched it.

Overall, Rose Wilder Lane is a writer definitely worth rediscovering.

A nice picture of her at the National Cowgirl Museum.

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Minneapolis is the head of commercial navigation on the Mississippi river. The city’s barge facilities handle about 600,000 tons of traffic annually–not huge by water-transport standards, but not trivial either.

Concerns about a predatory fish called the Asian Carp have raised the idea of permanently closing the locks at St Anthony Falls and hence eliminating Minneapolis’s industrial waterfront. Maybe this is necessary, or maybe there is an alternative way of dealing with the carp invasion–I don’t know. But I do think that the reaction of the Mayor to the potential termination of barge operations in his city is a little–jarring:

Get over it. Minneapolis does not need a port

What Minneapolis apparently does need, in the opinion of many real-estate developers and politicians, is a new swath of riverfront parks, condos, and restaurants.

Mayor Rybak is a Democrat, and presumably positions himself as an environmentalist–he doesn’t seem very concerned about the approximately 200 additional truck trips a day that would result from the closure of the port. I feel confident that the Mayor talks a lot about the importance of good jobs, but he demonstrates a pretty cavalier attitude toward an important piece of industrial infrastructure.

Hostility toward those types of industry that deal directly with the physical world is quite common among politicians and academics. I’ve written before about the travails of a towboat company in Seattle which had to wait five years for a permit to build “dolphins”–basically, three piles tied together at the top. A local business leader observed that”It’s all cultural…If it were biotech, it would get the green light.” And a columnist summed up the government’s attitude in these words: “Biotech is cool. Propellers and pilings are uncool.”

The cool biotech and software companies, the waterfront condos, the upscale restaurants–all of these things rest on a foundation of barges, freight railroads, dams, mines, and furnaces. There are too many people in important positions who fail to understand this reality or try to obscure it.

As such things go, closing the port of Minneapolis would not be a major economic catastrophe, except for those directly involved…St Paul, with its more extensive waterfront facilities, is not all that far away.. But it provides yet another example of the dismissive attitude of many political and academic elites toward a whole range of economic activity. See my post faux manufacturing nostalgia for further thoughts along these lines.

Related: Environmentalism and the leisure class, in American Spectator

A nicely-done directory of Minnesota’s river ports, here.

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Mavis Batey, a WWII codebreaker, was presented by the British intelligence agency GCHQ with a document (“the history of Abwehr codebreaking”) that she co-authored in 1945 and that has only now been declassified. One of the other authors was her late husband Keith, but the information was considered so secret, and was so compartmentalized, that she had not previously read or even been aware of his contributions to the document.

I’ve previously written about Mavis Batey (née Mavis Lever) in my post the bombe runs again. Her realization that a certain enciphered message did not contain a single occurrence of the letter “L” led to the breaking of the message, the setting of a trap for the Italian fleet at Cape Matapan, and the sinking of four enemy ships.

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…out of a wide range of potential choices, is Rep Jan Schakowsky (D-IL). I first became aware of this reprehensible individual after seeing the incredibly arrogant letter that she wrote to Kathleen Fasanella (of the blog Fashion Incubator) in response to Kathleen’s attempts to call attention to the harm being done to many small manufacturers by the ill-thought-out CPSIA legislation.

There are lots of reasons to dislike Schakowsky (see this, for example)—another such reason made its appearance Wednesday with her assertion, in an attempt to defend Obama’s suppression of the Keystone Pipeline project, that “Twenty thousand jobs is really not that many jobs, and investing in green technologies will produce that and more.”

Twenty thousand jobs is really not that many jobs?

There is of course a huge difference between a project funded with private money that will act to reduce America’s energy costs and increase its industrial competitiveness, and one funded with taxpayer money (much of it undoubtedly going to politically-well-connected corporations) which would quite likely act to increase America’s energy costs and thereby reduce its industrial competitivness. Perusal of Schakowsky’s bio reveals no experience at all working in the private sector, of course.

Whatever one thinks of the Pipeline and of various “alternative energy” options, surely it should be obvious to all that this CongressCreature’s cavalier dismissal of twenty thousand jobs should be considered unacceptable arrogance on the part of any American officeholder. It is a level of arrogance that, unfortunately, has become far too common among the government classes.

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A Flesch-Kinkaid analysis of State of the Union addresses says that Obama’s speech last night was at a grade level of 8.4. By comparison, JFK’s inaugural was at a level of 12.0, Richard Nixon was 11.5, George H W Bush was 8.6, and George W Bush was 10.4.

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Two old rivals. One is in Chapter 11, the other is thriving. Why?

Kodak and Fujifilm

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The wit and wisdom of Cassandra has returned to the Internet.

Temporarily, at least…I see that she still has her notice that “you have reached a blog that has been disconnected or is no longer in service” up on the masthead. Maybe if we all clap our hands, she will stick around. It worked for Tinkerbell, after all.

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The capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stockings for queens but in bringing them within the reach of factory girls in return for steadily decreasing amounts of effort.

–Joseph Schumpeter, 1942

Quoted here: the high price economy

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Missed this by a couple of months….November 15, 2011, was the 40th anniversary of the Intel 4004, the world’s first microprocessor. The history of this extremely influential device provides an interesting case study in innovation.

Early computers were constructed out of discrete components, first vacuum tubes and later transistors. Early work on transistors was done at Bell Labs…one of the inventors, William Shockley, became dissatisfied with Bell’s management and left to start his own company, which he located in Palo Alto to be near his mother’s house. (If Shockley’s mom had lived in Roanoke, would the term “Silicon Valley” now refer to the Shenandoah valley!?)

Eight of the new company’s employees (“the traitorous eight”) in turn became unhappy with the way Shockley was running things, and left in 1957 to form Fairchild Semiconductor as a division of Fairchild Camera and Instrument. The integrated circuit, which allowed several transistors to be placed on a single chip, was independently invented at Fairchild and at Texas Instruments. Large numbers of these chips still had to be interconnected to form the central processing unit of a computer.

By 1968, several of the “fairchildren” were less than thrilled with the way things were going at Fairchild, and left to start their own companies. Two of these, Gorden Moore and Robert Noyce, founded Intel with an intital capital of $2.5 million, which was provided by pioneering venture capitalist Arthur Rock. Intel’s original focus was memory components–their initial product could store 64 whole bits on a single chip!

In that year, a Japanese company called Busicom approached Intel to make some custom chips for a new calculator they were developing. Intel employee Ted Hoff was not impressed with Busicom’s design and suggested an alternative: make the device internally programmable and reduce its complexity by implementing the calculator functionality as computer code rather than as electronic hardware. Fredrico Faggin, who joined Intel in 1970, was able to achieve the difficult task of designing a very rudimentary CPU so that it would fit on a single chip. Masatoshi Shima, a Busicom engineer, also contributed to this work.

Intel astutely decided to buy back the general design and marketing rights to the 4004 from Busicom, and the latter company, which had been interested in the project only as a source of components for its calculator, sold the rights in exchange for a fee of $60,000 and a lower price for the chips.

The initial applications of the 4004 were not computers in any recognizable sense, but rather things like arcade games, voting machines, and a rudimentary word processor. Later versions of Intel microprocessors were also heavily used for embedded-control applications, including controllers for traffic lights. The first microprocessor-based personal computer was the Altair 8800, a $400 kit from a company called MITS which was introduced in 1975. With the introduction of the VisiCalc spreadsheet program for the Apple II in 1979, and the launch of the IBM personal computer in 1981, the PC rapidly moved into the position of an essential business tool.

The introduction of the microprocessor had a huge impact on the structure of the computer industry. The CPU itself was now highly isolatable from the rest of the computer system, and moreover its production was subject to huge economies of scale. Traditional minicomputer companies such as Digital Equipment were crippled, while new companies such as Dell and Apple which made computers based on off-the-shelf microprocessors could now be started at relatively low cost. With multiple companies producing computers using the same CPU family, the outlook for independent software companies became much more rosy: Microsoft was the preeminent exploiter of this opportunity. And beyond the computer industry per se, microprocessors have provided the intelligence for a considerable realm of devices, ranging from home appliances to machine tools to children’s toys

It’s interesting to note that both Intel AND Microsoft developed/acquired their key products (the 4004 and PC DOS) as for-hire projects from other companies, but neither Busicom nor IBM was astute enough to avoid signing away the rights to these products in exchange for, at best, quite small amounts of money.

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…an interesting piece here.

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…still seems to have a remarkable number of adherents.

Business Insider has an interview with a 32-year-old Brit who is cofounder of Huddle, a startup aiming to compete with Microsoft’s SharePoint. While I didn’t read the comment thread, up toward the beginning there are at least 3 comments from people mocking the idea that a startup would be able to succeed against a product which (a)comes from a very large company and (b)is successful and growing.

Well, let’s see. Up through the early 1980s, IBM’s position in the computer industry looked unassailable…indeed, IBM’s dominance was so complete that the computer industry had often been referred to as “IBM and the Seven Dwarfs.” Who would have guessed that a couple of startups called Intel and Microsoft were about to start grabbing market share from IBM in a big way?

Up through at least the 1970s, Sears Roebuck & Co. was a colossus of the American retail industry. Who would have guessed that Sears–along with many other large retailers–would have found itself losing out to a bunch of guys from Arkansas?

The steel industry was long dominated by the giant integrated steel companies, especially Bethlehem Steel and U.S. Steel. Both of these companies went bankrupt–but for smaller and more nimble firms such as Nucor, focused on mini-mills and continuous casting, the story was very different.

I haven’t looked at Huddle in any depth, and don’t have a considered opinion about their future. But I do know that many SharePoint users are less than happy with the product, and I do know that small and focused companies often have considerable advantages over larger and more complex companies. Sometimes these advantages, intelligently applied, will suffice to dramatically overcome the also-very-real advantages of the larger firm.

The belief that the-big-guy-always-wins seems surprisingly resistant to historical experience. J K Galbraith, in his book The New Industrial State, asserted that large firms would simply become larger and more vertically-integrated and would control demand through advertising, making themselves fairly unassailable. This was in 1967–in view of the history of the last 45 years, people today have much less excuse for such beliefs that Galbraith did

Why is the big-guy-wins theory still so widely held?

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A writer at The Economist notes that hatred of bankers is one of the world’s oldest and most dangerous prejudices:

Civilisations that have eased the ban on moneylending have grown rich. Those that have retained it have stagnated. Northern Italy boomed in the 15th century when the Medicis and other banking families found ways to bend the rules. Economic leadership passed to Protestant Europe when Luther and Calvin made moneylending acceptable. As Europe pulled ahead, the usury-banning Islamic world remained mired in poverty.

and

In medieval Europe Jews were persecuted not only because they were not Christians but also because killing them was a quick way to expunge debts. Karl Marx, who came from a Jewish family, regarded Jews as the embodiments of capitalism who could only be rescued from their ancestral curse through revolution. The forgers of the “Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion” wanted people to believe that Jewish financiers were engaged in a fiendish global conspiracy. Louis McFadden, the chairman of the United States House Committee on Banking and Currency in the 1930s, claimed that “the Gentiles have the slips of paper while the Jews have the lawful money.” The same canards have been used against Chinese minorities across Asia.

It can be reasonably argued that the financial industry in the US, and probably also in Europe, is too large as a % of the overall economy and also far too influential in political affairs–see my post about sticky governors. But the unthinking demonization of finance as an activity, and of people involved in that activity, is counterproductive, and, as the Economist author argues, dangerous.

via Stuart Schneiderman

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A 16-year-old girl in Florida parked in the wrong space, had her car keyed, suspected another girl, and posted on her own Facebook page the following:

oh so you keyed my car? well your karmas gonna be a wholeee lot worse that that

The next day, school officials suspended her for three days–and a criminal charge of “stalking” was brought against her by the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Department

As Scott Greenfield says:

To call the arrest of Allie Scott crazy is to state the obvious. That both a school district and a sheriff’s office would nonetheless indulge in such insanity is the piece that would make a good subject for Kafka.

Other incidents of Kafkaesque abuse of authority by public school officials and local police departments are easy to find.

For most of history, in most places in the world, people have lived in fear of The Authorities. For a couple of centuries, that fear was largely lifted (with certain obvious exceptions) in the territory of The United States of America. Now, as a result of the endless expansion of governmental powers and the political and administrative arrogance which have inevitably followed, it is returning. The American populace is being collectively cowed.

See my related posts zero tolerance-zero judgment-zero compassion and Philip Queeg Public High School.

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Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, writes:

This week, a bill that would create America’s first Internet censorship system is going to a full committee for a vote, and is likely to pass.

He is referring to the “Stop Online Piracy” act and the related “Protect IP” act. Links to information and analysis concerning these bills, for which heavy lobbying activities are underway, here.

This is dangerous stuff, and, as Tim notes, people need to be contacting their CongressCreatures now.

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Admit Britain to NAFTA?

The acronym even still works…”NA” could stand for “North Atlantic” as well as “North American.”

via Neptunus Lex

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Minutes to Memories, John Mellencamp