More from my water-law text:

"A commonly-held assumption that the western states quickly and uniformly adopted prior appropriation is not accurate.  Western history shows that the earliest irrigation developed around various quasi-utopian colony schemes, and these colonies were receptive to a variety of water allocation practices.  Irrigation colonies in southern California and Colorado following the Mormon model [of collective management] were founded in the 1870s and early 1880s."

So the West's story of rugged individualism is not the full story of how pioneer populations dealt with the challenges of scarcity.

Funny how history conveniently forgets facts that don't fit into the dominant narrative our society tells about itself...

If your state is up at bat tomorrow (like mine!), please do the future proud and BE A PART OF MAKING IT.

Lawrence Lessig gives a great presentation on why he's endorsing Obama here
(even if you don't know who Lessig is, it's a well thought-out appeal)

For pretty much any other information you could want on Obama, my friend (a Precinct Leader for his campaign in San Francisco) has put together a great primer here. (With-- bonus!-- a link to a great interview with Samantha Power, leader of the Save Darfur movement, who has been working on Obama's campaign for the last several years).

See you in the future!

Those of you who watched West Wing may remember that the code name for the US President is "POTUS" = President Of The United States. 

Similarly, the acronym of the judicial branch is SCOTUS = Supreme Court Of The United States.

The legislative branch, however, is simply called "Congress".

But wouldn't it be wonderful if it were nicknamed the Legislature Of The United States.

That is, LOTUS?


Imagine if that was the name, the peaceful image, associated with our major governing body.  Wouldn't that be beautiful?

The last few weeks have been tough ones for Kenya and Kenyans. We have seen what started off as a political problem sparked by the December elections turn into violence and tragedy. While I continue to be hopeful that current mediation efforts led by Kofi Annan will lead to a return of some level of normalcy across the country, I also recognize the destructive spiral things are taking in some parts of the country, notably in the Rift Valley. Every passing day without a solution makes this become a longer entrenched conflict that is beyond the elections. And I fear we have turned that corner.

All leaders at all levels need to understand that the current increase in militia activity is just a marriage of convenience. Once the “reason” for the sponsored conflict is resolved, the young men will still be there, hungry, with no incomes, with machetes in their hands. And they now know how to kill and maim.

Current Red Cross numbers indicate about 1000 people dead, and over 300,000 displaced. The conditions in the make-shift camps across the country are simply
heartbreaking, which is why with a growing group of young professionals via the Pamoja Youth Foundation, we have launched “Jaza Lorry!” Literally translating to “Fill the Lorry/Truck!”, the initiative is motivating assistance for those displaced, and channeling it to them through the Kenya Red Cross.

• For individuals in Kenya , you can buy items and
  drop them off in the Jaza Lorry box at every Nakumatt, Uchumi and Tuskys.
• For those outside Kenya ,
  we have partnered with mamamikes (http://www.mamamikes.com)
  Kenya ’s leading online marketplace to channel donations and vouchers.
• For any donations which do not fall into any of the above categories (e.g., in kind donations from companies), feel free to email me back and we can discuss the most appropriate way of channeling them.

Please give what you can.

This is a long road we are on, and it will take quite some work to heal the tears we
have experienced in our social fabric. Let us have the courage to take the first step.

-edwin

macharia2007@gmail.com

Excerpt from a reading for my Cyberlaw class, in the context of how Telecommunications companies claim that regulations (such as requirements to devote some portion of bandwidth to public broadcasting) violate their First Amendment rights as speakers and editors "to convey they content they wish to as large an audience as possible" (while simultaneously claiming their intellectual property rights trump the freedom of speech rights of users):

Implicit in these arguments is a controversial capitalist theory of freedom of speech. The theory is controversial not because it accepts capitalism as a basic economic ordering principle, but because it subordinates freedom of expression to the protection and defense of capital accumulation in the information economy. The capitalist theory identifies the right to free speech with ownership of distribution networks for digital content.

The argument that structural regulation of telecommunications networks restricts the First Amendment rights of telecommunications companies ties the right to speak ever more closely to ownership of capital. Arguing by analogy to print media, the capitalist theory of free speech
identifies the right to produce and control digital content with ownership of a communications network.

Nevertheless, conflating the right to speak with the right to control a communication network is problematic for two reasons. First, because they are conduits and networks, digital communications networks are designed to provide access to multiple voices. However, under the capitalist theory, these conduits exist primarily to promote the speech of the owner of the conduit, just as newspapers exist to promote the speech of the newspaper’s owner.

The second problem follows from the first: Content providers who also act as conduits have
incentives to favor their content over the content of others. For example, cable companies may be tempted to favor streaming media and digital music coming from the company’s content providers and advertising partners, while slowing down or refusing content coming from competitors, or, for that matter, from subscribers who want to be their own broadcasters. Broadband companies may seek to provide “walled gardens” or “managed content areas” which limit consumer access to that of the company’s proprietary network and its approved content partners.
 
[bold added]

More from my reading assignment (reminds me of the uniqueness of Gaia's willingness to have a conversation about/alter its terms of service).

New telecommunications networks allow ordinary people to communicate with vast numbers of fellow human beings, routing around existing media gatekeepers and offering competing content. People are no longer simply consumers of prepackaged content from mass media companies that are controlled by a limited number of speakers. Instead, people can use the new telecommunications networks to become active participants in the production of public culture.

But the very same technologies that offer these possibilities also offer media companies ever new ways to advertise, sell products, and push their favored content.  Thus, just as in the case of intellectual property, businesses that control telecommunications networks will seek to limit forms of participation and cultural innovation that are inconsistent with their economic interests. Once again, the goal is not necessarily censorship of unpopular ideas but rather diversion and co-optation of audience attention. Businesses want to direct the Internet user toward increased consumption of their own goods and services as well as the products of their advertising partners. Recognizing that there is money to be made in advertising, sales, and delivery of content, telecommunications companies do not want to be pure conduits for the speech of others, and they do not want too much content competition from their customers.

Instead, they want to use the architecture of the Internet to nudge their customers into planned communities of consumerist experience, to shelter end users into a world that combines everyday activities of communication seamlessly with consumption and entertainment. In some respects, businesses seek to push consumers back into their pre-Internet roles as relatively passive recipients of mass media content. In other respects, however, they openly encourage interactivity, but interactivity on their terms—the sort of interactivity that facilitates or encourages the purchase of goods and services.

[bold added]

Other types of businesses may be able to get away with this more, but I think there will be more pressure for social networking sites to be more responsive and acknowledge user participation in shaping terms of service (as Gaia has).  This has already happened to some degree with those other sites MyBook and FaceSpace, but primarily as isolated incidents regarding specific points (rather than as an ongoing dialogue process).   When Google et al. get the open source social network model up and running, that is likely to shift TOS norms toward user interests, and perhaps towards having more user participation in the drafting of such terms.  Maybe. Possibly. IMHO.

Yep, I'm excerpting this article yet again.  But this passage was really helpful to me in understanding how the intellectual foundations for corporatocracy came about.

The defense... of wealth must find a legal manifestation.

...Jacksonian and abolitionist ideas before the Civil War produced a constitutional vision of free labor and free contract. This constitutional vision celebrated the right of ordinary individuals to own their labor. Laissez-faire was defended as a means of keeping government from giving special benefits to the wealthy.

...In what Clinton Rossiter called the “Great Train Robbery of Intellectual History,” laissez-faire conservatives appropriated the words and symbols of early nineteenth-century liberalism— liberty, opportunity, progress, and individualism—and gave them an economic reinterpretation that served corporate interests. They massaged and refitted the existing rhetoric of free labor and the right of ordinary citizens to pursue a calling into a sophisticated defense of corporate power and privilege that smashed labor unions, protected sweatshops, and eviscerated health and safety laws. By the turn of the twentieth century, the best legal minds that money could buy had reshaped the liberal rights rhetoric of the 1830s into a powerful conservative defense of property that they claimed was the rightful heir to the best American traditions of individualism and personal freedom.

Of course, I said to myself while reading this, much of this flows from the idea that corporations have "personhood"-- but wait, this was BEFORE that decision.  This revisionism was what made corporate personhood possible. 

A similar transvaluation of values is overtaking the free speech principle today. The right to speak has been recast as a right to be free from business regulation.

...We are living through a Second Gilded Age, which, like the first Gilded Age, comes complete with its own reconstruction of the meaning of liberty and property. Freedom of speech is becoming a generalized right against economic regulation of the information industries. Property is becoming the right of the information industries to control how ordinary people use digital content. We can no more capitulate to the Second Gilded Age’s construction of these ideas than to the constructions offered in the first Gilded Age. We must offer a critical alternative to this construction, much as progressive thinkers did a century ago.

It's sad to see that someone has packed up their profile, and left this site.  Goodbye?

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