fUSION Anomalog.

Two years ago, we noted that Brazil had asked the WTO for permission to ignore certain US patents and copyrights as a retaliation against the US’s refusal to abide by a WTO ruling. This is, of course, typical of the US. When the WTO sides with the US on certain issues, you see the US and industry lobbyists go nuts about how those countries need to capitulate due to “international obligations.” But when the WTO rules against the US, the USTR has a long history of ignoring the ruling or even pretending (falsely) that it “won.” Given that most countries can’t do much if the US just ignores the WTO, there’s been a new push to allow countries to ignore US copyrights and patents up to a certain dollar amount. In Antigua, for example, the WTO said it could ignore up to $21 million worth of US IP.

Brazil is now moving forward with a plan to actually ignore US patents and copyrights. It’s putting forth a retaliation plan to the WTO that includes various tariffs and other sanctions — but most interestingly, a plan to ignore $238 million annually in US copyrights and patents — expected to cover both pharmaceutical patents and entertainment copyrights. As is typical in such situations, the USTR is wagging its finger and warning, “don’t do that,” but doesn’t seem willing to admit that the WTO already ruled against the US. [+]

There’s a new world order emerging around media and publishing. Producing original content is simply too expensive to sustain alone for all but the largest media companies. New models are essential — and emerging.

The solution that is emerging is known as curation. There’s been plenty said about the emergence of professional curation. These are content hunters and gatherers who are increasingly scouring the web for contextual content to publish and amplify.

But professional curation isn’t the only trend that’s rapidly on the rise. Chances are, you’re already a curator, and you may not even know it. New mobile applications, sites, and consumer driven content discovery are feeding the emergence of the accidental curator. [+]

As we talked about in the True Cost of Stuff, buying something new requires the extraction and destruction of a lot of resources, not to mention the destruction of our environment in extracting, hauling, manufacturing, packaging and shipping the item.

So if we want to avoid buying new things, what should we do if we need something? After all, there are always times when we feel we need something — not just want or desire, but need it for a real purpose. We might need new clothes, or books, or a bike so we can cut back on using a car.

One woman decided to buy nothing new, which is an interesting solution, but probably not for most people. But while you might not want to put such a drastic moratorium on yourself, here are 7 things you can do before even considering buying a new item.

1. Reconsider your need. Do you really really need it? Or is it a want? Or can you change things so you don’t need it? This should always be the first thing you do.
2. Borrow. You might only need it temporarily. Borrow books from friends or the library. Borrow a dress for a special occasion. Borrow a tool for a short-term project. Be sure to lend things in return, when you can.
3. Ask friends and family. Sometimes people you know might have the item you need, but not need it any longer. Instead of loaning it to you, they might be glad to give it to you. You only need to ask. I’ll often send out an email (or tweet) if I need something that others might have.
4. Freecycle. Same idea, but using a wider network. There are Freecycle networks in many areas — people who want to give something away, or who need something, post to the list and very often exchanges are made — for free.
5. Buy used. It’s infinitely better than buying new, because when you buy used you’re not having new resources taken from the earth and manufactured, but rather extending the life of resources that have already been used. Try thrift shops, charity stores, yard or garage sales, Craigslist or Ebay.
6. Make your own. This won’t work in every case (if I had to make my own clothes people would laugh at me more than they already do), but sometimes you can make something that’s just as good as buying, with inexpensive materials or materials you already have. This works if you’re good with crafts or carpentry especially. It can also be fun to get the family involved.
7. Go without. I know this seems the same as the first item on the list, but actually it’s a bit different: say you decide you really do need something, but can’t find it anywhere or make it. Should you buy new? Well, maybe you can go without it for awhile, until you do find a used version. Maybe you need it but don’t need it right now. Often things will turn up when you keep your eyes open — someone will happen to mention they have the item, or you’ll see it on Freecycle or Craigslist after a week or two. And sometimes, the need for the item will go away, and you’ll be glad you waited.

Sometimes you might have to buy a new item, even after exhausting all these options. But if you can run through this list first, often you’ll find you didn’t need it new. [+]

Kevin Kelly, who saw the potential to re-invent the fabric of industrial society in Dave Gingery’s home fab lab, has also written some other thoughtful pieces on civilization as a sort of organism or creature or monster. “I’ve been thinking of civilization (the technium) as a life form, as a self-replicating structure,” writes Kelly. “I began to wonder what is the smallest seed into which you could reduce the ‘genes’ of civilization, and have it unfold again, sufficient that it could also make another seed again. That is, what is the smallest seed of the technium that is viable? It must be a seed able to grow to reproduction age and express itself as a full-fledge civilization and have offspring itself — another replicating seed.”

Kelly saw this “seed” as a library full of knowledge and perhaps tools. It was this concept of a seed library of knowledge in the form of the SKDB project — paired with Gingery machine enthusiasts pouring molten metal into the shape of metal-cutting lathes — that inspired the vision of controlling and maintaining a repository for downloading machine-readable instructions that can be converted into stuff.

Translating bits and bytes on the web into something physical (atoms) requires a mechanism. In the case of DNA, this mechanism is a ribosome which assembles proteins from the coded data on a molecule of messenger RNA (mRNA). The SKDB project can be just such a mechanism for sharing hardware over the internet — ultimately translating the contents of packages into things. This can include DIY biology lab equipment, like pipettes, test tubes, racks, refrigerators, thermocyclers, cameras, spectrophotometers, and autoclaves to work with the reusable genetic building blocks of synthetic biology.

How soon will the designs of hackerspace be made available over the internet to the machine shop in your garage? Perhaps much sooner than you would guess. Machine-readable instructions such as G-code exist today, but they aren’t always human readable. Debian has an estimated $13 billion of volunteer hacker time invested in it. While the SKDB project is still in its infancy, technical demonstrations exist today and the movement is growing. “Making something from nothing” may be as close as the next hacker.

Interested in hacking open source hardware packages? Bryan Bishop and Ben Lipkowitz are forming a transhuman technology co-op powered by open source hardware. On the off-chance that you’re not involved, you should be — contact the community today at: openmanufacturing@googlegroups.com [+]

A new generation of neuron inspired computers is now a possibility as a team of French-based scientists have developed a compound that works inside the transistors in a manner similar to a synapse between neurons. The research was recently published in the January 22, 2010 issue of the journal Advanced Functional Materials.

The organic transistor, equipped with a chemical compound called pentacene and gold nanoparticles, also known as NOMFET (Nanoparticle Organic Memory Field-Effect Transistor), can imitate the biological functions of a nervous system.

Transistors are typically used in electronic circuits as a switch to either transmit or not transmit a simple signal. According to the scientific researchers, the gold nanoparticles combined with pentacene coating yield a memory effect and are able to “mimic the way a synapse works during the transmission of action potentials between two neurons.”

As a result the electronic component becomes an evolving factor in the system it is placed. From the research, neuron inspired computers with this technology will be able to mimic the activity of a human brain and complete more complex functions than silicone-based machines such as visual recognition. [+]

“Free culture is counterculture,” says Jonathan Zittrain, co-founder of Harvard University’s Berkman Center. “It’s not seen as mainstream, stable, safe. Instead we see it put into calmer euphemisms like user-generated content.” [+]

A new way of using the genetic code has been created, allowing proteins to be made with properties that have never been seen in the natural world. The breakthrough could eventually lead to the creation of new or “improved” life forms incorporating these new materials into their tissue.

In all existing life forms, the four “letters” of the genetic code, called nucleotides, are read in triplets, so that every three nucleotides encode a single amino acid.

Not any more. Jason Chin at the University of Cambridge and his colleagues have now redesigned the cell’s machinery so that it reads the genetic code in quadruplets.

In the genetic code that life has used up to now, there are 64 possible triplet combinations of the four nucleotide letters; these genetic “words” are called codons. Each codon either codes for an amino acid or tells the cell to stop making a protein chain. Now Chin’s team have created 256 blank four-letter codons that can be assigned to amino acids that don’t even exist yet. [+]

“Each time a new planetary system forms a few surviving microbes find their way into comets. These then multiply and seed other planets,” he said.

He adds: “We are thus part of a connected chain of being that extends over a large volume of the cosmos. Evidence is pointing inexorably in this direction.” [+]

The quantum wizardry appears to occur in each of a photosynthetic cell’s millions of antenna proteins. These route energy from electrons spinning in photon-sensitive molecules to nearby reaction-center proteins, which convert it to cell-driving charges.

Almost no energy is lost in between. That’s because it exists in multiple places at once, and always finds the shortest path. [+]

The planet already has a have massively distributed wireless sensors -cellphones” integrated with cameras, GPS, accelerometers and Internet connectivity that is spurring a new field called participatory sensing.

Ms. Estrin and her colleagues at the university’s Center for Embedded Networked Sensing have designed several projects that use cellphones and people in data-gathering and analysis. Cellphones, they say, are versatile data collectors and are becoming more powerful all the time —

One project involves collecting travel, time and location data that is fed into Web databases to calculate an individual’s personal environmental impact and exposure to pollutants (peir.cens.ucla.edu). Another project, in cooperation with the National Park Service, uses a smartphone application to identify, photograph and track the advance of invasive plants, like Harding grass and poison hemlock, which can crowd out local species and undermine biodiversity (whatsinvasive.com). [+]

“Just because you evolved on a planet does not necessitate that you continue to live on one. And there are some profoundly good reasons not to do so. Like that big honkin’ ‘gravity well’ that you have to expensively and dangerously blast your way up out of each time you need to go someplace. And the bigger the planet, the worse the penalty.” [+]

A new campaign called Move Your Money aims to tackle the frustrations with the Wall Street banks, and the politicians they’ve bought off, head on. The campaign is based on a simple idea: Americans ought to move their money from the big banks — that took billions in taxpayer money and continue to foist outrageous interest rates even as they cut lending — to local financial institutions that actually are a part of their communities. Move the money back home.

In the first 48 hours of the campaign, which launched days before the New Year, over 100,000 people responded with inquiries on how to move their money and credit to the nation’s 7,600 community banks and 8,000 credit unions. [+]

A devious device looking suspiciously like the pain box from Dune — or a minimalist sculpture from the ’60s — is now selling on eBay. In fact, that’s all it does. This robot sells itself on eBay every week.

Called “A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter (2009),” by the artist Caleb Larsen, the imposing cube has a mind of its own, literally:

Hooked up to the internet, it will put itself up for sale every seven days. Right now — the auction lasts until Thursday — you can land it for just north of four grand. But a week later, the cube will offer itself up for sale again.

It seems to be for real: That is, this thing comes with a legal contract binding the collector to facilitating the sale, and apparently this robot artwork is supposed to change hands every week — forever. Is the how AI begins? With a self-selling bot?

And the Q+A certainly on the seller’s page makes it seem like this artist is in it for the long haul:

Q: How would you handle the contingencies of ebay shutting down/going under? It seems difficult to maintain the “perpetual” state of auction for more than a few millennia.
A: The contract and the piece were designed to be platform agnostic to accommodate for this. If eBay dries up and disappears, then another platform, either propriety or public, can be used for the selling.

Whatever it is, the thing looks rigged to defeat mere mortals. It’s either something out of the future, or the twisted mind of William S. Burroughs — maybe both. [+]

[+]

ScienceDaily (Jan. 22, 2010) — What could human engineers possibly learn from the lowly slime mold? Reliable, cost-efficient network construction, apparently: a recent experiment suggests that Physarum polycephalum, a gelatinous fungus-like mold, might actually lead the way to improved technological systems, such as more robust computer and mobile communication networks. [+]

While most Americans with unpaid bills dread the collector’s call, Cunningham sees them as lucrative opportunities. Many collection and credit card companies, intentionally or not, violate little-known consumer rights laws, and Cunningham’s favorite pastime is catching them doing so and then suing them. In fact, it’s a profitable side job.

Call it ironic, but the only house on the block that appears to be the foreclosed end to some sad financial story is in fact the home of one of the debt collection industry’s emerging and persistent threats. Cunningham calls himself a private attorney general—someone who files private lawsuits in the public interest. Debt collectors call him a credit terrorist.

Patrick Lunsford, who edits InsideARM, a trade magazine for the debt collection industry, knows the term. “There is a sub-group out there that does actually advise people on how to bait [collectors],” he says. “That’s something that really gets under the skin of, well, obviously, collectors.”

Cunningham beats the debt collectors at their own game. He turns their money-making practice into a financial liability. He is a regular guy who has become a radical enemy of the banking system. [+]

Dear Old People Who Run the World,

My generation would like to break up with you.

Everyday, I see a widening gap in how you and we understand the world — and what we want from it. I think we have irreconcilable differences.

You wanted big, fat, lazy “business.” We want small, responsive, micro-scale commerce.

You turned politics into a dirty word. We want authentic, deep democracy — everywhere.

You wanted financial fundamentalism. We want an economics that makes sense for people — not just banks.

You wanted shareholder value — built by tough-guy CEOs. We want real value, built by people with character, dignity, and courage.

You wanted an invisible hand — it became a digital hand. Today’s markets are those where the majority of trades are done literally robotically. We want a visible handshake: to trust and to be trusted.

You wanted growth — faster. We want to slow down — so we can become better.

You didn’t care which communities were capsized, or which lives were sunk. We want a rising tide that lifts all boats.

You wanted to biggie size life: McMansions, Hummers, and McFood. We want to humanize life.

You wanted exurbs, sprawl, and gated anti-communities. We want a society built on authentic community.

You wanted more money, credit and leverage — to consume ravenously. We want to be great at doing stuff that matters.

You sacrificed the meaningful for the material: you sold out the very things that made us great for trivial gewgaws, trinkets, and gadgets. We’re not for sale: we’re learning to once again do what is meaningful.

There’s a tectonic shift rocking the social, political, and economic landscape. The last two points above are what express it most concisely. I hate labels, but I’m going to employ a flawed, imperfect one: Generation “M.”

What do the “M”s in Generation M stand for? The first is for a movement. It’s a little bit about age — but mostly about a growing number of people who are acting very differently. They are doing meaningful stuff that matters the most. Those are the second, third, and fourth “M”s.

Gen M is about passion, responsibility, authenticity, and challenging yesterday’s way of everything. Everywhere I look, I see an explosion of Gen M businesses, NGOs, open-source communities, local initiatives, government. Who’s Gen M? Obama, kind of. Larry and Sergey. The Threadless, Etsy, and Flickr guys. Ev, Biz and the Twitter crew. Tehran 2.0. The folks at Kiva, Talking Points Memo, and FindtheFarmer. Shigeru Miyamoto, Steve Jobs, Muhammad Yunus, and Jeff Sachs are like the grandpas of Gen M. There are tons where these innovators came from.

Gen M isn’t just kind of awesome — it’s vitally necessary. If you think the “M”s sound idealistic, think again.

The great crisis isn’t going away, changing, or “morphing.” It’s the same old crisis — and it’s growing.

You’ve failed to recognize it for what it really is. It is, as I’ve repeatedly pointed out, in our institutions: the rules by which our economy is organized.

But they’re your institutions, not ours. You made them — and they’re broken. Here’s what I mean:

“… For example, the auto industry has cut back production so far that inventories have begun to shrink — even in the face of historically weak demand for motor vehicles. As the economy stabilizes, just slowing the pace of this inventory shrinkage will boost gross domestic product, or GDP, which is the nation’s total output of goods and services.”

Clearing the backlog of SUVs built on 30-year-old technology is going to pump up GDP? So what? There couldn’t be a clearer example of why GDP is a totally flawed concept, an obsolete institution. We don’t need more land yachts clogging our roads: we need a 21st Century auto industry.

I was (kind of) kidding about seceding before. Here’s what it looks like to me: every generation has a challenge, and this, I think, is ours: to foot the bill for yesterday’s profligacy — and to create, instead, an authentically, sustainably shared prosperity.

Anyone — young or old — can answer it. Generation M is more about what you do and who you are than when you were born. So the question is this: do you still belong to the 20th century – or the 21st?

[+]

Outright Refusal to Pay

The more radical among consumers are actually refusing to pay what banks and creditors say they owe. An exemplar of this tactic is Ben Pavone, a California lawyer who, “…told Bank of America in a letter last week that he refuses to pay off his credit card debt until the bank lowers his interest rate”, according to the Huffington Post. Furthermore, should Bank of America try to tarnish Pavone’s credit rating, the feisty lawyer vows, “…he’ll sue ‘em.” Reportedly, Pavone’s dissatisfaction with the bank stemmed from his credit limit being reduced when Pavone requested that it be raised. Nevertheless, the lawyer now considers himself to have been, “…squeezed for cash” and is “…eager to argue in court that your interest rates are unfair within the meaning of various state and federal statues, and anxious to point out that you ‘had’ to cut my credit limit from $32,000 down to $30,000 at the same time you were borrowing billions from the federal government and paid your executive bonuses in full.”

[+]

This ought to really make Pat’s day. One hundred percent of the sale prices will go to the Haiti relief charity.

Finally! What you’ve all been asking for! A one of a kind, handmade PAT ROBERSTON VOODOO DOLL.

After an exclusive deal with devil, we are finally able to bring black magic into your very own home! The lucky winner of this auction will attain the soul of Televangelist PAT ROBERTSON in a handheld figurine comprised of the finest straw, cloth, and other organic natural materials!

Ever wanted to cause Pat Robertson a massive headache? give him back pain? jab him in the crotch? Of course you have! Well then BID NOW to own your very own physical representation of the dark, dark soul of Pat Robertson.

Accessories included with the doll are Pat’s very own “HOLY” BIBLE and BAG OF MONEY taken from real Americans! WOW!

Make sure you read the Q&A at the bottom of the ebay posting, it’s fabulous. [+]

I recently read a comment that “Well if you want to put light rail in the category of libraries and parks that’s fine”. I’m glad to hear that, because I do put transit in the ‘category of libraries and parks’- all core values that makes us better. Building a transit system is in a very basic sense building civilization.

Let’s compare and contrast with the automobile, which to all appearances makes us selfish megalomaniacs who drive alone and consider the burden to be on the pedestrian to stay out of our way. And let’s be perfectly clear- when Henry Ford paid his workers more, it was because he had to- almost none of them lasted more than six months working on the sped-up Ford assembly line.

It was Henry Ford, in fact, who emerges as the single person most responsible for the creation of Hitler. Hitler was still sitting in a German prison when Ford paid for the distribution of hundreds of thousands of copies of the forged “Elders of Zion Protocols” to the German people in the early 20s. It was on these fraudulent ‘Protocols’ that the Nazis built their anti-semitism. Ford in Germany was a big company and, ultimately, a big supporter of the Nazis. In fact, Ford hired a German Nazi to run his factory police force in Detroit in 1940.

The automobile, which will soon fade from common use, has a sordid history and is not a cultural or core value to our civilization. The private automobile has been anarchic and authoritarian at once- anarchic in the freedom granted the driver, and authoritarian in the powers we’ve granted the police on the highway. Neither of these can be considered values of civilization in any way.

In contrast, transit is a shared investment in a civilization that outlives the original investors, creates value in excess of its own existence, and benefits generations to come. Consider the railway system of India, a nation that upon liberation was almost entirely illiterate, yet had a framework of trained and educated employees spanning the mighty size of their nation, a network that instantly became a basic building block of governance.

It’s a sad comment on where the car has taken us that we even need to think hard about these things. But it’s where we are and it’s time to start thinking. [+]

[+]

GOP Senators Appear on TV With Anti-gay, Anti-abortion Christian Martyrdom Advocate:

Is the GOP becoming the party of violent Christian martyrdom ? Apparently, Jim DeMint, Sam Brownback, Michelle Bachmann and Randy Forbes weren’t deterred by the fact that Lou Engle has publicly made statements which resemble rhetoric deployed during the 1990’s, by leaders of the anti-abortion movement, that helped incite domestic terrorism. But they weren’t alone:
Engle, who has publicly called for acts of Christian martyrdom, could be found last summer blessing and anointing Newt Gingrich and Mike Huckabee at a Virginia Beach megachurch. Engle represents a religious right tendency that had become so dominant that known potentates such as James Dobson and Tony Perkins travel to Engle’s TheCall events – such as the San Diego stadium rally which served as the capstone to the successful anti-gay marriage Proposition Eight push in California.
Engle’s religious movement has also played a significant role in inspiring, and even organizing, legislators who pushed the pending, draconian anti-gay legislation in Uganda that some have described as a “kill the gays” bill.
Lou Engle is a leader in a religious tendency, rapidly becoming the new face of the religious right, which welcomes women and minorities but features an ideology just as politically and ideologically extreme as that of the bigoted, nativist branch of the Christian right that Engle’s tendency will soon overshadow. Engle has described his movement as an “underground church” and he has stated, in an interview for a documentary video about his movement,

“Right now they haven’t seen the true church. There’s an underground church that the world has no idea that exists. Once they get the stage, it’s over with.”

While the American left has heavily focused on the Tea Party movement, leaders in Engle’s arising tendency, which I’ve described as the The Rainbow Right, wield major electoral influence with minority groups and can infiltrate Washington-based Democrat “centrist”,”common ground” efforts with ease.
Four of the Christian leaders appearing in the “PrayerCast” event alongside Brownback and DeMint played dominant roles in a two and a half hour, key motivational and planning conference call, held July 30th, 2008, for leaders of the Christian right who organized the successful campaign to block gay marriage in Arizona, Florida, and California. Those leaders are: Jim Garlow, Bishop Harry Jackson, Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, and Lou Engle of TheCall.
Engle’s operation was so central to the California pro-Prop 8 drive that one of the four campaign timeline maps, distributed to members of that July 30th, 2008 conference call detailing major elements and events for the anti-gay marriage campaigns in AZ, FL, and CA, was dedicated solely to TheCall’s effort in California.
[ below: map/timeline for TheCall's pro-Prop 8 effort in CA ]

Founder of TheCall Lou Engle has predicted that legal abortion will lead to a second civil war. And, as I’ve previously noted, the runaway hit documentary Jesus Camp, by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, featured footage of an Engle appearance at Becky Fischer’s former summer camp for Christian children. In Jesus Camp Fischer states her desire to indoctrinate children to be as dedicated as Hamas suicide bombers [ see here for relevant footage of Engle at TheCall and Fischer, from Jesus Camp ].
Lou Engle’s son Jesse Engle specializes in casting out gay “demons” and has established a ministry in San Fransisco, which Lou Engle has described as a place “where the homosexuals boast the dominion of darkness.”
In the early 1980’s, KKK and Aryan Nations strategist Louis Beam helped popularize a tactic known as “leaderless resistance” in which high profile propagandists would incite terrorist acts carried out by autonomous individuals and cell groups. During the 1990’s leaders of the Army of God, wielding militant anti-abortion rhetoric, helped inspire terrorist bombings of abortion clinics and the assassination of doctors who provided abortions. Now, a decade later, one can hear such incitement coming from the stage at Lou Engle’s TheCall events, which Engle’s group holds in stadiums not just in the United States but around the world too, in Australia, Germany, the Philippines, Norway, England, Jerusalem and Brazil.
Over the last two decades, the American Christian right has gone truly global and established power centers in the developing world which now lend support to the long march, in the United States, towards extending Christian dominion over key sectors of society such as government, business and finance, education, media, and religion.
Engle’s role as leader of TheCall has now received some mainstream media notice but the source of his influence is still largely unknown. Lou Engle serves, alongside Sarah Palin’s prayer group leader Mary Glazier, on the Apostolic Council of Prophetic Elders, one of the key leadership groups wielding influence over a sprawling, global new incarnation of the religious right known as the New Apostolic Reformation.
As detailed in a recent Talk To Action report, Peter Wagner’s New Apostolic Reformation has played a major role in inspiring and organizing Ugandan legislators behind the draconian “kill the gays” bill before Uganda’s parliament.
Peter Wagner was advisor for Rick Warren’s dissertation for a Doctorate of Ministry from Fuller Theological Seminary. In a mid-December statement from Rick Warren, Letter To Uganda’s Pastors, Rick Warren lied about his connection to Wagner and made strange disclaimers that would seem to have been in reaction to the December 4th, 2009 Talk To Action report and also to YouTube videos [1, 2] from this author, showcasing Warren’s penchant for urging Christians to be as devoted to Jesus as the followers of Hitler, Lenin, and Mao were to their respective leaders. In the unusual statement, Warren writes both the question, below (in bold type) and the response:

Are you and Peter Wagner attempting to rid the world of homosexuals? Absolutely not. Peter Wagner was a seminary professor of mine, but not my doctoral dissertation advisor. I have not had contact with Peter Wagner for many years and am certainly not conspiring with him for any purpose. Additionally, the event chronicled at Angels Stadium in 2005 has been grossly misrepresented. I was simply arguing that Christians could have a tremendous effect for good in the world if they had the same dedication as the followers of Mao. I would never argue that anyone should emulate or espouse the views of Mao, Hitler or Lenin.

[+]

1. Mortgage underwater? Just walk away from it. Even academia says it’s OK. Move to the city and rent.

“Homeowners should be walking away in droves,” University of Arizona law school professor Brent T. White told the Los Angeles Times. “But they aren’t. And it’s not because the financial costs of foreclosure outweigh the benefits. One can have a good credit rating again — meaning above 660 — within two years after a foreclosure.”

In a scholarly paper called “Underwater and Not Walking Away: Shame, Fear and the Social Management of the Housing Crisis,” White tells cash-jacked homeowners that they can return the screw.

We’ve been championing that course for years, with reports on walkaways and trashouts, as well as violent homeowner blowback. Hell, we called the Great Recession before most did, and we’re still calling it another Great Depression in the making. So trust us. And if not us, then take it from the professor, who will soon be joined by a chorus of similarly credentialed whistleblowers as the financial crap truly hits the fan in the years to come. Go ahead, move back to the city and rent. You’ll end up there anyway when your suburb runs out of water and malls.

2. Unplug your cable. The easiest way to kill the so-called news networks is to cut them off at their enablers. Don’t like the hate spewed by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp nutjobs? Pull your cable bill’s plug, or shut down your satellite. Tired of the way that Reality TV, in entertainment and otherwise, has replaced reality itself? Withdraw life support.

First, there’s no holy reason you shouldn’t be able to subscribe to a channel package of your own choosing. Listen to the voice of wisdom: “It is regrettable that the cable companies continue to balk at offering channels on an a la carte basis and instead continue to raise the price of their bundled offering[s].” You know who delivered that dose of media sense? John McCain. Yeah, it’s that bad.

Plus, you don’t need old-school TV anymore. In our digital age, you can go online for your news and entertainment, even if you can no longer tell the difference between the two. How? Streaming video sites like YouTube and more, or better yet torrents, which are the future now. Looking to watch your favorite episode of The Colbert Report right now? You can already do that online. Can you do it through your cable network? Exactly. Looking to watch something you can’t screen anywhere online? There’s a torrent for that. Like Napster’s file-sharing platform before it, the BitTorrent protocol houses the people’s media library, dedicated not just to pimping out the same crap seen on network and cable, but work you have never seen before, often stunning artistry left for dead by the side of the mainstream. Not anymore. Trust us, you do not need your cable. Murdoch and other old-media asshats will hate you for unsubscribing. Most importantly, you won’t miss 80 percent of the shit you watched when it’s gone.

4. Reacquire your wealth. The easiest way for the Federal Reserve, led by Time Magazine’s ludicrous Person of the Year Ben Bernanke, to pick your pocket is through your accounts and investments, which can be liquidated in the blink of a discount window’s eye. Withdraw any extra cash you have, close whatever extra accounts you have, and take it somewhere besides Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase or another bailout addict. Better yet, keep it on the sidelines. The Fed hates that and so do the markets, which have nothing to do with you anyway. That game is above your head, and rigged outright. You either play with the house, or you play your conscience. Right now, your conscience should be worrying about another economic clusterfuck. Plus, the banks left standing after the financial crashes of the last few years are fatter than ever, and are still hoarding cash instead of lending it.

7. Avoid CDs and DVDs: At least, stuff that isn’t in collectible form. There is still a place for material goods in our mounting environmental chaos, but it is shrinking fast. Kind of like our natural resources. As we discussed in the cable section, you can get anything you want these days online, and if you can’t, whoever is stopping you from being able to do so deserves their fate. Plus, discs are wasteful. And obsolete. And they know it.

From the plastic, and therefore oil, it takes to make their cases to the reams of paper, and therefore trees and water, it takes to make their press and product packaging, CDs and DVDs are the easiest fat to axe. Which is why in the last decade CD sales have dropped precipitously, as online sales have caught up. Might as well seal the deal by never buying another disc again. Here’s how the media arrangement for the future works: Some entity sends whatever you want to watch wirelessly to your phone, computer and TV. Everything else is just wasted resources, money and time, no matter what the industry says. You can speed up that evolution by forcing the industry’s hand. If you don’t, it will squeeze cash from a disc’s stone until you make it stop. While we’re on this subject….

8. Stop buying bottled water, factory-farmed beef and new cars, especially hybrids. The first offense is a bailout for the oil industry, the second is a climate-change massacre, and the third is a waste of your time and money. The electric cars will be here soon. If you can walk or use public transportation until then, please do so. That is, if you really need a car at all. Most of us don’t. Have to drive miles to work? Consider how much money it costs you every month to get paid, and add that to the probably less impressive paycheck you could get from a gig closer to home, perhaps within walking distance. Our climate crisis demands that we kill as many emissions as we possibly can to keep the planet from overheating. Who knows? A few more degrees and we could be looking at everything from sea-rise catastrophe to the outright extinction of the human race, thanks to a species-killing dose of hydrogen sulfide. Don’t go blank on me, now. Extinction events have happened before, and can easily happen again.

One helpful way to stop them from happening is to decrease the amount of methane farted out by hordes of bovine prisoners herded into Cow-schwitzes across America and beyond. If you think carbon dioxide is a killer, it’s nothing compared to methane, which is increasing annually as the ice melts away and the sea coughs its stored poison into the sky. Throw in the heresy of using oil to make plastic bottles to store the same water that’s no more pristine than what’s already in your tap, and you have the hat trick from hell. If you can do only one thing on this admittedly ambitious list, do this one….or, uh, these three things. Instant impact.

9. Do not watch whiny bitches. Especially so you can tell us how whiny they are; trust us, we already know. Glenn Beck, Lou Dobbs, Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh and other compromised gossips ranting about everything from Tiger Woods to Barack Hussein Obama are a waste of everyone’s time, except of course the people who pay them to spout their nonsense. And those who watch it to confirm their already mindless prejudices and political objectives.

Those unhinged jackasses are exactly what the hardy souls at Media Matters are for. If you ignore them, they really will go away, at least for you. Which is what matters, in the end. Is there really room in your busy mind for their doltish nattering? When you read a story about how Bill O’Reilly cut some poor sap’s mike, you’re learning too much about something you already know too much about. Much better to occupy your time with solutions to the proliferating problems that are coming your way, from probable economic misery to promised environmental devastation. Don’t worry, if something legally actionable happens, you’ll hear about it. Until then, spend your time reading and ranting about more important matters. Like your sex life. [+]

The opinion of the lawyer wasn’t unusual, either: Electricity should go to people who had money, not hooked up willy-nilly to everyone. And why should a city support through tax dollars–regardless of the potential of repaying costs through revenue later—such universal availability?

Rural America, where 60 percent of the US population lived in 1900 and 45 percent by 1930, didn’t get electricity on any broad scale until the 1930s with FDR’s initiatives. Only 10 percent of rural homes had electricity in 1930; nearly half by 1945—at which point under 40 percent of Americans lived outside cities.

FDR powered the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Rural Electrification Administration, which were federally mandated to bring power, and which led to municipally owned entities many of which remain public today.

The argument FDR made was that the quality of life—and clearly the economic output—of rural Americans would suffer without electricity, which in the space of a few decades had become immensely profitable for private utilities, and an absolute necessity.

Undoubtedly, you see where I’ve been going with all this. Broadband in 2009 is electricity in 1900. We may think we know all the means to which high-speed Internet access may be put, but we clearly do not: YouTube and Twitter prove that new things are constantly on the way and will emerge as bandwidth and access continues to increase.

Like electricity, the notion of whether broadband is an inherent right and necessity of every citizen is up for grabs in the US. Sweden and Finland have already answered the question: It’s a birthright. Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, and many European countries aren’t far behind in having created the right regulatory and market conditions to bring better and affordable broadband to a greater percentage of its citizens than in the US. [+]

UPDATE: Video surfaces of hurled figurine smacking into Berlusconi’s face
(video at bottom plays automatically — clip of Italian PM being struck is within first few seconds)

Even the elite are mortal.

During an appearance in Milan on Sunday, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was hit in the face by a statuette, allegedly hurled by a man in the crowd. The missile fractured his nose, broke two of his teeth and injured his lip, according to the Associated Press.

Photographs and video from the scene of near-pandemonium show the embattled 73-year-old lawmaker struggling to get into his vehicle as his entourage tried to keep protesters at bay. The whole time, his mouth was slick with blood, a cut on his upper lip quite apparent. After he was in the car, he climbed back out and looked at the crowd, but did not say a word. Berlusconi’s bodyguards quickly pulled him back inside and he was rushed away.

An initial report said Berlusconi had been hit by a flung object, but Italian media cited police in reporting that a man punched the prime minister while holding a figurine. Video later surfaced of a fast-moving object striking the left side of the Berlusconi’s face. [+]

Images: Screen capture from Youtube video (see below)

The Only Thing Missing is “V for Vendetta” Masks
A few sources are reporting that men were arrested yesterday for trying to re-paint a bike lane on a 14-block stretch on Bedford avenue in Brooklyn. The bike lane was recently removed by the city because of complaints by some local groups (the usual stuff about having fewer parkings and “hurting local businesses”). The unknown men made a video (see below) of them doing their guerilla bike safety civil disobedience and we got our hands on it.

Here’s a photo of the removal of the bike lane last week, taken by Elizabeth Press.

The Gothamist had some info about the arrest of the amateur bike lane painters:

According to tipsters, the neighborhood’s volunteer community watch group responded to reports at around 4 am that two men were using spraypaint to recreate a section of the bike lane, which the Department of Transportation controversially removed from a 14-block stretch of Bedford Avenue last week. Police arrived at the corner of Bedford Avenue and Rutledge Street and arrested two suspects, sources said.

Here’s the video of the mystery men in action:

WATCH VIDEO: G-Word Online Clips: Better Biking

The video contains a manifesto that explains that bike lanes are there for safety, and that the removal of the Bedford bike lane won’t keep cyclists from using that route since it leads to the Williamsburg bridge. All that it’s going to do is make it more dangerous for cyclists.

They conclude with this warning for the city: “Do not try to remove [bike lanes], or we will put them back for our own safety.”

Via Youtube [+]

When you think of Canada, which qualities come to mind? The world’s peace-keeper, the friendly nation, a liberal counterweight to the harsher pieties of its southern neighbor, decent, civilized, fair, well-governed? Think again. This country’s government is now behaving with all the sophistication of a chimpanzee’s tea party. So amazingly destructive has Canada become, and so insistent have my Canadian friends been that I weigh into this fight, that I’ve broken my self-imposed ban on flying and come to Toronto.

So here I am, watching the astonishing spectacle of a beautiful, cultured nation turning itself into a corrupt petrostate. Canada is slipping down the development ladder, retreating from a complex, diverse economy towards dependence on a single primary resource, which happens to be the dirtiest commodity known to man. The price of this transition is the brutalisation of the country, and a government campaign against multilateralism as savage as any waged by George Bush.

Until now I believed that the nation which has done most to sabotage a new climate change agreement was the United States. I was wrong. The real villain is Canada. Unless we can stop it, the harm done by Canada in December 2009 will outweigh a century of good works.

In 2006 the new Canadian government announced that it was abandoning its targets to cut greenhouse gases under the Kyoto Protocol. No other country that had ratified the treaty has done this. Canada was meant to have cut emissions by 6% between 1990 and 2012. Instead they have already risen by 26%.

It’s now clear that Canada will refuse to be sanctioned for abandoning its legal obligations. The Kyoto Protocol can be enforced only through goodwill: countries must agree to accept punitive future obligations if they miss their current targets. But the future cut Canada has volunteered is smaller than that of any other rich nation. Never mind special measures; it won’t accept even an equal share. The Canadian government is testing the international process to destruction and finding that it breaks all too easily. By demonstrating that climate sanctions aren’t worth the paper they’re written on, it threatens to render any treaty struck at Copenhagen void.

After giving the finger to Kyoto, Canada then set out to prevent the other nations from striking a successor agreement. At the end of 2007 it single-handedly blocked a Commonwealth resolution to support binding targets for industrialised nations. After the climate talks in Poland in December 2008, it won the Fossil of the Year award, presented by environmental groups to the country which had done most to disrupt the talks. The climate change performance index, which assesses the efforts of the world’s 60 richest nations, was published in the same month. Saudi Arabia came 60th. Canada came 59th.

In June this year the media obtained Canadian briefing documents which showed that the government was scheming to divide the Europeans. During the meeting in Bangkok in October, almost the entire developing world bloc walked out when the Canadian delegate was speaking, as they were so revolted by his bullying. Last week the Commonwealth heads of government battled for hours (and eventually won) against Canada’s obstructions. A concerted campaign has now begun to expel Canada from the Commonwealth.

In Copenhagen next week, this country will do everything in its power to wreck the talks. The rest of the world must do everything in its power to stop it. But such is the fragile nature of climate agreements that one rich nation – especially a member of the G8, the Commonwealth and the Kyoto group of industrialised countries – could scupper the treaty. Canada now threatens the well-being of the world.

Why? There’s a simple answer. Canada is developing the world’s second largest reserve of oil. Did I say oil? It’s actually a filthy mixture of bitumen, sand, heavy metals and toxic organic chemicals. The tar sands, most of which occur in Alberta, are being extracted by the biggest opencast mining operation on earth. An area the size of England, of pristine forests and marshes, will be dug up, unless the Canadians can stop this madness. Already it looks like a scene from the end of the world: the strip-miners are creating a churned black hell on an unimaginable scale.

To extract oil from this mess, it needs to be heated and washed. Three barrels of water are used to process one barrel of oil. The contaminated water is held in vast tailing ponds, some of which are so toxic that the tar companies employ people to scoop dead birds off the surface. Most are unlined. They leak organic poisons, arsenic and mercury into the rivers. The First Nations people living downstream have developed a range of exotic cancers and auto-immune diseases.

Refining tar sands requires two to three times as much energy as refining crude oil. The companies exploiting them burn enough natural gas to heat six million homes. Alberta’s tar sands operation is the world’s biggest single industrial source of carbon emissions. By 2020, if the current growth continues, it will produce more greenhouse gases than Ireland or Denmark. Already, thanks in part to the tar mining, Canadians have almost the highest per capita emissions on earth, and the stripping of Alberta has scarcely begun.

Canada hasn’t acted alone. The biggest leaseholder in the tar sands is Shell, a company that has spent millions persuading the public that it respects the environment. The other great greenwasher, BP, initially decided to stay out of tar. Now it has invested in plants built to process it. The British bank RBS, 70% of which belongs to you and me (the government’s share will soon rise to 84%), has lent or underwritten £8bn for exploiting the tar sands.

The purpose of Canada’s assault on the international talks is to protect this industry. This is not a poor nation. It does not depend for its economic survival on exploiting this resource. But the tar barons of Alberta have been able to hold the whole country to ransom. They have captured Canada’s politics and are turning this lovely country into a cruel and thuggish place.

Canada is a cultured, peaceful nation, which every so often allows a band of rampaging Neanderthals to trample all over it. Timber companies were licensed to log the old-growth forest in Clayaquot Sound; fishing companies were permitted to destroy the Grand Banks: in both cases these get-rich-quick schemes impoverished Canada and its reputation. But this is much worse, as it affects the whole world. The government’s scheming at the climate talks is doing for its national image what whaling has done for Japan.

I will not pretend that this country is the only obstacle to an agreement at Copenhagen. But it is the major one. It feels odd to be writing this. The immediate threat to the global effort to sustain a peaceful and stable world comes not from Saudi Arabia or Iran or China. It comes from Canada. How could that be true? [+]

At exactly two minutes after midnight on Jan. 1, 2000, an alarm sounded at a nuclear power plant in Onagawa, Japan. Government officials and computer scientists around the globe held their breath. Was this the beginning of a massive Y2K computer meltdown? Actually, no. It was an isolated event, one of a handful of glitches to occur (including the failure of 500 slot machines at two racetracks in Delaware) as the sun rose on the new decade. The dreaded millennial meltdown never happened.

Instead, it was the American Dream that was about to dim. Bookended by 9/11 at the start and a financial wipeout at the end, the first 10 years of this century will very likely go down as the most dispiriting and disillusioning decade Americans have lived through in the post–World War II era. We’re still weeks away from the end of ‘09, but it’s not too early to pass judgment. Call it the Decade from Hell, or the Reckoning, or the Decade of Broken Dreams, or the Lost Decade. Call it whatever you want — just give thanks that it is nearly over. [+]

An irresistible new machine of resistance will be launched during the COP15 UN summit protests in Copenhagen. Made from hundreds of old bicycles and thousands of activists’ bodies ‘Put the fun between your legs: Operation Bike Bloc’ is a collaboration between Climate Camp and art activist collective The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination.

Infamous for touring the UK recruiting a rebel clown army, running courses in post-capitalist culture, throwing snowballs at bankers and launching a rebel raft regatta, the Lab of ii’s creative visions will combine with the Climate Camp’s logistical genius, radical politics and capacity for mass mobilization to engineer an entirely new form of civil disobedience.

Bike hackers, welders, activists, artists and engineers will team up to design the resistance machine in Bristol, UK. It will then be built and launched in Copenhagen as part of the Climate Justice Action mobilizations. The Bike Bloc will merge device of mass transportation and pedal powered resistance tool, post-capitalist bike gang and art bike carnival. We invite you to put the fun between your legs and become the bike bloc. [+]