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SOPA/PIPA Tools: Contact Your Senator/Representative

Write Your Senator directory (if needed) to protest PIPA, the Senate bill

Write Your Representative (if needed) to protest SOPA, the House bill

Subject example: Please Don’t Enact SOPA [PIPA]

Message example:

Dear [Senator/Representative Lastname],

I am writing to voice my concern about poorly crafted legislation (SOPA/PIPA) that, if enacted, would harm the U.S. economy, businesses, and their customers and constituents. Americans have begun to see the benefits of open online sharing, which this legislation could curtail and harm. It could be a significant set-back for our people and our economy. 

I also believe in copyright protection for creators, but neither SOPA or PIPA in their current forms are the way to do it. 

Thank you for your consideration.

Background on SOPA and PIPA legislation

Precipitate

Swirling letters, voices, images,
Blowing like leaves in furious wind.

Facts, reports, scholars,
Spell elation, tragedy or nothing,
Creative destruction to some,
Simple terror to most.

We turn, churn, burn,
Synthesizing, theorizing,
Econo, bio, digital systems,
All trying to unmask Chaos.

Until—
We see the pattern.

November

Today i overheard leaves murmuring, reminiscing, now being bustled and bandied about by chilling winds, each struggling with holding on or letting go.

Their blushes reflected gratitude:
Yellow, how we played, swinging to and fro, mischievously, on delicious days,
Orange, how we were productive, our energy growing our trunk and branches,
Red, how you stole my heart, sun, so blessed be we, without you to have never lived these luscious days.

Cinco de Mayo Salade Niçoise (Cinco de Mayo niçoise mashup)

Ingredients: Large turnip, large piece broccoli, romaine leaves, one red & one green jalapeño, garlic, vinegar, dijon, olive oil, egg, tuna, thyme, rosemary, fennel seeds, butter, white peppercorns

Cook the broccoli, turnip and egg while you make the rest of the salad.

1. Halve broccoli but otherwise leave whole. Steam in tbsp olive oil, rosemary 3 or 4 tbsp filtered water until bright green, al dente (covered pan, low fire). Experiment so you are left with a small amount of water, rosemary and olive oil when it’s done cooking.

2. Cut large turnip in bite-sized pieces; sauté 30 fennel seeds and 10 white peppercorns in 1 tbsp butter until melted, add raw turnip pieces and 1 tbsp water, cover, turn down fire to low. Cook until al dente. Experiment so you are left with a small amount of fennel, peppercorns and butter when it’s done cooking.

3. Hard boil eggs, ten minutes.

4. When the turnip and broccoli are cooked, uncover, stir with spatula, and put them in bowls with their sauces to cool.

5. Broil tuna w thyme, ground pepper & olive oil [or use canned and mix with 1 tbsp chopped jalapeño, thyme]

6. Make the traditional vinaigrette in a large bowl, with good-sized minced garlic clove, vinegar, dijon, olive oil, chopped red & green jalapeños.

7. Make the salad. Tear romaine into bite-sized pieces, and add to bowl. Add broccoli and tuna mixture if you used canned. Toss. Shell, halve and add eggs (and tuna if you used a steak). Add turnips on top. Good grind black or white pepper.

Una cerveza mas!

Responding to Little-Relevant Political Analysis

One of my LinkedIn connections shared this Salon.com article, “Will the Great Recession Lead to World War IV” on LinkedIn. Since LinkedIn constrains responses to too few characters, I’ll continue here. To appreciate, please breeze through the salon article. If you’re used to this type of article, topic sentences will be fine. My response:

I think the article is written by a politico, so it’s not operating at the optimal level of abstraction. IOW, political parties mean little except to politicos like this writer (Lind). What’s far more relevant is people and what motivates them (politcal parties mean little). Lind never gets to the real issues, some of which are:

1) for the first time, man discovers that s/he lives on a VERY small planet with finite resources; there’s no distant summit to scale anymore. If we’re not careful, that means zero sum, war and destruction. (superficially that could mean a shift to the right, but no political party currently offers a solution because they are all too legacy).

2) “rich” economies are headed for a drastic change in life expectations. The Industrial Economy created immense wealth, but we’re now between s curves, and most people will be forced to downgrade their life standards from a material perspective. The good news is, this need not affect spiritual or emotional quality of life, but it will drastically affect material standards of life. That could serve to create anger and resentment, but it could also produce spiritual cleansing. Personally, I don’t observe that consumerism or materialism have improved mankind’s lot; they tend to lead to a rather shallow existence.

3) the Industrial Economy’s ability to create immense wealth by fabricating things, by harnessing physical power to transform raw materials into goods, has run its course. Like the Agrarian Economy before it, it is now merely necessary, it serves as “non-production inputs” into the new economy, which I call the “Knowledge Economy.” In the mid nineteenth century, agricultural production, which had driven the expansion of human societies since the birth of the neolithic revolution, was superceded by the waxing Industrial Economy’s ability to create more value. In the same way, the Industrial Economy has now become a merely a non-production input: necessary but not creating much value. The highest level of human value is now in the Knowledge Economy, which is based on information, human experience and emotion. Overproduction reigns in every industrial sector, leading to commoditization. Industrial products are now largely commodities, and this will remain so.

In the Global Human Capital Journal, i have written hundreds of pages about this shift. 

4) the positive thing about the shift to the Knowledge Economy is that the most value is created by information, not materials. Food and products are needed to live, but they do not represent the highest value add. Materials are zero sum, but knowledge is not. Therefore, the WW IV scenario is one alternative but not the probable one. 

A more useful dialog than the Salon article would deal with the fact that “rich” countries are living far above their means, and how can leaders break the news to their constituents and help them feel good about it? I believe that people will discover than 90% of their consumption was over the top, and they won’t miss far less; a huge portion was keeping up with the joneses and created no real value beyond that. If you would like some references of what I’m talking about, see the Global Human Capital Journal’s twitter feed.

I believe that humanity will be confronted with itself. We will be forced to collaborate or die (or our populations will be significantly reduced). Since the Agrarian Economy began 10,000 years ago, man has adopted an exploitative attitude toward the Earth. To survive, we will have to *collectively* change this attitude. We have unprecedented power to create and destroy, and we will have to work together to survive.

To close, political prattle is part of the problem, it serves as a distractor. The real potential lies in people connecting with each other, increasing transparency, but getting to what’s really important. If you want to anticipate what the 21st century will be like, look at the 19th century, in which the Industrial Economy disrupted European society at all levels. We are headed into a similar level of disruption and change, and current political ideas will also evolve quickly.