Tweet of the Day: Comparing Gollum with Politicians is a No-No

A Turkish doctor reportedly lost his job and face trial for comparing the Turkish leadership with 'Lord of the Rings' fictional character Gollum 

Image above and quote below from the New York Times:

A Turkish man’s freedom may hang on a question put to a panel of “Lord of the Rings” experts: Is Gollum evil?

More significantly, was it an insult to compare Turkey’s president to the slimy, bug-eyed creature from the films based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s trilogy?

A physician, Dr. Bilgin Ciftci, is accused of sharing a meme that juxtaposes Gollum, as played by Andy Serkis (and advanced digital effects), with Recep Tayyip Erdogan in several situations: while laughing, while surprised, while eating. Insulting the president is a crime under Turkish law.

The punishments were swift. Dr. Ciftci lost his job with the Public Health Institution of Turkey after sharing the meme, and he faces a two-year prison sentence, the Turkish newspaper Today’s Zaman reported. After a judge said he did not know enough about the Tolkien creature to make an appropriate decision, five experts were ordered to conduct an investigation into Gollum’s moral character before the next phase of the trial begins in February.

The French Government Uses Free Speech as Pretext to Suppress Free Speech

At the Ron Paul Institute, Daniel McAdams comments that the French government has used the Charlie Hebdo incident as a convenient excuse to crack down on Free speech (“After Free Speech Rally, France Cracks Down on Free Speech”)

Well that didn't take long. Just three days after the French government hosted dozens of foreign leaders in a "unity rally" to defend free speech in the wake of last week's shooting at the Charlie Hebdo magazine, France has begun arresting its citizens for actually exercising free speech.

According to news reports, more than 50 French citizens were arrested today and charged with offensive speech — the same kind of speech that was the trademark of of the Charlie Hebdo publication. 

None of those arrested were charged with links to terrorism or any real crime. Instead, they are facing up to seven years in prison for making statements the French authorities claim are supportive of the shootings or are anti-Semitic.

New directives from the French Justice Ministry provided the legal basis for arresting those deemed "supportive" of the attacks or who express anti-Semitic or racist sentiment. Anti-Muslim sentiment was not included in the government's new arrest orders, despite a dramatic spike in actual attacks on French Muslims since the shootings. The justice ministry claimed the new anti-speech measures were necessary to protect freedom of expression.

Among those arrested is controversial French comedian Dieudonné M’bala M’bala, charged with being "an apologist for terrorism" and facing jail time over a Facebook post making fun of Sunday's "unity rally." Exercising free speech by making fun of the French government as it celebrates free speech is apparently a crime.

The French government has long banned Dieudonné's comedy performances over his controversial jokes, even as French authorities celebrate Charlie Hebdo's controversial jokes.

Those arrested for exercising free speech in France will be charged under "special measures" put into place after the shooting, which provide for immediate sentencing of the accused. Some 130,000 military and security forces have been deployed on the streets of France and ordered to keep a particular eye on incidents that could bring violence against the police.

Unreported in the US, Charlie Hebdo has long ties with the French Communist Party and after the shooting has moved its headquarters to the offices of Libération, a French newspaper with roots in the Communist Party-inspired unrest of May, 1968. One of most famous Charlie Hebdo cartoonists,Stéphane Charbonnier ("Charb"), was a long-time member of the French Communist Party. Currently the newspaper is considered "left wing" and is controlled by Edouard de Rothschild of the international banking family, which should provide some additional fodder for the conspiracy-minded.

France and Europe chokes under the noxious cloud of hypocrisy.

Judge Andrew Napolitano at the LewRockwell.com sees the same (bold mine)

The French government has prohibited speech it considers to be hateful and even made it criminal. When the predecessor magazine to Charlie Hebdo once mocked the death of Charles de Gaulle, the French government shut it down — permanently.

The theory of anti-hate speech laws is that hate speech often leads to violence, and violence demands police and thus the expenditure of public resources, and so the government can make it illegal to spout hatred in order to conserve its resources. This attitude presumes, as Wilson did when he prosecuted folks for publicly singing German songs during World War I, that the government is the origin of free speech and can lawfully limit the speech it hates and fears. It also presumes that all ideas are equal, and none is worthy of hatred.

When the massacres occurred last week in Paris, all three of the murderers knew that the police would be unarmed and so would be their victims. It was as if they were shooting fish in a barrel. Why is that? The answer lies in the same mentality that believes it can eradicate hate by regulating speech. That mentality demands that government have a monopoly on violence, even violence against evil.

So, to those who embrace this dreadful theory, the great loss in Paris last week was not human life, which is a gift from God; it was free speech, which is a gift from the state. Hence the French government, which seems not to care about innocent life, instead of addressing these massacres as crimes against innocent people, proclaimed the massacres crimes against the freedom of speech. Would the French government have reacted similarly if the murderers had killed workers at an ammunition factory, instead of at a satirical magazine?

And how hypocritical was it of the French government to claim it defends free speech! In France, you can go to jail if you publicly express hatred for a group whose members may be defined generally by characteristics of birth, such as gender, age, race, place of origin or religion.

You can also go to jail for using speech to defy the government. This past weekend, millions of folks in France wore buttons and headbands that proclaimed in French: “I am Charlie Hebdo.” Those whose buttons proclaimed “I am not Charlie Hebdo” were asked by the police to remove them. Those who wore buttons that proclaimed, either satirically or hatefully, “I am Kouachi” were arrested. Arrested for speech at a march in support of free speech? Yes.

What’s going on here? What’s going on in France, and what might be the future in America, is the government defending the speech with which it agrees and punishing the speech with which it disagrees. What’s going on is the assault by some in radical Islam not on speech, but on vulnerable innocents in their everyday lives in order to intimidate their governments. What’s going on is the deployment of 90,000 French troops to catch and kill three murderers because the government does not trust the local police to use guns to keep the streets safe or private persons to use guns to defend their own lives.

Meanwhile former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal Paul Craig Roberts deems that the unfortunate Charlie Hebdo incident was instead a false flag

The Information Age and the Philippine Cybercrime Law

Amidst fiery protest by many Philippine cyberspace users, the newly enacted Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012 RA 10175 took effect today (BBC). 

So far, according to Freedom House in 2012 the Philippines ranks 6th in the world in internet freedom.

I am pretty sure that the law will diminish the current state of internet freedom, regardless of the excuses given by politicians, and regardless of the relative standings of internet freedom in the world overtime. Although I expect some of the current activities to shift to the informal cyberspace.

Just read all the clauses containing the term “misleading” as punishable by law to understand the law’s arbitrariness. This simply means legalistic vagueness could be used to harass political opposition or anyone on the whims of the politicos.

As of this writing the government website hosting RA 10175 is down. This could be because of heavy traffic or could be down due to protest activities undertaken by hacktivists (Examiner)

As a side note, I am also quite delighted to see the passionate responses even by statists against internet censorship. It’s a bizarre world though, when curtailment of freedom involves them, the statists balk, resist and join the commotion, but when curtailment is applied only to others they cheer.

Nevertheless, here are the top 10 Countries who censor the internet most.

From 24/7 Wall Street based on Freedom House's ranking of internet freedom

1. Iran

2. Cuba

3. China

4. Syria

5. Uzbekistan

6. Ethiopia

7. Myanmar

8. Vietnam

9. Bahrain

10. Saudi Arabia

The next list is from the Committee to Protect Journalists 

The growing crusade by governments against the internet or internet censorship should be expected and constitutes resistance to change as forces of decentralization (internet) and centralization (governments) have been on a head-on collision course.

This essentially represents part of the volatile and turbulent transition process towards the deepening of the information age.

The lists of the 10 countries who apply internet censorship most reveals that despite governments’ acts to suppress free expression, the freedom of internet expression still thrives, albeit underground.

To give some examples

-China’s shadow or informal social media users continue to swell despite the government’s prohibition.

-Cuba’s repressive government has repeatedly failed to stop domestic political activist blogger who became an international sensation Yoani Maria Sánchez Cordero.

-There is the ongoing harassment against Wikileaks through  founder Julian Assange and the war against eponymous group Anonymous (who ironically appears to have taken up the cudgels of domestic cyber activists) for exposing on government malfeasances.

-Also the Iranian government’s attempt to convert her cyberspace into a national intranet has dramatically backfired where Iran’s government has been forced to retreat.

From Gizmodo,

After seriously flipping out, cutting of Iranian access to Google and basically herding all its citizens into a tiny little government-approved intra-net pen, the Iranian government has softened its Internet ban just a little bit and restored access to Gmail.

Though the outcry against censoring the Internet at large was loud, the backlash against cutting users off from Google services such as Gmail was particularly strong. Many Iranians (reportedly around half) resorted to using VPNs to get outside of the the intra-net bubble, creating millions of dollars in profit for local VPN firms. Even government officials railed against the lack of Gmail, and complained that local clients just weren't up to snuff.

Given that the penetration rate of internet users in the Philippines is nearly at 30% of the population (internetworldstats.com), from which the bulk comes from the elite and the middle class, it would not be surprising if a sustained uproar would end up with a political ‘compromise’ ala Iran.

Bottom line: Global governments including the Philippines will continue to do everything to try to control and regulate the flow of information in order to preserve the status quo. However and unfortunately for them, the free market in the internet, people’s newfound fondness with connectivity and the knowledge revolution will give them quite a challenge.

Yet there is no stopping the march towards the information age.

Bloomberg Censored in China

China’s authoritarian tendencies can still be seen from her continuing censorship of Bloomberg which seems in retaliation for the latter’s recent exposure of the China’s crony capitalist political economy.

Notes the CNN/Financial Times

Bloomberg's news website remains blocked by China's state censors a full month after it detailed the riches amassed by the family of Xi Jinping, the man who is expected to be the country's next president.

Although periodic outages of foreign media websites in China are common, the month-long total blackout of Bloomberg is an unusually harsh response, highlighting the extent to which its coverage angered the government.

Beijing has tried to apply pressure in other ways, too. In the weeks since the article was published, people believed to be state security agents have tailed some Bloomberg employees; Chinese bankers and financial regulators have cancelled previously arranged meetings with Matthew Winkler, Bloomberg's editor-in-chief; and Chinese investigators have visited local investment banks to see if they shared any information with Bloomberg, according to people with knowledge of these incidents…

In the report published on June 29, Bloomberg used publicly available records to show that Mr Xi's extended family had investments in companies with total assets of $376m; an 18 per cent indirect stake in a rare earths company with $1.73bn in assets; a $20.2m holding in a publicly traded technology company; a luxury villa in Hong Kong worth about $31.5m and at least six other Hong Kong properties worth a combined $24.1m.

Bloomberg was unable to trace any assets to Mr Xi himself, or to his wife or daughter. There was also no evidence of any wrongdoing by Mr Xi or his family.

Nevertheless, the report was seen as embarrassing for Mr Xi, threatening to undermine his image as a clean official in a country rife with corruption just months before he is set to succeed Hu Jintao as president in a once-in-a-decade leadership transition…

No other English-language mainstream media website has been blocked in China for longer than a few days since the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Censors now target specific articles or disrupt access to sites at politically sensitive times such as when dissident Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010.

This just goes to show why the Panglossian view of China’s future seems unwarranted.

China’s fate will ultimately depend on how political trends evolve (Will China revert to socialism or statism or a closed economy? Or will China embrace deeper liberalization?).

This cannot be interpreted merely from past performance. The above may also be symptoms of the strains from ongoing political deadlock and from economic slowdown (or bubble bust?).

For now China’s bubbles from previous Keynesian quasi boom bust policies will have to be addressed.

So far, the Shanghai Composite index keeps plumbing to new depths.

War on the Internet: 377 Words to use for Uncle Sam to Watch You

Free speech undermines the power of centralized government. So governments will make any excuses to work on repressing free speech.

One way is to make everyone a suspect for politically mandated illegitimate activities as ‘drugs’ or ‘terror’. This by monitoring so called ‘suspicious’ activities, a.k.a. spying. And naturally, where people congregate to share or exchange information, now becomes the hotbed for government intelligence.

A list of 377 sensitive words that you use may trigger Uncle Sam’s monitoring of you.

From Simon Black of Sovereign Man

After vigorous resistance, the Department of Homeland Security was finally forced into releasing it’s 2011 Analyst’s Desktop Binder. It’s a manual of sorts, teaching all the storm troopers who monitor our Internet activity all day which key words to look for.

Facebook, a.k.a. the US government’s domestic intelligence center, is the primary target for this monitoring… though it’s become clear so many times before that various departments, including the NSA and FBI, are monitoring online activity ranging from search terms to emails.

Domestic spying is typically denied in public and swept under the rug. After all, it’s legality has always been questionable… if not entirely Unconstitutional.

Yet month after month it seems, there is new legislation introduced to deprive Internet users of their privacy and make the open collection of data a natural part of the online landscape.

Homeland Security’s key word ‘hotlist’ is really no surprise… they’re just the ones to get caught.

So now we know, at least, what these goons are looking for. Sort of.

According to the manual, DHS breaks down its monitoring into a whopping 14 categories ranging from Health to Fire to Terrorism. It’s a testament to how bloated the department’s scope has become.

Afterwards there is a list of 377 of key terms to monitor, most of which are completely innocuous. Exercise. Cloud. Leak. Sick. Organization. Pork. Bridge. Smart. Tucson. Target. China. Social media.

Curiously, in its ‘Critical Information Requirements’, the manual decrees that analysts should also catalog items which may “reflect adversely on DHS and response activities.”

Absolutely unreal. Big Brother is not just watching. He’s digging, searching, reading, monitoring, archiving, and judging too.

The list of the 377 sensitive words here

Politicization of the Entertainment Industry

While I am glad to see that the quality of singing artists seems to have immensely improved from participants around the world including the Philippines, it is sad to see that a recently concluded international popular singing contest seem to have been reduced to a specter of voting for nationalism. Such social signaling has dismayingly been ventilated all over social media.

Yet logic says that if the victor of such singing contest would be determined by such a manner of selection, instead of skills, then the winner would likely hail from the country that has MORE population, all things equal. And I guess that this has been the outcome. [Updated to add: the show's title itself and contestant eligibility rules limits participants to residents of the country where the show is held]

It’s even bleaker to see how political correctness has pervaded the local entertainment industry such that holier than thou groups seek out edicts or legislation through coercive government machinery to attempt to repress on the freedom of religion and of the freedom of speech-expression of the others. Yet such senseless protests over moralism also triggered exasperating traffics.

This just shows how politics has been dumbing down the public and how politics have turned away many people’s attention from productive activities towards unproductive and even confrontational groupthink fallacies or “us against them” mindset.

Argentina’s Road to Serfdom: Book Import Bans

From Cato’s Juan Carlos Hidalgo,

The Argentine government has severely restricted the importation of books due to “human health concerns” [in Spanish]. That’s right. According to the government, it can be dangerous to “page through” a book that has high lead quantities in its ink. “If you put you finger in your mouth after paging through a book, that can be dangerous,” said Juan Carlos Sacco, the vice-president of an industrialist organization that supports the measure.

The government claims that this is not a ban. However, since each buyer has to demonstrate at the airport’s customs office that the ink in the purchased book has lead quantities no higher than 0.006% in its chemical composition, the result is that all book imports into the country are stalled.

The measure has a lot to do with the increasing efforts of the Argentine government to stop the flight of dollars out of the country. Capital flight in 2011 reached $21.5 billion, and it accelerated after the reelection of Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner in October. Facing increasing fiscal pressures, and after seizing private pension funds and raiding the Central Bank’s reserves, many people expect the government to go after their bank savings.

The government has reacted with increasingly ridiculous measures. Sniffing dogs are being deployed at airports and border check points to detect the ink used to print U.S. bills, so Argentines cannot take out of the country more than $10,000 without declaring it to the government. The Fernandez administration is also requiring major importers such as automakers to match the price of their imports with that of goods they must now export. As a result, Porsche is exporting Malbec wine and Mitsubishi is now selling peanuts.

Desperate governments will resort to any measures to advance their interests. And to stem capital flight from the private sector in reaction to their spendthrift ways, the Kirchner government now attempts to curtail freedom of speech through policies that promotes ignorance and illiteracy. Talk about ‘noble intentions’.

And of course, part of these mind control measures, imposed through propaganda and censorship, has been for the President of Argentina’s central bank to declare that printing money does not lead to inflation, as well as, to ban the private sector from making public estimates of statistical inflation which went against the government’s data.

As Benjamin Franklin once said,

A nation of well-informed men who have been taught to know and prize the rights which God has given them cannot be enslaved. It is in the religion of ignorance that tyranny begins.

Any government cannot simply wish away the laws of scarcity, which in fullness of time will be vented over the marketplace and eventually would incite a tempestuous political response.

Argentinians have yet to slough off their tolerance for despots which has brought about a cycle of political and economic crisis since the 20th century (as previously discussed here)

Japan’s Speech-jamming gun and Censorship

From My Fox Orlando, (hat tip Bob Wenzel)

Japanese researchers have invented a speech-jamming gadget that painlessly forces people into silence.

Kazutaka Kurihara of the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, and Koji Tsukada of Ochanomizu University, developed a portable "SpeechJammer" gun that can silence people more than 30 meters away.

The device works by recording its target's speech then firing their words back at them with a 0.2-second delay, which affects the brain's cognitive processes and causes speakers to stutter before silencing them completely.

Describing the device in their research paper, Kurihara and Tsukada wrote, "In general, human speech is jammed by giving back to the speakers their own utterances at a delay of a few hundred milliseconds. This effect can disturb people without any physical discomfort, and disappears immediately by stopping speaking."

Question is who benefits from this invention, will it be the public or political authorities? Since National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology is a public research institution and Ochanomizu University is a public national university for women, round 1 goes to the politicians.

World Press Freedom Rankings: Philippines 140th

Reporters without borders recently released the Press Freedom index.

The press release goes…

This year’s index sees many changes in the rankings, changes that reflect a year that was incredibly rich in developments, especially in the Arab world,” Reporters Without Borders said today as it released its 10th annual press freedom index. “Many media paid dearly for their coverage of democratic aspirations or opposition movements. Control of news and information continued to tempt governments and to be a question of survival for totalitarian and repressive regimes. The past year also highlighted the leading role played by netizens in producing and disseminating news.

Crackdown was the word of the year in 2011. Never has freedom of information been so closely associated with democracy. Never have journalists, through their reporting, vexed the enemies of freedom so much. Never have acts of censorship and physical attacks on journalists seemed so numerous. The equation is simple: the absence or suppression of civil liberties leads necessarily to the suppression of media freedom. Dictatorships fear and ban information, especially when it may undermine them.

It is no surprise that the same trio of countries, Eritrea, Turkmenistan and North Korea, absolute dictatorships that permit no civil liberties, again occupy the last three places in the index. This year, they are immediately preceded at the bottom by Syria, Iran and China, three countries that seem to have lost contact with reality as they have been sucked into an insane spiral of terror, and by Bahrain and Vietnam, quintessential oppressive regimes. Other countries such as Uganda and Belarus have also become much more repressive.

This year’s index finds the same group of countries at its head, countries such as Finland, Norway and Netherlands that respect basic freedoms. This serves as a reminder that media independence can only be maintained in strong democracies and that democracy needs media freedom. It is worth noting the entry of Cape Verde and Namibia into the top twenty, two African countries where no attempts to obstruct the media were reported in 2011.

Read the rest here. I didn’t read through the entire report though as to how the press freedom is treated or measured in terms of the cyberspace or the netizens.

But in many instance where many (in the local community) seem to believe that there has been much press freedom in the Philippines, the rankings (140th out of 179) would give them a disappointment.

Press freedom represents an indispensable or sine qua non element for civil liberties, a representative government, and especially, for market economies (economic freedom or capitalism)

As the great Ludwig von Mises explains,

A free press can exist only where there is private control of the means of production. In a socialist commonwealth, where all publication facilities and printing presses are owned and operated by the government, there cannot be any question of a free press. The government alone determines who should have the time and opportunity to write and what should be printed and published. Compared with the conditions prevailing in Soviet Russia, even Tsarist Russia, retrospectively, looks like a country of a free press. When the Nazis performed their notorious book auto-da-fes, they exactly conformed to the designs of one of the great socialist authors, Cabet.

As all nations are moving toward socialism, the freedom of authors is vanishing step by step. From day to day it becomes more difficult for a man to publish a book or an article, the content of which displeases the government or powerful pressure groups. The heretics are not yet "liquidated" as in Russia nor are their books burned by order of the Inquisition. Neither is there a return to the old system of censorship. The self-styled progressives have more efficient weapons at their disposal. Their foremost tool of oppression is boycotting authors, editors, publishers, booksellers, printers, advertisers, and readers.

Video: What's Wrong with Internet Censorship

Cato's Julian Sanchez explains what is wrong with internet censorship

From Cato:

Internet censorship is not the answer to problems of piracy online. Cato Institute research fellow Julian Sanchez explains that internet censorship won't effectively address the problem of piracy and will threaten innovation and the liberties of Americans by engaging in unconstitutional prior restraint.

By the way, after a furious backlash, bi partisan legislators are reportedly backing off from supporting the bill.

War on the Internet: Freedom Wins Round One

Writes Mac Slavo

Amid significant pressure from tens of thousands of internet users and major web behemoths like Google, Facebook, and Reddit, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is, in its current form, Dead on Arrival:

“Misguided efforts to combat online privacy have been threatening to stifle innovation, suppress free speech, and even, in some cases, undermine national security. As of yesterday, though, there’s a lot less to worry about.

“The first sign that the bills’ prospects were dwindling came Friday, when SOPA sponsors agreed to drop a key provision that would have required service providers to block access to international sites accused of piracy.

“The legislation ran into an even more significant problem yesterday when the White House announced its opposition to the bills. Though the administration’s chief technology officials officials acknowledged the problem of online privacy, the White House statement presented a fairly detailed critique of the measures and concluded, “We will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet.” It added that any proposed legislation “must not tamper with the technical architecture of the Internet.”

…

“Though the administration did issue a formal veto threat, the White House’s opposition signaled the end of these bills, at least in their current form.

“A few hours later, Congress shelved SOPA, putting off action on the bill indefinitely.

“Sourced From Washington Monthly via The Daily Sheeple

Sponsored primarily by purported free speech advocates that include democrats and republicans alike, the SOPA would have fundamentally transformed the internet as we know it today. As Daisy Luther writes at Inalienably Yours, the bill was nothing short of a direct attack against the first Amendment and the right to free speech:

“On closer inspection, the legalese in the bill has the potential to eviscerate free speech….and like NDAA, without proof…only with suspicion of “wrong-doing”. It’s all about copyright infringement. If you tick off the powers that be, and you’ve quoted someone, somewhere, saying something, you may have infringed on their copyright. As a defendant, you are not even present at the legal proceeding allowing “them” to shut you down until you prove yourself innocent.

“How do they shut you down? Search engines are required to remove you from their listings. Internet Service Providers can be ordered to block access to your site. Advertising networks and payment providers can also be forced to cease doing business with you. This continues until you are proven INNOCENT. Wait – I thought it was innocent until proven guilty….oh….that was “before” the NDAA.

Source: The Internet: The Last Bastion of Free Speech

While this bill of goods was being sold to the American public as a way to reduce online piracy originating on foreign shores, in essence the legislation would have made it possible for any organization (with the financial assets and access to attorneys to do so) to target web sites (foreign or domestic) using excerpts, quotes, and videos without express permission of the authors or producers of such content. Furthermore, any web site linking to suspected copyrighted content would be guilty by association for fascilitating the infringement.

Read the rest here

In the growing realization that political power is being frayed by the ongoing information age revolution or the democratization of knowledge, the 20^th century welfare and warfare state will use anything, like Intellectual Property and copyright arguments, as pretext to rein control over the internet. Earlier they argued that the cyberspace can pose a threat to national security.

Today, Wikipedia and other websites has shut down to express their opposition to proposals over censorship masquerading as ‘foreign Internet Piracy’.

The above is just one of the other being actions undertaken such as Spying of Email and the harassment of Wikileaks

As I previously wrote

These actions represent “resistance to change”, whereby politicians will try to enforce information control or censorship in the way the industrial age used to operate.

The horizontal flow of information threatens the institutional centralized frameworks built upon the industrial age economy.

As I earlier wrote,

“Political and economic ideology latched on a vertical top-bottom flow of power will be on a collision course with horizontal real time flow of democratized knowledge.

“This would likely result to less applicability of ideologies based on centralization, which could substantially erode its support base and shift political capital to decentralized structure of political governance that would conform with the horizontal structure of information flows.

“People will know more therefore control from the top will be less an appealing idea.

But again these attempts to regulate the web are likely to fail.

Nevertheless the war on the internet accounts as part of the adjustment process away from the command and control structure of the industrial ages with the knowledge revolution taking place beyond the reach of politicians. Besides, technological advances will work around regulations.

Signifying the foundation of knowledge, the internet will serve as THE battleground between socialism and free markets, and this will be just one of the many series of skirmishes that are destined to occur. And as previously noted, many internet activists have already been preparing for the worst scenario.

Indexed’s Jessica Hagy has a nice graphical depiction of the ongoing war, which she calls: Dark Ages II: in discussion now!

Indeed, the left and vested interest groups wants us to remain in the Dark ages and as their serfs.

Paul Krugman’s Positive Take on the Blogsphere

I have been saying that the information or digital age has been changing the way information flows or has been democratizing knowledge.

Writes Paul Krugman (Hat tip Bob Wenzel) [bold emphasis mine]

What the blogs have done, in a way, is open up that process. Twenty years ago it was possible and even normal to get research into circulation and have everyone talking about it without having gone through the refereeing process – but you had to be part of a certain circle, and basically had to have graduated from a prestigious department, to be part of that game. Now you can break in from anywhere; although there’s still at any given time a sort of magic circle that’s hard to get into, it’s less formal and less defined by where you sit or where you went to school.

Since there’s some kind of conservation principle here, the fact that it’s easier for people with less formal credentials to get heard means that people who have those credentials are less guaranteed of respectful treatment. So yes, we’ve seen some famous names run into firestorms of criticism — *justified* criticism – even as some “nobodies” become players. That’s a good thing! Famous economists have been saying foolish things forever; now they get called on it.

And this process has showed what things are really like. If some famous economists seem to be showing themselves intellectually naked, it’s not really a change in their wardrobe, it’s the fact that it’s easier than it used to be for little boys to get a word in.

As you can see, I think this is all positive. The econoblogosphere makes it a lot harder for economists to shout down other people by pulling rank — although some of them still try — but that’s a good thing.

Mr. Krugman doesn’t say it directly, but the econoblogsphere has been functioning as self-regulating free market of economic opinions or ideas and this is a development to cheer about.

Should Doomsayers Be Censored?

It had been a calculation error says the California preacher, thus doomsday will be reset on October 21. Booooo!

Reports the Yahoo, (bold highlights mine)

A California preacher who foretold of the world's end only to see the appointed day pass with no extraordinarily cataclysmic event has revised his apocalyptic prophecy, saying he was off by five months and the Earth actually will be obliterated on Oct. 21.

Harold Camping, who predicted that 200 million Christians would be taken to heaven Saturday before catastrophe struck the planet, apologized Monday evening for not having the dates "worked out as accurately as I could have."

He spoke to the media at the Oakland headquarters of his Family Radio International, which spent millions of dollars_ some of it from donations made by followers — on more than 5,000 billboards and 20 RVs plastered with the Judgment Day message.

It was not the first time Camping was forced to explain when his prediction didn't come to pass. The 89-year-old retired civil engineer also prophesied the Apocalypse would come in 1994, but said later that didn't happen then because of a mathematical error.

Not only has the events proven him wrong, but the preacher even admits to it: econometrics has failed him as I predicted. Yet he continues to apply the same methodology.

But I hear some people clamor that government has to “act” on Mr. Camping’s doom mongering.

Should the US government apply censorship on Mr. Camping?

Does it mean that we should rely on his poor track record to use force against what we may perceive as wrong predictions or ideas we don’t agree with?

But what if he will be correct and October will indeed account for as doomsday? Remember Aesop’s famed fable, The Boy who cried Wolf?

I am not saying that I agree with or believe in him. I think his overdependence on math camouflaged by religious creeds will continue to lead his predictions astray. But I could be wrong.

But there are two important points here:

-he is selling an idea of what he purportedly believes in and

-two we don’t know the future.

On the issue of selling ideas, marketing guru Seth Godin has a terrific commentary on the possible lessons gleaned from the recent apocalyptic prophesy.

Mr. Godin writes, (italics original)

Sell a story that some people want to believe. In fact, sell a story they already believe…

Not everyone wants to believe in the end of the world, but some people (fortunately, just a few) really do. To reach them, you don't need much of a hard sell at all.

In other words, many of those who listen to Mr. Camping’s prophesies could be people who already believed in them or that Mr. Camping merely personifies the belief of an extant segment of captive audiences. That's why he gets donations.

If Mr. Camping’s followers represent as zealots of doom, can we legislate away beliefs or faiths? Are we supposed to prevent the expression of ideas that doesn’t mesh with ours?

Besides, who should decide whose ideas are accurate anyway, the President? If governments have been shown as unable to sufficiently resolve social problems, then why should we expect them to know the substance of information which signifies relevance for us and what are not? Have you ever heard of propaganda or indoctrination-false information deliberately spread as truths for political ends?

This shows of the assumptions that government have superior knowledge accounts for as fatal conceit-the fallacious presumption of omniscience.

As US playwright and Nobel awardee Eugene Gladstone O'Neill said,

Censorship of anything, at any time, in any place, on whatever pretense, has always been and will always be the last resort of the boob and the bigot

Second is the issue of uncertainty.

All of us speculate about the future, that’s because we don’t know exactly how things will turnout. That’s why markets are there. And that’s why money exists. And that’s why people use mathematics, such as statistics, in the perpetual attempt to “smooth out” risks and uncertainties.

True, some issues are more predictable than the others, but again that’s why markets exist—to allocate resources according to one’s perception of time variant needs (satisfying one’s unease, e.g. some people see the need of believing in doomsdays).

As Professor Art Carden writes

People with strong beliefs should be willing to put their money where their mouths are. The late Julian Simon was a master of this. Superior knowledge and insight can be turned into profitable opportunities. My personal property no longer has value to me after the Rapture, but it might have value to someone else. If I knew the precise date of the end of the world, I would sell everything in the months leading up to it and use the resources to spread the word, as some of Camping’s followers have apparently done.

If I were pretty sure the Rapture might happen sometime over the next 40 years, I should be able to make a deal with someone who disagrees but who would be willing to pay me now in exchange for title to my property after the Rapture. I could then use the resources to spread my message. I got no takers on my offer of $1000 for all of one apparently Camping-affiliated group’s earthly belongings I made after I first learned about the claim that Judgment Day would happen on 5/21/2011.

Harold Camping isn’t the only discredited doomsday prophet among us. As I’ve followed this, I’ve wondered what percentage of the people who laugh at Camping and his misled followers nonetheless nod sagely, furrow their brows, and reach for their checkbooks whenever professional doomsayers in the environmental movement like Lester Brown and Paul Ehrlich warn of overpopulation, the end of oil, and the end of prosperity in spite of track records littered with doomsday predictions that failed to come true.

Indeed, beliefs can be parlayed into profit opportunities. We can profit from someone else’s mistakes, so why apply censorship?

This is like investing the stock market where wrong analysis or flawed theories or inaccurate information can lead to losses. So given the logic of advocates of censorship should we effectively ban losers (applied not only to stockmarkets but to all markets)? Or should we also apply censorship on newsletters fund managers and analysts whose prediction of the markets have been inaccurate?

What people say and do are frequently detached. Did global economic activities stop prior to May 21^st in anticipation of the rapture? Did you sell or give away your assets because of this?

If not, then the obviously you were not affected, because you didn’t believe, you were a skeptic. This is called demonstrated preference. Because the world didn’t fall into a stasis, most people around the world simply ignored such cataclysmic prophesy.

Only media likes to drum up on sensational issues because they profit from them. Fear draws attention. Yet shooting the messenger won’t eradicate the message. So censorship would signify as a fool’s errand.

At the end of the day, the issue of Judgment day will be one decided by your and my personal disposition and not by the government. Unless you honestly believe that governments can stop doomsday [har har har].

Finally, it would be an issue of legal fraudulence if modern day Cassandras engage in purposeful misrepresentation or deception to profit from prophesies of Armageddon.

But that would mean personal issues of those who felt affected or victimized, whose recourse should be channeled through the courts of law.

I close this anti-censorship ‘freedom of speech’ rant with this prominent quote which has been frequently (mis) attributed to Voltaire (but according to Wikipedia is from Evelyn Beatrice Hall who wrote “under the pseudonym of Stephen G Tallentyre in The Friends of Voltaire (1906), as a summation of Voltaire's beliefs on freedom of thought and expression)

I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

Egyptian Revolt: Web Censorship Fails

Learning from the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia, the Egyptian government swiftly severed web connections.

But this hasn’t prevented Egyptian malcontents from going around recently imposed government controls.

From the computerworld.com, (bold highlights mine)

"When countries block, we evolve," an activist with the group We Rebuild wrote in a Twitter message Friday.

That's just what many Egyptians have been doing this week, as groups like We Rebuild scramble to keep the country connected to the outside world, turning to landline telephones, fax machines and even ham radio to keep information flowing in and out of the country.

Although one Internet service provider -- Noor Group -- remains in operation, Egypt's government abruptly ordered the rest of the country's ISPs to shut down their services just after midnight local time Thursday. Mobile networks have also been turned off in some areas. The blackout appears designed to disrupt organization of the country's growing protest movement, which is calling for the ouster of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

"[B]asically, there are three ways of getting information out right now -- get access to the Noor ISP (which has about 8 percent of the market), use a land line to call someone, or use dial-up," Jillian York, a researcher with the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, said via e-mail.

Egyptians with dial-up modems get no Internet connection when they call into their local ISP, but calling an international number to reach a modem in another country gives them a connection to the outside world.

Centralization under fire.

Asia Leads In Web Connectivity

Asia is the largest and the fastest growing region in terms of web connectivity.

That's according to the stats from comScore as shown below

(all bold highlights mine)

``In September 2009, the Internet population in the Asia-Pacific region reached 484 million visitors age 15+ that accessed the Internet from a home or work location, an increase of 22 percent from the previous year. With nearly half a billion people online, the region now accounts for 41 percent of the total 1.2 billion person global Internet audience. China, home to the largest Internet population in the world, experienced a 31-percent increase to 220.8 million, making it the fastest-growing Internet country in the region. Japan saw its online population surge 18 percent to 68.3 million, while India climbed 17 percent to 35.8 million users. "

Here is the breakdown of the growth stats of each country...

Again from comScore,

“Asia is not only home to the largest Internet population in the world, but it is also one of the fast-growing,” said Will Hodgman, comScore executive vice president for the Asia-Pacific region. “With most markets in the region experiencing double-digit growth, marketers and advertisers have the opportunity to capitalize on the potential of the online channel to reach and engage a surging number of people engaging in a variety of consumer activities online, including reading content, watching video, playing online games, engaging with brands, conducting financial transactions and making online purchases.”

To access the comScore presentation here

Let me add that web connectivity will likely enhance productivity growth and market pricing efficiency via ease of access to information thereby reducing communication, research and transaction costs.

In addition, web connectivity is likely a source of friction or can serve as deterrent against pervasive government intervention by virtue of free or liberal access to information.

With reduced government intervention web connectivity is likely to power more trade among nations.