Freedom means nothing left to lose? Freedom means the ability to choose for yourself?
The Free Green project is pretty interesting. I'm completely in agreement with their mission: "At FreeGreen we hope to encourage progressive building practices by making green home designs free for everyone." What they're doing is providing free house plans which are 'green' -- meaning energy efficient, healthy materials, etc.
You can download the plans for free and take them directly to a builder to arrange construction. They also sell green building products, offer design services, etc.
"It is very difficult and arduous to create and sustain a democracy - but history shows that closing one down is much simpler. You simply have to be willing to take the 10 steps." The article details 10 steps to turn a free society into a dictatorship. These steps have been taken over and over in countries around the world and have been demonstrated to work. Most recently they were taken following the Coup in Thailand that overthrew the Democracy there.
"The Freedom of Information Act enables the public to obtain information from the federal government to ascertain... "what the government is up to."...a government shrouded in secrecy is not a government by the people and for the people."
It is far less burdensome and costly for federal agencies to post basic and most frequently requested information online than to respond separately to many individual requests for the same information when that information cannot be accessed on agency Web sites.
This is Olbermann commenting on the recent law, the Military Commissions Act, which suspended Habeas Corpus. George W Bush and others lied to us a string of claims, lies, that led to the recent signing of this law which suspends Habeas Corpus and other guarantees. It was sold to us as a way to protect freedoms, but are we free if the government can just lock us up with no just cause, not required to show proof of our existence, etc?
With the recent hubbub over domestic syping by U.S. spy agencies, here's an example that's probably legal.
Spy Agency Watching Americans From Space
The article is about the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.
The revelations of privacy violation by the U.S. Government keeps going on. The latest is news that the NSA has a huge database recording the "envelopes" of most telephone calls made in the U.S. This is following the wiretapping scandal from last year, and I see a lot of hubbub in the news.
NSA has massive database of Americans' phone calls USA Today, May 11, 2006
Anger grows over NSA surveillance report C|NET News, May 11, 2006
In his Huffington Post blog, Cenk Uygur writes about The Shadow Government ... that is, he's claiming that President Bush has declared his administration will ignore over 750 of the laws that have been passed during his tenure in office. And further that we know his administration is ignoring FISA, a law passed long before his tenure in office, which raises the question of how many other laws the administration is ignoring.
Attorney General Gonzales is proposing a mandatory labeling requirement for web sites publishing sexually explicit material. A web site operator not labeling their sexually explicit web site would face imprisonment.
I just listened to an National Public Radio piece that presents one mans concept of utopia. Namely, individuals or small scale organizations working on small scale work projects.
Okay, that's possibly the most alarmist title I could have chosen. But this is what the government is moving to doing.
What's a UAV? Unmanned Air Vehicle, a.k.a. Drone. They are being used widely in Iraq and Afghanistan against "the terrorists". There's pointers to various articles at the end of this. This has been a long time coming, and it clearly fits into the general government strategy to install broad surveillance.
My first thought is -- the C|NET and AOPA articles (linked below) are only looking at regulatory issues. One example is a tiny surveillance aircraft, that weighs all of 14 pounds, and was used to buzz a couple biker rallies in North Carolina. A point in one of the articles is that an airplane hitting a bird causes a lot of damage to the aircraft (and kills the bird), so what would this thing, at 14 lbs weighing much more than the typical bird, do to an aircraft? These things don't carry transponders, so how are pilots going to detect them and avoid running into them? They are unmanned, and so won't have an in-built ability to avoid other aircraft.
