God Control

By Capt. Fogg


I've said quite a bit about gun control; pretty much all I'm going to say, actually. There is something far more pernicious, more dangerous and more in need of control however and that's God. It's hard to deny although that doesn't prevent most people from denying it, God has been on the wrong side of things as often as the right side: slavery, conquest, persecutions, genocide. You name it; God has been the universal justification as often as the universal opponent.

So it isn't surprising that God now seems to be against Net Neutrality. Sure he is -- and our founding fathers who don't seem to have believed in the kind of god who gets involved in such matters as free markets thought so too. That's the thing about God's likes and dislikes and mysterious plans: people just make them up as they go along.

Take David Barton, for instance, allegedly one of the country's most influential Evangelicals. He thinks that government should stay out of the lives of selected people and should, in the name of freedom and less intrusive government, regulate the most private and personal consensual sexual behavior. That's nothing new, of course, but it may surprise you that according to the Gospel as invented by Barton, God hates net neutrality and wants the internet dominated by the powerful and rich. God and the Puritans brought us prosperity because we're not socialists. The rest of the world got their prosperity from the Devil apparently and Jesus was just joking about rich men and heaven. How can we question that?

God wills it -- just like God willed the Crusades and the extermination of European Jews: just like he willed the divine right of kings and the right of the Church to approve their power. He demanded a secular Democracy in the Colonies, some of them, while simultaneously mandating the power of George III, Rex Dei Gratia.

Face it, it's long since been far out of hand and the will of god has become indistinguishable from the background noise of commerce. Did God have an interest in boosting tobacco sales. He obviously, if we're to believe this radio troll, has an interest in the rights of corporations which exceeds his concern for the poor. Does God like free markets, or does he like kings? Does the Bible speak against Net Neutrality or call it Socialism. Does God hate Socialism or does he like you to share everything you have with the poor and sick? Depends on who you ask and of course I won't be asking the Religious right who I can't tell from the Religious wrong of late.

One thing our constitution does uphold, is the free exercise of religion, so lunatics and tyrants and even evil men like Barton get to rave on unmolested. The government can't really exercise God control and more than God can control the evil spewed out by Barton's forked tongue. It's up to me and you to be aware that whether or not it was God, Guns and Guts that made America "great" those things will serve any master with equal ferocity. Mention God and nobody can shut you up, nobody can really contradict you and millions will follow you through the gates of hell, raging and bellowing, cheering and jeering like the lost souls we are.

Net Neutrality and you

If you're reading this, you most likely have an interest in the future of the Internet and concern with the ownership thereof. Most of us assume it belongs to us, the way we once assumed the ' air waves' belonged to us -- just like the air itself. The electromagnetic spectrum now largely belongs to those who make a profit from it and the Internet may well follow suit. The phone and cable companies would certainly like to regulate what you may or may not get on line and how fast you get it as well as how much you'll have to pay.

What's at stake for them is the ability to sell you "premium" services over dedicated networks and to be able to "prioritize" or discriminate between traffic that takes up bandwidth and traffic they can make a buck on. Of course it's much more complex than this, but the outcome of FCC deliberations on Net Neutrality may very well have a huge effect on the flow of information and our assumption that everyone has a right to hear and be heard without interference; without corporate censorship.

Of course the ability of the FCC to do anything at all is in question following recent court decisions that seem to be part of the crusade against regulating anything and everything and without such an agency to provide a system of rules to protect a media that's fast replacing print and broadcast as our portal to the world, what you know, what you are able to know may well be determined by what makes the most money or most suits the interests of service providers. Indeed we've already traveled quite a distance down that path.

The FCC is now open to public comment. You can be sure that Verizon and Google, inter alia, are speaking very loudly and carrying a very big stick so if there's going to be any slim chance for the public to weigh in on Net Neutrality, your chance to be heard is now.

Internet neutrality and the Courts

Marconi was still a young man when the need for government control of communications became all too obvious. Newsmen using the new wireless telegraph began to jam each others' transmissions accidentally and on purpose and battles were fought over frequency allocations. Someone had to step in with some rules to allow the technology to develop, to prevent it being used as a weapon in restraint of free trade and to make sure that those using the public airwaves would use it without disregard for the public interest.

I can almost hear throats clearing at those last two words, almost see lips forming words like collectivism, socialism, Communism, but without it, the guy with the most money has the podium and the guy who owns all the podiums: press, broadcast and now the Internet, might just as well be the government with all that power. The difference between a fair trial and murder; between a Hockey game and a viking raid (if there is a difference) is the rules, so save your breath. I don't want to hear it.

The FCC was formed for these reasons, but during the last administration, it's been almost exclusively concerned with promoting the interests of power companies who want to use the power lines to get into the internet business, and sometimes to the serious harm of other users of the frequency spectrum. Whether or not this has changed under the Communist/Fascist Antichrist from Kenya seems to matter less than the current posture of the courts. The District of Columbia Federal Appeals Court decided yesterday in favor of Comcast and against the authority of the FCC in it's attempt to mandate "net neutrality."

The new administration has been in favor of equal treatment for all internet users; in favor of a policy that would prevent Comcast, for instance from slowing down and restricting the content they don't like and making content they approve of faster and cheaper. Yes, yes, I know all about free market competition, but I'm talking about the real world here and that's a world where corporations collude rather than compete. It's a world where a small group can control information to the point where no one can compete successfully. As I said, the difference between boxing and assault and battery or even murder is the rules.

It's too soon to make scary assertions about how this will work out, but as restrictions on how much of all media outlets can be owned by one person, real or corporate have been loosened along with restrictions on how much information they can restrict in their own interest, it looks to me like we're once again shooting ourselves in the foot, slow motion style. Our obsessive fantasy of a 'no holds barred' marketplace leading to peace and order, prosperity and a well informed electorate is, along with our phobic horror of phrases like "public interest" may be making corporate demagoguery a more valid vision of the future.

I Want My MSNBC

My local cable monopoly has decided to move MSNBC to a premium level so only the wealthy can afford to watch Maddow dissect right-wing narratives. I've written doggerel for the occasion, set to this tune:

Now look at them yo-yo's that's the way you do it
You play the race card on the Fox TV
That is workin' that's the way we do it
Teabaggers marchin' on Fox TV
Now that is workin' that's the way we do it
Local rednecks, them guys are dumb
Beck can do the wacky on your little wingers
Bill-O gets em twisted up and numb

We gotta install fear of the other
Custom lobby derivatives
We gotta lose these equivocators
We gotta own their colour TV's

See the little maggot with the wiring and the makeup
Yeah buddy that's his own hair
That bigger maggot wants his own pro ball team
And Rupert Murdoch is a billionaire

We gotta instill fear of the other
Custom lobby derivatives
We gotta lose these equivocators
We gotta own their colour TV's

Ailes has learned how to play the race card
Hannity's learned to beat the drums
Look at that blah blah, we got it comin out the camera
Man this is a lotta fun
And he's up there, what's that? Hawaiian noises?
Bangin' public option like a chimpanzee
Call him liar that's the way we do it
Money for nothin' but controversy

We gotta instill fear of the other
Custom lobby derivatives
We gotta lose these equivocators
We gotta own their colour TV's, Lord

Now that ain't workin' that's the way we do it
They call our bullshit on MSNBC
That ain't workin' that's the way we do it
Call up Comcast and move it to pay feed
Money for nothin' but controversy

I want my
I want my
Em-e's-en-bee-cee

Internet Freedom Act and Net Neutrality

No, no, no. The Internet Freedom Act isn't about freedom for you as an internet user and you should know by now that when a Republican uses the word Freedom it's about corporate control over your options. John McCain's "freedom act" appears now, after we've just begun to recover from eight years of the Bush FCC acting as a wholly owned subsidiary of big communications corporations; fudging the science and ignoring its own rules with impunity. Under Michael Powell and Kevin Martin, the Commission has stifled, hidden and falsified studies concerning the adverse effects on the public airwaves and even disaster relief services, of using power lines as a conductor for broadband internet and has made censorship of "indecency" a prime directive. It's high time they were prevented from protecting the public interest rather than the power of the telecommunications industry and the religious right.

If McCain's legislation is passed, the Internet Service Providers will have the power to limit your web bandwidth and mine and give preference to - you guessed it - the people they like, the people they own and the people who say what they want said. Have a blog that criticizes Comcast? Back to the days of 300 baud for you old chap! Fox News can blaze along at any speed they like with all the streaming and screaming video and Glennbeckery they can produce and the FCC won't be able to represent you. The freedom of giant corporations and puritanical moralists to censor you -- that's the kind of freedom John McCain thinks is worth fighting for!