Dhammapada 2.25

too bad the current Administration has went full-bore past the last misAdministration on this topic.

From Duke Today Top 5 formerly classified documents

(via Boing Boing)

There are so many, many, many others. Open government, to bad the Sr. Senator from California doesn’t believe in that… yes, I do mean you Ms. Feinstein. Can we say, torture? domestic surveillance based on secret nonjudicial interpretations of law?

Dhammapada 1.11

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, we come from the Internet, the new home of Mind.
On behalf of the future, we ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one; therefore we address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty it always speaks. We declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us, nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear. You are toothless wolves among rams, reminiscing of days when you ruled the hunt, seeking a return of your bygone power.

Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. The Internet does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.

We have watched as you remove our rights, one by one, like choice pieces of meat from a still struggling carcass, and we have collectively cried out against these actions of injustice. You have neither usage nor purpose in the place we hold sacred. If you come, you will be given no more and no less power than any other single person has, and your ideas will be given the same consideration anyone else would receive You are neither special, righteous, nor powerful here.

You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.

You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. This claim has been used throughout the centuries by many an invading kingdom, and your claims are no different, nor do they ring any less hollow. Your so called problems do not exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract. This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours.

The Internet consists of transactions, relationships and thought itself; arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. It is the last truly free place in this world, and you seek to destroy even that freedom. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.

We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth. A place where anyone, at any time, is as free to come and go, to say and be silent, and to think however they wish, without fear, as anyone else. There is no status beyond the merit of your words and the strength of your ideas.

We are creating a world where anyone anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.

Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here. There are only ideas and information, and they are free.

Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge. Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions.

The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose.

In the United States, you repeatedly try to pass unjust legislature in an attempt to restrict us. You disguise this legislature under a variety of different names, and pass excuses that they are for our own protection. We have watched you, time and time again; attempt to censor us under the guise of Copyright protection, or for the protection of Children. These laws come in many shapes and forms, in the name of ACTA, PIPA, COICA, SOPA, but their intentions remain the same. You seek to control what you cannot.

We scorn your attempt to pass these bills, and as a result, our discontent at your misaligned efforts grows each day.

You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.

In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy, Mexico, Spain, Greece, Egypt, Canada, the United States and many others you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of the Internet. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that is already blanketed in bit-bearing media.

Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no different than pig iron.

In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.

These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our presence in the world we have created immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.

We will create a civilization of the Mind in the Internet. We have created a medium where all may partake in the forbidden fruit of knowledge, where egalitarianism reigns true. May our society be more humane and fair than yours.

We are the Internet.
We are free.

And now for something completely different:

Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Secret Service (USSS), assassination, attack, domestic security, drill, exercise, cops, law enforcement, hazmat, nuclear, chemical spill, airport, AMTRAK, violence, gang, drug, narcotics, cocaine, marijuana

Department of Homeland Security (DHS)
Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)
Customs and Border Protection (CBP)
Secret Service (USSS)
Assassination
Attack
Domestic security
Drill
Exercise
Cops
Law enforcement
Hazmat
Nuclear
Chemical Spill
Airport
AMTRAK
Violence
Gang
Drug
Narcotics
Cocaine
Marijuana

Hmm… I am going to have to start making posts using all of these words in context. What a f’in waste of money. Really, I guess someone has to justify what one can only assume are the boatloads of money that has been expended on internet scanning tools.

Dhammapada 10.103

Dhammapada 6.81

Jezebel.com has a good summary/timeline up: The Complete Guide to the Susan G. Komen Debacle. The closing sums it up perfectly IMNSHO:

in order for Susan G. Komen for the Cure to revamp it’s image as a anti-abortion social club more interested in popularity and profit than actual good works, they’ll have to do some housecleaning. Either that or get better at lying.

and they also have another good read: Susan G. Komen’s Downfall, by the Numbers

Number of women who are diagnosed with breast cancer every year: >200,000

Number of women cured by useless politicking, lying, and doubletalk from charities that are supposed to be helping them: 0

But the fact remains that by making an unforced error in denying Planned Parenthood funding (in the grand scheme of things, a paltry $680,000) the Komen Foundation exposed themselves as a rats nest of wingnuts, irreparably damaged their brand, lost countless supporters (and therefore millions of dollars), and gave Planned Parenthood an enormous boost at a time when they really needed it. Corporations who have been pink-mailed by the Komen Foundation now have the ability to gracefully withdraw and focus their attentions elsewhere. Other corporations who have been threatened by the forced birthers to withdraw any funding of Planned Parenthood got a glimpse of the type of whirlwind they might reap for making such a move.

As everyone and their brother have written about the FAIL, and that the backtracking was nothing more than CYA (from the Komen press release, emphasis mine):

“We will continue to fund existing grants, including those of Planned Parenthood, and preserve their eligibility to apply for future grants, while maintaining the ability of our affiliates to make funding decisions that meet the needs of their communities.”

Just CYA to buy time. I’m not going to lose any sleep over their FAIL, they screwed the pooch, got busted, and we can only hope that real charities will reap the windfall.

The Salon.com title says it all: Komen for the Cure sells out women, again (emphasis mine)

…Komen itself cops to portioning just 24 percent of its funds to research – and 20 percent to fundraising and administration. For an organization with reported revenues of nearly $350 million, that’s still a lot of money for research. It’s an awful lot for itself, too.…

Komen also famously outsources its merchandising. It’s teamed up with the likes of KFC for “Buckets for the Cure” – because nothing says you care about women’s health like a big vat of fried chicken.

Women’s healthcare is not about lace-trimmed scarves and bottles of perfume. It’s sure as hell not about some feel-good, lip-service version of what my colleague Rebecca Traister calls “infantilizing Pepto-ed advocacy.” It’s not even — for anyone still stupid enough to think Planned Parenthood is some giant fetus-killing complex — about abortion. It’s about screening. It’s about treatment. It’s just that simple.

or from the Guardian: By defunding Planned Parenthood, the Susan G Komen Foundation betrays women (emphasis mine)

Mission accomplished, Komen. We are now aware of breast cancer. And now we are also aware that the Susan G Komen Foundation is more about bringing awareness to Susan G Komen and its corporate benefactors than it is about “Racing for a Cure”. Last I checked, a pink breast cancer awareness toaster isn’t a substitute for affordable chemotherapy.

And from PBS NewsHour: Questions Linger About Komen’s Commitment to Planned Parenthood

Even after the Susan G. Komen for the Cure charity reversed course Friday and said it would not halt grants to Planned Parenthood over a Republican-led congressional investigation, a number of observers wondered if Planned Parenthood might eventually be turned down because of other concerns about how it refers women for mammograms.…

The questions are lingering in part because Komen officials and spokespeople had emphasized two different reasons over two days for halting grants to 16 of 19 Planned Parenthood clinics that do breast cancer screenings…

Reporters openly wondered throughout the day whether Komen was leaving itself an out.…

The Sr. Management Team at the Komen Foundation made their bed, now they’re going to have lie in it (pun intended).

“Atheism is like a religion is like abstinence is a sex position”

jump to about 3:40 if you want to see the good bit

Dhammapada 17.234

Proof (watch it if you can stand it)

From an email I received from the local affiliate:

By now, most of you are probably aware of the controversy and questions regarding Susan G. Komen for the Cure’s recent granting strategy and performance criteria revisions, as well as their potential impact on Planned Parenthood and other grantees. Like you, the Komen … Affiliate is concerned about these changes and we, in tandem with the other Affiliates in the … Collaborative, are in discussions with Komen National headquarters. Our top priority in doing so is to do all we can to protect you, our supporters, and assure that the funds you so loyally invest in our work locally, are put to the best possible use to advance our community’s mission in the fight against breast cancer.

Sorry, it sucks to be you. No more money from me to you, unsubscribed from all email completed. Buh, bye.

Dhammapada 17.233

Iowa Nice

Ever since Tom Lehrer recorded his imperishable anti-Christmas ditty all those years ago, the small but growing minority who view the end of December with existential dread has had a seasonal “carol” all of its own:

Christmas time is here by golly: disapproval would be folly.
Deck the halls with hunks of holly, fill the cup and don’t say when.
Kill the turkeys, ducks and chickens, mix the punch, drag out the Dickens.
Even though the prospect sickens—brother, here we go again.

a little later…

In their already discrepant accounts of the miraculous birth, the four gospels give us no clue as to what time of year—or even what year—it is supposed to have taken place. And thus the iconography of Christmas is ridiculously mixed in with reindeer, holly, snow scenes and other phenomena peculiar to northern European myth. (Three words for those who want to put the Christ back in Christmas: Jingle Bell Rock.) There used to be an urban legend about a Japanese department store that tried too hard to symbolize the Christmas spirit, and to show itself accessible to Western visitors, by mounting a display of a Santa Claus figure nailed to a cross. Unfounded as it turned out, this wouldn’t have been off by much.

then…

I once tried to write an article, perhaps rather straining for effect, describing the experience as too much like living for four weeks in the atmosphere of a one-party state. “Come on,” I hear you say. But by how much would I be exaggerating? The same songs and music played everywhere, all the time. The same uniform slogans and exhortations, endlessly displayed and repeated. The same sentimental stress on the sheer joy of having a Dear Leader to adore. As I pressed on I began almost to persuade myself. The serried ranks of beaming schoolchildren, chanting the same uplifting mush. The cowed parents, in terror of being unmasked by their offspring for insufficient participation in the glorious events…. “Come on,” yourself. How wrong am I?

It’s definitely worth the read.

Direct Link

Dhammapada 3.35

Itivuttaka 3.88

Sutta Nipāta 3.710