ViHart is known for explaining math and science in a really creative and interesting way. She just finished her 3 part series on Fibonacci spirals and why so many plants use them. Watch the series below and then do yourself a favor and watch the rest of her videos.
Part 1
Part2
Part 3
So it looks like SOPA and PIPA have both been shelved, for now. Bloggers and forum-goers around the internet are celebrating victory. While the anti-SOPA movement these past few months has been historic and unprecedented, the time to claim victory has not yet come and likely never will. Bad bills like SOPA/PIPA have a way of coming back from the grave. Often times, they are grafted on to other unrelated bills and pushed through with minimal attention. Even if SOPA and PIPA don’t come back, the scumbags who wrote them are still in office (this REALLY needs to change come November) and they are guaranteed to write similar bills in the future. Big Entertainment lobbyists paid a lot of money to buy politicians, and they aren’t happy that they haven’t gotten what they paid for. In fact, the MPAA is overtly threatening to stop giving money to politicians who went against their wishes.
If this sounds like bribery to you, you’re not alone. Sign this official White House petition to investigate this act of blatant bribery.
But even if SOPA and PIPA are really dead (which they definitely are not), while we focused all of our attention on them, at least two other bills are being pushed that are as bad if not worse. ACTA (which is actually a treaty, not a bill), and PCIP.
ACTA
ACTA stands for “Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement” (wikipedia article).
I’ll let this video explain what ACTA does.
The worst part is, for years the text of the treaty has been kept secret. According to the wiki article:
“Both the Bush administration and the Obama administration had rejected requests to make the text of ACTA public, with the White House saying that disclosure would cause ‘damage to the national security.’”
Despicable.
PCIP
For more info on PCIP, check open its page on OpenCongress
PCIP stands for “The Protect Children from Internet Pornographers Act of 2011.” It was introduced by, surprise surprise, Lamar Smith, the same scumbag who introduced SOPA. Why is he so persistent you ask? Well, according to OpenCongress.org, the largest portion of Lamar Smith’s campaign contributions come from the TV/Movies/Music industry. He’s not really passionate about this issue he’s just been bribed. Sorry, people of Texas district 21, but your Congressman has been bought and no longer represents you.
Anyway, despite being an evil SOB and a scumbag, Lamar Smith is really smart. He knows that no Senator or Congressperson will risk appearing to support child pornography, so he made this anti-free speech, anti-privacy bill look like it cracks down on people who abuse children. And thus, once again, liberty dies to a chorus “What about the children?!”
So yes, we should take a moment to pat ourselves on the back for what we were able to spontaneously do to “stop” SOPA/PIPA. But don’t think that the fight is over. The fight will never be over. SOPA/PIPA have just been stalled temporarily. And even if they never come back, there are already bills that are just as bad, or worse, right around the corner. ACTA has been around since the Bush years. PCIP has been around since May and hardly anyone has known or cared (including myself). We can’t let this momentum die. Luckily we didn’t need to wait very long for the next bad bill to go through to rile us up again. Let’s just hope we weren’t too late like we were with the Indefinite Detention Bill (NDAA).
Always remember…
EDIT: Concerning the NDAA bill, Ron Paul has recently introduced legislation to repeal the Indefinite Detention of Americans provisions. The bill is called H.R. 3785. Please write to your representatives and ask them to co-sponsor and support this bill.
If the above article is true, media moguls are saying they’re going to stop donating to Obama’s campaign now that he has kinda-sorta threatened to oppose SOPA/PIPA, saying:
“God knows how much money we’ve given to Obama and the Democrats and yet they’re not supporting our interests. There’s been no greater supporters of him than we’ve been from the first day and the first fundraisers continuing until he was elected. We all were pleased. And, at its heart institutionally, Hollywood supports the Democrats. Now we need the administration to support us. This is a very important time for Hollywood. The issue at hand — piracy — is a legitimate concern. But Google and those Internet guys have been swiftboating the entertainment industry by saying we’re trying to shut down the Internet just because we don’t want them to advertise pirated movies. As for other claims, we make 24. We don’t make national security problems.”
Oh boohoo. You bought some politicians and now you want the legislation that you paid for. Well sorry, that’s not how the government is supposed to work. Politicians are supposed to work for the people whom they represent, not whoever pays them the most (let’s just hope Obama remembers that and doesn’t buckle under this threat.)
One astute redditor observed,
“The bigger problem here is that Hollywood moguls are not even hiding the fact that they are attempting to buy legislation for their own personal gain. I am more disgusted with the fact that the people withdrawing support are only concerned with their own personal wealth and are just pretending to give a damn about software creators.”
To the movie execs who want to legislate profits for themselves at the expense of our freedom: choke.
Watch it. Get informed. Be angry. Write Congress.
Like the title? 
Anyway, the reddit blog posted a great technical look at what SOPA/PIPA do and how they work. I highly encourage people to read it all the way through. Get educated on the issue! [LINK TO THE ARTICLE]
Major Kudos to Wikipedia for blacking out all of their English language pages today to raise awareness for SOPA/PIPA. In addition to Wikipedia’s protest, Google.com has a blacked out their banner and posted information if you click on it. Reddit is scheduled to go down from 8am-8pm EST. If you haven’t written or called your representatives yet, today is the day to do it! We want to flood them with letters and phone calls. Be polite but firm. Tell them you will not vote for them ever again if they support SOPA/PIPA. Even if you’ve already written them, do it again. I’d encourage everyone to, at the very least, change their facebook pictures and tweet something that raises awareness for the issue.
A redditor posted a very insightful comment early today on how to defend ourselves against the next SOPA.
“It’s not a waiting game, it’s a game of poker. Lamar Smith has a royal flush and few people know it.
SOPA may pass. It may not. He doesn’t care, and it doesn’t matter. The MPAA and RIAA started working on their legislative strategy to pass a new anti-piracy bill in late 2010. SOPA was designed to raise the noise. Everyone is playing right into the entertainment industries hand. The lobbyists are laughing manically at the ignorance of the mob. Even Wikipedia and reddit have played into it.
What people don’t know about is the ace: H.R.1981, the Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act of 2011 which is lying in wait. It’s not complete. You see, PCIP is not contestable because it’s about protecting children. They can, and very well might, copy and paste the full text of SOPA to the end of PCIP. That’s the backup. That’s the deal that was struck with entertainment industry lobbyists. We will try to push this anti-piracy bill. It probably won’t work. Don’t worry, we can pass it under an anti-child pornography bill.
There are two things which no Congressman will risk supporting: terrorism and child pornography. There can be no opposition, no discussion. Any anti-piracy law can ALWAYS be reframed as an anti-child pornography bill and it will pass, without even discussion. It will have the full support of the House (minus Ron Paul), the full support of the Senate, and most importantly the full support of the American people. NO ONE wants to risk being called a pedophile.
The entertainment industry has finally caught up with technology. They understand how it works. It took them 15 years, but they know what DNS is. They are going to exploit a fundamental problem with the way DNS is centralized and there is nothing that can be done to stop it. They have found an error in the very architecture of the Internet. The solution, from a free speech standpoint is not to fight it politically. The solution is the fix the error.
We must move to a decentralized system of DNS. It is not impossible. It requires some new thinking and a re-architecture of some web services, but it must be done if we want the Internet, as we know it today, to exist in 5 or 10 years.”
SOPA, or something like it, WILL eventually be passed. We need to make it obsolete before it even goes up for a vote. That is our biggest advantage in the fight against corporations and congressmen who would censor the internet. We can adapt faster than they can. For the most part, politicians are Luddites who openly admit or even boast that they don’t know anything about internet technology. Usually this admission comes just before they explain why their ideas for censoring the internet should be taken seriously. If they pass a law like SOPA, we should strive to bypass it, make it obsolete, fight it, and even outright break it.
The one good thing about this whole SOPA/PIPA ordeal is that it is a great example of how consolidated power will inevitably be abused. If the internet wasn’t so centralized this type of censorship would be impossible. That is the real key to defeating SOPA, PIPA, and whatever comes next. However, as we work to decentralize the internet, we should internalize the lessons we are learning here. Centralized power is bad for liberty.
Earlier last week, news came out that SOPA had been put on hold indefinitely. It turns out that “indefinitely” meant next month.
To be honest, this shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. This is a common tactic for the scumbags in congress to pull. They pretend to put a bad bill on hold, the people rejoice in their victory and then go back to watching football, and then the scumbags bring the bill back to life. We should let this be a lesson to us, these people will not stop. If SOPA is truly defeated, we still have to worry about PIPA which is every bit as bad. If both SOPA and PIPA get shot down, the scumbags who wrote them will still be in office. If we kick them out of office (which we definitely should), new scumbags will take their place.
Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.
“Law enforcement officers beat their wives or girlfriends at nearly double the rate of the rest of the population, and trying to control that is not only difficult for the victims but potentially deadly, experts say.
The trouble lies in the very nature of police work.”
Are abusive cops just a few bad apples? Or is it just the culture of cops to be abusive, violent thugs? The more one looks into the issue, the more it seems to be the latter.
Ars Technica posted an interesting article today. Apparently some Senators and Congresspeople are starting to back off SOPA and PIPA a little bit. Surprisingly, this includes the most stubborn and condescending of them, Lamar Smith, who is main scumbag behind SOPA. He said, “After consultation with industry groups across the country, I feel we should remove Domain Name System blocking from the Stop Online Piracy Act so that the Committee can further examine the issues surrounding this provision.”
On the Senate side of things, 6 Republican Senators who originally supported PIPA, wrote a letter to Harry Reid, asking him to post pone the vote, citing concerns about cyber security, possible damage to the internet, and 1st amendment issues. This is a good sign, but be aware that the politicians are going to start offering compromises and gutting the bills in order to get them through. We must not accept any compromises. SOPA and PIPA deserve to die. Now is the time to turn up the pressure. Call your representatives and urge them to kill SOPA and PIPA outright. Remind the companies that support SOPA/PIPA why you are boycotting them. Urge Wikipedia, Google, Facebook, and other companies to black out their websites for a day in protest, or to at least put some sort of SOPA/PIPA information on their front pages.
Keep pushing everyone. Don’t get lazy!
