Big Advertising Brother

Sometimes, the fun times and the free ride abruptly comes to a halt.

I've been wondering for the last 12 years, ever since the dot com bubble, how some of these internet companies make any money. It seemed to me that they weren't really selling anything, and they weren't charging me for the use of their work, so I could not figure out how it worked. There has been a lot of really cool free websites to choose from. The same is true for podcasts. It seems crazy (but somehow right) to me that so many excellent podcasts are available for free online.

Well, we increasingly see where these companies get their money. Facebook recently incurred the anger and ... well, I was going to say wrath, but actually no one is doing anything against them. They supposedly released a great deal of private information to third party advertisers. However, the general public is posting their private photographs and inane comments on the site all day without any regard for who sees it.

Now Google has started mining the search habits of people to target advertising at them. Not just casual and average Google using web searchers, but particularly the users of gmail, their popular (and FREE! see the pattern?) email service provider. The gmail program was reading the public's emails and targeting popup ads to people based on things they mentioned in private messages. That is kind of creepy, like a stalker staring in through your curtains at night. You can opt out at http://www.google.com/ads/preferences/html/opt-out.html

There is another site called Criteo that watches where you go browsing on the web and then targets personalized ads back at you about sites you've already been to. The banner ads on the sides of the screen reveal what the person has looked at before & offer ads targeted at that, serving as constant reminders to go back to the site later. This can be disabled, once you notice it, through a site at http://www.criteo.com/us/privacy-policy

The reaction is not universally bad. Some say it's not all Big Brother but potentially something that can make web browsing more personalized. Some can easily ignore the privacy concerns. They think this is OK if the computer sorts through your web browsing habits and just show them the things they are interested in. After all, if you're going to be exposed to ads, wouldn't it be nice if it was something you were probably interested in? There was a recent Science Friday episode where this was discussed, but the supporter of the ads was in the industry themselves.

I feel strangely ambivalent to this. In one view, you could say that the death of privacy would be great if you could not be discriminated by public disclosures of private facts. There is a certain honesty and surrender to not worrying what anyone might find out about you. And knowing that you are constantly being monitored could be exactly what some people need to help behave honestly and ethically. On the other hand, it sure seems that the potential for harm when someone has the ability to look at your private activities is something that cannot be denied.

Wisconsin Machinations

Suddenly, the bogeyman of the day for the newly elected and empowered state governors is PUBLIC SECTOR UNIONS.

While giving away huge tax breaks to major corporations or helping with public funding to steal businesses from other states, thus insuring that their state budgets veer into the red, they are, with the other hand, waving an accusing finger at the public unions. Somehow, school teachers, that's right SCHOOL TEACHERS, who don't get paid enough for the crap they have to take on a day to day basis, and who give up any hope of making a decent living when they agree to teach (usually for the idealistic reason that they want to help the next generation to learn their way in life) are being painted as these greedy people living high on the public dime.

The real calculus here by the conservative governors is a hope that they can break the backs of the unions that usually support and vote for democratic candidates. It's pure political maneuvering. If they spent more time trying to empower teachers and making sure that they had everything they needed to do their jobs, rather than trying to get the science teachers to teach religion in the science classes or get students to drill for standardized tests rather than learn critical thinking, they might actually impress some teachers and make them more likely to treat conservative candidates as something other than a threat to their way of life.

This week, a liberal blogger spoofed big conservative political supporter and contributor, David Koch. He called Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and recorded a 20 minute long conversation with him where he got the governor to reveal his true thinking on the matter. What was discussed in an open and unguarded conversation was that the issue is not budget balancing, but union busting, pure and simple.

The conservative Koch brothers are big supporters of the Republican party in Wisconsin, and through their generous contributions, they have had a hand at dictating public policy in the state. They have a scheme that would put the most polluting public power plants up for sale to private sector, where they would be unregulated. Detractors fear that they could set up an Enron-like scheme where the power rates could be jacked up and massive profits could be had at the expense of customers that would have no choice but to pay the price being asked.

Walker is a huge supporter of the union busting efforts and is hoping it will spread to other states. There are signs that it is at work in Indiana and Ohio. If not directly supported by conservatives, these governors have been the benefactors of massive ad campaigns funded by big interests and targeting conservative governor's opponents.

Wisconsin has already limited lawsuits against big companies, meaning corporations that pollute or act against the public in some other way cannot be assessed punitive damages greater than $200,000. Another tactic is a move to try to insure that all regulations will have to be signed off by the governor before they will be enforced. I don't understand if this is a form of a line item veto, or a way that a governor can simply avoid enforcing laws he doesn't agree with without fear of penalty from the legislature.

I heard a comment from some random Tea Partier that "We need a revolution." He probably wants to take down big government and disrupt taxation, but it could just as easily ignite a backlash by people wanting to assert their rights and interests over huge corporate influence and corruption. Perhaps they should be aware what they ask for, as political machinations have a way of backfiring on you.

Arab Uprisings Background: Historical Parallels

Check out the two pictures I found. I saw the first one, which is a map of where protests and uprisings are happening. The second one I searched out because of a memory of a book I read about the rise and spread of Islam. I remembered the extent of the Caliphate because I remember thinking that it was sort of a mirror image across the Meditteranean of the Roman Empire. One of the crazier comments about the uprisings was by Glen Beck, who said it was a conspiracy to start a socialist Islamic Caliphate. So maybe, as truly stupid as the comment was, it helped plant the idea of the Caliphate in my mind.

The interesting thing is that the Caliphate is the area where Islam first expanded out to. In general, Islam was spread at the point of a sword during this initial expansion. Since that time, Islam has spread to some additional areas in the world and diffused out into the rest of the world without state support, but the territory of the Caliphate remains strongly and primarily Islamic and the governments of the region are somewhere between strictly enforcing Islamic ideals to strongly supporting Islam at risk of loosing their authority if they did anything else. So this core of Islam is now a region where most nations have dictators that are strong, intolerent and repressive, and have been in power for long periods of time. It was unbelivable to me how many dictators in Arab countries have been in power for such long periods. We truly do not pay attention to whats going on in the Middle East until it erupts.

Besides the near perfect overlay of the Caliphate and the current unrest, the other correlation I noticed was that some of the best food producing areas in the region rioted the earliest and had the strongest response. They say that part of what initiated the unrest was high food prices, so you would think the food producing areas would be least prone to that problem, not most vulnerable to its effect.

There was an interesting show on Frontline about how organization and unrest spread via social media networks. The governments had been in power for so long that they were older and not technology saavy. One of the things I found amusing about some of the stories was about how they tried to shut down the internet, but the protests had grown too large by then and taken on a life of their own. By the time the figured out that the internet needed to be shut down to hold on to power, it was too late.

There has been some fear and speculation in this country that the Muslim Brotherhood was in charge of Egypt's revolution and that they were trying to establish a fundamentalist Islamic state. I knew nothing about them, so I looked them up. Apparently, they had been seen as a threat by Mubaric and suppressed years ago, but they were later allowed to exist as long as they did not get political. The reports say that they were content in this role for years. Before Mubaric, members of the Muslim Brotherhool were responsible for Sadat's assassination (bringing Mubaric into power). Apparently, the group split after that with a milder public part of the brotherhood seeking peaceful co-existence with the Egyptian authorities and another faction radicalized to the point that they supported Bin Laden. In this recent Egyptian revolution, the young organizers worked to suppress the Muslim Brotherhood and other groups from making the overthrow of Mubaric a fundamentalist Islamic uprising. They calculated that the revolution could not survive the opposition that would arise if it was only a fundamentalist Muslim movement, and they wanted to include women and non-Muslims in the uprising to maintain support for it.

The story is not over yet. We are not in a position where we understand much of what's going on, let alone could be justified in getting involved in any of the conflicts, but who knows how hard it will be for us to stay away.

To Write is to Dream

I have three blogs. There's this one, which is usually pretty serious. I have another one called Animal Tales at http://wagginganimaltales.blogspot.com/ which is daily observations and attempts at humor. The third blog is called Technically Speaking at http://techequipment.blogspot.com/, which is where I make humorous comments about my work environment under the guise of an official company blog.

Why?

At least in the other two blogs family and coworkers occasionally read the entries. In this blog, to my knowledge, no one reads the material. So the question becomes, why do it if no one is reading it?

I was asked this question by a business associate. It was in the context of a situation where I had two people visiting from a company, one who had read the Technically Speaking blog, and the other who had no idea that I had any blogs. His rhetorical question was why anyone would blog at all. No answer would have satisfied this person, he was actually making a statement, not asking a question. His statement was that it was worthless to write a blog, whether anyone read it or not, but especially if no one read it.

If no one ever read my blogs, it would still be worth it to me. The act of organizing your thoughts and explaining an idea is a useful exercise because it helps to define and refine what you think and believe. It's sort of like practicing a speech before you give it, you familiarize yourself with it. Having an external listener, even if it is a theoretical or fictitious one, helps to focus the explanation to someone outside yourself that is unfamiliar with your thoughts. This is useful because you make no assumptions that anything is a given, nothing is taken for granted, everything must be explained.

Writing is not a new thing for me. I got a Diary for a gift when I was in fifth grade and found that I liked writing down what happened to me and expressing my ideas and feelings about life. When I was in Junior High School, I started keeping a Dream Journal. This was after I read an article about how your dreams work. The premise of this idea was that you have a conscious mind that is aware of itself and under your control and consists of your inner audible thoughts. However, you also have a subconscious mind, the 90% that you "don't use" that sits quietly in the background and observes everything and never speaks to you directly. This subconscious is powerful and very aware, but can only communicate through dreams. It's as if the barrier between the two halves of your mind breaks down under sleep. The subconscious mind is aware of the separation and the dream conduit, and it spends dream time trying to send your conscious mind messages. These messages are usually things that are important or interesting that your conscious mind is missing, but your subconscious mind picked up on and wants to call attention to.

The subconscious is almost like a foreigner, speaking a different language. You don't have a dream that says, "you need to ask this girl out" or "you should cook more often" or "look out for your coworker, she is undermining you to your boss." Instead, the dream makes a little story and weaves it with emotions and memories. I found that by writing all the dreams down, I found they were rich in subcontext. You aren't just trapped in a dim and dirty room in the dream, there is terror in the very fabric of the dream. You don't just walk up to a friend on the street in the dream, you walk up knowing that you haven't spoken in years and that you are finally going to confront him about something that bothers you. In a flash, there are whole background histories embedded in the dream, something that was either in the background or took a second to realize, but might take several minutes to write down in a dream journal. It's sort of like computer zip files. Tiny little packets that open up and are full of lots of information.

The point of keeping a dream journal is to discover what it is that the dreams are trying to tell you. It takes practice and familiarization, but eventually, you get pretty good at it. The point is that you have to spend time at it and learn how to make it happen.

The same is true with blogging. It is a way of practicing explaining something and hopefully, fleshing out the subject and gaining a deeper understanding.

So I have to admit that I really do enjoy writing this blog, which I consider a chance to discuss the deep thoughts and revelations that occur to me, whether they are political, emotional, or philosophical. It helps me to feel like I am figuring out big questions in life and how things work. I have always had daydreams about being that teacher that really gets people to understand things or writing editorials for a newspaper that people really find to be interesting and insightful. The only problem is that I analyze things in too much detail and do not distill messages down to their simple core. I am definitely more of a blogger and not a Twitterer. I often think that no one wants to listen to this shit. I am also writing a novel that has been kicking around in my head for a long time. I started it, and really got going on it, but then I realized that it would not have broad appeal, it would not be a best seller, probably not even get past an editor. Still, I enjoyed writing it, and should not have let the thought that it was not going to be a bestseller stop me from continuing work on it.

If no one reads it, why write? You could also ask why anyone would keep a diary, especially one that you don't intend to let anyone read. After all, a blog or a diary isn't exactly like a diet journal where you write down everything you eat each day. It isn't raw facts that don't have any deeper truth, it isn't a dull accounting of mundane events. But it does have something in common with the a diet journal. If you don't write down what you eat, you often have a complete misconception about the quantity and quality of your diet. Write it down and you can't pretend you didn't do it. With writing your thoughts, memory can't rob you of what you thought or how you felt then, at that moment. You can read it years later and think it was ridiculous, but you can't deny that you said it or thought it.

Actually, there is a much deeper reason for writing a blog. I don't find many opportunities to talk at length about what I think with a real person. I don't know many people interested in the same things as I am. So it is good to have an outlet for what's really on my mind. Also, I am 46 years older than my son, meaning that he will live a significant portion of his life after I have passed away. I don't know how old he will be when I die, but whatever that age is, the chances are that he will not fully know or understand me. And as time passes after I am gone, he will develop a whole life that will not have me in it. There will be times when he might wonder what I would think or wish he could talk with me. There will also be a time when memories of what I was like will begin to fade, and he will forget much of what I was like. But if some of what I am is written down, then I will never completely die, and I will still be able to share some thoughts with him from across time and beyond the grave. I know that sounds sad and morbid, but it feels comforting and self indulgent, like eating something deliciously bad for you and not writing it in your diet journal.

[Actually finished 4/30/11, not back in February when I jotted down the idea and saved it to be written down later.]

Nathan Bedford Forrest

Sometimes it seems like it's been a long time since a movie has come out that is a truly original idea. So many "new" movies are just recycling old ideas or trying a new take on an old familiar character or story. Yet there are many stories and pieces of history that never make it to the movies.

I've always wondered why no one has made a movie about Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest. On one hand, it's understandable. Even the respected and admired General Robert E. Lee does not have many big screen movies about him. There just hasn't been much call for any movies about the losing leaders in the Civil War.

Of all the characters of the Civil War, General Nathan Bedford Forrest is one of the most notorious. In fact, I would venture to say that Quantrill is the only one that surpasses him, and that is simply because he went so far overboard. But on a good day, Quantrill had half the daring that Forrest had. Forrest managed to be a scoundrel, yet still have honor and integrity. He managed to use guile and deception, but still garnered respect from his adversaries. He usually attacked from a position of weakness, yet still prevailed. He had no formal military training, and not much formal education, yet he rose from private to general, and giving him a command was proven to be justified time and time again.

His strength was in his use of perception and deception. He was a natural military leader. Without being a student of history, his performances mirrored great battles like Trasimene and Agrigentum from ancient Roman times. Many would say he was an Anti-Hero, a villain and a scourge.

Perhaps one of the main reasons no one has ever done a movie about Forrest was because he was a cruel and brutal supporter of slavery. Most high ranking Southern officers owned slaves while the average fighting man did not. Forrest bought and sold slaves, which was much worse than just owning slaves in most people's minds, even in the minds of his fellow Southerners. Forrest hated Northerners and approached war as not only the duty to defend the South, but a great game with the added benefit that you got to kill Yankees. That was his recruiting slogan "come along boys, join up, have a lick of fun and kill some Yankees". He had a dashing personality that appealed to the young Southern hotheads under his command. He could draw more people to his banner more quickly than any other Southern commander. He was always able to put together a new unit of soldiers at almost any point of the war, except near the very end.

He pulled off several exploits that endeared him to his fellow rebels. These events would make many exciting scenes in my hoped-for movie. At Fort Donaldson, when the Southern forces surrendered to Grant, Forrest called the Southern commander a coward and escaped with his soldiers before they could be surrendered. After the battle of Shiloh, Forrest was tasked to guard the rear of the defeated Confederate forces as they were retreating. His rear guard detachment met up with the pursuing Yankees at a place called Fallen Timbers. Some have called this action the Battle of Fallen Timbers, but in reality, it was a one man show. He waited until the Federals were bogged down going through an area thick with fallen trees, and he wheeled his men around and charged them. He soon found himself out in front of his men, alone. He was soon surrounded by Yankees. When they discovered this fact, one charged in and shot him in the side, point blank. Forrest, in a battle frenzy, wheeled around slashing his saber and took off to escape. On his way out of the group of Yankees, he reached down and grabbed a Federal foot soldier. He hoisted him onto the back of his saddle and made a beeline back for his lines. The Federal soldier served as a human shield for the General, and was unceremoniously knocked off the horse when Forrest got back to his own men. The action checked the pursuing Federals and secured the retreat of the Confederate forces, but Forrest had to spend a couple of months to heal from his gunshot wound after the skirmish. So the injury was bad enough to put him out of action for a few months, yet he could still reach down while riding by and pick a soldier up off the ground and put him onto his horse.

Another one of my favorite stories about Forrest was a time when he met a Union force that was much bigger than his. He asked the Union commander to come out for a parlay, where he demanded his surrender. In plain view of the conference, he had two of his big guns brought over a hill, down a road and out of sight, toward the front lines. They looked like they were being moved into place for the battle. In reality, the same guns were quietly moved out of view to around the back of the hill where they were brought around again. This was repeated several times, and the Union General, after watching this while speaking to Forrest suddenly exclaimed, "My God, General, how many guns do you have? I've seen 28 so far!" Forrest replies that this must be all that have kept up - implying there were even more. The Union General surrendered without a fight, even though he had Forrest outmanned and outgunned.

In another famous battle called Brice's Crossroads, Forrest correctly predicted the exact course of the battle some two hours before it started. He taunted a larger Union force into hot pursuit on a blisteringly hot day. The column marched too hard and too fast and was tired and blown and strung out by the time they got to Brice's Crossroads, where Forrest had a massive ambush set for them. He chewed up the head of the column, and then the rest of the Federals that fed into the battle piecemeal were eaten up as well. Once they stopped coming on, Forrest counterattacked and pursued them and routed them. His soldiers all fought hard because they trusted him, and time and time again he delivered victories against all odds.

As the war wound down, Forrest's command was one of the last left standing. They could have become a guerrilla force, dragging out the war with the Union for months. Forrest decided to lay down his arms and convinced his men to do so, too, rather than taking them to Mexico to continue the conflict for years.

He settled down after the war as something of a hero to the Southerners, but was soon tempted into an organization that would later become the KKK. He wanted to fight to protect the rights of Southerners as they were re-admitted to the union and he wanted to limit the rights of Blacks to vote and control the new Southern governments. This was not an unusual position for a defeated Confederate. The organization began to transform into one that wanted to intimidate, harass, and harm blacks, and Forrest parted company with them at that point. Yet, his reputation was tarnished for years because of his association with the KKK, which was actually outlawed and went underground for over 30 years, with members being hunted down and arrested in the period just after the war.

This showed that Forrest had limits, and some would question if he was principled. If you asked whether he was he honorable, many of the people of the time would argue both sides of that position. Did he become honorable as time passed? In a strange and tarnished way, I would say, yes he did. Many that opposed Southern Rebellion and abolitionists that hated all repression of the blacks would probably never admit that there was anything honorable about the man. Yet many of those who faced him in battle would have a hard time arguing that he was not a man to be reckoned with.

Galaxy Zoo

I think I heard about Galaxy Zoo on a Science Friday broadcast about 2 months ago. I had heard about it before, but this time I logged on to http://www.galaxyzoo.org/ to see what it was all about.

The premise of the site is for astronomers tasked with classifying distant galaxies getting some help. There are something like 200 billion galaxies in the universe, which is far too many to go through all of them in a lifetime with the number of professional astronomers doing the work. They developed programs to sort out the galaxies, but found that a computer is not good at distinguishing a disk from a sphere or recognizing a disk seen from edge on. Humans are very good at this. So the images were split up by a computer and fed to a site where you can sign on to help. This is known as crowdsourcing, where you use volunteer citizen scientists to help perform a long task. Right now, there are a quarter million volunteers helping with the work. Unfortunately, that still works out to 800,000 galaxies for each volunteer to classify. The work would still not get done in our lifetime at this rate.

We have had so many exploratory space probes, generating so much data over the last 40 years. The average person probably assumes that all this data has been thoroughly analyzed by teams of diligent scientists. The reality is that the information is beyond the ability of scientists to study. It's a simple matter of time constraints. Can you thoroughly catalog all of your personal photographs? Most people probably do not take the time to do this, and that task is simple compared to analyzing the photos from a single fly-by of a satellite.

I used to watch Star Trek and wonder why they wouldn't have everything all figured out by 300 years from now? They are always flying by some red dwarf star or some nebula and stopping to explore like it's a wonderful new thing. I remember thinking, "surely they've seen this before?" It makes sense if you think about it. I have been paying attention to distance and speed in the various Star Trek series and have concluded that Warp 9 is not 9 times the speed of light. It's something much faster. There seems to be an exponential effect to warp factors, because they zip along doing 8 light years in a matter of hours. Even at these impressive rates, 300 years from now, we still have barely scratched the surface of one quadrant of the galaxy. That's just in our galaxy, which stretches for 100,000 light years across and contains 200 billion stars (give or take a hundred billion - we don't even know).

In the past, organizations like SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) have come up with ways that you can donate your computers processor to help crunch huge numbers. I believe they were analyzing huge amounts of radio spectrum looking for patterns that might be "man made". These efforts used distributed processing to run a large virtual supercomputer, but I have not heard that they have had much success in their efforts. They certainly have not found an intelligent signal, but I would also classify success as analyzing all the available data, and I'm not sure they've reached that milestone, either.

I've heard of crowdsourcing projects that search for habitable planets, supernovae remnants in nebulae, surface features on planets and satellites in our solar system, and protein structures in living organisms. There is a lot of knowledge out there to ponder. Last week, IBM put its new supercomputer called Watson on the game show Jeopardy to see if it could beat the two best Jeopardy contestants in history. It did so quickly and easily. This was seen as a huge challenge for computing, because answering the questions is not a simple database search, but an interpretation with some tricky aspects to it. Not all Jeopardy questions are straightforward, some involve word play and subtle twists. While the computer did admirably, they confessed that sometimes it would just miss the point completely. I witnessed this in the Final Jeopardy question on the second day. It was a question about airports being named after WWII battles and soldiers, and I knew it immediately (only because I stopped and read the historic plaque in O'Hare during one of several incredibly long layovers there). They said that Watson's strength is the ability to go over huge amounts of information in multiple databases, but it doesn't always make good sense of it. One of the possible applications that the IBM team said we could use Watson for was to point things out and make suggestions for a human user or team to quickly discard and sort through. They used the example of putting a patient's symptoms into the computer and having it list several possibilities. The computer could search through all the recent medical papers and all the old archives and do what amounts to an enormous amount of research very quickly. It would take a human forever to read all the medical papers and keep up to date. However, if the computer did that portion of the job for us, we could concentrate on those few possibilities that have a high probability of yielding good results, thus focusing our time and making us more efficient. We can see patterns and connections that the computer doesn't understand.

Our curiosity and need to improve our lives will always push us to learn about all the unknowns. I find it encouraging that we are still finding new ways to think and learn how to learn.

Arab Uprisings

I'm currently going through a period where I am behind on the news. I don't generally know the day's news until a few days later. I see this as a mental health move, in addition to being busy with work and perpetually behind since the blizzard.

I have a coworker that does not seem to be able to let my ignorance last for too long. He asked me about the Egyptian protests one day and suggested that the Muslim Brotherhood was behind it. Suspecting that this information came from Fox News, I took to the internet to better understand the background information. I skimmed through the Wikipedia backgrounds on the Tunisian Revolution and the Muslim Brotherhood, branching out in my search to learn when and how the various countries gained independence and got their current leader, as well as what their politics and society were like. I found out that one of the most probable replacements for Hosni Mubarak of Egypt was Mohamed Elbaradei, a Nobel Prize winner who had worked to control Iran's nuclear weapons program. I also found a map of the Arab world that showed which countries were experiencing revolutions and protests. I could not believe how widespread the movements were or how quickly they came about. In two months, most of the Arab world has seen unrest that could very well topple more governments.

My initial reaction was surprise that the Arab populous had this combination of dissatisfaction and willingness to express it. I think of travelling to an Arab country, particularly the less secular ones, as something I, as a westerner, should not even consider. I would expect the governments to be intolerant and likely to nail me for a crime whether I committed it or not. If you've ever seen Midnight Express, you know what I mean there. I would expect the people of these countries to form an instant lynch mob to help insure that I would be prosecuted for some transgression, most likely one that I had no idea I was doing. I have heard reports of people getting executed for blasphemy, which can be something simple like saying Muhammad or touching the Koran. I'm not saying my fears are completely rational, or that my views are well researched and backed by solid evidence, I'm just saying that my perception of the region is of a place that I could not relate to the government or the people and would not care to visit. I didn't realize this about myself until I started contemplating that these people were in revolt. They are acting more like I expected us to behave, with a thirst for freedom and a willingness to be rebellious.

Boiled down to the simplest summary of the situation in Egypt, it is a popular uprising of people wanting freedom from a tyrannical dictator who is corrupt and oppressive. Is that not an exact match in the description of America's own revolution? The differences are there, too. Egyptians are not taking up arms, they are stopping work and taking up banners. These protesters are militarily defenseless. After the common examples of what usually happens to freedom loving protesters in oppressive dictatorships, you would expect only one outcome, a Tiananmen Square style slaughter. People rounded up and put into re-education camps if they were not executed immediately. Worst, people simply disappearing without a trace.

The fact that the revolution worked - worked in overthrowing Mubarak, not necessarily giving them the better country that they want - is a miracle. The fact that it is spreading is also a surprise. At the time of this writing, protesters have been shot and killed in Pearl Square in Bahrain, and the movement in Libya is showing signs of evolving into a civil war. Not one country in the region is not dealing with unrest.

Many people credit Facebook & Twitter for enabling these movements. Governments are forced to attempt to shut down the internet to control the uprisings, and by then it's too late. The flow of information is too difficult to stop. The media has also been taken completely by surprise by the uprisings. Al Jazeera seems to be the only media outlet with eyes on the street in many of the areas of unrest. I find it ironic that the media outlet that conservative Americans were furious about for reporting unfavorably on the Iraq War are now the one outlet defying local Arab governments and reporting on the protests.

I see parallels between the use of Facebook and Twitter to get the facts out and WikiLeaks' recent influence on world events and opinions by bringing secrets out to the public eye. I grew up during the Cold War and entered the military during the Reagan era when we trained exclusively to face off against the Soviet Union. We were raised to fear this monolithic country that maintained power by lying to and oppressing their people. We felt that fighting the Chinese Communists was not as likely as fighting the Russians, but the adversary was similarly corrupt and oppressive. Both communist behemoths maintained their grip on power by a steady diet of misinformation and by blocking the truth from getting out. This is why we had Voice of America, a U.S. government run radio network whose only goal was providing our truth to the poor slobs trapped behind the Iron and Bamboo Curtains. We all knew what would happen if you stood up against the government in those countries. Death, torture, or re-education were the most likely possibilities. We felt we were better because we had free elections, freedom of the press, and freedom of expression, along with economic freedoms. I find it ironic that we have evolved to the point where we have participated in torture, where the governments are more interested in staying in power than telling the truth, and where a few very powerful corporations are increasingly in control of policy if not elections. When someone rips the veil off of our government and shows some glimpses behind the scenes, you actually have citizens that are rising to the defense of our government to keep secrets and take hideous actions in the supposed best interest of our country.

Even though the protesters say they want democracy and freedom, there are those in this country that do not trust or believe it, and further, they do not trust Muslims to have these freedoms because they fear they will be used against us. I hear the stories of how some conservatives fear the rise of Islam if Arab populations are free to elect their own leaders, and there are also Glen Beck style rants that are so far into left field that you can just classify them as "the sky is falling" assertions of pure panic, and not reasoned analysis. I cannot believe that people can abandon their ideals just because they can't relate to the people that profess those same ideals.

What amazes me even more is how unprepared the U.S. was for these revolutions. Here we are again, using a page from the old play book that we never seem to learn from, which is backing oppressive leaders simply because they behave as we like them to in the global or regional political arena. The irony I find in the events is to recall some of the things that George W. Bush professed and to wonder if he was right, even if it was for all the wrong reasons? The Iraq War was started under the pretext of self defense. Later, when the weapons of mass destruction were not found, the reason transformed retroactively to "Spreading Democracy in the Middle East". I remember at the time thinking that it was so much hogwash, because you can't have someone else's revolution for them. If they don't fight for freedom themselves, it doesn't mean much, and if you occupy a country, you can't truly say that they are a self governed democracy. Bush made several speeches where he touched on his desire for the Middle East to be transformed by Democracy. Then, in the Palestinian Elections of 2006, the radical Islamic Terrorist group Hamas was elected by the Palestinians in their first really free elections. What did the freedom and democracy loving West do at that time? They immediately denounced the elections and declared that they would not deal with the new government and things have gone downhill since. So while a look at George W. Bush's opening remarks in his May 2008 speech at the World Economic Forum in Egypt provides one with an eerie foretelling of the events in the last two months, I still do not think that we were ready for the actual possibility (let alone the speed) of popular uprisings, nor are we willing to allow them to take their natural course, if that means fundamentalist Islamic governments taking power.

I do not think Iraq was a starting point for this revolution. I understand that the youth in Iraq are less religious because of the way their country was torn apart by religious violence. I think that their youth spent an inordinate time growing up on the internet, because it was too violent to go outside. I am curious to see what they do with the democratic society we are trying to establish there. It's been 8 years, and you can't say the government is stable or not corrupt. It's just not as oppressive as it was under Hussein. I keep thinking about Iran in this crisis. They already had a revolution, back in the 70's and the Islamic Fundamentalists that seized power after that uprising turned the clock back in that country to a level of progress and technology from years ago. They are facing their own uprisings, first the 2009 and 2010 ones following an election that many felt was stolen and did not reflect the will of the people, and in recent days, a continuation of that unrest inspired by the success of the uprising in Egypt.

Even the Israeli society is undergoing a transformation of sorts. There is a movement of ex-Israeli soldiers speaking out against the actions in occupied territories. The group Breaking The Silence has been collecting recordings of anonymous Israeli soldiers telling about their experiences, and mostly questioning the stories coming from and the policies of the Israeli government. It reminds me so much of what could happen in a world where there were dozens of Wikileaks and the information on what America is really doing behind the scenes came out for the consumption of the general public. While painful, I think this would be a good thing. How can we form honest opinions about our government, that we are charged to select, if we do not get to see what it is that they are really doing and why? How can we correct corruption and misdeeds if we remain blissfully ignorant of them? Why should we blindly support a government that will not share the information of what they are doing and why? Are we small children that cannot be trusted with the truth?

While my coworkers comments on the Muslim Brotherhood were a reflection of the fears that many in this country hold over the possibility of a more fundamental Middle East, I do not share these fears. Better to be dealing with a government willing to express the will of their people and hopefully have some chance of solving many of the intractable problems than to continue on as we have been. Let them elect their devout Muslim countrymen, we seem to make Christian beliefs a prerequisite for getting elected in this country, why shouldn't they make Islamic principles the basis for electing their leaders? I'm not saying I think religious people should rule any country, I think that's a disaster. I'm just asking why we are so blatantly hypocritical of the practice and unable and unwilling to see that our stance is inconsistent?

Whatever happens, the situation is fascinating. The thing about history that is constant is that things get shaken up from time to time. Sometimes, things seem to get jostled into place more firmly, the revamping of society is like an urban renewal project that cleans out the blight and sets things right. Sometimes the revolution pushes things out of control and makes us wish for better days. I think it's good to sit back and watch groups of people struggle for their freedom. If you aren't inspired by this, what side are you on?

Power Plays

In my opinion, it is no question which side of the political divide exerts more sway on public opinion. The Republicans have a much more unified effort at pushing their political agenda. Through Fox News and conservative talk radio conservative talking points are continuously hammered into the public's brains. Don't give me this bull about the liberal media - conservative viewpoints dominate the media in all meaningful ways, and if you doubt me, look at advertising revenue and market share. This is a well oiled machine, this way of pushing a certain viewpoint out on the public. There are many people I know repeat the same talking points and if you ever wonder where they get these ideas, tune in to Rush Limbaugh, Hannity, or O'Reilly for a week and then listen around for how often you hear their remarks being parroted. The true brilliance of this approach is that people are walking around making smart sounding arguments and assertions about subject that they know absolutely nothing about. Hey, it sounded good on the radio or TV, no reason to research it and see what it's all about, you're armed and ready, just get out there and shoot your mouth off. It's the great American pastime.

I heard about the Wisconsin Representative walkout and efforts by the Governor to end collective bargaining by government employees. I saw the initial reports that were shaping it up to be a union breaking effort by a heartless Republican on one side of the argument and a reining in of overpaid and over-privileged fat cat government workers on one had. I did a little research and found that the salary comparisons were said to be unfair, as you are looking at a mostly degreed, well educated and professional government service population being compared to everyone from CEOs to minimum wage workers in the private sector. Apparently, the government does very little blue collar work, and what labor intensive functions they do have, they take care of with private sector contractors. One report said that the Wisconsin legislature just passed a package of tax breaks for large corporations in the state that exceeds the budget shortfall. They then pointed to the budget shortfall, conjured up a government employee boogie man and had all the justification they needed to try to do something they really wanted to do anyway, which is to pull the teeth of the unions.

I'm not a huge fan of unions, as they are strong on protecting their rights and benefits and short on holding their membership accountable or enforcing the need for standards and continued education. I get tired of the thought that seniority is everything and exceptional performance is not being rewarded in union controlled labor sectors. I find this to be a fatal flaw of unions, because it kills the possibility of continual improvement and exceptionalism.

I do see some merit in the charge that the budget crisis was created in order to limit the power of the unions and thus permanently tilt the balance of power in favor of the Republicans. I might be open to the possibility that this was not their intent, but it is certainly the effect. And it's hard for me to believe that the Republicans would not want to take credit for this accomplishment if they can pull it off.

State Legislatures do not have filibusters and there is no way to prevent a vote or force those that want a vote to be in the supermajority if they want to proceed. The action of fleeing the assembly does not strike me as cowardice as much as desperation. Running away is not a sustainable tactic in the long run. As politics go, the only way that this tactic works is if you can get strikes and protests to turn up the volume while you delay the vote. If the pressure rises during the delay, it might cause some of the Republicans to retreat or reverse their positions. I doubt the Democratic opposition is well enough organized to pull that off. It's not as if the public is going to rally behind the government workers, either.

What I can't believe happens in these debates and in some elections is how teachers are vilified by conservatives just because they are in unions. It's like wanting to hit your mother. I can't see tearing down the people that teach our children, and I don't understand why anyone supports those that do. I've yet to hear a convincing argument that teachers are harming our children.

This reminds me of the great Texas Redistricting Fiasco of 2003. The Republicans in the state finally took control from Democrats and immediately sought to redistrict the state to form more favorable conditions for Republicans. The Democratic legislators fled the state and Texas actually called on Homeland Security to try to track them down. The Democrats failed and the Republicans solidified and gained stronger control of the Texas election system. Some analysts assert that the Republican efforts have permanently tilted the balance of power in the state.

It's not hard for me to believe that political operatives look for opportunities like this and are quick to implement power grabbing plans when they come up. We've also seen it in textbook review boards that are trying to force textbook publishers to rewrite history more favorably to the conservative cause and Republican point of view. In Kansas, the state board of education is notorious for being taken over by conservatives every other election with the result being that they immediately try to get evolution out of the science classes and creation inserted, sometimes under the guise of Intelligent Design.

I see a system that is being continually gamed to the advantage of whoever can successfully peddle their influence. If they can't get to the people in power, they try to put people in power that they can control. We live in a system where the rich get obscenely richer and the poor and middle class just slide a little further down the socioeconomic scale every year, losing ground, losing influence, and losing power. In cycles in the past in this country, money has exerted its power until the conditions reach the breaking point for the masses and they push back. Some of the conservative propaganda you hear, the constant talking points that are parroted endlessly, are centered on how the Europeans are "Socialists". People that parrot this phrase do not truly understand what Socialism is. Socialism is not taking over industry in Europe. You do not have governments controlling the production of goods. You have government providing a broad and extensive safety net in the way of retirement pensions and medical care, but this has not resulted in a massive bureaucracy or horrible health outcomes. What Americans fail to understand is that Europeans are getting the type of system they want. They are electing officials that support these systems and demanding that they be continued. They cannot understand our system that allows the people at the bottom of the economic spectrum to be neglected. It's a little like the elementary school boy that is being teased by his friends for liking a girl. In this case, the little boy is looking at his tormentors and going, "yes, I like her. Why is this a problem for you?" The barbs and the insults are not considered derogatory to the target, so they do not have the power to sting or influence them.

Is the U.S. system of large corporations and political parties pulling power plays on the rest of society a good thing? Are we more productive and prosperous because we have this way of doing things built in to our society? Are there less European multibillionaires than there are in the U.S.? Does the European system have more immunity to the few powerful people purchasing influence and trying to reshape the world in their image? Is it true that the average American is not in favor of limiting the power or advantages of the rich because they hope and expect to be rich some day?

Americans are not a timid people. The same rebelliousness that caused us to seek independence still thrives in the hearts of our supercapitalists that want to do business as they see fit with no interference from the government or the people. The problem is that the people come from the same stock, and when you ride over them for long enough, they will start pushing back. In the end, our competitive and rebellious nature will force us into confrontations and conflicts. We haven't evolved to the point where we can have empathy for our opponents and seek solutions that provide the best outcomes for both sides. We run our Power Plays and hope for the best.

Deficit Mania

The 2010 election spawned the whole political movement of the Tea Party and now the interpretation is that these are strict constitutionalists with a strong aversion to big government and a desire to drastically cut spending.

In fact, the main stream Republicans can talk about little else than the deficit. I consider the Tea Party to be a radical subset of the Republicans, more conservative, more militant and insistent in their beliefs.

The Republican Political Playbook has for years used the phrase "Tax and Spend" as a way of tarring and feathering their opposition. Some within the Republican ranks will tell you that cutting taxes puts more money into the hands of people and makes them spend more and therefore stimulates the economy. This lately has translated into a full blown concern for the deficit, which is a different thing. Democrats may argue that money should be spent by government to stimulate the economy, and really they are doing just the same thing as Republicans. The only difference is that they are unbalancing the budget by adding debits while the Republicans are unbalancing the budget by reducing credits. Both are poor accountants.

The Republicans felt that deficit spending was justified to fight a war in Iraq (which some said was not justified in and of itself, much less not justified to spend that much money). The Democrats are willing to run deficits to pump money into the economy in order to shore up the unemployed or stimulate the economy. No one has ever been willing to actually address the deficit in a truly decisive manner. In the 1990s we had a surplus, partly because the end of the Cold War freed up a lot of money we had been pouring into the military, but also because the economy was cranking along nicely and energy prices were low. What did our friends in Congress argue about when there was a surplus? True to form, the Republicans argued about cutting taxes and the Democrats argued about increasing spending.

No one tried to pay down the debt. No one tried to adjust entitlements, which is best to do when times are robust than when times are lean.

Politicians are not fiscally responsible and they are not serious about wanting to be fiscally responsible. You don't diet by eating whatever you want and trying to exercise all day and you don't believe that a healthy way to lose weight is to starve yourself and never exert yourself. This doesn't make sense. You work on both ends of the equation in order to keep yourself healthy and on the right track.

It's the same way with the federal budget. We need modest tax increases coupled with modest spending cutbacks to meet in the middle in the least painful way. We need to do simple things to balance the books on entitlements, which means looking at each system and making them balanced. Social Security is easy to fix, you float the retirement age to the neutral revenue point. This would mean raising it up a few years now, but then letting it float so the change would be gradual. Eventually, the age would come back down when the baby boomers started to exit the system at the other end of retirement (how's that for a nice way to say it?).

I've heard many people argue that big government programs and federal spending were working to reverse the Great Depression and one year FDR went along with the deficit hawks and cut spending and the depression started to come back. People argue that WWII got us out of the depression and I have to ask, how is that not a program of unprecedented government spending, as well as high taxes? The Keynesian Economists swear that you need a lot of government spending to reverse economic downturns. While it's impossible to know if the bailouts and stimulus bills staved off utter collapse of the economy, it's hard to argue that they didn't work to improve things. People have largely forgotten that the bailout/stimulus spending began under a Republican administration and was widely supported by both sides initially. Now the Democrats are left holding the blame for rising the deficit and debt, but get no credit for saving the economy.

Many people believe that one role that big government does well is to fund basic research and development. Many assert that this spending is like an investment with very high payoffs in the future, which I believe, but find hard to prove. Some people think that private industry should be doing the research and development, but Corporate America is less and less willing to spend money on the future in this way any more. If big government really wants to put their thumb on one side of the scale to help tilt this, I wouldn't mind if we tied tax incentives for big corporations to the amount they pour into R&D (or hiring people and creating new jobs for that matter). If you're going to burden the taxpayers with an expense, at least pick something that will work like an investment and earn you something down the road.

I do not believe that the general public or our elected officials have a good idea of how to manage government spending and I see nothing on the horizon that will change that.