sopa and pipa

It looks like the online community has won, for the time being, the battle to stop SOPA and PIPA. The online protests—including the one-day shutdown of Wikipedia and other big sites—generated so much heat that key House and Senate supporters of the bills backed away.

We'd better be prepared for ever fiercer attacks on freedom of information on the internet. The bills ostensibly were written to protect “Intellectual Property,” but could all too easily have been used to shut down speech that corporations don't like. The corporatocracy cannot maintain control over American government and American life if the internet is allowed to continue to evolve ever more powerful ways for people to communicate, debate, and organize politically.

Statist regimes like China and theocracies like Iran heavily censor internet communications. In this country the constitution makes it hard for government to censor internet postings directly—although with this Supreme Court, anything is possible—but Sopa and Pipa get around this by essentially privatizing censorship. 

Internet freedom is the only barrier to corporate feudalism in this country. That this attack was partially authored by Pat Leahy, our supposedly liberal Senator, is doubly troubling, as is the apparent fact that campaign money from Hollywood blinds him to how easily and insidiously his law could be abused.

i’m curious...

...how exactly will those TV Muslims in Dearborn institute Sharia Law in the U.S? There are really only three ways they can accomplish the aim of their stealth jihad.

One way would be to convince American voters to elect Sharia-endorsing senators and representatives until they achieve a majority in both houses of Congress—in fact a 60% supermajority in the Senate, because that’s what it takes to bring anything to a vote these days. Congress could then pass the whole Sharia shebang into law. Of course they would need to elect a president who would not veto the legislation (unless they can get this done before our current secret Muslim president leaves office), and take their chances in the Supreme Court, which might indeed uphold the constitutionality of flogging as punishment for driving while female or of stoning-to-death for homosexuality. Surely you can see how that kind of strictness would appeal to Scalia, Alito, Roberts, and Thomas at least.

The second way to institute Sharia would be violently to overthrow the most powerful and heavily armed government in the history of the world, overcoming all resistance by sheer force of numbers and the huge cache of Weapons of Mass Destruction that the Muslims have hidden in abandoned libraries and theaters in Detroit. 

The third way is, of course, to simply wait, while politicians and their useful idiots dismantle our constitutional principles and civil liberties, eventually leading to the collapse of constitutional government in the U.S. Then anything goes, and if the Sharia contingent is the most organized and determined, they'll get their way. They'll have to defeat the Wall Street feudalists, though, so it won't be easy.

fuck you ruth marcus

As the entire internet has by now noticed, Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post heard that a high-school kid sassed a Republican governor on Twitter; that the governor's staff, which apparently spends considerable time searching the social media for unfavorable references to said governor, proceeded to contact her school's administration and complain; and that said administration then called the kid on the carpet and demanded that she apologize in writing to the governor.

Three people:  a kid who doesn't like  her governor, a governor who uses his office to hassle kids who don't like him, and a school principal who thinks it's his job to protect the governor's ego. 

Three issues: a teenager’s “bad” manners, unconstitutional misuse of the powers of public office, and narrow minded authoritarianism on the part of school administrators. Which of these strikes Marcus as worthy of a nationally syndicated rant? Right.

we're all wrong, most of the time

I think this is too good not to watch. But maybe I'm wrong.

latest product

Another package in the GFMS line, this one for Couscous.

evil

“The human toll here looks to be much worse than the economic toll and we can be grateful for that.”

—Larry Kudlow, CNBC, on the Japanese catastrophe,
quoted (with video evidence) at Vanity Fair.

(emphasis mine)

too much snow, too much winter

what I’ve been doing instead of blogging

Building a telescope. 

package design update

Almost two years ago, I posted an account of the process of creating designs for a new line of frozen foods called Good Food Made Simple®. Most prepared convenience foods are junk, with way too much fat and sugar and salt and long lists of preservatives and colors and such. But GFMS products are to be “made from ingredients you can understand”—my client is betting that people who won't eat junk food will still appreciate convenience, or maybe that people who want convenience will appreciate the better quality.  I think this is a good bet. The first product was prepared frozen steel cut oatmeal.

The product was just trickling into retailers when disaster struck: the contract manufacturer who was actually making the stuff went belly-up. My client, who’s had more than their share of this sort of bad luck, remained convinced they have a good concept, and went looking for another manufacturer. Fortunately they found one, but the new factory’s production line could not be adapted to the same shape of frozen oatmeal “pucks,” so the packaging had to be redesigned to fit the new shape. Those are some of the new packages in the photo at the top of the post.

I've learned that it can take real determination and persistance to get a new product onto the market.

In the meantime, new products have been developed for the line. There are now four flavors of oatmeal in retail 2-packs, two flavors in club store 8-packs, and egg patties, both whole egg and whites only. Hot cereal blends with ancient grains like quinoa and farro are coming soon, as well as breakfast burritos, a couscous/quinoa side dish, potstickers, and more. The oatmeal is doing quite well in the first Costco region to take it on (in Texas—go figure) and is coming soon to Hannaford stores in my own area. 

stirring in my sleep

This hosting service costs me an annual fee, and despite the passage of a year and a half since I last posted, I have ponied up the money—somehow unwilling to let it go. I just now came back here to read over old posts.  Some of them I barely remember, while others seem to me as if I wrote them only days ago. A few make me proud that I wrote them. A few more are downright embarassing. Will I start posting again? I’m not sure, but if I do my focus will be different. In the first go-round, I wrote about news and politics, along with bits and pieces about design, old ads, and life in my corner of Vermont. I was trying hard to post regularly, in the hope of developing an audience, something I manifestly failed to do. If I start up again, it will be irregular and personal, and I'm not going to worry about whether anyone reads it.