ndpodcast/news

I gotta be honest. I didn’t think it would happen. But it did.

The Web was abuzz with glee yesterday after news to do with a Congressional hearing, first broken to the world Thursday evening, filtered through to inboxes and RSS readers throughout the US – and even the world.

The topic of discussion at the congressional hearing was the rate hike(s) proposed months prior by SoundExchange. It was originally slated to be put into effect this Sunday. “Was” is the detail that has millions and millions of netizens and Internet radio broadcasters breathing a collective sigh of relief.

Yes, as was reported the evening of July 12th on Wired’s Listening Post blog, SoundExchange executive Jon Simson "made a startling statement.” In essence, the company, more or less one and the same with the RIAA (the Recording Industry Association of America), told all members of government and media present that it would not be instituting the rate hikes it has steadfastly pushed for publicly for months.

In the moments following SoundExchange’s decision to lose the aggression and mull things over some more (the company will still seek a change it rates, though they’ll likely work much more closely with Internet broadcasters big and small in order to ensure they don’t create a vacuum in the Web radio industry – which would indeed have been the result had the rate hike been put through come Sunday), Pandora founder Tim Westergren spoke to Wired and told of his waning optimism over the matter in the final hours before the hike. In gratitude to all Save Net Radio campaigners and other Internet radio advocates, he said, “This is a direct result of lobbying pressure, so if anyone thinks their call didn’t matter, it did. That’s why this is happening.”

Pandora is a popular custom Internet radio station service/creator.

What I can gather from the various articles and posts published on this reversal by SoundExchange is that all involved in the debate over any rate hikes will be starting back at square one. Any fees purportedly “etched in stone” will be taken completely off the table and all parties at the table will start talks afresh.

Interestingly enough, in an addendum to the original post at Wired’s Listening Post, author Eliot Van Buskirk stated that Congress seems to have removed the Copyright Royalty Board from future discussions on the matter. Instead, Congress itself will overlook negotiations between SoundExchange and Webcasters directly.

This is without a doubt a victory for Webcasters and their listeners. It just goes to show that if a group screams loudly enough, the rescue team (in this case, the US Congress) will have no choice but to come to its aid.

SoundExchange, Before Congress, Backs Down; Net Radio Broadcaster Sigh Relief

The Big Brother nightmare of George Orwell's 1984 has become a reality - in the shadow of the author's former London home.

It may have taken a little longer than he predicted, but Orwell's vision of a society where cameras and computers spy on every person's movements is now here.

Foresight: The cameras crowd George Orwell's former London home

According to the latest studies, Britain has a staggering 4.2million CCTV cameras - one for every 14 people in the country - and 20 per cent of cameras globally. It has been calculated that each person is caught on camera an average of 300 times daily.

Use of spy cameras in modern-day Britain is now a chilling mirror image of Orwell's fictional world, created in the post-war Forties in a fourth-floor flat overlooking Canonbury Square in Islington, North London.

On the wall outside his former residence - flat number 27B - where Orwell lived until his death in 1950, an historical plaque commemorates the anti-authoritarian author. And within 200 yards of the flat, there are 32 CCTV cameras, scanning every move.

Orwell's view of the tree-filled gardens outside the flat is under 24-hour surveillance from two cameras perched on traffic lights.

The flat's rear windows are constantly viewed from two more security cameras outside a conference centre in Canonbury Place.

In a lane, just off the square, close to Orwell's favourite pub, the Compton Arms, a camera at the rear of a car dealership records every person entering or leaving the pub.

Within a 200-yard radius of the flat, there are another 28 CCTV cameras, together with hundreds of private, remote-controlled security cameras used to scrutinise visitors to homes, shops and offices.

The message is reminiscent of a 1949 poster to mark the launch of Orwell's 1984: 'Big Brother is Watching You'.

In the Shriji grocery store in Canonbury Place, three cameras focus on every person in the shop. Owner Minesh Amin explained: 'They are for our security and safety. Without them, people would steal from the shop. Although this is a nice area, there are always bad people who cause trouble by stealing.'

Three doors away, in the dry-cleaning shop run by Malik Zafar, are another two CCTV cameras.

'I need to know who is coming into my shop,' explained Mr Zafar, who spent £400 on his security system.

This week, the Royal Academy of Engineering (RAE) produced a report highlighting the astonishing numbers of CCTV cameras in the country and warned how such 'Big Brother tactics' could eventually put lives at risk.

The RAE report warned any security system was 'vulnerable to abuse, including bribery of staff and computer hackers gaining access to it'. One of the report's authors, Professor Nigel Gilbert, claimed the numbers of CCTV cameras now being used is so vast that further installations should be stopped until the need for them is proven.

One fear is a nationwide standard for CCTV cameras which would make it possible for all information gathered by individual cameras to be shared - and accessed by anyone with the means to do so.

The RAE report follows a warning by the Government's Information Commissioner Richard Thomas that excessive use of CCTV and other information-gathering was 'creating a climate of suspicion'.

Source: George Orwell, Big Brother is watching your house | News | This is London

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 is an amazingly powerful federal law, protecting interactive computer services by ensuring that the soapbox is not liable for what the speaker has said. Section 230's immunity to state law claims (typically defamation, but including all other lawsuits based on state laws) allows for many of the online services you know and love, including user product reviews, online auction feedback, internet dating services, message boards, classified ads, usenet -- the list goes on and on.

But Section 230 does not provide complete protection, exempting "intellectual property" law from its reach. The term "intellectual property" was not defined, leading to the question of whether state laws that are similar to traditional intellectual property are covered. Today, the Ninth Circuit emphatically answered that question, "constru[ing] the term 'intellectual property' to mean 'federal intellectual property,'" such as copyrights, patents and federal trademarks. Perfect 10, Inc. v. CCBill, LLC, __ F.3d __ (9th Cir. 2007). The Ninth Circuit reversed the District Court's ruling on Perfect 10's right of publicity claims, reasoning that:

"Because material on a website may be viewed across the Internet, and thus in more than one state at a time, permitting the reach of any particular state’s definition of intellectual property to dictate the contours of this federal immunity would be contrary to Congress’s expressed goal of insulating the development of the Internet from the various state-law regimes."

This means that Section 230 can protect service providers from claims that the users of their services violated state laws, such as the right of publicity, trade secrets and state trademark laws. This is great news for service providers, and great news for free speech, since it allows service providers to provide the platform upon which others may speak, while leaving the responsibility where it properly lies -- upon the author.

As for the federal intellectual property rights, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act provides a safe harbor for copyright claims. The Ninth Circuit decision clarified a number of factors of the DMCA safe harbor, importantly noting that "[t]he DMCA notification procedures place the burden of policing copyright infringement--identifying the potentially infringing material and adequately documenting infringement--squarely on the owners of the copyright." The Court of Appeals remanded the case back to the District Court to see whether CCBill qualified.

This is not going to be the last ruling on the subject. Perfect 10 has filed numerous lawsuits trying to hold everyone from search engines to credit card companies liable for other people's use of Perfect 10's pornographic photographs.

Source: EFF: DeepLinks

Google launched in October 2005 a feed reader, which became popular a year later. The company also offered publishing tools like Blogger, Page Creator and Google Docs, but even if they make your job easier by letting you focus on the content, you still have to come up with the text and the ideas.
Google Writer is a new application planned to be launched soon at Google Labs. It will integrate with many other Google services and guide you while writing a blog post, an essay or a news article.
Let's say you have a blog about Google, you wake up in the morning and wonder what to write. Now you can go to Google Writer, create a new project, enter some keywords and a small description and choose the default output (Blogger). Now when you create a new article inside this project, Google Writer gives you suggestions about the hot topics of the day, insightful articles about Google, news and popular queries that include "Google".
After choosing the topic, Google Writer suggests a title, some key quotes from other blogs and some interesting sites, images, and videos about the topic to facilitate your research. You can choose those that interests you and let Google Writer to create some context around the quotes. Google Writer has a big database of n-grams from web pages and it's able to create grammatically-correct sentences. It also learns your writing style from the previous articles, it knows your favorite authors, sites and your interests.
Now that you have the basis of the article, Google Writer suggests some concepts or portions of the text you should write about or expand. Google Writer has a smart autocomplete that learns from the web and is adapted to your style. It's also able to summarize text, to show interesting content from the web related to a text fragment and previous articles on the same topic.
At launch, the tool will only support Internet Explorer and Firefox, and will be invitation-only. Google intends to expand the tool for other online activities like sending mail, instant messaging, so you can dedicate more time to other important things, like writing cool applications. I asked Google if the creativity will disappear with tools like this that build a text on top of some aggregated fragments, but I only got a strange mail:
"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.

powered by Google Writer"

Source: Google Operating System: Google Writer

Anothr is an instant messaging robot that sends alerts with the latest from your favorites blogs and news sites. It works with Google Talk and Skype, and the only thing you have to do is to add the bot as a contact (for Google Talk and other Jabber clients, the email address is anothr@gmail.com). Then you'll see a list of available commands, but the most important thing is how to add the feeds: you can either type the address of each site individually or type "opml" and then upload your OPML (most feed readers offer the option to export your subscriptions as an OPML file; if they don't, there must be some hacks to make this possible).
The default interval for receiving updates is 10 minutes, but you can change it by typing "timer [number of minutes]".

Source: Google Operating System: Anothr - Read Feeds in Google Talk

Uhm.. No Dude. You do what WE say..... Fuckin' Asshole

by Maxim Kniazkov Sun Mar 25, 4:41 AM ET

WASHINGTON (AFP) - US Vice President Dick Cheney has assured political allies that an early withdrawal of US forces from Iraq would not be allowed, despite efforts by Congress to impose a deadline on US combat operations there.

The comments late Saturday followed a historic vote Friday in the House of Representatives, which called for a pullout of US combat troops from Iraq by August 31, 2008 -- regardless of whether Iraqi security forces are ready to take over from them.

President George W. Bush has vowed to veto the measure. But the threat has called into question the future of a 124-billion-dollar emergency funding bill, to which it is attached.

Lacking line-item veto power, Bush can reject bills only in their entirety.

In light of this circumstance, the president acknowledged earlier Saturday that if the bill that finances the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is not passed by April 15, the military "will face significant disruptions."

Cheney for his part used his appearance before the Republican Jewish Coalition in Manalaplan, Florida, to reassure allies that the current political struggle will not result in a precipitous US withdrawal from Iraq.

"A sudden withdrawal of our coalition would dissipate much of the effort that has gone into fighting the global war on terror, and result in chaos and mounting danger," the vice president declared. "And for the sake of our own security, we will not stand by and let it happen."

He did not explain what steps the administration could take if the supplemental bill dies in partisan bickering. But he expressed confidence in the final outcome, stating "We will complete the mission, and we will prevail."

Quoting extensively from Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, the vice president reiterated his conviction that an US early withdrawal from Iraq would be "a complete validation of the Al-Qaeda strategy."

And he painted a dire picture of the Muslim world descending into chaos and tyranny, if radical Islamists were allowed to prevail.

"Having tasted victory in Iraq, jihadists would look for new missions," he predicted. "Many would head for Afghanistan and fight alongside the Taliban. Others would set out for capitals across the Middle East, spreading more sorrow and discord as they eliminate dissenters and work to undermine moderate governments."

The speech marked a ratcheting up of a tense standoff between the White House and Democratic-controlled Congress, which is under heavy pressure from constituents to find a way to wrap up the war that most Americans now believe was a mistake.

But the Democrats made clear they have no intention of backing down. In a radio address Saturday, Representative Paul Hodes (news, bio, voting record) said the era of blank checks issued by Congress to the president was over and urged Bush to respond "by listening to the American people."

The angry debate added a new wrinkle Sunday, when a leading US foreign policy expert, former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, delivered a stinging rebuke to the whole concept of the war on terror, arguing it was promoting "a culture of fear" that was being exploited for political and financial gain.

"The sense of a pervasive but otherwise imprecise danger was thus channeled in a politically expedient direction by the mobilizing appeal of being 'at war'," he wrote in The Washington Post.

The fear, Brzezinski argued, was also being exploited by so-called "terror entrepreneurs."

He reminded that in 2003, Congress identified 160 sites as potential terrorism targets that should be fortified at the government's expense.

With lobbyists weighing in, Brzezinski noted, by the end of that year the list had grown to 1,849, by the end of 2004 -- to 28,360, and by 2005 -- to 77,769.

Now, he said, the database lists some 300,000 possible targets, which include not only the Sears Tower in Chicago, but also the Illinois Apple and Pork Festival.

Source: Cheney assures early Iraq pullout won't be allowed - Yahoo! News

Jamendo, the free music community, has distributed freely and legally more than one million albums using the popular peer to peer technology called BitTorrent.

For sure, the Gold or Platinium record threshold depends of the country and Jamendo acts globally, anyway, we are very proud that our trackers have crossed the million mark.

This figure is the minimum indicative number of the total of complete albums we have distributed so far. Peer to peer technology is not a matter of control and BitTorrent is not the only peer to peer protocol, we also support the eMule/eDonkey technology where it is even harder to have an idea of the number of distributed albums. Projecting the traffic of our mldonkey servers, we believe that we can add 50% more, bringing us to the level of one million and an half of complete albums distributed in 2 years.

The aim of Jamendo is not to define charts or the Top 40 of the best Creative Commons Licenced music. But if you ask, the most downloaded album of all time on Jamendo is Silence - L’autre endroit . This album was released on Jamendo in January 2006 under the free art licence and has been downloaded more than 11600 times.

Today, more than 2800 albums are available on Jamendo. This means around 2000 hours of free music ! The albums are downloaded at the rate of 200.000 albums per month.

Unlimited, free, and legal.

Source: Jamendo Blog » Blog Archive » Jamendo has gone Platinium !

By SPACE.com Staff
posted: 27 March 2007
01:18 pm ET

One of the most bizarre weather patterns known has been photographed at Saturn, where astronomers have spotted a huge, six-sided feature circling the north pole.

Rather than the normally sinuous cloud structures seen on all planets that have atmospheres, this thing is a hexagon.

The honeycomb-like feature has been seen before. NASA's Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft imaged it more than two decades ago. Now, having spotted it with the Cassini spacecraft, scientists conclude it is a long-lasting oddity.

"This is a very strange feature, lying in a precise geometric fashion with six nearly equally straight sides," said Kevin Baines, atmospheric expert and member of Cassini's visual and infrared mapping spectrometer team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "We've never seen anything like this on any other planet. Indeed, Saturn's thick atmosphere, where circularly-shaped waves and convective cells dominate, is perhaps the last place you'd expect to see such a six-sided geometric figure, yet there it is."

The hexagon is nearly 15,000 miles (25,000 kilometers) across. Nearly four Earths could fit inside it. The thermal imagery shows the hexagon extends about 60 miles (100 kilometers) down into the clouds.

At Saturn's south pole, Cassini recently spotted a freaky human eye-like feature that resembles a hurricane.

"It's amazing to see such striking differences on opposite ends of Saturn's poles," said Bob Brown, team leader of the Cassini visual and infrared mapping spectrometer at the University of Arizona. "At the south pole we have what appears to be a hurricane with a giant eye, and at the north pole of Saturn we have this geometric feature, which is completely different."

The hexagon appears to have remained fixed with Saturn's rotation rate and axis since first glimpsed by Voyager 26 years ago. The actual rotation rate of Saturn is still uncertain, which means nobody knows exactly how long the planet's day is.

"Once we understand its dynamical nature, this long-lived, deep-seated polar hexagon may give us a clue to the true rotation rate of the deep atmosphere and perhaps the interior," Baines said.

• Video: The Hexagon on Saturn

Source: SPACE.com -- Bizarre Hexagon Spotted on Saturn

 

Wow. This is a must see clip from March 23, 2007, in which UN Watch director Hillel Neuer really unloads on the blatantly corrupt UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva—and then is denounced by furious council president Luis Alfonso De Alba, who threatens to remove Neuer’s statements from the record.

The United Nations at work.

Watch Video

These statements won’t be taken out of the record as long as LGF is online.

Source: lgf: Banned UN Speech: "Human Rights Nightmare"

Carl Sagan: toking astronomer
New biography reveals popular scientist was into pot.
from Cannabis Culture # 22
http://www.cannabisculture.com/cgi/issue.cgi?num=22
by Dana Larsen

The late astronomer and popular science writer Carl Sagan has been revealed to have been an ardent marijuana smoker. An upcoming biography titled Carl Sagan: A Life, reveals that Sagan's best friend for 30 years was Dr Lester Grinspoon, Harvard psychiatrist and outspoken pro-pot advocate.

In his 1977 book The Dragons of Eden, Sagan discusses the pygmies, for whom marijuana is their only cultivated crop. He wrote that "it would be wryly interesting if in human history the cultivation of marijuana led generally to the invention of agriculture, and thereby to civilization."

In an anonymous essay he wrote for Grinspoon's book Marihuana Reconsidered Sagan explained that he first tried pot around 1961, "a time of awakening of my social consciousness and amiability."

In the essay he describes a wide variety of experiences and observations he had under the influence of pot. He explains that marijuana increased his appreciation and understanding of art and music, as well as his sensitivity to tastes, aromas, and sexual pleasure. He also describes how marijuana led to insights "on a wide range of social, political, philosophical and human biological topics."

"There is a myth about such highs," wrote Sagan, "that the user has an illusion of great insight, but it does not survive scrutiny in the morning. I am convinced that this is an error, and that the devastating insights achieved when high are real insights; the main problem is putting those insights in a form acceptable to the quite different self that we are when we're down the next day. Some of the hardest work I've ever done has been to put such insights down on tape or in writing.

"I am convinced that there are genuine and valid levels of perception available with cannabis (and probably with other drugs) which are, through the defects of our society and our educational system, un-available to us without such drugs."

Ann Druyan, Sagan's former wife, is a director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. Sagan died of pneumonia in 1996. He was 62.

Source: We Ride Skeletal Lightning

March 20, 2007

If you’re an independent filmmaker or dramatist, you may not have many chances to adapt the works of popular fiction writers. Intellectual property law doesn’t make it easy, and the licensing fees alone can make approaching big name authors prohibitively expensive.

Jonathan Lethem, however, is one author who is eager to see his work adapted by others. The bestselling author of Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn has started a project called Promiscuous Materials, in which he has made several of his short stories available for adaptation into short films or one act plays by anyone who can afford the reasonable price of a dollar.

In an NPR interview, Lethem explained his reasoning:

What I’m doing is sort of saying, look, we give things away sometimes. That’s part of our work, and… as it happens I’d like to do more of it. …The reason this seemed so important to me is that… people talk about intellectual property as if it were an absolute concept with very easily defined terms, and I want to suggest that actually there’s an enormous grey area. There’s a really big spectrum between charging for something and giving it away…

Lethem takes his inspiration from the open source software movement and Creative Commons (though the license he is using is not a CC license). In a recent issue of Harper’s, Lethem argued that contemporary ideas of intellectual property stifle creativity and prevent artists from building on the achievements of others. To drive the point home, he constructed the entire article from quotations by other authors.

Not all of Lethem’s work is available on these terms, and there are some simple conditions that artists must agree to before using his material. Visit jonathanlethem.com for more info.

Posted by Hugh D'Andrade at 11:44 AM

Source: EFF: DeepLinks

Rosie O'Donnell Takes A Stand for 9/11 Truth
Talk show host lays out WTC 7 facts in blog

Infowars.net | March 16, 2007 

It has been evident for a number of weeks now that talk show host Rosie O'Donnell has been trying to cover 9/11 truth in the best way she can without being yanked off the air - now her latest blog posting confirms this.

In her latest blog, dated March 15th, O'Donnell dispenses with the small talk and gets to the nub of the matter by stating some of the facts surrounding the demolition of building 7 on 9/11.

Here is the Blog entry in full:

at 5 30 pm
9 11 2001
wtc7 collapsed

for the third time in history
fire brought down a steel building
reducing it to rubble

hold on folks
here we go

• The fires in WTC 7 were not evenly distributed, so a perfect collapse was impossible.
• Silverstein said to the fire department commander “the smartest thing to do is pull it.”
• Firefighters withdrawing from the area stated the building was going to “blow up”.
• The roof of WTC 7 visibly crumbled and the building collapsed perfectly into its footprint.
• Molten steel and partially evaporated steel members were found in the debris.

[WTC 7] contained offices of the FBI, Department of Defense, IRS (which contained prodigious amounts of corporate tax fraud, including Enron's), US Secret Service, Securities & Exchange Commission (with more stock fraud records), and Citibank's Salomon Smith Barney, the Mayor's Office of Emergency Management and many other financial institutions. [Online Journal]

The SEC has not quantified the number of active cases in which substantial files were destroyed [by the collapse of WTC 7]. Reuters news service and the Los Angeles Times published reports estimating them at 3,000 to 4,000. They include the agency's major inquiry into the manner in which investment banks divvied up hot shares of initial public offerings during the high-tech boom. …”Ongoing investigations at the New York SEC will be dramatically affected because so much of their work is paper-intensive,” said Max Berger of New York's Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossmann. “This is a disaster for these cases.” [New York Lawyer]

Citigroup says some information that the committee is seeking [about WorldCom] was destroyed in the Sept. 11 terror attack on the World Trade Center. Salomon had offices in 7 World Trade Center, one of the buildings that collapsed in the aftermath of the attack. The bank says that back-up tapes of corporate emails from September 1998 through December 2000 were stored at the building and destroyed in the attack. [TheStreet]

Inside [WTC 7 was] the US Secret Service's largest field office with more than 200 employees. …”All the evidence that we stored at 7 World Trade, in all our cases, went down with the building,” according to US Secret Service Special Agent David Curran. [TechTV]

lets start here
ok…go slow
remember 2 breathe
use google

-----------

Clearly anticipating a huge response, O'Donnell has suspended the comments form on the post.

O'Donnell's day time ABC chat show, The View first came to the attention of the 9/11 truth community last December when actor James Brolin, the husband of Barbara Streisand, encouraged viewers of the show to check out the website 911weknow.com , which purports to expose how the twin towers and Building 7, which wasn't hit by a plane, were brought down via controlled demolition.

The show then came to our attention again last month when O'Donnell and a panel discussed John Conner of the Resistance Manifesto. At this time O'Donnell mimicked Conner by shouting "9/11 was an inside job" in front of her mainstream audience.

On the panel at that time was The "Grey Gardens" star Christine Ebersole, who declared her admiration for Conner. Ebersole then appeared on John Conner's radio show (MP3) and stated that she agreed a corrupt faction within the U.S. government is to blame for 9/11.

"I think we want to look at our government as sort of like a benevolent father that's going to take care of us and be kind to us and treat us well, and I think it's too much for our people to conceptualize, and I'm sure that's what happened to people in Nazi Germany," Ebersole commented.

The New York Post immediately blasted Ebersole as a "kook".

O'Donnell was again in the news today after she covered the "confession" of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, questioning it's authenticity. The Huffington Post commented:

"...it's very difficult to assert anything with certainty right now. But it's a little disquieting to listen to the laugher of the View audience and they try to figure out what they should be cheering for and what should bother them."

Indeed, it seems that O'Donnell has woken up to 9/11 truth only to find herself in a situation where her audience are not really 'typical' truth seekers, which is entirely a good thing. It therefore comes as no surprise to see Rosie O'Donnell making a more forceful attempt to educate her readers at this time.

It is important to stress that celebrity sound bites do not make a revolution, but it is important to remember that people such as O'Donnell have an avenue to reach a lot of people. It is down to the discretion of her viewers to decide whether to look into what she is saying.

While many have praised her, some vicious bloggers have already labeled O'Donnell as a lunatic and an anti-semite and are calling for her head, no doubt the mainstream media will pick up on this as they usually do, two days later than everyone else.

Watch this space.

Source: Rosie O'Donnell Takes A Stand for 9/11 Truth

The RIAA has been ordered to turn over its attorneys' billing records in Capitol v. Foster by March 26, 2007. The order requires the RIAA to produce the attorneys' time sheets, billing statements, billing records, and costs and expense records. The Court reviewed authorities holding that an opponent's attorneys fees are a relevant factor in determining the reasonableness of attorneys fees, quoting a United States Supreme Court case which held that "a party cannot litigate tenaciously and then be heard to complain about the time necessarily spent by his opponent in response" (footnote 11).

March 15, 2007, Decision and Order Directing Production of RIAA's attorneys' billing records*

Source: Recording Industry vs The People

1. Don’t pick on the weak. It’s immoral. Don’t antagonize the strong without cause, its stupid.
2. Don’t hate women. It’s a waste of time
3. Invest in yourself. Material things come to those that have self actualized.
4. Get in a fistfight, even if you are going to lose.
5. As a former Marine, take it from me. Don’t join the military, unless you want to risk getting your balls blown off to secure other people’s economic or political interests.
6. If something has a direct benefit to an individual or a class of people, and a theoretical, abstract, or amorphous benefit to everybody else, realize that the proponent’s intentions are to benefit the former, not the latter, no matter what bullshit they try to feed you.
7. Don’t be a Republican. They are self-dealing crooks with no sense of honor or patriotism to their fellow citizens. If you must be a Republican, don’t be a “conservative.” They are whining, bitching, complaining, simple-minded self-righteous idiots who think they’re perpetual victims. Listen to talk radio for a while, you’ll see what I mean.
8. Don’t take proffered advice without a critical analysis. 90% of all advice is intended to benefit the proponent, not the recipient. Actually, the number is probably closer to 97%, but I don’t want to come off as cynical.
9. You’ll spend your entire life listening to people tell you how much you owe them. You don’t owe the vast majority of people shit.
10. Don’t undermine your fellow young men. Mentor the young men that come after you. Society recognizes that you have the potential to be the most power force in society. It scares them. Society does not find young men sympathetic. They are afraid of you, both individually and collectively. Law enforcement’s primary purpose is to suppress you.
11. As a young man, you’re on your own. Society divides and conquers. Unlike women who have advocates looking out for them (NOW, Women’s Study Departments, government, non-profit organizations, political advocacy groups) almost no one is looking out for you.
12. Young men provide the genius and muscle by which our society thrives. Look at the Silicone Valley. By in large, it was not old men or women that created the revolution we live. Realize that society steals your contributions, secures it with our intellectual property laws, and then takes credit and the rewards where none is due.
13. Know that few people have your best interests at heart. Your mother does. Your father probably does (if he stuck around). Your siblings are on your side. Everybody else worries about themselves.
14. Don’t be afraid to tell people to “Fuck off” when need be. It is an important skill to acquire. As they say, speak your piece, even if your voice shakes.
15. Acquire empathy, good interpersonal skills, and confidence. Learn to read body language and non-verbal communication. Don’t just concentrate on your vocational or technical skills, or you’ll find your wife fucking somebody else.
16. Keep fit.
17. Don’t speak ill of your wife/girlfriend. Back her up against the world, even if she’s wrong. She should know that you have her back. When she needs your help, give it. She should know that you’ll take her part.
18. Don’t cheat on your wife/girlfriend. If you must cheat, don’t humiliate her. Don’t risk having your transgressions come back to her or her friends. Don’t do it where you live. Don’t do it with people in your social circle. Don’t shit in your own back yard.
19. If your girlfriend doesn’t make you feel good about yourself and bring joy to your life, fire her. That’s what girlfriends are for.
20. Don’t bother with “emotional affairs.” They are just a vehicle for women to flirt and have someone make them feel good about themselves. That’s the part of a relationship they want. For you it is a lot of work and investment in time. If they are having an emotional affair with you, they’re probably fucking someone else.
21. Becoming a woman’s friend and confidant is not going to get you into an intimate relationship. If you haven’t gotten the girl within a reasonably short period of time, chances are you won’t ever get her. She’ll end up confiding to you about the sexual adventures she’s having with someone else.
22. Have and nurture friendships with women.
23. Realize that love is a numbers game. Guys fall in love easily. You’re going to see some girl and feel like you’ll die if you don’t get her. If she rejects you, move on to the next one. It’s her loss.
24. Don’t be an internet troll. Got out and live life. There is not a cadre of beautiful women advertising on Craigslist to have NSA sex with you. Beautiful women don’t need to advertise. The websites that advertise with attractive women’s photos and claims of loneliness are baloney. All they want is your money and your personal information so that they can market to you. The posts on Craigslist by young “women” seeking NSA sex, and asking for a picture are just a bunch of gay troll pic collectors. This is especially true if the post uses common gay lexicon like “hole” as in “fuck my hole” or seeks “masculine” men, or uses the word cock (except in the context of “Don’t send a cock shot.”) There are women on Craigslist. They are easily recognizable by their 2-5 paragraph postings. Most are in their 30's or older.
25. When you become a man in full, know that people will get in your way. People who are attracted to you will somehow manage to step in your path. Gay guys will give you “the look.” Old people will somehow stumble in front of you at the worst time. Don’t get frustrated. Just step aside and go about your business. Know that these are passive aggressive methods to get you to acknowledge their existence.
26. Don’t gay bash. Don’t mentally or physically abuse people because of who they are, or how they present themselves. It’s none of your business to try to intimidate people into conformity.
27. If your gay, admit it to yourself, your parents, your friends and society at large. Be prepared to get harassed. See rule 14. If someone threatens you or assaults you, call the cops. Have them arrested. You have no obligation to self sacrifice because of who you are. As a gay person, you’ll have more social freedom than straight men. Use it to protect yourself. Be prepared to get out of Dodge if your orientation makes your life unbearable. Move to San Francisco, New York, Atlanta, or New Orleans. You’ll find a welcoming community there.
28. Don’t be a poser. Avoid being one of those dudes who puts a surfboard on top of their car, but never surfs, or a dude with a powder coated fixed gear bike and a messenger bag, but was never a messenger. Live the life. Earn your bona fides.
29. Don’t believe the crap about the patriarchy. More women are accepted and attend college. More degrees are awarded to women than men. Women outlive men. More men commit suicide. Men are twice as likely to be victims of violence, including murder. If you consider sexual assaults in prisons, twice as many men are raped as women (society thinks prison rape is funny). The streets are littered with homeless men, sprinkled with a few homeless women. Statically, women are happier than men. The myth that girls are being cheated by are educational system is belied by the fact that schools are bastions of femininity, mostly run by and taught by women. Girls outperform boys in school. It is the boys in school getting fucked over, and prescribed ritalin for being boys. Real wages for men are falling, while real wages for women are rising. Just because someone says something enough times, doesn’t make it true. You have nothing to feel guilty about.
30. Remember, 97% of all advice is worthless. Take what you can use, and trash the rest.

Source: best of craigslist : Advice to Young Men from an Old Man

It's good to get into the habit of recording customer service calls. It gives you proof if they mess up and maybe you'll get a really bad one that you'll want to submit to The Consumerist. Here's some tools to help you.

• From landline to headphone input on recording device: 302-902 TRKIT
• VoIP: Skype plus HotRecorder or plus PowerGramo.
• Outbound only: 3-2-1-Call-Log
• Inbound: Sign up for Grand Central and press 4 when receiving a call

— BEN POPKEN

Source: How To Record Customer Service Calls - Consumerist

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A U.S. Marine charged with murdering 18 unarmed civilians in Haditha, Iraq, said in an interview with CBS's "60 Minutes" he regretted the deaths but would make the same decisions today.

Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich admitted shooting five unarmed Iraqi men in the back in the interview and said his actions were justified because he believed the men had hostile intent toward the Marines.

"There is nothing that I can possibly say to make up or make well the deaths of those women and children, and I am absolutely sorry it happened that day," Wuterich said.

"What I did that day, the decision that I made, I would make those decisions again today. Those are decisions that I made in a combat situation and I believe I had to make those decisions."

CBS summarized the interview in a news release.

Four Marines have been charged with unpremeditated murder in the killings of two dozen men, women and children on November 19, 2005, in Haditha.

Four Marine officers have been charged with other counts including dereliction of duty.

Iraqi witnesses say enraged Marines shot the civilians to retaliate for the death of a colleague, who was killed by a roadside bomb hours earlier.

The interview is scheduled to be broadcast on Sunday.

Source: Haditha Marine says would make same decision again | Top News | Reuters.com

The RIAA is actually made up of many different Record Labels.

This is a complete list of them all.

Source: Digg - Ever Wondered Who The RIAA Really Are?

March 13, 2007

The FBI has blatantly abused a key PATRIOT Act provision and knowingly violated the law to spy on Americans' telephone, Internet, and other personal records, as documented in a report recently released by the Justice Department. Congress must rein in this egregious behavior, but it can't stop there -- the Bush Administration's unprecedented pattern of disregarding the law stretches far beyond the examples in this report. Tell Congress to defend your privacy now.

Before PATRIOT, the FBI could use so-called National Security Letters only for securing the records of suspected terrorists or spies. But under PATRIOT the FBI can use them to get private records about anybody without any court approval as long as it believes the information could be relevant to an authorized terrorism or espionage investigation.

According to the Justice Department's Inspector General, the FBI's misuse of its authority included issuing NSLs to spy on people who weren't the subject of any existing investigation whatsoever. The FBI also lied to Congress and underreported its use of NSLs by many thousands. Worse still, the FBI has ignored its own lawyers' advice and intentionally evaded PATRIOT's thin bounds, improperly requesting and obtaining personal records through so-called "exigent letters" that Congress never authorized.

That's only a sampling of the horror story painted by the report, and, had Congress not ordered the Inspector General to review the FBI's activities last year, these abuses might have never been revealed. From the moment PATRIOT was passed, we said the NSL power was ripe for abuse and unconstitutional, and it's clearer than ever that Congress should repeal PATRIOT's expansion of NSL powers and reform the PATRIOT Act as a whole.

Moreover, Congress must broadly investigate the Administration's use of surveillance powers, including the NSA's massive and illegal domestic spying program. Congress and the American public have been kept in the dark about such clear violations of the law and Americans' privacy for far too long. Immediate and thorough oversight hearings are necessary to uncover the truth and hold the Administration accountable.

Take action now.

Source: EFF: DeepLinks

Written by Ernesto on March 12, 2007

Like most other BitTorrent sites, The Pirate Bay has grown explosively over the last year. They are now tracking 500.000 .torrent files and almost 5 million peers, what makes them by far the most popular BitTorrent tracker. In comparison, a year ago they tracked only 125.000 torrents.

It is estimated that almost 50% of the public .torrent files are now tracked by The Pirate Bay trackers.

To celebrate this great accomplishment, the Pirate Bay crew decided to give the Swedish King a diploma. “The diploma is a congratulatory diploma about our joint efforts in making Sweden famous globally when it comes to technology and culture”, writes Brokep on the Pirate Bay blog.

Make no mistake, King Carl XVI Gustaf really deserves it. A few weeks ago the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA) published a report in which Sweden was placed on their piracy watch list. The IIPA considers Sweden to be a save haven for pirates. The Pirate bay is also mentioned in the report, hate that The Pirate Bay admins “proudly flaunt their role in facilitating infringements, often taking pot shots at rights holders from whom they receive notices of infringing activity”.

It’s worth celebrating.

Source: The Pirate Bay’s Torrents Quadruple in a Year | TorrentFreak

San Francisco - The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) has announced it will revoke an illegitimate patent held by Clear Channel Communications after a campaign by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

The patent covered a system and method of creating digital recordings of live performances. Clear Channel claimed the bogus patent created a monopoly on all-in-one technologies that produce post-concert digital recordings and threatened to sue those who made such recordings. This locked musical acts into using Clear Channel technology and blocked innovations by others.

However, EFF's investigation found that a company named Telex had in fact developed similar technology more than a year before Clear Channel filed its patent request. EFF -- in conjunction with patent attorney Theodore C. McCullough and with the help of Lori President and Ashley Bollinger, students at the Glushko-Samuelson Intellectual Property Clinic at American University's Washington College of Law -- asked the PTO to revoke the patent based on this and other extensive evidence.

"Bogus patents like this one are good examples of what's wrong with the current patent system," said EFF Staff Attorney Jason Schultz. "We're glad that the Patent Office was willing to help artists and innovators out from under its shadow."

The Clear Channel patent challenge was part of EFF's Patent Busting Project, aimed at combating the chilling effects bad patents have on public and consumer interests. The Patent Busting Project seeks to document the threats and fight back by filing requests for reexamination against the worst offenders.

"The patent system plays a critical role in business and the economy," said McCullough. "Everyone loses if we allow overreaching patent claims to restrict the tremendous benefits of new software and technology development."

For the notice from the Patent Office:
http://www.eff.org/patent/wanted/clearchannel/notice_of_intent_to_cancel.pdf

For more on EFF's Patent Busting Project:
http://www.eff.org/patent

Contacts:

Jason Schultz
Staff Attorney
Electronic Frontier Foundation
jason@eff.org

Theodore C. McCullough
Registered Patent Attorney
theo702000@yahoo.com

Source: EFF: Breaking News

AT&T told an appeals court in a written brief Monday that the case against it for allegedly helping the government spy on its customers should be thrown out, because it cannot defend itself -- even by showing a signed order from the government -- without endangering national security. 

A government brief filed simultaneously backed AT&T's claims and said a lower court judge had exceeded his authority by not dismissing the suit outright.

Because plaintiffs' entire action rests upon alleged secret espionage activities, including an alleged secret espionage relationship between AT&T and the Government concerning the alleged activities, this suit must be dismissed now as a matter of law," the government argued in its brief (.pdf).

The telecom giant and the government are appealing a June ruling in a federal district court that allowed the suit brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation against the telecom to proceed, despite the government's invocation of a powerful tool called the "states secrets privilege," which allows it to have civil cases dismissed when national secrets are involved.

California Northern District Court Chief Judge Vaughn Walker ruled, however, that since the government had admitted it was wiretapping Americans without a warrant and that AT&T had to be involved, the case could go forward tentatively. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals will hear the government and AT&Ts' appeal in the coming months.

"This case cannot and should not go forward where AT&T is disabled from responding to
allegations or evidence tendered by the plaintiffs, and is therefore deprived of the
ability to defend itself against potentially massive liability," AT&T's lawyers wrote in a brief (.pdf). "Moreover, as this Court has explained, although a dismissal in contexts like this one may appear 'harsh' for the individual plaintiffs, the 'greater public good,' and "ultimately the less harsh remedy," is the protection of military and intelligence secrets the release of which could harm the public's safety."

The suit, which relies heavily on documents provided to the rights group by former AT&T employee Mark Klein, alleges that AT&T helped the government spy on internet communications, data-mine domestic call records and listen in on phone calls without a warrant as required by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.  The government, which says it has inherent constitutional powers to wiretap in the time of war, said in January it would stop the warrantless wiretapping of certain overseas phone calls and get warrants from the court it evaded.

AT&T also argues that all of lawsuit needs to be thrown out because the government has never admitted to spying on internet traffic and getting phone records.  It has only admitted to wiretapping overseas communications where one end of the communication belongs to a person suspected of terrorist links.  Since the EFF defendants say they aren't terrorists or communicate with terrorists, the only part of the spying that has been admitted -- and thus admissible in court -- doesn't apply to them, AT&T argues.  Since the rest of the purported surveillance is thus secret the case has to be thrown out.

As to Plaintiffs' claims of harm from untargeted content surveillance, the government has not acknowledged the existence of any such program, and any information about the methods or targets of alleged government surveillance is unquestionably covered by Director Negroponte's invocation of the state secrets doctrine.

AT&T furthermore argues that the lower court's ruling that AT&t had to be involved due to the width of the surveillance program and the size of AT&T was an uninformed guess:

The district court used a chain of conjecture, hypothesis, and unwarranted inference to suggest that AT&T's alleged participation in these programs was not in fact a secret. The court, for instance, relied on its own unfounded and inexpert speculation that content surveillance requires the cooperation of a telecommunications provider.

EFF will file its response later this month, and  will likely argue, as it already has in the district court, that Congressional officials have admitted that some of the nation's largest telecoms did turn over call record databases to the government, so that is not a secret either.

The appeals court has not yet set a date for oral arguments.

Source: WIRED Blogs: 27B Stroke 6

By: SGT News | Submitted on: 03/12/07

SOUTHERN ARIZONA (SGT NEWS) - Political maverick and Texas House member Ron Paul formally announced his candidacy for the president of the United States this morning during the “Washington Journal” call-in program on C-SPAN.
Paul stands as one of the last remaining believers in strict enforcement of the Constitution and a limited federal government in Washington D.C. Paul ran unsuccessfully for the White House in 1988 under the Libertarian ticket, but now caucuses with the Republican Party. His political platform includes low taxes, individual liberties and a principled belief in the right to life.
His presidential exploratory committee formed earlier this year stirred up his enormous grassroots support from heartland voters, small government believers and fed-up Republicans who believe current GOP candidates offer no real solutions to an expanding federal government and refuse to tackle America's important issues, such as illegal immigration and an erosion of American's civil liberties.
Paul is a life-long Libertarian and proves his focus on ensuring American's civil liberties by voting against legislation such as the Patriot Act, which provides the government wider authorization to collect information about the American people. In addition, he voted in 2004 in favor of the “Pledge Protection Act”, which amends federal code to prevent court cases that directly attack the Pledge of Allegiance or its authorization under the Constitution.
Dr. Paul favors an immediate end to the Iraq war. Although Paul admits the people of Iraq are better off without Saddam's rule, he does believe that our presence in Iraq “offers little in the way of a real solution to our problems in the Middle East – many of which were caused by our interventionism in the first place.” Paul voted against the 2007 appropriations bill for the Department of Defense because it included funding for the war in Iraq.
He supports controls on immigration and increased use of visas for skilled workers. “Amnesty for illegal immigrants is not the answer,” Paul said in a 2005 article. “Why should lawbreakers obtain a free pass, while those seeking to immigrate legally face years of paperwork and long waits for a visa?” Paul opposes an illegal immigrant's right to taxpayer-funded welfare, including free medical coverage, food stamps and housing subsidies.
He strongly believes in local control of education and voted against a federal government grant that provides Black and Hispanic colleges $84 million dollars. He supports school choice and favors the use of vouchers that parents can use for private & parochial schools. In 2000, Paul supported a Republican Liberty Caucus (RLC) resolution to abolish the Department of Education and return education control to states, cities and communities.
The National Taxpayers Union ranks Ron Paul highly on matters of taxation. Paul supports eliminating the estate, capital gains and inheritance taxes, opposes the marriage penalty and voted to increase the child tax credit. Paul supports a phasing out of the death tax and making President Bush's tax cuts permanent. Paul dubs himself “The Taxpayer's Best Friend”, a slogan used during his Congressional campaign in 2004.
Paul breaks with the Republican Party by opposing the use of the death penalty as punishment for violent crimes. In 2001, Paul voted to legalize the use of marijuana for medicinal purposes and opposes the federal government's ability to perform random drug tests on federal employees.
Paul represents the 14th district in Texas that stretches along the gulf coast in southeast Texas.

Source: SmallGovTimes.com :: Ron Paul formally announces White House candidacy

A study (.pdf) released today by an independent research group at George Washington University shows that 79 percent of federal agencies are in violation of an amendment to the Freedom of Information Act that requires agencies to post records online and help citizens make information requests via the Internet.

Congress approved "E-FOIA" in 1996 to expand public access to information and make it easier for the federal government to handle the high volume of FOIA requests it receives each year. The current FOIA process can be an arduous one. E-FOIA was intended to save time and money. But that hasn't happened. In a government where more secrecy, not less, has been the norm, it's not surprising that the feds fall short of the law. What is surprising is how short they fall.

With support of the Knight Foundation for journalism, the GWU study surveyed 149 agencies and found most lacking in key areas:

• Only one in five federal agencies (21 percent) posts on the Web all four categories of records that the law specifically requires;
• Only one in 16 agencies (6 percent) posts all ten elements of essential FOIA guidance;
• Only 36 percent of agencies provide the required indexes of records;
• Only 26 percent of agencies provide online forms for submitting FOIA requests;
• Many agency Web links are missing or just wrong - one FOIA fax number checked in the Knight Survey actually rang in the maternity ward of a military base hospital.

The report's authors said  federal agencies are "flunking the online test" and some government sites simply link to each other in an "endless empty loop."

Source: WIRED Blogs: 27B Stroke 6

U.S. / NEWS Fri Mar 9, 2007 @ 11:13pm neoform

Multiple media outlets are focusing on the unsurprising story that the FBI seems to have been abusing its powers under the Patriot Act to issue so-called "national security letters" (NSLs), whereby the FBI is empowered to obtain a whole array of privacy-infringing records without any sort of judicial oversight or subpoena process. In particular, the FBI has failed to comply with the legal obligations imposed by Congress, when it re-authorized the Patriot Act in early 2006, which required the FBI to report to Congress on the use of these letters.
That the FBI is abusing its NSL power is entirely unsurprising (more on that below), but the real story here -- and it is quite significant -- has not even been mentioned by any of these news reports. The only person (that I've seen) to have noted the most significant aspect of these revelations is Silent Patriot at Crooks & Liars, who very astutely recalls that the NSL reporting requirements imposed by Congress were precisely the provisions which President Bush expressly proclaimed he could ignore when he issued a "signing statement" as part of the enactment of the Patriot Act's renewal into law. Put another way, the law which the FBI has now been found to be violating is the very law which George Bush publicly declared he has the power to ignore.
It was The Boston Globe's Charlie Savage who first drew attention to the Patriot Act signing statement in a typically superb article, back in March, 2006, which reported:
When President Bush signed the reauthorization of the USA Patriot Act this month, he included an addendum saying that he did not feel obliged to obey requirements that he inform Congress about how the FBI was using the act's expanded police powers.
The bill contained several oversight provisions intended to make sure the FBI did not abuse the special terrorism-related powers to search homes and secretly seize papers. The provisions require Justice Department officials to keep closer track of how often the FBI uses the new powers and in what type of situations. Under the law, the administration would have to provide the information to Congress by certain dates.
Bush signed the bill with fanfare at a White House ceremony March 9, calling it ''a piece of legislation that's vital to win the war on terror and to protect the American people." But after the reporters and guests had left, the White House quietly issued a ''signing statement," an official document in which a president lays out his interpretation of a new law.
In the statement, Bush said that he did not consider himself bound to tell Congress how the Patriot Act powers were being used and that, despite the law's requirements, he could withhold the information if he decided that disclosure would ''impair foreign relations, national security, the deliberative process of the executive, or the performance of the executive's constitutional duties."
Bush wrote: ''The executive branch shall construe the provisions . . . that call for furnishing information to entities outside the executive branch . . . in a manner consistent with the president's constitutional authority to supervise the unitary executive branch and to withhold information . . . "
The statement represented the latest in a string of high-profile instances in which Bush has cited his constitutional authority to bypass a law.
When a country is ruled by an individual who repeatedly and openly arrogates unto himself the power to violate the law, and specifically proclaims that he is under no obligation to account to Congress or anyone else concerning the exercise of radical new surveillance powers such as NSLs, it should come as absolutely no surprise that agencies under his control freely break the law. The culture of lawlessness which the President has deliberately and continuously embraced virtually ensures, by design, that any Congressional limits on the use of executive power will be violated.
That NSLs are a dangerous and oversight-less instrument which entail enormous potential for abuse is hardly a new revelation. But those who tried to warn of such dangers were tarred and feathered as allies of the Terrorists, people who wanted to prevent the Commander-in-Chief from protecting the American people. Who else would possibly express concerns about The Patriot Act?
As a result of that commonplace, debate-precluding cartoon campaign, Russ Feingold -- the only Senator to vote against the original enactment of the Patriot Act -- was able to convince only nine of his fellow Democratic Senators to oppose re-authorization of the Patriot Act. And though the media aided the White House in obscuring the substantive objections he raised to that bill, Feingold repeatedly emphasized that he was in favor of many of the provisions of the Patriot Act, but was concerned about the lack of safeguards to protect Americans from abuse -- specifically the standard-less and oversight-less NSLs (as he said then: "we need to place safeguards on the broad NSL power and to put a sunset on that power so that Congress can make sure it's not abused"). But as usual, such concerns were drowned out by manipulative appeals to the need of the Commander-in-Chief to Protect Us from The Terrorists.

Source: Newsique.com / U.S. / The FBI's lawbreaking is tied directly to President Bush

 

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

- Ernest Hemingway, author and journalist, Nobel laureate (1899-1961)

 

Hemingway, who took his own life in 1961, knew his share of both intelligent people and of unhappiness. He lived through two world wars, the Great Depression, four wives and an unknown number of failed romantic relationships, none of which would help him to develop happiness if he knew how.

As Hemingway's quote was based on his life experience, I will base  the following speculation on both my personal and my professional experience as a sociologist. Not enough study exists to quote on this subject.

Western society is not set up to nurture intelligent children and adults, the way it dotes over athletes and sports figures, especially the outstanding ones. While we have the odd notable personality such as Albert Einstein, we also have many extremely intelligent people working in occupations that are considered among the lowliest, as may be attested by a review of the membership lists of Mensa (the club for the top two percent on intelligence scales).

Education systems in countries whose primary interest is in wealth accumulation encourage heroes in movies, war and sports, but not in intellectual development. Super intelligent people manage, but few reach the top of the business or social ladder.

Children develop along four streams: intellectual, physical, emotional (psychological) and social. In classrooms, the smartest kids tend to be left out of more activities by other children than they are included in. They are "odd," they are the geeks, they are social outsiders. In other words, they do not develop socially as well as they may develop intellectually or even physically where opportunities may exist for more progress.

Their emotional development, characterized by their ability to cope with risky or stressful situations, especially over long periods of time, also lags behind that of the average person.

Adults tend to believe that intelligent kids can deal with anything because they are intellectually superior. This inevitably includes situations where the intelligent kids have neither knowledge nor skills to support their experience. They go through the tough times alone. Adults don't understand that they need help and other kids don't want to associate with kids the social leaders say are outsiders.

As a result we have many highly intelligent people whose social development progresses much slower than that of most people and they have trouble coping with the stressors of life that present themselves to everyone. It should come as no surprise that the vast majority of prison inmates are socially and emotionally underdeveloped or maldeveloped and a larger than average percentage of them are more intelligent than the norm.

Western society provides the ideal incubator for social misfits and those with emotional coping problems. When it comes to happiness, people who are socially inept and who have trouble coping emotionally with the exigencies of life would not be among those you should expect to be happy.

This may be changing in the 21st century as the geeks gain recognition as people with great potential, especially as people who might make their fortune in the world of high technology. Geeks may be more socially accepted than in the past, but unless they receive more assistance with their social and emotional development, most are destined to be unhappy as they mature in the world of adults.

People with high intelligence, be they children or adults, still rank as social outsiders in most situations, including their skills to be good mates and parents.

Moreover, they tend to see more of the tragedy in the communites and countries they live in, and in the world, than the average person whose primary source of news and information is comedy shows on television. Tragedy is easier to find than compassion, even though compassion likely exists in greater proportion in most communities.

Bill Allin

'Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems,' striving to make the difficult problems easier to understand so someone can change the system.

Source: Scribd - Why Intelligent People Tend To Be Unhappy