12 Things You Can do to Fight the Internet Blacklist Bill
A Toolkit for Anti-SOPA Activism
Rainy Reitman
EFF
Congress is debating dangerous legislation that would give the Department of Justice unprecedented power to “blacklist” websites without a trial and give Hollywood copyright holders a fast-track way to shut down a website’s financial services for alleged copyright infringement, endangering sites like Vimeo and Etsy. It’s nothing short of a bill to create a censorship regime in the U.S., and it’s moving fast.
We need your help to stop this legislation before it can undermine Internet security and censor the web. Ready to join EFF, Demand Progress, Fight for the Future, Free Software Foundation, Creative Commons, CDT, the Participatory Politics Foundation, and Public Knowledge in the fight? Here are 12 things you can do right now to help us stop the blacklist bills.
Got more suggestions for ways to fight SOPA and PIPA? Tell us about it through identi.ca, Twitter, or Facebook or send an email to rainey@eff.org.
- Call your Senators and Representative and tell them to oppose Protect-IP and SOPA, respectively. Click here for some suggested talking points. Then tell your friends about the call on social media sites.
- Contact Congress through EFF’s action center. Customize your letter to explain who you are and why you are worried about this bill. If you’re outside the United States, try this petition from Fight for the Future instead.
- If you work for a tech company, approach the leadership at your company and explain to them your concerns. Urge them to join you in speaking out. These companies (PDF) already took a stand.
- Write a blog post about the blacklist bills. Whether it’s a candid explanation of why you oppose the legislation, a discussion of the effect on human rights, or a call to filmmakers to protest the blacklist, there are plenty of things to say about this scary legislation. Help us get the word out by writing articles on your own blog, your school blog, or on blogs that take guest contributors.
- Are you an artist? Showcase the dangers of censorship through art and music, and use your art as a way of reaching people who might otherwise not know about this issue. You can make stickers, posters or patches, create a YouTube video, or hold an open-mic night around censorship.
- Do you administer a website? Then put a banner on your site protesting censorship or link to EFF’s action center.
- Coordinate a teach-in or debate at your local college or community center. Invite local experts in copyright and free speech to come discuss the issue.
- If you’re in high school, talk to you civics and media studies teachers about a class discussion on the implications of this bill. Point them to our free Teaching Copyright materials.
- If you’re in college, speak out through like-minded organizations working for digital freedom, such as Students for Free Culture or Electronic Frontier on Campus. If there isn’t a chapter at your school, start one. Then use that platform to coordinate with other students to speak out against this bill.
- If you’re in college, set up a meeting with your college newspaper editorial board and explain the bill to them and why they should speak out about it. Work with them to write articles on the topics. Check out these examples from the University of Buffalo, University of Massachusetts, and University of Minnesota. See more examples at the Center for Democracy and Technology’s Chorus of Opposition page.
- Write a letter to the editor of your local paper. Remember, these are often really short. Find out the requirements for your local paper and follow them carefully.
- Become a member of EFF. We’re leading the fight to defend civil liberties online, so that future generations will enjoy an Internet free of censorship. By standing together, we can make it happen.
Want to know what’s wrong with SOPA — View this one-page breakdown (PDF)
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(hat tip: Activist Post)
Special Report: Man On The Street – FEMA Camps Activated! (video)
Infowars Nightly News
December 9, 2011
Darrin McBreen reports on new documents that reveal current on-going operations to staff the FEMA and U.S. Army camps it runs around the United States.
FEMA camps on 72 hour notice AND military authorized to arrest = VERIFIED (video)
Dutchsinse
December 9, 2011
For the record, I said months ago that I did NOT believe that there was a REAL plan to round up American/US citizens and put us into “FEMA camps”… being that I am from the “show me state” of missouri.. I felt this claim required more proof that what was offered months/years ago.
Now, the tables have turned, and I surely / sorely stand corrected.
The US congress has approved a bill which AUTHORIZES THE MILITARY to be able to arrest US citizens on US SOIL !!! Not only can they arrest us without cause, they can hold you indefinitely — with no lawyer and no one knowing your location !! ( they can do this now through this “law” that was passed…by labeling you beligerent towards the government thus being a terrorist sympathizer — therefore allowing the military to take you to a secret prison without a trial)
Also this very same short period of days, this week, KBR (security corporation which handles FEMA emergency camps) put out a call to staff these FEMA camps.. and to be ready on a 72 hour notice.
Take these two events together.. same week… FEMA camps being alerted to staff on a short notice, and the US military authorized to arrest people at the drop of a hat.
Who voted yes and who voted no:
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/vote.xpd?vote=s2011-218
Here is the s. 1867 military authorization bill:
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c112:S.1867:
here is the link to KBR security corporation needing to staff FEMA camps with a 72 hour notice:
http://static.infowars.com/2011/12/i/general/kbr-doc.pdf
Here is the general link to Alex Jones / Infowars — who has been staying on top of this issue.. (I know a lot of people thumb their nose at AJ — but this is just one of MANY news outlets covering this issue — just search on google s.1867 or KBR FEMA if you don’t like Alex Jones or agree with his other work) This issue transcends “personalities”… we need to put any differences aside and deal with this together in unison !
http://www.infowars.com
http://www.prisonplanet.com
http://www.prisonplanettv.com
Human Rights Agency Addresses Biological Weapons Convention in Geneva, Switzerland
[Activist Post] Editor’s note: Several weeks ago we put out a request for funds to send Activist Post contributor, Janet Phelan, to the Conference of the Biological Weapons Convention in Geneva, Switzerland. Thanks to our generous readers, enough was raised to send her on this important mission. She was indeed able to give a presentation, and will be following up with details about her visit.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
My name is Janet Phelan and I sit on the board of ITHACA, which is a human rights agency. I am grateful for the opportunity to submit these concerns to the Seventh Review Conference of the Biological Weapons Convention.
I am here today to submit concerns to this Convention that the United States of America is engaged in an offensive biological weapons program. My research indicates that these weapons may be stockpiled at Sierra Army Depot, which is a military base in Northern California, as well as possibly at other locations.
In 2001, in the wake of the attacks of September 11, the United States passed a piece of legislation which in itself constitutes a violation of Articles I, II and IV of the BWC. This piece of legislation, Section 817 of the US PATRIOT Act, The Expansion of the Biological Weapons Statute, gives the United States a “blank check” to stockpile biological weapons and toxins and de facto removes the U.S. from the stipulations contained in the BWC. This is accomplished by the addition of a final caveat to 817, stating that “the prohibition contained in this section shall not apply to any duly authorized United States governmental activity.”
Other NGO’s, including the Sunshine Project, have raised concerns as to what kind of research is going on in the proliferation of BSL-3’s and 4’s—now numbering over 1350 BSL-3’s in the United States. Other than the reports of stockpiles at Sierra Army Depot and the violations of the BWC contained in Section 817, concerns also extend to evidence that the U.S. has covertly set up two separate delivery systems — one involving extensive reconfigurations of city water systems, and the other involving what we call “imposter pharmaceuticals” — the putative “poison pill” which, rather than treating a disease, will cause imminent death to the unsuspecting victim.
Both of these delivery systems have the ability to selectively attack predesignated targets and leave surrounding populations unaffected.
I do not need to remind the Convention that Saddam Hussein was executed for charges including a purported attack on his own people — the gassing of the Kurds. There is a dark red thread running through recorded history of governments initiating pogroms against their own citizens. One needs only to look at the last decade and the dramatic movement away from the democratic ideals upon which the United States was based to realize that the U.S. government has already traveled a long ways from an open, free and democratic society towards the secret and restrictive regimes that have historically initiated attacks upon their own people.
On behalf of all U.S. citizens, and all others residing within her borders, we are seeking your help. The situation is dire and the international community must be alerted to the fact that all of these signals — stockpiles, changes in legislation, and multiple secret delivery systems — point to a future attack within the borders of the U.S. facilitated by the United States government.
We have been limited by time constraints today. I would like to advise the Convention that we have accumulated a considerable amount of evidence, including correspondence with government agencies about Section 817 and other pertinent legislative changes — agencies including the Department of Justice, State Department and the Environmental Protection Agency, to name a few. We have also amassed details and documentation concerning delivery systems. We would be happy to supply this documentation to the Convention, if requested.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Submitted December 6, 2011
Geneva, Switzerland
Gingrich ‘Proposed the Death Penalty for Marijuana’
by David Edwards
RawStory
December 12, 2011
Over the weekend, struggling Republican presidential candidate Gary Johnson reminded MSNBC viewers that GOP frontrunner Newt Gingrich had once to called to punish some drug offenders with death.
“Newt Gingrich, in 1997, proposed the death penalty for marijuana — for possession of marijuana above a certain quantity of marijuana,” Johnson explained. “And yet, he is among 100 million Americans who’ve smoked marijuana.”
“I would love to have a discussion with him on the fact that he smoked pot, and under the wrong set of circumstance he proposed the death penalty for, potentially, something that he had committed. I have troubles with that,” he added.
Johnson, a former New Mexico governor who has advocated for marijuana legalization since 1999, is at least partially correct about Gingrich’s position.
As Speaker of the House, Gingrich introduced the “Drug Importer Death Penalty Act of 1996.”
The bill would have required a “sentence of death for certain importations of significant quantities of controlled substances.” It would have applied to anyone convicted more than once of carrying 100 doses — or about two ounces — or marijuana across the border. Defendants would have had a window of 18 months to file their one and only appeal.
CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE…
(hat tip: The Intel Hub)
Hemp Versus the Status Quo
by Rand Clifford
Activist Post
October 17, 2011
Industrial Hemp - Wiki image
The US rose to eminence by producing value, and by a fair percentage of citizens sharing the wealth. The further the nation has been corrupted from the stability of fairness, the faster our rate of decline. Runaway greed, lust for power, and raw crony capitalism have reversed our national trajectory so insidiously that not just we, but even Earth’s biosphere, are in free fall. Is it more than simple coincidence that such comprehensive decline so closely parallels our prohibition of hemp?
Sure, there was a glitch 5 years after hemp was banned as the evil weed with roots in hell. Top government officials still insist, forcefully, that there is no difference between “marijuana” and industrial hemp. With that in mind, please compare marijuana propaganda and hysteria that heralded hemp prohibition and haunts us to this day, with the government’s own film, Hemp for Victory, produced in 1942. We needed hemp to “win” WWII, so under duress, the feds resorted to truth.
So what changed in those 5 years? Certainly not hemp, exactly the same resource extraordinaire that has served humanity for at least 12,000 years. Priorities changed, propaganda changed. And hemp didn’t change when the war ended and hemp reverted to our enemy. You might wonder, whose enemy?
Arguably, hemp is the most useful member of the entire plant kingdom. So how could nature’s premier converter of sunshine and water into value, a superstar of the biosphere and powerful supporter of life on Earth be considered an enemy?
War is our enemy. Nobody wins in war, everybody loses…except the “money changers”. Ever since Jesus ran them out of the Temple with a whip (remember him, the Prince of Peace?), they have relentlessly, progressively embedded as a certain subspecies—psychopaths born without conscience, without any sense of right or wrong, without a soul; beings to whom truth and justice are alien concepts, to be in any way so much as acknowledged only under extreme duress. So yes, all of humanity loses in war, there are no winners. And coincidence has nothing to do with those at the root of hemp prohibition being the same as those who have blessed us with perpetual war.
As in the words of humanity’s Rosthschild malignancy: “We own you. We will take everything.”
Greed is Not Good
Remember “Morning in America” (mourning?) when “greed is good” pealed like church bells? Reaganomics was born that morning. Even after decades of wealth gushing ever upward, hardly any of it ever seems to trickle back down. Imagine that, shucks, the whole concept sounds so…Reagan. Millions of fossil Americans can still get misty at any mention of “Dutch”.
Despite reality (real reality, not Bush, or reality TV kinds), the GOP (repugnantcan party) clings tenaciously to this fiendish canard even as we approach midnight in America. Trickle-down theory…Reaganomics.
Greed is the glue that sticks wealth to wherever it rises. Greed is also the essence that keeps hemp our enemy. Hemp has every potential to spread wealth down through the workers who actually create wealth, potential to energize regional economies—perfect antidote to the plague of globalization, that concentrator of wealth into, as George H. W. Bush described, “…higher, tighter and righter hands.” Same hands now steering humanity toward hell; hands with the stickiest fingers, and the greatest distance from those passé concepts: humanity, and commonwealth—or common good.
War is All Hell
Keeping track of all our current wars gets increasingly difficult, especially with CorpoMedia so focused on future targets, such as Iran, Pakistan, Syria, Lebanon, Russia, China…even, as certain tea-party princesses have said, the “country” of Africa.
After so much of our manufacturing base has been gutted, fully one third of it within the first decade of “America’s century” (four-fifths of that during the Bush/Cheney nightmare); and with so many other good jobs herded offshore, it might seem that war and financialization are becoming our primary industries. Plunder and casino, rape and manipulation, destruction and parasitism, murder and financial malignancy…the future is so bright we’ve gotta wear headlamps.
The farcical War on Terror is a dream come true for the money changers. The war against a ghost that could never surrender because it’s, well, a ghost. Forever war. And the slimiest war mongers of all feverishly masquerade as hardcore fundamentalist Christians. The Prince of Peace would puke.
Almost seems we can’t engage anything without declaring war on it. And talk about (intentionally?) miserable aim. The War on Terror, besides being a lurid excuse for pirating resources, especially oil, and “spreading freedom and democracy”, it cloaks a maniacal assault on our Constitution (with or without “boots on the ground”) to render the US a police state. Such irony might have only one viable competitor….
The War on Drugs
Somehow, it might not seem quite so bad, a government waging war against its own people to eliminate the scourge of drug abuse; but when that same government is the world’s top drug trafficker…rather exceeds the term irony, transcending into the Twilight Zone.
If more people knew how much the Taliban’s eradication of opium poppy production had to do with why we invaded Afghanistan, and have stretched it out to our longest war ever…well, it probably wouldn’t matter.
It’s sensible business, filling our increasingly-privatized prison system with marijuana smokers to capitalize on a huge, reliable slave-labor pool. And after all, as president Calvin Coolidge said:
“The business of America is business.”
Bad business is one thing, but, the worst business…guess that’s why we’re Number One. When you’re the Boss, anything you might say or do is right; hard right, nowadays, as hard as the righteous wing cherry-picking scripture…and through the most twisted, tortuous exegesis, all but actually saying—indeed, platforming: “In the beginning, God created corporations….”
Of course that’s not quite correct. Hemp came way before corporations. Hemp is even older than money—has actually been used as money, the real kind, not faith-based money (fiat). In early America, taxes could be paid in hemp. Nowadays our tax dollars feed the rounding up of marijuana offenders and packing them into work prisons. Yes, our taxes perpetuate the drug war cash cow (that would wither without marijuana), and insure that hemp will not threaten the status quo in this corporate-controlled home of Big Oil.
Wisdom Versus Cleverness
Our star, Sol, the sun…it gives us all the real-time energy we might ever need. The challenge is harvesting that energy as elegantly as with growing hemp. Luckily…or perhaps exactly the opposite for us—and even more unluckily for our progeny—Earth has been very good at fixing solar energy into fossil energy.
Millions of years worth of solar energy mostly sequestered from the biosphere; toxic, biocidal energy, black death safely isolated from Earth’s life processes…. Perhaps fossil energy is some grand test of human wisdom, along the lines of: If you’re clever enough to significantly tap fossil energy, are you wise enough not to disrupt the biosphere with it?
Cleverness is plentiful—the human brain is magnificent…except for the wisdom deficiency, which so dependably invites disaster. Cleverness often breeds destruction; wisdom involves nurture, greater awareness and esteem for what gave us life and keeps life going, and utmost respect for the future. Wisdom versus cleverness influences being born into heaven, or hell.
Wisdom feeds the creation of value. Cleverness too often engenders a world controlled by parasites who create no value, but instead, employ every form of violence, murder, destruction and manipulation to usurp value from those who create value. Hemp is a paragon of wisdom—of fitting perfectly into and furthering Earth’s living energy systems. Hemp could shield the wisdom in humanity from the parasitical cleverness driving us down the road of perpetual war, toward utter biospheric collapse.
Where will we, and the rest of Earth’s species live after human cleverness collapses our biosphere?
For at least 12,000 years, humanity’s wisdom embraced hemp as an indispensable ally. For 74 years (except for those few years of Hemp For Victory!), cleverness in this nation now become the greatest parasite the world has ever seen has kept hemp our enemy. But wisdom hangs on in the more than 30 countries treating hemp as the supreme natural resource it has always been. Those countries feed the annual $450 million retail hemp business in this country—business living exclusively on imported raw materials.
Nothing compares with hemp in terms of powering good jobs that cannot be offshored—millions of acres of hemp, an agricultural revolution creating an expanding spectrum of gainful employment. Nothing could touch hemp in terms of impacting the near total dominance of corporations in virtually every aspect of modern America.
Hemp offers many thousands of superior products that perpetuate living systems, instead of killing them as the fossil-energy empire is doing—a whole new industry of vast scope, creating value, virtually independent of the corporate fossil empire. Only hemp has such fantastic potential to wrest power from the parasites and spread it among their victims. Hemp could turn Power to the People from a trampled cliché, into glory!
If you believe that marijuana realistically had anything to do with the prohibition of industrial hemp farming in this world’s most powerful parasite…please try to not judge me too harshly. I’m simply advocating wisdom.
For further reading about hemp, and its prohibition, please go here.
Rand Clifford’s novel Castling, the classic “Story of the Power of Hemp”, and the sequel, Timing, are published by StarChief Press. The novels, Priest Lake Cathedral, and Voices of Vires will be available soon.
(hat tip: Activist Post)
We Can Print You: Biotech Organ Printing
by Terrence Aym
Before It’s News
December 15, 2011
Need a new kidney? They’re on special today. Or how about a heart? We can print you out a new one in a jiffy. Science fiction? Not really. Biotechnology is moving so fast the mainstream media can barely keep up with it despite their far flung networks.
Labs across the world are competing to create new life, patent new lifeforms, improve human biology and even redesign old-fashioned human beings.
CLICK HERE TO READ FULL ARTICLE…
