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Of course there is - the man who created it!

two websites which are used by conspiracy nuts

http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/

http://www.algore.com/

[The following is a revision of a letter I have been distributing via email. I ought to have posted this earlier, but I lacked the courage. You can find the original on my website.]

Dear US Citizen,

I am writing to remind you to vote conscientiously tomorrow. I will also indulge in a little political activism by introducing some issues (watered stock, free trade, and others) for your consideration. As you read this message, keep in mind that I am not recommending that you vote for this or that candidate, but only that you think about what is at stake, make a choice, and vote.

I wish to bring to your attention a pattern of behavior by national governments that suggests that, in the world-wide political arena, the interests of citizens rank far below those of large corporations, and that the latter seek actively to diminish the influence of citizens on their governments' legislative activity. In some countries, citizens are even compelled by law to foot the bill for this nonsense. ;) It is worth noting that the worst consequences of this are not in the future: most US citizens feel so disenfranchised today that they either don't vote or vote for the lesser evil, and US taxpayers (citizens or not) bear the burden of unprecedented personal and national debt. If you don't vote, you will be capitulating, and the future of US politics will be that much closer to a foregone conclusion. As a citizen of the European Union and a resident of Switzerland, a very small sovereign state, I have learned that the rest of the world cannot afford apathy or carelessness on the part of registered voters in the US. You can think of this message as a plea for help.

[As you read this, please excuse the careless use of "Americans" where "US citizens" would have been correct.]

The first issue I want to discuss is the connection between corporations and public money. You may or may not be aware of the emergence of watered stock and pooling as a powerful weapons in the corporations' arsenal; for example, Microsoft and Cisco have managed to attain tax-free status by writing off stock options (and then earning some of that back when new stock is issued for the purpose of redeeming those options) and Citigroup recapitalizes and decapitalizes itself arbitrarily to achieve spectacular mergers (thus posing a great risk to the banking sector) -- right under the nose of the SEC. In a perfect world, this sort of abuse would have been reigned in already but, in our world, the possibility of relief seems remote. Let me make this plain: the watered stock write-off scheme amounts to a theft of public money and pooling needlessly endangers the stability of the economy. At the very least, insofar as stock represents a redeemable claim against a company's assets, it is a perversion of the modern economic perspective in which the stock market is allegedly as adequate a store of value as gold ever was.

Actually, said modern economic perspective was already quite perverse (in ways too numerous to mention) long before watered stock was even imagined. Such perversity is a natural consequence of the absence of an adequate standard of value, which was in turn an intended consequence of changes in policy that took place earlier in the century. Long ago, Alan Greenspan explained that the institution he heads today is a powerful instrument with which the government can confiscate part of the value of your money and, not incidentally, engage in deficit spending regularly. You might argue that calculated inflation is a small price to pay for being able to float a chronic debt and sustain a deficit as needed. You might argue that your national debt is presently unassailable because American households, which on average have a negative savings rate and face unabatable credit card debt, are financially overcommitted as it is. You might be wrong. Habitual deficit spending and the resulting chronic national indebtedness, along with the corporate welfare mechanisms that aggravate them, are to blame for your misery: the federal government uses inflation and national debt to mortgage your personal assets and your public resources, respectively, as effortlessly as a corporation uses watered stock to dilute the value of your share holdings. Think what you will of Greenspan's former support of the gold standard, but you have to admit that he was correct in predicting the practical consequences of failing to provide an adequate store of value, and in identifying the welfare state as the primary beneficiary:

Stripped of its academic jargon, the welfare state is nothing more than a mechanism by which governments confiscate the wealth of the productive members of a society to support a wide variety of welfare schemes.

What he may not have realized then is that corporate welfare is just as likely a welfare scheme as any other.

It now behooves us to ask not only how this wave of abuse can be stemmed, but also how this sort of situation can arise even under the watchful eye of our elected officials. The answer is that, in the US, the Executive and the Agencies operate with considerable autonomy; many important decisions are often made away from public scrutiny, largely or altogether, and there is a vested interest on the part of large corporations to increase the autonomy, if not the stature, of these public servants. Consider the case of MAI, the Multilateral agreement on investment -- a charter of rights and freedoms for corporations. Those of you who have not heard of it should at least know that it was the culmination of attempts to transfer some important powers from the popularly elected legislative bodies to the executive officials of sovereign states and to give corporations the legal standing of sovereign states. Let me take a moment to explore the brilliance of these tactics.

• When decision making forums are sheltered from public scrutiny, executive officials can serve corporate interests with impunity.
• When corporations have the same legal standing as sovereign states, large multinational corporations have power over small sovereign states -- perhaps even those in which the company is incorporated.

Surely, you can give examples of an administration negotiating treaties that would be difficult to accept for a majority of citizens and impossible to ratify for most congresses; now, try to imagine a future in which the legislature is powerless to stop unfavorable or undesirable consequences of free trade arrangements that it did not have the opportunity to approve or reject. Surely, you can name instances of a corporation getting away with practices that a majority of citizens would condemn but which the courts are powerless to stop in the absence of adequate legislation or jurisdiction; now, try to imagine a future in which a corporation undertakes legal action against sovereign states for refusing to let it set up shop, or even for having laws and regulations that hinder it, such as strict environmental standards.

"That's not a problem," you say, "because Public Citizen told us about MAI in the nick of time." That's not the point; the point is that MAI is evidence of an alarming, long-standing pattern of behavior: as Noam Chomsky has said, our governments really are, and have been for a long time, trying to undermine democracy. Consider, as further evidence, the case of Australia's MIGA, an agency that predates MAI and obviates the "need" for it.

Now, the two leading candidates, Al Gore and George Bush, look at the issue very differently, saying that free trade creates jobs, without mentioning what kind and where. Actually, Bush has even said that it is the duty of the administration to "sell" free trade (on WTO's terms, of course) to US citizens! Ralph Nader, on the other hand, has said that he wants the US to withdraw from the WTO and that we should re-examine the premise of so-called "free trade" agreements. I was going to give you a reference to Nader's website with that last statement, as WTO/NAFTA was one of the three key issues on his home page until just a few days ago, but now it is not even in the issue summaries. What could this mean? I think it means that he has pushed one of his favorite issues into the background because he needs enough votes to get federal funding for his next campaign. And this, in turn, suggests that American politicians think that the US electorate is politically comatose. You can help prove them wrong: a strong showing by Americans on election day would tell US politicians and corporations and the world that Americans are still in control of their political system. It would be a great sequel to the Battle of Seattle, with a lot less violence and just as much press coverage. Realistically, you probably cannot afford to act as resolutely as José Bové, but you can vote.

When I think about US politics, I think of the fable in which a master presents some options to his student, threatening to beat him with a cane if he chooses poorly; the essence of the problem is that the student cannot choose any of the options presented to him without risking bodily harm. (You should now take a moment to discover how the student can avoid the beating and what the moral of the story is.) You can and should vote for the presidential candidate who will most closely represent your interests, as you have more valid options than the mainstream media seem to suggest: you can vote for George W. Bush; you can vote for Al Gore; you can vote for Ralph Nader; you can vote for Harry Browne; and you can vote for some other candidate (yes, there are more) though his name may not appear on your ballot. If you cast a so-called "useful" vote, you are supporting a system in which you have a lot less influence than you otherwise might, and you might get beat with a cane. Of course, if you don't vote, you have no voice, nor will you ever, and when you and I finally get beat with a very stiff cane, no one will hear us scream. Please, vote.

Yours,

Alejandro Gómez de Argüello

From Biafra's Bio:

(I hope that slashdot doesn't munge the links this time)

1985

Infamous Senate anti-music hearings are staged by Senator Al Gore and his cohorts as a favor to his wife Tipper and her openly bigoted fundamentalist friends calling themselves the Parent's Music Resource Center (PMRC). Among the PMRC's demands were the censorship through a labeling system of warning stickers, the "Reassessment of contracts" of artists whose lyrics are, "sexually explicit", "anti-Christian" or mention suicide or homosexuality. "Expert witnesses" called by the Washington Wives blame rock music for gang violence, suicide, murder, devil worship and sexual perversion. Frank Zappa stands virtually alone in opposing the PMRC and sensing their significance. The music industry above and below ground keeps their head in the sand, preferring to sleep through the hearings.

April 15, 1986

Two weeks after Dead Kennedys are publicly targeted by Susan Baker of the PMRC, Biafra's house in San Francisco is raided and torn apart by a squad of Los Angeles and San Francisco police officers. Cops even ransack the cat-box hoping to find - well? ask them. "Frankenchrist" albums and Giger posters are taken from the house and the Alternative Tentacles/Mordam offices.

June, 1986

Biafra and four others are charged in Los Angeles with one count each of "Distribution of Harmful Matter to Minors". They are the first people in American history to face criminal charges over a record; three years before the attack on 2 Live Crew. Biafra and other supporters form No More Censorship Defense Fund to cover the money to fight the charges. Defendants face a possible one year in jail and a $2,000 fine. The law had never been used before. The L.A. City Attorney's office admits to L.A. Weekly reporter Don Bolles that they kept files on several other PMRC-targeted musicians, but chose Biafra because it was, "a cost effective way of sending a message". The prosecuting attorney later says one of his goals was to destroy Alternative Tentacles. Fund-raising and the ensuing media circus delay the completion of the follow-up album to Frankenchrist, the appropriately titled Bedtime for Democracy .

August, 1987

Charges against Biafra and the other defendants are dismissed after a three-week criminal trial in Los Angeles. Even though Frankenchrist was not found to be obscene; Biafra, Dead Kennedys and Alternative Tentacles records are subsequently banned from a multitude of chain stores nationwide. This is exactly the type of de-facto censorship Tipper Gore and the PMRC had in mind. By this time, controversy has vaulted Biafra's spoken word performances from coffeehouses to the college lecture circuit, where he is brought in to "lecture" on censorship. For the first time the media is more interested in Biafra's political views than music-industry shoptalk on his latest music album. His documentation of Tipper Gore and the PMRC's ties to fundamentalist Christian extremists is no longer dismissed as lunatic. He also appears as an FBI agent in the Tim Robbins-John Cusack film, Tape Heads, wearing the same blue pin-stripe suit he wore at the trial.

________________________________________

From Biafra's Bio:

1985

Infamous Senate anti-music hearings are staged by Senator Al Gore and his cohorts as a favor to his wife Tipper and her calling themselves the Parent's Music Resource Center (PMRC). Among the PMRC's demands were the censorship through a labeling system of warning stickers, the "Reassessment of contracts" of artists whose lyrics are, "sexually explicit", "anti-Christian" or mention suicide or homosexuality. "Expert witnesses" called by the Washington Wives blame rock music for gang violence, suicide, murder, devil worship and sexual perversion. Frank Zappa stands virtually alone in opposing the PMRC and sensing their significance. The music industry above and below ground keeps their head in the sand, preferring to sleep through the hearings.

April 15, 1986

Two weeks after Dead Kennedys are publicly targeted by Susan Baker of the PMRC, Biafra's house in San Francisco is raided and torn apart by a squad of Los Angeles and San Francisco police officers. Cops even ransack the cat-box hoping to find - well? ask them. "Frankenchrist" albums and Giger posters are taken from the house and the Alternative Tentacles/Mordam offices.

June, 1986

Biafra and four others are charged in Los Angeles with one count each of "Distribution of Harmful Matter to Minors". They are the first people in American history to face criminal charges over a record; three years before the attack on 2 Live Crew. Biafra and other supporters form No More Censorship Defense Fund to cover the money to fight the charges. Defendants face a possible one year in jail and a $2,000 fine. The law had never been used before. The L.A. City Attorney's office admits to L.A. Weekly reporter Don Bolles that they kept files on several other PMRC-targeted musicians, but chose Biafra because it was, "a cost effective way of sending a message". The prosecuting attorney later says one of his goals was to destroy Alternative Tentacles. Fund-raising and the ensuing media circus delay the completion of the follow-up album to Frankenchrist, the appropriately titled Bedtime for Democracy .

August, 1987

Charges against Biafra and the other defendants are dismissed after a three-week criminal trial in Los Angeles. Even though Frankenchrist was not found to be obscene; Biafra, Dead Kennedys and Alternative Tentacles records are subsequently banned from a multitude of chain stores nationwide. This is exactly the type of de-facto censorship Tipper Gore and the PMRC had in mind. By this time, controversy has vaulted Biafra's spoken word performances from coffeehouses to the college lecture circuit, where he is brought in to "lecture" on censorship. For the first time the media is more interested in Biafra's political views than music-industry shoptalk on his latest music album. His documentation of Tipper Gore and the PMRC's ties to fundamentalist Christian extremists is no longer dismissed as lunatic. He also appears as an FBI agent in the Tim Robbins-John Cusack film, Tape Heads, wearing the same blue pin-stripe suit he wore at the trial.

________________________________________

I don't know if I these proposals are useful, but I don't think that they're censorship. The proposal to allow for monitoring what sites your kids go to seems like it would be pretty easy to implement in a browser. All you really need to do is lock down the browser history feature. It wouldn't take very long to add a feature to Mozilla that required password access to clear/alter the history.

--

Also:

Al Gore: Gore worked to reduce the influence of drugs. The Administration Proposed the Largest Anti-Drug Budgets Ever. The Administration requested $19.2 billion in the FY01 budget to fight the war on drugs.

George Dubya: On the supply side, Governor Bush will improve interdiction and stop drugs before they reach our children. He will use better intelligence and surveillance to track and catch drug smugglers before they reach our borders. He will ensure that the INS hires the full allotment of Border Patrol agents required under law. Right now, the GAO reports that the INS had "a net shortfall of 594 agents for the 3-year period ending September 30, 1999." Governor Bush will hire more agents, and will reform the INS to better focus on its job of defending our border.
--

I'm not an American, but we always amuse ourselves with references to Al Gore having "invented the internet". Even G. W. Bush uses this against him in debates. I've never heard the real story, though; did Gore really claim to have invented the internet, and what was the context of his saying that?

I also find the following quote mildly amusing: 'In the spirit of the Open Source movement, we have established the Gore 2000 Volunteer Source Code Project. www.algore2000.com is an "open site".'
--

In a changing and complex world, parents need an ally--an active government, on the side of parents, giving them the tools they need to raise happy, healthy, thriving children, according to their own values...

Some say we should take no action at all--just let children roam free on the Internet. To them I say: children are not miniature adults. They are vulnerable and impressionable, and we have an obligation to protect them from harmful words and images on the Internet...

Today, on behalf of President Clinton, I am calling for new legislation to require every school and library that applies for the e-rate to come up with its own plan for protecting children from objectionable Internet content...

In a changing and complex world, parents need an ally--an active government, on the side of parents, giving them the tools they need to raise happy, healthy, thriving children, according to their own values...

Some say we should take no action at all--just let children roam free on the Internet. To them I say: children are not miniature adults. They are vulnerable and impressionable, and we have an obligation to protect them from harmful words and images on the Internet...

Today, on behalf of President Clinton, I am calling for new legislation to require every school and library that applies for the e-rate to come up with its own plan for protecting children from objectionable Internet content...

IANAA, (I Am Not An American) but hail from thier neigbour to the North. Since much of what goes on below the 49th eventually happens up here, I'll comment anyway.

Isn't it amazing. Here we are, 224 years after the American Revolution, and we're back to square one. If this follows through, the Citizens of the Good Ol' US of A will be paying sales tax to a coproration. Heh. Something like that hasn't happened since, ohhhhh... the British Crown decided to tax tea. Read the link, kids - that was to save a faltering coporation, namely the East India Company, too.

So, we have taxes on audio capable blanks to make sure the RIAA and it's kin get thier fair share, absurd patents and copyrights whose sole purpose is to guarantee profits for already successful companies, and now this. Makes you sick, especially when this and this stare you in the face each night on the news

Welcome to the Free World, fellow serfs, look what the American Free Market eventually brings you - The Copristocracy. It works just like an Aristocracy, but instead of being appointed by a King, the people in it founded a successful company, are paying off our "elected" officials to pass laws so they keep thier fabulous wealth, so they can pass it on to thier progeny - just like a Duke, Prince or Barron. So much for the Revolution, eh?

Had Rob said, "Signal 11 incorrectly believes that I implemented the karma cap to spite him. He's spreading false information that it's only applied to certain accounts." it would have been much different. Not only is it more informative than "Signal 11 is an idiot," it would also make Rob look like the better man.

If Rob was publishing some official statement on the "Signal 11 controversy", then perhaps I would expect him to use this language. However, this was an online chat, and, to a certain extent, I would expect it to follow the rules of regular conversations - always try to say things diplomatically, but a slip of the tongue or an outburst of emotion is regrettable but forgivable.

I find it disturbing that, even here, everyone's words are being used against them, like a court of law. I remember, back when I first discovered the Internet, I loved that you could put your best foot forward. I could think overnight about a response on a newsgroup, and really put my idea into the best words possible. I silently agreed with the flames against misspellers and those who didn't research the facts, not because I thought they were idiots, but because they didn't take full advantage of the medium, didn't use a spell checker, and didn't search on the web for 5 minutes to do a sanity check on their idea.

Even today, when a well-meaning co-worker sends out a virus alert or get-rich-quick-scheme, I quickly put out a rebuttal with the proper web site link, but then send a slightly longer personal message telling the originator how I found it was a hoax - I feel it's a duty of mine, to instruct others in the power of these new tools, rather to insult them as newbies and idiots.

However, I see more and more people trying to make others eat their words, simply because technology allows them to become etched in silicon. Al Gore is constantly harassed about saying he "created the Internet", while what he said was slightly different ("During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet"), and lots of folks have defended him since then, including Vinton Cerf. George Bush, Jr. gets his own ribbing for various slips of the tongue (including my favorite non-event from the campaign, the so-called "RATS" subliminal message). Indeed, most of politics seems to be an endurance race, to see who can go the longest without saying something wrong and/or stupid. Which may explain why so little gets said these days...

I guess it goes back to Nixon, when he was caught on tape saying some truly awful things. It had a dual political purpose - on one hand, it gave some evidence to the Watergate investigators, but on the other hand, it gave a window into the man's personal life, highlighting some deep flaws.

This may be where the problem is - the press has gotten the impression that it's in the slips of the tongue and the political mistakes that we find the true character of a person, and are constantly trying to get past the "surface" and find the flaws of the "true" person. We have bought into the idea, and are berating Rob for one statement, which may be damning out of context, but completely human if taken in context.

Stop playing the "I caught you!" game, and start treating people like humans, flawed but forgivable. (And sorry, dboyles, for a comment more directed to the community than your comment).

Al Gore invented Open Source with his open-source campaign website. I think it happened shortly after he invented the internet...

Aren't you glad The Internet is in Al Gore's hands?

>The Internet
Sold on E-bay for a gazillion dollars. Rumor has it that the new owner is an independently wealthy Redmond, Wa executive.
When: 9/21/2000
Company: The Internet (aka Al Gore)
Severity: Off the Scale
Points: What's the point of points now.

I signed up Lars, Jon Katz, Miss Portman, AL Gore and CmdrTaco. (this is a joke, I did not sign up these people)

But you have a good point, ANYONE ANYWHERE could signup on this "legally binding document" and there is really no way to tell who really behind IP 209.272.218.128, they should atleast require a pgp signature (even though this would still have problems) or even better yet, print it out, sign it and have 2 witnesses sign it, and fax it in with 2 forms of photo ID.

I remeber like 2-3 years ago, the Internet has just one big ass "Hoax" no one took anything serious on the Internet, it was more of a "play toy" for geeks and porn haven for preverts and that was it, now we are passing around credit card numbers and "legally binding documents" on the web and just expect it to work on in the real world. I view the real world and the Internet a whole lot differant. These world are just that, too differant and unrelated worlds.

This is one of the times where people would need to be tracked on the Internet, to tell how the really are, but at the same time certain things we do or don't do on the Internet should remain private.

Would pgp keys work in this sisuation? I think the Internet should remain %100 anonymous, unless the user wants to be known (and can also prove that they say who they really are), but when a user does want to prove that they are really who they say there are, there needs to be a sure %100 method of doing this. Maybe goverment issused PGP or simlair? (Sorry I don't know much about pgp, so this probably sounds really fsck stupid)

Attention all faithful Slashdot viewers! It seems that somewhere in the U.S. today, some dude did something bad that you should all be really mad at. We must make sure that these dudes stop doing bad stuff so we can be happy. It would be a real travesty to see backwater America (read: Everywhere inbetween L.A. and New York) lost to the rednecks, ignorants, simpletons and retards! So write to all your congressmen and tell them to make sure doesn't happen!
Over and out.

Did a domain speculator get the name before Al Gore could assert his claim?

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For Hire - but not cheap. I only do good work.