inkbluesky

my Sin City leaf

Just thought I'd take a break from the bicycle photo theme for the day. Click photo for larger sizes.

Two Butterfly Species Evolved Into Third, Study Finds

New research shows the insect was originally created from two different butterflies in an evolutionary process many biologists didn't think possible.

The scientists arrived at this conclusion by successfully re-creating the butterfly in the lab, using "second-hand parts" from two related species.

I 've posted a couple times about fake front groups that sound like they are acting in the public interests, but they just a screen for promoting a corporate agenda. It looks as though the big cable companies and telcos are trying to influence African-Americans using the same technique. Net-Neutrality is an African American Issue

Finally, if network neutrality becomes a black issue when telcos can buy, sell and rent black organizations, when a black congressmen accepts a million dollar telco donation and sponsors legislation that allows the industry to redline and disinvest in our communities, that's a black issue too.

Bobby Rush, in his statement answering the Chicago Sun-Times offers the transparent legalistic defense to conflict of interest charges, that since the donation was from a single company and the legislation benefits several telcos, no conflict exists. What else can you expect from a legislative body that elects its Speaker, its majority and minority leaders not on the basis of who has the most compelling vision for the nation and its people, but who can raise the largest number of corporate dollars? To anyone not mired in the culture of corrupt public officialdom, Rush's position reeks of a conflict of interest, whether it meets the legal definition or not.

The congressman, his donors, and their front organization, Hands Off the Internet claim that handing over the Internet to private corporations and eliminating network neutrality will lower the cost and improve the quality of Internet service for everybody. This is nothing short of an outright lie. According to Stanford University's Dr. Lawrence Lessig in a recent interview with Robert McChesney, broadband Internet access in France, Japan and South Korea and several other countries is cheaper, faster and more widely available than in the U.S. In every case, they do this by making the provision of service to everyone law and public policy, not leaving it up to “the market” or the whims of private corporations.

The whole “free competition” and “leaving it up to the market” argument flies in the face of how AT&T and other telco and cable monopolies came into existence and how they actually conduct their business. As the Univeristy of Illinois's Dr. Robert McChesney explained recently on Democracy Now:

”…the phone companies and the cable companies, which provide Internet access to 98% of Americans and almost all businesses, are viewing – you know, they are companies that were set up by the government. They're not free market companies. Their entire business model has been based on getting monopoly license franchises from the government for phone and cable service and then using it to make a lot of money. And they’re using their political leverage now to try to write a law basically which lets them control the Internet…”

”…what they want to do desperately is be in a situation where they can rank order websites. And websites that come through the fastest to us, to the users of the Internet, (will be) …the ones that pay them money or the ones they own. And websites that don't pay them come through slower, much harder to get, or in some cases, they’ll have the power to take them off the Internet altogether.”

”…there’s no technological justification for this. There’s no economic justification. It's pure corrupt crony capitalism. They're basically using their political leverage to change this so they get a huge new revenue stream, and it gives them an inordinate amount of power over the Internet.”