The road to the future of the Internet, as laid down by Google & Verizon this week

Every month you receive an electric bill.  When you get down to it the metric by which you are charged is pretty simple.  X units at $Y-per-unit = your bill.  Nothing more, nothing less.  Use more electricity, you pay more.  Use less electricity, you pay less.

Imagine a world in which your electric bill was subdivided dozens of different ways depending on just what you were powering.  Suppose there was a special tier set up for your television or computer equipment, that “promised” the power would be so much more percent stable and clean than normal power if only you pay 10% more for it.  Imagine a world where you can’t use your electric stove because stoves are placed in a tier that is 50% more than the standard rate, to the point where cooking every day becomes cost-prohibitive.  Tiers for your stove, your microwave, your dishwasher, your electric toothbrush, your alarm clock, your plug-in vehicle, and more.  Your bill becomes increasingly frustrating, and increasingly expensive.

Google & Verizon would like to do this to your Internet.

All this which is your's now for one price can be your's again for more money!

The company that lives by the motto “Don’t Be Evil” has announced, along with Verizon, a radical new take on the concept of Network Neutrality.  Up until now the battle has been one of old ideology vs. new ideology – the phone and cable companies who existed long before the Internet became a hit vs. the companies that have sprung up, grown, and gone on to thrive in the new frontier that is the Internet.

That is, until Monday, when Google & Verizon teamed up to announce their take on net neutrality, and the brave new world they would like to drag us all into:

After a week of speculation and denial, Google and Verizon unveiled their own version of net neutrality in the form of a “suggested legislative framework for consideration by lawmakers,” as Google’s public policy guy Alan Davidson and Verizon Vice President Thomas Tauke put it on Google’s public policy blog.

“Ultimately, we think this proposal provides the certainty that allows both Web startups to bring their novel ideas to users, and broadband providers to invest in their networks,” they wrote. We’re guessing that lots of people will disagree with that assessment.

The language sounds good and wholesome – that Google and Verizon are trying to go ahead and do something good.  Not only good – but good enough to serve as a framework that can be implemented as national law in the United States, and perhaps even expanded upon internationally.

That’s all well and good right up until the point where you dig a little deeper:

Additional Online Services: A provider that offers a broadband Internet access service complying with the above principles could offer any other additional or differentiated services. Such other services would have to be distinguishable in scope and purpose from broadband Internet access service, but could make use of or access Internet content, applications or services and could include traffic prioritization.

Suddenly Verizon's current ad campaign is a whole lot more creepy.

Traffic prioritization.  Those two words on their face are exactly contradictory to the whole concept of network neutrality.  To enable traffic prioritization, and worse yet make it law, would make it absolutely legal for any ISP to throttle any sort of general service down in order to make a preferred service appear faster to the end user – perhaps even charging more for that service.

An example beyond the electricity-based one that led off this post that is more closely intertwined with the Internet would go something along the lines of the following:

You, as a Verizon customer, have access to the Internet.  You have access to the whole wide Internet, all of its features, protocols, tools, and everything you can do right now.  The tiers are implemented.  Now your Verizon Internet web portal that the installation service shoves down your throat and you probably never use, now that website suddenly loads much faster than any other page on the Internet.  Because of the deal with Google you notice that sites like Google, Picasa, and Youtube load much faster than Bing, Photobucket, and Vimeo.  Your online gaming experience suddenly deteriorates as you notice net speeds drop by 10 or 20%.  You call Verizon to complain as a customer, only to be told that if you pay $5 or $7 more a month on your bill, you can be bumped up to the Gamers+ Tier! which lets you enjoy your online games at faster speeds – the same speeds that existed before the tiers were ever implemented.  Frustrated, you cancel your contract and become a customer of someone like Comcast.  You feel better in the short term, until 18 months down the line Comcast itself signs a similar deal with Google, or perhaps with another big online player like Yahoo & Microsoft.

How about in the corporate environment?  Suddenly your bandwidth is cut, and you’re forced to pay more to enjoy conveniences such as readily streaming video conference abilities and quick access to key websites that your business deals with.

The corporate regulation of the Internet will kill the Internet as we know it.  What is left over will be chopped, dissected, tiered, and pay-walled into a new sanitized Internet which is controlled by the large and powerful, with the small and upcoming companies forced to buy in wherever they can in order to expand their reach to different subsets of Internet customers – instead of today where a .com is a .com is a .com whether you are accessing it from Wide Open West in Michigan or from a university network in California.

The Google / Verizon deal creates a new framework that will be impressed upon Congress to enact.  That same Congress is filled with… let’s say… older people who probably don’t understand the Internet much – and it will be in their hands (and the hands of the lobbyists that get their ear the most) to determine the next course of the greatest source of free flowing information in the history of man.

An excellent point-summary of just where this is taking us all:

1. Under their proposal, there would be no Net Neutrality on wireless networks — meaning anything goes, from blocking websites and applications to pay-for-priority treatment.

2. Their proposed standard for “non-discrimination” on wired networks is so weak that actions like Comcast’s widely denounced blocking of BitTorrent would be allowed.

3. The deal would let ISPs like Verizon — instead of Internet users like you — decide which applications deserve the best quality of service. That’s not the way the Internet has ever worked, and it threatens to close the door on tomorrow’s innovative applications. (If RealPlayer had been favored a few years ago, would we ever have gotten YouTube?)

4. The deal would allow ISPs to effectively split the Internet into “two pipes” — one of which would be reserved for “managed services,” a pay-for-play platform for content and applications. This is the proverbial toll road on the information superhighway, a fast lane reserved for the select few, while the rest of us are stuck on the cyber-equivalent of a winding dirt road.

5. The pact proposes to turn the Federal Communications Commission into a toothless watchdog, left fruitlessly chasing consumer complaints but unable to make rules of its own. Instead, it would leave it up to unaccountable (and almost surely industry-controlled) third parties to decide what the rules should be.

Many advocacy groups around the Internet are incensed at what Google and Verizon have announced, and what is truly terrible in all of this is that when it comes time for the Net Neutrality fight, those who want a free and open Internet as it is today have just lost the biggest of all allies which until extremely recently was thought to be as solidly on the side of neutrality as could be.

edit:

An earlier version of this post poked fun at the famous “Series of Tubes” rant by former Alaskan Senator Ted Stevens.  That part has been removed in light of the news today that he was killed in a plane crash along with eight others.

From all this oil to nothing in less than a month? Might just be too good to be true.

Something that may go on to become one of the more regrettable moves that the Obama Administration has made comes out of the absolute rush to bury the negative story that has become the Deepwater Horizon oil spill from the second that the cap of the spill held straight on through this day and beyond.  The trumpeting has been loud and clear:

The White House announced Wednesday that a “vast majority” of the oil in the Gulf has dissipated or been collected, following the plugging of the BP Deepwater Horizon well — but environmental groups are skeptical.

As officials were monitoring a thus-far successful “static kill” of the undersea wellhead, the administration responded, ironically enough, with a leak to The New York Times: a new government analysis claiming that only 26 percent of the estimated 4.9 million-barrel spill still remains intact in the Gulf of Mexico.

The chorus from rational thinkers: Where did the oil go?

The cap is on, but much oil still remains between it and the sea surface.

So far, the Deepwater Horizon disaster seems to be following the legacy of another greatly famous spill, 1989′s Exxon Valdez disaster.  In the aftermath of that spill, 70% of the oil was broken down by natural forces (50% biodegrading, 20% evaporation).  The remaining 30% made for one of the worst environmental disasters in American history.  14% of the grand total from the Exxon Valdez was actually recovered.  More than 15% remains out there to this day.  A similar extrapolation for the Deepwater Horizon means that there will be oil out there on the Gulf shores through the start of the 2030s decade.

The extraordinary usage of oil dispersant is what makes things seem better:

According to David Pettit, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, the administration is using the report to suggest that “the worst is over.” The truth, Pettit says, is that about a quarter of the oil has dispersed — meaning it still exists, but in microscopic particles in the ocean — and another 26 percent of the oil is still unaccounted for.

C-130 aircraft dumping gallons upon gallons of the dispersant Corexit into the Gulf

The dispersant has done its job – breaking the huge puddles of oil into small droplets which don’t show up on our TV screens as ugly masses that show the true scope and size of the disaster.  The result?  The Obama Administration is allowed to deflect and move away from this as far and as quick as possible.

Side effect: with the oil well capped and the large masses of oil broken up, an adequate estimate of just how much oil spilled – which would determine the amount of BP’s fine – can go in no way other than one to benefit BP:

The blown-out well in the Gulf of Mexico gushed 12 times faster than the government and BP estimated in the early weeks of the crisis and has spilled a whopping 4.9 million barrels, or 205.8 million gallons, according to a more detailed analysis announced late Monday.
BP’s Macondo well spewed 62,000 barrels of oil a day initially, and as the reservoir gradually depleted itself, the flow eased to 53,000 barrels a day until the well was finally capped and sealed July 15, according to scientists in the Flow Rate Technical Group, supervised by the U.S. Geological Survey and the U.S. Department of Energy.

At these figures, BP could be on the hook for somewhere between $4.5 and $17.6 billion for the spill of 4.1 million barrels of oil.  Internal documents at BP painted a much more dire (and realistic?) picture of what was going on at the site of the blowout.  Documents released by Congress show that BP’s estimate of the ‘worst case’ scenario for a blowout with no blowout preventer to be as many as 100,000 barrels per day – raising the amount of fines to between $9.76 and $38 billion.  When applying for a permit to drill the well, the worst case was estimated back then to be 160,000 barrels per day – adjusting fines higher to $15.62 to $61.12 billion.

In any event, an accurate measurement will not be taken, and that’s about the best news possible for BP.  Actually, it might only be the second best bit of news.  Turns out, they’ll also get to be in charge of gathering their own evidence to be used against them:

“The items at the bottom of the sea are a big deal for everybody,” said Stephen Herman, a New Orleans lawyer for injured rig workers and others.

BP will surely want a look at the items, particularly if it tries to shift responsibility for the disaster onto other companies, such as Transocean, which owned the oil platform, Halliburton, which supplied the crew that was cementing the well, and Cameron International, maker of the blowout preventer.

BP and Transocean — which could face heavy penalties if found to be at fault — have said they will raise some of the wreckage if it can be done without doing more damage to the oil well. That would give the two companies responsibility for gathering up the very evidence that could be used against them.

But the federal government has said it simply doesn’t have the know-how and the deep-sea equipment that the drilling industry has. And it said the operation will be closely supervised by the Coast Guard.

Closely supervised by the Coast Guard – the same Coast Guard that never got the accurate estimates of the oil gusher, and has consistently low-balled estimates from the start – initially saying on April 23rd, the day the rig sank, that no oil was going to leak into the Gulf.

The administration, for its part, has continued to tread lightly on a line between happiness over the disaster being “over” and trying to not hang a virtual “Mission Accomplished” banner behind them, and some members of the media have called them out on this:

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, battered by weeks of questions about the administration’s spill response, bristled when asked whether he would display a “Mission Accomplished” banner.

“I think it is fairly safe to say that because of the environmental effects of Mother Nature, the warmer waters of the Gulf and the federal response, that many of the doomsday scenarios that we talked about and repeated a lot have not and will not come to fruition,” said Gibbs, who otherwise was happy to field 90 minutes of press questions flanked by National Incident Commander Thad Allen and Obama’s top environmental adviser Carol Browner.

A core sample of beach shows that "out of sight, out of mind" doesn't mean it's gone.

Once again, intelligent people – scientists – find their selves on the outside looking in when it comes to trying to deliver truth to the masses.  In this case, it’s the harsh reality that this disaster still has a long, long way to go:

But those assurances failed to satisfy scientists and environmental groups, who disputed the claim by Carol Browner, the White House energy and climate adviser, that “the vast majority of oil is gone”.

In Louisiana, state wildlife officials told CNN that tar balls and patches of oil were still washing up in the marshes and coastal areas of St Bernard, Plaquemines and Jefferson parishes.

Susan Shaw, a marine toxicologist and director of the Marine Environmental Research Institute, said the White House had been too quick to declare the oil was gone. “The blanket statement that the public understood is that most of the oil has disappeared. That is not true. About 50% of it is still in the water,” she said.

Like other scientists, she said the report failed to explain how it reached its estimates on the amount of oil that was biodegraded naturally, or dispersed with chemicals. “There are a lot of unanswered questions.”

Even the White House’s own estimates still left a spill five times the size of that from the Exxon Valdez, she said, with long-term consequences that would be unknown for years to come.

The “out of sight, out of mind” mentality is likely to continue, sadly.

The new report comes after days of speculation about where the Gulf oil has gone. After the damaged well had been capped July 19, U.S. Coast Guard flyovers didn’t spot any big patches of crude on the water.

But oil cleanup is mostly getting rid of what’s on the surface, Carney said. There’s a common perception that “as long as you keep it off the beach, everything’s hunky dory,” he added.

In fact, scientists are still finding plenty of spilled Gulf oil—whether it’s bubbling up from under Louisiana’s islands, trapped underneath Florida’s sugar-white beaches, or in the ocean’s unseen reaches.

This week, biological oceanographer Markus Huettel and colleague Joel Kostka dug trenches on a cleaned Pensacola beach and discovered large swaths of oil up to two feet (nearly a meter) deep.

Oil gets trapped underground when tiny oil droplets penetrate porous sand or when waves deposit tarballs and then cover them with sand, said Huettel, of Florida State University in Tallahassee.

The following was the front page of Huffingtonpost.com for a good chunk of the afternoon…

Worst headline. Ever.

I get it.

No no, really. I get it.

Oh there’s substance back there somewhere beyond the headline, after I finished shaking my head…

With U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker’s decision to overturn California’s ban on same-sex marriages, we now have two landmark marriage equality cases wending their way forward through the legal process, with the Supreme Court looming as their potential final destination.

The first is the aforementioned Prop 8 decision. The second is last month’s ruling by U.S. District Judge Joseph Tauro, who ruled that the federal ban on same-sex marriage, more commonly known as the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), was unconstitutional.

So yes, the issue of same-sex marriage will continue to be around in a SCOTUS-type light through 2012.  Hopefully the headlines don’t turn to be expressed in lolcats* or something.

Here, this post has a lot more actual information on this.

* – Bonus: Can you express the same-sex marriage legal victories in the lolcats language?

The long road to equal rights for same-sex couples continues in California.

The forces of discrimination against people merely on the basis of who they choose to love was struck down Wednesday in a 4 – 3 decision by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.  A state decision with national implications, it now appears very likely that the supporters of the freshly-defeated Proposition 8 will appeal to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court, which is very likely to uphold the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California’s decision, which then sets the stage for a national showdown over this state law in the U.S. Supreme Court – perhaps even by the end of 2011.

Apparently the defense put forth by the supporters of Proposition 8 was meager at best, and the ‘facts’ brought forth to support keeping marriage as something exclusive to heterosexual couples were laughed out of the court by Judge Vaughn Walker – in a completely professional manner, of course.

What’s important here is that those who would seek to deny rights to someone because of their sexual orientation – and then hide behind happy looking family-supporting banners – are on the run for now as this continues to move through the courts.

Get that love and respect out of here!

A closer look at that judicial smackdown is prudent though, and the best summary of that comes from The Atlantic‘s politics editor Marc Ambinder:

1. Marriage is and has been a civil matter, subject to religious intervention only when requested by the intervenors.

2. California, like every other state, doesn’t require that couples wanting to marry be able to procreate.

3. Marriage as an institution has changed overtime; women were given equal status; interracial marriage was formally legalized; no-fault divorce made it easier to dissolve marriages.

4. California has eliminated marital obligations based on gender.

5. Same-sex love and intimacy “are well-documented in human history.”

6. Sexual orientation is a fundamental characteristic of a human being.

7. Prop 8 proponents’ “assertion that sexual orientation cannot be defined is contrary to the weight of the evidence.”

8. There is no evidence that sexual orientation is chosen, nor than it can be changed.

9. California has no interest in reducing the number of gays and lesbians in its population.

10. “Same-sex couples are identical to opposite-sex couples in the characteristics relevant to the ability to form successful marital union.”

11. “Marrying a person of the opposite sex is an unrealistic option for gay and lesbian individuals.”

12. “Domestic partnerships lack the social meaning associated with marriage, and marriage is widely regarded as the definitive expression of love and commitment in the United States.
The availability of domestic partnership does not provide gays and lesbians with a status equivalent to marriage because the cultural meaning of marriage and its associated benefits are intentionally withheld from same-sex couples in domestic partnerships.”

13. “Permitting same-sex couples to marry will not affect the number of opposite-sex couples who marry, divorce, cohabit, have children outside of marriage or otherwise affect the
stability of opposite-sex marriages.”

My personal favorite is the last in that list of thirteen.  It is the refrain that has been trumpeted by supporters of same-sex marriage since the start – the refrain that has been used time and time again toward those who believe that same-sex marriage will somehow cause a simultaneous downfall of The Family Unit and Western civilization as a whole.  Permitting same-sex couples to marry will not affect the number of opposite-sex couples who marry, divorce, cohabit, have children outside of marriage, or otherwise affect the stability of opposite-sex marriages.  Right there.  Pure and simple.  Black and white.

This ruling is a milepost on a very long road toward the rightly-earned equality for homosexuals.  There’s a literal mountain of data showing that, over time, the opinions of average Americans are swinging toward the support of same-sex marriage, and that is seen by the number of states where same-sex marriage is legal slowly increasing with time.  The common theme among the data is that the younger the person is, the more likely they are to support same-sex marriage:

Support for same-sex marriage, by state and age group, from 1994 - 2008

In a world of those in the 18 – 29 year old age group, same-sex marriage would be legal in all but 12 states, with Texas and North Carolina being the front lines of where same-sex rights are being fought for.  Add in the 30 – 44 year old tier and use midpoints between the two groups, and pluralities move back much further, making same-sex marriage legal in only 28 of 50 states.  Keep adding in older folk and the numbers keep moving back.  Sadly, it is these older folk that vote in droves, and it is these older folk who thus drive policy.  That gives us the current situation that supporters of same-sex marriage find their selves in, and sets the stage for legal battles like the one from Wednesday, taking place in a quite liberal-leaning state like California.

For now, the victory for equal rights stands as it is, and the political reaction to this will be relatively muted – given everything else currently happening in the country.  For Republicans to try to run on this when they have so many other vectors for attack against Democrats, they would run the risk of seeming petty and not focused on issues that the electorate feels are important, and could end up with doing more harm to their brand than good – something that neither party can afford at this stage.

Meanwhile, other places that have already dealt with this will look at America, perhaps shake their head for a moment, and then continue on with their day.  A same-sex couple loving each other is so far down on the ladder of actual importance in the grand scheme of things, that dedicating time, debate, drama, and elections to it will seem petty in the future.  Eventually all of America might aspire to be the upholders of equality like other leaders in this field – Argentina, Belgium, Canada, Iceland, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Mexico City, the states of Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, and the nation’s capital – Washington, D.C.

We’ll get there eventually.

If the truth fell in a forest and nobody heard it, did it happen?

The closest thing that we are going to get to the Pentagon Papers incident of our generation, the leaking of over 90,000 documents by whistle-blowing site Wikileaks to three major news organizations around the world, has so far seemed to simultaneously caused a great deal of yawning, and a great deal of questioning of why the nearly decade-long war is allowed to continue with no real end in sight, nor any real final goal that will allow us to finally leave.

The yawning, surprisingly enough, comes from media outlets their selves who trotted out experts over the past week to address the content of the information that was leaked, and the near uniform response was along the lines of this was already known or there was nothing new added here: not addressing just how terrible that truth is, or bothering to repeat that truth one more time louder, just playing things off as this is the new business as normal, and off with life we go.

More depressing still (because the information contained within the leaked documents, “known” or not, is pretty depressing for the future war effort) is that the lead headline to evolve in the days since the leak is not the content of the leak, but how the information was leaked in the first place, and the efforts of the government to track down the source of the link and the leader of the Wikileaks site itself – letting the entire reality spelled out in plain black and white by the leaked documents to continue onward almost completely undisturbed.

Julian Assange, head of Wikileaks and someone U.S. intelligence would really love to get to 'talk' to

U.S. intelligence has wanted to track down the head of Wikileaks, Julian Assange, for months now after the release of Collateral Murder, a leaked video from the U.S. Army that shows the killings of eighteen civilians, among them two reporters, who happened to be caught in a particularly bad part of Baghdad in July of 2007.  That heat has only been turned up sharply after the most recent document dump.

Jacob Appelbaum, a security researcher & U.S. citizen, on his way from Holland to the Defcon conference in New Jersey received the “this is completely random, trust us” treatment upon touching down on American soil:

Jacob Appelbaum, a Seattle-based programmer for the online privacy protection project called Tor, arrived at the Newark, New Jersey, airport from Holland flight Thursday morning when he was pulled aside by customs and border protection agents who told him he was randomly selected for a security search, according to the sources familiar with the matter who asked to remain anonymous.

Appelbaum, a U.S. citizen, was taken into a room, frisked and his bag was searched. Receipts from his bag were photocopied and his laptop was inspected but it’s not clear in what manner, the sources said. Officials from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the U.S. Army then told him he was not under arrest but was being detained, the sources said. They asked questions about Wikileaks, asked for his opinions about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and asked where Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is, but he declined to comment without a lawyer present, according to the sources. He was not permitted to make a phone call, they said.

After about three hours, Appelbaum was given his laptop back but the agents kept his three mobile phones, sources said.

Deaths from insurgent bomb attacks, as compiled from leaked data

As far as the leak is concerned on the U.S. military’s side, they believe they have their guy, and that guy has been and is continuing to be locked away in solitary confinement:

The Army private charged with leaking an airstrike video and downloading documents remained in solitary confinement Saturday.Military officials told CNN that Pfc. Bradley Manning is also the prime suspect in the latest leak of documents to the WikiLeaks website.

Manning was routinely processed Thursday at the Quantico detention facility, a military spokesman said Friday.

Manning’s future remains undetermined, his fate to be determined by a military tribunal some time in the month of August at the earliest:

Manning could go before a military judge in August in Washington, but given the complexity of the case it could likely be delayed, the military official said. Investigators are gathering evidence on the initial charges, which they will present to a military judge who will approve a court martial if the case adds up, the military official said.

Manning, the military spokesman, said no hearing dates have been set, as the uniformed code of military justice is a “very deliberate process.” All parties are working to assure that the private’s rights are protected, he added.

The way in to the Wikileaks group is still being actively sought by intelligence, to the point of apparent bribes to friends of Manning:

One of the civilians interviewed by the Army’s criminal division, who asked for anonymity so that his name would not be associated with the inquiry, said Friday that the investigators’ questions led him to believe that the Army was concerned that there were classified documents in the Boston area.

“I was under the impression that they believed that perhaps Bradley had used friends in Cambridge as a mechanism for moving documents,” he said.

The civilian also said that the Army had offered him “a considerable amount of money if I were to keep my ear to the ground and be an in with them with WikiLeaks.” He said that he had turned the Army down and that he had no connection to WikiLeaks. The other civilian also said in an interview on Friday that he had no connection to WikiLeaks.

The first civilian said it appeared from the questioning that Army investigators “are trying to build a network among Bradley’s friends to infiltrate WikiLeaks.”

Reality in Afghanistan. Set to continue for the foreseeable future.

As said in the onset of this piece, the contents of the information leaked are being passed over in favor of the search for who leaked the information.  The perceived problem here is the leak instead of the reality of the situation – which is the desperately hopeless situation on the ground in Afghanistan, and how the voices of those who are still anti-war seem to have faded to a dim mummer of what they were under the Bush Administration.

The yawn can be heard in the voice of top politicians like Senator John Kerry, who have gone out and said that the information released is nothing new, and nothing important:

Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) said Sunday the information revealed in the WikiLeaks report about the military struggle in Afghanistan is not comparable to the historic controversy surrounding the Pentagon Papers.

Asked to assess the report on CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS,” Kerry explained the difference between the two secret reports that roiled Americans perceptions about war.

“The Pentagon Papers revealed a government — our government, that had been engaged in a long pattern of deception with the American people.  There is no such thing here,” Kerry said.

…

“We knew almost everything that’s there.  It gives a little color to the battlefield struggles and to, you know, some of the difficulties within the villages and so forth,” he said.  “But basically they are an incomplete presentation of the challenge and not particularly game changing.”

Spare the message, shoot the messenger.  Ironic that we are here, now of all times, given that the month that just ended has gone down as the deadliest month there for U.S. troops since the war’s start:

With the deaths of six more American troops on Thursday and Friday, July became the deadliest month for U.S. forces in the nine-year Afghan war.

The killings came in a manner and location that has typified the recent increase in violence in Afghanistan. NATO  officials said five of the American service members died in roadside bombings and the sixth was killed in an armed attack, all in southern Afghanistan, where the Taliban insurgency is strongest.

…

The latest killings pushed the death toll to 66 Americans, surpassing June, when 60 Americans were killed. The overall toll for NATO forces in July, 89, is still below the record reached in June, when 103 NATO troops were killed.

66 fallen soldiers.  That used to be news.  People used to care about that.  Now?  Now it’s just part of the new normal.  Don’t expect that to change, by the way:

Virtually since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the nine-year war in Afghanistan has largely been an afterthought in American politics. Though public interest has risen somewhat in recent months amid national debate over strategy, the firing of Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal and higher casualty counts, Afghanistan remains well down the list of voter concerns, polls show.

And interviews with voters, elected officials and political strategists this week suggest that the publication this week of thousands of classified battlefield reports will not substantially change that status.

War for how much longer?

This is big.  A “black eye” for how the war is being conducted, and what really is and is not being accomplished in Afghanistan doesn’t begin to come close to the 90,000 documents that Wikileaks has handed off to three major news organizations.  The stories began to run tonight, and this will be an embarrassment to stretch across Presidential administrations.

Where do you even begin?

The war logs also detail:

• How a secret “black” unit of special forces hunts down Taliban leaders for “kill or capture” without trial.

• How the US covered up evidence that the Taliban have acquired deadly surface-to-air missiles.

• How the coalition is increasingly using deadly Reaper drones to hunt and kill Taliban targets by remote control from a base in Nevada.

• How the Taliban have caused growing carnage with a massive escalation of their roadside bombing campaign, which has killed more than 2,000 civilians to date.

As for defense of the administration, the White House comes out swinging at Wikileaks for releasing the information…

The White House also criticised the publication of the files by Wikileaks: “We strongly condemn the disclosure of classified information by individuals and organisations, which puts the lives of the US and partner service members at risk and threatens our national security. Wikileaks made no effort to contact the US government about these documents, which may contain information that endanger the lives of Americans, our partners, and local populations who co-operate with us.”

…though they would like you to know that a majority of this happened under the other guy’s watch…

In a statement, the White House said the chaotic picture painted by the logs was the result of “under-resourcing” under Obama’s predecessor, saying: “It is important to note that the time period reflected in the documents is January 2004 to December 2009.”

The forgotten war of the 21st century is about to become a lot less forgotten.  It better, because if this isn’t enough to wake people up to the reality of the failed mission and the idea that troops don’t need to be dying there any longer, nothing will.

In the meantime, cheers to the light of truth, still being shone by those brave enough to do so.

A tide of solid oil washes ashore in Dalian, China (image from The Big Picture)

The irresistible luxuries of a life comfortable, filled with needs for wants that mere decades ago we never knew we had, continue to lead us down a path of pillaging and environmental destruction.  The pace is slower than water torture in our eyes, but geologically similar to driving full-speed toward a brick wall.  Recent efforts of green movements translate to tapping the breaks, but a glance at the headlines show that the other foot is still slammed on the accelerator, to the floor.

Our latest example comes from China.  The northeastern Chinese port of Dalian is the sight of an unfolding environmental disaster.  Explosions in two pipelines at the port on the night of the 16th triggered a major fire at first, and a spill of oil into the sea after the fact.  The initial details of the story immediately bring back memories of another explosion-leading-to-disaster, that being the Deepwater Horizon oil rig and the resulting Gulf of Mexico disaster.  The Dalian spill is a paltry 170 square miles, whereas the Deepwater Horizon disaster is 2,500 square miles on the surface and an untold number of cubic miles when oil at varying ocean depths is taken into account.

Firefighters walk toward the explosions caused by two ruptured oil pipelines in Dalian, China. (image from The Big Picture)

China, the rising Asian superpower, is seeking to create their own version of the comfortable world seen half way across the globe during the American Century.  The country continues to push forward with the consumption of energy, the acquisition of energy, and shows little regard for safety or pollution prevention.  The nation trying to stamp its own unique mark on the 21st century continues to follow through the trials and tribulations of modernization, a path well blazed by the United States before the age of regulations.

Regulations are only imposed after some entity somewhere does something horribly wrong, which creates the popular ground swell support for reigning in unchecked exploitation.  China will learn in time much like the United States did during the 20th century.  They will adapt and learn to take better care of the land they have.  Still, if the opening years of the 21st century have shown back in the United States, the mere presence of regulations does nothing to the constant and sustained effort to sidestep them – often with a recurring high success rate.

Disaster on every channel.

Still, the regulations will come and the difficulty to pollute will rise.  Disasters that happen in the interim will be relegated to historical collateral damage, though questions abound to exactly how many such shots the environment as we know it can sustain before radical changes begin that could negatively effect us all.

Also, consider that just because “we” as Americans or “we” as Europeans, Chinese, Japanese, westerners, decide that we want to take a greener path and run down it, that doesn’t mean “we” as a species will do so.  For every person living at the top of human society, there’s ten in countries much poorer, who will do anything necessary to scrape for the top – or to reap the benefits of satisfying the demands of those at the top with the highest profit margin possible.  Of this, I am speaking of Africa and specifically Nigeria:

Fifty years ago, Shell sank its first 17 wells in the Delta. The rest is history written as nightmare: unparalleled government corruption, ecocide, impoverishment. One estimate puts  spills in the Delta over the past half century at 546 million gallons—nearly 11 million gallons a year. If it’s hard to wrap your mind around those figures, maybe this  is easier to grasp: more oil is spilled from the Delta’s pipeline maze each year than has been lost so far in the Gulf of Mexico.

Through photographs, you can glimpse life in the Delta under the shadow of big oil. Derelict shacks slouch on river banks amid an extravagance of garbage and waste. Children bathe in lifeless ponds. People live and work in the heat and amid toxins released by flames roaring from flare stacks. Flaring is universally agreed to be wasteful, but is also a way of maximizing oil production on the cheap. Much of the gas burned could be used productively, but in places like the Niger Delta big oil just doesn’t want to spend the money necessary to reclaim it. The flames belch toxins and methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. The U.S. prohibits such flaring. Officially, Nigeria does, too, and scheduled its first “flare-out” for 1984. To date, however, its governments still keep eternally postponing the deadline for stopping the practice.

The sheen, sludge, and slime of crude oil that Americans living on the Gulf coast are just beginning to get used to have been omnipresent facts in the Delta for so long that most people know little else. Average life expectancy in the rural Delta, says Bassey, “has never been lower than it is now”—48 years for women, 47 for men, and 41 if you escape subsistence farming and petty trading by becoming an oil worker. In other words, years shaved off lives are the personal sacrifice those in the region make to big oil.

Gas that could be used for energy needs is wastefully burned off, illuminating the night horizon of Eboucha, Nigeria. In addition to being wasteful, the gas makes local areas toxic, with sharp drops in life expectancy for locals.

As long as there is demand in a capitalist society, someone will meet that demand at the lowest cost possible given the rules provided.  When the rules provided are none, are merely for show, or are simply not enforced, the efforts of everyone following the rules will be undercut right then and there.

Nigeria’s ongoing oil disaster has no iconic images like those from the Gulf of Mexico, Alaska, or China.  Their oil disaster is ongoing and unfolding in a near accidentally-imposed media blackout.  A lack of coverage because of a lack of caring, though a lack of coverage begets that very same lack of caring.

Local political forces have led to a situational state in that region of the world that involves armed groups attempting to stand up to the corrupt national government – though with a primary weapon of disrupting and destroying oil producing and transporting facilities, the problem is only made worse in the short term.  The long term situation if rebels were ever able to win would be simply determined by the speed at which that new government in that new country could become corrupted by the oil dollar just like the previous hosts.  The “we” in the west can champion our green world and speak lofty words of grand goals to bring it about, but the ugly reality continues in the here and now.  The human “we” are still very efficient destroyers of our environment, and this entire writing only considers what is wrought via oil – just one front in a countless-front war on our own planet.  As said at the top – we are tapping the brakes in that speeding car, but the other foot remains on the gas pedal, flooring it toward the inevitable brick wall.

Hurricane Alex about to make landfall in northeastern Mexico

Hurricane Alex, a large and quickly intensifying storm, is about to make landfall on the northeastern coast of Mexico near the barrier island town of La Yegua, Tamaulipas.  Winds in Alex have quickly jumped to 100mph sustained in the hours before its landfall, and will be effecting a large amount of real estate.  Hurricane force winds extend out 70 miles from the center, tropical storm force winds 205 miles.  Half a foot to a foot of rain is expected in the storm’s path which is certain to cause life threatening flash floods.  That’s not the only effect, however…

Current position of Alex as of 8pm June 30 EDT

Satellite of Hurricane Alex as of 21:00 June 30 EDT (click for loop)

The very large circulation of Alex is causing numerous issues with the ongoing Deepwater Horizon spill operations.  Stiff winds out of the southeast at 15 – 25 knots, waves to six feet, and bands of heavy thunderstorms related to Alex’s circulation have forced oil skimmers to head to safe port though the capping operations have been allowed to continue – if barely.  The broad, long fetch of winds blowing over the slick have also forced the largest majority yet of the mess back toward the coastlines of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and the Florida panhandle.  There is the outside risk of the oil reaching the shoreline of far eastern Texas within three days, if wind patterns hold up.

Forecast location of the Deepwater Horizon oil slick for July 1

More Information:
Weather Underground – Hurricane Alex
Brownsville, TX Radar
Deepwater Horizon Oil Slick Forecasts

A protesting calling card left in a shattered window in downtown Toronto

Saturday was a less than shining moment for the country of Canada and, specifically, the city of Toronto.  Toronto is the site of the current G20 meeting of nations, where leaders of the 20 largest economic engines around the world gather to talk about the economy and how to maintain the comfortable sort of life that capitalism has earned us.  Well that was before the 2008 economic crisis, now the meetings probably more closely resemble real-time disaster planning that may or may not be working.  In any event, Toronto “won” the honor of hosting the summit – a reward I put in quotations because inevitably in seemingly every one of these summits, protesters show up and damage is done to local businesses – not to mention the increased costs of security.  Canada is footing a nearly $1bn (USD) bill for this exercise in economic kumbaya.

Old fashioned dollars-and-cents issues aside with the cost, another cost to seriously consider is – as it is seemingly everywhere that real important people show up to – two things are destined to happen: small groups of very angry protesters will break things, and for the vast majority of peaceful protesters will inevitably suffer an infringement on their freedom of speech – in order to prevent the violence that is going to happen either way.

First to speak to the violence.

Police vehicle set ablaze by protesters in Toronto

Even when things were “going well” – which itself is impossible to be true for all players at any given time if capitalism works the way it is supposed to (someone’s pleasure must be at someone’s expense) – violent protests seem to always follow the gathering of world leaders in any spot not named the United Nations.  A 1999 meeting of the World Trade Organization in Seattle quickly became overshadowed by large anti-globalization protests that seem to have set the new standards for how protests and the response to them will go when the important people come to town – from international organizations to the Republican National Convention during the 2008 election campaign.  The cycle to be followed now on all sides seems to see its genesis in peaceful protests, heavily fortified locations for the important delegates, and some group at some point breaking off and starting the attention-getting violence: violence that 99 times out of 100 overshadows whatever message they were supportive of in the first place, inevitably doing more harm than good (assuming the ultimate goal of shouting that message is to gather support for it).

It’s hard to sway a neutral mind by lighting police cars on fire.

Police break up a sit-in protest in Queen's Park, Toronto.

The other casualty seen during violent protests, wherever they may be, are the efforts of those who are actually showing up and exercising their right to speak and protest freely.  As soon as windows are broke on one side of town, people peacefully protesting in much greater numbers will see their rights taken away rather quickly.

A recap of how this happens can be easily gleamed from the tweets of a Canadian journalist, TVO’s Steve Paikin.  He summed up events as follows:

i saw police brutality tonight. it was unnecessary. they asked me to leave the site or they would arrest me. i told them i was dong my job.

they repeated they would arrest me if i didn’t leave. as i was escorted away from the demonstration, i saw two officers hold a journalist.

the journalist identified himself as working for “the guardian.” he talked too much and pissed the police off. two officers held him a third punched him in the stomach. totally unnecessary. the man collapsed. then the third officer drove his elbow into the man’s back.

no cameras recorded the assault. and it was an assault.

the officer who escorted me away from the demo said, “yeah, that shouldn’t have happened.” he is correct. there was no cause for it.

i can appreciate that the police were on edge today, after seeing four or five of their cruisers burned. but why such overreaction tonight?

the demonstration on the esplanade was peaceful. it was like an old sit in. no one was aggressive. and yet riot squad officers moved in.

police on one side screamed at the crowd to leave one way. then police on the other side said leave the other way. there was no way out.

so the police just started arresting people. i stress, this was a peaceful, middle class, diverse crowd. no anarchists

literally more than 100 officers with guns pointing at the crowd. rubber bullets and smoke bombs ready to be fired. rubber bullets fired

i was “escorted” away by police so couldn’t see how many arrested, but it must have been dozens.

No points were effectively communicated to undecided minds by this action.

Just one account from the ground, but most assuredly not all that much of a flattering one for the Toronto Police – who were in turn acting in the heightened stress environment that resulted after violent protesters started vandalizing the downtown area.  It was someone’s job to stand up and be the adult here, but no one took that initiative.  The modus operandi by then was to react.  There would be no preventing.

Mr. Paikin continued with some additional good points:

we must make a distinction between the “thugs” who broke store windows and torched cop cars and the very reasonable citizens who just wanted to remind the authorities that the freedom to speak and assemble shouldn’t disappear because world leaders come to town.

i have lived in toronto for 32 years. have never seen a day like this. shame on the vandals.

and shame on those that ordered peaceful protesters attacked and arrested. that is not consistent with democracy in toronto, G20 or no G20

The freedom to speak and assemble shouldn’t disappear because world leaders come to town.  There is absolutely no better way to sum it up than this.  A distinction must be made between apprehending and dealing with those who protest in a needlessly violent way and just carrying on with the normal line for dealing with protesters – one bad apple means the entire bunch should be cleared out.  Unfortunately with even easier methods of crowd dispersal just around the corner – and already debuted in the case of the sonic cannon – expecting reason when dealing with protesters seems to be something that never really was around, but will be missed when its entirely gone.

Additional links:
Toronto Star’s Photo Blog on the event

Visible satellite loop of Tropical Storm Alex, ending at 13:00 June 26 EDT. (click for motion)

Fueled by light winds aloft and water temperatures in the mid-80′s, Tropical Depression #1 has strengthened to Tropical Storm Alex this morning – at present sporting winds of 45mph.

Warnings are currently up for the entire coastline of Belize, as well as the coast of Mexico up to Cancun.  The system is expected to make landfall later today near the Mexico/Belize border as a tropical storm.

Five-day forecast track for Alex as of 11:00 June 26 EDT

After Alex crosses the Yucatan Peninsula over the day Sunday and emerges back out over the open waters of the Gulf of Mexico Sunday night it is now expected to slowly churn its way to hurricane intensity before making a second landfall in northeastern Mexico.  More importantly though, Alex is not expected to turn toward the Deepwater Horizon operations at this time, which would most certainly be a dodged bullet for the containment operations.  This could still change, of course, but at least there is a slight amount of good news from this forecast.

Keep in mind that the operations would have to be evacuated as many as five days in advance of any approaching storm, which means oil would flow unrestricted into the Gulf during that time.

More information:
Weather Underground – Tropical Storm Alex
National Hurricane Center – Tropical Storm Alex