This is Fucking Awesome

The city will build out the infrastructure and then sell wholesale access to Internet service providers, telecommunications companies and nonprofit organizations. ISPs and other providers will handle all billing, marketing, customer service and the at-home equipment needed to pick up the signals.

Philadelphia will become a customer of the network by allowing city departments to buy broadband access to communicate with one another. As part of this new technology plan, the city will also establish a nonprofit organization that will provide computers and technical training to low-income residents.

The fact that Verizon lobbied like hell to block this and got a law passed to make it nearly impossible to do it elsewhere in PA is disgraceful. Preventing municipalities from offering services that compete with private corporations? Are you fucking kidding me? This is infrastructure, people. You want it to be Public, Open and Cheap. You want to give cities the ability to offer you internet access for the same reasons you let them fix the streets and put out fires.

On a base moral level, cities are more important than corporations. The interests of the city and its citizens should outweigh the interests of shareholders and CEOs. That should be obvious, but for some reason in this day and age it isn't.

Of course, this anit-municipal movement is nothing new. Telco corporations have been trying to restrict this for years, why? Well...

Comcast and SBC both know that once a decent municipal alternative emerges, they've got legitimate competition and will be forced to lower rates. Competition harms the bottom line; it also forces them to work harder to improve their product and keep you happy - or lose you. There is no scientific mystery here.

One of the roles of government is to regulate the market. Another role is to offer services. People act like this is communism or something, but that's total bullshit. We're not talking about nationalizing that ass, we're talking about bringing some real fucking competition to the table.

Man this shit pisses me off. But bully for Philly. Here's hoping they lead the way for us all.

Here's something I've said before: I'm superficially as well as substantively attracted to intelligence in women. On the one hand, conversation is a must for any real interest. On the other hand, for me having a woman tell me she's got (or getting) a degree is equivalent to great cleavage in terms of an immediate turn-on. It's kind of cheap and tawdry, but also true.

What prompts this re-revelation? Well, last night I went to see a rough cut of this movie about a guy named Zizek, who's an intellectual rockstar from Slovenia. It's actually quite good. The woman who made it, Astra Taylor, interviewed me last weekend for a book she's writing. I'm kind of fascinated with her; book-writing, film-making, all seems very exciting and triggers my IQ fetish.

Also at the screening by complete random chance was this other woman from whom I've had a long-standing yen. She was the main office person at ETW while I was there, working on her PhD the whole time -- I always thought she was super hot, though very clearly unavailable. Anyway she was there and we chatted for a moment after. She's finished getting her degree, said I could call her doctor (really! yowza!), and I actually got quite nervous and don't think I made any kind of impression at all. Yes, that still happens to me from time to time. Kind of a treat, actually.

What can I say? It's spring, and the warm air makes the blood run. Yesterday riding round the city from meeting to gym to screening it was a cavelcade of city girls. With the farenheight pushing 70, the great unveiling is on, and everyone's looking fresh and pretty. The nite-ride back to Frank's place was dusted with very light warm rain; just lovely all around.

Here's a quick recipe for a possible offensive, courtesy my man Wes Connley: start keeping it real. Start talking about the real impacts in SSI reform. It means a society no longer makes it it's business to take care of its most vulnerable people. That's the Market's job now. You know that 40 year old mentally disabled kid who's mother is pushing 70? Yeah, he's moving back in with grandma, because we can't keep livable group homes and assisted-living facilities together to service adults who are on disability. It means no more help to get your child with downs syndrome through school, and no special programs for him if you even make the effort. The Market will find a solution.

Then if that's not pushing it far enough, start asking: should privatize the military? How about we downsize and outsource our national security apparatus? Lets let the market handle all that. And why not? That's what we're fucking effectively doing with our current energy policy.

The continued stability of this nation rests on the weakening foundation of cheap oil, but that's not what the future portents, and everyone knows it. Yet this nation has done nothing to address the growing danger -- that we may find ourselves economically undermined by this mismatch. Such a collapse would be on the order of a great depression. It's not happening now, but it very well may unless something changes soon. There's a good chance we may be undone by the very market forces we're supposed to have faith in. In other words, it's about time we did something like the Apollo Project, for our own national security. For real.

Look, the invisible hand is no benevolent spirit, and the market's justice is the law of the jungle. It's the war of all against all. Trusting it for everything is essentially arguing for a kind of anarchy, or some sort of leviathan. Now, you and I might understand that there are healthy and virtuous concepts buried in both those beliefs, but to the average American audience, these are politically (if understood at all) merely terms of derision, like "bitch" or "asshole."

Now, there are those on the right who understand the absolute value of freedom, or at least its real virtue, too; but to be honest, the great portion of Americans are people who are comfortable with institutions, In fact, we're in fact desirous. We want to trust in our institutions, to trust in one another. There's nothing wrong with this, it's just a little public/civic spirit. Granted, most folks deserve a higher level of performance than they're currently getting out of their institutions and communities, but this by no means they don't still want to have them. People want good government, they want it to be something they're proud of, that they take pride in. We can bring that back.

Allan Greenspan, sometime GOP shill and full-time market fundamentalist on America's energy prospects:

"The experience of the past fifty years--and indeed much longer than that--affirms that market forces play the key role in conserving scarce energy resources, directing those resources to their most highly valued uses,"

Really. Is that what the experience of the last fifty years (and much longer) shows? I rather think not. The only time America has had any kind of scarcity with regard to energy was the OPEC embargo of the 70s. The immediate reaction was rationing (such a hallmark of a free enterprise), and the increases in efficiency that actually resulted were largely the result of the CAFE laws and other public sector moves, not the fabled invisible hand of the market.

The market can theoretically correct itself in two ways, either industry has to spontaneously decide to produce products for which there is no clear demand, or consumers can prompt change. The former is very unlikely, so we can assume Greenspan is pinning the future of this country on consumers, that is to say for consumers start making smarter choices about what they drive (the hybrid becoming the new Hummer), where they shop (penalizing big box retailers that rely on long-distance transit for customers and long-haul trucking), what they eat (penalizing commercial agricorps which use petroleum-based fertilizers) and where they live (away from places with 100+ mile daily commutes). Let's get real, the "market" isn't going to solve this one for us. The market for energy is elastic enough to be very profitable right up to the end, when it isn't, and we've got another 15 years worth of infrastructure that no longer works.

I can't believe anyone still takes Allen Greenspan seriously. "Fifty years and much longer" my ass. Going back further, America has never had an energy crisis. Our own territory contained vast amounts of oil, which built some of America's first great fortunes, and after WWII we secured friendly relations with Saudi Arabia which helped ease us off the oil peak. The little shock-let of the OPEC embargo is the last and only energy crisis in this nation's history.

Greenspan is so intense a market fundamentalist that he creates imaginary history to support his beliefs that the invisible hand of the market will deftly handle any energy crunch. He goes on to say:

Sustained higher price will "stimulate the research and development that will unlock new approaches to energy production and use that we can now only scarcely envision," Greenspan said.

Ah science, the American religion. I love science, but we're talking about 100 years of infrastructure that's predicated on affordable automotive transport for goods and people. Over at GM, they used to have a two-man team of engineers who would trot out the same electric car at every concept show all through the 80s and 90s. Their job was to design and fit a new body onto the same chassis and power-train by the time next year's show rolled around.

Sustained higher prices are going to stimulate profit-taking in the near future, not serious research. The "hydrogen economy" is decades away if not a total mirage. We need stronger investment in the kind of basic research which corporations will never do -- the fuel cell came out of NASA -- and we need to make a serious public investment in renewing our infrastructure for the 21st Century.

Kind of like the Apollo Alliance idea. Energy policy is a national security issue. It is the national security issue at the moment, actually. It's also an economic issue and an environmental issue. Right now the Republican message on this is ridiculously weak and flat-out wrong. Will anyone step up to champion the alternative view?