Lamar Smith, SOPA’s creator wants to insert himself into the NSF granting process. With SOPA he wanted to control free speech about ideas. With this latest attempt he wants to control which ideas get created.

Reading the text of his letter, it all sounds so innocent, he just wants to help.

If you are an innocent, all he’s asking for are the transcripts of the funding decision so he can understand where our money is going … If you are not so innocent, you realize it’s an attempt to get information that can be used to drive scientific inquiry in directions of political interest or away from areas that political interest would prefer no science be done.

Congress is not interested in being educated, they are interested in pushing an agenda and their agenda is not the pursuit of knowledge it’s the pursuit of a political line of reasoning.

Which would make Lenin oh-so-proud.

One of the weirdest properties of our age is the Republican Party’s transformation into a Leninist Bolshevik Party.

A Leninist party is one with strong central control, a single unified political position and very little internal democracy.

A Leninist party believes that everything is political. A Leninist party views objective reality as a political construct, and since it’s a political construct,  different political view can create a different reality.

A Leninist party is often indistinguishable from a religious group. Both groups believe, view outsiders as dangerous obstacles to the promised land, and have a lot of group think.

Enough with pre-amble.

Once a Leninist party’s politics take deep root, then it’s only a matter of time where politics drives scientific result and not the other way around.

For example, Stalin preferred Lysenokism instead of genetics because it lined up with his political theories. 

This latest bill is cause for concern, and more deeply distressing than SOPA ever was. SOPA controlled speech. Controlling the NSF is about controlling which new ideas we create.

over the last two months I have moved away from authoring content in Facebook to using Facebook only for distribution.

This reverses a five year trend.

simply put I post on my blog and then let my blog auto post to fb.

The core reason are

1. facebook surfacing doesn’t work for me. It works well but not perfectly and i have no control over it.

2. I can not trivially search for my own content

3. I can not trivially share my content with non Facebook friends

4. privacy doesn’t work for me on Facebook. I have too many friends and the rules change too fast for me to follow them. I just assume everything is public and don’t stress.

5. it’s hard to extract my content from Facebook.

so what I want now is to author my content on my computer, post it to my blog and have it trivially shared.

The Android cell phone makes this stupid easy because having applications work with each other is easy in the os.. I can take a picture with the camera and share it on my blog which then tweets and pushes to Facebook.

that ease of application sharing is a killer feature.

side note my next personal phone must have that feature.

I hope I am a harbinger not a peculiar fool because content should be free. Free as in liberty not beer.

kostadis