Things are cooking on the Internet, regarding the Internet itself.
On the blogging front, we have a significant miscarriage of justice in Minnesota.
On Friday, a Minnesota jury found that a blogger must pay $60,000 in damages because of statements he published in his blog about a public figure who was subsequently fired from his job. Internet publishers and free speech advocates should pay close attention to this case if it is appealed because the blogger was found liable even though the jury did not find that the blogger’s statements were false.
We read the lawyers will appeal, and stand a good chance of winning based on higher court precedents. However, that such a decision could be reached at all seems to call for censuring the judge who promoted this result by deceiving the jury. I doubt that will happen, but if the defense has any sense at all, they will slam the other side for legal costs and the so-called victim of the non-defamation will end up with massive legal bills. Again, I’m skeptical. These days such poetic justice is becoming increasingly rare.
The elite are becoming increasingly bloodthirsty. So some of the little people are hitting back the only way they know how. I prefer the peaceful approach, and for now the Internet allows a lot of interesting options. For example, Anonymous has posted a cache of emails and interviews from a whistle-blower from Bank of America which tends to indicate more ways in which the mortgage fraud was conducted. In this case, it was collusion behind the scenes to get your loan insurance revoked so they could, without notice, stick you with a much more expensive insurance policy by force.
The whole cache is rather extensive, and it’s not all posted yet. There isn’t much interest from the MSM in analyzing the data yet. Given the pallid response from the majority of the victims of this whole mess, even when the nasty business is digested for us ordinary readers by whomever does analyze it, I rather doubt the news will be sufficient to stir the justified retribution. The folks doing these evil deeds are the evil oligarchs who actually run the governments of the world, the masters of the afore-mentioned coup no one seems to notice.
It will be interesting to see how Anonymous intends to attack the Fed and the financial oligarchs. Unless they have something really interesting up their collective sleeve, this one might be pretty hard to accomplish. I rather suspect simply DDoSing the servers won’t do much, and only get more of the Anonymous crew arrested. Cracking the servers at the Fed could be effective, but I tend to think that’s a tall order. I am under the impression much of their networks are Unix based, and highly competent people are taking care of the security arrangements. But we shall see.
Finally, I don’t pretend to know much about the risks from the reactors in Japan dumping radioactive particles on our heads here in the US. Those who paint scenarios of disaster aren’t likely to know that much about it, either. I am quite certain the real experts will lie about it. That’s their job. Even if something really nasty does happen to drift our way on the jet streams, I am certain they’ll lie about it.
What we are not deceived about, but of which many are simply ignorant, is how utterly precarious is the future of a huge chunk of Japan’s population right now. A reliable estimate says they import half of all they eat, and the piddling 15% of their arable land happens to be mostly in the disaster areas. Their entire food delivery system has been on the knife edge of just-in-time delivery, and that system is completely broken in the tsunami zones. As I understand, they do not have any significant stocks of emergency food, nor sufficient means for distribution. Nor are they doing very good at getting those folks out of there. So we have starvation and disease almost sure to aggravate whatever else is already a problem there.
We live in interesting times.
