Laughter is the best medicine against Fear. What Fear fears most is ridicule. Jon Stewart , Stephen Colbert, and Bill Maher have become major figures because laughter trumps fear, just as paper covers rock. When you're laughing at what scares you, it will eventually cease to scare you. You'll see the caricature in time and the Emperor will become naked without realizing it.
You're looking for something that is semi-handmade, something made in your local area, something useful. Can you design it yourself? Go for it. Can't? Find someone who can. Concentrate on local color, local materials, and local labor. You want to emphasize that in your marketing.
The move from an economics of scarcity to one of abundance is just as wrenching. And the resistance is greater. That's why we haven't seen many new technologies emerge this decade (the commercial Internet is over a decade old). Our policies favor scarcity over abundance. They even try to force scarcity (as in digital goods) where non exists.
The Fords were given a taste of power, a taste of money, by the overt racist crowd. They have their own power base, their own organization, their own political skeletons. But now that Ford Jr. has gotten "uppity," and gone after something assumed to belong to whitey, it's all out in the open.
We're really looking to restore the balance which existed before the DMCA, and which the original sponsors of that act claimed they were going to maintain. Restore fair use. Eliminate content's veto over all technology. Expand the commons. Focus on the Constitutional goal of the copyright act -- to create more.
Any American who denies that George W. Bush is now in Saddam's league is fooling himself.
The fact that Washington reporters from national networks and journals swallow this malarky tells you all you need to know about the corruption of our current system. They just smile and nod and tut-tut about how dirty the system is, all the while endorsing it through their silence over lies, racism, and character assassination.
In going through the effects of my ancestors, who lived through those times, what I'm most struck by is their careful attention to technology. We can be that way again. Despite my lack of a technical education, I have tried to be that way in my work. We all need to be that way.
Physorg reports that chemistry professor Lon Wilson and his team have found a way to ionize very short carbon nanotubes, giving them a negative charge, and then loaded drugs or imaging agents on them.
Government action is not needed here. But the threat of it, from an entrenched Washington power center, should concern all of us.
