Just when I thought I was going to be in complete agreement with George Bush on at least one issue, he manages to surprise me, yet again. I am truly confused.

The Danish cartoon story is baffling to me in so many ways. It is, without any shadow of a doubt, a clear case of free speech vs. religious dogma. Were the cartoons distasteful? Probably so. Although probably no more so than the dozens of antisemitic cartoons that appear daily in the Arab press. But that’s not the point. The point is that it’s speech, and we cannot, we should not, we MUST not accept this attempt by fundamentalists to endanger our right to free speech. I strongly support Denmark and the newspapers who chose to run those cartoons and even re-run them. I am truly ashamed of the attitude of the French, British, and American governments, who chose this time to play the appeasement card.

So I’m baffled. Baffled because I think this is a tremendously poor move on behalf of people like the Palestinians, who have long yearned to have a democratic state of their own. Baffled, because I really thought Bush believed in this freedom thing (although his methods have always left me dissatisfied). Baffled, because this really should not be controversial for people who believe in freedom, which makes me wonder how many actually believe in freedom.

And so I’m afraid of what this means for the future. It’s almost as if the rapid availability of information combined with globalization gives rise to a new and serious threat to our freedoms: one newspaper says something offensive, which leads some undemocratic regime to go berzerk, which leads to boycotts, threats of violence, and effectively censorship. Because, let’s be realistic: from now on, who’s going to have the courage to publish a cartoon critical of Islam?

Last night, I attended, in Boston’s Faneuil Hall, an ACLU “Emergency Townhall Meeting” regarding Bush’s domestic spying program. The participants were top notch, particularly Marc Rotenberg of EPIC and Representative Ed Markey. The arguments were calm, composed, and focused, only rarely straying into the anti-Bush diatribe one might expect from an ACLU meeting.

But from the moment I stepped into the room through tonight, I’ve felt extremely sad and powerless. I feel like we, liberals, are pedalling in the mud. We’re preaching to the choir, and, frankly, we’re not getting any traction outside of those who already agree. After all, if I disagree with Bush, it’s not exactly news. Even if Congressman Ed Markey disagrees with Bush, it’s not news.

Is it okay for the President to spy on Americans without a warrant? Of course it isn’t. Did Bush notify the proper people in Congress? The evidence clearly shows he didn’t. Does this program help in the fight against terrorism? Well, who knows, but then again, putting every Muslim in jail would probably help in the fight against terrorism, too, but it would hardly be legal, so that’s hardly a valid argument.

This is a big deal. This is a President going for a power grab, placing justices on the Supreme Court who will support his power grab, and rewriting laws he doesn’t like. This is how democracy is threatened, bit by bit, one infraction after another, until it’s too late to turn back.

But the thing is, there’s nothing I can do. The only people who can do something are those who are closest to Bush. The reasonable Republicans who realize that this is bad news for everyone. As I’ve said before, it behooves members of any group to denounce the extremists closest to them.

Let’s be more precise. It behooves me to denounce Cindy Sheehan right now. I fully support her right to protest, and I agree with her on Iraq. But I cannot accept her visit to Venezuela, her participation in anti-globalization protests, her (supposed) blind support of Palestinian causes without any balance or understanding of the Israeli position, and her recent claim that Democrats and Republicans are “just the same” in her prelude to running against Dianne Feinstein. Those are the positions of extremists. And, most importantly, my statement on THIS issue has a certain value, because it obviously isn’t blindly partisan.

But I can’t do anything about Bush’s spying program. Because even if my position is justified, it will always be seen as partisan. So it behooves the Republicans to put an end to this insanity. You can support Bush, but ask for oversight. You can support Bush on 90% of the issues, but oppose him when he threatens the very constitutional principles he is supposed to defend.

If you don’t speak up, if you stick to the brainless partisan line, then you are responsible for what will happen as this power grab continues.

On days when I’m truly bored, I cruise the conservative blogs.. you know the ones whose sole disagreement with the Bush administration is that Harriet Miers isn’t conservative enough. I’ve found one interesting pattern, which surely many have noticed: a good red flag that a blog is nutty is an unprovoked, instinctive, and consistent ridiculing of France. There was a plot to bomb the Paris subway? That’ll teach the French! It’s quite funny, really. Like a wingnut litmus test.

That said, there are, of course, plenty of good reasons to criticize the French, just as there are plenty of reasons to criticize other nations for their mistakes. The one issue that continued to boggle my mind on my recent trip to Paris is the French’s insane attitude towards smoking. There’s simply no way to evade the second-hand smoke. Though restaurants have mandatory non-smoking sections since 1991, there seems to be either no regulation or enforcement on isolating that non-smoking section in any way: in all likelihood, the non-smoking section is a single table squeezed between two smoking sections.

It’s more than just regulation, too: it’s the fact that so many French people actually smoke (more than 30%). A smoking section is always packed with smokers. For a country that prides itself on a strong, community-focused health system, it’s a bit of a contradiction. After all, there’s a certain amount of irony to sitting at a cafe, discussing the potential ill effects of genetically modified foods, all the while blowing well known carcinogens in everyone’s face.

Finally, there’s some legislative movement towards banning smoking in public spaces. It’s about time.

I’m back from a few weeks away, and what better way to start than to witness Hal Abelson – one of the most inspiring speakers I know – give a talk on open architectures for education – a most important topic in today’s world of increasingly intellectual-property-centric world. I’m sitting in a lecture hall, hearing this lecture for the second time, and it’s just as inspiring, just as deep and meaningful as it was the first time.

Go watch it, all 45 minutes of it. It’s worth every second if you care about science, about the creation and dissemination of knowledge.

So the right wingers are quick to accuse anyone who opposed the War in Iraq of being weak in the fight against terrorism. This is, in no uncertain terms, a load of crap, and it needs to be made incredibly clear. Someone who truly wants to fight terrorism knows that overthrowing the Taliban and fighting Al Qaeda were and continue to be incredibly important. But the War in Iraq was a ridiculous diversion that set us back in the real issue of fighting terrorism.

Case in point: it turns out that the French, though opposed to military action in Iraq, have been helping the CIA in unprecedented ways in fighting real terrorism, meaning Al Qaeda. I have significant issues with the power of French magistrates and their degree of oversight (i.e. none), but it’s clear from this story that the French are incredibly serious about fighting Al Qaeda. It’s also clear how Donald Rumsfeld is a posturing idiot who will blatantly disregard national security in exchange for a good sound bite about Old Europe.

I wonder if Instapundit and the other French bashers will ever pick up this story and scale back their absurd rhetoric.

UPDATE: Heh, nope the wingnuts like Instapundit didn’t pick up the story. But they did happily enjoy the fact that Paris lost its Olympic bid to London. At least Instapundit is honest enough to call it petty. If only he noticed that many of his other comments are just as petty.

Senator Rick Santorum, a “rising star” of the Republican Party, in his book:

Many women have told me, and surveys have shown, that they find it easier, more “professionally” gratifying, and certainly more socially affirming, to work outside the home than to give up their careers to take care of their children. Think about that for a moment…Here, we can thank the influence of radical feminism, one of the core philosophies of the village elders.

Now, there is no problem whatsoever with choosing to stay at home to raise your children. Whether you’re a man or a woman, in fact. It’s a beautiful, fantastic, commendable choice. But as always, the problem with these social conservatives (and with the Republican Party as a whole, these days), is that they don’t want you to choose. They want to tell you how to live and how to raise your children. They know better than you how to live your life.

What will Republican Women say? Is this the policy of the Republican Party?

I attended Creative Commons’s iCommons summit today (photographic proof). As I watched the presentations, looked around at the more than 80 representatives from the 70 countries that are now taking part in Creative Commons, I realized a simple fact that has snuck up on me: Creative Commons is kicking some serious butt.

There are now 15,000,000 documents distributed under a CC license, which is almost 0.2% of the Google index. The number of CC-licensed documents is currently growing at an 80% quarterly rate. As Neeru said when she showed the pie graph: the amazing thing is that you can see the Creative Commons share on a web-wide pie graph.

What’s most amazing to me is the rapid success of CC’s international expansion. While the US effort had the novelty of the movement and the blog early-adopter phenomenon to jumpstart it, a lot of these international efforts are making significant headway with far fewer resources, far less press, far more complicated copyright issues (moral rights anyone?), and far less low-hanging fruit.

This is now a real, world-wide movement, the likes of which I have never experienced. A movement of people who believe that there should be some kind of middle-ground between extreme DRM control and total public domain. A movement of people who want to create a new ecosystem of sharing, because they know deep in their hearts that sharing (some) culture and science freely is the most important trend we have to reassert as a generation.

I could not be more proud of the fact that I play a tiny role in this huge effort.

Below, an FBI report about Guantanamo cited by courageous Senator ChrisDick Durbin. Every freedom-loving American should be outraged and ashamed that this stuff is happening in our name:

On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18-24 hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold. . . . On another occasion, the [air conditioner] had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his hair out throughout the night. On another occasion, not only was the temperature unbearably hot, but extremely loud rap music was being played in the room, and had been since the day before, with the detainee chained hand and foot in the fetal position on the tile floor.

Of course, the press and Republicans can’t stop talking about how ChrisDick Durbin “compared US troops to Nazis.” Actually, what ChrisDick Durbin said is:

If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime–Pol Pot or others–that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners.

Does anyone actually disagree with that precise statement? Meaning, when you read the first paragraph, do you think “yeah, this sounds like the America I dream of?”

The point is that these acts of torture are shameful in an absolute sense. It is so incredibly sad that our government’s core argument is that, in the words of Dick Cheney, “these people have been treated far better than they could be expected to have been treated by virtually any other government on the face of the Earth.” Yes, we are better than the North Koreans, phew, that’s a relief.

Blame Durbin all you want for his supposedly excessive comparison, the cold, hard facts remain: we are torturing prisoners at Guantanamo. In the name of freedom, we are torturing people.

We should be ashamed.

UPDATE: and, on a lighter note, I should be ashamed of using the wrong first name: it’s Richard/Dick Durbin, not Chris Durbin. Updated with strikethroughs.

Global warming is real. Science should not be manipulated by partisan hackery. More on this later, but in the meantime, sign up to the Virtual March on Washington to Stop Global Warming.

There is a classic French tale about a man eating his bread and cheese, and finding that he finishes the bread before the cheese. “Un peu de pain pour finir mon fromage,” he asks. And later, “un peu de fromage pour finir mon pain.” And later again “un peu de pain pour finir mon fromage….” I’m certain this story exists in just about every culture with the appropriately substituted food type.

In 1993, many nations standardized on the Berne Convention of a “life + 50 years” copyright. In 1996, the European Union lengthened its term of copyright for composers to “life + 70 years.” In 1998, Congress passed the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, which retroactively extended the length of all copyright by 20 years. One of the stated reasons was to bring the US copyright duration in line with European copyright length for composers. And now, in order to help its poor starving performers, the EU wants to extend its copyright term to be more in line with the US. And by “more in line,” they mean “life + 100 years.”

On the assumption that (100-70) is indeed less than (70-50), sounds to me like someone’s asking for more cheese. It is ludicrous to discuss this issue as if these large media companies wanted anything less than “forever copyright.” Just because they’re asking for it in chunks doesn’t make their end goal any different. And so the question becomes: do we really want to live in a world where there is no public domain? Where ALL content is controlled by the media companies FOREVER? Because there is no doubt that that is what they’re looking for, and our governments are giving it to them.

“Unlimited copyright on the installment plan,” as Lessig puts it.