"From a local perspective, this industry is really growing in Charlottesville," says one expert, speaking with great objectivity, as if this growth were a matter of complete moral indifference.

Exactly how many people will be there?

"About 225 people are expected to attend the inaugural event, which is attracting government, business and academic leaders, said conference chairwoman and organizer Joan Bienvenue, who is also the director of the UVa Applied Research Institute."

Wait, what? The University of Virginia has an "applied research institute" for applying research to the practice of mass murder?

Is there no shame left in any institution?

"Sen. Timothy M. Kaine and Rep. Randy Forbes, R-4th, are also scheduled to give key speeches at the conference."

I guess that answers my question.

And where exactly will this blood-soaked confab take place?

"Located in Albemarle County, Rivanna Station is a sub-installation of the Army's Fort Belvoir. The local base employs mostly civilians and houses operations of the National Ground Intelligence Center, Defense Intelligence Agency and National Geospatial Intelligence Agency."

The National Ground Intelligence Center, previously downtown in what became the SNL Financial building, is now north of Charlottesville, and the University of Virginia has built a "research park" next door, where this conference will be held. The NGIC famously played an utterly shameless role in marketing the war on Iraq that took at least a half a million lives and destroyed that nation.

When the experts at the Department of Energy refused to say that aluminum tubes in Iraq were for nuclear facilities, because they knew they could not possibly be and were almost certainly for rockets, and when the State Department's people also refused to reach the "correct" conclusion, a couple of guys at the NGIC were happy to oblige. Their names were George Norris and Robert Campus, and they received "performance awards" (cash) for the service.

Then Secretary of State Colin Powell used Norris' and Campus' claims in his U.N. speech despite the warning of his own staff that they weren't true. NGIC also hired a company called MZM to assist with war lies for a good chunk of change. MZM then gave a well-paid job to NGIC's deputy director Bill Rich Jr, and for good measure Bill Rich III too. MZM was far and away the top "contributor" to former Congressman Virgil Goode's campaigns, and he got them a big contract in Martinsville before they went down in the Duke Cunningham scandal. Rich then picked up a job with a company called Sparta, which, like MZM, was conveniently located in the UVA Research Park.

Local want ads in Charlottesville offer jobs "researching biological and chemical weapons" at Battelle Memorial Institute (located in the UVA Research Park). As you may know, researching such weapons is rarely if ever done without producing or at least possessing them. Other jobs are available producing all kinds of weaponry for all kinds of governments at Northrop Grumman. Then there's Teksystems, Pragmatics, Wiser, and many others with fat Pentagon contracts.

From 2000 to 2010, 161 military contractors in Charlottesville pulled in $919,914,918 through 2,737 contracts from the federal government. Over $8 million of that went to Mr. Jefferson's university, and three-quarters of that to the Darden Business School. And the trend is ever upward. The 161 contractors are found in various industries other than higher education, including nautical system and instrument manufacturing; blind and shade manufacturing; printed circuit assembly; real estate appraisers; engineering services; recreational sports centers; research and development in biotechnology; new car dealers; internet publishing; petroleum merchant wholesalers; and a 2006 contract with Pig Daddy's BBQ.

Have we at long last no sense of decency? War has taken 200 million lives in the past 100 years, costs the world $2 trillion a year and the United States half of that. It is the top destroyer of our natural environment and undergirds all the removal of our civil liberties and the creation of mass surveillance. Military spending produces fewer jobs that other government spending or even tax cuts. Numerous top officials say it produces more enemies than it kills.

And who does it kill? Over 90% are civilians of all ages. Over 90% are on one side of conflicts between wealthy and poor countries. These one-sided slaughters leave behind devastated nations: Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya. A poll of 65 nations found the U.S. most widely viewed as the greatest threat to peace. For 3% of what the United States spends on a program of killing that endangers us, impoverishes us, and erodes our way of life, starvation could be eliminated worldwide. It wouldn't take much to become the most beloved nation rather than the most feared.

There are some essential lessons we can learn from the student occupation of Beijing's Tiananmen Square, which took place 25 years ago. The 1989 protests began as a demonstration by university students to mourn the death of Hu Yaobang, the reformist Communist Party chief who had been forced out by Deng Xiaoping. The protests swiftly expanded to include demands for an end to corruption, for press freedom and for democracy. At their height, perhaps a million people were in the square. The protests were crushed on the night of June 3-4 when some 200,000 soldiers, backed by tanks and armored personnel carriers, attacked. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of unarmed demonstrators were killed.

Lesson No. 1. A nonviolent movement that disrupts the machinery of state and speaks a truth a state hopes to suppress has the force to terrify authority and create deep fissures within the power structure. The ruling elites in China, we now know from leaked internal documents and the work of a handful of historians, believed the protests had the potential to dislodge them from power. Monolithic power, as we saw in China, is often a mirage. Some of the internal documents that exposed the fears and deep divisions within the ruling elite have been collected by the Princeton University Library.

Lesson No. 2. An uprising or a revolution usually follows a period of relative prosperity and liberalization. It is ignited not by the poor but by middle-class and elite families' sons and daughters, often college-educated, whom Mikhail Bakunin called declasse intellectuals, and who are being denied opportunities to advance socially and economically.

"Once a regime abolishes civil liberties and acts in the middle of an uprising to restore 'order,' resistance becomes more dangerous."

This is what happened in China. Chairman Mao Zedong's death in 1976 saw Deng Xiaoping assume leadership. Deng instituted political and free market reforms. The reforms created a new oligarchy. It led to widespread corruption, especially among the party elites. For workers there was a loss of job security and social benefits, including medical care and subsidized housing. University graduates were no longer guaranteed jobs, and many could not find employment.

The political liberalization that followed the terror of the Cultural Revolution expanded internal freedoms. A mixture of declining expectations, especially among college graduates, and the political opening provided the classic tinder for revolt. Political theorists such as James C. Davies and Crane Brinton have found that a period of relative liberalization coupled with declining prospects for advancement commonly precedes revolutions.

Once a regime abolishes civil liberties and acts in the middle of an uprising to restore "order," resistance becomes more dangerous. The Chinese government, after suffering more than a month of protests, declared martial law on May 20, 1989. Nonviolent mass demonstrations, while costly in human terms, often are more effective in totalitarian societies. Fear and forced submission to power are the only weapons left in the arsenal of the ruling class at such a point; when people are no longer afraid, the regime loses control.

Lesson No. 3. Radical mass movements often begin by appealing respectfully to authority for minimal reforms. The students, gathering in Tiananmen Square to mourn Hu, asked that the Chinese constitution, with its guarantees of rule of law and freedom of speech, be respected. Radicalization within the movement happened in the midst of the demonstrations. Once a movement educates itself about structures of power, and once those in state authority display their indifference to the tepid demands of the demonstrators, a movement becomes bolder and wiser. The Tiananmen Square occupation, begun as a spontaneous reaction to a death, swiftly evolved into a revolt. Students eventually drafted what became known as the Seven Demands. These were:

-Affirm as correct Hu Yaobang's views on democracy and freedom;

-Admit that the campaigns against spiritual pollution and bourgeois liberalization had been wrong;

-Publish information on the incomes of state leaders and their family members;

-End the ban on privately run newspapers and stop press censorship;

-Increase funding for education and raise intellectuals' pay;

-End restrictions on demonstrations in Beijing;

-Provide objective coverage of students in official media.

Lesson No. 5. The most potent weapon in the hands of nonviolent rebels is fraternizing with and educating civil servants as well as the police and soldiers, who even though they suffer from the same economic inequality usually are under orders to crush protest. This demands a counterintuitive response from protesters. They must show respect and even compassion to forces deployed to stop the rebellion. Demonstrators are required to exercise tremendous self-discipline as they endure acts of violence and repression. They must refuse to retaliate. If bonds of sympathy are established between protesters and some of the police and soldiers, the ruling elites are unsure whether they can trust the security apparatus to obey. This engenders paralysis within the centers of power. In China the ruling Communist Party watched in dismay May 20 as the initial military assault to crush the protesters failed. Thousands of people surrounded military vehicles. They spoke to the soldiers about the reasons for the protests. They offered them food and water and invited them into their homes. Friendships were formed. The protesters and their supporters built so much solidarity with the soldiers that the government was forced to withdraw the military from Beijing four days later.

Lesson No. 6. When a major authority figure, even in secret, denounces calls to crush a resistance movement the ruling elites are thrown into panic. Maj. Gen. Xu Qinxian, leader of the 38th Group Army, refused to authorize an attack on the unarmed protesters in the square, saying, "I'd rather be beheaded than be a criminal in the eyes of history," according to the historian Yang Jisheng. He was stripped of his command and arrested. His refusal sent shock waves throughout the rulers, especially after seven senior commanders signed a petition that called on the leadership to withdraw the troops. In many uprisings the ruling elites, after members of their inner circle defect, see distrust and potential disobedience among other authority figures, even those who are loyal. To protect themselves the elites carry out internal purges, such as those conducted in the Soviet Union by Josef Stalin-purges that are self-destructive. One person in authority saying "no" is an effective form of resistance. The elites know that if enough people refuse to co-operate they are doomed. They cannot let this spread.

Lesson No. 7. The state seeks to isolate and indoctrinate soldiers and police before sending them to violently quash any movement. This indoctrination hinges on portraying the protesters as elitists and traitors, often with ties to foreign governments, who do not share the traditional cultural, religious and moral assumptions of the wider population. The Chinese leadership and state press called the demonstrators tools of "bourgeois liberalism." The government quarantined troops for 10 days outside Beijing and subjected them to daily indoctrination before the final armed attack on Tiananmen Square. State propaganda, while denouncing the protesters as disloyal, portrays the state as the ally of the working class and the defender of traditional values. Any successful mass revolutionary movement, to counter this propaganda, must exhibit respect for the traditional values of society, including religious and patriotic values.

Lesson No. 8. Secrecy is self-destructive to a nonviolent resistance movement. Openness and transparency expose the endemic secrecy and deceit used by regimes to maintain power. Openness inspires confidence in a movement, not only among those within it but among those who sympathize with it. The nature of secrecy is manipulation, the hallmark of despotic power. If people believe they are being manipulated they will distrust a movement and refuse to participate. Secrecy is also an admission of fear, which is what the state wants to instill in those who resist. Finally, the huge resources available to the state to employ informants and carry out surveillance mean that most resistant acts planned in secret are not secret to the state. Only under extreme totalitarian conditions-Nazi Germany or Stalinism-can secrecy be justified by protesters. But even then it rarely works.

Lesson No. 9. The state on the eve of breaking a rebellion with force seeks to make police and soldiers frightened of the protesters. It does this by sending in agents provocateurs to direct acts of violence against symbols of state authority. It is imperative to the state that police and soldiers believe they are in mortal danger, especially when the state is demanding that they use deadly force to quell an uprising. Indoctrinated soldiers sent into Tiananmen Square in June of 1989 believed they would come under fire from armed dissidents or disloyal army units.

Lesson No. 10. After deadly force is used to end a revolt, which happened when Deng Xiaoping sent more than 200,000 soldiers to gun down protesters in Beijing, the state invests tremendous energy to foster historical amnesia. Those in China who seek to remember the uprising-even 25 years later-are silenced. Parents whose sons or daughters were killed in the military assault on Tiananmen Square are forbidden to openly mourn. It is imperative to the ruling elites that the true historical narrative be erased. The use of deadly force against unarmed citizens exposes the tyranny of the state and therefore must be banished from memory.

Lesson No. 11. Once a movement is put down, wholesale retribution occurs. It is estimated that 4 million people were investigated by state security after the Tiananmen Square massacre on suspicion of involvement in the protests. An additional 1 million government employees were investigated. Tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, were arrested and sent to labor camps. Many were executed.

A few weeks ago, a top official at the Securities and Exchange Commission reported on what he called a "remarkable" amount of potentially illegal behavior in the private equity industry - aka the industry that buys up, changes and sells off smaller companies.

In its evaluation of private equity firms, the SEC official declared that half of all the reviews discovered "violations of law or material weaknesses in controls." The announcement followed an earlier Bloomberg News report on how the agency now believes "a majority of private equity firms inflate fees and expenses charged to companies in which they hold stakes."

At first glance, many probably dismiss this news as just an example of plutocrats bilking plutocrats. But that interpretation ignores how such malfeasance affects the wider economy.

One way to understand that is through the simmering debate over pension obligations in states and cities across the country.

Citing data from the National Association of State Retirement Administrators, Al-Jazeera America recently reported that the average amount of pension dollars devoted to private equity and other so-called "alternative investments" "has more than tripled over the last 12 years, growing from 7 percent to around 22 percent today." With public pensions now reporting $3 trillion in total assets, that's up to $660 billion of public money subject to the rapacious fees being exposed by the SEC. Those fees are paid through a combination of tax increases and pension benefit cuts.

Private equity shenanigans can also hurt the middle class by encouraging looting. For instance, as Crain's New York recently reported, in the last decade, private equity firms have collected $2 billion in so-called "transaction fees," which the business publication says "are bonuses the firms take for conducting their business of buying, managing and selling companies." This scheme has been called the "crack cocaine of the private equity industry." As just one example of how it works, the New York Times recently examined a merger of two orthopedic implant manufacturers and how that merger resulted in a Wall Street jackpot.

Indeed, according to the Times, the financial firms involved in the deal ended up extracted "a 20 percent share of gains from the sale, as well as management fees of 1.5 percent to 2 percent charged to investors" and "a share in an estimated $30 million in 'monitoring fees.'" The Times noted that "this deal will be a gift that keeps giving" to the private equity firms involved because "they will be paid millions more in fees for work that they are never going to do."

In other words, millions of dollars are taken out of companies creating tangible economic value and jobs. The money instead is sent to the speculators.

The good news, of course, is that we know how to curtail some of the worst effects of private equity's expansion. For one thing, the SEC can follow up its evaluation with fines and prosecutions. Additionally, states can pass laws mandating at least some modicum of transparency in their pension funds' dealings with the private equity industry. And, as Eileen Appelbaum of the Center for Economic and Policy Research has written, the tax code can be changed to make sure that the fees claimed by private equity managers are no longer treated as capital gains and therefore taxed at a discounted rate.

There are three things we know about man-made global warming. First, the consequences will be terrible if we don't take quick action to limit carbon emissions. Second, in pure economic terms the required action shouldn't be hard to take: emission controls, done right, would probably slow economic growth, but not by much. Third, the politics of action are nonetheless very difficult.

But why is it so hard to act? Is it the power of vested interests?

I've been looking into that issue and have come to the somewhat surprising conclusion that it's not mainly about the vested interests. They do, of course, exist and play an important role; funding from fossil-fuel interests has played a crucial role in sustaining the illusion that climate science is less settled than it is. But the monetary stakes aren't nearly as big as you might think. What makes rational action on climate so hard is something else - a toxic mix of ideology and anti-intellectualism.

Before I get to that, however, an aside on the economics.

I've noted in earlier columns that every even halfway serious study of the economic impact of carbon reductions - including the recent study paid for by the anti-environmental U.S. Chamber of Commerce - finds at most modest costs. Practical experience points in the same direction. Back in the 1980s conservatives claimed that any attempt to limit acid rain would have devastating economic effects; in reality, the cap-and-trade system for sulfur dioxide was highly successful at minimal cost. The Northeastern states have had a cap-and-trade arrangement for carbon since 2009, and so far have seen emissions drop sharply while their economies grew faster than the rest of the country. Environmentalism is not the enemy of economic growth.

But wouldn't protecting the environment nonetheless impose costs on some sectors and regions? Yes, it would - but not as much as you think.

Consider, in particular, the much-hyped "war on coal." It's true that getting serious about global warming means, above all, cutting back on (and eventually eliminating) coal-fired power, which would hurt regions of the country that depend on coal-mining jobs. What's rarely pointed out is how few such jobs still exist.

Once upon a time King Coal was indeed a major employer: At the end of the 1970s there were more than 250,000 coal miners in America. Since then, however, coal employment has fallen by two-thirds, not because output is down - it's up, substantially - but because most coal now comes from strip mines that require very few workers. At this point, coal mining accounts for only one-sixteenth of 1 percent of overall U.S. employment; shutting down the whole industry would eliminate fewer jobs than America lost in an average week during the Great Recession of 2007-9.

Or put it this way: The real war on coal, or at least on coal workers, took place a generation ago, waged not by liberal environmentalists but by the coal industry itself. And coal workers lost.

We all have an interest in a clean, healthy (human health promoting as well as well functioning--sustainable) environment. It's universal...

The owners of coal mines and coal-fired power plants do have a financial interest in blocking environmental policy, but even there the special interests don't look all that big. So why is the opposition to climate policy so intense?

Well, think about global warming from the point of view of someone who grew up taking Ayn Rand seriously, believing that the untrammeled pursuit of self-interest is always good and that government is always the problem, never the solution. Along come some scientists declaring that unrestricted pursuit of self-interest will destroy the world, and that government intervention is the only answer. It doesn't matter how market-friendly you make the proposed intervention; this is a direct challenge to the libertarian worldview.

And the natural reaction is denial - angry denial. Read or watch any extended debate over climate policy and you'll be struck by the venom, the sheer rage, of the denialists.

The fact that climate concerns rest on scientific consensus makes things even worse, because it plays into the anti-intellectualism that has always been a powerful force in American life, mainly on the right. It's not really surprising that so many right-wing politicians and pundits quickly turned to conspiracy theories, to accusations that thousands of researchers around the world were colluding in a gigantic hoax whose real purpose was to justify a big-government power grab. After all, right-wingers never liked or trusted scientists in the first place.

So the real obstacle, as we try to confront global warming, is economic ideology reinforced by hostility to science. In some ways this makes the task easier: we do not, in fact, have to force people to accept large monetary losses. But we do have to overcome pride and willful ignorance, which is hard indeed.
(c) 2014 Paul Krugman --- The New York Times

Energy giant Kinder Morgan was recently called insensitive for pointing out that "Pipeline spills can have both positive and negative effects on local and regional economies, both in the short- and long-term." The company wants to triple its shipping capacity from the Alberta tar sands to Burnaby, in part by twinning its current pipeline. Its National Energy Board submission states, "Spill response and cleanup creates business and employment opportunities for affected communities, regions, and cleanup service providers."

It may seem insensitive, but it's true. And that's the problem. Destroying the environment is bad for the planet and all the life it supports, including us. But it's often good for business. The 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico added billions to the U.S. gross domestic product! Even if a spill never occurred (a big "if", considering the records of Kinder Morgan and other pipeline companies), increasing capacity from 300,000 to 890,000 barrels a day would go hand-in-hand with rapid tar sands expansion and more wasteful, destructive burning of fossil fuels-as would approval of Enbridge Northern Gateway and other pipeline projects, as well as increased oil shipments by rail.

The company will make money, the government will reap some tax and royalty benefits and a relatively small number of jobs will be created. But the massive costs of dealing with a pipeline or tanker spill and the resulting climate change consequences will far outweigh the benefits. Of course, under our current economic paradigm, even the costs of responding to global warming impacts show as positive growth in the GDP - the tool we use to measure what passes for progress in this strange worldview.

And so it's full speed ahead and damn the consequences. Everything is measured in money. B.C.'s economy seems sluggish? Well, obviously, the solution is to get fracking and sell the gas to Asian markets. Never mind that a recent study, commissioned by the Canadian government, concludes we don't know enough about the practice to say it's safe, the federal government has virtually no regulations surrounding it and provincial rules "are not based on strong science and remain untested." Never mind that the more infrastructure we build for polluting, climate-disrupting fossil fuels, the longer it will take us to move away from them. There's easy money to be had-for someone.

We need to do more than just get off fossil fuels, although that's a priority. We need to conserve, cut back and switch to cleaner energy sources. In Canada, we need a national energy strategy. And guess what? That will create lasting jobs! But we must also find better ways to run our societies than relying on rampant consumption, planned obsolescence, excessive and often-pointless work and an economic system that depends on damaging ways and an absurd measurement to convince us it somehow all amounts to progress.

It's not about going back to the Dark Ages. It's about realizing that a good life doesn't depend on owning more stuff, scoring the latest gadgets or driving bigger, faster cars. Our connections with family, friends, community, and nature are vastly more important.

Yes, we need oil and gas, and will for some time. Having built our cities and infrastructure to accommodate cars rather than people, we can't turn around overnight. But we can stop wasting our precious resources. By conserving and switching to cleaner energy, we can ensure we still have oil and gas long into the future, perhaps long enough to learn to appreciate the potential of what's essentially energy from the sun, stored and compressed over millions of years. If we dig it up and sell it so it can be burned around the world, we consign ourselves to a polluted planet ravaged by global warming, with nothing to fall back on when fossil fuels are gone.

Last month, the Federal Communications Commission endorsed a new set of rules that might effectively kill net neutrality, by allowing Internet service providers in limited instances to create two speeds of Internet traffic. One lane, supporters of the measure say, will be fast and the other lane will be superfast. This kind of semantic maneuvering is a sleight of hand, a troubling use of euphemism, designed to make us believe slow means fast in the same way Michael Jackson convinced us that bad meant good.

As co-founder of a popular feminist blog targeted toward women of color, I know firsthand what an open Internet has meant to those of us who attempt to build broadly inclusive social justice movements. And as a person who likes to binge on the occasional Netflix show in my spare time, I know what streaming services like these have meant for increasing the representation of people of color in visual media. I can't wait to find time to watch Season 2 of "Orange Is the New Black."

So I'm concerned about the creation of a tiered Internet, specifically. But I'm also concerned more generally with the continued deregulation of corporate media. The most clear cautionary tale of how deregulation of the mechanisms through which we obtain media affects culture can be found in hip-hop. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 deregulated media conglomerates allowing companies like Viacom and Clear Channel to buy up huge shares of media markets.

This move killed local radio by folding those stations into larger corporate entities, with regional and remote deejays and a top 40 playlist. This is the reason why if you listen to urban radio you hear seemingly the same 10 songs on a monotonous loop for the duration of the time you listen. This corporate structure has meant that artists and innovators who could build a name for themselves locally and regionally had very few avenues in the late 1990s and early 2000s to bring their musical products to market. We lament the bastion of misogyny, gratuitous capital and emotional vacuity that represents much of mainstream hip-hop today. But if you are not talking to a hip-hop studies scholar, then you hear very little about how the politics of deregulation corporatized the culture and placed a stranglehold on innovation and creativity. Streaming services and social media sites like MySpace have mitigated some of these effects, but nothing can get that old thing back.

This kind of cultural Darwinism bequeaths us a few winners and a whole lot of losers. More to the point, it creates a "cultural landscape that now is about winning, not taking the extra beat to think your way around a problem," as Questlove of the Roots so powerfully articulates. In this kind of cultural moment, black cool becomes what hip-hop scholar Jeff Chang, echoing Questlove, sees as a kind of corporate currency that has reached its apex of articulation in hip-hop, only to be the object of corporate co-optation when conglomerates like Apple purchase Dr. Dre's signature Beats headphones for a heady cost of $3.2 billion.

Some see the crowning of this hip-hop billionaire as a win. I see it as a narrowing of possibility. It is winning in the most profane sense of the term. Hip-hop has produced a bona fide billionaire. So what? I am left wondering what the goals of the culture were and are, left wondering about the state of political and cultural possibility among young black and brown youth like my students who still identify with hip-hop music as their primary soundtrack, even as they wrestle with all the things the culture has managed not to be, all the expectations that it has not lived up to.

We could continue to see these failures as a kind of black and brown pathology. Or not. The hip-hop of my youth (I hate sounding old) was a locally and regionally affected blend of sonic Southernness. I didn't grow up loving East Coast hip-hop, because I didn't grow up hearing a whole lot of East Coast anything on my local radio station. I rooted myself in place listening to 2 Live Crew, Outkast, Goodie Mob, Geto Boys, Master P and No Limit, and a whole host of West Coast rappers, who seemed to have a certain appeal down South. Nostalgia is rarely productive, but the history lesson here is instructive.

Social policy is a conduit for cultural possibility. And in this moment, a free and open Internet has granted us a very scary world and a very wonderful world, too. It has created the space for us to connect in unprecedented ways, it has granted access to young thinkers and writers of color who have used blogs and social media sites to build platforms unthinkable to our forebears. Sometimes the cultural adeptness that places otherwise unqualified people at the fore of social conversations is disturbing. But mostly it's exhilarating. It has forced us to think about what kind of democracy we actually want to be. It has forced us to be more honest because there are ever increasing mechanisms for people to speak and be heard. It has given lie to those media conglomerates who seem especially incapable of (unwilling to) diversify their casts, the stories they tell and cover, the songs they promote and grant airplay, and the voices they spotlight.

The end of net neutrality is just one more way that corporations pimp democracy for their own capitalist ends. When I see the lack of general concern about this among people of color, I wonder if we know what is at stake. We use Twitter more than any other demographic. I read excellent amateur writers and poets who have cultivated audiences using blogs. And many of my friends have migrated to Web-based shows on YouTube to get the culturally diverse content they can't find on television.

If it becomes more expensive for YouTube and Netflix to stream shows to us at speeds we can actually watch, please know those costs will be passed on to us in real and substantial ways. If blog platforms become targets of these regulations, so many of us who have built substantial communities of like-minded folks for little to no cost will be adversely affected.

Dear Senator McCain,

Congratulations, you have just been awarded the "Vidkun Quisling Award!" Your name will now live throughout history with such past award winners as Marcus Junius Brutus, Judas Iscariot, Benedict Arnold, George Stephanopoulos, George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, Prescott Bush, Sam Bush, Fredo Bush, Kate Bush, Kyle Busch, Anheuser Busch, Vidkun Quisling and last year's winner Volksjudge John (the enforcer) Roberts.

Without your lock step calling for the repeal of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, your flip/flopping regarding US POWs, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Syria, Iran and those many other profitable oil wars to come would have been impossible! With the help of our mutual friends, the other "Rethuglican whores" you have made it possible for all of us to goose-step off to a brave new bank account!

Along with this award you will be given the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross with Golden Oak Leaves, Swords and Diamonds presented by our glorious Fuhrer, Herr Obama at a gala celebration at "der Fuhrer Bunker," formally the "White House," on 07-05-2014. We salute you Herr McCain, Sieg Heil!

Signed by,
Vice Fuhrer Biden