The GOP Establishment is still too dumb to lead the Tea Party rebellion

The Freedom Caucus is not the problem. The GOP Establishment is unable to learn the lessons the Democrats are teaching for free.

When Buckley endorsed Barry Goldwater for President he understood that Lyndon B Johnson would likely win, but he know Goldwater would push the country and the party to the right. It was not about the candidate who would lose the least (Nelson Rockefeller, then) but the candidate who would be best for America.

It is the duty of the Republican party to message the American People relentlessly: to take Conservative/Libertarian ideas and sell them to the people even if it means losing a few elections now, to win bigger ones later. The Democrats have lost lots of elections for being too Left, but they have also come back to win big. I say that the losses and the wins here are completely related, that the losses set the stage for the wins. Republicans have had no big wins for decades.

Point: a 60% cloture vote in the Senate dates only to the post-Civil War era and was widely supported by the South to protect Jim Crow. It is useless today. If people don’t want huge Democratic spending bills, they can stop voting for so many Democrats.

Point: Since 1944, employer tax breaks for "health care" has been a boondoggle, hurting the aged, children, the unemployed. Obamacare just piles another layer of crap on top of that original 1944 crap. Outlawing employer health insurance in favor of allowing people a tax break for emergency health insurance (what used to be called disability and major medical) and health savings accounts for the rest would be a huge step forward.

Point: the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946 gives the Executive the right to pass laws, unless 61% of the Senate disagrees strongly enough to overrule the agency. Eric Cantor sent me a personal fund raising note complaining that Obama was, like, totally abusing all these powers the Congress gave him without once mentioning why they might like to revoke that power.

I could go on, and that is the problem.

The coming Indian net.neutrality debacle?

So, this is what happens when the apparatchiks write about policy:

Noam Chomsky, a famous leftist American philosopher

See, MSM? Not too difficult, even for foreigners.

town square for the global village

Every village needs an idiot.

The telecom operators claim that these applications impact their revenues

Protect their revenues at all costs!!

The debate on Net neutrality, as it is called, has developed into a duel for the ownership cake. Why do we need owners for this wonderful realm? The question in itself is baffling.

So, so baffling. We are so baffled. The question is not over ownership, everyone owns their cables, their fiber, their web servers. The issue is control other other people's stuff and how to use you two to get it, you tools.

The Net neutrality principle simply states that there should be no blocking, no throttling and no paid prioritisation of any lawful content on the Internet.

None of these three things are the same. Within the three are divisions. Why not allow prioritized traffic? Why not let the telecoms figure out how much to charge?

Though the recommendation of this committee pitches for a neutral Internet, it has proposed regulations on Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) OTTs

“Quick, more boiling oil!”

It suggests that arbitrages on regulations and pricing exist between operators and substitute service providing OTTs, which needs to be removed to provide a level-playing field for both.

Do not be fooled by the word “arbitrage,” which is an import from high finance. What the author just said here is that Indian telecoms are saddled with regulatory burdens and taxes, which create a tax burden-gap benefiting the independent app providers.

This outrage must be ended!

It’s worth mentioning that operators are regulated on call tariff through interconnect charges, tariff ceiling for roaming calls, etc. Such regulations won’t ever allow genuine competition between conventional calling and VoIP calling. This calls for further deliberation on the “solution”.

And will be! This is called “failing upward.”

GOVERNMENT: our regulations and taxes created the problem, now we need more to “fix” it.

While only domestic VoIP services are recommended for regulations, other services are not. It would be interesting to see how a line would be drawn among OTTs, since many offer multiple services packed in one.

More room for more regulations! You need to stop bundling awesome things so we can break them properly.

The DoT committee has failed to address other issues such as data privacy. With OTTs holding huge consumer data, the issue of protecting consumers’ sensitive data is worth a mention. However, the regulator reviewing tariff plans on zero-rating before being launched in public is an optimistic step for consumer protection.

Yes, we saw government consumer protection. It was called the June 2015 Office of Personnel Management data breach.

OTTs play a part in promoting Internet adoption and regulating OTTs on tariff may make the free services a paid service. This might impact the pace of OTT-driven Internet adoption. With the Internet penetration standing below 20 per cent, regulations might land a knockout punch on India’s digital inclusion mission.

A price we must pay!

A hurdle to Net neutrality also comes from the existing revenue models of Internet-based services. From Internet search to prioritising data packets on quality of service, the entire network is governed by payments made by companies to avail preferential treatment.

Un scandale! Remember: the first outrage of “preferential treatment” is when you pay a telco to come plug a wire into your house or business. Will this blasphemous perfidy never cease?!

The power of choice should, in any case, rest with consumers and not the operators. Consumer demands vary according to individual preferences. For example, some consumers might settle for an average Internet speed, while others might not. Thus, differential services/paid prioritisation may be provided only on “consumer demand”, but it should be ensured that other services are not negatively impacted.

Note the constant format: start with a sane proposition, then slide in the crazy. Note the complete lack of documentation showing that “vital services” have ever been blocked.

The operators highlight the need of capital expenditure for infrastructure and argue that OTTs, that impact their revenues, hinder their ability to invest on infrastructure. It is undeniable fact that OTTs rely on Internet service, and it’s equally their responsibility to let Internet breath for long. OTTs should lend a hand on building the foundation, for which the question that needs answer is “how”.

Normally, OTTs pay their ISPs for their connection, and their consumers pay yet more to be connected. But not in new, glorious theme park's Statismland!

Thus, the Internet we use is nowhere close to being perfectly neutral.

Note the complete lack of any data to shore up the Big Lie. Note how their “thus” attempts to conceal this total lack of any case by simply presuming it into existence. The Internet is not neutral. It is so completely Balkanized that no one can control the whole thing. Which is the real problem.

We still have to safeguard it from the probable clutches of the prospective owners.

In case you were wondering, the “prospective owners” are in fact all the little players who do in fact own bits and pieces of “the Internet”: ISPs, consumers, businesses, the soi-disant OTTs. The future owner is your happy local community kommissar and apparatchik.

OTTs help getting new consumers on-board and also propel data revenues.

Translation: our regulations turn ISPs into crappy phone providers. Instead of letting telecoms lapse into mere ISPs who compete on price, and letting independents offer new, cheaper and usually better telephony services, and letting the real and natural dual-tension between ISPs and OTTs play out (how they both need and burden each other), we offer more regulations.

So operators should work out on economies of scale strategies rather than cribbing over the competition brought in by innovation.

Sounds pretty.

If regulations seem the only solution, they shouldn’t be based on tagging prices on these apps. The idea is to promote the Internet, not to break it. The need is to make it robust, seamless and for everyone.

Still pretty, but problems persist. First, “seamless?” Nothing a tech sees is seamless, this is a political hack's word. “Robust” would be good enough. Second, the pricing of the apps is the least of the problems. The big part here is the “revenue sharing.” Oh, didn't you read that? That is what the authors meant by sharing the regulatory and tax burden, you know, instead of, oh, I dunno, relieving the suffering telecoms from their obsolete and current burdens!

Because, you know, libertarians are crazy.

“Baffled.”

Academia lies and lies and spends and spends

When I was a volunteer IT department for an AIDS care non-profit corporation (heavily Democratic, as you may imagine), I was often told that pharmaceutical companies were free-riding on all that magical medical research done by those wonderful universities.

Meanwhile, the great Dr Jerry Pournelle tells us:

Of course as soon as the Master Plan was adopted and funded, the California State Colleges began a political campaign to be turned into universities, with salaries comparable to the Universities, and graduate schools with research, and publish or perish, and all the rest of it; and instead of being teaching institutions they would become second rate copies of the Universities, with a faculty neglecting teaching in order to gather prestige in research and publication, or, perhaps, at least to look as if they were. In any event the California State Colleges became California State Universities, their commitment to actual undergraduate education was tempered to make room for the graduate schools, budgets were higher, costs were higher, and tuition, which had been designed to be very low, began to climb.

And guess what else was a Democratic lie?!?

During a decade as head of global cancer research at Amgen, C. Glenn Begley identified 53 “landmark” publications -- papers in top journals, from reputable labs -- for his team to reproduce. Begley sought to double-check the findings before trying to build on them for drug development.

Result: 47 of the 53 could not be replicated.

Turn anything Socialist, and you turn it into ice cream soup, because the animating intelligence behind the original thing is gone. Care for the poor, love of science or literature… the Soul of Man withers and dies under Socialism.

THIS MAKE FILM CRITIC HULK SAD!

HULK'S SEEN COUNTLESS RIOTS AFTER SPORTING EVENTS AND SEEN THE COPS LAUGHING AS A BUNCH OF WHITE COLLEGE KIDS JUMPED ON CARS.

“Hulk has seen a bunch of white college kids” who need to be on the business end of night sticks.

Oh, sorry. I’m aware you think I would of approve of everything white people do, since you probably think of me as a white supremacist, but I’m not. Those filthy white college kids are using the US government's bizarre college subsidies to fund criminal behavior, and hire university police forces (is there any stranger collection of words in English? I think not) to protect them while they break the things their elders sweated and labored to buy.

I am barely a college drop out (does three days count?) and I have never seen white people behave in so despicable and vicious a fashion as you describe, and it is clear to me that college subsidies need to die permanently to stop this cancer from spreading.

I once worked as a security guard in two fast-food joints, in a city with one of the more famous, Left-leaning four-year universities. One was near three bars in a working-class neighborhood: one gay bar, one black bar and one white bar. I ejected one person in the few months I worked there (white, male, dunno sexual preference); everyone else was pretty well-behaved. The restaurant on-campus was at least 30% infected with hateful, vicious, thieving elitist punks, most of them stupefied with alcohol and very well dressed. I am sure that the patrons of the first joint would have agreed with me.

Sad: FilmCritic!Hulk does not know what normal behavior is due to an artificially warped upbringing.

On Do The Right Thing: I saw it in the theater when it came out and not since. I remember loving the first 90% but I do not recall the ending clearly enough to critique it without a re-watch.

Review: “Just Like A Daydream,” various artists

Some years after Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly and all the Original Rock’n’Rollers (call it AE, After Elvis), poured their signal into the British Isles, Anglo-American music ran in close sync from the Beatles through punk, new wave, and, on either sides of the Pond, the new wave of British heavy metal (NWOBHM) and soi-disant hair metal.

This loose coupling (less popular trends like progressive rock were already Pond-assymmetric ) loosened further in the late ’80s. The already successful kraut rock-influenced Depeche Mode* became the premier British act in 1990 when “Violator” outgrew the American art f-g market. America's bellwether was folky, twangy R.E.M., at once a lot less gay than Depeche Mode (no equivalent to “People Are People”) and a lot more (having an actual gay man in the band).

In Britain, shoegaze was kicked off with:

• 1988 My Bloody Valentine, “Isn’t Anything”
• 1990 Ride, “Nowhere”
• 1991 My Bloody Valentine, “Loveless”

I dated a guy in 1993 who introduced me to shoegaze: both went nowhere (ha!). Hair metal had gone over the Warrant cliff, Nirvana had kicked off grunge (1991), R.E.M. had not yet been dethroned by “Monster,” and rap began making regular inroads to the hit charts.

Critics loved to hate shoegaze, preferring instead the cheerful “misogyny” and violence of gangster rap, madly waving the Flag of Irony while also hating on hair metal (perfect). Rap, of course, is not Ironic but Heroic, but being a critic means never having to let reality stand you up so long as you have a curtain of words to hide behind.

A big hole exists for musicianship beyond the pentatonic scale and relentless improv.: jazz fusion; progressive rock; the Medieval tune-resurrecting; erudite folkies; even motion-picture soundtracks are still overwhelmingly orchestral. Shoegaze was accused of many things: class warfare; misogyny (emphasis on high art, distorted guitars and performance); misandry (a lush, emotional, wimmin-y sound); racism (it's not rap!). But shoegaze mostly was an attempt to fill that damned hole.

Enter this American shoegaze compilation. Most of the songs are indeed drenched in the echo, delay and reverb pedal effects that gave the genre its name. Malory’s lead track starts with almost a cliché of delay, but pretty. Secret Shine creates a dramatic sweep that makes me hang on for the next line. Glowfriends and The Flower Beds tender pop tunes; the former almost too Pop for this collection. In Civilian Clothing contributes a stand-out anti-love song. Finally, The Fauns provide a lush soundscape that melts into Sunlight Ascending’s six minute instrumental dreamscape.

It’s good stuff. All I could wish for would be a lyrics sheet. Track list:

1. Malory, “Just Be”
2. The Morning Paper, “Making You Up”
3. Airiel, “Cinnamon”
4. The Brother Kite, “The Finest Kind”
5. Brief Candles, “National Dream Registry”
6. Tears Run Rings, “Mind the Wires”
7. Crash City Saints, “Panic Queen”
8. Secret Shine, “Oblivion”
9. The Joy Bus, “Something Wrong Inside”
10. Je Suis Animal, “Sparkle Spit”
11. Glowfriends, “Sensible”
12. The Flower Beds, “Mean to Me”
13. Panda Riot, “Flowers at Night”
14. Soundpool, “Do What You Love”
15. In Civilian Clothing, “Current Therapist”
16. Thrushes, “Aidan Quinn”
17. The Fauns, “Lovestruck”
18. Sunlight Ascending, “Out of This Place”

* Rumor claims industrial metal band KMFDM was named for “Kill Mother F-cking Depeche Mode,” but was never verified.