STOP SOPA and PIPA - Description - Purpose - How To Stop The Bill!

This article taken from The Warrior Forum who is participating in the protest today.

This is an informative read about the ridiculous legislation called SOPA and PIPA that is threatening to be passed by our own government.

Please read to get a good idea about how much damage this could cause an already struggling economy.

This is the stupidest legislation to ever come through our government with regard to the internet.

The Strong Watchman

... or else you could find many of the sites you use on a regular basis permanently closed to you. And maybe find your sites closed to many of your regular visitors.

The Basics

SOPA (the Stop Online Piracy Act) is a bill currently in the US Congress that would allow the US Government to add sites to a blacklist, preventing anyone in the United States from accessing them. The stated goal is to limit access to pirate ("warez") sites, and sites that sell counterfeit physical products. Fake Rolexes, designer clothes, prescription drugs, etc.

The intent of the bill is something we strongly support. Piracy affects those of us in the Warrior group more than most, as a lot of us make our livings selling our own intellectual property. Our membership includes tens of thousands of authors, musicians, graphic designers, photographers, programmers, copywriters, videographers, public speakers and others, from nearly every creative field.

We feel the impact of digital thievery first hand.

This bill is not the way to handle the problem. It is a disaster in the making.

It would damage the Internet's basic security infrastructure, possibly require ISPs to monitor every site you visit, and make the operation of any website that contains user-generated content (blogs, forums, digital marketplaces, and social media sites) too risky for investors and new developers.

Wikipedia has posted a good basic summary of the potential problems. Read it. It is frightening. And you need to be scared.

How It Would Work

Here's the simple version: If the Justice Department or any copyright holder accused a site of "encouraging or facilitating" piracy, the government could order that site removed from US-based search engines and ad networks, forbid payment processors from handling transactions for them, and require ISPs to block access to those sites by their customers.

Let's consider how that might apply to this forum... There are currently over 335,000 pages on this site. If just one of those pages contained a single post promoting an illegal download, or one WSO seller has used graphics or code from a copyrighted product without permission, or we miss just one Chinese spam for counterfeit goods, we could be blocked.

Would it matter that we actively look for and delete those posts? Maybe, but only after the process had begun. And we'd probably never know about it until the block was in place.

The amount of time that it would take to correct such an unjustified blocking would cause permanent damage to any interactive site. Shifting the membership away from a destination for that long nearly guarantees the site would never recover.

Along with that, there is no requirement that payment processors re-accept a site that has been blocked this way. You know how these guys work: They don't care if the site is eventually found innocent. They'd label it as "high risk," and never deal with it again. And they'd probably start creating whole new categories to lock out, just to avoid the headaches.

"You let visitors post on your site? Sorry. We don't accept interactive services in our network."

And, unless the ISPs are working from a centralized and regularly updated database, it's unlikely most of them would ever remove the blocks once they were in place.

Mistakes would almost certainly be fatal to the target sites. We're talking about legitimate sites that provide real value for their visitors and real incomes for their operators and their families.

It is unclear at this point whether the legislation would affect sites based in the US, or if it applies only to "foreign" sites. Even if it doesn't start out applying to sites hosted in the United States, do you really think it will stay limited to "offshore sites" for long?

And how do we justify sitting by while our friends around the world are subjected to this potential for arbitrary blocking within the US?

Don't Think This Will Affect You?

Maybe you aren't involved in a market where this would seem to matter, and you're not interested in the principle of the thing. Consider a few possible examples that might make the reach of this Congressional folly clearer.

Any blogs you like? Keep in mind how many of them are hacked every day. One of the main activities for those hackers is pointing the victim sites to online shops selling illegal drugs.

*POOF*

Gone.

Hang out at any scrapbooking sites? A lot of them let the members share their original page themes and other digital scrapbooking elements. If one clueless designer uses graphics from a catalog or other copyrighted source, your fun little hobby community could be taken away from you. And the site owner could lose their income.

Use shareware or freeware? Legitimate software libraries, like CNet's, would be prime targets. After all, it only takes one mistake.

Do you surf using proxies to protect your privacy? Forget that. It's only a matter of time before that's marked as a refuge for pirates and they're blocked.

Have you ever tried to keep track of which sites are pirating your products? If you live in the US, you can forget that, too. Once they hit the blocklist, you can't see them. Which means you can't take any action to reduce the damage.

That's just the tip of the virtual iceberg.

The real damage will begin when the pirates implement new systems for distributing their warez. Evading a domain-based list is child's play for experienced people, and pirates really don't care if it's illegal. If they did, they wouldn't be pirates.

And it won't just be the traditional pirates who join in. Anyone who's studied history knows that prohibition just romanticizes the suppliers and users, and creates networks dedicated to serving that "heroic" image.

And, of course, there's the problem of retribution. If the US starts arbitrarily blocking access to foreign sites from within our country, how long do you think it will be before other countries develop similar approaches to advancing their political goals, and block their citizens from accessing sites they don't deem suitable?

At that point, it isn't even nominally about piracy any more. It's about politics, pure and simple. If you doubt the temptation, consider how quickly nations in the Middle East tried to block their citizens from accessing western social networks at the first sign of unrest over the past few years.

Think about how this would look to the world after all our comments about the Chinese "Great Firewall."

If you believe our bureaucrats would be careful enough to only list sites that existed for the sole purpose of piracy, remember: These are the same bureaucrats who listed a then-sitting US Senator (the late Edward Kennedy, of MA) on our anti-terrorist "no fly" list.

What's your recourse if someone accuses you of "encouraging or facilitating" piracy and you're found to be innocent? Good luck with that. The only way you could get any satisfaction there would be if you could prove they wilfully and knowingly made false allegations.

Ask your lawyer what the chances are of proving that. Be prepared from them to laugh and say "Zero."

This is the single most dangerous piece of legislation to regulate the Internet that has ever had any real chance of becoming law in the US.

What Can You Do?

If you live in the US, contact your Senators and Representatives and encourage them to vote against SOPA (H.R. 3621) and PIPA, the Senate version (S. 968).

When you contact them, be calm, clear, and concise. Tell them that you support the goal but oppose the legislation, because of the damage it will do to small businesses and the security of the Internet in general.

If you feel the need to cite a source for them, point them to the Wikipedia article, which lists a number of US government studies and reports that show just how much damage the legislation could do.

And be clear that you don't want to see an edited version of the bill passed. This thing is not just poorly implemented. The concept itself is flawed and dangerous.

Emails count a little. Phone calls and faxes count more. A short, clear printed letter mailed to them counts the most.

If you're contacting your representative, mention H.R. 3621 (SOPA). If it's your Senators, the bill number to mention is S. 968 (PIPA).

You can find the contact information for both Senators and Representatives at Contacting the Congress. Just select your state, type in your zip code, and click the "Submit It" button.

When contacting them, be sure to either mention your name and address to the person you speak with on the phone or include it in your correspondence. They want to know you're actually one of their constituents.

Remember to be polite, clear, and brief. These folks are trying to protect your interests. Most of them simply don't understand the potential problems the bill would create.

Calling them, or typing a brief letter and putting a stamp on it, will probably take less time than you were about to spend in this forum today. And it could make a huge difference.

If every US citizen who reads this takes that few minutes' worth of action, we can generate a ton of pressure against the bill. If we all just leave it to everyone else, we're likely to be stuck with this as law, along with all the problems it brings.

It's up to you. Choose wisely.

2012 - The Adventure Begins - The End Of The World

So there is a lot of hype about the possibilities of the world ending in 2012.  The Mayan Calendar would have us believe that December 21st, 2012 is the end of all things. This is a huge jump of faith of course.  To assume that the world is going to end because the Mayans ended their calendar in 2012 is a tremendous expression of faith in the plausibility of chaos.

Perhaps the Mayans just thought....well 2012 is far enough into the future.  We will update it when we get there.  And then calamity befell the Mayans.  

What happened to the Mayans?

As one "expert" explains...

For reasons that are still debated, the Maya centers of the southern lowlands went into decline during the 8th and 9th centuries and were abandoned shortly thereafter. This decline was coupled with a cessation of monumental inscriptions and large-scale architectural construction. Although there is no universally accepted theory to explain this “collapse,” current theories fall into two categories: non-ecological and ecological. Non-ecological theories of Maya decline are divided into several subcategories, such as overpopulation, foreign invasion, peasant revolt, and the collapse of key trade routes. Ecological hypotheses include environmental disaster, epidemic disease, and climate change. There is evidence that the Mayan population exceeded carrying capacity of the environment including exhaustion of agricultural potential and overhunting of megafauna. Some scholars have recently theorized that an intense 200 year drought led to the collapse of Mayan civilization. The drought theory originated from research performed by physical scientists studying lake beds, ancient pollen, and other data, not from the archaeological community.
I lean more toward this theory. It seems there would be more mass burial if disease had wiped them out

This quote taken from 

http://www.eons.com/groups/topic/1876687-Where-Did-The-Mayans-Go-

Did The Mayans Know Something We Do Not About The End of the World?

It is entirely possible that the Mayans knew something that we do not.  But what could it be?  And where did they get there information?  

I like this explanation from a Yahoo user.  

Basically, it's a bunch of New Age over-hype. 

One of the measures of the Mayan calendar was called a baktun, and it lasted about 144,000 days, or 400 years. The current baktun, number 13, will end on December 20, 2012. 

Anyway, there was an old Mayan myth that said that there used to be a world before this one. It lasted 13 baktuns, and when the thirteenth one ended, so did that world.

Some archaeologists discovered this and thought it was interesting, but nothing else. Then some New Age theorists came along and said that the Mayans had predicted that the world would end again, by alien invasion, polar shift, or whatever.

Now that we're coming up on 2012, more people have noticed it and are spreading and changing the rumor. They're even making a movie about it.

Oh, and btw, the archaeologists say the Mayans had absolutely NO PREDICTION that the world would end. The New Agers misinterpreted the legend. What would the Mayans really have done? Had a New Year's party.

Quote taken from 

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090423174707AAJmXxc

The Human Psyche Regarding The End Of The World

This leads me to my primary point.  I truly believe that humanity is aching for some massive type of reality check concerning the purpose of it's existence.  Humanity may not know or understand this as a whole.  But the actions of humanity as a whole continue to move it down a destructive course and to a destructive end.  

It's almost like humanity as a whole in relationship to God is like a stubborn and rebellious child in relationship to a parent.  Most mature parents realize that their child desires to have safe boundaries in which to live and exercise their being.  When the boundaries are firmly in place the child is comfortable, well-behaved, productive, positive and plays well with others.

When the boundaries are not in place...the child generally pushes harder and harder at the boundaries, testing how far they can push the parent before they get the smack-down...(the enforcement of the boundary).  The child will push untli they find the boundary...it's simply human nature.

Similarly, humanity as a whole is akin to the rebellious child who is pushing the boundaries.  Humanity as a whole is desperately wishing that some cataclysmic event will take place to create a boundary in their collective existence.

This desire touches on the very nature of human existence.  Why are we here?  What are we doing?  How do we live together?  These questions all have relative answers when the boundary of God is absent from the discussion.  The rebellious humanity seeks answers to these questions which can not be found satisfactorily unless there is a boundary imposed by a higher power.

In the case of the Mayan calendar predictions of 2012...the same element of desire for boundaries is rearing it's head.  Inevitably humanity is seeking for some type of authoritative answer about what the future will bring.  What source could be better than the "mysterious" and "wise" extinct Mayan civilization?  How convenient that the Mayans are all dead...and left behind a huge unanswered question about the end of the calendar.  As the previously quoted writer says, the Mayans made no prediction...they merely ended the calendar...based on their past legends and stories.

This is convenient because the misguided, rebellious segment of humanity who refuses to acknowledge God as the final authority, can easily dump the mysterious Mayan "wisdom" into the place of God...even into the place of judgement by destruction of the earth and the end of all things.  

Does this not just scream out a Freudian slip of subdued unconscious knowledge?  The knowledge which every human knows that we are ripe for judgement before a Holy God who has made it clear, exactly what the boundaries are.  The boundaries or laws of God have been written on the hearts of men, and manifest themselves through the conscience of each individual.  The conscience reflects the righteous judgement of God on a personal level and on a global level for the entire human race.

I truly believe that humanity as whole is grasping for the truth without even knowing it.  They are begging for cosmic boundaries so that they can place themselves in the universe and understand that someone else (namely God) is actually running the show and setting the boundaries.

What Happens If December 21st 2012 Comes and The World Does Not End?

That will be a a real kicker won't it?  What will humanity do next?  If divine judgement does not come in the form of Mayan wisdom, then what ludicrous mystery will replace the failure of this erroneous prophecy?  Unfortunately, I think humanity is too stubborn to embrace what they really desire...the truth of God's Word and the establishment of His Kingdom.

It is entirely possible as one friend of mine said, that the failure of the Mayan prophecy in 2012 will allow the world's leaders to say "Peace and Safety"...as December 21st, 2012 comes and goes without catyclysm or destruction.  This will give humanity a breath of relief for a short season.  But it will not be long until they again focus their collective conscience on another event of judgement and destruction.  The conscience of humanity simply can not withstand the law of God written on their hearts.

I would encourage my readers to ask God for help in understanding the clear message laid out in His Word regarding the "end" of the world.  What so many call the end of the world, Christians call the establishment of God's Kingdom. 

One could say this is the end of the rule of men...and the beginning of the rule of God on the earth.

Romans 8:18-27 has a great deal to say about the nature of this reality.

18I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. 19The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. 20For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope 21thatⁱ the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.

22We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. 23Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. 24For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what he already has? 25But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.

26In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express. 27And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints in accordance with God’s will.

I pray that God will bless you richly in His wisdom, mercy, grace, joy, peace, and love in 2012....starting today.

Remember that God is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him.

So ....SEEK HIM in 2012.  

The Strong Watchman

I had this interesting conversation with a Facebook friend...which inspired me to write this.  

The Strong Watchman

Well thanks. I would suggest that we have the same laws written on the same fleshy hearts, 

that were created by the same God, and we recognize the same evil, and we are grieved in the same way...

because our conscience bears witness to the same final authority to discern good and evil.

God is the final moral authority not men. Men would mess it all and do mess it all up...every day...always. We must have a higher authority to which all hearts must answer...otherwise the universe is chaos for eternity.

God will set things right and display through His divine plan, the attributes of His holiness, perfection, mercy, grace, and justice. We can not usurp the position of God...because we can not create something out of nothing as He has done. We simply are not God...but we are created in His image...and we are existing simply for the good pleasure of His will whether unto honor or dishonor...

There comes a time when one must accept that God's ways are deeper than our ways...and past finding out. If we can understand that God truly is the creator and worthy of worship because He truly is the creator...it frees us up to realize that no matter what God decides...it is His business to do things the way He does things.

We can question evil...and why God has not stopped it. We can question our very existence and purpose in this miserable place...but if we realize that God is God...and we are not...and we choose to worship Him regardless...we are chosen...and called according to His purpose. I bear witness of this not just from scripture (which I believe is inerrant by the way) but also because my soul bears witness personally that God is real, hears and answers my prayers, and has a plan for my eternal soul.

This is merely the playground...Earth is merely the testing ground for every soul...to see how they will perform in eternity. To see whether each soul will choose God or Evil.

The real stumper of a question comes when you realize that God planned it all out...and He knows...and had foreknowledge of who would choose or not choose HIM. But He created them anyway...for the good pleasure of His will to demonstrate his kindness and mercy to those who would receive it. To demonstrate the attributes of holiness...which alone are His.

It's not an easy thing to believe in God...especially in this world...where we judge God by our own relative standards and experiences here on earth. God was kind enough to come into our world (which He created) as one of us...in the form of a servant (Jesus) and to demonstrate His love for us by dying in this earthly body...a gruesome death...which is the punishment that we all deserve for NOT choosing God.

If God is life...and we choose death...is it His fault? But if God knew what we would choose is it his fault? yes...but I would venture to say more by design...a very complicated design which no human mind could conceive.

The question really is. What will you do with the offer of eternal life that God has made plainly obvious in the person of Jesus Christ? If you read the historically accurate story of the bible...and God's intervention with men throughout history...you can see the purpose of God's punishment of rebellious and sinful people...who chose NOT to follow the law of God which is written on their hearts.

Once you know that God is God...and that His plan is by His design for the good pleasure of His will...can you still worship him? Or will you rebel in the darkness of your finite understanding...to your eternal demise.

What we should be asking is...can we be among the redeemed that walk with God...and live forever in His majesty? That is where I want to be...if such a place exists. If such an existence is possible.

My own heart bears testimony to the reality of eternity and the existence of God in the person of Jesus. Not to mention the historically accurate recording of history in God's Word...(ask the paleontologists and such...many of them use the Bible as a guide to dig up their ancient sites.)

I am more than sold...on the validity of scripture...and faith merely enriches the entire experience for me. Opening up new and greater mysteries to my understanding every day.

It's good to be alive. Eternally alive.