Ho hum, the National Security Agency wants corporations to make it even easier to spy on American citizens. The NSA wants them to create a "multi-part encryption key" that could unlock any device, but only if you possessed the entire key. Who's going to possess the entire key? Already, we have a problem -- much as I'd hate for our government to have it, I wouldn't be thrilled about a third party having it, either.
Carl Gibson describes how "one of America's reddest states," North Dakota, "embraced socialism" to battle banksters. Long story short: 1919 saw the birth of the North Dakota Mill and Elevator Association, which the state created to battle private-sector price gouging on its wheat, and, of course, the Bank of North Dakota, which has emerged from Our Ongoing Economic Armageddon unscathed, by working for North Dakota and not some crony's derivative scheme.
Chris Hedges, writing at Truthdig, profiles America's Greatest Citizen, Ralph Nader, coinciding with the release of a book of his unanswered letters to our two most recent Presidents. Mr. Nader is, of course, skeptical of the power of the internet to force change (most people really do walk around with their heads buried in their cellphones, and it's a wonder more of them don't cause car wrecks), but still has faith in the power of direct contact with your representatives -- as he says, "the first step in gaining power is...not to concede our powerlessness."
Michael Arien interviews music journalist Chris Ruen about the havoc streaming music services wreak of musicians' earnings. You'll recognize "when Spotify tells artists they have to license because otherwise people will just pirate it" as a classic hostage situation, but Mr. Ruen also says we need to "stop acting like 'copyright' or 'piracy' are scary four-letter words," and though that doesn't mean we need to embrace things like SOPA or PIPA or CISPA, it also doesn't mean we have a "right" to "free" music just because it's possible.
Finally, pharmacist at a Georgia WalMart refuses to fill a prescription for a patient who had already miscarried. The drug would have essentially passed the dead fetus from the mother's uterus without doing more invasive surgery, but the pharmacist wouldn't fill a prescription for it. The good news? Both the pharmacist and the WalMart spokeshack danced around the real reason (their "religious" "conscience") for denying the patient her prescription, and while normally I decry the persistence of cowardice, here it indicates folks afraid of a bad PR backlash we as a civilization were too timid to administer even ten years ago.
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