Later On

The Wife loves a folding fan (and Paris, and couture), so she leapt on this article:

Forget Balenciaga’s "Giant City" and the other luxury purses that vie for the title of "It Bag" of the moment.

If two young Parisian fashionistas have their way, next season’s must-have accessory might just be a relic resurrected from a bygone age — the folding fan.

Eloise Gilles and Raphaelle de Panafieu left their jobs in fashion and invested their savings to rescue one of Paris’ last remaining fan makers, the long-dormant house of Duvelleroy. Their first collection — 12 exquisite models concocted by hand from traditional fabrics like silk and feathers and state-of-the-art materials like carbon fiber — is to make its retail debut later this month.

"Fans are not only elegant and feminine but they’re also super practical. Whenever I go out, to parties, to restaurants and especially to clubs, I always have mine," said Panafieu, a 28-year-old who says folding fans have been her trademark ever since her father brought her one from Asia when she was a kid.

Panafieu’s quirky accessory of choice became her job after she met Gilles a few years ago and the two decided to invest in a fan-making house. They discovered Duvelleroy, among the few remaining survivors of France’s world-famous fan-making industry, and pooled their savings to buy the house from owner Michel Maignan, a retired auctioneer.

Two years ago, the two quit their jobs — Panafieu’s in marketing at a chic Paris women’s clothing label and Gilles’ as a brand consultant for French luxury labels — to throw themselves into resurrecting the house.

Founded in 1827 . . .

Continue reading.

The police claim that they don’t really want to imprison innocent people, yet that continue to follow procedures that guarantee the conviction of at least a proportion of innocents. (This is beyond the police arresting people for, say, taking photos in a public place—i.e., just making up laws and locking up people who annoy you.)

Mark Kleiman:

The Harris County (Houston) District Attorney’s office has a unit devoted specifically to identifying innocent people in prison and letting them out. That leaves about 2900 D.A.’s offices that don’t.

One way innocent people get to prison is the “line-up” or “photo spread” in which a victim or other witness is asked to identify the perpetrator from a group of six people, or six photographs. That creates a strong impression that the perpetrator is somewhere in the group, and there’s overwhelming evidence that someone – whoever looks most like the actual perp – is likely to be selected. Once that happens, everything pushes the witness toward more and more certainty about the identification, no matter how spurious.

It turns out that there’s a different way to do the identification process: give the witness a set of photos, or a group of people, to look at one-by-one, asking in each case, “Is this the guy?” In experiments, this approach is less likely to lead to a positive identification, which is why police and prosecutors don’t like it. But the different between the two techniques consists entirely of false IDs. Yet such is the muscle of law enforcement in the political system that most states still allow, and most police departments still use, the “six-pack” process, with its predictably high false-positive rate.

So innocent people continue to lose large chunks of their lives to false verdicts based on eyewitness ID. How many? If the rate of false conviction were 3% – which I would regard as an insanely optimistic number – that would be 50,000 people doing hard time for stuff they didn’t do. It’s hard not to get angry.

This is very cool:

Arup Associates has won a competition to design a hotel for insects. ‘Beyond the Hive’ was sponsored by British Land and the City of London to celebrate 2010 as the International year of Biodiversity.

Selected from five shortlisted hotels that were built and placed in parks around London, the jury included Paul Finch; Sarah Henshall; Adrian Penfold, Head of Planning & Environment, British Land; Peter Wynne Rees, the City Planning Officer; and architect Graham Stirk.

A Hotel for Insects
Insects prefer habitats that are essentially neglected. Different varieties of insect require different habitats and environmental conditions to survive, so the challenge of designing an Insect Hotel is to cater for as many of these conditions and contexts as possible. These habitats generally consist of the detritus of the natural and man made world comprising of organic and inorganic materials most of which can be procured from waste management or garden sources. The most important consideration is that the hotel will need to be buffered against temperature extremes with humidity maintained for certain species. Most simple insect hotels may be constructed in a very straightforward way from an assemblage of materials stacked together aided by an armature structure, that contains the disparate materials. Stacked timber palettes containing a variety of deadfall and inorganic waste is an example of this approach. As the objective of the City of London Corporation’s Brief suggests that the hotel is also ‘visually engaging and a well crafted object’ and ‘enhances its setting and complementing the garden’ as well as having utility and corresponding to a defined volume, a more sophisticated version suitable for the vicissitudes of a London Park and the more critical eye of the human inhabitants seems to be what is asked for.

The Hotel Guest’s Requirements
Stag Beetles: Need rotting logs for their larvae to eat and grow in. The design must ensure that these do not dry out, but neither must they be allowed to get too wet. This habitat should be located at ground level.

Solitary bees: Above the stag beetle compartments and consisting of stacked logs of varying sizes and cut bamboo, with ends facing out. Compacted sand/dirt mixed with broken terracotta is also useful.

Butterflies and Moths: A series of vertical slots should be used as an entrance to a dry wooden space that is filled with vertical planes of bark.

Spiders, Lacewings and Ladybirds: A combination of materials can be used here, including discarded shredded shoes; a variety of materials to produce various grades of space, including rolled up corrugated cardboard within plastic tubes.

Continue reading to see diagrammed structure.

Sort of:

1 qt red Fresno peppers, stems removed
6 habanero peppers, stems removed
3 dried ancho peppers, stems removed
8 dried chipotle peppers, stems removed
juice of 10 limes, then add enough dark (Jamaican) rum to barely cover peppers
1/4 cup sea salt (not iodized)

Blend, bring to boil, cover and simmer 20 minutes, remove from heat and let cool 20 minutes, then bottle.

I’m very interested to try this batch.

The prototype shaving brush was more pleasant to use than the aluminum production version: more heft, and the silvertip knot seemed slightly larger. I got a very fine lather—and loads of it—and did a flawless three-pass shave with the Progress and a Swedish Gillette blade. A splash of Floïd, and I’m off to buy more Fresno peppers for another batch of pepper sauce: must strike while the iron is hot (or, more appropriately perhaps, make hay while the sun shines).

It’s not recent, but it’s absolutely terrific: fast-paced, well written, vivid and bizarre: everything that makes for great summer reading. Indecent Exposure:  A True Story of Hollywood and Wall Street, by David McClintick. Link is to secondhand hardbound copies. I don’t think it would do well as a mass-market paperback.

Trent Hamm has quite an interesting post at The Simple Dollar on how relating some personal information about yourself that is outside the norm seems to make many people feel defensive, as if they are being judged.

It strikes me that most of us (some projection here, I’m sure) sort of work things out as they come up, taking a position that we work out for ourselves at the time and, as the default, maintain until something brings it up for inspection and discussion, at which point we may change our position.

In other words, most of us go through life making it up as we go along: winging it.

So when we encounter someone who has thought through things to reach a different position, it reminds us that we never did quite work out the details but just took our position and ran with it. So it’s very easy to feel caught out, guilty, judged, and insecure.

I don’t know that that’s the cause, of course, but it seems like one possibility.

Obviously, a more mature reaction is to switch to learning mode and see what you can learn from someone who’s taken a different approach: find out the reasons, see if they apply to you, and discuss and invent more options.

But, yeah, most people just get defensive.

This sounds very good. The ingredients:

• 1 1/2 cups barley
• 1 1/2 cups chicken or veggie broth
• 1 1/2 cups water
• 1 teaspoon salt
• Olive oil
• 1 15-ounce can of chickpeas (garbanzo beans), rinsed and strained
• 1 cup shelled pistachio nuts
• 1 cup diced dried apricots
• 2-3 chopped green onions or scallions
• 1 cup chopped parsley
• Zest and juice of a lemon
• 1 Tbsp of ras el hanout spice mix*
• Salt to taste

*Ras El Hanout Spice Mix:

• 1/2 teaspoon black pepper
• 1/2 teaspoon cardamom
• 1/8 teaspoon cayenne
• 1/8 teaspoon ginger
• 1/8 teaspoon nutmeg
• 1/8 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1/4 teaspoon turmeric

Massimo Calabresi in TIME:

Five days before a 2007 article in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that the diabetes drug Avandia was linked to a 43% increase in heart attacks compared with other medications or placebos, a group of scientists and executives from the drug’s maker, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), gathered in a conference room at the offices of the Food and Drug Administration in White Oak, Md. The GSK goal: to convince regulators that the evidence that the company’s $3 billion-a-year blockbuster drug caused heart problems was inconclusive. To do that, the GSK officials focused not on heart-attack data but on a broader, less well defined category of heart problems called myocardial ischemia. The most recent studies of Avandia, the GSK officials told the FDA, had "yielded information that is inconsistent with an increased risk of myocardial ischemic events," according to sealed court proceedings obtained by TIME.

What GSK didn’t tell the FDA was that on May 14, 2007, two days before the White Oak meeting, GSK’s Global Safety Board had noted that a new assessment of Avandia studies "strengthens the [cardiac-risk] signal observed in the [previous] analysis." Or that eight days earlier, the company’s head of research and development, Moncef Slaoui, had sent an e-mail to its chief medical officer saying Avandia patients showed an "increased risk of ischemic event ranging from 30% to 43%!" Or that the day before the meeting, the company had produced a preliminary draft report that showed patients on Avandia had a 46% greater likelihood of heart attack than those in a control group.(See how to prevent illness at any age.)

But the mixed-evidence argument GSK presented to the FDA worked. After months of deliberation, the agency decided to keep the drug on the market — a move worth billions of dollars to GSK but that also may have put millions of patients at risk.

Such examples of the drug industry’s outmaneuvering FDA regulators are disturbingly common, say both scientists and policymakers who follow drug approval and safety monitoring. More than 140 million Americans take at least one prescription drug in any given month, and they rely on the FDA to ensure those drugs are safe. That trust, the story of Avandia illustrates, is a gamble. In July, an FDA advisory group conducted the second hearing on the drug’s safety since its 1999 approval and again concluded that the evidence against the drug was insufficient to pull it from the market. The group instead recommended additional warnings and restrictions on Avandia’s use. In the coming weeks, the FDA will decide whether to take that advice or withdraw Avandia from the market…

Continue reading.

For Google Chrome.

Greenwald:

Jeffrey Goldberg, in the new cover story in The Atlantic, on an Israeli attack on Iran:

Israel has twice before successfully attacked and destroyed an enemy’s nuclear program. In 1981, Israeli warplanes bombed the Iraqi reactor at Osirak, halting — forever, as it turned out — Saddam Hussein’s nuclear ambitions; and in 2007, Israeli planes destroyed a North Korean-built reactor in Syria.  An attack on Iran, then, would be unprecedented only in scope and complexity.

Good news!  Israel can successfully end a country’s nuclear program by bombing them, as proven by its 1981 attack on Iraq, which, says Goldberg, halted "forever, as it turned out — Saddam Hussein’s nuclear ambitions."

Jeffrey Goldberg, The New Yorker, 2002, trying to convince Americans to fear Iraq:

Saddam Hussein never gave up his hope of turning Iraq into a nuclear power. After the Osirak attack, he rebuilt, redoubled his efforts, and dispersed his facilities. Those who have followed Saddam’s progress believe that no single strike today would eradicate his nuclear program.

When it suited him back then, Goldberg made the exact opposite claim, literally, of the one he makes today.  Back then, Goldberg wouldn’t possibly claim what he claims now — that the 1981 strike permanently halted Saddam’s "nuclear ambitions" — because, back then, his goal was to scare Americans about The Threat of Saddam.  So in 2002, Goldberg warned Americans that Saddam had "redoubled" his efforts to turn Iraq into a nuclear power after the Israeli attack, i.e., that Saddam had a scarier nuclear program than ever before after the 1981 bombing raid.  But now, Goldberg has a different goal:  to convince Americans of the efficacy of bombing Iran, and thus, without batting an eye, he simply asserts the exact opposite factual premise:  that the Israelis successfully and permanently ended Saddam’s nuclear ambition back in 1981 by bombing it out of existence (and, therefore, we can do something similar now to Iran).

This is what a propagandist, by definition, does:  asserts any claim as fact in service of a concealed agenda without the slightest concern for whether it’s true.  Will the existence of a vast and menacing Iraqi nuclear program help my cause (getting Americans to attack Iraq)?  Fine, then I’ll trumpet that.  Now, however, it will help my cause (mainstreaming an attack on Iran) to claim that the Israelis permanently ended Iraq’s nuclear efforts in 1981, thus showing how well these attacks can work.  No problem:  I’ll go with that.  How can anyone take seriously — as a Middle East expert and especially as a journalist — someone with this blatant and thorough of an estrangement from any concern for truth?  Can anyone reconcile these factual claims?

Jonathan Schwarz, who flagged this contradiction, documents how Goldberg’s dishonest propaganda begins in the very first sentence of his new Atlantic article, which reads:  "It is possible that at some point in the next 12 months, the imposition of devastating economic sanctions on the Islamic Republic of Iran will persuade its leaders to cease their pursuit of nuclear weapons."  Schwarz explains the obvious: . . .

Continue reading.

Take a look.

Around here, the red Fresno peppers don’t hit the stores until August, so this is the time I make pepper sauce. Each batch is somewhat different. Here’s what I’m bottling now:

One qt of ripe red Fresno peppers, stem cut off
1 small can chipotle peppers (otherwise I used dried chipotles)
2 dried ancho peppers
1/4 cup kosher salt

Put the above in a blender, add sufficient vinegar to barely cover. You can use white vinegar, but this batch has a combination of tarragon white-wine vinegar and golden balsamic vinegar. Also, in this batch I added half a dozen or so large cloves of garlic, peeled.

Blend until smooth, pour in a pot, and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer covered for 20 minutes. Remove from heat, let cool for 20 minutes, then pour back into the blender and blend again.

Use a funnel to pour sauce into bottles and cap. I use these bottles.

With all the vinegar and salt, I’ve not refrigerated this sauce, but feel free. I find the homemade sauce has a better taste than the commercial stuff.

Sometimes I add 6-8 habanero peppers to the batch, discarding the stem. Since it’s a pepper sauce, just leave the seeds and ribs.

Other things that can be added: bourbon, rum, ketchup (not much), …

Matt Taibbi reports in Rolling Stone:

Cue the credits: the era of financial thuggery is officially over. Three hellish years of panic, all done and gone – the mass bankruptcies, midnight bailouts, shotgun mergers of dying megabanks, high-stakes SEC investigations, all capped by a legislative orgy in which industry lobbyists hurled more than $600 million at Congress. It all supposedly came to an end one Wednesday morning a few weeks back, when President Obama, flanked by hundreds of party flacks and congressional bigwigs, stepped up to the lectern at an extravagant ceremony to sign into law his sweeping new bill to clean up Wall Street.

Obama’s speech introducing the massive law brimmed with celebratory finality. He threw around lofty phrases like "never again" and "no more." He proclaimed the end of unfair credit-card-rate hikes and issued a fatwa on abusive mortgage practices and the shady loans that helped fuel the debt bubble. The message was clear: The sheriff was padlocking the Wall Street casino, and the government was taking decisive steps to unfuck our hopelessly broken economy.

But is the nightmare really over, or is this just another Inception-style trick ending? It’s hard to figure, given all the absurd rhetoric emanating from the leadership of both parties. Obama and the Democrats boasted that the bill is the "toughest financial reform since the ones we created in the aftermath of the Great Depression" – a claim that would maybe be more impressive if Congress had passed any financial reforms since the Great Depression, or at least any that didn’t specifically involve radically undoing the Depression-era laws.

The Republicans, meanwhile, were predictably hysterical. They described the new law – officially known as the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act – as something not far from a full-blown Marxist seizure of the means of production. House Minority Leader John Boehner shrieked that it was like "killing an ant with a nuclear weapon," apparently forgetting that the ant crisis in question wiped out about 40 percent of the world’s wealth in a little over a year, making its smallness highly debatable. 

But Dodd-Frank was neither an FDR-style, paradigm-shifting reform, nor a historic assault on free enterprise. What it was, ultimately, was a cop-out, a Band-Aid on a severed artery. If it marks the end of anything at all, it represents the end of the best opportunity we had to do something real about the criminal hijacking of America’s financial-services industry. During the yearlong legislative battle that forged this bill, Congress took a long, hard look at the shape of the modern American economy – and then decided that it didn’t have the stones to wipe out our country’s one ­dependably thriving profit center: theft.

It’s not that there’s nothing good in the bill. In fact, there are many good things in it, even some historic things. Sen. Bernie Sanders and others won a fight to allow Congress to audit the Fed’s books for the first time ever. A new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was created to protect against predatory lending and other abuses. New lending standards will be employed in the mortgage industry; no more meth addicts buying mansions with credit cards. And in perhaps the biggest win of all, there will be new rules forcing some varieties of derivatives – the arcane instruments that Warren Buffett called "financial weapons of mass destruction" – to be traded and cleared on open exchanges, pushing what had been a completely opaque market into the light of day for the first time.

All of this is great, but taken together, these reforms fail to address even a tenth of the real problem. Worse: They fail to even define what the real problem is. Over a long year of feverish lobbying and brutally intense backroom negotiations, a group of D.C. insiders fought over a single question: Just how much of the truth about the financial crisis should we share with the public? Do we admit that control over the economy in the past decade was ceded to a small group of rapacious criminals who to this day are engaged in a mind- numbing campaign of theft on a global scale? Or do we pretend that, minus a few bumps in the road that have mostly been smoothed out, the clean-hands capitalism of Adam Smith still rules the day in America? In other words, do people need to know the real version, in all its majestic whorebotchery, or can we get away with some bullshit cover story?

In passing Dodd-Frank, they went with the cover story…

Continue reading.

Neil Buchanan at FindLaw:

Last week, the Trustees of the Social Security system released their 2010 annual report.  Unsurprisingly, this news event served as an opportunity for many long-time opponents of the system to argue that Social Security is doomed and must be either dismantled, privatized, or significantly revamped.  Once again, however, the report itself shows that the nation’s retirement system is fundamentally healthy.

This year’s annual report was delayed for several months, because the report on Medicare’s finances is issued at the same time as the Social Security report.  Because of the passage of the health-care bill earlier this year, the Trustees needed additional time in order to produce estimates of the effects of that legislation on Medicare.  As it turned out, the new health-care law has extended the exhaustion date of the Medicare trust fund from 2017 to 2029.

That good news was amplified by forecasts showing that Social Security’s long-term financial picture has not changed, compared to last year’s forecasts, even though the recession has continued its grim hold on the economy.  If anything, Social Security looks slightly better this year than it did a year ago.

In this column, I will first describe the major findings of the Social Security Trustees’ report.  I will then turn to the arguments that the system must be "fixed" as soon as possible — arguments that stubbornly refuse to go away, even in the face of the clear facts about Social Security’s continuing viability.

Most importantly, I will argue that adopting unnecessary fixes today will actually worsen the cynicism among younger workers, too many of whom already believe that Social Security will not be there when they retire.  They are wrong in that belief, but efforts to change Social Security will only make their cynicism grow.

The Short-Run Forecasts: Focusing on an Unimportant Issue

This year, the release of the Trustees’ annual report was accompanied by a discussion of the short-term finances of the Social Security system.  As the headline in The New York Times put it: "Medicare Stronger, Social Security Worse in Short Run, Report Finds."  The way in which Social Security’s short-run situation is worse was described by Treasury Secretary Geithner, who said that Social Security’s benefits "are expected to exceed tax revenue for the first time this year, six years earlier than was projected last year."

As I discussed in a FindLaw column earlier this year, this supposed short-run problem is completely meaningless…

Continue reading.

We’re all in this together—when we help others, we help ourselves. Donald McNeil, Jr., reports in the NY Times:

A dangerous new mutation that makes some bacteria resistant to almost all antibiotics has become increasingly common in India and Pakistan and is being found in patients in Britain and the United States who got medical care in those countries, according to new studies.

Experts in antibiotic resistance called the gene mutation, named NDM-1, “worrying” and “ominous,” and they said they feared it would spread globally.

But they also put it in perspective: there are numerous strains of antibiotic-resistant germs, and although they have killed many patients in hospitals and nursing homes, none have yet lived up to the “superbug” and “flesh-eating bacteria” hyperbole that greets the discovery of each new one.

“They’re all bad,” said Dr. Martin J. Blaser, chairman of medicine at New York University Langone Medical Center. “Is NDM-1 more worrisome than MRSA? It’s too early to judge.”

(MRSA, or methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus, is a hard-to-treat bacterium that used to cause problems only in hospitals but is now found in gyms, prisons and nurseries, and is occasionally picked up by healthy people through cuts and scrapes.)

Bacteria with the NDM-1 gene are resistant even to the antibiotics called carbapenems, used as a last resort when common antibiotics have failed. The mutation has been found in E. coli and in Klebsiella pneumoniae, a frequent culprit in respiratory and urinary infections.

“I would not like to be working at a hospital where this was introduced,” said Dr. William Schaffner, chairman of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University. “It could take months before you got rid of it, and treating individual patients with it could be very difficult.”

A study tracking the spread of the mutation from India and Pakistan to Britain was published online on Tuesday in the journal Lancet.

In June, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention noted the first three cases of NDM-1 resistance in this country and advised doctors to watch for it in patients who had received medical care in South Asia. The initials stand for New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase.

“Medical tourism” to India for many surgeries — cosmetic, dental and even organ transplants — is becoming more common  …

Continue reading.

Interesting post at Transform:

There have been two very positive developments for drug law reform in the last few days: On Sunday, The Observer newspaper ran a series of pro reform news and comment features alongside arguably the most unambiguous call for a debate on alternatives to the drug war, including regulation, yet to emerge from a UK broadsheet. Meanwhile, the previous week witnessed the debate making a significant step forward in Mexico when President Calderon joined calls for a debate on legalisation as a response to the country’s growing crisis, followed by a clear call for legalisation and regulation by his presidential predecessor Vicente Fox – both statements receiving massive international media coverage.

• The Observer.

The first piece in the news section united these recent developments. Titled ‘War on drugs: why the US and Latin America could be ready to end a fruitless 40-year struggle’, with the subheading:

‘Mexico’s president Felipe Caldéron is the latest Latin leader to call for a debate on drugs legalisation. And in the US, liberals and right-wing libertarians are pressing for an end to prohibition. Forty years after President Nixon launched the ‘war on drugs’ there is a growing momentum to abandon the fight’

The coverage then describes some of the developments in the Americas, from the Mexican president’s recent comments through to the growing cannabis law reform activity in California and elsewhere in the US.

A second piece in the Observer is a drug law reform op-ed (also using the Mexican presidential comments as its launch pad) titled ‘Drugs: the problem is more than just the substances, it’s the prohibition itself’ by Maria Lucia Karam, a retired Brazilian judge and board member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP). Using examples from Brazil she argues that:

‘Prohibition consigns the drug market to criminalised actors not subject to oversight of any kind. Legalisation would mean regulation and regulation is the best way to control the dangers of drug use, while cutting the cartels off at the knees’.

and that: . . .

Continue reading.

TYD passes along this column by Annalee Newitz:

Earlier this week Google and Verizon pledged to uphold a set of network principles that could transform the internet into a husk of its former self. Let’s look down the barrel of the Googlezon* future.

Keep in mind that the two-page Googlezon proposal, which you can read here, isn’t law, though both companies have requested that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) turn it into a formal regulation. Even if it isn’t law, though, Googlezon has stated it will follow the proposal’s principles. And mostly those principles are harbingers of a dystopian media future.

Quick backgrounder on net neutrality
The Googlezon agreement was written partly in response to public interest groups and lawmakers lobbying for the US government to mandate "net neutrality." In a nutshell, net neutrality means that internet service providers like Verizon have to deliver everything – data, services, whatever – in a "neutral" way. For example, if we had net neutrality laws in the US, Verizon wouldn’t be allowed to do things like make Gmail run faster than Facebook. Neither would Verizon be able to "prejudice" its consumers against certain services, for example by making any peer-to-peer traffic run really slowly.

Google has always been a staunch supporter of net neutrality, since its income depends on people being able to access the company’s services quickly online. Imagine if Verizon demanded that Google pay extra to prevent YouTube from giving you the annoying twirly circle. Google’s business model would be crippled, and you would probably have to start paying for YouTube access.

But nobody has successfully implemented net neutrality laws in the US. So if Google wants to protect its business, it has to make deals with companies like Verizon. And here’s where things get ugly.

The internet becomes a pay-to-play medium
The the Googlezon agreement includes a section where both companies pledge to keep the "public internet" completely neutral. Verizon says it won’t privilege some services over others (unless they are "special services" or "mobile services," but we’ll get to that). And for its part, Google pledges that it will keep all of its services on the public internet.

But what the hell is this "public internet"? Isn’t all of the internet public? Obviously there are internal business and government intranets that are private, and pay-to-play services, but the internet itself is by definition public. So why all this talk from Googlezon about how they’ll keep the public internet neutral?

One simple answer, my friend: . . .

Continue reading.