CISPA, the bill in Congress that would end privacy on the internet, has gone through a tricky legislative maze that has a lot of people confused. Here’s the deal: CISPA is now tucked inside of Senate bill S.2105, which has bipartisan congressional support, is being actively supported by the Obama Admin., and is scheduled for a vote in early June. It’s alive and well, and on a clear path to becoming law.

The Senate goes on recess next week, which means we have exactly 3 days to make calls before they leave for a week and then come back for the vote. The most important thing we can do with that time is to try to get meetings scheduled with our senators while they are in their home states over the recess. This is a proven grassroots strategy that was key to killing SOPA. We can beat CISPA if we do this.

We really need your help this time. We can’t email our supporters about this because of an ongoing deliverability issue with our system, so we’re counting on our friends and allies to spread this in other ways.

Here’s the site we put together — use it to call your senators and request a meeting ::

Privacy Is Awesome.

Good guy Sen. Wyden said yesterday that this bill would create a “cyber industrial complex […] that profits from fear and whose currency is Americans’ private data.” He’s right, and our best shot at stopping it from becoming law is getting this strategy spread out far and wide right now.

I Called all 3 of my representatives. My list of advice for the call:

• Tell them who you are. (“Hi. My name is _. I’m a student/worker/employee/ect with ____, and I oppose the the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act [CISPA] which is being passed under Senate Bill S.2105, which would do to the internet what China and Vietnam have done to the internet, censor it and kill the business that goes on over it.”)

• Be very respectful (these guy’s/lady’s jobs normally sucks).

• Be passionate, tell them internet neutrality and freedom are important to you, the economy, and the future.

If you do all this you’ll start getting personally written letter to you in the mail from your representatives office (I have gotten 3 since I started doing this) that express support for the statements I have made, which I think (fingers crossed) have influenced the decisions of my representatives.

Writing emails does nothing, a respectful phone call about how a representative can gain or lose your vote is huge. A handwritten letter is even better.

Who is my representative is an awesome resource for finding your representatives office numbers by zip code.

For those wondering why CISPA is so bad: The EFF’s Explanation of CISPA

Also, sign the ACLU petition to oppose CISPA and unfettered access to Americans’ internet activity.

First they came for the Educators, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a teacher

Then they came for the Free Press, and I did not speak out— Because my media of choice was safe.

Then they came for the Homosexuals, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a ‘gay’.

Then they came for the Internet — even if I still knew what to say, I have no where left to say it.

Source

I have written a few times about factors that affect willpower.  Willpower is the name that we give to the mechanisms (most of which involve the frontal lobes of the brain) that prevent us from carrying out a behavior we really want to perform. 

Over the past several years, there have been a number of studies showing that if you make people work hard to control their behavior, then they have difficulty continuing to use willpower in a later situation that calls for preventing behavior.  The idea that willpower is a resource that can be used up is called ego-depletion.  It has been studied extensively by Roy Baumeister, Kathleen Vohs and their colleagues.

A paper by Veronika Job, Carol Dweck, and Gregory Walton in the November, 2010 issue of Psychological Science suggests that one factor that affects whether you show ego-depletion effects is whether you believe that willpower is a limited resource.

In one study, they asked people a number of questions about willpower. Some people gave answers suggesting that they believe that willpower is a limited resource.  Other people gave answers suggesting that willpower is actually an unlimited resource.

Later in the study, people did a difficult task that was either relatively easy or one that was hard.  The easy task involved crossing out all of the letter es on a page of written text.  The harder task asked people cross out all of the ‘e’s for a while, and then switch so that they crossed out every ‘e’ except for the ones that were followed by another vowel.  This task is difficult, because people have to prevent themselves from doing a behavior that they had already built up some habit to perform.

After doing this task, people performed a Stroop task.  In the Stroop task, people see words naming colors that are written in a colored font.  People have particular difficulty naming the color of the font when the word is the name of a different color.  For example, people are prone to make mistakes when they see the word “yellow” written in red font. 

Putting all this together, people who believed that willpower is a limited resource made more mistakes on the Stroop task following the difficult letter-crossing task than following the easy letter-crossing task.  That is, these people showed the typical ego-depletion effect where doing one difficult self-control task makes it hard to do a second. 

In contrast, the people who believed that willpower is essentially unlimited did equally well no matter which letter-crossing task they did.  That is, those people who think that willpower is unlimited did not show the ego-depletion effect.

Now, it is possible that there are just differences between people.  Some people have limited willpower resources and others don’t.  On that view, it isn’t that your beliefs about willpower affect your performance, but rather that your beliefs about willpower reflect your actual abilities.

To explore this possibility, a second study actually manipulated people’s beliefs about willpower by using a biased questionnaire.  One version of the questionnaire got people to agree with statements suggesting that willpower is a limited resource (“Working on a strenuous mental task can make you feel tired so that you need a break before accomplishing a new task.”)  A second version used a questionnaire that got people to agree with statements suggesting that willpower is unlimited (“Sometimes working on a strenuous mental task can make you feel energized for further challenging activities.”) 

After these questionnaires, the groups did the same tasks as before.

In this study, the group that was biased to believe that willpower is limited did more poorly on the Stroop task following the difficult letter-crossing task than following the easy one.  In contrast, the group that was biased to believe that willpower is unlimited did just as well on the Stroop task regardless of which letter-crossing task they did.

Taken together, these studies suggest that people’s beliefs about their own willpower are one factor that affects how effective their willpower will be.  The more that you believe that willpower can keep you from doing things that you don’t want to do, the more likely you will be to use your willpower successfully.

All this suggests that it is well worth believing in willpower.

Really, really good article. How did I miss this?

“We are watching the beginnings of the defiant self-assertion of a new generation of Americans, a generation who are looking forward to finishing their education with no jobs, no future, but still saddled with enormous and unforgivable debt… Just as in Europe, we are seeing the results of colossal social failure. The occupiers are the very sort of people, brimming with ideas, whose energies a healthy society would be marshaling to improve life for everyone. Instead, they are using it to envision ways to bring the whole system down.

“But the ultimate failure here is of imagination. What we are witnessing can also be seen as a demand to finally have a conversation we were all supposed to have back in 2008.

“There was a moment, after the near-collapse of the world’s financial architecture, when anything seemed possible. Everything we’d been told for the last decade turned out to be a lie…

“It seemed the time had come to rethink everything: the very nature of markets, money, debt; to ask what an ‘economy’ is actually for. This lasted perhaps two weeks. Then, in one of the most colossal failures of nerve in history, we all collectively clapped our hands over our ears and tried to put things back as close as possible to the way they’d been before.”

Actually, Graeber is understating the case, in at least two ways. First, the lies have been with us far longer than just a single decade. They go back at least 30 years, to the elections of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, the later of whom became known as “Tina” for her favorite catch-phrase attack on the imagination: “There Is No Alternative”. Second, it was not just a failure of nerve, and a failure of imagination. It was a failure of reason and of democracy as well. It was, in a sense, an inevitable failure, since those three decades have seen us create enormous deficits of reason, imagination and democracy which made it impossible for us to mobilise the necessary resources at the moment they were needed most.

He who controls the uteri should be she.

We all know this: If you want to prevent abortions, you make sure everyone has health care, a high school education and birth control. Not the exact opposite. Then why do the people who purport to want to stop all abortions seem to favor almost every policy that makes them inevitable?

Egyptian-American journalist Mona Eltahawy offers insight to the roots of misogyny in her new piece about the Middle East for Foreign Policy “Why Do They Hate Us?”:

“Our wombs are the future. And if you don’t control the future by controlling women’s bodies, you’ve lost control generally.”

This echoes the answer that serial rapist Noah Cross gives his pursuer Jake Gittes in the classic film Chinatown:

Gittes: Why are you doing it? How much better can you eat? What could you buy that you can’t already afford?Cross: The future, Mr. Gittes! The future.

This is a truth proven self-evident again and again—in the Middle East and in the United States. Those obsessed with control obsess on two things: rewriting history and women’s wombs.

This is why the GOP emboldened by a Tea Party movement that was supposedly not concerned with social issues passed 135 new laws limiting reproductive health care. On the federal and state level they’ve attacked Planned Parenthood, an organization that exists to provide preventative health care, birth control and choices for women.

These restrictions make no sense because abortion is more common when it’s illegal. So why does the GOP pursue them anyway? The future. AND they think they can get away with it.

Again, I’ll state that this election is about the future. Forget the benefits to women in Obamacare that are clearly at stake. Instead, imagine in election where women show up in vast numbers to state their disapproval of a GOP much too concerned with their wombs and much too ignorant of their health care.

This would change the debate in this country and begin a future worth living.