Do you consider a grant to study algae blooms to be a form of politicized artistic expression? No? Apples/Oranges.

Brilliant observation.

Because "sleep darts" don't work in real life like they do in bad movies. These guys are holding hostages at gunpoint and swearing they're going to go down shooting. The cops didn't want another Sidney, where the crazy Islamist wackadoo had time (it only takes a moment, right?) to kill a hostage before being incapacitated.

No, "irony" is a pretentious sounding lefty doing his best to sound intellectually superior to other people while simultaneously failing to recognize the perfectly reasonable use of a common idiom. The "knock" in this case is the attack by Islamists on a paragon of lefty publishing. The rhetorical question involved is whether said liberals are still so obtuse that even an event that head-knocking could fail to move them from their assertion that it was the writers and artists who are to blame for their deaths, not the Islamist wackadoos who planned and carried out their murders.

Actually, I believe they tried to stop the government from forcing people to pay for having such art made. Some people saw the creation of Piss Christ as being outside the role of the federal government. Crazy, I know.

"Watch this space for updates."

If only there were places on the web one could go to watch live streaming coverage of event such as this, or liveblogs. Or a service where small messages containing updates could be broadcast to other users, searchable by special keywords called "hashtags"....

Yeah, all of those contemporary examples of Christians and Jews doing things like shooting up rooms full of satirical journalists, and sending mentally challenged young women into vegetable markets with bombs strapped to them - they just won't stop doing that! All of those Christians and Jews that post online videos of themselves beheading their captive hostages, lining up villagers and gunning them down, burning teachers alive for daring to teach girls to read - it's definitely just like what all those thousands of Muslims are doing, no question.

Are you implying that there was a time when residential internet was regulated under Title II? If so, I'd be interested to hear a great deal more.

And was that due specifically to Title II, or was it due to other regulation, which allowed the national, monolithic monopoly that Lily Tomlin (quite rightly) so loved to hate?

I stand to be corrected, but I believe that there's nothing currently in Title II that would result in the stagnation that AT&T brought about in its time. It's true that there would be greater scrutiny of how carriers manage their networks, which could conceivably result in slow-downs in deployment of certain management practices and technologies, but I'd venture to suggest that that's the fucking point.

When 'innovation' means a willingness to hold a content service's customers to ransom, then hell yes, I'd like to see that process slowed down. I'd even pay a little for the privilege of not getting fucked over.

I agree that it's unfortunate that such measures seem to be necessary. It would be nice to believe that the invisible hand would bitch slap any company that tried to play fast and loose with its customers. But tragically, because of the nature of communications networks, that doesn't always happen.

And let's make no mistake - it's the very companies who are guilty of these sins that are arguing that Title II is a return to the 'bad old days' of the 1930s, when the FCC was created and Title II came into being. It was during those 'bad old days', by the way, that the majority of Americans finally got telephone service, such as it was.

From earlier this afternoon:

“My statement to the Frederick News-Post regarding the use of my name was wrong and inappropriate. I’m not afraid to admit when I’m wrong,” Delauter says in the statement.

So, some sort of AI built into the system, wired to prefer the company of experts? Or does it learn, over time, to like experts?

That's the problem in the case I mentioned. A single party monoculture, run, effectively, by a handful of entrenched, corrupt individuals, has been preventing - through gerrymandering, union-backed vote blocking, etc - any given individual from within their own party or any other from in any way changing the status quo. That finally became so toxic and so transparent, that many in that part turned against the person their party's governor told them should be the next executive, and voted instead for an unlikely individual.

No, you are. Reading comprehension difficulties and deliberately low-information, knee-jerk opinion-spewing are why we are where we are. Please stop being yet another one of those people.

But if you knew ANYTHING about Maryland politics, you would know that the state has generally been a Democratic monoculture, with their party promoting and enacting and deficit-spending on the most ridiculous, corrupt, crazy crap imaginable. Even the predominantly Dem population of the state finally had enough of their own party's serial insanity, and voted in a shiny new Republican governor. Specifically because of things like counter-constitutional executive overreach and spectacular incompetence by the liberals who'd been running the show. The leftier counties in the state are infamous for the level of corruption and collusion between large government employee unions and the elected council members with whom they're in bed. It's off the charts, really. This local know-nothing on the council in one of our more rural, less-wealthy counties is really of no consequence, other than as a source of humor for the next couple of local new cycles. But we get to wear the entrenched one-party legislature in Annapolis full time, and it's going to take too long to undo the unspeakable (hilarious, if it weren't so evil) congressional district gerrymandering foisted on the state by the Dems a few years back.

So the guy is an ill-informed twit, a product of a typical Maryland public education. That's fine, because he's just a typical local guy who got a few dozen more votes than the next guy, and got a job as a minor league politician on a local county council.

But the problem is that we're seeing this sort of attitude (manifesting itself a bit differently) from the very top of the nation's executive branch. Lip service to promised "transparency," but in practice, draconian limitations on non-spin-approved access by journalists and photographers, reporters (and their entire organizations) being tapped and harassed if they don't convey the right message. Politicians have always had their favorite media contacts, but the ever-receding notion that they work for us is resulting in newly toxic levels of entitlement-itis and a sort of vaguely imperial bearing. That some elected officials have flirted with that from day one of the republic is not news, but the founders anticipated that and built in checks and balances. And some of those have been sorely tested, of late.

It will be interesting to see how the Attkisson suit plays out.

Really? That's your theory? That three guys loaded for bear were just homicidal maniacs out to kill for the sake of killing, and by incredible coincidence, they happened to be Muslims shouting Islamic slogans and saying they were avenging the prophet? You're not even fooling yourself. Stop it.

But we also put a lot of effort and energy in to establishing and maintaining systems and processes that make it viable as a way to avoid having to physically barter goods all day long. We don't have faith in the money, we have an appreciation for what we've done to make money a useful thing, and faith - if we must use that word - in the proposition that what worked yesterday (in the way of currency and financial instruments being a useful conveyor of value) will also work tomorrow. Which is to say, the trust is in the the civilization that arises from lots of people looking after their self interests, and wanting an efficient way to interact with each other. The proof that that trust isn't wildly misplaced is visible in the wildly superior standard of living that is enjoyed by cultures that get past walking sacks of goods to a market to trade for other goods every week. Boiling that all down to "faith in money" is too simple.