Take SOPA, the “Stop Online Piracy Act,” a bill introduced in the United States House of Representatives last October (and its counterpart bill in the US Senate, called “Protect IP Act”, PIPA.) They are supposed to protect intellectual property. But opponents to the bills argue that it will have a chilling effect on free speech, that it violates the First Amendment of the US constitution (which guarantees freedom of expression to US citizens and is the first of the Bill of Rights), and that it amounts to internet censorship.

To protest SOPA and PIPA (remember that they are bills and are not yet enacted into law), prominent groups and companies are planning on taking action. Google will have something on their main page; Wikipedia will be off-line for 24 hours on Jan 18th; reddit is going down for 12 hours to protest SOPA and PIPA. That all is going on in the US. What’s going on in India?

India is an interesting case. Like that of the US, the government of India depends on a compliant citizenry: people who do as they are told, and to shut up when they are told to STFU. Of course, this is not all that difficult since a majority of Indians have been brainwashed into the belief that the government is a benevolent agency — mai baap — which hands out goodies to favored groups and therefore has to be obeyed. The trouble is (from the government’s point of view) that some people are not very cooperative and insist on exposing the government’s lies. This simply would not do. These people write stuff and say things that could be damaging to the government’s case.

The government has a two-pronged approach to this problem. First, do something about the “demand side.” If people cannot read and write, they are unlikely to be exposed to the truth. The way is therefore to control the education sector and make it dysfunctional enough that even after more than 60 years post independence, about half a billion Indians are illiterate. Destroying the future of the people just to keep them in the dark is one of the greatest crimes that the governments of India have committed against India. The Congress party has directly and indirectly held the reins of government for around 50 years, and mass illiteracy is one of their enduring legacies.

The Indian government has censored news reports, banned books and movies, and made it illegal for people to discuss current affairs on radio. That’s what I call the “supply side” of the matter: make sure that the supply of information is limited to what the government likes. But then came the new threat: the internet and with it access to the world wide web of information.

As long as the internet was just text based, the government was not too worried. What scared them into action was that the internet became multi-media. Not just text, you could watch videos and listen to a variety of opinions, and you did not have to be literate to do so. That, as you can imagine, put a spanner in the carefully designed works of the government to keep the people uninformed through illiteracy.

So here we are. The country is being run by a bunch of crooks, headed nominally by the most despicably dishonest man, the appointed prime minister, Dr Manmohan Singh. His master is an Italian woman who rules her minions with an iron hand. Among her hand maidens is one Kapil Sibal, a man who is roundly despised and is perhaps a cretin. Sibal is in charge of internet censorship. He regularly tells internet firms to censor content that will damage the carefully built images of his master and her family.

The Center for Internet & Society has an informative article, “Invisible Censorship: How the Government Censors Without Being Seen” by Pranesh Prakash (dateline Dec 15, 2011.) Here’s an extended excerpt:

Government Has Powers to Censor and Already Censors

Currently, the government can either block content by using section 69A of the Information Technology Act (which can be revealed using RTI), or it has to send requests to the Internet companies to get content removed. Google has released statistics of government request for content removal as part of its Transparency Report. While Mr. Sibal uses the examples of communally sensitive material as a reason to force censorship of the Internet, out of the 358 items requested to be removed from January 2011 to June 2011 from Google service by the Indian government (including state governments), only 8 were for hate speech and only 1 was for national security. Instead, 255 items (71 per cent of all requests) were asked to be removed for ‘government criticism’. Google, despite the government in India not having the powers to ban government criticism due to the Constitution, complied in 51 per cent of all requests. That means they removed many instances of government criticism as well.

‘Self-Regulation’: Undetectable Censorship

Mr. Sibal’s more recent efforts at forcing major Internet companies such as Indiatimes, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, to ’self-regulate’ reveals a desire to gain ever greater powers to bypass the IT Act when censoring Internet content that is ‘objectionable’ (to the government). Mr. Sibal also wants to avoid embarrassing statistics such as that revealed by Google’s Transparency Report. He wants Internet companies to ’self-regulate’ user-uploaded content, so that the government would never have to send these requests for removal in the first place, nor block sites officially using the IT Act. If the government was indeed sincere about its motives, it would not be talking about ‘transparency’ and ‘dialogue’ only after it was exposed in the press that the Department of Information Technology was holding secret talks with Internet companies. Given the clandestine manner in which it sought to bring about these new censorship measures, the motives of the government are suspect. Yet, both Mr. Sibal and Mr. Sachin Pilot have been insisting that the government has no plans of Internet censorship, and Mr. Pilot has made that statement officially in the Lok Sabha. This, thus seems to be an instance of censoring without censorship.

Backdoor Censorship through Copyright Act

Further, since the government cannot bring about censorship laws in a straightforward manner, they are trying to do so surreptitiously, through the back door. Mr. Sibal’s latest proposed amendment to the Copyright Act, which is before the Rajya Sabha right now, has a provision called section 52(1)(c) by which anyone can send a notice complaining about infringement of his copyright. The Internet company will have to remove the content immediately without question, even if the notice is false or malicious. The sender of false or malicious notices is not penalized. But the Internet company will be penalized if it doesn’t remove the content that has been complained about. The complaint need not even be shown to be true before the content is removed. Indeed, anyone can complain about any content, without even having to show that they own the rights to that content. The government seems to be keen to have the power to remove content from the Internet without following any ‘due process’ or fair procedure. Indeed, it not only wants to give itself this power, but it is keen on giving all individuals this power.

So what are we going to do about it? We, if we care, should make sure that Manmohan Singh and his cohorts like Kapil Sibal, and their master the Italian Antonia Maino aka Sonia Gandhi, and her puppy are stopped from destroying the nation. Let’s vote them out.

I have arrived at a generalization: Americans are extremely efficient in production and (perhaps as a consequence) are extremely inefficient in consumption. They can afford to be wasteful because they are rich. Conversely, I believe that people that are inefficient in production (in other words, poor) are forced to be efficient in consumption.

Running the Numbers: An American Self-portrait is a site by Chris Jordan which illuminates that general idea. (Hat tip: Suhit Anantula).

Running the Numbers looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 32,000 breast augmentation surgeries in the U.S. every month.

This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs. Employing themes such as the near versus the far, and the one versus the many, I hope to raise some questions about the role of the individual in a society that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming.

Here are some of the statistics that Jordan’s pictures illustrate:

• Depicts one million plastic cups, the number used on airline flights in the US every six hours.
• Depicts two million plastic beverage bottles, the number used in the US every five minutes.
• Depicts 200,000 packs of cigarettes, equal to the number of Americans who die from cigarette smoking every six months.
• Depicts 8 million toothpicks, equal to the number of trees harvested in the US every month to make the paper for mail order catalogs.
• Depicts 11,000 jet trails, equal to the number of commercial flights in the US every eight hours.
• Depicts 426,000 cell phones, equal to the number of cell phones retired in the US every day.
• Depicts 1.14 million brown paper supermarket bags, the number used in the US every hour.
• Depicts 106,000 aluminum cans, the number used in the US every thirty seconds.
• Depicts 410,000 paper cups, equal to the number of disposable hot-beverage paper cups used in the US every fifteen minutes.
• Depicts 65,000 cigarettes, equal to the number of American teenagers under age eighteen who become addicted to cigarettes every month.
• Depicts nine million wooden ABC blocks, equal to the number of American children with no health insurance coverage in 2007.
• Depicts 24,000 logos from the GMC Yukon Denali, equal to six weeks of sales of that model SUV in 2004.
• Depicts 213,000 Vicodin pills, equal to the number of emergency room visits yearly in the US related to misuse or abuse of prescription pain killers.
• Depicts 29,569 handguns, equal to the number of gun-related deaths in the US in 2004.
• Depicts 60,000 plastic bags, the number used in the US every five seconds.
• Depicts 30,000 reams of office paper, or 15 million sheets, equal to the amount of office paper used in the US every five minutes.
• Depicts 3.6 million tire valve caps, one for each new SUV sold in the US in 2004.
• Depicts 125,000 one-hundred dollar bills ($12.5 million), the amount our government spends every hour on the war in Iraq.
• Depicts 170,000 disposable Energizer batteries, equal to fifteen minutes of Energizer battery production.
• If 170,000 batteries were depicted at their real size, the print would need to be 26×43 feet, as shown here. To depict one year of Energizer disposable battery production (six billion batteries) would require a print 26 feet high by 146 miles long.
• Depicts 38,000 shipping containers, the number of containers processed through American ports every twelve hours.

(Hat tip: Jan Manik)

Seriously though, the US is showing signs of serious trouble. Huckabee is raving lunatic, as Pharyngula reports.

PS: My favorite bit in that satire bit is “… and Mexicans continue to occur.” ROTFL with the idea of Mexicans occurring like some periodic drought or infestation.