Some of you may be aware of what happened on January 12th. It is a date I think will be remembered as important in the evolution & improvement of the Internet. On that day, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)--who I am helping educate people about the changes occurring--opened the application process for generic top level domains, or gTLDS.

It is a step that I think will help foster innovation and create opportunity, in a number of ways.

As an FYI, for those not aware of what this all means, let me take a step back. The first "general purpose domains" were introduced in October of 1984, including those you know quite well, .com, .org, and .net. But now, this is going to greatly expand.

This graf from a Taibbi blog post reminds me of something. First the graf:

The potential liability each of the banks faces from foreclosure litigation is vastly greater than $25 billion, and uncertainty surrounding that litigation is holding the stock prices of all of the major companies (in particular struggling ones like Bank of America) down.

A settlement would release those firms from that potential liability and likely bring massive surges in stock-market investment. It would therefore have a profound strengthening effect on the Too-Big-To-Fail banks.

Now, if you see a big multi-day run up in bank stocks you know what's going on: the fix is in and a settlement has been made in principle. That's how we'll know: word will leak out to the main players and insiders before the news is announced.

So, buy the rumor and sell the news.

Apparently Skynet is here:

The Navy's new drone being tested near Chesapeake Bay stretches the boundaries of technology: It's designed to land on the deck of an aircraft carrier, one of aviation's most difficult maneuvers.

What's even more remarkable is that it will do that not only without a pilot in the cockpit, but without a pilot at all.

The idea of remotely piloted war machines is one thing: but autonomous ones?

. . . like no other.

If anything this story (h/t Bruce Schneier) is indicative of very rapidly changing ideas of privacy:

Young couples have long signaled their devotion to each other by various means — the gift of a letterman jacket, or an exchange of class rings or ID bracelets. Best friends share locker combinations.

The digital era has given rise to a more intimate custom. It has become fashionable for young people to express their affection for each other by sharing their passwords to e-mail, Facebook and other accounts. Boyfriends and girlfriends sometimes even create identical passwords, and let each other read their private e-mails and texts.

I think some adults understand this, but not all. Has anyone ever swiped your journal and read it and taken something you wrote completely out of context? Imagine emails and teen boys full of testosterone and aggression? Not a good combination, that. The digital age presents an altogether different set of risks, up to an including emails and photos finding their way on to the internet. Once there they are impossible to delete. Impossible.

It's one thing to share a locker combination, but sharing digital data? While I am really trying hard not to be an old-fogey about this, from my experience with tweens and teenagers: it is impossible to explain to them the risks. And the adults in charge really are falling down on the job.

The censorship tool is likely to raise fears that Twitter's commitment to free speech may be weakening

AP, January 26

San Francisco - Twitter has refined its technology so it can censor messages on a country-by-country basis.

The additional flexibility announced on Thursday is likely to raise fears that Twitter's commitment to free speech may be weakening as the short-messaging company expands into new countries in an attempt to broaden its audience and make more money.

But Twitter sees the censorship tool as a way to ensure individual messages, or tweets, remain available to as many people as possible while it navigates a gauntlet of different laws around the world.

And all three are inter-related:

Whether or not the U.S. is declining is the wrong question

Has Petroleum Production Peaked, Ending the Era of Easy Oil?

The Coming U.S.-India Train Wreck

Connections!

. . . my Texas only bird count for 2012 is now up to 57!

No, she won't.

. . . feelgood kinda stuff here. But this is just awesome. Love is goddamned awesome, you know?

OK, by now, you've either seen or heard about this picture, where Arizona Governor Jan Brewer sticks her claw-like index finger into President Obama's face, practically picking boogers out of his nose. All that's missing is the broom and the pointy hat.

We want the rich taxed more, up to 66% more in some cases^*.

^* My methodology for coming up with that number is this: the average American, as quoted in the story below, believes that the rich should be taxed at a 24% effective rate. That's 10% points higher than it is now. Ten divided by fifteen is 66. That's a sixty-six percent increase in the effective tax rate.

. . . standardized tests at the college level are not going to teach people critical thinking skills. From the story:

After four years of college, more than a third of them showed no significant improvement on a test of critical thinking and reasoning.

It's the sort of thing employers have been complaining about for years.

First, I know for a fact that most employers do not want people with critical thinking skills. They want drones who will work themselves to death or yes men and women.

Second, the idea that standardized testing will somehow magical teach people critical thinking skills is laughable. Here's what will: compel students to take a full year of logic, a full year of Algebra, a full year of physics and two years of reading books from the canon^*, after they have take the math and logic.

Look, I hated algebra and higher math as much as anyone. (Logic was different: it was fun, but that was also due to the professor I had.) But I noticed a very real, perceptible leap in my critical thinking faculties after I finished college algebra--my GPA leaped upwards and my facility at dissecting historical and literary texts exegetically and critically grew.

And screw statistics: statistics is bullshit the way it is currently taught. All it teaches people to do, as currently taught, is manipulate and spin data.

^* And yes, the Western canon is critical to the way Westerners think and how our societies have evolved. There is a place for other great books not in the Western canon and they should be learned, but Dante, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Cernvantes and Homer and Virgil are a fundamental starting point.

. . . hippies have been proved right, but we will still get more austerity.

. . . murder two dozen innocent Iraqis. Get zero jail time and even manage to stay in the service.

. . . thought criminal I posted on yesterday, Joshua has some more thoughts.

Read an old book, learn a new idea.

Now, let me preface this piece by saying I did not watch the State Of The Union address last night. I prefer reading the transcript. I can't abide the canned applause, and watching half of Congress look at their watches while the other half whoops and hollers.

And it doesn't matter: Republican or Democrat, no one is truly unifying the Congress behind a vision or goal. Even talk about Osama bin Laden's liquidation was only going to draw tepid polite applause from the Republicans, which is a goddamned shame.

So I read it the next day

I imagine Hopey McChange's SOTU went something like this: Osama, dead. Blah-blah-blah-Osama, dead. Blah-blah-blah. Iran. Income inequality. Bankers not guilty of crimes. Blah-blah-blah. Osama. Dead.

Am I wrong?

I'll not be watching the SOTU this evening, instead I will be watching episode two of season three of Justified. If you are not watching Justified you are simply missing out on the best television show right now. As a matter of fact, there are four excellent interviews by Terry Gross here and here and here and here. How can you go wrong with Elmore Leonard, dig?

In 2002 I created The Agonist and I've been here ever since. It's been a wild ride. We've been through three wars: Afghanistan Iraq and Libya. We've been through three presidential elections, 2004, 2008 and now this one in 2012. We've seen five midterm congressional elections. And more media cycles and mini-scandals and real scandals than I can possibly remember. We've been though four technology iterations, Blogger, Word Press, Scoop and Drupal. We've had over 20,000,000 unique visitors and too many page views to count. We've seen one massive financial crisis and have hosted some of the best writers on the Internet, including Don Henry Ford, Michael Collins, Stirling Newberry, Ian Welsh and Numerian. And we have an editorial team that has been an absolute pleasure to work with: Rick, Tina, Nate, Lex, Moley and Raja. You guys and gals are the best. I traveled and posted stories and photographs from countless countries, including two epic personal journeys, across the Silk Road in 2003 and the Spice Route from 2008-2009. And in the course of my travels I have had the distinct pleasure of meeting many of you in person.

If someone had told me in 2002 that I'd still be blogging ten years later I'd have laughed. And yet, here we are. You know, it's been real. It's been fun. And many times it's been real fun.

But it's time to move on. I'm ready to buckle down and focus more on my long form writing and soon I will return to graduate school. I'm going to need all the mental space possible. Short form blogging precludes that.

So, on February 1, 2012 I will step down as Editor in Chief of The Agonist. That's the bad news.

But here's the great news: I am supremely excited to announce that Steve Hynd, formerly of Newshoggers, will now lead us.

I will remain an active member and will continue to post here from time to time (fear not, Friday Catblogging will live on). But Steve will take up day to day management of the site and posting and answering queries and generally doing everything I did, except I'm certain he'll do it better.

A site like this certainly takes on a great deal of the ethos of its creator. That ethos, I hope, has been open-mindedness, a willingness to listen and to learn from others. I have all the confidence in the world that Steve is all of that, but more so, I am certain he will mold The Agonist into a better, more thoughtful, timely and global place.