Reclaiming My Show ~ Ep. 1308 ~ The Dan Bongino Show®

From the Dan Bongino Show's description of this episode on youtube.com/Bongino or in his Show Notes:

In this episode, I address the explosion in censorship by the big tech tyrants. I also address a troubling story about the attacks on conservative website Breitbart. I discuss the troubling deep state connections of the cabal responsible for the attempted takedown of President Trump.

It is sounding a lot like Dan Bongino is heading for an alternative venue for his videos. The tech tyrants are making such a huge mistake.  You would think that they are smart enough to realize that the content from people on the Right, such as Dan Bongino, brings them a gigantic audience.  Content that they don't even have to pay for.  So they disagree with what that content is?  Like that matters?  Why not just let the viewers decide for themselves?  Youtube and Twitter and google, all trying to be our nanny, it is such a stupid idea.  If their liberal progressive ideologies are so "correct," then why should they worry so much about folks like Bongino, johnny2k, and other Conservatives having the opportunity to express their views?

Well, I'm afraid that I can tell you why they are doing these things to Conservative people, to not only keep their views from the public, but to even intimidate them to keep them silent.  Those on the Left want total control.  They want the White House and the Legislative Branches and the Courts all under their control.  But, worse yet, (yes, it gets worse), they want to abolish America and be a part of a One World Government, the New World Order, and Communistic government at that.

There is only one thing that we can do.  To fight back, as Dan Bongino is.  With venues where we can get the word out.  Utilizing Parler.com is a great start.  Another plan is also being developed, for videos.  But, something has to be done.  And I am with Dan all the way, even if it means moving my blogs somewhere else when this all happens, which I suspect will be very soon.  We may be up against a very intense enemy, that will use all possible weapons against us, but we will win in the end.  Ummm, yes, I pray that we win!

Be sure to see the 

SHOW NOTES for Episode 1308

Looking for news? The Bongino Report brings you the top conservative and libertarian news stories of the day, aggregated in an easy to read format to assist the public in getting accurate information. 

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How our gadgets breed complacency ~ By Phil Elmore

Perhaps five years later, I was in a bookstore at the mall when a young boy's loose shoelace got caught in the escalator. He yelped as the machine dragged him off-balance. I saw what was happening, snapped open my pocket knife, and went for the escalator to chop his lace free – when his parent reached him first and pulled him bodily free by the waist. I quietly folded my knife and went about my business unnoticed, but I remembered the incident. I remembered and was glad that I learned to act rather than watch.

Fifteen years later, I stood in the same bookstore. It was just last weekend, and that bookstore is dying. Its shelves are almost empty. Its cafe furnishings are being sold off plate by plate. It is doomed, a victim of technology. As the e-book kills the paperback, places like it will crumble to dust. I stood at the foot of that same escalator less than one week ago, and I remembered. I remember that lesson, so long ago now, about technology, about mental preparedness ... about complacency.

In his column today, Phil writes about a subject that normally may not receive much attention or even provoke any thoughtful contemplation. Phil's discussion about complacency and its cause makes me think about other columns that I've read recently, where our life-styles of comfy living have made us oblivious to what is going on in America and the world. Robert Ringer, in his column "What soft socialism has wrought," may have sparked Phil's thoughts, or at least my own, about complacency, when he wrote:

The average American had no idea that he was slowly being boiled alive, because soft socialism made it possible for him to buy a house he couldn't afford, go on vacations he couldn't afford and fill his life with high-tech toys he couldn't afford. This comfy lifestyle made him oblivious to the realities of life.

All you really need to know now, before reading this column, is that when I looked "complacency" up on dictionary.com, this definition comes up:

a feeling of quiet pleasure or security, often while unaware of some potential danger, defect, or the like; self-satisfaction or smug satisfaction with an existing situation, condition, etc.

How our gadgets breed complacency

PHIL ELMORE

By Phil Elmore

March 03, 2011 ~ 1:00 am Eastern

© 2011

The most fundamental component of technology, of the technocracy we occupy in our daily lives, is the software on which we operate. That software is found in your brain. Your brain is the most often neglected aspect of every piece of technology you use – for just as a thing to be perceived begs an entity to perceive it, that which is to be operated begs an operator. We, as human beings, are largely self-programmed. We integrate the data provided us through numerous means, and from this data, we draw concepts.

What happens if we start to rely too much on any piece of technology? Be it a smartphone to store our phone numbers, an application that remembers our passwords, or the network of networks on which we rely for everything from entertainment to commerce to communication ... if we forsake the software that is our brains in favor of the hardware that is all around us, we become complacent.

Complacency is fatal.

Almost 20 years ago, I witnessed something that would change my attitude about complacency forever. In retrospect, the incident helped form my opinions of technology, too, which I bring to you every week in this column. It was such a simple thing and, looking back, such a potentially terrible thing.

I was leaving a four-story college residence hall. As I exited the building I stopped to see what was going on – for a crowd of people was staring up the large hillside into which the campus was built.

We watched and a few people pointed and muttered. A lone student dragged a metal bed frame down the hill. I remember him as tall and skinny. He moved with determination and without a word, the bed frame scraping the asphalt walkway as he tugged it along.

No one questioned him. No one stopped him. We watched as he walked up to the old brick-faced building, upended the bed frame, and climbed it like a ladder. The corner of the frame shattered the window of the room he was boarding like a pirate. He scrambled in through the opening.

I walked into the building. The student burst from a room on the lounge level -– the room that was, I would learn later, below the room occupied by a young woman who'd just dumped him. Crazed and screaming incoherent oaths, he stopped in the hallway.

I froze.

I knew I should do something, but I did not know what. I had no gun. I had no knife. I had no pepper spray. I was not near a phone; this was before cell phones, even before pagers became common. Like the 20 or 30 people who had watched this bizarre scene unfold, I was technologically unprepared – but mentally, I was even less prepared. My software could not handle the data. The scenario was outside the normal. My brain clicked to a stop, unable to process a situation with which it had not been prepared to cope.

READ FULL STORY at WorldNetDaily.com

Be sure to check out
johnny2k's Tea Party Gear!

Fluoride conspiracists at it again ~ By Phil Elmore

This study, like those before it, is weak. The correlation found between fluoride and IQ levels is not causation. The study's gross flaws are evident even in the raw data it presents, much less the unwarranted conclusions true believers have made from it. Reporting this study uncritically or, worse, as grounds to sound alarm, is nothing but more fluoride fear-mongering. If water fluoridation truly does have long-term health benefits, no one is served by making the case using "evidence" as poor as this.

Once again, Phil Elmore felt the need to debunk another fluoride-in-the-water conspiracy theory, thanks to a column in WorldNetDaily.com by Michael Carl (the article is linked below). And knowing Phil, he's surely prepared to be deluged in email that will probably not be very kind. Conspiracy theorists tend to not take it very well when people debunk their theories. Neither do people that believe in global warming, but that is a whole other story.

Fluoride conspiracists at it again

PHIL ELMORE

By Phil Elmore

January 06, 2011 ~ 1:00 am Eastern

© 2011

I did not want to address this topic again. I really didn't. When a reader e-mailed me a link to Michael Carl's recent article in WorldNetDaily, however, I knew I would have to march once more unto the breach. Specifically, I must once again address the topic of fluoride conspiracy theories, about which I have written twice previously in Technocracy.

I first debunked popular conspiracies concerning the fluoride in Americans' drinking water in July of last year. In that column I forwarded the apparently bold notion that fluoride is not, in fact, a Nazi-era, brain-softening, mind-control industrial waste toxin poured indiscriminately into our water supplies by New World Order operatives bent on controlling the masses. Mail exhorting me to swallow large quantities of concentrated poison began to pour in (no doubt illustrating the devotion of conspiracy theorists to science, reason and logic). I addressed this and a conspiracy website's "open letter" to me in a follow-up article in August, entitled "Fluoride fear-mongers."

In that column, I spoke of the mission statement of Technocracy, a column devoted to identifying the many ways in which technology affects your life and especially your liberty. To this end, I frequently advise you of technology whose application or misuse may be cause for concern. For such warnings to have meaning, however, it is my responsibility to tell you when I believe a given technology or technological application is being vilified – being marketed as a consumable product by conspiracy theorists, who package fear in order to profit from its sale. This was my conclusion, again, regarding fluoride fear-mongering. While we may debate whether it is the appropriate role of government to add, remove, or regulate any chemical in public water supplies (my columns have not addressed this), the alarmism peddled over water fluoridation is nothing less than hysteria. This hysteria is groundless, yet it is girded by junk science and heralded falsely as scientific fact.

Michael Carl reported on Monday that "Research shows fluoride is IQ-killer for children." He based this conclusion on a Chinese study, touted as the strongest of a series of studies from "China, India, Iran and Mexico," of 512 children in two Chinese cities. Commentary on the study, as recounted in Carl's piece, came primarily from Paul Connett, Ph.D., director of the Fluoride Action Network (an agitator group devoted to conspiracy theories about fluoride). Carl also quoted Dr. Vyvyan Howard, an environmental activist who sits on the advisory board of the very same organization. Setting aside this biased presentation, there are very serious flaws in the study itself – flaws which should preclude definitive conclusions of causality as Carl has made in his article.

READ FULL STORY at WorldNetDaily.com

Be sure to check out
johnny2k's Tea Party Gear!

Coping with information overload ~ By Phil Elmore

The younger generations of America are known to use the term, "TMI," meaning "Too much information." In other words, they are saying, when using the term, that a conversation is providing more personal information than they really want to know, and they want to turn off the flow of that information. This is basically what Phil will suggest to you, when he writes, "You can, however, take a break from information overload. You can take a holiday. You can catch your breath. I urge you to do just that." Merry Christmas!

Coping with information overload

PHIL ELMORE

By Phil Elmore

December 23, 2010 ~ 1:00 am Eastern

© 2010

The technology that saturates contemporary society, the technology that pervades modern existence, is overwhelmingly information technology. It reflects how easily we share data and communicate opinion to one another. It facilitates the transfer of words, video and sound to every corner of the globe and in every room of our homes. It is in our televisions. It is on our computers. It is in our pockets, on our belts, and in our purses on our phones. News, entertainment, information, infotainment and fully interactive real-time communication: This is the information technology that now shares both waking and sleeping minutes with us.

There is no way to cut yourself off from modern technology. You can try to avoid it, yes. You can refuse to be informed. You may even be successful in your willful ignorance. I spoke, not long ago, with a man who did not know the name of our state's current governor, nor was he aware of the prostitution scandal that forced the previous governor of New York to resign. Yet ignorance of current events and politics is not safe harbor from modern technology; the same man was interrupted twice during our conversation by his wireless phone.

There are religious communities in the United States who refuse to use modern technology – but in many cases, those same communities actively trade both goods and services with people who do. A local group who shuns technology, for example, trades their hand-crafted sheds and other outbuilding structures for the use of their neighbors' machine tools – tools they themselves refuse to own, the services of which they nonetheless avail themselves. In an interwoven, increasingly interconnected society whose members are a text message, an e-mail, or a Voice over IP (VoIP) call away, even self-described Luddites are kidding themselves when they try to disconnect from the socio-technological network of networked networks that holds us all in its thrall.

READ FULL STORY at WorldNetDaily.com

Be sure to check out
johnny2k's Tea Party Gear!

Be thankful for technological bounty ~ By Phil Elmore

. . . Despite the misgivings we might have about the inexorable integration of modern technology with modern life, the benefits generally outweigh the liabilities.

Yes, we must remain vigilant for the many ways technology can intrude in our lives. We must remain aware of the countless ways it can be used to infringe on our civil liberties. We must remain skeptical of government applications that use technology to facilitate overreaches of power and invasions of privacy. But technology, while neither good nor evil, is far more often used to help us than to harm us. The advancement of technology is the advancement of society. In our technologically advanced age, how can we be anything but thankful, despite the problems, the pitfalls and the complications that age visits on us?

I don't believe that Phil Elmore could have had any idea that this column will be what inspires a 7 year-old kid by the name of Zefram Cochrane to eventually build a space ship that could go into warp speed, and make first contact. Or, then again, when Phil mused, "The advancement of technology is the advancement of society," maybe he did know!

I was looking for some old Star Trek clips from the original TV series to put with this commentary on Phil's column, but then I came across the following video. It didn't take long, by the Grace of God, to figure out that this was the one to use! You'll understand why after you watch this video and read Phil's column:

First Contact

Video provided by ncc1701dotus

But here's the thing: Most of us will never see the Phoenix launch into hyper-space at warp speed. However, those of us in the baby-boomer generation or older have seen technological innovations at warp speed. Think about it: An amazing innovation when I was a kid was when TVs became available in color; radios weren't even available yet when my parents were kids. So, can you imagine what my generation and those in previous generations are thinking when we see what is available now?

Video provided by TheREALjohnny2k

I know... It's a long way from the iPod Nano to warp-drive space craft, and many of us will not be around to see interstellar flight. However, it is those of us that won't be around THEN that are going to need to lead the way in making sure that our freedom to innovate stays intact. We have to be the ones to make sure that people like Sir Richard Branson are allowed the opportunity to create or invent, achieve, and prosper by limiting government interference through taxes, regulation and bureaucracy.

Okay, let me just be upfront and cut to the chase: Entrepreneurs, inventors and innovators are motivated by being rewarded for their ingenuity through the free market system. That reward is usually tied to a financial return on their investment of time and/or capital. If the government steps in to confiscate too much of that reward and/or stymies the efforts of those that wish to succeed, the incentive to advance our technologies are diluted.

And as long as I'm on a roll, I'll mention the fact that too many government mandated entitlements tend to decrease the motivation to take the risks necessary to advance our technology.  If the government is just going to confiscate your financial rewards through redistribution of your wealth to entitlement programs and bureaucrats, why bother?  If you want to see the next generation of new technologies, we need to keep the government out of the way. Just sayin'...

This Thanksgiving, take the time truly to give thanks. Cherish your family. Be grateful for what you have. Take the time to wonder, truly, at the technological bounty you take for granted. There are devices, functions, applications all around you that affect you every single day. Overwhelmingly, that effect is a good one; with a few exceptions, technology makes your life better. Be glad. Be happy. Be awed.

Be thankful for technological bounty

By Phil Elmore

November 25, 2010 ~ 1:00 am Eastern

© 2010



Recently, I had my first Skype phone call. For those of you who don't know, Skype is one of many "Voice Over IP," or VoIP, services. These enable users to make phone calls using the Internet. An elaborate variety of phones for Skype and VoIP services are available, but in my case all I needed was my computer, a microphone and a webcam.

As I chatted with my business contact, who was seated in his library several states away, I marveled at the high sound quality and the clear picture – a picture that was better on his than on mine, if it matters, because he had a better-quality camera. We wrapped up our business concerning some freelance writing projects and I reached for the mouse.

Then it hit me. It's the future.

The same sensation came to me during a late-night drive on the busy four-lane highway carved across most of the breadth of New York State. Every car that passed me had glowing lights inside. I saw countless GPS devices, DVD players and kids playing video games ... all in the comfort of their cars at 75 miles per hour. As a child, I dreamed of being able to watch television or play video games during the four-hour drive across the state to visit my grandparents. Now, kids take those fantasies for granted. If they don't have a video-game system in their parents' cars, they've got one in their pockets – and that portable device with its full-color screen plays games more advanced than those I played on the primitive Atari and Nintendo consoles of my youth.

It's the future. Everything we ever dreamed about, everything we ever pictured in science fiction movies and television, has come to pass. Sure, we're still a ways away from the jet packs and rocket cars laughably predicted for the late '70s by magazines like Popular Mechanics, but we've got robots performing surgery. Our cars talk to us, know where we are and tell us where we need to go. Our phones have access to the Internet and thousands of other applications both useful and pointless, up to and including telling us what song we're listening to.

Now think about a typical episode of "Star Trek." Take out the matter teleportation and the spaceships, and what have you got left? A computer that can play almost any music ever recorded and answer almost every question ever asked of it. Communication devices that connect every member of the crew, often presented as small folding devices carried on the belt. Computers that run and control everything, from individual pieces of transportation to larger networks governing industrial processes if not entire cities. The ability to see anything, anywhere, within reason and range, and the ability to contact just about anyone, too, at any time.

Is that so different from the world we live in now? It isn't. It's identical.

If anything, the world we now occupy is, in some key ways, more advanced than "Star Trek" ever thought of being, if only because there are technological applications we now take for granted that people even 10 years ago, much less 20 or 30, could not have imagined. Social networking is a good example; Scotty never would have said, "The Twitter feed canna hold nae more than 140 characters, Captain!"

READ FULL STORY at WorldNetDaily.com

Be sure to check out
johnny2k's Tea Party Gear!

Facebook as the new public square ~ By Phil Elmore

Facebook has even been given the Hollywood treatment. "The Social Network," starring Justin Timberlake and Jesse Eisenberg, dramatizes the creation of the site, casting the social network's pivotal figures as would-be Internet conquerors so polarizing that some speculate whether the film could harm Facebook's business. The fact that the site is a business is readily forgotten by most of its users, myself included. While Facebook's revenue streams range from overt banner ads to virtual stores to more subtle, insidious pay-to-play addictive online games, most of its denizens pay no money (directly, anyway) to use it. They take it for granted, and as they come to rely on it, it insinuates itself into the fabric of their day-to-day lives. (emphasis my own)

"The Social Network" Official Trailer - In theatres Oct 1 2010

Video provided by SonyPictures

On the day that this Technocracy column was posted by Phil Elmore on WorldNetDaily.com, I wrote the following tweet:

Facebook as the new public square http://bit.ly/ce8m3H So compelling that I am not sure I can blog this one and do it justice. @phil_elmore   2:09 PM Sep 30th

Yes, I still feel the same way. It is still very compelling, and I am still not sure if I can do it justice in a blog, but I decided to try to add my thoughts and commentary anyway.

On the surface, it may not seem like a column that I would normally consider including on Blogging in Our Time 2 Escape. Normally, my genre is in American politics and economics. Phil's column, in this case, didn't really touch on politics, but it did focus on culture. But let's face it, culture has a direct influence on politics and economics, and vice versa.

As Phil says, "Social networking has inarguably expanded the 'public square'." Since Facebook has become a major player in the social networking world, with over 500 million users, it has created a gigantic public square. While MySpace.com tends to cater more toward Rock groups and rocking teens interested in music, in my humble opinion, Facebook has become the virtual public square of the world. Yes, on Facebook, while you can still find out what a long-lost friend had for dinner yesterday, there is much more to it now. For now, just about any political organization, candidate, organizations with a cause, or budding bloggers, can now have their own virtual website, without having to spend the big bucks to have a web presence. Honestly, any individual or organization with a cultural statement to make would be foolish NOT to have a Facebook page.

There is something else that Facebook has done that has gone unnoticed by many in the media. It has created a social network on an international scale. It has become the "public square" of a world without borders. And I think that one of the things we will all be learning is that because of this, cultures of specific geographies will soon begin to intermix. That's right, you heard it here first. And the big news is that the only thing that can possibly stop it from happening would be government intervention. (In other words, you may still not find too many Facebook friends living in North Korea... for now.) Or more bluntly, as Phil had written:

Meanwhile, Glorious Leader Obama, who never met a private citizen or news agency he could not vilify for daring to disagree with him, has set his Orwellian sights on Facebook posters (as well as Skype and Blackberry users) so that he and his thought police can wiretap these services on command.

What Phil was alluding to in his column, and what I am expounding on, is that Facebook is, or will soon be, the new 21st Century battleground of ideas and cultural conflicts. It is also a place for peaceful dissent when you don't like what your government is doing, at least for now. It would seem to be a better way to fight than by spilling blood. Well, okay, a few people have taken their Facebook disputes into the parking lots for actual physical confrontations... But, I digress.  Seriously, for the most part, Facebook is still a great way of sharing ideas and cultures where the worst that can happen is that you may occasionally be "unfriended." And if that is the worst that can happen, I think we may be able to still hope for a more peaceful world in our future. Just sayin'...

UPDATE 10.02.2010
Clayton Morris talks to Ben Mezrich about "The Social Network"

Video provided by TheREALjohnny2k

Social networking has inarguably expanded the "public square." It has made our personal relationships easier – to initiate, to maintain, and to conclude – thanks to the immediacy of online contact regardless of physical distance. It has therefore made our personal lives more volatile. This volatility is neither good nor bad; it is simply a fact of social networking in general and of Facebook in particular.

This is true whether you like it – or whether you, uh, don't click the "like" button.

Facebook as the new public square

By Phil Elmore

Posted: September 30, 2010 ~ 1:00 am Eastern

© 2010



I lost a friend last week. I know, because, Facebook told me so. It might, in fact, be more accurate to say that Facebook made the decision for me – the decision to conclude a friendship over which I was wringing my hands.

A close friend of mine, you see, had become increasingly distant over many months, coping with issues of his own. As I watched him alienate family members while doing his best also to push me away, his personality evolved. The proverbial "they" say that people don't change, but of course they do, and I am no less guilty of this than anyone. In this case, however, a person I had known for several years began offering unsolicited criticism and inflicting an ugly, frequently caustic and ever-more arrogant attitude on the rest of the world – when he was feeling like answering messages at all, which he often wouldn't.

Then, one day, I logged into Facebook and discovered he had "unfriended" me. While I was grappling with whether I should cut ties with someone I regarded as a brother, in order to remove from my life a negative influence, he was clicking a mouse and rendering me a virtual unperson. For a teenage girl, this would be a mortal offense. For me, as an adult and in perspective against the rest of my life, it was merely an irritant. But it was also a sobering declaration. I realized just how important Facebook has become in facilitating both the development and the termination of real-life friendships. In the synchronicity that often accompanies such mundane revelations, I quickly found other friends and family acting out this very phenomenon.

Surfing through my Facebook friends' pages, I discovered a relative embroiled in a furious argument with an even more distant relative. The exchange was pretty ugly, if harmless, and revealed a combative side to both individuals I hadn't realized existed. I vowed to stay out of it.

The same day, I spoke to another friend of mine whose wife, daughter, mother and father are all on Facebook. He'd received a frantic alert in the early morning from his mother, who, through his father, reported that his daughter had been leaving inappropriate comments on the site. It turned out that his dad, new to social networking, had misconstrued comments made by a friend of the daughter's as her own statements (an easy mistake to make, given how Facebook displays "wall posts" made by friends-of-friends in the user's activity stream).

Most of these people have in common the fact that they were all, at least at one time, people I would not have thought would have Facebook accounts. The site's powerful influence on society is thanks to how many people use it, after all. It encourages users to register real names rather than pseudonyms, making it easier to find and connect with your real-life acquaintances (although my friend Sidney Remington, last name withheld, was initially told by Facebook that his name could not possibly be real). Facebook blurs the lines dividing social categories, making virtual strangers "friends" and allowing everyone from your boss to your mother to the members of your high-school graduating class to know what you had for dinner last week (and whether you uploaded a photo of it from your mobile phone).

READ FULL STORY at WorldNetDaily.com

Be sure to check out
johnny2k's Tea Party Gear!

Are you prepared for technology to fail? ~ By Phil Elmore

It was late Sunday night when I went to post a column here, and a screen saying that Blogger was temporarily out of service would come up. "No problem," I thought, "I'll try back in a little while." For two hours, I continued to check back to see if blogger was up and running yet. I went to Blogger's status page to see if they knew about the problem.  I also checked on twitter to see if any tweets had been posted saying what the problem was or if they had any estimated time of when blogger would be back up. There was absolutely no communication from Blogger about the problem. I began to start losing patience after several hours of constant checking for status and checking to see if I could post yet.

What I did then was to do a search on twitter for "@blogger," which resulted in seeing a torrent of tweets to Blogger. I was relieved to know that I was not the only person with the problem. I also saw that many of the tweets written to Blogger were beginning to get nasty. A few of the tweeters were threatening to start blogging at WordPress, another free blogging service. But the overall theme of the tweets was beginning to show panic. That was when I tweeted to Phil to let him know about the problem and the panic when technology fails.


The one scary thought I had through the turmoil, though, was the fact that technology can fail due to human error, or, insidiously, because of an intentional act of terror, or worse: the government pulling the plug.  Just sayin'....

The reality of the 2003 Northeast Blackout was more mundane ... and perhaps more disturbing. The cascade failure of the power grid, which some parties tried to blame on Canada, underscored the relative fragility of the energy network on which we all depend so strongly. A single point of failure can, under the right conditions, become a catastrophic outage, plunging thousands and even millions of people into more than darkness. To lose power is not just to lose light, but to lose heating, cooling, communication and entertainment. In short, when technology fails, it fails us in every facet of our day-to-day lives. When we and our neighbors experience such a failure at the same time, panic, conflict and injury or death are not far behind.

The time to prepare is before technology fails. You depend on technology; we all do. How you cope with its failure is your choice ... and your responsibility.

By Phil Elmore

Posted: June 10, 2010 ~ 1:00 am Eastern

© 2010

On June 7, blogger stopped working. The outage was longer than just a couple of hours. It was long enough, in fact, for people who depend on blogger to, well, blog, to start to freak out. At microblogging site Twitter, a rising note of alarm started to creep into posts that went like this: "Is anybody else having trouble getting blogger to work?" It got worse as the outage persisted, and people who have made updating their blogs part of their daily routines suddenly couldn't communicate with their readers.

As much as we might be tempted to dismiss bloggers as basement-dwelling loners engaged in the Internet equivalent of talking to themselves, it's a fact that a great many people get their news from and spend time communicating with a network of bloggers who use public and commercial blogging sites (rather than their own websites). It was one of them, John Kubicek, who first brought the blogger.com outage to my attention. John maintains a popular conservative blog in which he summarizes major news events and links to various conservative and libertarian columns.

"See the panic?" John wrote to me. "PANIC? Like the end of the world kind of thing? It can be more than just annoying when technology fails. Think fishing and shrimping in the Gulf. People who depend on technology are affected by failures sometimes for their livelihood, and it can be devastating."

I thought about that for a long time. Mr. Kubicek quite rightly points out that when a major piece of our technological world goes awry, it can affect us to the point of destroying our jobs and our lives. The oil leak [See video below] still raging in the Gulf is one of the best examples. Technology intended to prevent an accident of this kind completely failed, triggering week after week of finger pointing, excuses and failed attempts at solutions – all while the Obama administration refused to take the problem seriously.

In only too typical fashion, Obama is more concerned with covering his own posterior while mouthing vulgar, contrived comments calculated to make him look tough. The problem in this case, of course, is that pencil-necked bureaucrats known for their stilted public speaking voices and their nagging tendency to apologize for America at every conceivable turn can rarely affect a street-tough image that anyone finds believable.

Dukakis rode a tank, the expression on his face making him look slack-jawed and simple underneath his ridiculous helmet. John Kerry put a shotgun over his shoulder, as if we'd believe he's an avid hunter who wouldn't do his best to ban your guns. The mediocre-at-best George W. Bush wore a flight suit and landed on an aircraft carrier, ludicrously declaring accomplished a mission that grinds on killing our soldiers to this day. And now Barack Hussein Obama, the man whose masterful manipulation of modern media prompted us to dub him our technology dictator, has taken to the airwaves threatening to kick someone's behind, as if we'll believe he's a passionate fighter for truth and justice and not simply a brittle, defensive, incompetent tyrant.

Technology brought us imagery of these failures. Technology was used by these men in their attempts to spin their failures and their flaws into some false belief on the part of voters that such men could or should be trusted. As we've learned only too well watching the devastation in the Gulf, however, technology can collapse at any moment, leaving us to discover just how dependent we have become in relying on something that is fundamentally not reliable.

What's the longest you've ever gone without power? In 1998, a derecho (a violent straight-line wind storm) knocked out the power to my city. Over the next three days, my desperation grew as hour after grueling hour without power, without hot water, without the ability to cook the majority of food in the kitchen, without a freezer to preserve that food, without any form of entertainment that was not battery-powered AM radio, without any light at night that did not come from the flashlights I had sprinkled throughout the house, took its toll on my patience. I started calling home whenever I was not present, hoping against hope that the answering machine would pick up, indicating that power was restored. After three days of this, when I finally heard my own digital voice on the other end of the line, the message I left was incomprehensible. I was too busy blubbering with delight that this long weekend's sojourn into primitive living was finally over.

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When technology invades the body ~ By Phil Elmore

The key words in Phil's column tonight, in discussing the use of technology for enhancing our bodies, are "potential for great harm." Not only is there the potential for breakdowns in the technology - both in the hardware and the software - there could also be the potential for misuse by government entities. Just saying...

We, as a society, crawl, walk and even run inexorably toward William Gibson's technologically saturated future. When we begin to accept technology into our bodies, we begin to absorb potential for great harm. As unreliable as any machine can be, dare we introduce this danger for any but the most necessary of reasons? What is the line between restoring one's lost functions and augmenting one's senses to a superhuman degree? At what point do we accept the possibility that an implanted device could experience a failure engineered by another person to hurt us?

Technology, while morally neutral, continues to raise moral questions. In this case, there are no easy answers.

By Phil Elmore

Posted: June 03, 2010 ~ 1:00 am Eastern

© 2010

In his groundbreaking cyberpunk novel, "Neuromancer," William Gibson writes of a dystopian society whose citizens are irrevocably enhanced and inevitably corrupted by technology. Technology surrounds them. Technology permeates everything they do. Technology is now part of their bodies:

This was it. This was what he was, who he was, his being. He forgot to eat. ... Sometimes he resented having to leave the deck to use the chemical toilet they'd set up in a corner of the loft. … Its rainbow pixel maze was the first thing he saw when he woke. He'd go straight to the deck, not bothering to dress, and jack in. He was cutting it. He was working. He lost track of days.

… His gaze swept past her, to the rack of blank monitors. He seemed to shiver. … "We cause the brain to become allergic to certain of its own neurotransmitters, resulting in a peculiarly pliable imitation of autism." His head swayed sideways, recovered. "I understand that the effect is now more easily obtained with an embedded microchip. ..."

There was a time when the idea of microchips embedded in a person's brain was the stuff of fantasy and science-fiction novels. Three summers ago, "Business Week" ran a special double issue in which it focused on the future of technology in the consumer and business worlds. In that issue, Louise Lee wrote of the many ways technology can be, is being, or could be used to enhance the human body.

Among the examples cited was the use of pacemakers by researchers at the Cleveland Clinic to treat obsessive-compulsive disorder by sending electrical impulses to the patients' brains. At Brown University, according to Lee, a few paralyzed patients have had chips implanted in their brains that relay neurological signals to computers (which, in turn, carry out certain tasks like moving cursors). At the University of Southern California, researchers are learning how to use computer chips to take over the functions of damaged tissue within the brain, as a means of circumventing brain damage – or even, as in Gibson's "Neuromancer," enhancing a healthy brain's memory capacity.

Many readers may have heard of the cochlear implant, a device that processes sound in order to impart signals to a hearing-impaired person. (A famous conservative talk-radio host uses one, in fact.) The device sends its signals through the auditory nerve to the brain. It is, therefore, a form of brain-computer interface – a "neuroprosthesis" that works with the human nervous system to restore functions of the body lost to disease or injury.

Research on brain-computer interfaces, including animal tests and experiments involving human beings, continues to push and expand the envelope of what can be accomplished with neuroprosthetics. In April, the New York Times reported on a new prosthetic device that replaces lost fingers. Made by a Scottish company, each motorized replacement finger is controlled by computer chips in the prosthesis itself. The action of the fingers is triggered by moving the muscles in the wearer's palm. While not a direct link to the brain, it is at least an indirect cue from the wearer's nervous system that tells the prosthesis what to do.

Implanting chips in the brains of living beings is no longer speculation. As a reality, it is now being discussed in terms of its ethical implications. "Worldwide," wrote Ellen M. McGee and G. Q. Maguire, Jr., "there are at least 3 million people living with artificial implants. In particular, research on the cochlear implant and retinal vision have furthered the development of interfaces between neural tissues and silicon substrate micro probes. The cochlear implant, which directly stimulates the auditory nerve, enables over 10,000 totally deaf people to hear sound; the retinal implantable chip for prosthetic vision may restore vision to the blind." The authors go on to raise fascinating questions about the line between fixing what's broken and enhancing what's already working – asking when and whether it is appropriate to "play God" with devices wired directly to the human brain.

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