In light of the Gawker story on blogger payola, I thought I would share my own story and response. Earlier this month I received this email:

I’ve been reading lafiga.firedoglake.com and have a story idea that might interest your followers:

“One of the fundamental arguments for a European Union was the ability for companies to easily move across borders. An increasing number of European-based companies are moving a portion of their staff to other countries within Europe and more commonly to Asia – it simply makes sense in a global economy. Expanding facilities in different countries allows companies to take advantage of lower operating costs and taxes or simply to serve a new territory – and they often need proven managers to run these operations. Moving is a hassle for everyone, but utilizing relocation resources such as specialized agencies, realtors that have a national or global presence and proven courier services companies can make the transition smoother. In this article, I will discuss some potential resources for businesses and their employees.”

Would you be interested in having me write a guest post for your blog? Alternatively I could just supply you with some great trend information that you can use to write a post yourself.

Let me know if you’re interested – I think this topic will be of great interest to your readers.

Thanks for your time and best regards,
Margot M
Blog Content Guild
(Please let me know if you don’t want to receive any more emails from me! Thanks!)

So I wrote back:

Dear Margot,

I am very familiar with that process you describe which is known as neo-liberalism and has nothing to do with “liberal” politics; and which has caused horrific financial consequences to economies across the globe, both in the counties which have lost business and in the countries which have been the recipients of new businesses (think about the Special Economic Zones on the coast of China).

If you have been reading my site as you claim, you will notice that I cover pop culture, LGBT rights, religion, film, tv and other matters and have a progressive political slant. I wonder why you think a progressive political site would be interested in encouraging economic ruin and subhuman working conditions. Have you looked into the working conditions in the countries where some of these companies relocate? “Lower taxes” in another country only serves to benefit the company/shareholders, not the workers; and when companies relocate en masse, the finances of the mother country are eroded. With the loss of tax dollars comes the loss of funds for roads, schools, care for the elderly and ill. Those tax savings do not trickle down, and such practices are one of the root of the current Occupy protests. Seriously, you promote and thus would like to see more businesses leave your homeland, creating unemployment and social turmoil at home while exploiting workers and the environment elsewhere? Um, gross.

While I appreciate your entrepreneurship in trying to pitch me such an inappropriate and venal story idea, I can read between the lines of your email: You wish to promote certain companies with which you have a relationship. Remember this well: Writer and whore share many of the same letters, and it is wise to know who your trick is before you lift your skirts.

Needless to say, I haven’t heard back from her.

Udderly creepy! Scientists in China have created a herd of 300 cows that produce human breast milk, according to Sky News, and the hu-moo juice should be available on Chinese supermarket shelves in three years.  Using transgenic and cloning technology similar to that which produced Dolly the sheep, cloned cow embryos were injected with human genes and then implanted into surrogate cows.

Workers at University of Beijing’s dairy farm say the result–identical to human breast milk with the same antibacterial and immune-boosting qualities:

is sweeter and stronger than the usual bovine variety

Genetically modified food is popular in China where GM papayas, tomatoes, potatoes, and cooking oil are already widely available for sale. The team at University of Beijing have already produced animals that are resistant to mad cow disease, as well as beef cattle that are genetically modified to produce more nutritious meat.  The Chinese government recently approved insect-resistant rice and corn modified to help pigs absorb more nutrients.

Is there a breeding program to cross boy hu-moos to girl hu-moos? Do their heifer offspring also produce hu-milk? Or are boy hu-moos killed? What happens to their meat? And I have to wonder if human genes injected into the cloned milk cow embryos were screened for predispositions to genetic illnesses.

Lead cow developer and director of the research project, Professor Li Ning, says:

There are 1.5 billion people in the world who don’t get enough to eat. It’s our duty to develop science and technology, not to hold it back. We need to feed people first, before we consider ideals and convictions.

Hu-moo dairy worker  Jiang Yao said of the cow-man milk:

It’s good. It’s better for you because it’s genetically modified.

This caught my eye:

The Gainesville (Georgia) School Board has promised it would look into why two Chinese oriented meditation websites come up as ‘occult’ and are blocked by the Gainesville High School Internet filter…Expressing her concern at Monday’s board meeting held in the high school cafeteria, Mary Silver, who supports Clear Wisdom and Falun Dafa, told board members the sites do not encourage involvement in the occult. Far from it, she said.

Falun Dafa is also known as Falun Gong, a form of exercise and meditation banned by the Chinese government in 1999. Practitioners have been jailed, sent to work camps and tortured. And if you believe some websites, killed and their organs sold for transplants. Occult means “secret” or “hidden.” At time the word is equated with “esoteric,” and has by used by some to describe practices like meditation, yoga, astrology, witchcraft as well as various mono- and polytheistic faiths which may practice these exercises and arts. Lumped into “occult” by pop culture are werewolves, vampires, zombies and anything else scary.  Eye roll.

A quick search for “Falun Dafa” and “occult” gets you to discussion forums like Vampire.nu and Occultforum.org, as well as one site that claims Falun Dafa practitioners

collect energy for [their] own benefit, but a portion is re-directed (by occult processes) to the Falun Gong cause in China.

So basically, Falun Dafa practitioners believe they are using some not readily known method to help gain freedom to practice their religion and to draw attention to human rights abuses. Kinda like prayer circles where the faithful pray to make money or to get rid of demons in their neighborhood.

But wait a minute.  Why is the term “occult” blocked by the high school’s internet filter? What other words are blocked? And why? Is “atheist” blocked? “Evolution”?   Are certain religions? Philosophies? And how would parents feel if terms like “resurrection” or “son of God” were blocked?

In April Prince William School District in Virginia received a letter from the ACLU pointing out that the school district’s internet ban on the term LGBT was unconstitutional. TDB reported:

According to the ACLU, barred websites under the system’s “LGBT” filter include those for educational organization The Gay Lesbian and Straight Education Network, school diversity campaign the Gay-Straight Alliance Network, anti-bullying initiative Day of Silence, and anti-suicide initiative the It Gets Better Project.

Meanwhile, because Prince William County Public Schools does not elect to bar “political/activist groups,” “health,” or “reference,” it currently allows students to access anti-LGBT websites like People Can Change, the National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality, and Exodus International.

At they time they sent out the letter, the ACLU issued the following statement:

The ACLU also sent similar letters to schools in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Texas as part of the organization’s “Don’t Filter Me” initiative, which seeks to combat illegal censorship of LGBT information on public school computer systems by enlisting students to check their school’s web browsers and report what they find.

Under the First Amendment right to free speech and the Equal Access Act, gay-straight alliances and LGBT support groups should have access to national organizational websites that help them to function, just as other groups, such as Key Clubs and the chess clubs, are able to access their national websites.

Ken Blackstone, a spokesman for the Prince William school system said that:

the school system is required by federal law to use Internet filtering software to keep students and staffers from looking at inappropriate content at school. He said the division’s Blue Coat filtering software blocks out 32 specific categories, including, for instance, sites containing pornography or promoting violence or drugs.

Butt the process is automated and sometimes the software doesn’t correctly differentiate between, for example, gay support groups and gay pornography.

In order to correct that problem, Blackstone said the school division has a process by which students or staff can request to have a site unblocked. He said that to the best of his knowledge, no one made such a request in this case.

So, if websites about certain  “occult” faiths, philosophies and belief systems are not allowed into the school, and other religions and philosophies are allowed to pass through the Internet filter, why? Who sets up these filters? Are they set by prevailing community standards, the Federal government, or by the school itself using certain guidelines and their own interpretations?

Seems though that blocking equal access to all religions is a blow against freedom of religion, one of the very cornerstones of our nation and one of the reasons we even have Founding Fathers.

And side note: banning the word “occult” prevents seekers from finding information about colon cancer, arthritis and even baseball!

Many, many years ago, 76 million years ago to be exact, in a galaxy beyond the Marcabian vortexes, the internets (both of them) were in a before-spore state–the not the thought of spores, not even a logos of spores; rather the frisson of an idea which would begin to fruit with the Domain Name Scams of the 90s and the DdoS battles, the ongoing Sockpuppet Wars and of course the Freewebs Cruise which launched a gajillion hits from 2008 on.

The tools tried true by  CULT (Crazy Ultra Loony Tunes) and ANON (nice oxy- and hydro-morons in it for teh lulz; how can a nothing be a something?) laid a template for the current Wikileaks Web War, wherein a website is shut down by malicious, rapid fire hits, the nowadays equivalent of hitting AOL’s IM key repeatedly to knock someone off line.

Digby had this to say:

Wikileaks exposed the graft and corruption of a particular group of Icelandic bankers and they are being called to account for it by their people. It exposed the secretive Church of Scientology [LaFiga: The first wave of stuff from CoS was originally a doxdump on alt.rel.scientology and Xenu.net and mirrored elsewhere circa 1994 before there was Wikileaks; the volcanic space opera OT3 appeared online, and props need to go to 2005's "Trapped in the Closet" episode of South Park before the Wikileaks super sexy secondary big dump which thumbed its nose at the cult and stoked the fires of Chanology, itself a bunch of Anonymous] It exposed the ongoing war between China and Google (which, by the way, Joe Lieberman sees as an excellent template for the US to emulate.) And, if they don’t succeed in threatening the entire internet, we are likely to soon see a trove of communications exposing corruption in the US banking system.

What baffles me is that when a bunch of self-mythologized, basement dwelling, distance-learning, snap-crackle-pop culture munchers–though stereotypes begin somewhere–allegedly acting as individuals or with a queen-less hivemind–are seemingly at cause for allegedly Being Bad by publishing Top Sekret relidjush doktrines, and then deciding ot shut down sites, it’s

Oh noes cyber-tewwowism

and there’s prosecution. But when like, it’s Other Somebodies publishing Top Sekret dokumints and the governments don’t like them, it’s okay that there’s an organized DdoS against those Other Somebodies? Now something even uglier has happened:

Today Wikileaks encountered a new form of censorship that should make all of us shudder. Rather than being shutdown at the web hosting level, EveryDNS shutdown the wikleaks.org domain name.

Maybe it’s not “organized”, but just a tribillion of self-mythologizing individuals all butthurt at Wikileaks for as many reasons as they have Cheeto stains, all sleepy hollowed and riding the refresh button. And some I bet wish they’d thought of it, cuz the click thrus must >9000. Think of the stats!

And where exactly do some of these people work who do all this neato stuff?  For whom? And what do they do in their spare time?

And wow, how many mega-cloud servers are there? Can a site get effectively disappeared because Lots of Corps & Govts don’t like it? Can it be renamed and mirrored and hidden? It’s happened before–giant games of whackamole, but that was before white hats got hired as experts, some who might have costumes and coats of many colors.

In any case, It’s from the Internets, expect It. They are never gonna give you up.