Amazon -- the company, not the river -- has been on my shit list since they became patent-abusing bastards. But their recent actions have moved them up the list.

Most troubling is the sudden removal of WikiLeaks's content from Amazon Web Services. There was much speculation that the U.S. government put pressure on Amazon to make this happen -- but just a few weeks later, Amazon was bragging that the federal government is one of its biggest customers. This suggests that the pressure involved was good ol' money: piss of one of AWS's big customers, and Amazon will pull the plug on you.

But wait -- there's more. Rather like the rat bastards at Apple, Amazon's censorship of WikiLeaks goes along with a pattern of censorship of sexually explicit material.

It's not as if they don't know what they're doing. When people objected to a book with the (disgusting, to be sure) title Pedophile's Guide to Love and Pleasure showing up the Kindle store, Amazon said, "Amazon believes it is censorship not to sell certain books simply because we or others believe their message is objectionable. Amazon does not support or promote hatred or criminal acts, however, we do support the right of every individual to make their own purchasing decisions." That's a wonderful statement -- but Amazon then caved in and removed the book.

Amazon is now removing erotic incest fantasy fiction and works that portray homosexual rape -- and not just removing such stories from further sales, but deleting stories from purchaser's Kindles. Amazon was famously sued over such remote deletion last year, and supposedly set a policy which limited its use.

Amazon now says that the recent retroactive deletion was due to a "technical issue". Ha.

The Swedish Bed (hey, I don't name 'em) says, "Some great illustrators thought it might be cool to redesign Darth Vader using only the passage that first describes him in the script." Check out the alternate interpretations, some are pretty nifty.

As you may have gathered from my last post about them, I am not a fan of Steve Jobs and Apple; they've been on my shit list since the infamous look and feel lawsuits of the late 80s and early 90s. But I am a fan of Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. "Woz", as many know him, is pretty much the anti-Jobs: he was the engineering genius behind Apple's early success, back in the pre-Mac days when functionality and openness were Apple's virtues. He was the sole developer of the hardware, circuit board designs, and operating system for the Apple I, and did the vast majority of the design and development for the Apple II. Many technophiles have contrasted the openness and elegance of Woz's work with the closed, walled-garden, and pretty but technologically deficient designs pushed by Jobs.

Before Apple, Woz founded a Dial-a-Joke line; after Apple, he spent almost a decade teaching computer science, without pay, for public schools in Los Gatos. When Apple went public, Woz shared his stock options with employees he though had been unfairly left out. Wired columnist Leander Kahney calls Woz "a man who has lived his life according to deeply geeky and humanistic principles," which seems to me like a correct description and a high complement.

So when Woz talks about something with both technological and humanistic implications, like network neutrality, the wise pay heed:

The early Internet was so accidental, it also was free and open in this sense. The Internet has become as important as anything man has ever created. But those freedoms are being chipped away. Please, I beg you, open your senses to the will of the people to keep the Internet as free as possible. Local ISP's should provide connection to the Internet but then it should be treated as though you own those wires and can choose what to do with them when and how you want to, as long as you don't destruct them. I don't want to feel that whichever content supplier had the best government connections or paid the most money determined what I can watch and for how much. This is the monopolistic approach and not representative of a truly free market in the case of today's Internet.

Imagine that when we started Apple we set things up so that we could charge purchasers of our computers by the number of bits they use. The personal computer revolution would have been delayed a decade or more. If I had to pay for each bit I used on my 6502 microprocessor, I would not have been able to build my own computers anyway.

I don't believe in astrology in the least. But, I do check Rob Brezsny's "Freewill Astrology" every week, as a random source of insight. And this week's Capricorn entry, was so perfect that I guffawed out loud and made everyone in Bean Hollow turn and stare:

I have tracked down a formula that I think should be one of your central ongoing meditations in 2011. It's from newsman David Brinkley: "A successful person is one who can lay a firm foundation with the bricks that others throw at him or her." In the coming months you will be extra smart about knowing which of these bricks to use and how exactly to position them in your foundation. And more than that, Capricorn: You will have special insight not only about bricks that have been flung fairly recently, but also about those that have been hurled at any time in your life.

To regs@dhmh.state.md.us:

Dear Ms. Phinney:

It has been brought to my attention that that Board of Chiropractic and Massage Therapy Examiners is considering changes to Maryland's massage therapy regulations. As a Licensed Massage Therapist I find the elements of the proposal dealing with continuing education to be deeply disturbing.

The most troubling change is that which requires the State Board of Chiropractic and Massage Therapy Examiners to pre-approve all continuing education courses. Under this plan, the board will no longer accept courses that are approved by the National Certification Board for Therapeutic Massage and Bodywork (NCBTMB) -- even though NCBTMB certification is the dominant credential used for licensing in the first place. (Certification from the National Certification Commission for Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine (NCCAOM) is also recognized for licensure, and as an Asian Bodywork Therapist I believe that is very important.)

This will reduce the quality of continuing education available to LMTs in Maryland. I have received much of my continuing education at the national conventions of the American Organization for Bodywork Therapies of Asia (AOBTA), traveling as far as California to receive instruction from the best teachers available. AOBTA is an NCBTMB certified provider, but if each individual state were to require approval of continuing education courses, such national providers would find it difficult or impossible to continue.

The proposal states that it "has no economic impact" and "has minimal or no economic impact on small businesses." This is a stunningly inaccurate statement. Many, if not most, massage therapists work for small businesses or are sole proprietors themselves, and continuing education makes up a significant outlay. And this proposal would heavily impact continuing education providers both in Maryland and across the nation.

This proposal is not in the best interests of the public, and I strongly urge DHMH to reject it. Thank you.

Very truly yours,

Tom Swiss
Dipl. A.B.T. (NCCAOM), AOBTA-CP, LMT
tms@EarthTouchShiatsu.com

If you needed more proof that Apple is a bunch of evil censoring bastards, here it is: Apple has pulled a "WikiLeaks" app from its App store. The $1.99 app, created by Igor Barinov to make the WikiLeaks data more browsable and accessible, was yanked without explanation. The app had no data in it that isn't already public.

This comes on top of Steve Jobs telling us he wants to give us "freedom from porn", and Apple banning apps with political cartoons by a Pulitzer-winning cartoonist, a gay travel guide to New York, and graphic novels based on James Joyce's Ulysses and on The Importance of Being Earnest. Public outcry has made them pull back on some of those decisions, but it does not make the fact that they were made in the first place less outrageous.

"Think Different"? No. More and more, Apple shows that it wants people who use its hardware to think the same.

And if you have a problem with that, Apple might just put you down the memory hole, as when they delete from their message boards discussion threads that are critical of their shiny but underfunctional geegaws.

Of course, censorship never does take very well. (Let's be clear: this is censorship. Apologists for corporatism like to say that only the government can engage in censorship, but that's not what the word means; when a business says "this is objectionable" rather than "people won't buy this", that's censorship.) The iPad has a built-in web browser, and though it doesn't support Flash -- the format of most video on the web today -- adult website "YouPorn" is already offering a selection of its videos in HTML5, which does work on the iPad.

So you can still view pr0n on the iPad -- just like you can still view WikiLeaks information. That does not change the fact that Apple's attempt to moralize is more appropriate for a church than for a technology company; and given that Apple is getting its fingers more and more around our information channels, it's much more disturbing.

If you support free expression, support free software. So long as you don't have the choice of what to install on your computer, your freedom is limited. We're headed more and more toward the world RMS envisioned in his short story The Right To Read.

Zelda's Inferno exercise: write a "Song of Yourself", a poem in praise of your own highest nature.

"I celebrate myself, and sing myself," said old Uncle Walt
So why not you and me?

Me, I am proud to say that every star in the Universe is attracted to my body
I am loved by dogs
The sun does not hide its face from me, nor the flowers their scent
And the moon herself...well, a gentleman is discrete

I have seen the Clear Light reflected in the faces of every person passing by
I have fought the forces of evil, and they have not yet vanquished me

I have seen the Daibutsu at Nara during the New Year's festival
And been the plaything of the Goddess of Chaos
And been led by a mysterious woman to the top of a sacred mountain

I can use chopsticks, and play Louie Louie on the guitar
And fold an origami crane (if I have the instructions in front of me)

And no one is closer to the Divine than I am.

This is about all I knew about her: Emily Salmon was about my age, didn't smoke, loved dogs, and was trying to go vegetarian. She lived in Hagerstown, where she worked as an afterschool aide. But as she said in an e-mail, "Hagerstown is no place for a single person with no family. I want to meet more people." She wanted to become a math teacher, so she was going to move to Catonsville and take classes at CCBC. She was going to rent my spare bedroom. I only met her the one time she came over to see the room; she seemed like a really nice person.

She was supposed to come over last Saturday to sign paperwork and get a key, but I never heard from her. I figured she had decided at the last minute to take a room elsewhere, or got cold feet about moving (she seemed a little nervous about it).

Today I got a call from her cousin. Emily passed away. I don't know the details.

I didn't know her at all. But in a couple of months we could have been friends. And that seems to call for some sort of commemoration. So may you rest in peace, Emily.

Zelda's Inferno exercise: write about an untold family story. I deviated from the instructions...

Grieving is made of stories, and my task here is to listen, to be the conduit for the healing energy of narrative to flow to ground. They tell me stories of this woman I never met, they explain the photos. And all I do, all I can do, is smile and nod and um-hum at the appropriate times, and sometimes ask a question to move the story forward, to help the teller shape her or his thoughts. I am not the story teller here but the story extractor, gently tugging on the tale to help keep it moving, trusting that this helps, that as the heartmind tells the story of the other it sorts out the story of the self.