Because the companies behind SOPA are using international trade agreements as a backdoor to pass SOPA-style laws

SOPA’s supporters are pushing two agreements: ACTA and TPP1. ACTA would criminalize users, encourage internet providers to spy on you, and make it easier for media companies to sue sites out of existence and jail their founders. Sound familiar? That’s right, ACTA is from the same playbook as SOPA, but global. Plus it didn’t even have to pass through Congress2.

TPP goes even farther than ACTA, and the process has been even more secretive and corrupt. Last weekend (we wish this was a joke) trade negotiators partied with MPAA (pro-SOPA) lobbyists before secret negotiations in a Hollywood hotel, while public interest groups were barred from meeting in the same building.3

Trade agreements are a gaping loophole, a secretive backdoor track that–even though it creates new laws–is miles removed from democracy. Trade negotiators are unelected and unaccountable, so these agreements have been very hard for internet rights groups to stop.

But now the tide is turning. Fueled by the movement to stop SOPA, anti-ACTA protests are breaking out across the EU, which hasn’t ratified ACTA. The protests are having an impact: leaders in Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia have backtracked on ACTA.4 Now a massive round of street protests in over 200 cities is planned for this Saturday February 11th.

We’re planning an online protest this Saturday to support the protests in the streets. Why? Because together we can drive millions of emails to key decision makers–and start tipping the scales like we did on SOPA.

Can you take part? Click here to get the code to run on your site!

We just built an ACTA & TPP contact tool, and it’s not just a petition. It’s code for your site that figures out the visitor’s country and lets them email all their Members of European Parliament–the politicians who will be voting on ACTA in June–or the trade negotiators behind TPP. This direct contact between voters and their officials, driven by websites of all sizes, was instrumental in the fight against SOPA.

We can use the same tactics to defeat ACTA & TPP, but we need your help!

Support the street protests with a flood of emails to the officials responsible for ACTA & TPP. Get the code for your website!

Don’t have a website? Tell officials in your country to scrap ACTA & TPP! And spread the word about Saturday’s protests!

This is going to be tough fight. But we need to make secretive trade agreements harder to pass than US law. If we don’t, our internet’s future belongs to the lobbyists behind SOPA.

This is just the beginning,

–Holmes Wilson, Tiffiniy Cheng, Joshua Blount & the whole Fight for the Future team.

P.S. This map of ACTA street protests in Europe is amazing. The largest has almost 50,000 RSVP’s!

Sources:

1. For more information on ACTA, read these excellent articles from Techdirt and La Quadrature du Net. For information on TPP, read this Ars Technica piece. For video, watch this.

2. Obama’s signing of ACTA may have been unconstitutional. See Anti-counterfeiting agreement raises constitutional concerns and Techdirt.

3. Hollywood gets to party with TPP negotiators, public interest groups get thrown out of the hotel.

4. Ars Technica: Czech, Slovak governments backing away from ACTA, too.

Read the entire article here.

As most of you already know, I moved from the US to The Netherlands last summer. After all the hubbub in the US media last year about the supposedly poor quality of the healthcare system in the UK, I am the first one to admit I was very nervous about having to find a psychiatrist in my new country. Yes, I know The Netherlands and the UK are miles/kilometers (and a sea or two) apart, but the US media does make it sound as if all European healthcare was spawned from Beelzebub himself. I am very happy to say that in The Netherlands, for me, this just isn’t so.

Unlike in the US, there is not a shortage of psychiatrists where I now live. After seeing my GP, I was given an appointment at GGZ to see a psychiatric intake nurse almost immediately, and the appointment lasted for a full hour. The next appointment, a mere 3 days later, was an intake with the psychiatrist. Imagine my surprise when that session lasted 1.5 hours (with my last two American psychiatrists, each spent only half an hour with me during our first appointment). Within the first week I spent a total of almost three hours with my new team, had thoroughly (and I mean thoroughly) reviewed my history, had my present concerns carefully addressed and left my appointment with a battle plan to manage my Bipolar.

This efficiency frightened me to the point I almost needed a Xanax.

Now, you can’t spend all of this time with nurses and psychiatrists without a few new items emerging. One thing that did change was my diagnosis, from BP II to BP I, and I am comfortable with that. Especially after all the care and attention that was paid in documenting my history. I have long suspected this to be the case, and even wrote a post questioning my BP II diagnosis last October [Hypomania or Mania - Which Was it?] Another reason I respect the change is at no point did I relay my original diagnosis nor did the nurse or psychiatrist ask, “Which flavor of bipolar are you?” Instead they allowed the history itself to reveal the diagnosis.

It also seems that my new Dr and I are on the same page, thank goodness, when it comes to antidepressants. My weight gain is out of control due to the Wellbutrin and with diabetes running in the family, I thought I’d give it the old college try to dodge that bullet a little while longer. I came away from my appointment with the elimination of Wellbutrin in very gradual stages (it has always caused me to gain weight) and a minor adjustment to the very low dose of Abilify I am already on (which never made me gain one pound). So, with that said, I am going to indulge myself with a bit of whining. Because coming off an antidepressant is like wallowing in the fifth circle of hell. All of the withdrawal symptoms make me extremely angry that I ever had to go on the stuff in the first place. I can’t wait for the nausea, stuttering vision and inevitable migraines! Ah, just talking about what I have to look forward to…I can feel my blood beginning to boil with fifth circle rage already.

So, in the spirit of a right and proper free-for-all, I open the floor to all of you. Share your horror stories about the nightmares involved when trying to find a new psychiatrist – about going off of antidepressants. Or, what the heck! Let’s talk about the unpleasantness of titer-ing down / going off of any psychiatric drug.

According to critics, ACTA bypasses the sovereign laws of participating nations, forcing ISP’s across the globe to act as internet police.

Worse, it appears to go much further than the internet, cracking down on generic drugs and making food patents even more radical than they are by enforcing a global standard on seed patents that threatens local farmers and food independence across the developed world.

Watch the embedded YouTube videos in this Forbes article. Horrified? You should be.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2012/01/23/if-you-thought-sopa-was-bad-just-wait-until-you-meet-acta/

Special thanks for the link to my 16 year old son who is paying attention to the world around him.

This morning I came across an article in the Philly Post addressing the possibility Newt Gingrich may be bipolar and if so, should he be allowed to become President of the United States.

I am going to cut to the chase on this one.  A diagnosis of Bipolar should, indeed, exclude a candidate from the presidency. And I say this as a Bipolar sufferer myself. While I agree with the theory that the very qualities that mark mood disorders make for great leaders in times of crisis, (A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness by Dr. Nassir Ghaemi) the reality is allowing someone who can become manic or gravely depressed to have access to ‘The Button’ is ridiculous. Additionally, Clearance is not granted to those with serious mental illness, so allowing the Commander-in-Chief to suffer from Bipolar is utterly absurd.

It seems that Liz Spikol, the article’s author,  and I are on the same page with this topic.  She writes, “Now let’s say Newt Gingrich has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder I. Is he still a viable candidate for president? No, but it’s not about the diagnosis. It’s about the behavior.”  That’s absolutely correct.  It is about the behavior. It’s not about lack of intelligence (bipolar people are often times very intelligent), socioeconomics, party affiliation or stigma.  It’s all about whether the person in question can present rational, consistent leadership for one of the most powerful nations on earth, as well as whether they are able to handle stress in a time of crisis – the latter being a well-documented trigger for a bipolar episode.

So, for everyone out there, both foreign and domestic, I give the floor to you.  Any thoughts on whether a Bipolar sufferer is a viable candidate for the US Presidency?

The largest online protest in history has fundamentally changed the game.  You were heard.

On January 18th, 13 million of us took the time to tell Congress to protect free speech rights on the internet. Hundreds of millions, maybe a billion, people all around the world saw what we did on Wednesday.  See the amazing numbers here and tell everyone what you did.

This was unprecedented. Your activism may have changed the way people fight for the public interest and basic rights forever.
The MPAA (the lobby for big movie studios which created these terrible bills) was shocked and seemingly humbled.  “‘This was a whole new different game all of a sudden,’ MPAA Chairman and former Senator Chris Dodd told the New York Times. ‘[PIPA and SOPA were] considered by many to be a slam dunk.’”

“’This is altogether a new effect,’ Mr. Dodd said, comparing the online movement to the Arab Spring. He could not remember seeing ‘an effort that was moving with this degree of support change this dramatically’ in the last four decades, he added.”

SOPA and #PIPA will likely return in some form.  But when they do, we’ll be ready.

Homeland had a great night at the Globes last Sunday.  “…Claire Danes, the show’s incandescent star, was nominated for, and then won, the Golden Globe for best actress in a TV drama series; the show also won for best TV drama.”  This has the bipolar community (and my husband) abuzz with kudos and hope that this series will help fight the stigma bipolar disorder carries.

But, will it?

Conflict is what makes stories interesting. Ask any novelist, screenplay writer, basically anyone who tells stories for a living and they will tell you that without some good conflict, you ain’t got nuttin’. What made Carrie such an interesting character in Season 1 is not that she is bipolar, but that she was very good at setting up her own conflicts. She set up illegal surveillance to watch a suspected terrorist, stalked the man, had sex with hm, fell in love with him, compromised her job as a CIA agent at every turn and, let’s face it, sometimes acted pretty loony in the process. Although the above made for great plot points and conflict, there’s not much I can do with that to fight stigma. Because Homeland is all about characters, not bipolar. And Carrie has some serious character flaws. When we are trying to fight the stigma of an illness, an individual’s character really has nothing to do with any of it.

Fighting stigma is about educating people about the illness at hand and dispelling any misconceptions. People need to be educated about bipolar disorder without muddying the waters with flawed character traits. Only when people understand the illness can they begin to see that just because someone is bipolar, it does not mean our national security will be threatened. If anything, Homeland is bad for fighting stigma. What makes Carrie Matheson a great character is exactly what makes her bad for fighting stigma.

Jamie Stiehm concluded her NYT Op-Ed article, “So let a thousand conversations bloom. Secrets held up to light and air lose their power in the public square. Spies know it as keepers, and writers know it as tellers.” True.  But, it’s still up to us Bipolars to set the agenda for the conversations about fighting stigma. We need to lead participants down a path not about a fictitious character on a TV show, but down a path of education.

Links to a report for which there is a $3500 fee, but the takeaway here is the patents for Zyprexa, Abilify, Seroquel and Geodon will expire by 2017.

Many websites are blacked out today to protest proposed U.S. legislation that threatens internet freedom: the Stop Internet Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA). From personal blogs to Wikipedia, sites all over the web — including this one — are asking you to help stop this dangerous legislation from being passed.

Take Action:
Email Congress

Call Congress

Join the Blackout!