layout: post title: Hack the Planet — Today I went to the Suburban Civic Fair at the local Harper College in Palatine, IL. It was quite interesting. The keynote was Jim Hightower a radio personality, author and radical.

He made it clear how we can interface the world. Break ourselves down to our fundamentals and people should be able to understand what we want is what they want.

Fundamentals being things like social justice. Benefit of society. Equality. People may not practice these things, but they believe in them. This is how you talk to the common person.

When we talk about how we are against this war in Afghanistan - and at an even larger level the war that the US has been waging on the world in order to maintain its dominance its hard to understand. So we break it down. First we have to define what the US has done in the past. There’s a laundry list which I only know of a few recent things (e.g. Palestine, Iraqi sanctions, Chile, Cuba, Iran, etc).

We need to explain how that the sole reason we are against these wars is that they have been against people’s freedoms and rights. Simple fact is - we support regimes like Saudi Arabia and Israel which have brutal governments. At least Israel is a democracy - but it needs to evolve past the racism and oppresion of Palestinians. Saudi’s a dictatorship. What is our government thinking? The Shah of Iran was a dictator - what was our government thinking?

Its really simple. In the short term, getting in bed with a dictator looks good on paper if you’re after oil. It however adds to the hatred. We need to do things that are for the people - not just the foreign governments. Lets look beyond the oil and towards democracy and self-government.

Let’s hack the planet and make it right. Remember - hackers aren’t malevolent. (and since we’re defining thins Jihad is the human struggle)