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increased unrest — a process aided by access to
cellphones and the Internet — represents more than a security
problem for the leaders in Beijing. It threatens their whole model
of command-and-control capitalism. China's rapid economic growth
has relied on the ability of its rulers to raze villages and move
mountains to make way for the latest factory towns and shopping
malls. If the people living on those mountains use blogs and text
messaging to launch a mountain-people's-rights uprising with each
new project, and if they link up with similar uprisings in other
parts of the country, China's dizzying expansion could grind to a
halt.

With its militant protests and mobile population, China
confronts a fundamental challenge. How can it maintain a system
based on two dramatically unequal categories of people: the
winners, who get the condos and cars, and the losers, who do the
heavy labor and are denied those benefits? More urgently, how can
it do this when information technology threatens to link the losers
together into a movement so large it could easily overwhelm the
country's elites?

The answer is Golden Shield. When Tibet erupted in protests
recently, the surveillance system was thrown into its first live
test, with every supposedly liberating tool of the Information Age
— cellphones, satellite television, the Internet —
transformed into a method of repression and control. As soon as the
protests gathered steam, China reinforced its Great Firewall,

"Bush helped me get
my vision," he has said. Similarly, when challenged on the fact
that dome cameras are appearing three to a block in Shenzhen and
Guangzhou, Chinese companies respond that their model is not the
East German Stasi but modern-day London.

Human-rights activists are quick to point out that while the
tools are the same, the political contexts are radically different.

I thought that reminded me of a quote of Darwin's, and sure enough it did:

"About thirty years ago there was much talk that geologists ought only to observe and not theorize; and I well remember someone saying that at this rate a man might as well go into a gravel-pit and count the pebbles and describe the colours. How odd it is that anyone should not see that all observation must be for or against some view if it is to be of any service!"

Presidential debates should include all candidates who have qualified for a sufficient number of ballots lines to accumulate the electoral votes to be elected president.

as Obama softens his positions on civil liberties, political reform, trade policy, presidential accountability and ending the war -- issues on which Nader has long focused -- his prospects improve.

And one does not have to be a Nader supporter to hope, for the sake of democracy, that they improve sufficiently to earn him a place in the Google/YouTube debate and other fall match-ups.

This is a world where massive amounts of data and applied mathematics replace every other tool that might be brought to bear. Out with every theory of human behavior, from linguistics to sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology. Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves.