Category: Uncategorized

IP is book burning

Jeffrey Tucker explains how IP reduces the store of human knowledge:

Last week, I had to haggle with an authors’ consortium in Britain concerning a 1946 text. The author had no children and he died before the copyright on the book expired. Someone swept in a renewed the thing, thereby taking it off the market. It hasn’t been in print for some 40 years. A paralegal helped me discover the owner, which turns out to be some scam operation that preys on people who want to reprint books. I asked to distribute the thing online. The consortium never seem to have heard of the internet. They wanted a fee for $1 per book with a contract that lasted 2 years and a limit on our sales. None of this works for us. So we said no. As a result, the book, which is not that mission critical, goes back to its eternal resting place, all because of “intellectual property” which is just so obviously a hoax and a violation of human rights.

This is only one of dozens of cases I’ve dealt with. And there are actually millions of books in this condition, effectively burned and destroyed by IP law.

The amount of human knowledge that is being lost to future generations thanks to IP law is really disturbing. Since scientage, or “the body of scientific knowledge” is one of the tripartite aspects of science, science fetishists who habitually fulminate about an incipient “new Dark Ages” should really spend a lot less time worrying that illiterate and innumerate children run the risk of not having TE(p)NS talked over their ignorant heads and a lot more about the disappearance of information that was published in the past. Lest you think there is nothing valuable to be learned from keeping the words of dead authors alive, consider the cost of this temporary loss of this insignificant tidbit of scientage.

WND column

No Change after Nov. 2

There is nothing surprising about the Republican tsunami that will rock Congress on Election Day. It was obvious given the parody of governance demonstrated by the Obama-Pelosi-Reid triumvirate of incompetence. I first predicted that the Republicans would reclaim the House, and quite possibly the Senate as well, back on July 14, long before the conventional wisdom otherwise known as Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight began suggesting that they might have a shot.

Now here is another prediction: The tea party is about to learn that its efforts to transform the Republican Party by working through it are doomed to failure. In fact, there is a reasonable chance that as soon as 2012, the tea party will go from the Republican Party’s most visible ally to its most vicious and implacable enemy.

I laughed, I did

It looks like the little mommmyblogger media whore got what she always wanted – TV!

Providing analysis and historical context will be ABC News contributors George Will, Cokie Roberts, Donna Brazile and Matthew Dowd. They will be joined by Ron Brownstein, Editorial Director for the National Journal Group and conservative commentator Dana Loesch.

Good for her, if that’s what she wants. But no wonder conservatives are so hapless. Look at their “opinion leaders”. I’d almost be tempted to watch, just to see the expression on George Will’s face when the mommyblogger makes one of her nonsensical attempts at a point.

VPFL Week 7

94 Greenfield Grizzlies(2-5)
74 Moundsview Meerkats (1-6)

84 RR Redbeards (3-4)
66 Winston Reverends (4-3)

92 Blackmouth Banksters (5-2)
78 Judean Rhyneauxs (4-3)

48 Valders Quixotes
44 Meigs Marauders

46 Bane Sidhe
39 MS Swamp Spartans

The Piranha of the Serengeti are looking simply woeful this year. Even when I finally managed to score some points, I got lit up by the nearly-as-woeful Grizzlies; who would have thought the worst two teams in the league would shoot it out. But while I can blame myself for trusting those who said Shonn Greene and Ryan Mathews were going to have big years – my first two draft picks in lieu of keepers – it’s just bad luck that has seen opposing teams score 520 points against me, 170 more than the Bane Sidhe so far. But these things should balance out over the course of the season, so even if I’m already out of the playoff hunt, I can still achieve respectability.

On the NFL front, why does Chilly insist on trying to talk smack with Belichick? Does he not have enough problems on his hands?

90% Democrat

That’s what Nate Silver says about the odds for Senate on October 29th. I suggested it would go Republican back on July 14th. Regardless, we’ll see what happens soon enough.

Senate: Republican chances of taking over the Senate are up a tick to 11 percent Saturday from 10 percent Friday.

Needless to say, with regards to the most important issues facing the nation, it doesn’t matter which of the ruling party’s two factions holds the legislative branch. Republicans are even more loyal to the banks than the bought-and-paid-for Democrats thanks to their ideological confusion of corporatism for capitalism. But speaking of my far-fetched predictions, here’s another very interesting poll.

“Half of Democrats Think Obama Should Face Primary. An AP-Knowledge Networks poll finds that 47% of Democrats think Presidential Obama should be challenged for the 2012 Democratic presidential nomination”

Time travel!

My own feeling is that time travel is rather less likely than a secret elite making use of advanced technology. Although apparently less advanced phone-wise than we are now; that mobile phone looks bigger than my Android device. Of course, this raises the question: if they had phones in 1928, what do they have now?

Mailvox: Jesus and war

LJ has his doubts:

Read your bit on Jesus and war. It is hard to believe Jesus would support all the death that War brings to innocent children. What would he say about our inability to put money into education for the poor. You are fooling yourself.

I’m always a little taken aback when people begin with a reasonable, if mistaken, point, and then go on to make asses of themselves by making baseless declarative statements about me. How am I fooling myself? And with regards to what? While everyone is certainly welcome to disagree with me, you have to either know nothing about me or be almost completely unfamiliar with this blog to believe that my opinions are formed on the same basis of that amorphous collection of vaguely remembered elementary school classes, parental biases, college lectures, personal insecurities, peer pressures, and emotional reactions that go into forming most people’s opinions.

Now, as to the subject in question, Jesus doesn’t speak much on war, but it is clear that he doesn’t regard it as the be-all and end-all of evil that most people today seem to consider it, except when the media and the White House have whipped them up into a frenzy of support for another round of long-distance bombing.

First, God Himself wages war against men. “You fear the sword, and the sword is what I will bring against you, declares the Sovereign LORD.” – Ezekiel 11:8.

Second, Jesus did not come to bring peace. “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.” – Matthew 10:33

Third, Jesus intends to make serious war upon mankind in the future. “I saw heaven standing open and there before me was a white horse, whose rider is called Faithful and True. With justice he judges and makes war. His eyes are like blazing fire, and on his head are many crowns. He has a name written on him that no one knows but he himself. He is dressed in a robe dipped in blood, and his name is the Word of God. The armies of heaven were following him, riding on white horses and dressed in fine linen, white and clean. Out of his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations. “He will rule them with an iron scepter.” He treads the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God Almighty. On his robe and on his thigh he has this name written: KING OF KINGS AND LORD OF LORDS.” – Revelation 19:11

Fourth, I’ve never seen any evidence that Jesus cares particularly about education, either for the poor or anyone else, to say nothing of any moral duty to pay for the education of poor children.

In conclusion, it would appear that LJ doesn’t know the Bible nor the first thing about what Jesus would say about anything. The efforts of the New Atheists notwithstanding, spouting an opinion in complete ignorance is unlikely to convince anyone of anything.

Wells Fargo in the crosshairs

Here is an example of the difference between the State perspective on the fraud committed by the mortgage banks and the federal one. Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray is clearly not buying the “technical error” line of defense:

“The big mortgage servicers and financial firms continue to demonstrate their belief that they do not need to play by the same rules as everyone else who uses our court system. The suggestion by Wells Fargo and its colleagues at several other national firms that they can cure fraudulent testimony by simply refiling new affidavits and continuing to proceed toward foreclosures shows they do not recognize the seriousness of the problem they have created. There is no simple ‘do-over’ for false testimony that will be likely to avoid sanctions and penalties imposed by the courts. Their brazen efforts to minimize their financial exposure by sweeping these problems under the rug are an insult to the justice system in this country. These disclosures by Wells Fargo will now become the focus for a new prong of our on-going investigation.”

That giant crack in the wall keeps growing….

UPDATE: I’m not generally a fan of politicians, but I find that I LIKE this guy. A lot. He appears to be about as focused as The Terminator. Here’s hoping he isn’t merely angling for a revenue-enhancing settlement, but actually intends to pursue the fraud to its core.

Women oppose freedom

There is no way to avoid this obvious conclusion. The vast majority of women are absolutely and diametrically opposed to every form of freedom unless it happens to align with what she happens to want to do at the moment. One of the latest feminist calls to arms is this direct assault on the freedom of speech:

Whistles, catcalls and lewd come-ons from strangers are all too familiar to New York City women, who say they are harassed multiple times a day as they walk down the street. Now lawmakers are examining whether to do something to discourage it. A City Council committee heard testimony Thursday from women who said men regularly follow them, yell at them and make them feel unsafe and uncomfortable. Advocates told stories of preteens and teenagers being hounded by adult men outside city schools and pleaded for government to address the problem.

Problem? What problem? A man is merely exercising his Constitutional right to free speech in a public place that happens to make a woman feel unsafe and uncomfortable is a problem that the state must solve? I feel a lot more than a little unsafe and uncomfortable when a man is exercising his Constitutional right to free speech in a public place in order to advocate higher taxes, more bank bailouts, more gun laws, and more government intervention. If we’re going to throw out the freedom of speech and ban the dangerous sort, let’s ban that kind of talk first and then we can worry about whistles and catcalls.

Men who value human freedom must staunchly oppose all forms of equality, particularly sexual equality, for three reasons:

1. Equality does not exist in any material, legal, or spiritual form.
2. Equalitarianism is the primary reason for the material decline of the quasi-democratic West as well as its decreasing freedom.
3. Most women do not believe in equality themselves and have historically used the concept as a stalking horse for imposing statism in order to ensure privileged female status through government force. For example, consider the female opposition to DNA-based paternity testing:

“DNA tests are an anti-feminist appliance of science, a change in the balance of power between the sexes that we’ve hardly come to terms with. And that holds true even though many women have the economic potential to provide for their children themselves…Uncertainty allows mothers to select for their children the father who would be best for them. The point is that paternity was ambiguous and it was effectively up to the mother to name her child’s father, or not… Many men have, of course, ended up raising children who were not genetically their own, but really, does it matter…in making paternity conditional on a test rather than the say-so of the mother, it has removed from women a powerful instrument of choice.”

I should be very interested in seeing anyone attempt to make a rational case for how human freedom can be expanded by ensuring that a sizable portion of the electorate is vehemently opposed to nearly every aspect of it.

Republicans will fix nothing

There is the evidence. It also proves MPAI, needless to say, as 92% of Republicans believe Congress or Obama are to blame for the current economic slump, (wait, aren’t we in a recovery?), and only around six percent understand that the bankers are to blame. The worst thing is that about 50% of them genuinely think Obama is to blame, when there is no possible way he can be held responsible for it. While he has most definitely exacerbated the situation by his Hooverian response to it, the die was not only cast, but the results were known before he even took office! We already know that the Republican elite has zero desire to force the banks to take responsibility for their criminal and economically destructive actions; this poll indicates that there will be very little grass roots pressure on them to do what they don’t want to do because the voter anger has been successfully redirected to date.

Remarkably, the Democrats are somewhat better in assigning the blame where it belongs. Nearly 25 percent of them hold the bankers responsible, although they clearly don’t recognize that their hero Obama is completely owned by Goldman Sachs. (When the guy is appointing ex-Goldmanites to administration positions outside the Treasury, you know it’s completely out of control.) And at least Bush was in office when the meltdown began, although if he can be blamed for pushing TARP, he can’t reasonably be blamed for the Fed keeping interest rates low and blowing multiple financial bubbles.

Anyhow, it is quite clear that the electoral devastation about to be wreaked upon Democrats by Republicans (which, you may recall, I was one of the first to predict), is not going to have a salutary effect upon the situation because the Republican Party and the greater part of the Tea Party insist on believing that the perpetrators of the primary causal factor were among the victims. They will surely dig in a different part of the hole than did the Democrats, but we can be confident that they will continue making it deeper. The battle between Republicans and Democrats is an internecine battle between the Keynesians known as Neo-Keynesians and the Keynesians known as Monetarists. Both sides subscribe to a false economic theory and both are beholden to the banks, and as both the names and the polls indicate, the Republicans are more strongly beholden to them than are the Democrats.

This means that Obama and the new Republican majorities, (or if I am only half-correct, House majority) will be eager to announce bipartisan cooperation in finding a means of saddling the taxpayer with TARP II, in which the cost of the fraudulent mortgage-backed security put-backs is shifted from the banks that committed the fraud to the taxpayer while their myriad of proven crimes are swept under the carpet. And the passage of that heroic, bipartisan, and much-publicized “reform” will mark the effective end of the Tea Party, even if its zombie corpse remains an animated political identity for decades to come.