Lee Fields - Money I$ King
- friend Brendan (aka Raw Dawg)
It’s been one of those days of unbelievably bad Republican math.
"Secret copyright treaty leaks. It's bad. Very bad."
Yes, I’m just copying this from BoingBoing in whole, but I think this is pretty important and not just to me personally and to my profession:
The internet chapter of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a secret copyright treaty whose text Obama’s administration refused to disclose due to “national security” concerns, has leaked. It’s bad. It says:
- * That ISPs have to proactively police copyright on user-contributed material. This means that it will be impossible to run a service like Flickr or YouTube or Blogger, since hiring enough lawyers to ensure that the mountain of material uploaded every second isn’t infringing will exceed any hope of profitability.
- * That ISPs have to cut off the Internet access of accused copyright infringers or face liability. This means that your entire family could be denied to the internet — and hence to civic participation, health information, education, communications, and their means of earning a living — if one member is accused of copyright infringement, without access to a trial or counsel.
- * That the whole world must adopt US-style “notice-and-takedown” rules that require ISPs to remove any material that is accused — again, without evidence or trial — of infringing copyright. This has proved a disaster in the US and other countries, where it provides an easy means of censoring material, just by accusing it of infringing copyright.
- * Mandatory prohibitions on breaking DRM, even if doing so for a lawful purpose (e.g., to make a work available to disabled people; for archival preservation; because you own the copyrighted work that is locked up with DRM)
More at Michael Geist’s site.
Also, the “national security” claim made by the Obama Admin. pisses me off to no fucking end.
All together now: Fuuuucccckkkkkk Youuuuuu.
Exasperated Sighs Are The New Black
- me: how does the President continue military actions/drone bombings in Pakistan w/o running afoul of the War Powers Resolution? does Congress pass authorizations that fly under the media radar
- without formally declaring war on Pakistan?
- brendan: "All reasonable and necessary force" are the magic words in the authorization in the act passed just after 9/11.
- me: fucking a
Mr. Netanyahu, Tear Down This Wall »
On the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Western leaders are full of self-congratulation. But their paeans to universal freedom ring hollow, when they bear large responsibility for another wall constricting human freedom: the apartheid wall dividing the Palestinian West Bank.
Israeli authorities refer to it as a “separation barrier,” but that’s misleading. The wall doesn’t separate pre-1967 Israel from the West Bank. If that’s all it did, it would be an entirely different political object. Instead, the wall cuts deep into the Palestinian West Bank, separating Palestinians from each other and from their land, and signaling to the Palestinians that Israel intends to annex territory that Palestinians want for an independent Palestinian state. The fact that Western countries that support the Israeli government - above all the United States - say nothing about the West Bank wall signals to Palestinians that Western support for Palestinian statehood is merely rhetorical.
Much like U2, for the United States (and the rest of the West that supports the “Separation Wall”) we can file this under “UNCLEAR ON THE CONCEPT”
Matt Taibbi (via retropolitics) (via jhnbrssndn)
“The injunction of Jesus to love others as ourselves is an endorsement of self-interest.” — Barclays CEO John Varley
What is there to even say beyond “are you. fucking. kidding me?” … It’s like debating torture, even having to have this conversation is wounding us all.