Theft is newspeak for copyright violation, along with the other newspeak vocabulary “intellectual property”. It’s a very deliberate propaganda aimed at framing the discussion of copyright by mapping it onto a vocabulary which unconsciously prejudices our thinking, by bringing our cultural value of private property into play.

This framing, this point of view is completely and demonstrably incorrect. That fact that this propaganda is so successful has devastating effects on our culture, which will take years to properly understand. But the propaganda is highly successful, primarily because the dominant means for cultural dissemination (film, music, television) are controlled by large corporations. This structure is very effective at censoring and biasing the discussion.

That’s why the following video is fantastic. We need popular media which disseminates the truth: copying is not theft.

Check out this “debate” between MPP’s Aaron Smith, and some chick called Calvina Fay:

Although I’m happy to see the issue being addressed (more or less) seriously in the mainstream media, I’m irritated by the inherent bias in the forum:

• “street signs” at lower screen read:
  • “Golden state going to pot?
  • “Stoner stimuls for the states?
• Off the cuff remarks biasing the forum:
• “What if everyone walks around stoned all the time?
• CNBC correspondent asking if the LA correspondents eyes are glazed.
• L.A. correspondant: “you’d be high to think this is a slam dunk”

And let us not forget the inherent bias of the mechanics of the forum. Two people are given a few short minutes to present their point of view. The brevity of the allowed statements gives the dishonest representative of the dishonest status-quo an advantage, since all of here statement are familiar falsehoods, and thus ring true to the uneducated ear. The MPP debater has to focus on disassembling what lies he has time to deal with in the time allotted. So let’s take a look at the prohibitionists talking points:

” Legalizing it isn’t going to solve our drug problem, nor our economic problems. In fact it will make it worse.”There’s nothing new here of course, and there’s nothing true here either. While legalizing marijuanna certainly won’t solve our economic problems, it will create a new revenue stream and eliminate a harmful, wasteful, useless, cruel and racist expense: the incarceration and prosecution of marijuana users. It will reduce law enforcement costs, and free up funds and resources to fight real crimes. So it will mitigate our economic problems. Thus it’s a positive step in the right direction. The statement that legalisation will “make it worse” is just a fabrication to prevent us from looking at the sheer dumb-headed falseness of her statement.

Alcohol and tobacco have more social costs than they provide taxation income”But then what about the fact that Alcohol and tobacco have more social costs than they provide taxation taxation? This may very well be true. But we don’t criminalize Alcohol or tobacco production, despite the fact they are distinctly more harmful than cannabis. Why not? Primarily because we have learned from our mistakes. We attempted to apply cannabis style prohibition to alcohol back in the twenties, and it was a complete disaster. Not only did we lose the income from taxation of the substances, but their use increased, and the social harms exploded . Not only did we continue to see normal array of problems associated with alcohol abuse, but we added widespread crime and corruption into the mix. The parallels to the situation with cannabis are quite close. What’s different is the intrinsic harm caused by cannabis, which is much less than the intrinsic harm done by alchol use.

Legalisation will lead to more users. This is pure conjecture. The number she spits out (30%) is pulled out of hers, or someone else’s ass, with no basis in experiment to justify it. The data that does exists indicates that drug use either remains the same, or in many cases decreases with legalisation. Holland has lower cannabis use amongst its citizens than any of its neighbouring countries. Why? Well one Dutch official believes it’s because they “have succeeded in making cannabis boring”. This isn’t just an outlier. We have had similar results with alcohol prohibition, and Portugal has had similar results by decriminalizing all drug consumption. So the evidence suggests that prohibition not only doesn’t work, it has the opposite of the desired effect.

Marijuana is not harmless, it’s the number one drug that kids are in treatment for. This one actually makes me fucking angry. This is completely true, because Marijuana is the number one drug for which kids are being forced into involuntary “drug treatment”. One friend of mine was forced into one of these programs in his teenage years because he had smoked a few joints and got caught. They promptly put him on a series of pharmaceuticals. Brilliant. It’s the usual case that the most harmful consequence of cannabis consumption is getting caught. Now certainly marijuana is not harmless. Excessive use can rob your motivation. Excessive smoking can lead to bronchitis. All these effects can easily be cured by laying off for a couple of weeks. Cannabis is among the least habit forming drugs, and is associated with no withdrawal symptoms. So sure, excessive marijuanna use is harmful, just like excessive sugar or fast food consumption is harmful. Don’t overdo things. But criminalization of something radically safer than alcohol is just plain criminal.

We’d still have a black market for children, just like with alcohol and tobacco. The old “think of the children” ploy. It’s another complete line of bullshit. If you are worried about your children, or someone else’s children, you should be for the legalization of cannabis. Why? Well, the rate at which kids try cannabis under prohibition is high. By far the worst consequences of smoking cannabis result from its prohibition. If you get caught it can ruin your career, education and future. Why would you want to put your kids at that kind of risk, all because of a prohibition policy which has no benefit. ONDC polls indicate that high school age kids find it easier to get pot than to get alcohol. Under alcohol prohibition, an eight year old could walk into a bar and get a drink, no problem. Experience shows that regulation (like alcohol and tobacco) is more effective at keeping kids off drugs than prohibition (like cannabis and our failed attempts at alcohol prohibition). So the real question here is, are you stubbornly going to hold to prohibition, or are you interested in results? If you are interested in actually protecting your kids, support legalisation.

In closing, I just want to comment on the old trope “legalisation would be sending the wrong message to kids”. This statement is stupid in so many ways. Consider for example the Dutch experience (“we have succeeded in making cannabis boring”). Consider the kid who learns all the DARE propaganda, but sees healthy happy productive members of their peer group and society using and enjoying cannabis, and in fact coming off better than those using legal drugs. What message is that kid getting? Let me tell you: They are learning that the government lies, and that the laws are bullshit. Do you really want to teach your kid disrespect for the law?

I wish Malcolm X had a holiday, or had some streets named after him. Some years ago, a group called the “Guerilla theatre of the absurd” at Reed College printed up stickers, the size and color of street signs, saying “Malcolm X dr.”, and pasted them on all street signs of some particularly wealthy street in Portland. In essence, they did a citizen renaming of a street.

Now, a study of American history shows that the teaching and preservation of American history is grossly, horribly mangled and abused in order to maintain fealty to a kind of unifying fairy tale. As part of this process, I think Malcolm X is being forgotten, and I find that tragic.

So I’d like to propose a new holiday: From now on, let Feb. 21 be Malcolm X day! How do we celebrate Malcolm X day? We print bumper stickers, the same size, shape and color of street signs in our city, and we do a citizen of renaming of a street, or a part of a street, whatever we can pull off. We do this every year, in every city where we can find some brave soul to join the movement. When do we stop? When they rename a street in your town after Brother Malcolm. After that we can celebrate by getting out and having a parade down Malcolm X drive or Blvd.

So what do you think? We have 9 months to prepare. Start your planning. Post pictures of your civic improvements on the web!

Leaders are overvalued in our culture.  American history tends to paint social change as happening as a result of the actions of a few great leaders, as opposed to occurring  despite the nations leadership, and due to the agitation of large numbers of affected people.  So while I don’t wish to devalue the work that, say, MLK did, I don’t think the civil rights movement of the sixties was thanks to him.  Rather, MLK was successful because he had so many dedicated, hard working followers, most of whom history will forget.

Now look at the following video.  It makes the case clearly, brilliantly and light heartedly.  A small act of sainthood.  Bravo!

J3D provides a box constructor Box(float xdim, float ydim, float zdim, Appearance ap).

The documentation states:

public Box(float xdim,
           float ydim,
           float zdim,
           Appearance ap)

Constructs a box of a given dimension and appearance. Normals are generated by default, texture coordinates are not.

Parameters:

xdim – X-dimension size.

ydim – Y-dimension size.

zdim – Z-dimension size.

ap – Appearance

This is an error.  xdim, ydim, zdim are actually  one-half the x,y, and z dimension sizes.

So, the weather is fantastic here in Switzerland, and I finally got motivated enough to bike into work.  It’s no small commitment, I have a 28 km ride, which includes climbing the Albis Pass.  Okay, it’s a pretty small pass, but my bike only has two front chain rings, so it’s actually a pretty tough hall, especially after a few weeks of slacking on the training.

My poor condition probably explains why I was feeling tired and easily distracted as I had to navigate the tricky traffic & trams around Bahnhoff Enge.  I was in the narrow space between traffic and a tram line, when I realized that I had gotten way too close to a tram island (basically a curb in the middle of the road).  I rubbed against it, and didn’t handle it well, and totally wiped out.  Below you see the result:

my biking injury

The worst thing is now I have to go and buy a new pair of leg warmers.  Well, okay that’s probably not the worst thing, but it does suck.

What I found surprising is how many of my colleagues suggested that I go to the doctor.  I did get the first aid kit from the hallway and clean and disinfect it myself.  Really, what more would a doctor do?    I wonder how much of my doctor reluctance comes from not having had health insurance for so long while living in the states?  Go team Obama on that one.

The New York Times has a lengthy article entitled “A Supersized Custody Battle Over Marvel Superheroes”, discussing an ongoing legal battle over copyrights regarding character created by Jack Kirby between 1958 and 1963.  It is useful to analyse such reporting, to see how consent is manufactured for policies which benefit the power-elite (read large corporations), and harm the public, in this case the public domain.

First, a brief history lesson which needs repeating, as the vast majority of America has never even heard of the public domain, and has no understanding of how copyright law differs from property law, which differences defines how copyright violation differs from theft.  Copyright is (intended to be) a short term abridgement of human rights, specifically the right to free speech, in an effort to encourage and reward creative works.  They provide the creator of a work with a temporary monopoly on the spread of his or her ideas.   The main players behind the creation of copyright and patent law in the United States were Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, who clearly had mixed feelings on the subject.  The fundamental idea was that through creation of this temporary (state enforced) monopoly, congress could “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts”.  A useful brief history can be found here.  Once this temporary copyright expired, the intellectual work would return to the public domain.  The original period of copyright length in the U.S. was 14 years, and the author had the right to extend the copyright for an additional 14  (Details of the historical development of copyright law can be found here).  The feeling was that this was an appropriate length of time to allow a creator the opportunity to benefit from his or her creation with an acceptable abridgement of human liberty.  In other words, copyright is a tradeoff between reward for the creator (incentive) and civil liberty, particularly to provide an incentive for publication and distribution.

As costs and times for distribution and publication decrease, the cost function for this tradeoff change, implying that copyright lengths should decrease.  In the last century copyright and publication has become dominated by an oligarchy of powerful corporations, primarily the members of the RIAA and MPAA, with Disney being a major villain.  These corporations have  championed a series of extension to copyright, each time adding a small fixed amount to the existing copyright lengths,  so that copyrights can now be extended to the life of the author + 70 years.  There is no reason to expect that these corporations will allow their increasingly valuable copyright portfolios to expire, so as waves of valuable intellectual property stand to enter the public domain (where they belong), we can expect the armies of lobbyists to swarm Congress’ halls once again.

So what does all this have to do with manufacturing consent?  In the NYT article, the article never mentions the concept of public domain.  It never discusses the fact that Kirby’s creations, now at 50 years of age, should have entered the public domain 32 years ago (under the original terms of copyright law).  There is consideration of the harm done by such copyright litigation which has no redeeming social value.  Jack Kirby, 16 years dead, is not going to be rewarded by this lawsuit, nor will the current process encourage any kind of creative work, beyond creative legal wrangling.  The underlying message of the article seems to be “look, thanks to the efforts of this lawyer and our wonderful copyright system, this guys heirs are gong to be getting a payday!  Isn’t the American copyright system grand?”  Rather than the message we should all be reading, which is “Look, this legal vampire is trying to make a lot of money of this copyright vampire.  The copyright vampire deserves to suffer, since without it’s machinations these works would be in the public domain and contributing to our culture.  But the legal vampire isn’t contributing anything to our culture either, and giving money to Kirby’s heirs isn’t doing anything for anyone either, other than using the legal system as a kind of lottery”.  The real lesson to be learned here is the following:  We need copyright reform.  We need copyrights to be shorter, and we need them to remain in the hands of the creator, not in the hands of some parasitic corporate behemoth.

I actually want to write about Obama’s attempt at student load reform, but before I do I want to mention an excellent article at truthout discussing Beck, Coulter, and Limbaugh. The author (one Davidson Loehr) gives a brief review of Julius Streicher, who would seem to be the closest thing to a real life Howard W. Campell Jr. as exists, and compares his crimes (for which he was hung at Nuremburg) to the activities of Coulter, Beck, and Limbaugh. It’s a good read, and mostly on the money. He makes a very strong case against Coulter and Beck, but if the quotes he uses for Limbaugh are the best he could find, his case is pretty weak there. Limbaugh is probably guilty of little more than paving the way for Beck and Coulter and Fox news.

Moving on to Obama’s student loan overhaul: I just read an article at the NYT called Obama’s Student Loan Overhaul Endangered. For those of you who don’t know, the American student loan system works as follows: Most student loans are made by private, for profit companies, with government guarantees. In other words, the private companies take the profit, while the federal government takes the risk. This is essentially the same problem people discuss with the bank bailouts (and the airline bailouts, and the automotive bailouts…) with one important difference: Here the situation is planned in advance. It’s not an attempt at averting an even worse catastrophe, it’s just an example of successful (for the profiteers) lobbying. For federally subsidized loans, the govt makes the interest payments until graduation. Student loans are exempt from bankruptcy, so even if you go bankrupt, you will still owe on the student loans.

Obama’s plan is to loan the money directly, which would save the government billions of dollars, which he would use to expand Pell grant scholarships. This is no-brainer policy reform. The only people who lose out are the lenders, who, let’s face it, are parasitic users who have obtained their risk-free, merit-free profits by gaming the U.S. political system.

But the education bill is strongly opposed by some Senate Democrats, particularly those in states where for-profit student lenders are major employers. In a letter to the majority leader, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, six Democrats said they disliked the president’s proposal.

“We write to make you aware of our concern with provisions of contemplated student lending reform that could put jobs at risk,” the senators wrote. “Increase our nation’s commitment to higher education funding is a priority, but we must proceed toward this objective in a thoughtful manner that considers potential alternative legislative proposals, while still delivering an equivalent amount of savings over the next ten years.

So, who should be haranguing for this? They are: Senators Thomas R. Carper of Delaware, Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, Bill Nelson of Florida, Mark Warner of Virginia and Jim Webb of Virginia. Now, I’m a huge fan of Webb for his courageous attempt at justice reform. He’s also one of the most reasonable and ethically consistent senators with regard to foreign policy. I might not agree with all his conclusions, but I thnk he’s a pretty good guy who works hard at being ethical. So in the end, the system is to blame, not the individuals. I’m not familiar with the others, but probably the same holds true. It’s not hard to see how this probably played out: Contributions buy you access. Once the lenders have access they make a spiel about how this is going to cost their state X jobs, and probably paints the whole thing as a political liability for the Senator in question. At that point the senator in question either cynically decides in favor of the local over the national interests (this amounts to self interest through the election process), or decides that he (or she) has to pick their battles carefully, and this one isn’t worth fighting.

What really gets me is couching the conflict of interest in terms of national interest vs jobs, where the real issue is national interest v.s. private wealth. Why? Well, the loans are going to made anyway, which means the jobs are needed anyway. The only difference is who’s doing the work, and where. So it’s not a question of jobs, it’s a question of whether or not we want to let some asshole(s) with money and connections profit from the student loan process or not. Who are these assholes? Well, Sallie Mae is at the top of the list.

The whole “jobs vs X” line is overplayed, and pretty transparent. It used to be used to great effect to torpedo environmental protections. Of course, environmental protections typically create jobs. It’s automation and outsourcing that destroys work places. Hopefully the american voter is gradually getting wise to this line of bullshit. So write your senator and tell them you don’t fall for that jobs versus X bullshit anymore, and you expect him (or her) to vote with your interests in mind, not with Fannie Mae’s.

I recently listened to an old Alex Jones – Noam Chomsky interview.  I absolutely detest Alex Jones, who’s essentially the Rush Limbaugh of the tinfoil hat crowd.  What I find reprehensible in his pseudo-journalism is the net effect of it, which is to discredit and marginalize legitimate points of concern in the political spectrum, for example corporate manipulation (well, ownership) of the media and manufacturing consent being perhaps the most vital.

The problem is AJ has a much bigger audience and visibility than intelligent, reasonable individuals (like Chomsky) who are working hard at exposing this stuff and educating people.   So when you start talking about corporate and elite ownership of the media, the average person will likely have heard these concepts first from a wing-nut source like Alex Jones, and will likely glaze over.  So while A.J. ended his interview with Prof Chomsky by calling Chomsky a corporate-elite schill, the truth is that A.J. does far more to further the corporate-elitist agenda.  I’ll be discussing that at some other point, but I want to talk about a concrete example of this kind of corporate media control that’s taking place right now.

Maybe you’ve heard about the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood?  These guys a a national coalition of health care professionals, educators, advocacy groups, parents and individuals whoare trying to “reclaim childhood from corporate marketers”.   They managed to push Disney into offering refunds on their “Baby Einstein” videos, because (surprise!) watching a video doesn’t educate your kids, and in fact watching videos is probably harmful for young kids, no matter what’s being watched.  This wouldn’t be a problem if Disney hadn’t claimed that these videos were “education”.

So Disney had to offer refunds, and the companies involved had to drop the word “educational” from their marketing.  Good news all around.   But mega corporations (and Disney’s among the worst) doesn’t like it when people try to execute some kind of democratic control or accountability.  So Disney called up the Judge Baker Children’s Center (a Harvard affiliated children’s mental health center).     Apparently Disney put pressure on Judge Baker, who in turn pressured the heroes in this story not to advocate against corporations, and not talk to the media.  Wow.  Now the JBCC is evicting the C.C.F.C., apparently because “the mission of the C.C.F.C — to protect children from harmful exploitation by corporate marketers — is not in line with the Judge Bake mission”.

Now Karen Schwartzman said Judge Baker received no money, and no promise of money from Disney, so one has to wonder what form of motivator Disney used?  Hints of research grants (this wouldn’t be money to JB after all, but to the childrens center), or pressure through Harvard (does Disney donate or have joint research programs with Harvard)?  Or perhaps it was just the threat of frivolous lawsuits.  Disney is a particularly nasty beast, because, in addition to having the huge financial resources available to all major corporations, they have such an overwhelming hold on the American collective unconcious.  I think it’s hard for the average American to think of Disney as evil, which no doubt has  helped in Disney’s efforts to plunder and deny the public domain.

There’s a fairly good article at the NYT.