His­tory of Copy­right [Falkvinge on Infopol­icy]

Given the recent fuss raised by cor­rupt politi­cians (SOPA and ACTA) and thugs enforc­ing the “laws” of the Evil Empire on its pup­pet states, its inter­est­ing to look at this seven part series on the his­tory of copyright.

This year’s pres­i­den­tial can­di­dates span the polit­i­cal spec­trum. They are both pro-abortion and anti-abortion. They have both embraced and opposed bans on assault weapons. They have both accepted and rejected the idea of human-induced cli­mate change, both pro­moted and derided a gov­ern­ment takeover of health care, sup­ported both amnesty for ille­gal aliens and build­ing a giant wall on the border.

And that’s just Mitt Romney.

A. Bar­ton Hinkle

“We Demand a Vapid, Con­de­scend­ing, Mean­ing­less, Polit­i­cally Safe Response to This Peti­tion.”.

Rea­son has cast a gim­let eye on the White House’s “We
the Peo­ple” peti­tion site before. (See Peter Suderman’s “5,000
Sig­na­tures Will Get You a Response From White House Pol­icy Wonks,
Unless Your Idea is “Bad” or About Weed”) But some enter­pris­ing
cit­i­zens have take the enter­prise of ques­tion­ing the enter­prise
even fur­ther, sub­mit­ting this
peti­tion on the site:

We demand a vapid, con­de­scend­ing, mean­ing­less,
polit­i­cally safe response to this petition.

Since these peti­tions are ignored apart from an occa­sional
patron­iz­ing and inane polit­i­cal state­ment amount­ing to noth­ing more
than a con­de­scend­ing pat on the head, we the sign­ers would enjoy
hav­ing the illu­sion of suc­cess. Since no other out­come to this
process seems pos­si­ble, we demand that the White House imme­di­ately
assign a junior staffer to com­pose a tame and vapid response to
this peti­tion, and never attempt to take any mean­ing­ful action on
this or any other issue. We would also like a cookie.

After being hit with ques­tions about UFOs and legal­iz­ing weed,
the White House has raised the thresh­old for a guar­an­teed response
to
25,000 e-signatures in 30 days. To date, the peti­tion has
9,228. (Thanks in part to get­ting some
media cov­er­age yes­ter­day.) Go to town, commenters.

Via Jerry Brito’s Google+ feed, where he describes the peti­tion
as “fatal­is­tic and cyn­i­cal.” I agree. And I would also like a
cookie.

[Hit and Run]

Com­ple­ment­ing the hon­est cam­paign ad, here’s the only real­is­tic peti­tion I’ve ever seen.

The Evil Empire has done every­thing it can to shut down dona­tions to Wik­iLeaks, and it’s been pretty suc­cess­ful. I decided to try mak­ing a dona­tion of $100 using one of the alter­na­tive meth­ods avail­able: Bit­coin. This was a multi-step process. First, I had to trans­fer money from my check­ing account to Dwolla, which took four days. From there, I trans­ferred the money to Mt. Gox, which took another day. Once it was there I pur­chased $100 worth of bit­coins, which was about 7.14 at the time. Finally, I sent those bit­coins to the dona­tion address for Wik­iLeaks. The last two steps took just a few min­utes, most of which was spent deal­ing with the Mt. Gox interface.

Over­all, this was rather incon­ve­nient due to the has­sle involved in actu­ally get­ting the bit­coins. I expect this will only get worse in the future, as Bit­coin is some­thing of a com­peti­tor for Dwolla. Pay­pal has a long-standing pol­icy of cut­ting off busi­nesses which are in any way involved with alter­na­tive cur­ren­cies (steal­ing their bal­ances in the process)–we saw that with e-gold well before they were attacked by the Evil Empire. I wouldn’t be at all sur­prised if Dwolla either adopted an anti­com­pet­i­tive pol­icy them­selves, or else were ordered to by Gestapo agents.

The good news that once I actu­ally got my hands (fig­u­ra­tively) on the bit­coins, it was triv­ial to bypass the block­ade on WikiLeaks.

The Immi­nent Dol­lar Col­lapse, Explained To An 8-Year-Old. It’s the ele­phant in the room. The United States is utterly bank­rupt and has been liv­ing off of bor­rowed money since 1971, when it defaulted on its loans — though of course, it wasn’t worded like that. Not even an income tax of 100% is enough to cover the expenses, and the US is about to go the way of the Soviet Union. [Falkvinge on Infopol­icy]

I came across this nice sim­pli­fied expla­na­tion of the cur­rent state of the US Dol­lar a while back. It was orig­i­nally writ­ten in Swedish, so it doesn’t have the “Amerika über alles” view­point that pretty much any­thing writ­ten in the US does. I thought it was rel­e­vant today given the cur­rent fuss in the main­stream media about whether the gov­ern­ment will have to “default” if they can’t bor­row yet more money.

China rul­ing party ‘exceeds 80m’. China’s gov­ern­ing Com­mu­nist Party, the world’s largest polit­i­cal party, says its mem­ber­ship has now passed 80 mil­lion. [BBC News]

Accord­ing to Wikipedia, the Evil Empire’s rul­ing Boot On Your Neck Party had 127 mil­lion mem­bers split between its “Demo­c­rat” and “Repub­li­can” fronts as of 2004. While that num­ber is seven years old, I cer­tainly haven’t seen any­thing to sug­gest that it’s any smaller today.

A New West­ern Theoc­racy? There seems to be lit­tle place for facts in west­ern democ­ra­cies these days. Sam­ple some news from a major main­stream news source (in the for­mat of your choice), and you’ll doubt­less hear of some new law, or a law­maker mak­ing a ‘state­ment’ of a posi­tion that needs to be taken. If you poke a bit deeper, you’ll tend to find that there are usu­ally few facts sup­port­ing the posi­tion or law – in many cases the facts flat-out oppose the law.

[…]

Facts can be chal­lenged, their basis ques­tions, the val­ues dis­puted. There’s no chal­leng­ing beliefs, because they are a belief, and their only basis is that some­one feels that way. Any fantasy-land belief can be turned into a real-world law, through the appli­ca­tion of spin-doctors and lies. When the beliefs lack of real­is­tic basis shows up in its con­se­quences, do we get some humil­ity, a ‘hey I was wrong, let’s fix this’? No. It’s more beliefs. [Falkvinge on Infopol­icy]

The ridicu­lous light­bulb ban I men­tioned just a few days ago is an excel­lent exam­ple of this.

Postrel: Need a Light Bulb? Uncle Sam Chooses. in Cal­i­for­nia, where I live, this plen­i­tude no longer includes what most shop­pers want: an inex­pen­sive, plain-vanilla 100-watt incan­des­cent bulb. Sell­ing them is now ille­gal here. The rest of the coun­try has until the end of the year to stock up before a fed­eral ban kicks in. (I have a stash in stor­age.) Over the next two years, most lower-wattage incan­des­cents will also disappear.

[…]

The bulb ban makes sense only one of two ways: either as an expres­sion of cul­tural sanc­ti­mony, with a lit­tle technophilia thrown in for added glam­our, or as a round­about way to trans­fer wealth from the gen­eral pub­lic to the few busi­nesses with the know-how to pro­duce the light bulbs con­sumers don’t really want to buy.

Or, of course, as both. [Bloomberg]

Not con­tent with ban­ning cap­i­tal­ism, agri­cul­ture, and chem­istry (aka “the War on Drugs”), the Evil Empire is now ban­ning light bulbs. Of course, this is the same coun­try that pre­vi­ously banned toilets–there’s really noth­ing so minor or silly that the gov­ern­ment won’t threaten to mur­der peo­ple over it.

The phi­los­o­phy of gun con­trol: Teenagers are roar­ing through town at 90 MPH, where the speed limit is 25. Your solu­tion is to lower the speed limit to 20, out­law any vehi­cle that has a round hood orna­ment or that can carry more than 10 gal­lons of fuel, require sen­si­tiv­ity train­ing and manda­tory annual test­ing for all licensed dri­vers, require all vehi­cle pur­chases to be doc­u­mented at a deal­er­ship (with a 10-day wait­ing period), and spec­ify the locks on the garage where the vehi­cles are stored (with their wheels removed and stored in a locked con­tainer on the other side of the home). Mean­while the most dan­ger­ous inter­sec­tions are changed from stop­lights to yield signs, and res­i­den­tial and school zone reg­u­la­tions are tight­ened with ‘no-stop’ rules so strict that even police can­not stop to set up a speed trap, thus giv­ing the speed­ers free reign in the very areas they are likely to do the most damage.

Tony B.

Left wing — right wing: Same stink­ing car­rion bird in between.

The Ulti­mate Answer to Kings