Letter Never Sent

Thanks to Politechbot I found real audio of Lawrence Lessig on the Diane Rehm Show. Lessig, a Stanford law professor, is the author of The Future of Ideas and is on the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (donate to them!) which fights in court to help maintain our online freedom. He talks about the bleak future of the internet that is certain if people do not fight to keep their freedoms. He also goes into some of the problems that powerful copyright and patent law has caused in restricting innovation and freedom. At one point, Hilary Rosen of the RIAA phones in and tries to get the music industry’s message across.

Transferrable copyrights will kill the culture of the United States. While copyright is necessary in some degree to safeguard the livelihood of artists and creators, perpetual and transferrable copyrights and patents will strangle the cultural exchange and the natural process of building on the work of others. Ideas should not be commodified.

I have finally migrated from blogger. I was very happy with them, but it is time I stood on my own two feet. Especially if they decide to start charging for their wonderful service or if they have server trouble I won’t be left out in the cold unable to update the site. The site now uses Movable Type which thus far seems to be an excellent, free package. Kudos to them. All of the files are stored on my space and I have complete control over almost every aspect. It was not all that difficult to set up. It took me a few hours to get everything set up exactly the way I wanted it. I still have to get the rest of the pages to go with this one as they use a different design. The eventual goal is to redesign the site so that I only have to change a few things to completely change the look.

Keeping Hitler Alive from David Grenier:

The first pretext given is that we are protecting Iraq’s neighbors. Rarely does the U.S. media report that all of Iraq’s neighbors, including Iran (who was at war with Iraq through the 80s) and Kuwait condemn the U.S. bombing raids and call for a lifting of sanctions in Iraq. The second pretext given is that we are protecting the Kurds in Northern Iraq, which as shown above is simply not true. Not only do we allow the Turks to attack the very Kurds we are protecting, but we may have covertly delivered the Kurdish leader Ocalan to them. Turkey was reluctant to let the United States and Britian use their air bases to bomb Iraq. They were also searching for Ocalan who they claimed was a terrorist. Suddenly Ocalan shows up in Nigeria and is arrested, flown to Turkey, tried and condemned. The U.S./UK bombing went on as planned. Now it’s possible that Turkey has an international spy network with offices in Nigeria, or it’s possible that the CIA flushed out Ocalan in exchange for the use of Turkish military facilities. We probably won’t know for decades.

The Israeli military continues to kill civilians, including women and children, with impunity. They’ve killed children with sniper fire, women with high-caliber rounds packed with hundreds of tiny sharp steel darts known as flechettes, and they’ve riddled people with multiple rounds leaving them in the street to bleed to death. There needs to be a zero-tolerance policy towards violence of any sort. It is ridiculous that while we wage a war on ‘terror’ murderous goons in uniforms chew up human life with technological efficiency and such uniform pitilessness. In the case of Israeli, these murderers are our closest allies.

• Argentina: Another IMF debacle. Buchanan makes some excellent points here.
• Crime’s newest cash of choice? — on the appeal of the Euro
• Corporate money-laundering
• Machinations of the secret government: “With the accusations that have accumulated, the spectre of European law has been tormenting MI6 for over a year now. On top of that there is the rising scandal of Echelon. The British secret government, dominated by MI6 and the CIA head of station in Grosvenor Square, is incompatible with the modus operandi of the European Union, and legal bust-ups with Europe are looming on the horizon.

  It was therefore no surprise that a Republican delegation led by Senator Phil Gramm slipped into London last summer to visit the ‘unelectable’ William Haig and propose British membership of NAFTA. The secret government was hoping to solve its problems by getting Blair out and reversing Britain out of Europe and into NAFTA. Master cooks themselves, they will have no qualms about cohabiting with the Bush administration (which is run by shysters who have cooked everything from the Florida electoral rolls to the US Supreme Court).
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• The global elite are extremely vulnerable to attack. Hence the recent crackdown on terrorism and the obsession with RMA and assymetric warfare. They are like the giant spiders in The Hobbit with their soft underbellies. The war on terror is a necessary consequence of the intersection of their growing power and influence while technological innovation speeds communication and information.
• Media consolidation: Views from Ani Difranco, Phil Donahue, and others.