Quote: "When we can't dream any longer we die." - Emma Goldman.
Topic: Are copyright laws a threat to our online freedom?
Article: Copyright laws are a threat to our online freedom by Christian Engström.
Quote:
"With regard to monopolies they are justly classed among the greatest nuisances in Government. But is it clear that as encouragements to literary works and ingenious discoveries, they are not too valuable to be wholly renounced?"
James Madison to Thomas Jefferson, 17 Oct. 1788.
Book: "Promises to Keep: Technology, Law, and the Future of Entertainment", William W. Fisher III.
Guest: Thomas Sydnor, Senior Fellow and Director, Center for the Study of Digital Property, Progress & Freedom Foundation. Is it time to put an end to welfare queens like Bill Gates, Michael Jackson and Pfizer making billions from interventions by big government? F. Scott Fitzgerald once said that the rich are not like you and me; they need the assistance of big government to be rich. Is he defending big government interference in the marketplace to protect patents, etc? Not quite, but it plays an essential role in defining enforceable property rights, without which there could be no market transactions, so they empower private citizens. Thom would submit that they have gone way too far, creating welfare queens. Thomas Jefferson's views on intellectual rights. The article by Christian Engström, the Pirate Party's member of the European parliament. Madison's reply to Jefferson. Numbers of years has grown. If you want to stop intellectual copyright, you need to be able to monitor everything. He said Engström's ideas are woefully uninformed. Not every violation is prosecuted. We forgive minor trespasses. What if we get rid of copyright? "Promises to Keep" - create a surveillance society. Thom thinks it is crazy.
Bumper Music: Shake It Up, The Cars.
Richard Stallman, president of the Free Software Foundation, quoted Bill Gates as saying in 1991: "If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today...A future start-up with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose." (Challenges and Strategy Memo.16 May 1991).
Article: The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer b Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC.
"Copyright and patent protection support a $220 billion a year prescription drug industry, a $25 billion medical supply industry, a $12 billion recorded music industry, a $25 billion movie industry, and a $12 billion textbook industry. According to the International Intellectual Property Alliance, industries that rely heavily on copyright and patent protection accounted for $630 billion of value added in 2002, almost 6 percent of the size of the economy."
Generic drugs would save a fortune.Thom went to Pirate Bay and found his own copyright stuff. Wiki has no music or film clips of Elvis because of copyright. Jefferson said that at worse, copyrights should expire on death. They are meant to encourage not restrict. Every invention builds on something existing, and often several people invent similar things around the same time. Thom maintains a 7 day copyright on the podcast, after which you can hear them at White Rose.
Bumper Music: Don't Think Twice, It's All Right, Bob Dylan.
Clip: Fox host: Finns and Swedes have “pure genes…pure society,” but Americans marry “other species”. (Brian Kilmeade)
Creative Commons alternative to copyright, Wiki is using it, Vietnam is considering it. South Africa and other countries are against patents for AIDS drugs. Requiring companies to come up with something genuinely new to get a new patent would spur invention. The pharmaceutical industry claims to spend a lot on R&D, but the NIH funds a lot of the research and the companies spend three times as much on advertising and marketing as on R&D.
Bumper Music: Come On In, Brad Paisley (video).
Topic: How is the alliance of Russia & China going to mean the end of life as we know it in the United States?
Special greetings to new affiliates The Detour WETX, Tennessee and KPHX Phoenix, Arizona.
Article: IMF sees end to the global recession By Krishna Guha and Sarah O'Connor in Washington and Michael Mackenzie in New York.
Article: Unity on economy proves elusive By George Parker.
Article: Geithner’s Dirty Little Secret.
Guest: William Engdahl, American-German freelance journalist, historian and economic researcher; author of several books including "A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order" and "Seeds of Destruction"...his latest book is "Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order". Are we in a debt trap? What is the future of the American economy? It began with sub prime mortgages, you could see it back in 2003. In 1999 Geithner and Summers put laws in place that allowed unbridled speculation and fraud. The US economy, because Congress refused to rein in Wall Street, will face 10 years of economic hell, worse than the 30's for human toll, nothing on the horizon will turn it around.
Global growth prediction includes China. The US economy has no green shoots, fastest free fall. From Hamilton until Reagan/Clinton the US had a national policy that built things, it no longer protects the economy. Starve the beast. Classical debt trap like Argentina, Mexico, Brazil. The only difference is that the dollar is the world reserve currency. It was backed by oil after gold, but since 2001 it has been backed by nothing but US military pressure - blackmail. Slightly inflate our way out of debt, then change policy and get out of the IMO? It ill take at least 4-5 years. 30 years ago the US workforce was the envy of the world. Reduce military?
Georgia. If you were living in the US, what would you do to prepare for the hell? Ukrainian parliamentary commission. Saakashvili initiated the attack on South Ossetia. Rove. It was catastrophe for Bush because Russia reacted very quickly and Georgia. Saakashvili is a tribal gangster, thug. Georgia, NATO. Germans do not want another war with Russia, and if Georgia is in, Germany and NATO have to react. Americans have no idea how close the world has been pushed by the expansion of NATO towards Russia, missile "defense", and Obama did nothing to roll it back.
How do we solve the problem? Russia, IMF-directed economic disaster. We should have reduced our side, but America escalated, over $1 trillion a year. Classic, similar to Britain after 1873, all the king's horses cannot put it together again. Terminal decay. The healthiest thing is to announce rapid reduction of NATO, convert to peace dividend - the cold war never ended. That would mean taking on the trillion dollar lobbying industry. There's no better time, life and death, future of the nation. We've had 8 years of military insanity. Wake people up. His analysis. We need more independent research published, media. Psyops. Do what you can to survive. Make yourselves felt in Congress. He doesn't give investment advice. The prospective of the dollar relative to other currencies is down, with hiccups. Demand from China, Japan, Russia declining.
The Russian Chinese alliance. Iran. New world order? No, but reaction to the last 9 years of US foreign policy. Brzezinski's worst nightmare. The US has made Russia and China sit down at the table because the US has become an incalculable superpower. Events in China. Sound like neocon groups. Obama's speech in Russia. Is Obama repudiating the Bush doctrine? All so far is nice talk. Financial backers put Barack Obama in the White House, his mandate is to say pretty words. The world is skeptical.
Bumper Music: We'd Like to Thank You, Herbert Hoover, from "Annie".
Bumper Music: For What It's Worth, Buffalo Springfield (video).
Clip:
"In 2009, a great power does not show strength by dominating or demonizing other countries. The days when empires could treat sovereign states as pieces on a chess board are over. As I said in Cairo, given our independence, any world order that -- given our interdependence, any world order that tries to elevate one nation or one group of people over another will inevitably fail. The pursuit of power is no longer a zero-sum game -- progress must be shared. ...
Now let me be clear: America cannot and should not seek to impose any system of government on any other country, nor would we presume to choose which party or individual should run a country. And we haven't always done what we should have on that front.
"
Obama’s Speech in Moscow, President addresses New Economic School graduation, 07 July 2009.
Bumper Music: Tommy Can You Hear Me? The Who.
Thom is more optimistic than Engdahl, sees only 2 years. If anyone can fix things it is Obama, but we're not seeing it yet.
Why is it that the most important question in the world is never asked in our corporate media?? Instead we're just told to play with our toys.
Article: Forget Shorter Showers: Why Personal Change Does Not Equal Political Change by Derrick Jensen.
"Or let’s talk water. We so often hear that the world is running out of water. People are dying from lack of water. Rivers are dewatered from lack of water. Because of this we need to take shorter showers. See the disconnect? Because I take showers, I’m responsible for drawing down aquifers? Well, no. More than 90 percent of the water used by humans is used by agriculture and industry. The remaining 10 percent is split between municipalities and actual living breathing individual humans. Collectively, municipal golf courses use as much water as municipal human beings. People (both human people and fish people) aren’t dying because the world is running out of water. They’re dying because the water is being stolen.
Or let’s talk energy. Kirkpatrick Sale summarized it well: “For the past 15 years the story has been the same every year: individual consumption—residential, by private car, and so on—is never more than about a quarter of all consumption; the vast majority is commercial, industrial, corporate, by agribusiness and government [he forgot military]. So, even if we all took up cycling and wood stoves it would have a negligible impact on energy use, global warming and atmospheric pollution.”
Or let’s talk waste. In 2005, per-capita municipal waste production (basically everything that’s put out at the curb) in the U.S. was about 1,660 pounds. Let’s say you’re a die-hard simple-living activist, and you reduce this to zero. You recycle everything. You bring cloth bags shopping. You fix your toaster. Your toes poke out of old tennis shoes. You’re not done yet, though. Since municipal waste includes not just residential waste, but also waste from government offices and businesses, you march to those offices, waste reduction pamphlets in hand, and convince them to cut down on their waste enough to eliminate your share of it. Uh, I’ve got some bad news. Municipal waste accounts for only 3 percent of total waste production in the United States.
"
Book: The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, Thom Hartmann.
This is the essence not only of Thom's new book “Threshold”. We have been sold the line that we can save the world by recycling, driving hybrids, etc. These are positive, but there's a larger issue. If all of us did all the things that Al Gore, who does not address this, talks about, radical change, there would be only 22% change from the US, and we need 75% worldwide or we're screwed. Yesterday the G8, China and India said you blew CO2 to get rich and now you're telling us we can't? It's not consumers, it is industrial society, assumptions, culture. The problems are all symptoms, the problem is the culture, collective stories. We tell ourselves that an industrial economy that worships growth, corporate rights, hierarchy and dominance are more important than cooperation, war not peace, Patten not Gandhi.
That kind of culture will screw things up. For example, water. We need to take on industry and agriculture. No major politician, network, talks about it. Energy. Add military and it is more. We could go off the grid and still have a problem. Waste. We are being given false choices, it is blame the victim, don't look at the other hand doing the magic trick. Ecological problems are the result of industrial and military society. The US military uses the most gas. Eisenhower said to beware of the Military Industrial Complex. El Niño has changed. It may increase rather than reduce hurricanes.
Topic: "Geeky Science Rocks!!"
Article: Fructose Metabolism By The Brain Increases Food Intake And Obesity, Review Suggests.
Article: Plump youngsters show heart-y risks by Janet Raloff.
Article: Stomach surgery helps obese adolescents By Nathan Seppa.
The Mondragon cooperatives in Spain have pioneered some extraordinary ways of engaging in industrial processes, where the primary driver is not externalizing costs (waste). They are owned by the community, get very efficient. In our systems the goal is profit, and so we dump wastes into the commons. So consumers are driving some of the waste, but the way industry acts is at the core of the problem. Worker owned businesses, not investor. Not socialism, nor pure capitalism.
Fructose vs. glucose. Fructose vs. high fructose. Apples have equal amounts of both, and fiber to make you feel full unlike drinks.
Book: "Endgame", Derrick Jensen.
It's hard to find somebody who can be both head of state and head of government. Obama is saying good things. Unitary executive theory. Call the White House as often as Congress.
Bumper Music: Democracy is coming to the USA, Leonard Cohen.
Victoria Jones of Talk Radio News. The House took up the Intelligence Authorization bill, expanding the number of legislators getting the information. Letter to Ponetta. The CIA pushed back saying it took the initiative. Second veto threat from Obama, expansion from 8 to 40, saying it would imperil the ability to guard secrets. Senator Jim DeMint Q&A about book saving freedom, we are where Germany was before World War II, saying "they understand socialism, they understand tyrants". Don't Ask Don't Tell Murphy bill has 150 cosponsors, to do nationwide tour. Ike Skelton to hold hearings. Call Congress.
