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Secret Copyright Treaty Leaks. It's Bad. Very Bad.
Jamie found a Boing Boing story that will probably get your blood to at least a simmer. It says "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." You can read the original leaked document or the summary. If passed, the internet will never be the same. Thank goodness it's hidden from public scrutiny for National Security.
The whole point is that there are precious few details about any of ACTA because nobody outside of the governments involved, their lawyers and a few high-paying lobby groups have been allowed to see any of its contents.
*Everything* about it is hearsay until either someone succeeds in getting an FOI request honoured or the thing gets ratified and it's too late to do anything about it.
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The mainstream media only notices it when someone's already being prosecuted for violating it.
I agreed completely until this statement. Mainstream media isn't that oblivious- they simply don't have YOUR best interests at heart.
I'm sure most news networks themselves do notice it, but their parent companies are the very entities lobbying/pushing for more legislation. CNN = Time Warner, NBC = Vivendi Universal, FoxNews = News Corp, ABC = Disney, etc... These news companies (either through affiliates or parent corps) own most of our music, movies, TV shows, and other media, so it's only natural for them to protect their interests by trying to distract us from the draconian laws they're currently pushing through the governments of the world.
Sadly, it seems that blogs and independent news are our only hope.
Sigs are for losers
Here, read this: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/
Thanks
...um ratified treaties are laws. See http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/constitution_transcript.html, Artivle VI, paragraph 2, "This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding."
Interesting that you're voted Offtopic while the post that went offtopic was your parent. You are spreading misinformation, but it ought to be corrected instead of simply modded down.
The NPR program This American Life recently had two episodes (391 and 392, found here) on the health care system, and the problems with it are just not as simple as the Democrats or the Republicans are making them out to be.
For one thing, the hospitals are most certainly *not* fine. A big part of the insurance problem is that companies who serve a large area population use that influence to negotiate really low service rates with hospitals in their area. The hospitals want that customer base, so rather than standing firm at a reasonably profitable price, they lower prices for the big insurance company and jack up prices for the same procedures when dealing with smaller companies. The example given in the show was of one hospital in CA which charged one company $1600 for a procedure, and charged another $11,000.
There's a lot more where that came from in the shows. I highly recommend them to everyone who wants to open his mouth to talk about health care. Everyone knows it's broken, but too many people are looking solely at the broken parts their party claims will fix the whole thing.
Your brain is not a computer.