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EFF: the Final Leaked TPP Text Is All That We Feared (eff.org)
An anonymous reader writes: Wikileaks has released the finalized Intellectual Property text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which international negotiators agreed upon a few days ago. Unfortunately, it contains many of the consumer-hostile provisions that so many organizations spoke out against beforehand. This includes the extension of the copyright term to life plus 70 years, and a ban on the circumvention of DRM. The EFF says, "If you dig deeper, you'll notice that all of the provisions that recognize the rights of the public are non-binding, whereas almost everything that benefits rightsholders is binding. That paragraph on the public domain, for example, used to be much stronger in the first leaked draft, with specific obligations to identify, preserve and promote access to public domain material. All of that has now been lost in favor of a feeble, feel-good platitude that imposes no concrete obligations on the TPP parties whatsoever." The EFF walks us through all the other awful provisions as well — it's quite a lengthy analysis.
Before it lays eggs!
were fucked.
The most ignorant thing about pushing all this in the current global climate with the contortionists US twisting with regard to Islamic Fundamentalist Terrorist/Rebels, everyone will blame America and Americans, everything bad in the TPP and it's ugly sibling TTIP will be blamed on American corporations and sales will suffer accordingly. Want your citizens and country to maintain any semblance of freedom boycott Large US Corporations (small ones run by real Americans apparently are fine, so oddly enough help America rebuild Main Street and protect you own country by working together globally to gut Wall Street).
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
I consider it well inside my rights to ignore your laws.
In less martial words, issuing laws that contravene the consensus of the population is dangerous. Laws are upheld mostly because people consider them good, not because they are being enforce. Look around you and ponder which laws are upheld (in general) and which one are flauntingly broken. Do you see people go on murdering sprees, bank robberies or even do some minor shit like pushing grannies out of the way? No. Why? Not because they're forbidden, but because they go against the "general moral consensus", for a lack of a better term. People in general consider this "wrong". Yes, they are also illegal, but that doesn't matter too much.
On the other hand, people of all times have broken laws without remorse if those laws were considered unjust. From speeding to copyright to drugs, all covered by laws with fines and punishment that are in no remotely sensibly proportion to the crime involved, laws being ignored and broken routinely by people you would otherwise consider upstanding, moral and law abiding.
The actual danger here is in the view people get on laws in general.
If you need an example for this, look no further than the former Communist Bloc. People in there quickly noticed that the laws are not there to protect them from "bad people", but to protect the state against them. Which in turn led to a corruption without parallel, because the average citizen's attitude was "why bother giving a shit about the state if it doesn't give one about me?".
And we can have that too. If we insist in installing more and more laws that work against our population. People already don't ask what "they can do for their country" anymore. Oppression and trying to enforce even more ridiculously anti-population laws will only increase resistance to them, to the point where people will actually resent and oppose the state as much as people in the former East Bloc did resent and oppose their state.
Ok, we cannot flee to a west. There is none.
But there's always necks to be severed.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
by the .1% for the .1%. Choose to be a slave, or learn how to fight.
no problem
think they can get away with this.
I really got to wonder who these people are who wield the power to write these laws. Not the congressmen, the head of these mega corporations that own the congressmen who pass laws on their behalf, while blatantly shitting down the throats of the rest of us. I mean, I got to know if they honestly have an argument for why they think this is a good thing, even in the face of overwhelming unpopularity. Or, do they just not give a fuck? Are they delusional or nihilist? [whynotboth.jpg]
You were critically hit for no damage. The bruise will look nice, and maybe the scars will make good party talk.
This treaty is an outright declaration of class warfare, with lots of surveillance goodies thrown in to get the enforcement part of government on board.
The thing to do now in the US is simply vote it down. If it is fast tracked so that Congress can only vote yes or no, then "no" it is. Just in case there's a chance of passage, we should make a lot of noise, make sure our representatives know our will and that it won't be safe to ignore us.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
The Toilet Paper Partnership? You're gonna need it once you read what they're trying to enforce worldwide...
Hope and Change. LOL. This is what we get from all the idiots falling for Obummer's bullshit.
It's true that this is all bullshit. Speaking like a true politician, how do we know the EFF or Wikileaks has the right document? How do we even know that a true document exists? How do we even know that there even is a real TPP deal?
Truth is, the US government can neither confirm nor deny such allegations from EFF and Wikileaks. Furthermore... ... we'll probably just say fuck you to the other nations who signed on to this deal and scrap it. We do that with virtually everything else. Make them sign on to bullshit, and we go on about our way as the world power.
- Sam.
choose your methods of fighting !
The Committee For Public Safety will now come to order !
resistance will not be futile, but mandatory.
This is my opinion based on what little I know and understand of the rumors and lies Thanks, Randal
What got passed is what the deep pockets paid for. It's called extortion.
I don't know about you, but 90% of the things I buy to live (Food, Toiletries, shelter) are owned and made by 13 companies. Unless you can afford really expensive boutique goods how the hell do you boycott? And if you can afford that TPP is good for you...
Better yet, tell me how to get the churches and their blue collar workers back on track with socialism? How do I remove abortion as a wedge issue? I'm singling that one out since the left dropped guns and the right seems to be losing homosexuality and racism (and the welfare queens) as their wedge issues. It's the last major one I know of that divides our working class. Tell me how the hell to fix our politics...
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This is why Jury Nullification is so important. Of course that's why many of these laws will be enforced without a trial.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
That's basically the US exporting his own copyright laws to other countries in the pacific ocean. So things don't change at all for americans: just keep downloading whatever you want as you've done for 20 years and don't give a f...
You should all be more worried about the Investor-State dispute settlement: companies will have the right to sue governments if they don't like their laws and regulations (environment safety, workers' rights, healthcare, welfare, etc...), and private lawyers will be part-time "judges" who will obviously rule in favor of corporations. That's far more dangerous for democracy and national sovereignty.
Finally, most importantly, start realizing that the expression "free trade" isn't good at all. It means companies moving production and services where labor costs are lower. It means companies being more powerful than democratically elected parliaments. It means more wealth inequality, plutocracy and oligarchy. I know that it's quite difficult to realize that something that is called "free" can be bad, especially when you're taught the opposite since elementary school, but sooner or later you need waking up.
John F. Kennedy; his Hollywood pimp, Peter Lawford; and Jack Mankiewicz, who left JFK's cabinet to become head of the MPAA. That's just history.
Since this weakens the public domain and strengthens rights for rightsholders, does it comparably strengthen the case for copyleft? How/would this change FOSS promotion and/or adoption strategies?
The base of the Republican party is currently so outraged at the party leaders in Washington, who have been doing Obama's bidding since 2010 (fully-funding his demands for Obamacare, Planned Parenthood, Illegal aliens, etc) and not ever actually fighting him (they have not even sent him a single conservative bill, as evidenced by his lack of vetos) that the GOP establishment is in complete chaos, unable to pick a leader who satisfies both the lobbyists in DC and the voters back home.
Sorry, but the GOP leaders in D.C. are bought-and-paid-for by the same Wall St. money men who have also spent more money electing (and re-electing) Obama than on any other politician in history. These same people are also the biggest funders of BOTH H->illary Clinton AND Jeb! Bush.
People who want to end all the corruption need to stop voting for the people Wall St wants. No more Jebs. No more Hillarys or Obamas. If you keep supporting these people for other reasons, then shut yer mouth and stop complaining - you have given other issues a higher priority a selected this path as a side-effect; you need to be honest with yourself. Wall St gets everything it wants by distracting you with other issues they know you care more about like abortion or man-man sex (they have a candidate on each side of those issues to push yer buttons and accomodate you while they get their way). WAKE UP!
Obama and his people in the Commerce and State departments (which he, as President, appointed and controls) are the ones who have (A) Negotiated this deal, (B) classified it to prevent the public from reading it, and (C) demanded the TPA bill earlier this year to put it on a fast-track to fly through congress without proper Constitutional scrutiny.
Sadly, "establishment" Republicans in congress (bribed by the same firms that funded Obama's rise to power) ignored their base voters and let him have TPA, and will do everything they can to pass TPP...... but There would BE no TPA or TPP without team Obama writing them and demanding them!
This is broadly about multinational corporations (and their billionaire owners and investors) freeing themselves of national boundaries and rules - but at the core of it are the multinational entertainment companies and their lobbying groups like the MPAA which are every bit as much of the core of the modern Democrat party as trial lawyers, government employee unions, and gay marriage advocates - separating this from Obama would be like separating George W Bush from the NRA, social conservatives, or defense contractors, etc.
I can and will circumvent any technological or legal obstacles they can dream of, and they can all go fuck themselves. At some point they're going to run out of dimwits who don't know how to use encryption, VPN, tor, i2p, freenet, bittorrent, etc., and their entire consumer base will have collapsed with a mighty "ARRR!!!" How's that for an end game, you short-sighted, unimaginative, greedy bitches?
Buy your next Linux PC at eightvirtues.com
I strongly suggest that, in countries that will see their public domains turned back 20 years, electronic distributors of public domain works create a special "TPP Pack" -- a collection of works that are currently in the public domain, but will revert back to copyrighted status. This will give everyone enough time to download these packs before the TPP is ratified.
And I'm not getting any financial compensation for the fact that works I purchased, with the understanding that they would become public domain within the next two decades, will now not become so, and I'm sure that are those who are seniors and perhaps will never see those works enter the public domain during their remaining lifetime. Speaking of which, once those Generation Typewriter are removed from the voting constituents, perhaps Digital Issues will become more important and we will finally see copyright term reductions. Of course, retroactively, and without compensation as well.
PS why wasn't this included in the Canadian Government's "TPP summary"?
When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.
"90% of the things I buy to live (Food, Toiletries, shelter) are owned and made by 13 companies."
It seems that the U.S. government now only helps rich people become richer. There is no democracy.
Companies That Control the World's Food (That is the 2nd page of the article.)
Food Processing's top 100
If you wait a year or two, you can buy anything for dirt cheap.
DVDs are just a couple of bucks once they aren't popular anymore. Same for games (hate Steam for the DRM, love it for the two-dollar games that are actually good). MP3s are just a couple of bucks new, in fact.
Seriously, when stuff is that cheap, I don't care that I must pay for it.
The Economist is a very pro-business magazine. Here's what they said about patents and the TPP:
"The cost of the innovation that never takes place because of the flawed patent system is incalculable. Patent protection is spreading, through deals such as the planned Trans-Pacific Partnership, which promises to cover one-third of world trade. The aim should be to fix the system, not make it more pervasive."
-- The Economist, "Time to fix patents", 8 August 2015
Millions spent by 487 organizations to influence TPP outcome
Kneel before the god of free trade.
I look forward to discovering the unexpected surprises in this thing.
Don't start claiming its you vs the law now, this committee was given a limited mandate to negotiate a TRADE agreement, not define laws that violate basic human rights.
Yet they put clauses that attack journalism and free speech, which many countries (including the US) cannot legally implement. Clauses that define criminal punishment regimes are not trade agreements, and the blanket data exchanges would be a violation of privacy right.
We need to dump the whole thing, stop secret negotiations, if it can't pass public scrutiny then its not DEMOCRATIC. There is nothing about trade that needs to be secret by its nature and a secret negotiation of a trade agreement is an anathema.
Trump hates this and this will kill jobs and workers rights.
The new min wage can now be say chinas minimum wage
Said before and will probably say again, these laws are designed to eliminate interfaces of resistance. What? Well, take segregation for example. There was an obvious point of resistance: sit at a lunch counter, take a bus, get arrested.
Now take most of these trade agreements. There's no obvious point of resistance for ordinary citizens. Stuff just gets more expensive and/or inferior. Stuff that used to exist disappears. Products come with "features" that spy on you, and there's no alternative. There's no point of resistance, and it's too difficult to build any consensus for boycott like there was with segregated buses.
It's as if TPTB studied civil disobedience and figured out how to eliminate the traction surfaces where resistance is applied.
IMHO, it has to get worse before it gets better. At some point, they run out of smooth surfaces. The temptation to oppress in places where resistance is more obvious becomes too great for them, and then we have a flash-point.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
You encourage others to become aware of how they are played by their corrupt leaders. I encourage you to study your history, and see the big picture.
Our situation was not caused by a recent bad crop of politicians. Our situation is part of a cycle that has been repeating since the dawn of recorded history. I see no reason to expect that it should change now.
In fact, the only thing that has changed is technology level. Likely, that is the only thing that will change in the foreseeable future. If there is any hope of breaking the familiar human cycle of governance, the game-changer will be in our technology. But enough speculation...
Wealth and power corrupt, by their nature. And they are sought most vigorously by the already-corrupt. The net effect is that all world leaders seek primarily to serve themselves, and secondarily to serve their contemporaries (other aristocrats). They only serve the masses inasmuch as they must in order to further their own agendas. Throw them all out, and whoever you replace them with will be just the same. If they are not just the same, they will either become so, or will be politically outmaneuvered by someone who is just the same, with an obvious net effect.
You can't change this by shouting "wake up" at ordinary people. Nor can you change this by political action. You can't change this, period. The only thing you can do is apply political force, to ensure that your own agenda is in their best interest. This is done by funding lobbies, and organizing grassroots movements to encourage the poor to vote as a group on the issue. Apart from becoming an aristocrat yourself (no easy task, since they are not at all keen on sharing power), these are the only means available to you.
Beyond that, all you can do is recognize your place in the cycle, and adapt to it. Failing to do so will just create friction for yourself and others.
Right off the bat, legislation is confused with natural laws, a prime error. Then legislation that contradicts foundational principles in increasing degree is still called "law". In the end, we have chaos and tyranny. Such legislation has no inherent moral authority, but suckers enough people to create hesitation over the resistance and counteraction needed to really put an end to "enforcement" of such (tyrannical) "laws".
This is seriously scary, the more so because the EU is negotiating this in secret behind closed doors,which is apparently possible for a democratically chosen government.
-- Cheers!
Whats it going to take to get governments in this world (USA, EU, Australia, New Zealand etc) that AREN'T being run by Hollywood and the big media companies?
The Dutch are all very much against this. However, the Dutch goverment is orgasming in ecstacy that it may be wagging it's tail and sitting on the US's lap even closer. So we are doomed.
Copyleft uses the power of copyright to subvert its common intent.
By giving copyright holders more powers, maybe we can now do more savage things to corporate violators, like send them jail.
Perhaps we need an anti-TPP software licence to take advange of this new power.
The harder they squeeze....
Filesharing and ripping of DVDs and Bluray discs will continue unabated and there is NOTHING any of these assholes in suits can do to stop it. "You can't stop the signal, Mal." It'll go underground, to handing off USB flash drives if nothing else. Tor will be leveraged more and more. They can squeeze tighter and tighter and more of it will slip through their fingers, just like always.
Of course this all assumes Congress votes for the goddamned thing. Call you congressperson and tell them HELL, NO!
The US Gov't still does a lot of things to help the poor. Studies show that anti-poverty programs work. The Sentiments your expressing are just playing into the hands of the 1%ers who want to cut those programs without touching their own. Gov't is a dangerous tool like fire and guns. You regulated it and control it, but you don't just cast it aside.
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the little midget, Mr 4th Reich, helped create the mess. It was under HIS watch in the Clinton administration, under the banner of "the Cold War is over" that many of the security-of-the-west-based restrictions on international trade and labor collapsed, and the crony capitalism went into overdrive. As the internet bubble of the 90's created a false sense of a booming economy, manufacturers took advantage of the more-open trade rules to export labor in an attempt to match the (often illusory) stock returns of all those suddenly-popular dot-com stocks. Large employers of the middle class who had long posted respectable returns while paying good wages were suddenly seen as "losers" by investors who saw pets.com booming, and with employees as some of their biggest expenses and the sudden availability of slave labor in China, well.... it's now hard for a two-earner family to live with only two kids where it was once possible for a family of six to get by on one income.
The opening trade rules with China, no-doubt greased by all those fund raisers Hillary Clinton, Al Gore and others in the admin were holding, combined with all that Wall St banker cash flowing into the Clinton machine, generated benefits so obvious that many businesses and industries that had never before paid for lobbyists in DC suddenly started having lobbyists. When you add-in the massive piles of regulations Mr Reich and his pals in the Clinton admin put in place (many with start dates set for after Clinton left office so the negative effects would kick-in after he was gone and the public would misplace the blame) nearly all of which can be evaded if you can buy the right lobbyists and congress critters, this self-serving economics troll should learn to have at least a micron of introspection.
There's enough blame to go around in the corruptocrats of BOTH parties in DC, but it's particularly obscene when a goose-stepping little socialist troll who usually confines his propaganda to the mush-headed young morons in his classrooms steps out into public to shovel his garbage with the expectation that the general public has forgotten him and just how destructive he and his ilk are. The American economy will likely never return to Reagan era rates of growth as long as the millstones put in place by Herr Reich and his dear leader (and now heaped-higher by Obama) are removed from the national neck.
You STILL do not get it, even though you say that you do...... Globalization is not really "left" nor "right"; it's a play by the super-rich and powerful to escape all limits and controls. They do not care about any particular economic or political system; they know the leaders of any nation with any system will cater to them. What they want is for all governments everywhere to let them move (along with their power and money) across any border at will with no cost, subjecting them to no controls or limits imposed by the little insignificant people (avg citizens/voters). People on the left are fooled into supporting the globalist agenda when their efforts to push leftist dreams like gay marriage or climate change limits etc bang-up against "small-minded" local or national politics (they are encouraged to see globalism as an override). People on the right are fooled into supporting globalization under the monikers of "economic freedom" and liberty and thinking it will be a limit on the socialists. The people pushing globalism have NONE of these things on their minds; they are only thinking of power and money. The populations who let them rig things ever-more in their favor are being foolish.
Crony capitalism and massive government are conjoined twins. Socialism (which requires massive govt) and globalization (which is wed to international unelected and unaccountable committees and agencies that will only answer to massive governments and oligarchs) are just frosting on that cake that can be used to encourage the would-be victims of these things to buy into them and have no escape hatch.
All I can say about this whole debacle is that many people in my country, which is affected by this, have lost their faith in the government, both ruling party and opposition, and therefore in democracy.
Approximately 75% of our population is opposed to the TPPA, yet it has been forced through. Ratification of this law was not given mandate in our last election.
This is an example of downright evil behaviour by the wealthy elite. Foreign corporations now have more rights than the citizen of our nations and may now sue against the decisions of the majority of the people. We have potentially lost our sovereignty.
And the copyright provisions are the least of our worries, really who cares about that, it's probably the biggest non-issue of the entire agreement.
Even a person randomly selected from off the street by a clown in a blindfold.
An average person would find it hard to be as corrupt and destructive as a professional "community organizer" with a law degree who was fixated on corruption, taking more money from Wall St than any politician in world history, and well-connected to political activists who agree with him.
I dislike Romney rather intensely, but he would indeed have been better. Sarah Palin would have been better. John McCain would have probably been as bad as Obama. Seth Rogan would have been better. Jay Leno would have been better. The checkout lady down at my local grocery store would have been a better president, who used the presidency more honestly and responsibly. Even a local kid from the skateboard park would have been more careful and more worried about what he was doing with that power.
Obama, with many of the actions his supporters either like to ignore or actually foolishly celebrate, went full-on anti-Constitutional and, aided by the liberals on the Supreme Court, has set many precedents that cannot now be easily undone. Any future President of any party will be able to cite the precedents of Obama when he or she completely ignores laws and the congress and does whatever ho or she wants "with a phone and a pen". No Checks. No Balances. Forget all those old civics lessons about co-equal branches of government and forget those old "Schoolhouse Rocks" musical animations.
The new Obama way we do things in America is with an emperor who spies on everybody without warrants, interprets all laws to mean what he wants and refuses to enforce any he disagrees with, makes international treaties without the Senate, appoints people to positions in government without congressional approval, bans products he dislikes, forces citizens to buy stuff he orders them to buy, orders people to be fined or go to jail if his policies violate their beliefs, throws film makers in jail if they are a convenient excuse for his policy failures, and denounces anybody who disagrees with him as insane or a racist. The left is going to HATE all those precedents if a non-leftist ever takes them and runs with them as ruthlessly as Obama.
You guys on the left are now reduced to justifying your foolish support for our Maximum Leader and his evil precedents by saying "the other option was worse". You REALLY need to think that through and realize you are admitting you supported total dirtbaggery. The first black American president SHOULD have been recorded in history as a great man (there are some truly honorable black generals, admirals, captains of industry, and even some very decent politicians). Sadly, history will record that the first black American president was an evil divisive racist hack bent on tearing the country down and apart while doing NOTHING to benefit black Americans who have fared worse under him than under either Bush or Reagan.
Man-Man sex
I like your phrasing here because it is very accurate. Even the hardcore anti-SSM people don't seem bothered by girl-on-girl. It's the guy-on-guy that enflames their imaginations.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
https://birds-are-nice.me/musi...
I show how the concept of the public domain has been crushed by demonstrating just how little popular music exists in it.
I'd call this shameless self-promotion, but I make about £0.03 a month in advertising off that. Factor in that everyone uses ad-blocking here and I might make £0.06 this month if it gets slashdotted. No, I just want to flood the internet with public-domain music in open-standard format.
Completely hostile to our own people, and utterly ridiculous. It looks like another attempt to extend US law to the civilized world. The United States is now clearly our enemy. We must do everything possible to stop their corrupt corporate dictatorship, subjugating our own government.
I agree. Both are happening. The corruption and the correct management.
And Japan. It's not just IP to worry about, it's a whole host of things. Under NAFTA Canada became the most sued country and most of those were to remove our environmental protections. At least we're in an election right now and if we can get the Conservatives out we have at least a HOPE of at least renegotiating it. Then again, a guy I work with just voted (advanced voting) and somehow accidentally checked the wrong box...sometimes I want to give up...
I do not want to spoil the fun here but China is not party to TTP.
Wait, what? I can't believe it, NO!!!!!
You mean the politicians in charge of the US decided to lie in bed with corporate interests rather than furthering and advancing the rights of the people they were elected to represent?
Say it ain't so?
Go take a look at George Carlin's interpretation of what the American Dream is. Wake the fuck up, people, you're being cornholed on a daily basis by these bums!
The bill itself should be available by the end of this month, has to be publicly available before it can be passed, and is unlikely to be voted on before next year anyway. Cf., http://www.citizen.org/documents/tpp-vote-calendar-october-2-2015.pdf
... we have written the year 2000, that the world will observe strange things (...) from the West a law which purpose will be to supress all individual thinking ..." - Rudolf Steiner, 1916
With post 2K Software patents and now this 1984 nightmare of a law package, I'm wondering if this guy actually was on to something.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Comment removed based on user account deletion
When you post in fixed-width font, it just makes you look like a moron.
All of her friends were there, the room decorated with balloons and streamers, an arc of letters proclaiming "Happy Birthday, Jenny!" in purple, her favorite color, the cake chocolate with chocolate frosting, her mother, smiling ear-to-ear at how happy her daughter was to have a room full of people there to honor her on her Special Day. Yet the man in the suit, standing in the corner with his hands at parade rest isn't smiling. Men like him never smiled; they just stand there, expressionless, reactionless, like a Beefeater guard. As everyone starts to sing 'Happy Birthday', the man in the suit notes the time and date, and the exact number of celebrants who are actually singing. All six candles are blown out in one huge breath by little Jenny, to a rousing "Hooray!" from everyone except the man in the suit, cake is cut and shared, presents are opened to the ooohs and aaahs of the children. Some time later, after the children have gone in the other room to play in the manner children play with one another, the man in the suit breaks his discipline and approaches the mother, handing her a clipboard and a pen. "Please sign here, ma'am, to certify your acceptance of the royalties bill. Thank you. We'll expect payment in full within 30 days." Things just weren't the same after the Trans Pacific Partnership agreement went into effect. Even something as simple as singing 'Happy Birthday', which once was put into the public domain, became complicated, as the decision was reversed, the original rights-holder claiming perpetual ownership, and demanding royalties for every 'performance' of the song, even in private venues like little Jenny's birthday party, an event which had to be registered ahead of time, along with a signed statement of intent to perform the song, and a security deposit made against the actual royalties, based on the actual number of participants performing the song on the scheduled date. At least the party wasn't held in a public place, Jenny's mother thinks with a sense of relief; the surcharge in that case would have bankrupted them..
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
In the states local markets are few, far between and expensive. It's not about wanting to or not wanting to. It's about how much money you have. 62% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck (look it up). Those extra dollars are the difference between making rent this week and not...
Also I don't think Heinlein forsaw or could address modern politics, specifically the type created by Karl Rove and Dick Cheney. He mostly focused on economics. That works when you've got a united undercalss. Rove and Cheny did two things. They divided the underclass with wedge issues and and they started using bold lies repeated endlessly to convince folks of those like. Hell, Rove ran a draft dodger against a war hero more than once and one. How the hell do we deal with that?
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Ironic that that Chapter QQ is about Imaginary Property :-/
Have you ever wondered where money comes from? Consider this carefully. Generally, at any given time, there are more dollars in circulation than there were the day before, or the year before, etc. Where did they come from? Who owned them first? Who spent them first?
I won't give you the answer here because you'll likely not believe it, but I encourage you to look into it.
If you do, you won't have to wonder why the government is so deeply in debt and getting deeper.
According to the leaked text, in any case of copyright lawsuit or proceedings it is the absence of copyright that has to be proven. Goodie.
"In civil, criminal, and if applicable, administrative proceedings involving copyright or related rights, each Party [i.e. signatory country] shall provide:
(b) for a presumption that, in the absence of proof to the contrary, the copyright or related right subsists in such subject matter."
There's a footnote full of "mays" to it, but we all know how it ends.
Seriously. You don't have to prove holding the copyright, and the burden of proof is on whatever the other side is?
W. T. F.
both need to learn: that sometimes their different, yet shared, views of freedom and liberty cause them to have more in common than either truly has in common with the bought-by-Wall-St "establishment" monsters in both parties.
The so-called "moderates" in BOTH parties "run to the left" or "run to the right" in their primaries and make little point of hiding their plans to "run to the middle" in the general and then "be their own man/woman" after being elected. They are spelling it out right in front of you: they will lie to you in the primary, lie to everyone else in the general and then serve Wall St once elected. DUH! These trolls portray themselves as the level-headed "reasonable" ones (that's their campaign tactic) in the hopes you do not notice they have told you explicitly that they do not plan to be trustworthy or to serve you. They simply want to become wealthy and powerful on a career path who's primary qualifications are rhetoric, false smiles, and handshakes - the career involves a few years as a quasi-celebrity with a legal right to do insider trading on Wall St (assisted by "tips" from lobbyists for Wall St) followed by a career as a lobbyist for Wall St.
Most people would be shocked by the number of congress members and Senators who get elected, move to Washington, and never move back home but instead join or create lobbying firms after they lose reelection (often sharing firms with the very people from the other party they pretended to hate and oppose during their political careers). Toxic levels of corruption.
You are right that on TPP liberal private sector unions, conservative TEA Partiers, liberal free-speechers, and conservative "obey the actual words of the Constitution!" types are both natural allies AND have the added bonus of being RIGHT (both in the "correct" and in the "moral" sense)
People forget that Bush41 hated Reagan and did everything he could to keep Reagan and the Conservatives from winning in 1980. Reagan put him on the ticket as VP to try to heal the party after a bruising 1980 primary - but Bush (and Mitt Romney's dad for that matter) was a pillar of the "establishment" wing of the GOP. When Bush41's son George ran, he did NOT have the backing of conservatives in the GOP who were made super suspicious of him by his dad's phony play at a "third Reagan term" that turned-out to be an establishment GOP resurgence. From 1988-1992 the Bushies packed the GOP leadership with their big-government Republicans (and even today places like Fox News are infested with big government Bushie RINOs rather than actual Conservatives). Bush43 was NOT the choice of Conservatives, he was just the last Republican candidate standing after the usual tidal wave of campaign attacks funded by Wall St supporters of the establishment wing of the party.
Conservatives really only warmed to Bush43 during the general election because he was the only way to prevent Al Gore from being President - they were very wary of his agenda which was essentially "inject the feds into local schools" (hated by the small-govt conservatives) and "no more nation-building" (intended to be a contrast with Clinton/Gore in places like Somalia and Kosovo, but conservatives were worried it was a soft-on-foreign-policy agenda). Conservatives warmed more to Bush43 after Al Gore tried to drag the election through the courts and all the re-counts in only Democrat districts of Florida with ever-changing-as-needed standards for what constituted a vote ... and MORE supportive when Gore's team went to court to block the absentee ballots of deployed military folks (Gore might as well have physically assaulted Charlton Heston [smile]). Finally, conservative support for Bush43 solidified on 9-11 before all the bodies were even counted when it appeared he might actually have a spine.
The conservative base of the party, however, never really loved Bush43 and hated many of the non-conservative things he did, like his massive increases in government. The creation of DHS (which concentrated more power in DC), all the warrantless spying (contrary to the plain text of the Constitution), huge new medicaid drug program (Massive and unfunded growth of LBJ social spending) "no child left behind" program (Making local schools the business of the Feds, contrary to the Constitution), Wall St bank bailout (using taxpayer money to bail-out cronies) and initial auto-industry bail-out (more tax money for cronies) are ALL completely contrary to the most-fundamental conservative principles and are what led to the rise of outrage among rank-and-file conservatives and eventual formation of the TEA Party. If you go back and look without partisan goggles, you'll realize that when the TEA Partiers first arose in the eyes of the media who, being mostly Democrats were eager to paint them as rednecks who opposed Obama over his race, their signs and banners and complaints were that the new president was doubling-down on the government growth and crony bailouts of the Bush43 admin - they'd finally had ENOUGH of the crony policies not the particular man.
The current fight in DC over House Speaker is the result of all those fake conservatives in DC having finally pushed the actual conservatives over the puke-out-the-RINOS threshold. The past decade has firmly-established the fact that RINOS (who campaign as conservatives and then never actually act as Conservatives) are completely worthless and untrustworthy; their actions have the same results as any establishment Democrat would have, thus making them NOT "the lesser of two evils" (from a Conservative perspective).
and yes, THAT is why Trump is leading and none of the RINOs can take him down by pointing at him and shrieking to the base that "He's not a real Conservative!!!" - the base has realized that there is nothing honest or conservative about the RINOs.
*slow clap* your president ladies and gentlemen *slow clap*
When will we learn that governments cannot be allowed to conspire about anything in secret? You let the government do anything out of public sight and they will fuck the living hell out of voters in order to make every special-interest group ecstatic and fill their campaign coffers.
Trump is a psychopathic imbecile. I fully expect he will be elected.