You know, if I can just grow the shit, I'm not paying $3500 for it.
I could, in theory, grow grapes, corn, and tobacco, and so I could make wine, bourbon, and cigars. But it's a lot of work and the end product would suck, so I'll gladly pay others.
Yes, certainly the figures cited in the article you quoted are inflated, but there's no question that legalizing cannabis and other drugs and taxing them would not only bring in significant income, but would reduce prison and law enforcement costs -- as well as increasing liberty. Keep your laws off my body.
The word "marijuana" for cannabis was introduced by the prohibitionists back in the 1930s. Everybody knew that hemp was a good thing, and cannabis was a useful medicine, so they needed a new word to whip up a frenzy, and to keep all those old prohibition agents employed now that they were no longer arresting rum runners.
The word "marijuana" was great because it linked the drug to those dirty dark-skinned fellows. As evil prick Harry Anslinger testified to Congress in 1937, "There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the US, and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing, result from marijuana usage. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others."
So, yes, the selection of the word marijuana by prohibitionists was rooted in racism. Cannabis would be a more historically neutral term for the medicinal plant, or hemp for the industrially useful strains.
Congress works for megacorps and for the investment class.
and it is our job to use our vote and our voice with our local representatives to effect policy change.
Most of us have no voice with our representatives. At the local level politics is all party machinery; at the federal level, Congressional districts are deliberately gerrymandered, and election laws rigged, to keep representatives in office. It works very well: re-election rates in the House usually top 90%.
Crowley was every bit a genius. He had chunks of guys like L.Ron Hubbard in his stool. His work is very very hard to read, and you always get the sense that he's laughing atyou, the reader, but there's much to learn in what he had to say. His "Magick Without Tears" is still one of the greatest works for young sorcerers.
When he was at his best -- and parts of Magick Without Tears are there -- yes.
When he was deep in the grip of his Aiwass delusions, well, not so much.
Chaos Magick works. I am absolutely convinced that you can change your external reality in significant (even measurable) ways using Magick.
You can certainly change your experience, your own subjective reality, with magic(k).
Of course, you can also do that with LSD.
And since "consensus" reality is a social construct, if you've got a crowd that's susceptible to manipulation, under some circumstances you can change the consensus with magic(k).
But if you think "objective" reality -- that is, consensus reality as observed and experienced under carefully controlled conditions by skeptical observers in a reproducible manner -- can be changed by magic(k) in ways not already accounted for by physics, well, prove it and the JREF has a fortune for you.
if you are actually talking about moslem terrorists, they have hated us for decades
We've been giving folks in the Middle East plenty of reason to hate the U.S. for decades. It's not like brutal and stupid American foreign policy is a recent invention, it's all tied up with that "Manifest Destiny" bullshit, that belief in American exceptionalism that says the world belongs to us.
...and have hated non-muslims for hundreds of years.
the american situation has zero - ZILCH- to do with their hate. their hate lives on, entirely on its own. muslim culture enhances hatred of non-muslims and their view is that some day, the earth SHOULD belong entirely and exclusively to them.
Wow, your ignorance and prejudice and fear of Islam is remarkable.
Islam contains as much diversity within in as any of the major religions. You've got fundamentalists who think heretics should die, sure; you've also got Sufi mystics who love everybody. Most Muslims -- like my veterinarian, or the South African karate students I've trained with -- are just ordinary folks.
its about classic old vs new religion. you really think that 'america' is at all relevant when it comes to 'my god vs your god' ? come on./blockquote>
Religion is a tool used by those would manipulate people for political ends. It works -- look at how well you've been manipulated to fear Islam, for example.
...half the time. When the wind was southerly, he knew a hawk from a handsaw.
He's an interesting character. He was one of the first Westerners to take an interest in yoga and in Buddhism, and his early writings on these are insightful. Some of his work shows a understanding of ritual magic as psychological exercise -- for instance, in a preface to his and Mather's version of The Lesser Key of Solomon, he wrote that "The spirits of the Goetia are portions of the human brain.... If, then, I say, with Solomon: 'The Spirit Cimieries teaches logic,' what I mean is: 'Those portions of my brain which subserve the logical faculty may be stimulated and developed by following out the processes called "The Invocation of Cimieries."'"
And then he had a nervous breakdown and started top believe that he was "the Prophet chosen to proclaim the Law which will determine the destinies of this planet for an epoch," and "in a class which contains only seven other names in the whole of human history".
There should be no compulsion to contribute, as the freedom to choose to contribute or not *must* be one of the fundamental freedoms in Open Source.
If you're using imperfect software -- i.e., any real software -- but you have source, and you are a large IT enterprise, then you have the motive, method, and opportunity to make fixes.
If you don't contribute those changes back to the community, those changes won't be rolled into the next version.
So if you're making fixes to free software, it's in your own interest to contribute them back. That's the compulsion to contribute -- rational self interest.
If security is important, you don't put it in the hands of low-wage worker bees. You put it in the charge of highly paid, highly skilled, creative and independent thinkers.
If you want the illusion of security, though, drones will do fine.
Most of us are justifiably afraid of real terrorism.
Cancer and heart disease have killed somewhere in the neighborhood of ten million people in the past ten years. Over a million people died in accidents in the past decade; about 400,000 of those were killed in motor vehicle accidents.
In the past ten years, about 160,000 people were murdered.
About 30,000 drowned.
Only 2,974 were killed in acts of terrorism carried out by foreign nationals within the U.S.
If you're justifiably afraid of terrorism, you must be justifiably scared shitless of all this other, much more dangerous stuff.
And yet nobody gets all bent out of shape about how we have to suspend habeus corpus to protect ourselves from the dangers of swimming pools, cars, and Big Macs.
So long as we think fearing terrorists is justified, we will want Big Government to protect us. (Never mind that it's the brutal and stupid foreign policy of Big Government that motivates the terrorist's hate.)
Removing adverts and altering how other peoples work is used without their permission...
When you put work on the web, you are giving people permission to view it.
Blocking ads is no different than putting a piece of tape over my screen to block images I don't want to see. I have every right to view a work however I please, and to do whatever I want to a copy you give me. (Distributing a derivative work, now, is another matter.)
The internet has the capability to be an incredible paradigm change for us all, but it is unlikely that it will be allowed to become this due to regulation that will invariably be placed upon it by our governments and corporations.
The reason that the internet has this capability is because such regulation cannot be effective. If you and I can get packets to each other, we can encode communications over that channel and share whatever information we want. The most regulation could do is give us a "War on Sharing" as effective as the "War on Drugs" -- reduced civil liberties, occasional high-profile busts, and very little impact on the availability of the contraband.
What's the point of these mobile sites again? Why are they different?
Low bandwidth, for one. This weekend I was at a campground, right on the edge of having no signal at all (had to walk a half mile from our campsite to get out of totally dead space), and wanted to check the weather report to see if a storm would hit us. m.wund.com is much more useful than www.wunderground.com in such a circumstance.
Isn't this what's supposed to be solved by different stylesheets for different viewing devices anyway?
Of course stylesheets help, but often you want to send different content to mobile users.
Wouldn't a password vault or encrypted text file on a non-networked pc be much simpler?
Since when is a computer -- subject to various sorts of software and hardware malfunctions -- much simpler than a freakin' piece of paper in a locked box?
No, my friend, I'm afraid that's just the way things look when you're being lapped. Taubes did indeed make a lame attempt to defend his "work", such as it is, against Fumento's criticism, which Fumento then tore to bits.
Advocates of Atkins-style diets belong in the same bin with creationists, climate change deniers, and (to bring this back on point) the folks who told us for years that making water bottles out of a polymer of a synthetic hormone was perfectly safe because BPA couldn't possibly ever ever leach from polycarbonate.
The problem is mostly that American's caloric intake increased almost 25% between 1970 and 2000, while at the same time we became more sedentary. Any difference that the sort of calories (fat, protein, complex carbs, simple sugars, whatever) might make is swamped by the fact the we just eat too much gorram food and don't get our asses up and moving enough.
A couple hundred extra calories a day above your metabolic needs is going to make you a lard-ass whether you eat them as wheat germ and broccoli, or as bacon double cheeseburgers. (Though the bacon double cheeseburgers will probably still hit you harder in terms of cancer, heart disease, and other fun effects.)
As for Taubes and his famous "What If It's All Been a Big Fat Lie" story, he's full of crap.
While we're quoting the constitution, please quote the part that defines "enemy". Oh.
Gosh, I guess that means it's up to the courts to interpret...
No more so than it's up to the courts to interpret any other word. In the context "levying war against..or in adhering to their enemies", it means a group at war with the U.S. Full stop.
By the way, you do realize that your whole point is invalid because the Rosenbergs were not charged with treason
Would you care to look upthread and see how the topic of treason came into the discussion? Thanks.
they took oaths not to reveal secrets
Julius might have signed some such nonsense when in the Army, but when did Ethel Rosenberg ever take such an oath? Please provide a citation or retract this claim.
There is no evidence that Ethel Rosenberg engaged in espionage. Greenglass long ago recanted his testimony.
What the Rosenbergs did - giving atomic secrets to a hostile tyranny is treason.
In the U.S., treason is narrowly defined as "levying war against [the U.S.], or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort." The Rosenbergs did not make war against the U.S., and no state of war existed between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., so we were not enemies. We were rivals in a geopolitical game including nuclear brinksmanship and other brutal and stupid behavior on both sides, yes, but not enemies. (Indeed, at the time the Rosenbergs started their activities, we were allies with the U.S.S.R. against the Nazis.)
Vassiliev, who acted as his own lawyer, was not an impressive witness. On the arcane but crucial question of whether, in his unfettered trawl through KGB archives, he'd ever seen a single document linking Alger Hiss with "Ales"--the code name of a Soviet agent in the 1940s who, Weinstein and Vassiliev insisted, had to be Hiss--he admitted he hadn't. He also failed to provide a satisfactory account of just how he'd managed, despite being required to leave his files and notebook in a safe at the KGB press office at the end of each day, to smuggle out the notebooks with his extensive transcriptions of documents, which, he explained, he couldn't even ask to have photocopied, because the contents were considered Russian state secrets.
We can all be either disgusting drooling snotty ape like creatures, or divine beings.
It's not an exclusive or. We are drooling (sometimes) snotty (sometimes) ape like creatures. And since we create gods, we are also divine beings.
You just have to learn to swallow the dilemma.
(Fortunately, we Discordians are trained in dilemma swallowing, as well as proposition juggling, axiom throwing, rebutting on a bed of nails, and all the other arts of the sideshow philosopher.)
Either you stand up to things you don't like, or you remain silent forever. Good luck with your decision.
If you choose to stand up to things you don't like, you still have the choice of tactics in how to make your stand. Part of that it figuring out how to either 1) continue to remain alive and free, or 2) make it expensive for the opposition to kill or imprison you.
Take a nice drive to a different city. Pay cash for all gas and tolls. Do some touristy stuff while you're there -- if it comes up, don't deny you were there, but don't advertise it either.
With cash, buy a cheap wi-fi card (or USB interface) and hard drive to make your laptop clean, so the MAC address and any browser data won't be traceable to you later. Buy these at different places. Install the drive and wi-fi in your laptop and do a fresh install of your OS.
Find a place with free wi-fi. Use it. You want a small cafe or bar that's not going to have security cameras, not a franchise. Be bland and unrememberable.
Post the data to wikileaks, certainly. But that's a single point of failure. So also:
Post links to those pages on any blog that's remotely relevant.
Optional: with cash, buy a couple of SD cards. Make like Rodrigo Rosenberg and record a video of yourself explaining that if you disappear, it's because the spooks got you. Put a copy of the video and the data in question on the SD cards. Seal in envelopes marked "open only in the event of my death or disappearance." Mail to a few people you can trust (inside another envelope, so the attention-getting message isn't visible...). Works best if you have friends/family who are the sort who would engage in a bloody campaign of vengeance against your killers, but most of us would have to settle for something less dramatic.
Wipe the hard drive. Install bogus data on it so it looks boring. Dispose of it and the wi-fi card at an electronics recycling drop-off point.
Utterly and completely destroy whatever media originally held the data, and dispose of the remains at several different places.
But seriously, you're comparing not getting perpetual compensation for something you wrote to invading your personal space?
I'm not invading your personal space. I'm camped on your lawn, scores of feet away from you on the other side of a wall, and doing you no harm. Land ownership is just as much a social-legal fiction as is copyright. Yet you're willing to kill to protect it?
Nor have I mentioned perpetual compensation, I've explicitly disclaimed that. Please do me the favor of not putting words into my mouth.
I tell you this -- I would rather have you camp on my lawn for a few days than falsely claim authorship of one of my works.
Am I harmed if you claim credit for a song that I wrote? Not directly, it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. But you are collecting something -- credit -- that I am, ethically, owed. I assert that the financial situation is the same: just as you owe me my name on the liner notes of the CD (or whatever the equivalent is for an MP3 from iTunes), when you sell recordings of a song I wrote, you owe me a just royalty.
You could conceivably have your written song copied and distributed worldwide without even knowing about it.
And I have no objection to that. Is it somehow unclear to you that I am not arguing in favor of copyright? Copy, share and enjoy, please. I just want a fair share if you make money off of it.
Sure, without copyright, other bands could play and the writer wouldn't be compensated, but the original band will always do the best
That statement, sir, is unadulterated rubbish. Is Hendrix's version of "All Along the Watchtower" inferior to Dylan's?
Joplin's "Me and Bobby McGee" not as good as Kris Kristofferson's? Do you think Ike & Tina Turner's "Proud Mary" is not as good as CCR's? Feh, I say, feh.
(On the topic of covers, I have to digress a second: while trying to refresh my brain on covers better than originals I stumbled across this, which mentions that that the version of "Desperado" on the Langley Schools Music Project. Let me say that if you love music, you owe it to yourself to seek out this album. Also Songs in the Key of Z.)
The simple fact that you wrote that post makes you incapable of realizing that there is an actual, non-scientific world of "regular folks" that you never come into contact with.
I come into contact with a wide variety of people, thank you very much. That I have a somewhat scientific mindset no more means that I don't come into contact with "regular folks" any more than that I'm a vegan means I don't come in contact with meat eaters, or than that I'm a amateur athlete means I don't come into contact with couch potatoes.
But having had a bit of training in scientific thinking, I know that my own casual observations -- of people or of the physical universe -- are limited and biased. As are yours, and everyone's. So making sweeping generalizations based on "simple observation of people" is just shoddy thinking.
Songwriters don't necessarily have CD sales. Songwriters often produce rough demos, or written music, to get their ideas to performing or recording musicians. Not all songwriters are singers.
It's the songwriters, not the original performers, who get these royalties. If I play "Love Potion Number 9" at a paid gig, Leiber and Stoller get the nickel, not The Clovers.
The reason the stupid copyright law exists in the first place is to benefit the people!
Exactly! And having creators get paid is of benefit to the people, it helps "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." But restricting sharing of creative works is not.
So how can we have creators get paid, and not restrict sharing?
One solution is to restrict selling, by requiring a royalty on commercial use of a work. This is orders of less magnitude less invasive than trying to restrict personal sharing.
And it's more in line with intuitive notions of fairness.
(Note that I'm speaking of the general idea, not the current ASCAP/BMI implementation which adds many problematic aspects on top of it.)
It isn't so that you can claim profit from each and every rendition of a song throughout space and time.
And, since I said the royalties should apply only to commercial performances (as is currently the case) and only for a limited time (as it not), we don't have a disagreement on that point.
A cover band playing a professional song will never detract from the professional group's funds, and I defy you to find anything to the contrary.
Me camping out on your front lawn will never detract from your funds. (I'm a good camper and always leave the site better than I found it.) But yet it still detracts from something abstract, from your sense of control over your life.
So it is with art. If someone gets rich off by performing a song I wrote and I get nothing, it detracts from our sense of justice and fairness.
Of course, the world is not very fair. Nor does it give us much control over our own lives. But we structure our legal and social systems around these ideas anyway.
As a practical matter, creators of works we enjoy ought to get paid. As a matter of cultural freedom, people ought to be free to share works they enjoy. As a matter of intuitive fairness, creators ought to get a share of riches made off of their creations. Royalty-right supports all these ends.
If you have a counter-proposal that does it better, I'm open to hearing it.
Slashdot Mirror
I could, in theory, grow grapes, corn, and tobacco, and so I could make wine, bourbon, and cigars. But it's a lot of work and the end product would suck, so I'll gladly pay others.
Yes, certainly the figures cited in the article you quoted are inflated, but there's no question that legalizing cannabis and other drugs and taxing them would not only bring in significant income, but would reduce prison and law enforcement costs -- as well as increasing liberty. Keep your laws off my body.
The word "marijuana" for cannabis was introduced by the prohibitionists back in the 1930s. Everybody knew that hemp was a good thing, and cannabis was a useful medicine, so they needed a new word to whip up a frenzy, and to keep all those old prohibition agents employed now that they were no longer arresting rum runners.
The word "marijuana" was great because it linked the drug to those dirty dark-skinned fellows. As evil prick Harry Anslinger testified to Congress in 1937, "There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the US, and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing, result from marijuana usage. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others."
So, yes, the selection of the word marijuana by prohibitionists was rooted in racism. Cannabis would be a more historically neutral term for the medicinal plant, or hemp for the industrially useful strains.
Congress works for megacorps and for the investment class.
Most of us have no voice with our representatives. At the local level politics is all party machinery; at the federal level, Congressional districts are deliberately gerrymandered, and election laws rigged, to keep representatives in office. It works very well: re-election rates in the House usually top 90%.
"This is like deja vu all over again." -- Yogi Berra
It's become an idiom in American English.
HTH. HAND.
When he was at his best -- and parts of Magick Without Tears are there -- yes.
When he was deep in the grip of his Aiwass delusions, well, not so much.
You can certainly change your experience, your own subjective reality, with magic(k).
Of course, you can also do that with LSD.
And since "consensus" reality is a social construct, if you've got a crowd that's susceptible to manipulation, under some circumstances you can change the consensus with magic(k).
But if you think "objective" reality -- that is, consensus reality as observed and experienced under carefully controlled conditions by skeptical observers in a reproducible manner -- can be changed by magic(k) in ways not already accounted for by physics, well, prove it and the JREF has a fortune for you.
The true believer's approach makes claims about the objective universe that don't hold up to controlled experiment and observation. The skeptic's dismissal of all this as hallucination or delusion neglects the fact that most events in the universe occur outside of laboratory controls, and ignores the person to whom the experience is happening, flattening out the subjective dimension. The challenge for the industrial-strength shaman is to move between these models, from reality tunnel to reality tunnel, as needed to be effective in any given situation.
Thicker? Quite possibly. But 370 atmospheres? That link is the best crank science since the Time Cube, man.
We've been giving folks in the Middle East plenty of reason to hate the U.S. for decades. It's not like brutal and stupid American foreign policy is a recent invention, it's all tied up with that "Manifest Destiny" bullshit, that belief in American exceptionalism that says the world belongs to us.
Wow, your ignorance and prejudice and fear of Islam is remarkable.
Islam contains as much diversity within in as any of the major religions. You've got fundamentalists who think heretics should die, sure; you've also got Sufi mystics who love everybody. Most Muslims -- like my veterinarian, or the South African karate students I've trained with -- are just ordinary folks.
...half the time. When the wind was southerly, he knew a hawk from a handsaw.
He's an interesting character. He was one of the first Westerners to take an interest in yoga and in Buddhism, and his early writings on these are insightful. Some of his work shows a understanding of ritual magic as psychological exercise -- for instance, in a preface to his and Mather's version of The Lesser Key of Solomon, he wrote that "The spirits of the Goetia are portions of the human brain.... If, then, I say, with Solomon: 'The Spirit Cimieries teaches logic,' what I mean is: 'Those portions of my brain which subserve the logical faculty may be stimulated and developed by following out the processes called "The Invocation of Cimieries."'"
And then he had a nervous breakdown and started top believe that he was "the Prophet chosen to proclaim the Law which will determine the destinies of this planet for an epoch," and "in a class which contains only seven other names in the whole of human history".
Some more thoughts on poor ol' Aleister here.
So: wacky, yes, but I'd take Crowley over L. Ron any day.
If you're using imperfect software -- i.e., any real software -- but you have source, and you are a large IT enterprise, then you have the motive, method, and opportunity to make fixes.
If you don't contribute those changes back to the community, those changes won't be rolled into the next version.
So if you're making fixes to free software, it's in your own interest to contribute them back. That's the compulsion to contribute -- rational self interest.
If security is important, you don't put it in the hands of low-wage worker bees. You put it in the charge of highly paid, highly skilled, creative and independent thinkers.
If you want the illusion of security, though, drones will do fine.
Cancer and heart disease have killed somewhere in the neighborhood of ten million people in the past ten years. Over a million people died in accidents in the past decade; about 400,000 of those were killed in motor vehicle accidents.
In the past ten years, about 160,000 people were murdered.
About 30,000 drowned.
Only 2,974 were killed in acts of terrorism carried out by foreign nationals within the U.S.
If you're justifiably afraid of terrorism, you must be justifiably scared shitless of all this other, much more dangerous stuff.
And yet nobody gets all bent out of shape about how we have to suspend habeus corpus to protect ourselves from the dangers of swimming pools, cars, and Big Macs.
So long as we think fearing terrorists is justified, we will want Big Government to protect us. (Never mind that it's the brutal and stupid foreign policy of Big Government that motivates the terrorist's hate.)
And, of course, vice-versa.
Maybe that's the problem: ol' Jehovah couldn't tell which group of Semites he was promising the land to, they all look alike to him after all.
Not at all. He gave them the fingerprints that he had. The fact that they were useless to ICE is not his fault.
When you put work on the web, you are giving people permission to view it.
Blocking ads is no different than putting a piece of tape over my screen to block images I don't want to see. I have every right to view a work however I please, and to do whatever I want to a copy you give me. (Distributing a derivative work, now, is another matter.)
The reason that the internet has this capability is because such regulation cannot be effective. If you and I can get packets to each other, we can encode communications over that channel and share whatever information we want. The most regulation could do is give us a "War on Sharing" as effective as the "War on Drugs" -- reduced civil liberties, occasional high-profile busts, and very little impact on the availability of the contraband.
Low bandwidth, for one. This weekend I was at a campground, right on the edge of having no signal at all (had to walk a half mile from our campsite to get out of totally dead space), and wanted to check the weather report to see if a storm would hit us. m.wund.com is much more useful than www.wunderground.com in such a circumstance.
Of course stylesheets help, but often you want to send different content to mobile users.
Since when is a computer -- subject to various sorts of software and hardware malfunctions -- much simpler than a freakin' piece of paper in a locked box?
No, my friend, I'm afraid that's just the way things look when you're being lapped. Taubes did indeed make a lame attempt to defend his "work", such as it is, against Fumento's criticism, which Fumento then tore to bits.
Advocates of Atkins-style diets belong in the same bin with creationists, climate change deniers, and (to bring this back on point) the folks who told us for years that making water bottles out of a polymer of a synthetic hormone was perfectly safe because BPA couldn't possibly ever ever leach from polycarbonate.
Except that Atkins-style diets are more dangerous to human health than those other ideas.
The problem is mostly that American's caloric intake increased almost 25% between 1970 and 2000, while at the same time we became more sedentary. Any difference that the sort of calories (fat, protein, complex carbs, simple sugars, whatever) might make is swamped by the fact the we just eat too much gorram food and don't get our asses up and moving enough.
A couple hundred extra calories a day above your metabolic needs is going to make you a lard-ass whether you eat them as wheat germ and broccoli, or as bacon double cheeseburgers. (Though the bacon double cheeseburgers will probably still hit you harder in terms of cancer, heart disease, and other fun effects.)
As for Taubes and his famous "What If It's All Been a Big Fat Lie" story, he's full of crap.
No more so than it's up to the courts to interpret any other word. In the context "levying war against..or in adhering to their enemies", it means a group at war with the U.S. Full stop.
Would you care to look upthread and see how the topic of treason came into the discussion? Thanks.
Julius might have signed some such nonsense when in the Army, but when did Ethel Rosenberg ever take such an oath? Please provide a citation or retract this claim.
There is no evidence that Ethel Rosenberg engaged in espionage. Greenglass long ago recanted his testimony.
In the U.S., treason is narrowly defined as "levying war against [the U.S.], or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort." The Rosenbergs did not make war against the U.S., and no state of war existed between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., so we were not enemies. We were rivals in a geopolitical game including nuclear brinksmanship and other brutal and stupid behavior on both sides, yes, but not enemies. (Indeed, at the time the Rosenbergs started their activities, we were allies with the U.S.S.R. against the Nazis.)
As for the Vassiliev notebooks -- they're crap:
So Vassiliev did what crank authors due when presented with criticism: brought suit under the U.K.'s libel laws.
It's not an exclusive or. We are drooling (sometimes) snotty (sometimes) ape like creatures. And since we create gods, we are also divine beings.
You just have to learn to swallow the dilemma.
(Fortunately, we Discordians are trained in dilemma swallowing, as well as proposition juggling, axiom throwing, rebutting on a bed of nails, and all the other arts of the sideshow philosopher.)
If you choose to stand up to things you don't like, you still have the choice of tactics in how to make your stand. Part of that it figuring out how to either 1) continue to remain alive and free, or 2) make it expensive for the opposition to kill or imprison you.
If I were given some hot data -- say, a copy of the "torture photos" that have made Obama lose his testicles (or perhaps to display that he never really had any) -- I would keep in mind that in order to get the information out there, I don't have to arrange for permanent hosting. I just get it out to a bunch of different places long enough for the Streisand Effect to work its magic.
My suggestion:
I'm not invading your personal space. I'm camped on your lawn, scores of feet away from you on the other side of a wall, and doing you no harm. Land ownership is just as much a social-legal fiction as is copyright. Yet you're willing to kill to protect it?
Nor have I mentioned perpetual compensation, I've explicitly disclaimed that. Please do me the favor of not putting words into my mouth.
I tell you this -- I would rather have you camp on my lawn for a few days than falsely claim authorship of one of my works.
Am I harmed if you claim credit for a song that I wrote? Not directly, it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. But you are collecting something -- credit -- that I am, ethically, owed. I assert that the financial situation is the same: just as you owe me my name on the liner notes of the CD (or whatever the equivalent is for an MP3 from iTunes), when you sell recordings of a song I wrote, you owe me a just royalty.
And I have no objection to that. Is it somehow unclear to you that I am not arguing in favor of copyright? Copy, share and enjoy, please. I just want a fair share if you make money off of it.
That statement, sir, is unadulterated rubbish. Is Hendrix's version of "All Along the Watchtower" inferior to Dylan's? Joplin's "Me and Bobby McGee" not as good as Kris Kristofferson's? Do you think Ike & Tina Turner's "Proud Mary" is not as good as CCR's? Feh, I say, feh.
(On the topic of covers, I have to digress a second: while trying to refresh my brain on covers better than originals I stumbled across this, which mentions that that the version of "Desperado" on the Langley Schools Music Project. Let me say that if you love music, you owe it to yourself to seek out this album. Also Songs in the Key of Z.)
I come into contact with a wide variety of people, thank you very much. That I have a somewhat scientific mindset no more means that I don't come into contact with "regular folks" any more than that I'm a vegan means I don't come in contact with meat eaters, or than that I'm a amateur athlete means I don't come into contact with couch potatoes.
But having had a bit of training in scientific thinking, I know that my own casual observations -- of people or of the physical universe -- are limited and biased. As are yours, and everyone's. So making sweeping generalizations based on "simple observation of people" is just shoddy thinking.
Songwriters don't necessarily have CD sales. Songwriters often produce rough demos, or written music, to get their ideas to performing or recording musicians. Not all songwriters are singers.
It's the songwriters, not the original performers, who get these royalties. If I play "Love Potion Number 9" at a paid gig, Leiber and Stoller get the nickel, not The Clovers.
Exactly! And having creators get paid is of benefit to the people, it helps "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." But restricting sharing of creative works is not.
So how can we have creators get paid, and not restrict sharing?
One solution is to restrict selling, by requiring a royalty on commercial use of a work. This is orders of less magnitude less invasive than trying to restrict personal sharing. And it's more in line with intuitive notions of fairness.
(Note that I'm speaking of the general idea, not the current ASCAP/BMI implementation which adds many problematic aspects on top of it.)
And, since I said the royalties should apply only to commercial performances (as is currently the case) and only for a limited time (as it not), we don't have a disagreement on that point.
Me camping out on your front lawn will never detract from your funds. (I'm a good camper and always leave the site better than I found it.) But yet it still detracts from something abstract, from your sense of control over your life.
So it is with art. If someone gets rich off by performing a song I wrote and I get nothing, it detracts from our sense of justice and fairness.
Of course, the world is not very fair. Nor does it give us much control over our own lives. But we structure our legal and social systems around these ideas anyway.
As a practical matter, creators of works we enjoy ought to get paid. As a matter of cultural freedom, people ought to be free to share works they enjoy. As a matter of intuitive fairness, creators ought to get a share of riches made off of their creations. Royalty-right supports all these ends.
If you have a counter-proposal that does it better, I'm open to hearing it.