Quote of the Day
The future may be made up of many factors
but where it truly lies is in the hearts and minds of men.
Your dedication should not be confined for your own gain,
but unleashes your passion for our beloved country
as well as for the integrity and humanity of mankind.
Li Ka Shing, Chinese Businessman
Blog Monthly Update
Pageviews continued an upward trend in December since bottoming out in August; this month's total was the second highest total of the year, although a half of what I saw near the mid-terms last year.
Why I am AGAINST
the Stop Online Piracy Act and PROTECT IP Act
Make no mistake: as a blogger, I am providing original content on a daily basis; I have written about cracking down on student plagiarists as a university professor. Whenever I quote people or program transcripts (e.g., Meet the Press) or post audio clips, I attribute the efforts of others and provide links to the original content. Note (if you didn't know already), even the embedded Youtube video players will take you directly to the Youtube video webpage if you click on the "Youtube" link in the lower right corner of the player. Sometimes videos are disabled for embedding on Youtube or other sites; usually, I'll just post the link for the convenience of the reader. Moreover, I used to be one of the 2 data warehouse contractor DBA's for a federal agency that deals with intellectual property issues.
I am confident that my efforts constitute fair use; for example, my regular Political Humor feature initially started off with political cartoons, but I often wrote a relevant commentary or responded with an ad lib of my own. I also took care to sample the cartoons from a variety of sources, so even though I love Michael Rodriguez' work, you had to go to the IBD site to get most of his cartoons. I eventually decided to transition to late night political jokes (which is hard to do when all the comedians, except maybe Dennis Miller and a few others, are politically liberal). But take another example: one of my favorite videos I've used on at least 2 or 3 commentaries was from the State of Maryland Lottery; this struggling farmer's wife suddenly discovers that hen they had bought or raised had laid a golden egg, so she eagerly calls over her husband, whom just happens to be snacking on a chicken leg. Yeah, THAT chicken. I found the video and downloaded a copy of it (the website doesn't allow embedding of its videos). The intent was for me to upload it into the blog or maybe upload it to Youtube, which didn't seem to have it. But Google had this legal statement which said I had to have rights to the content. I thought as a Maryland taxpayer I should have those rights, but I went to the Maryland lottery site which didn't seem to address the issue. So I finally just decided to cite the link of where I found the video.
The lottery video process is just an example of the overhead I had to go through in trying to reference the work of others. If I was working for the State of Maryland, I would be thrilled a conservative blogger wanted to publicize an ad featuring a pitch for the Maryland lottery. I was trying to make a political point there, regarding the demagoguery that Democrats and the OWS movement were doing by targeting the economically successful--and, just like Jesus loved to teach using parables, I wanted to use that little skit to get my point across. But worrying about arcane legal concepts as to what exactly constitutes fair use discouraged me from posting like I wanted to. And there was the steep overhead of researching the issue; I could have just posted a link from the get-go. But I know that many readers aren't going to go through the effort of clicking on the link. The purpose I had was not in publishing the video for its own sake; it was really for the convenience of my reader. So all this of overhead had a chilling effect on publishing a creative commentary, even a free one.
Let me drive my point in a different way, using my knowledge of pop music. I used to listen to Casey Kasem's America's Top 40 every Saturday morning on the radio. I remember Neil Diamond had just come out with his latest album, and there was a relevant network TV special, featuring in particular one song: "You Don't Bring Me Flowers". It turned out Barbra Streisand had also covered the same song on her new album. Some DJ decided to mix the two versions together in a duet form, and the makeshift duet took off in popularity and spread like wildfire--enough for their record companies to notice; the two singers did an authentic duet, and the song became a monster hit. But imagine if the DJ had to worry about the record companies or artists coming after him: the duet probably never would have happened.
Let me give another example. I used to be a Bruce Springsteen fan (his politically progressive activism in the mid-2000's completely turned me off). He had a forgettable ballad (not the Boss' strong suit) called "Secret Garden"; then somebody at radio station Z100 (I believe) came up with a mix sprinkling key dialogue from the movie "Jerry Maguire" with the song, and it just works.
So here's the point: you have these big media companies trying, under the guise of promoting intellectual property, to bring yet another weapon to bear on illicit distributions of creative products. Keep in mind recording artists, authors and related media businesses already are covered under copyright laws (as are my dissertation, articles, book chapters and blogs, among other creative efforts); for instance, there was the notorious case of Napster, and I've seen referenced clips of copyrighted material no longer available on media websites.
The real target of the law will be media hosting sites with "deep pockets", not college students with very limited assets. If you are going to make your servers available for content contributions by the public, it's very difficult and expensive to patrol websites and review each and every contributions for undue fair use. It's gotten to the point that some videos showing some young children, even toddlers, dancing to a major pop song get zealously pursued; content makers want to strip the soundtrack, seeing the dancing baby video as a workaround depriving them of revenue from official videos (or CD sales, etc.) What exactly would be the point of watching a dancing baby video with no music at all?
Small website services, trying to provide innovative services, could find themselves saddled with having to hire lawyers and staffing that they can't afford on limited resources; the big content providers like Google and Yahoo (whom, of course, oppose the new proposed law) can. This boils down to the same issues we often see at the core, the cronyism between government and Big Business. These expenses are significant enough to stifle innovative small businesses or even discourage startups.
We are talking about some Draconian steps including tools used against WikiLeaks among the weapons being used against web hosting companies, because some contributors violate fair use guidelines. I could even see cynical attempts to conservative-leaning media hosts where, say, a progressive secretly plants copyrighted material on a website and then goes after the host for copyright infringement. The real intent, of course, is not concern over the rights of the copyright holder: it's using the government to enforce de facto censorship.
So I see this as being, at its core, a worrisome encroachment on individual economic rights: it constitutes a de facto barrier to the small businesses that lack the resources to fight the regulatory burden this new law would impose. That some conservative groups are among those advocating these laws is regrettable; after preaching in this blog for years about regulatory burden, I think I'm being quite consistent about the principles of limited government.
PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.
Richard Benedetto,
"Media Abet Obama's Aloofness on Tough Issues"
Thumbs UP!
Brent Bozell's Media Research Center regularly covers the vast left-wing hypocrisies. Hearing this from a respected journalist whom has been covering national politics since the early 1970's and the White House from Reagan through George W. Bush and an adjunct professor (with a doctorate from Syracuse) is another thing.
How is it possible that while the numerous GOP contenders for the Presidency have put themselves out there a baker's dozen number of times, being subjected to tough (and sometimes gotcha) questions on a variety of topics, from the huge budget deficit to tough international issues, like Iran and North Korea, the President of the United States is able to get away with a single news conference and predictable sound bites, while somehow finding room in his busy schedule to engage in fundraising (at taxpayer expense, of course), vacations and numerous games of golf, not to mention appearances on daytime TV and late night programs?
Why exactly is it that not one journalist has been able to identify specific significant steps to cut spending? These "professional" liberal journalists just nod their heads in stunned amazement at Obama's profound understanding of a "balanced approach", which, by the way, consists of NO MEANINGFUL CUTS ANYWHERE in the budget and only class warfare tax hikes--and if and when taxes or revenues are discussed, the brunt of them is in the future, past his current term in office and many of those amount to little more than tinkering with planned budgetary increases? These journalists seem to intuitively understand why we CAN AFFORD to maintain the 75% of the Bush tax cuts going to lower-income workers, but we can't afford the tax cuts to the 1% whom pay about 40% of the household income tax burden (twice the rate of their share of national income). Do you think those same journalists would ever point out that even if you could unconstitutionally strip the top 1% of all their assets and income, that would only provide a partial fix to current trillion dollar-plus deficits (Democrats Bill Gates and Warren Buffett lead and account for just under $100B (the bulk of which, of course, they'll leave to charity under their control, not the coffers of Mr. Barack Obama to fritter away); the top 10 ends at about $20B). In the meanwhile, we're spending nearly 24% of GDP versus a recent historical average of about 19.5%--2.5 years into the "Obama recovery".
At a time of record natural gas production (a result of the Great Shale Gas Rush) and diving gas prices, the EPA naturally feels that utilities won't naturally look to take advantage of plentiful natural gas in adding capacity; no, we have to tax coal plant operators more (to be passed along to customers, of course). Nothing like an American President's lack of faith in the free market system...
What can journalists say? Obama's natural eloquence is just too much to combat: "8 failed years of policies" (you think that the journalists would ever point out that Bush also added nearly $5T to the deficit and Medicare drug benefit entitlement with smoke-and-mirrors accounting, expanded domestic spending (including federal assistance to education by over 50%), didn't do anything about shoring up increasingly insolvent entitlement spending, engaged in government intervention in the economy, and expanded foreign intervention (like President "Nobel Peace Prize winner" Obama in Libya and Yemen and got a traditional ally Pakistan really, really mad at us?). It sounds to me more like 12 failed years of progressive policies..."do-nothing Congress" Um, Mr. President? Where exactly are your and the Senate Dem majority's budgets? Why is it that we still have the world's highest business income tax bracket? Do you believe foreign-based corporations think high business taxes and regulations make them want to invest more in American factories and workers?
Poor liberal journalists! They just can't get past Obama's rope-a-dope defenses...
Musical Interlude: Nostalgic/Instrumental Christmas
"Auld Lang Syne"
Kenny G Freedom Mix (see reprise below) (sax/instrumental)
Reading by Chris McKiddie
Guy Lombardo. I used to bring in the New Year during my youth watching Guy Lombardo on the annual telecast...
Dan Fogelberg, "Same Old Lang Syne". RIP, Dan. Ladies, make sure the men of your lives get checked for prostate cancer.
Conclusion of "It's a Wonderful Life"
Kenny G (reprise: Millennium Mix, 2010)
