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Holy Conflict of Interest, Batman!

July 20, 2012 Leave a comment

Well, that settles it. I’m not going to see the new batman movie.

Click here to tell serial MAFIAA whore, Senator Patrick Leahy, to quit being a dick.

You might remember Senator Leahy, he’s still trying to resurrect SOPA. He’s calling it IPAA now as a sort of policy laundering.

The IP Attache Act would use your tax dollars to try to change the copyright, trademark, and patent laws of other sovereign nations to favor the MPAA/RIAA scumbags here at home, and then eventually these laws would make it back to the US in the form of a treaty or “Congressional-Executive Agreement” later on.

The US government won’t stop trying to take over the internet. They don’t want you listening to people like me, they want you to go listen to fake news that they control. Cable TV news channels don’t mention things like SOPA, CISPA, and IPAA, and they lose credibility when they refuse to cover real news stories.

People are finding out just how badly Fox News, NBC, and CNN are lying to them and tuning out. This puts pressure on the US government to shut down sites like Wikipedia and WordPress, and to censor Google.

Back to the MAFIAA (MPAA/RIAA), you shouldn’t give these labels and movie studios any of your money. The more money you give them, the more money they can use to hurt other people and buy laws with.

I’m going to vote for President Obama this year, but I really wish he’d get rid of Joe Biden. It’s obvious why he chose Biden as his VP., because Biden is buddy/buddy with the big Hollywood criminals that want to ram internet censorship laws down our throats.

Obama already had more than enough support in Delaware, and they only have four electoral votes anyway. He could have picked a VP that would have shored up his support in states that were competitive. Evan Bayh from Indiana was on the list.

Obama only won Indiana by about 1% of the vote in 2008 (including mine), but he would have gotten more support here, and maybe even won the state again this year (which is now unlikely and could help cost him his re-election) with Evan Bayh as his VP.

He chose Biden because Biden can go pump campaign donations out of the MAFIAA. Unfortunately, that means they control the Obama administration. Things would not get better in this area under Romney, so I just have to deal with the “yuck” factor when voting for Obama/Biden.

Worth mentioning: That raid on MegaUpload’s file locker site? Joe Biden told them to do it.

Maddox on SOPA. My response.

January 29, 2012 Leave a comment

“Maddox” (George Ouzounian) has an interesting post on SOPA. Unfortunately, he tries to compare the Rodney King incident with SOPA and Occupy Wall Street. So I sent him an email correcting this flawed association. I decided to copy it here in case anyone finds the facts interesting.


Hi “Maddox”,

I’ve read your site over the years and usually agree with what you write, or at the very least I find myself amused.

The SOPA page is more or less factually correct. I’m not going to argue about most of the points you bring up on that page.

One thing that I did kind of find odd is that you compared the injustice of SOPA to the beating that the scumbag known as Rodney King brought down on himself in 1992.

The facts of the situation, often ignored by the far left and the media in order to stir the usual shit, involve:

A man that was already on probation for drug felonies.

He decided that since the police wanted to pull him over on a freeway, that they might violate his probation, so naturally he did something brilliant…

He led the police on a 115 mile an hour chase, endangering the lives of himself, the police following him, and everyone around him on the freeway.

When the police finally stopped him, it turns out that he was high on crack cocaine, and he proceeded to assault a police officer.

After the police used force to subdue him (maybe a bit too much, but not unprovoked), the minorities decided that the police were profiling him because he was black.

If your definition of “to profile” includes chasing people that run from the police, and/or tasing and whacking them with a baton after they finally get them stopped and after they lunge out to attack a police officer while fueled up on crack cocaine. The police profile a lot of people.

The minorities decided to use the Rodney King incident as an excuse to riot, loot, and torch businesses and homes belonging to people who had nothing to do with the incident at all. Along the way they even managed to shoot and kill each other and innocent bystanders.

Because of these assholes, the police, the National Guard, and active US Army and Marines units declared martial law and illegally curtailed the civil rights of people who hadn’t done anything wrong, to restore order and arrest the criminals.

Since the situation was bad enough for the US government to send in the military to act as civilian law enforcement, they got to set a precedent. Later on, they’d expand the role of the military as civilian law enforcement using the nebulous term “terrorism”, but that is outside the scope of this topic.

The lasting lesson of Rodney King is that any idiot can show up with a video camera halfway into a situation, provide no context, and the media will keep raping the public with clips from the footage.

For what it’s worth, if you thought Rodney King had redeemed himself in the past 20 years and become a productive member of society, you’d be wrong. Here’s what Wikipedia says about him (clarifications in brackets are mine):

“Since the [1992] arrest… King has been arrested at least a further eleven times on a variety of charges, including domestic abuse and hit-and-run.”

Still not following me? Maybe it’s because I’m “white” which means “racist” of course. Take what Chris Rock said instead. “When the police have to chase after you, they’re bringing an ass kicking with them.”

The fact that King was black and got an unscrupulous lawyer were the reasons he got $3.5 million from the tax payers of Los Angeles and the State of California, which he proceeded to lose almost immediately on squandering and lousy investments (including a record label that never produced anything notable)

I’m not sure that SOPA (which is an injustice and an anti-constitutional infringement of civil liberties) compares to the beating that one stupid crackhead brought down on himself or that groups of peaceful Occupy protestors should be compared to an unruly mob of (mostly) minorities who use the situation of the day as an excuse to smash things, steal, and kill innocent people.

You can quote me if you like. I’ve noticed that the people you tend to cite are like something from a mentally retarded 12 year old on AOL (and usually in all caps), it might be refreshing (if not entirely entertaining) to quote someone that is not intellectually inferior to you.

Thoughts on Linux and so-called Secure Boot.

January 23, 2012 2 comments

DRM, fun for the whole Family License Pack

The uEFI Forum is largely a bunch of SOPA promoters hoping to turn your PC into a locked platform using DMCA anti-circumvention laws.

Unfortunately, the next generation boot firmware for the PC not only fails to completely replace the PC BIOS (which will continue to be used for power on self test and hardware initialization). Those in the know, beyond the corporate media spin doctoring, know that uEFI is just a layer of DRM and corporate lock-in that rides on top of the 30 year old legacy BIOS that starts the computer in real mode just like it did in the 1980s.

uEFI is not a next generation PC boot firmware, we’re being sold a bill of goods. The biggest particular problem is “Secure Boot”. Users are being mislead into believing it has something to do with securely booting a computer while its true purpose is to lock the user into running whatever corporate-sponsored OS that came with the computer, and turning them into a criminal by forcing them to commit a US federal felony by circumventing it to install free software as the computer’s operating system instead.

For the latest lies from the corporate-sponsored media, we go to The H Online which has declared that “Securely booting Linux [is] a “difficult” proposition”. The H is becoming less of a legitimate news source about free and open source software, and becoming more like just any other anti-free and open source rag that mindlessly recites anything that Microsoft pays for. The Register is another example of such an occurance. Over time, Microsoft starts writing their Linux news and you get libellous headlines instead of information. It’s not like the Red Hat employee that they cite is helping dispel this propaganda. (more in a moment)

uEFI “Secure Boot” (which should be called Restricted Boot since it is designed to lock you into an ISV’s operating system software), is is a complex specification. It relies on a nebula of assumptions about the state of the hardware and the bootloader that are not necessarily true and are easily forged. Even if that was not the case, it relies on an assumption that there are no firmware bugs which can be used to subvert and bypass it. It will not provide any meaningful level of additional security to users of any PC operating system, even if it agrees to boot the operating system that the user is trying to use at all. It is designed to turn anyone who cracks it into a criminal, by forcing them to violate Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and being liable to be sentenced to prison for trying to use their computer in freedom.

Cited in the contemptible malarkey is Matthew Garrett, a Red Hat employee. Red Hat is a member of the uEFI forum so that they can sign RHEL and won’t be stopped by Restricted Boot on any workstation or server that comes with their software. I’m pretty sure that this is why we won’t be seeing the GRUB 2 bootloader on RHEL any time soon. GRUB 2 is licensed under the GPL version 3, which  protects users from what the FSF refers to as “Tivoization”, which refers to the practice of using free software in a manner that locks the user out of their system with free software, by using DRM in that software.

If Red Hat shipped GRUB 2 and did not disclose their signing keys as teh GPL 3 requires(to protect the user from exploitative hardware/software vendors), they would be in violation of the GPL. The Free Software Foundation could revoke their rights to use the GRUB 2 software. Red Hat has a lot of resources and can probably maintain their fork of Grub 0.97 indefinitely so that they can cooperate with hardware makers to restrict the user. Red Hat benefits from user lock-in just as surely as Apple and Microsoft do if only their signing key is in the uEFI Secure Boot implementation on hardware that ships with their operating system, because there won’t be any of that pesky competition on any system that comes with RHEL.

So right off the bat, I don’t think Matthew Garrett can be a trusted source of information because he is obviously tainted by his employer, and has the same reasons to lie and mislead you as Stevan Sinofsky of Microsoft.

Canonical (Ubuntu) is also a member of the uEFI forum and can probably use Secure Boot on embedded ARM systems to trap people in Ubuntu. They can’t use GRUB 2, but there are bootloaders for ARM, some of them proprietary, which can be used instead. They can probably also sign Ubuntu LTS releases and get their signing key into workstations and servers that ship with Ubuntu, for much the same end result as the RHEL situation I described above. They could even use Grub Legacy in that situation. It didn’t just disappear, it’s still being carried by them if you look up “grub” in their software repository.

A better news flash would be that there never was, is, or will be a way to securely boot a PC, and that corporations are salivating at the prospect of using it to lock end users into their operating system software, to keep the user trapped with whatever their computer happened to come with. The headlines designed to smear Linux are just paid for by Microsoft. The “bootloader attacks” that Secure Boot is supposedly meant to deal with are mostly attacks on the Windows Activation system that rely on bootloader exploits to make Windows believe it is an OEM copy that came with the PC so that the user may use a copy of Windows without paying for it.

Microsoft isn’t interested in stopping the malware of the week from stealing your identity or subverting your system and using it to display (sometimes pornographic) advertisements, which are just two of the things that Windows is known well for. They are interested in stopping the user from being able to run their own software on their private property and from getting away with using a less crippled version of Windows than what came with their computer without forking over more money through the Anytime Upgrade scam.

I don’t believe the corporate ambitions of Red Hat or Canonical are any different.

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This work by Ryan Farmer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

SOPA/PIPA would cost taxpayers $45 million a year to protect billionaires

January 22, 2012 Leave a comment

They saved a spot in line for the MAFIAA

Just a quick post from the “It’s only a recession if you work for a living” department.

SOPA/PIPA would cost US federal taxpayers $45 million dollars a year to enforce.

“Still, Coburn has his concerns with the approach taken in the Senate bill. And he insists, as he does with all legislation, that its costs be offset with cuts elsewhere in the budget; the Senate bill, he said, carries an estimated $45 million in federal enforcement costs.

It is “interesting” when the resounding answer to everything else is “it’s not in the budget”, that they come up with $450 million in deficit spending over the next 10 years to protect the rich business criminals at the MAFIAA and Fixed News.

Oh well, the lobbyists bribed a pack of corrupt politicians to pass the damned thing. I guess anything is in the budget when corporate lobbyists have worked enough dirty money into the United States Congress.

As corporate welfare goes, SOPA/PIPA is hardly the costliest legislation in recent history, but that’s no excuse for fleecing taxpayers who work for a living to protect billionaires.

Besides, some people like Fox Noise. :)

PS: Just for fun. If you gave the budget to enforce SOPA for 10 years to NASA, they could do another Mars mission, complete with two more rovers. Hey, it beats giving scum sucking corporate bitch turned Senator turned scum sucking corporate bitch Chris Dodd a handout. Doesn’t it?

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This work by Ryan Farmer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

MAFIAA hard at work in Germany and France…

January 20, 2012 Leave a comment

Apple is bullshit, and it's bad for you!

Just because United States lawmakers won’t stop until we’re a banana republic doesn’t mean that we should turn a blind eye to the MAFIAA’s crimes in other countries:

In Germany, the RIAA has apparently been some busy little beavers, sending pay up or else extortion demands to customers over:

Amy Winehouse, Blink 182, Bon Jovi, Eminem, Florence And The Machine, Jamiroquai, Jennifer Lopez, Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga, Rihanna, Take That, The Black Eyed Peas, The Rolling Stones, AC/DC, Alexandra Burke, Alica Keys, Avril Lavigne, Backstreet Boys, Beyonce, Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Foo Fighters, Kasabian, Kesha, Kings of Leon, Leona Lewis, Michael Jackson, Ozzy Osbourne, Pink, Pitbull, R. Kelly, Shakira, The Strokes, Bryan Ferry, Coldplay, David Guetta, Depeche Mode, Good Charlotte, Gorillaz, Katy Perry, Snoop Dogg, U2, and Pink Floyd -source Torrentfreak

If these are the most patrolled “musicians” (and I use that term loosely), in the United States as well, it could explain why I’ve never been harassed by the MAFIAA. With “artists” so utterly intellectually devoid, not entertaining, and many of them unable to even produce a satisfying tune, it’s no wonder that they have to resort to extortion to make any money these days.

The only true disappointment is that apparently, Ministry of Sound has joined in the harassment/extortion campaign. Every so often, they put out a decent compilation.

These kinds of extortion demands didn’t start out with the RIAA/MPAA, they started out……with producers of gay porn. The scheme was apparently successful there, perhaps because nobody wants others to find out they’ve been downloading such fine art as “Harry Squatter” and “Everyone Does Raymond”. Over time this method started being picked up by movie producers who had made such cinematic suppositories as “The Hurt Locker”, although that one eventually fell apart last month after the judge had already thrown out many of the defendants due to the court not having jurisdiction over them. They even managed to sue a dead person and a bunch of people who don’t even have a computer in the house, even though the RIAA has done worse, so it’s hardly worth mentioning.

Over in France, and again according to Torrentfreak, the MAFIAA succeeded a while back in getting a law passed that boots people off the internet after three “accusations” of copyright infringement, with no way to get internet service again. In that period of time, 165 people have apparently gotten their third strike and have lost internet access permanently. The United Nations considers internet access to be so crucial that they declared that it should be a human right. I guess it is a right, until you piss the wrong people (the ones with money) off at you.

To pour salt in the wound, in the time passed since the French law went into effect, iTunes business in France has increased by 22.5%, or 14 million Euros. That’s money that is leaving France, not creating any French jobs, and heading to Apple and the RIAA/MPAA in the US, which is a branding company that creates few honest jobs, and a couple of content cartels which create no honest jobs. On top of it all, it is the French taxpayers who pay for their government to police them on the behalf of wealthy plutocrats in the United States.

As difficult as it is for me to want to believe it, people really must be this stupid. Apple is a patent troll and a bully, and the RIAA/MPAA are organized crime. When people ask me what I think about Steve Jobs being gone, I tell them that I think it was a good start. To reward them with higher iTunes sales in exchange for coming in and paying off your elected officials to boot your fellow citizens off the internet over a stupid Lady Gaga album, is mind numbingly stupid. I guess I’m just afraid that this news will encourage the rich business criminals here in the US to keep pushing SOPA/PIPA in the hopes that people will see fit to hand them millions of dollars to avoid being thrown in prison for some MP3s.

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This work by Ryan Farmer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Megaupload seized. Fascists continue to leave Controlled Cloud Computing alone.

January 20, 2012 2 comments

Stop censorship!

The FBI picked yesterday to raid and take down MegaUpload.

In what was, obviously, intended to say “Fuck you America, we don’t need SOPA to do this”, the jack booted thugs at the FBI, acting upon orders from their commanders at the MAFIAA (A catch all term that is commonly used to refer to RIAA/MPAA/BSA type cartel organizations), seized the MegaUpload domain, arrested the owners and administrators, and replaced it with the standard finger wagging “This domain has been seized” banner.

Anonymous responded by taking out the DoJ, FBI, and some cartel websites with a Distributed Denial of Service attack. (Windows malware-controlled PCs can do something productive I guess.)

Sure, MegaUpload probably had some files that were violating copyright. I know Twitter does. So does Facebook, Google Docs, Amazon “Cloud”,  the Ubuntu One skin for “Amazon Cloud”, and many others. Incidentally, they all oppose SOPA, not because it’s the moral and just position to be in (it is), but because it would cause them an undue burden to ceaselessly monitor their users. Under SOPA/PIPA, legitimate websites can be taken down by the government because one of their users posted a link to copyright-infringing material. SOPA/PIPA is clearly designed to discourage sites from allowing user-generated content. (I guess that means that if SOPA/PIPA get passed into law, you won’t be reading any more blogs.)

If you think about it, MegaUpload was in the same “cloud storage” business that companies like Amazon and Microsoft are in, it is my firm belief that the US government only picked on MegaUpload  because they made the government come back with a warrant when they wanted private user data, and Amazon and Microsoft are all too eager to comply with them with no court supervision required.

While I’m on the subject of major “cloud” storage sites, I’ve noticed a lot of “pirated software” on Microsoft Windows Skydrive, including materials to crack Microsoft software. Go figure.

The Federal Government has generally left certain “cloud” storage companies alone because they comply with warrantless sneak and peak searches, authorized not by the Constitution, but by anti-terrorism legislation rammed through in the aftermath of 9/11, when people were so frightened that they let the government pass anything and everything that claimed to “protect” them. The legislation hasn’t caught one terrorist in 11 years, it has not stopped a single terrorist attack anywhere in the world.

What it is doing, is enabling the US government agents on the MAFIAA payroll to take down sites without even bothering to give lip service to constitutional “protections” like freedom of speech, freedom against self-incrimination, the right to due process and equal protection of the laws, etc.

If anything is enabling “terrorism” on Americans, it is laws like the PATRIOT ACT, DMCA, proposed SOPA/PIPA,  companies like Apple and Microsoft, and products like iTunes.

Companies that write and push these laws are terrorist organizations. Wiktionary defines terrorism  as “A psychological strategy of war for gaining political or religious ends by deliberately creating a climate of fear among the population of a state.” The fear inspired by possible SOPA violations is designed to get the population of a state (the United States) to censor themselves. When the day comes that you can’t even talk about things they don’t like, you’re being censored, regardless of what SOPA proponents like MPAA scumbag Chris Dodd will tell you. (Now should we go after the MPAA/RIAA with cruise missiles, or should we take this opportunity to try out Prompt Global Strike? It would be the best use of my tax money in a long time either way.)

When you buy things from Microsoft, Apple, iTunes, RIAA labels, the MPAA, or various other censorship promoters, you’re not supporting American jobs, you’re supporting draconian laws like the PATRIOT ACT, DMCA, and the proposed SOPA. These things don’t just come out of nowhere, the promoters of them use a lot of money (some of it may even be from you) to grease the wheels. I don’t even believe it is just campaign contributions either. I think there’s plenty of cash under the table going to our elected officials from these outfits. Mexican President Felipe Calderon said at one point that part of the reason so many illegal drugs were getting across the border was because American politicians were taking cash money from drug cartels to make sure that certain smugglers got through without any issues at the border. Why would anyone have a hard time believing that American politics works differently elsewhere?

I haven’t bought any new RIAA-labeled music since the RIAA sued Napster. (I have bought some used CDs, mostly of stuff I listened to in the 80s and 90s. In compliance with the First Sale Doctrine.) I have not purchased any MPAA-labeled movies since they got on the lawsuit wagon. I specifically refuse to buy anything from Adobe, Apple, or Microsoft. As these companies started to openly work against my interests, I cut myself away from them. I could ignore them no longer. Will it stop them? No. It will never stop them as long as people think it is socially acceptable to spend money on cartel-promoted intangible items like MP3 files and ebooks and movies. The only thing I can do is apologize for my part of funding them and not do it again.

On so-called “Piracy”? I have no ethical problems with sharing information to help your friends. Unfortunately the MAFIAA has the finest government money can buy in the United States, and sharing information to help your friends can be illegal.

I’ve posted before what my thoughts are on “digital purchases”, they’re just a sneaky way to remove ownership from you and allow the MAFIAA to never let your “purchases” out of their sight. “Content” on “the cloud” is even worse because then you’re not even in possession of the file. It is the ultimate Digital Restrictions Management, cloaked as a kind of convenience.

“What about stores selling files? They got rid of DRM years ago!”

A common misconception exists around that. The only reason Apple doesn’t use DRM on their proprietary AAC files, and why many MP3 stores such as Amazon’s don’t do so either, is due to the obvious argument that the Red Book CD standard never had DRM. The argument can still be made, as long as CDs are still for sale, that the customer could theoretically buy and rip their own CDs. Thus there’s no reason to DRM-cripple the digital stuff until they cease making CDs. (Though it didn’t stop Apple from attempting this, they didn’t back off of it for years, and then they forced all their customers to buy the files all over again to get a clean copy) Then it will be back. Take my word, it’ll be back. Notice how there are precisely ZERO online movie stores with no DRM? Blu Ray has about half a dozen layers of DRM, and you have to crack them all before the disc plays on a non-”authorized” device. Since, barring violation of the DMCA, it’s impossible to make a clean copy of n HD movie, Apple and other stores don’t have to provide you with a clean copy of a movie that you have nominally “bought”. (They can take it away at any time thanks to their Foulplay DRM).

What companies are going for with SOPA and other “anti-piracy” laws is no less than the death of the free and open internet where all (regardless of government and corporate approval) are more or less free to voice their opinion and make their own websites and host their own material, and to turn it into something that more closely resembles America Online or the Microsoft Network from the 1990s. Full of nothing but tons of corporate-controlled push content and advertising, and the pack of pedophiles that lurk around that they’re really not interested in doing anything about. (They never have been interested in stopping pedophiles. Pedophiles don’t cost companies any money and provide a great excuse to raid sites they dislike.)

I don’t disagree with what Anonymous does. They are striking back at an oppressive, extralegal, and anti-constitutional cabal of government gone bad and out of control corporations. If anyone from them reads this, I’d like to put in a request. Next time, DDoS those parasites over at Apple, take down iTunes, do something that stings. Godspeed and good sailing!

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This work by Ryan Farmer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

On SOPA

January 18, 2012 Leave a comment

Stop censorship!

(This is made up of a set of email I sent to some of the contacts on my address book. I figured I might as well post it here too.)

A good deal of the major web sites have blacked themselves out today in protest of SOPA.

Many of them would not exist at all if SOPA/PIPA (also known as the Internet Blacklist Bills)  were to go into effect, or had it been in effect at the time they had started out.

The list of sites includes Wikipedia, Google, and Facebook, some of the most popular sites on the internet. They, and other productive businesses, are under a coordinated attack from large and entrenched companies who distort the news, promote proprietary closed source software and DRM, and troll innovative companies with bogus patents issued by the United States.

SOPA/PIPA doesn’t just threaten “pirates”. SOPA/PIPA threatens free and open source software, and free and open content. It gives the US government, without any court order, the ability to remove sites from the internet. Not just in the US, but worldwide. It must be stopped.

In my personal opinion, it would blow up in the face of the proprietary software companies that are promoting it, and possibly lead to a mass exodus to free and open source software (at least until the rich business criminals at Microsoft and Apple figured out a way to shut them down with unfair legal tactics). As tempting as it would be to otherwise just not care about SOPA/PIPA because it would likely cause these companies to  choke on their own greed, gloating at the prospect that the government thugs will take sites distributing this proprietary software down is not the right thing to do. An act of repression is not a good thing, even when it is likely to backfire and cause a revolt. (Besides, you’d think ICE actually had a job to do that isn’t getting done. Hint hint.)

The protest against SOPA/PIPA has forced the mainstream media to (sort of) do their jobs. They were silent on it before because many of the larger ones like MSNBC/CNN/Fox Noise actually supported it.

With sites like Wikipedia and many others gone black or having had large protest banners today, they had to come out of hiding.

The protests have done at least some good. They have raised awareness of this repressive piece of Anti-American legislation, and chased some of the supporters away from it. It lost at least three co-sponsors today as a direct result of the protests.


http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2012/01/sopa-blackout-sopa-and-pipa-lose-three-co-sponsors-in-congress.html

Many of them gave the MAFIAA (MPAA/RIAA) people a chance to attack the grassroots protests with rhetoric and smear.

Says former Senator, turned MAFIAA shill, Chris Dodd,

“Some technology business interests are resorting to stunts that punish their users or turn them into their corporate pawns, rather than coming to the table to find solutions to a problem,” says Chris Dodd, CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America, which supports the bills. “A so-called blackout is yet another gimmick, albeit a dangerous one, designed to punish elected and administration officials who are working diligently.”


http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/technology/story/2012-01-18/SOPA-PIPA-protest-reaction/52641560/1

You might remember Senator Dodd, he resigned because the MPAA offered him a truckload of money to be a lobbyist working against the American public, and for the rich business criminals who make up the MPAA.

SOPA was largely written by members of ALEC. Most people don’t know what ALEC is, but ALEC is actually the government of the United States. The real one. It’s made up of corporations, lobbyists, dirty money, and private lawyers that hand off finished bills for the shills in Congress to introduce and pass.  They probably figured SOPA/PIPA would simply sail through like the rest of the US laws they write, such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Normally, their attacks on education, the right to read, and the right to share and help your friends goes unnoticed. Indeed, the DMCA was mild compared to SOPA/PIPA. It managed to get rammed through back when the “social” media phenomenon of the internet was not as vibrant as it is now, or it too may have been shot down by overwhelming public outrage.


http://alecexposed.org/wiki/ALEC_Exposed

ALEC has written a number of state level laws and passed them off to their shills in state governments across the United States, including in Indiana. The “Right To Work” bills are largely their doing. An attack against living wages and jobs with good benefits. Companies wish to deal with workers on an individual basis so that they are expendable and, unable to bargain with their employer, have to accept whatever lousy pay and benefits they’re offered.

Wal-Mart (a member of ALEC) in particular is supporting that one, because it likes to hide the true cost of their merchandise. By avoiding unions, paying their employees minimum wage,  and giving most of them no health insurance or benefits. You may think you’re saving money when you shop there, but those employees who work 40 hours a week end up in the line for food stamps and Medicaid. Wal-Mart shifts the difference onto state and federal tax payers, who must foot the bill regardless of if they even shop at Wal-Mart.

SOPA/PIPA is only a symptom. In fact, I’d say that we’re fighting the wrong thing. The disease of bad government remains. You can’t fight a cancer by treating only the symptoms and hoping it goes away.

Finally, I notice that Chris Dodd speaks of middle class jobs being destroyed by “piracy”. I wonder what middle class jobs a branding company full of lawyers and former US senators actually produces. Are they talking about the Mexican cleaning crew that goes over their restrooms or something? (As for Microsoft, they employ very few Americans. Most of the development on Windows and IE is done in India and China.)

Our government has been taken over by these people. When Ben Franklin was asked whether we had a monarchy or a republic, he apparently answered “A republic, if you can keep it”.

Fighting off theocrats and big business interests who want to subvert our freedom, by fighting individual acts that they commit against us, is like trying to cure malaria by swatting at mosquitoes (to borrow part of a Richard Stallman quote about fighting off software patents).

We no longer have a republic, we have a Corporatocracy.

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This work by Ryan Farmer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

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