Copyright Bite

I received a warning when I logged into my YouTube account recently. I had openly and with attribution used a couple of popular tunes in some of my videos. Those have been flagged as violations of copyrights, my account to be reviewed, and the videos may be pulled, or my account suspended. Meanwhile, those videos sport pop-up ads to buy the tunes. The two offending videos use tunes that had their heydays in the 1930's and 1970's. Even the children of the original creator and performer of the older tune are all dead. Is it right that some corporation is making a fuss over my sharing this with a few friends? There have been less than 75 views in the year since it's been posted. I see no reason to fight this. I'd be quite content to have ads pop up for the tunes I use. I even wish there were a mechanism in place to request ads to pay for use of related content. It's not so much that I like ads, but that I respect content creators. But I don't respect any right in perpetuity for corporations to hold creative rights once a creator and his direct heirs are out of the picture. Like McCartney having to pay the estate of Michael Jackson to use his own songs.

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Yet more quotes

I've been finding a lot of new quotes (new to me) these days. Here is another batch of my favorites: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. - Hanlon's Razor A woman approached a virtuoso piano player after a particularly brilliant performance and said, 'I'd give anything to play like that.' He replied, 'No, you wouldn't.' Attributed to Artur Rubenstein What is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. Christopher Hitchens If the words 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness' don't include the right to experiment with your own consciousness, then the Declaration of Independence isn't worth the hemp it was written on. Terrance McKenna If the minimum wasn't acceptable, it wouldn't be called the minimum. Anon No matter how good she looks, some guy is sick of her shit Anon Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety. Benjamin Franklin A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. \Robert Heinlein (through Lazarus Long) America... just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable. Hunter S. Thompson Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too? Douglas Adams I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: 'O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.' And God granted it. Voltaire Don't cry because it's over. Smile because it happened. Dr. Seuss If you can't explain something simply, you don't understand it well enough. Albert Einstein

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Climate: OJ and the Haystack

Why Climate Change Denial Is Like the O.J. Trial is an interesting article. The essence is that the climate denialists are using the same techniques as the OJ defense team: Find anything resembling a needle in a vast haystack of data, then claim that the presence of the needle casts doubt on the character of the haystack itself. Because there is an overwhelming pile of evidence in support of anthropogenic global warming, there are bound to be occasional pieces of data that can appear to contradict the mass of affirmative information. The pile is overwhelming, especially to non-scientists. Therefore few have the patience to understand the whole thing. Those who want to spin the counter argument claim that, because the two sides are both represented, therefore the issue is in doubt. And, as in the OJ trial, if there is cause for doubt, then no action is to be taken.

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More of my favorite quotes

I collect lots of quotes. Lots of bang for the buck. There's a novel in every good quote. Here's my most recent batch of favorites: "Television is more interesting than people. If it were not, we would have people standing in the corners of our rooms." Alan Corenk "Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle." Plato "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." Aristotle "I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed." Michael Jordan "Statistics are like bikinis. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital." Aaron Levenstein (Professor of Management at Baruch College, City University of New York) "I think it only makes sense to seek out and identify structures of authority, hierarchy, and domination, and to challenge them; unless a justification for them can be given, they are illegitimate, and should be dismantled, to increase the scope of human freedom." Noam Chomsky "Some people are called to build the piano, some to carry the piano, and some are called to play the piano" Darrin Patrick "One of the most powerful teachings of the Buddhist tradition is that as long as you are wishing for things to change, they never will." Pema Chodron, Start Where You Are “None of us are as smart as all of us” Japanese proverb "The average man does not want to be free. He simply wants to be safe" H.L. Mencken Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose Bill Gates Atheism is a religion like off is a TV channel. The Godless Blogger "There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that you just legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, that their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous their prosperity will find its way up and through every class that rests upon it." William Jennings Bryan at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1896. "[T]he life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Thomas Hobbes "Remember, Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, but backwards and in high heels." Bob Thaves, "Frank and Ernest", 1982 "Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear." Thomas Jefferson

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“The greatest preventable holocaust in the history of planet Earth”

"The greatest preventable holocaust in the history of planet Earth" That's the judgment on what awaits us from Michael Ruppert, in a new documentary entitled "Collapse". The age of fossil fuels has been a blip in the scale of human history. We've only been using them a few centuries, and yet we are unable to remember a time when fossil fuels were not abundant and cheap. That age is now over. Recent experience has taught us that the end of this age was heralded by massive price spikes and has already caused the greatest economic dislocation since the Great Depression, or possibly even including it. Given that the growth of human population has so neatly coincided with the growth in the production of fossil fuels, human population now faces a analogous decline on the far side of the bell curve.

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