Meanwhile, in the Senate

[solarbird]

Remember the Senate? A committee just passed a bill letting the Justice Department be a proxy claimant in copyright infringement suits, so all those bad-publicity-for-Hollywood RIAA and MPAA lawsuits could be filed by the Justice Department instead. It also "creates a Cabinet-level copyright-patent czar charged with creating a worldwide plan to combat piracy." All Democrats voted for; most Republicans voted for, but four voted against.

Also, if you missed it, MSNBC'c Scarborough acknowledges that they cover whatever the McCain campaign wants them to cover:

"I want to ask you, what will we talk about two days from now?" Scarborough replied: "Whatever the McCain campaign wants us to talk about, because the McCain campaign is assertive."

And here's the kind of sick fundamentalist politics I mostly stopped covering: American Family Association's One News Now condemns France for France's support of letting queers be legal, and, oh, by the way, the Large Hadron Collider is stupid because if they want to know about the origin of the universe they should just read Genesis. Morons.

Comments

[hubbit.livejournal.com]

The Senate passage hasn't hit Slashdot yet, although the idea has been discussed on there before. (Short answer: look for end-to-end encryption to increase dramatically. Very short answer: the Federable Gummint has no goldurned business prosecuting a damages suit, that's for a real plaintiff to file. Microanswer: your government will turn on you like a hungry piranha.)

Worldwide plan to combat piracy. We can't even keep our own damned finances straightened out. What Washington needs is some Priorities Reassessment. If Congress had any backbone they'd tell the entertainment industry to fornicate themselves, point out that they are ENTERTAINMENT (ie, expendable), and tell them we have much larger fish to fry than whether Joe Knockoff is selling bootleg CDs in a commercial parking lot when we can't even figure out how to plug the leaks in Social Security for the next generation.

Personally, I recommend buying CDs from independent artists, and reading books. Books are lovely things, and you don't see the book publishing industry waging war on their consumers, threatening to have the Feds break in peoples' doors for borrowing books from the library rather than buying them.

Yet.

Edit: I just noticed this show of candor:

"I want to ask you, what will we talk about two days from now?" Scarborough replied: "Whatever the McCain campaign wants us to talk about, because the McCain campaign is assertive."

Well, Joe got the first three letters right, anyway.

[mathmuffin.livejournal.com]

The creation scientist and astronomer Dr. Danny Faulkner (http://creationontheweb.com/content/view/3510) does admit that the Large Hadron Collider will make significant discoveries about particle physics. But shouldn't an astronomer have more curiosity about the details of the creation in Genesis? God said, "Let there be light." Aren't creation scientists curious what wavelength that light was? The Large Hadron Collider could tell us. (Of course, non-creationist scientists will view the answer as the wavelength of the Big Bang.)

I suspect that Dr. Faulkner doesn't take his own argument seriously. The last sentence of the article (http://www.onenewsnow.com/Culture/Default.aspx?id=245800) is an inside joke. Dr. Faulkner said that the origin of the universe can be found in the first 11 chapters of the Bible. Not the first chapter, which gives the creation story, nor even the first two chapters, which also cover the origin of mankind, but the first eleven chapters, everything prior to the story of Abraham. Biblical scholars label those first 11 chapters as mythological, while the rest of Genesis is labeled historical.

[solarbird]

All that as it may be, the AFA's clear editorial stance is as I summarised.