kiaer.ts

So why should anyone with any familiarity with Galt's character even contemplate that Galt would accept the position of political/economic/military dictator of the U.S., otherwise known as the presidency?

If duly elected and with a genuine "electoral mandate" to move towards laissez faire?

I think that's a fantasy. You can't beat the house when the house sets the odds; you will always end up losing. Politics is a rigged game. The rules of the games are set by the ruling class to insure that, no matter who is nominally elected to office, they will always win and we will always lose. We can't beat them by playing their game. Politics is a bottomless sewer draining the energy of anyone who participates in it.

If liberty is ever to be achieved, it will be achieved from the bottom up, not the top down, by a critical mass of people who have figured out how to ignore the state and to replace its functions with voluntary, market based institutions. I am not optimistic enough to expect that this will happen during my lifetime, but it will ultimately happen either this way or not at all. Getting an objectivist/libertarian god elected president of the United States in order to turn the US into a libertarian paradise is a prospect no more real than Santa Claus.

Martin

You speak the truth, Martin. Those who speak the truth aren't terribly popular around here (fantasies about checks and balances, the Republican Party, and Glenn Beck are far more widely acclaimed), but there are a few of us who do appreciate seeing it (the truth) on our screens. Bravo!

JR

Jeff,

Thanks very much for your kind words. They mean a lot, coming from a distinguished libertarian writer and scholar like you.

As for Ted's subsequent nasty reply to you, I'll say this about Ted -- the man has the perspective of a sociopath, at least with regard to his views of foreigners. I still remember, some time ago, making a post in which I pointed out that the Iraq war resulted in the likely deaths of several hundred thousand Iraqis, the creation of at least two million Iraqi refugees driven from their homes, the massive ethnic cleansing of Sunnis from Iraqi cities, and massive destruction of Iraqi infrastructure, all to replace a previously U.S. government supported dictatorship with a brand new more U.S. government friendly dictatorship. Ted's reply (and I paraphrase here, because I can't remember his exact words and I can't locate the exact post) was something like, "Ha! Ha! The Iraq war is over. We won!". To respond like that, and not even to give the slightest acknowledgement of the horror of the war, or the terrible injustice and tragedy of so many innocent people killed and wounded, driven from their homes, their lives destroyed, and not even to feel the slightest degree of sympathy or sorrow for the suffering of the victims, is indicative of a person with a depraved indifference to human life.

I see that Ted has now joined the just started torture thread. Naturally, he is a strong advocate of U.S. government torture as official policy. He seemed practically giddy with excitement at the very thought of it.

Martin

The horror, the horror . . .

Sorry, Liz would have been clueless as Lillian Rearden.

But our current Secretary of State might fit the bill rather nicely.

I'm no huge fan, but she did admirably in Suddenly, Last Summer, and from what I have seen of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Butterfield 8, and Who's Afraid, she would have been perfect for the part. You'd make a good Balph Eubanks with those quips of yours, but wrong movie.

At least some government assets count as intellectual property. When I worked at a NASA installation years ago, they kept a legal staff that pursued unauthorized use (by t-shirt makers among others) of the agency's photos and designs.

That's trademark, not copyright. I assume government also has a stronger and criminal protection for the unauthorized use of official logos. You can dowhatever you like with images such as Hubble Telescope photos.

Ted,

There is copyright ownership of private emails. Even when made at work.

You need to brush up on your copyright understanding of government documents being in the public domain if you want to make blanket statements like you just did.

Not all are.

Look it up.

Michael

EDIT: I just looked around and my suspicions were confirmed. Specifically, if private emails are found within the the cables of government officials and war logs, or if those cables.logs contain copyrighted materials of third parties, Wikileaks could be nailed for copyright infringement even on the first dump to the public. The fact that it approached the Pentagon and asked the military to review the documents before releasing them does not legally exempt it from following USA law (when on USA turf).

I have read comments in a few places that Wikileaks has published copyrighted works. For example, in one case I read it had published the LDS Church Handbook of Instructions, which is under copyright protection, but I have not checked this.

I could invest more time and energy, but I just don't have it to prove a hairsplit.

I said government documents and works created by government agents in the pursuit of their duties are not protected by copyright. How that extends to private emails, or applies to Asshenge, I will leave up to you.

"Rights" are not intrinsic or inherent. They are inalienable when men of reason, and of honor, and of violence say they are. There is no magic invisible barrier, no intrinsic property of frightened self absorbed individuals that protects them from being violated by barbaric predators that happen to have the shape of human beings. It requires men of violence and honor to do it for them.

!

It is reliably suggested by his biographers that Sir Isaac Newton was a Unitarian, deriving his theology from his explorations of Arianism.

Seventh Day Adventists deny the existence of hell.

I hope they realize they will go to hell for that.

I can easily imagine Ayn Rand writing this:

Is there really no one else who has made that sort of splash? I'm having a hard time coming up with one. Angelina Jolie, perhaps?

For me, Jolie's greatest performance was in "Gia," where she played the bisexual fashion model Gia Carangi, who died of AIDS. Jolie is amazing in that. She had the sensuality and animal energy of Ava Gardner, which virtually no one has been able to duplicate. But after she got huge around the world, Jolie decided to become the big humanitarian. Elizabeth Taylor did that, but it was later in her career. So suddenly Angelina Jolie thinks she's a U.N. ambassador for all human misery in the world. Everything turns high concept, and soon she's collecting a multiracial menagerie of children. The result is a total flattening out of her artistic image. In a way, she suffers from the problem of being a star in the age of paparazzi, where you're much more hounded than even Elizabeth Taylor ever was. Marilyn Monroe was certainly harassed by the press and hated it, but not like today, where there's hardly a place on earth to have your own thoughts. So Angelina Jolie became defensive and covert, and now there's something too calculated and manipulative about her public persona, so she's less interesting than she was. Of course, there are no great roles being written for her. She gets action adventure scripts, like Lara Croft, where a contemporary woman has to show she's tough and can duke it out with the guys. But I'm not sure Jolie would have been able to handle some of the roles Elizabeth Taylor did so well like "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof." There's a relaxation at the heart of Elizabeth Taylor's acting style -- and also in Elizabeth Taylor the woman-- whereas you always feel a wariness or tension in Jolie.

I had never heard of Universalism as such. I found the last sentence of my first post on this thread particularly telling, an almost Objectionist view that there is no salvation outside the Church (of Ayn Rand).

http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/feature/2011/03/23/camille_paglia_on_elizabeth_taylor

Richard Burton, who was supposed to become the next great Shakespearean actor after Laurence Olivier, used to say how much he had learned from Elizabeth about how to work with the camera. Cinematic acting is extremely understated. The slightest little flick of an eyelid says an enormous amount, and that's where Elizabeth Taylor was far superior to Meryl Streep. Streep is always cranking it and cranking it, working it and working it, demanding that the audience bow down and "See what I"m going through! See what I'm doing for you!" Streep is an intelligent, good actress, but she doesn't come anywhere near Elizabeth Taylor on the screen. Because she wasn't a trained stage actress like Streep, Taylor has vocal weaknesses -- at high pitch, she can get a bit screechy -- which is perfect for Martha in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" but not so good for Cleopatra. But she was like a luscious, opulent, ripe fruit. She enjoyed life to the max. She loved to eat and drink, she loved baubles, and she had a terrific sense of humor -- people would say they could hear her raucously laughing from a mile away. She was a basic, down-to-earth gal who could play queens when she had to.

Ah, yes, I owned the Uncle Fester Lightbulb.

Ted,

Wikileaks is still online.

I doubt it will ever be taken down, that is unless the Wikileaks people don't want it anymore. Even should that happen, there are so many mirrors out there that, like I said, I doubt it will ever be taken down completely.

Sure, the head dude (Assange) was the poster boy for a frontal assault on the USA government and will suffer the consequences of a pissed off humongous spy and military infrasturcture, but I wager the USA copyright law will not be his major headache.

In other words, copyright-wise, I doubt he will suffer punishment. I might be wrong, but for now, I doubt it. So Wikileaks is a very good example of what I was talking about.

Michael

Let me repeat, Michael, copyright has nothing to do with any trouble Asshenge might face. There is no copyright in federal government documents or works produced by government agents in the pursuit of their duties.

DURHAM, N.C. -- When Chad Holtz lost his old belief in hell, he also lost his job.

The pastor of a rural United Methodist church in North Carolina wrote a note on his Facebook page supporting a new book by Rob Bell, a prominent young evangelical pastor and critic of the traditional view of hell as a place of eternal torment for billions of damned souls.Two days later, Holtz was told complaints from church members prompted his dismissal from Marrow's Chapel in Henderson.

"I think justice comes and judgment will happen, but I don't think that means an eternity of torment," Holtz said. "But I can understand why people in my church aren't ready to leave that behind. It's something I'm still grappling with myself."

The debate over Bell's new book "Love Wins" has quickly spread across the evangelical precincts of the Internet, in part because of an eye-catching promotional video posted on YouTube.Bell, the pastor of the 10,000-member Mars Hill Bible Church in Grand Rapids, Mich., lays out the premise of his book while the video cuts away to an artist's hand mixing oil paints and pastels and applying them to a blank canvas.

He describes going to a Christian art show where one of the pieces featured a quote by Mohandas Gandhi. Someone attached a note saying: "Reality check: He's in hell."

"Gandhi's in hell? He is? And someone knows this for sure?"

Bell asks in the video.In the book, Bell criticizes the belief that a select number of Christians will spend eternity in the bliss of heaven while everyone else is tormented forever in hell.

"This is misguided and toxic and ultimately subverts the contagious spread of Jesus' message of love, peace, forgiveness and joy that our world desperately needs to hear," he writes in the book.

For many traditional Christians, though, Bell's new book sounds a lot like the old theological position of universalism — a heresy for many churches, teaching that everyone, regardless of religious belief, will ultimately be saved by God.

And that, they argue, dangerously misleads people about the reality of the Christian faith.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/03/24/whos-hell-michigan-pastors-book-sparks-debate-eternal-torment/#ixzz1HWpoklaX

Outstanding sentence. Do you know Friedrich Dürrenmatt's 1986 novel Der Auftrag (The 1988 English translation was entitled The Assignment: Or, on the Observing of the Observer of the Observers)? Each of its 24 chapters is a single sentence.

JR

No. But I do remember hearing of an 18-page long (probably in the Loeb Classical Library edition) sentence of reported speech by a Latin historian, Tacitus being my guess. I'll see if I can find it.

I've been nicknamed Lurch by several different people over the years - but Toad was always my favorite.

Ted,

I don't recall ever saying that copyright infringement should fall under criminal law instead of civil law, nor do I remember discussing awarding damages or not in this discussion, so I presume your remarks are in addition to mine, not as commentary on them? Am I correct?

When you use words like "federal," "civil" and "criminal," you are presuming USA law, correct?

Here's a question. How about New Zealand where Crhis Sciabarra's emails were posted, being that two of the persons doing so were Americans living here in the USA, and ditto for Chris? I don't remember SLOP's server (I think is was Dreamhost at the time), but I presume it was in NZ. Maybe I'm wrong about that.

I agree with you that Robert Campbell's work falls under fair use. That's what I would argue in a lawsuit. But the judge would decide, not me.

Michael

US law was assumed. The point in bringing up civil versus criminal and the lack of copyright on federal documents was to point out that wikileaks was a poor comparison. Of course you are correct that the reach of the law is limited, that was assumed also. But you said "I can host almost anything I want without fear of USA copyright violation. ...Think Wikileaks, for instance,. for another good example." I don't know what sort of extradition treaties exist between the US and the countries Asshenge frequents. But I have no doubt that felony US criminal statutes apply. (I also have a feeling that the Administration and magistrates in the UK and Sweden are sympathetic to Asshenge.)

As for Sciabarra, I don't know the law in NZ, so I couldn't venture even an amateur opinion, but there would presumably be jurisdiction to bring a suit if, say, they have stronger privacy or defamation laws. For example, Roman Polanski, living in Paris, sued Vanity Fair, published in the US, for defamation in a London court, and won.

As for the Judge deciding, well, you can indict a ham sandwich too.

Not right, but authority.

Note to all readers: If this doesn't give you the creepy-crawlies then something's definitely wrong with you.

Note to all readers - in three short posts, Shayne reverts to spewing ad hominem.

When police chase criminals, they do so based on strictly limited and delegated authority, not on right. The government has no rights. This is not even Objectivism, for God's sake, it's junior high civics.

Bullshit. A person either acts by right or what they are doing is committing a crime. A policeman doing a legitimate duty is acting by right delegated to him or by his own right (just as we all have a right to stop a crime), not "authority", which is the word an abject statist uses to describe this.

Shayne

-Throw your "civics" class in a garbage bin.

So, you say the government has "rights," and yet you call me call me the statist for saying it may only do what it has been authorized to do? I am afraid you'll need a more powerful obscenity than bullshit to convince me to leave my senses and forget the plain meanings of words. Unfortunately I won't be reading your further responses.

He keeps such a long sentence 'rolling' and 'building' by not tiring us.

He keeps such a long 'sentence' going by substituting commas for full stops. It is not an actual complex sentence with a string of dependent clauses.

Dickens is a piker. Here is a real sentence form chapter 42 of Melville's Moby Dick:

Though in many natural objects, whiteness refiningly enhances beauty, as if imparting some special virtue of its own, as in marbles, japonicas, and pearls; and though various nations have in some way recognised a certain royal pre-eminence in this hue; even the barbaric, grand old kings of Pegu placing the title 'Lord of the White Elephants' above all their other magniloquent ascriptions of dominion; and the modern kings of Siam unfurling the same snow-white quadruped in the royal standard; and the Hanoverian flag bearing the one figure of a snow-white charger; and the great Austrian Empire, Caesarian, heir to overlording Rome, having for the imperial color the same imperial hue; and though this pre-eminence in it applies to the human race itself, giving the white man ideal mastership over every dusky tribe; and though, besides all this, whiteness has been even made significant of gladness, for among the Romans a white stone marked a joyful day; and though in other mortal sympathies and symbolizings, this same hue is made the emblem of many touching, noble things -- the innocence of brides, the benignity of age; though among the Red Men of America the giving of the white belt of wampum was the deepest pledge of honor; though in many climes, whiteness typifies the majesty of Justice in the ermine of the Judge, and contributes to the daily state of kings and queens drawn by milk-white steeds; though even in the higher mysteries of the most august religions it has been made the symbol of the divine spotlessness and power; by the Persian fire worshippers, the white forked flame being held the holiest on the altar; and in the Greek mythologies, Great Jove himself made incarnate in a snow-white bull; and though to the noble Iroquois, the midwinter sacrifice of the sacred White Dog was by far the holiest festival of their theology, that spotless, faithful creature being held the purest envoy they could send to the Great Spirit with the annual tidings of their own fidelity; and though directly from the Latin word for white, all Christian priests derive the name of one part of their sacred vesture, the alb or tunic, worn beneath the cassock; and though among the holy pomps of the Romish faith, white is specially employed in the celebration of the Passion of our Lord; though in the Vision of St. John, white robes are given to the redeemed, and the four- and-twenty elders stand clothed in white before the great white throne, and the Holy One that sitteth there white like wool; yet for all these accumulated associations, with whatever is sweet, and honorable, and sublime, there yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue, which strikes more of panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in blood.

Not right, but authority.

Note to all readers: If this doesn't give you the creepy-crawlies then something's definitely wrong with you.

Note to all readers - in three short posts, Shayne reverts to spewing ad hominem.

When police chase criminals, they do so based on strictly limited and delegated authority, not on right. The government has no rights. This is not even Objectivism, for God's sake, it's junior high civics.

I just bought "The Emperor's New Mind" by Roger Penrose. On p. 240, Oxford pb edition, is this: "One implication of Maxwell's equations was that electric and magnetic fields would indeed 'push' each other along through empty space."

Sounds as if light is not merely a one time initial impulse and then carried forever at the same speed by inertia of motion (and no friction)but it gets a continuous 'kick' in the way described.

Which spurred this question I had never fully focused on before: Light will travel slower than c (186,000 miles per second though a vacuum) when it goes through a denser medium - like water or glass. But why doesn't even a thin medium like air, -progresively- slow it down, impede it?

Continually acting on it, so that it eventually goes slower than 186k - or whatever speed it -started- to travel in that medium at? In other words, when traveling even across the galaxy or the solar system, there is a lot of dust. Why wouldn't it slow down more and more and more?

The 'refractive index' suggests a constant unaltered speed in any (transparent, obviously) medium.

Why isn't there the equivalent of frictional drag, slowing it down?

Even with an ongoing kick in the pants 'push' - as described by Maxwell's equations, you would think some of the juice would go out of it across vast distances? (The laws of physics often assume 'frictionless' conditions, but in reality that is not the case.)

Media which transmit a signal have an inherent velocity of transmission. For example, the speed of sound in air of a certain temperature and density is constant - sound doesn't become more bass as it travels. The same for light. What does happen to massive particles traveling through a resistant medium is that they are slowed down by the act of friction applying a force against the direction of travel of the body. But we are not talking about the momentum (mass times velocity) of the photon. There is no friction acting against the "mass" of photon as it travels. Rather, when travelling through a medium such as glass, photons, which are absorbed and reemitted by atoms in their path, are delayed by the time it takes the atom to be excited and to emit a new photon. The photon thus emitted is still traveling at the speed of light. There is no progressive loss of speed due to these absorptions and emissions.

Can the reproduction of private email correspondence, if done in sufficient quantity, really constitute a violation of copyright law? This is not a rhetorical question. I honestly don't know, and I'm curious.

George,

This is a gray area of the law--and there is even the problem of which law to use. It gets worse, too--there's a problem with which country's law to use. Don't forget that the Internet covers the world.

So far, the server has been the main defining factor in determining jurisdiction. If I host a work on servers in the USA, the laws of USA prevail. Ditto for other countries. Thus, if I put a work (say, the latest Hollywood movie) on servers in Panama or an island somewhere, I can host almost anything I want without fear of USA copyright violation. (You gotta be careful with hit-men, though, but that's another issue, )

Think Wikileaks, for instance,. for another good example.

In an ideal world where there is no messiness, posting an email you received would be a flat-out copyright violation. In the real world, the legal literature I have read takes into account a whole lot of context.

Here's just a simple example, although it is not relevant to the issue that prompted your question. I mention it merely to show the complexity. Suppose you receive a sales email from an online store and you used it verbatim in a promotion on your site, but gave credit to where it came from. You didn't ask for permission. Is a product description of, say, an electronic drill (or worse, penis enlargers) and purchasing conditions worthy of claiming copyright infringement? No court or judge I know of would waste much time over this.

Here's another. RSS feeds, which the vast majority of Internet sites now have (look for a small squarish orange button with three curved white lines in it), give tacit permission for folks to use the works on such sites elsewhere.

I once blasted the hell out of the SLOP people (including Hsieh since she was there at the time) for posting portions of Chris Sciabarra's emails without his consent, and I called it "copyright violation" back then. However, strictly speaking, since the excerpts were short, they could have argued fair use if a lawsuit arose. My point with those sanctimonious bullshitters, though, was that they used double standards for this stuff. When folks did it to them, it was copyright violation worthy of the harshest moral condemnation and no exception. When they did it to others, it was "righting a wrong."

Like I said, bullshit.

On OL, I have adopted the policy of common sense. I advise people to seek permission. If someone's work is used without permission and that person writes to me complaining that he or she doen't want it posted here, I tend to remove it. But not always. It depends on the reasonableness of the situation.

A recent case with Michael Newberry's tutorials comes to mind, and that wasn't even a copyright thing. We ended up coming to a very good understanding where his values and mine were served. There was no need for moral condemnations, pointing fingers, accusations of this and that, one pushing the other around, and so forth.

Anyway, that doesn't happen much.

The problem with the Objectivist (and even libertarian) world is that it sometimes attracts people who are not reasonable and consider this to be a virtue. I call them control freaks. Depending on what is at stake, I rarely insist with their material, not because I bow to their control, but because pompous pains-in-the-ass are time-suckers with no gain at the end. Their works are rarely objects worth fighting over.

Probably the largest problem we have had (other than the... drum roll... mass plagiarist of the past ) concerns Ayn Rand Answers edited by Robert Mayhew. Robert Campbell did a side-by-side comparison with Rand's spoken worlds to show the changes Mayhew made. Sometimes he quoted extensively from the book to give context. The publisher sent me a standard form DMCA takedown notice, Robert removed the parts of the quotes that did not have changes and all was presumably good. I have heard nothing from the publisher since. If they want more, though, this is a case I believe is worth fighting for.

In my opinion, legally, the Internet is still the Wild Wild Web in terms of Intellectual Property and I predict it will be for a long time to come. Just think of the fundamental issue--protection governing copies. In order for you to read my words right now, which I own the copyright to, they have to be copied onto your browser. How's that for a mess at the premise level? So I believe common sense over listening to this person or that is the best way for me to go.

I don't advise anyone legally, though, since I am not a lawyer. (Gotta say that in this country.)

Three points. First, according to federal law, there is no copyright in federal documents or works created by government agents in the pursuit of their duties. Copyright is a civil matter - there may be criminal laws relevant in the theft, possession, and distribution of government documents. Second, the fact that a court may not find damages in a specific case at law in no way impairs or makes ambiguous one's copyright in one's work. And as for Campbell's work, it falls well within fair use, being the non-commercial use of mere portions of works for scholarly ends which could not possibly be achieved without recourse to the text, which itself was openly published for its intellectual import.

I too will make the necessary disclaimer that Michael is not a lawyer.

Does that mean that if a cop thinks there are drugs at your house but has the wrong address, that it's OK for him to bust down your door in the middle of the night for the "utilitarian purpose" of making sure you don't flush something down the toilet? And then to shoot you if you mistake him for a criminal?

Don't be silly. Who here is advocating drug laws? Try something more reasonable like the hot pursuit of a criminal who hides in your back yard. You don't have the absolute right to stop the cop based on your property rights. Politics and ethics are separate sciences. Rights, while derived from moral principals, are a political concept. They exist within the context of a polity. It is not immoral for a policeman to tread on your lawn in the valid pursuit of his duties.

I certainly agree that if a cop is chasing someone, then he has a right to reasonable pursuit across your property. That has nothing to do with what Mike is trying to justify here. We are talking talking about imminent threats here, we're talking about this sort of thing:

Not right, but authority. I'll let Mike speak for himself if he wants to give an example. The point to me is that government officials should have the authority to interrogate (not 'torture') unlawful enemy combatants with rather wide leeway. How we treat them is a matter of our needs and standards. You'd be surprised how little concern I have for the 'rights' of war criminals subject to summary execution on the battlefield according to the laws of war.

Does that mean that if a cop thinks there are drugs at your house but has the wrong address, that it's OK for him to bust down your door in the middle of the night for the "utilitarian purpose" of making sure you don't flush something down the toilet? And then to shoot you if you mistake him for a criminal?

Don't be silly. Who here is advocating drug laws? Try something more reasonable like the hot pursuit of a criminal who hides in your back yard. You don't have the absolute right to stop the cop based on your property rights. Politics and ethics are separate sciences. Rights, while derived from moral principals, are a political concept. They exist within the context of a polity. It is not immoral for a policeman to tread on your lawn in the valid pursuit of his duties.

Sigh. I could have got a carton of cigarettes on the Black Market here for half those Atlas Points, but I am too Respectable.

I still love the avatar. I have a grey jacket with floppy sleeves in which I often do my imitation of it. although I now know that the attractive crinoline effect on the bottom consists entirely of anus.How wonderful and weird is life and all its forms.

Here are three for making me laugh out loud with that one, but be aware the animal has a u-shaped gut, and in the adult its anus is actually next to its mouth. I think the dark spot visible in the center of the body in the larva is the anus. Here's a different image, the bend at the bottom is the gut.

Ted, thanks for the aquacornucopia. I remember reading that book about us all being essentially aquatic (was it Morgan)? - and thinking, yes, of course. The way many connect with Rand. I never feel so entirely myself as when immersed in the nearest available body of water - lucky I grew up close to the ocean. Morgan could be a lot of biological hooey for all I know, but I know my lakes and rivers and the value of being in them.

Still don't like dulse though.

You mean Thomas Hunt Morgan? He's a standard, and a prolific writer, but I haven't read anything by him.