Achtung, Baby!

They’re coming for your vapid Hello Kitty memorabilia!

News Digest from the Fake-Crisis Management Center, no. 2011\08A

Crisis to become fake as soon as you can afford it.

However, broadband that one cannot afford, is as good as no broadband at all. When FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn addressed the National Rural Assembly in Minnesota last month, she wasn't panicking about a make-believe spectrum crisis.

Post-Nuclear Germany, Beware

Beware of fooling yourself most of all:

However, without these subsidies not one of the "world famous" Danish wind farms would be profitable. But not even the government largesse, courtesy of the taxpayers/consumers seems to be enough to keep wind power profitable in Denmark; Scan Energy, one of the major wind and solar energy companies, with production also in Germany and France, has finally called it a day. Among the major shareholders are a number of the biggest Danish farming estates. Now there is, according to the Danish daily Jylland-Posten, a real risk that some of these family estates, built up during centuries, will have to be sold as a consequense of the Scan Energy bankruptcy.

News Digest from the Fake-Crisis Management Center, no. 2011\05A

Internet Addiction: A Public Health Crisis?

The CRISIS has been found!!!

A large portion of studies on internet addiction come from countries like Taiwan, China and South Korea, which have some of the highest broadband use in the world.

The South Korean government has declared Internet addiction a "public health crisis,"...

News Digest from the Fake-Crisis Management Center, no. 2011\1-D

US investigation of Google Street View was a 'wasted summer'
Inquirer

DOCUMENTS HAVE SURFACED that shed some light on the lackadaisical attitude of US regulators towards last year's Google Street View privacy violations.

A senior attorney at the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) described the Google investigation as "a wasted summer" in a letter obtained by the Electronic Privacy Information Centre through a Freedom of Information Act request.

The letter was written only a couple of days after the FTC decided to drop its inquiry into the matter. Many privacy advocates, especially in the UK and Europe, would be aghast at hearing the attorney describe the matter as "a time suck".

They need more time to abuse for-profit schools between naps, I guess.

Data protection organisations in the UK and Germany certainly have, unleashing considerable fury over the fact that a company that has so much data about us didn't have policies in place to stop this from happening.

Crisis Averted on the Back of an Envelope

Labor's economic plan: borrow, waste and tax.
Australia.TO

Let us look at that which they are so proud of: the $43 billion National Broadband Network that was cooked up on the back of an envelope on a airline flight.

Fake-Crisis not Critical Enough

GST and mining tax too low, says OECD report
Sydney Morning Herald

AUSTRALIA'S mining tax is too low, its GST should be increased and extended to food, and its approach to building the National Broadband Network conflicts with "multiple" international studies.

What would we do without "multiple" international studies ?

An Effete Pig Fingers Effete Pigs

”Firing back” at an idea with an unrelated trope has become the gold standard in (anti) intellectualism by intimidation.

Two books have shaped German debate this autumn. Thilo Sarrazin's book "Deutschland schafft sich ab" (Germany is abolishing itself) and "Das Amt und die Vergangenheit" (The Foreign Ministry and the past). On first appearances they would seem to have little in common, other than they are both published by Random House. Actually, though, these books are intricately bound up with one another, two souls in the breast of the politically-minded Bildungsburger or member of the German educated classes.

After all, both arguments somehow become equal because they came out of the mouths of “a class”, a sorting mechanism from people outside of those being assigned to one class or another.

Somehow, Sarrazin’s mention of the disinvolved and least educated not participating in the larger society’s social and economic life, and a collection of essays about the largely now deceased staff of Germany’s postwar foreign ministry whitewashing its’ past are to become about something else entirely. Were those Ausenministarium folk really elitists? Maybe. But was it their class and education that drove their moral failure? This is a question that one may not ask in a post-you name it society.



Which “class” is it right to appear to be after today, all you Besserwisser types out there?

Where then, should we arbitrarily deposit out judgment on the likes of that elite “class” called opinion journalists such as the article’s author, Welt journalist Alan Pösner? We may not judge right nor wrong in an individual for fear of sanction or being held to account for our words, which is how constructing invective for a constructed class develops so much appeal.

Steal His Book – If he ever Publishes One

Gutmenschtum cause requires flexibility. Flexibility, that is, with the reality of any situation over which you decide to become as theatrically outraged as those who tell you that you should (if you want to remain a good little Gutmensch.)


Sign and Sight, the product of near-monopoly mega-publisher Bertelsmann (AKA the Death Star of European gutmenschliche non-diversity of thought and opinion), takes up the matter in their unsalable digital form over a tempest in a teapot governing Argentine copyright law. Apparently it’s draconian because at it’s heart, it doesn’t exempt professional academic philosophers from stealing others’ copywritten work.

The article 17º states that "Every author or inventor is the exclusive owner of his work, invention or discovery, for the term granted by law".
Juan Bautista Alberdi intended for the copyright term to be indefinite, but during the writing of the Constitution it was decided to give a time limit, as done in Chile and the United States.

Pretty damn typical, and a good friend of authors who want to defend themselves from theft of their work by those evil corporate publishers, not to mention comforting the publishers enough to believe that if they print something, some ass isn’t going to turn around and give it away. It’s hard to see any publisher committing to print ANYTHING without that protection.

Alas, enter the outraged:

in 2009, something happened that no one in their right mind would have believed possible: the Argentinian Book Chamber filed charges against a university professor who was running a number of websites on philosophy. Among other things, these featured unpublished or unavailable texts by Derrida, Heidegger and Nietzsche.

Because laws are for vanity, I guess – not to be enforced!

[in 1913] Clemenceau learned that one of his theater plays was being played without authorization. After a dispute about the topic, the first copyright law was enacted in 1913.

The interview’s hero, Horatio Patel further bumbles:

In my naivete I had assumed that the existence of such a wonderful medium for sharing texts would mean that within a decade, the majority if not the entirety of philosophical writ could be available online. Which would mean that everyone would have a complete library in their homes, making it unnecessary to travel or wait, and that the 'books' could be leant to thousands simultaneously, and would be easy to locate. And finally I thought of philosophy magazines which are published once a year at most, and then only in editions of 50, which is barely enough to supply the specialist libraries. This would all change, I thought. Everything that had ever been or would ever be produced, could be published online. This was utterly fantastic, I thought.

Which in the case of copywritten work, can easily made spontaneous with online sales and e-book readers. However, that’s not good enough. The author or rights-holder must never be compensated for their work, even if they want to.

The source of his horror?

Horacio Potel's name was picked up by the European, Asian and US media. The case of the Argentinian professor who was taken to court for putting philosophical texts online, with no intent to make a profit, made it painfully clear that if everyone breaks the law, anyone could be prosecuted.

Picked up, because the idea of defending the hero of all great truths from intellectual repression couldn’t matter more based on the logic that the man wasn’t making a profit. He was giving away other people’s work without their permission, but that’s okay, because there wasn’t any profit involved in his giving something away.

Tell you what... I feel generous. I’m going to give you Potel’s shoes. How does that sound. There’s no profit involved, so we can all feel good and warm inside! Property is theft, Pal!

Doesn’t Horacio Potel realize that if the rights-holders of Derrida, Heidegger’s and Nietzsche’s work wanted their otherwise unavailable writings released for free, they would do it? Even Abbie Hoffman didn’t surrender his rights to “Steal this Book”. Even he understood that it wasn’t yours’ to give away.