Ideas And Minds

As businessmen, including many who supported Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, continue to go public with complaints about regime uncertainty and its discouraging effect on the economy’s recovery, some observers are speculating that the tycoons’ animus is driven at least in part by their sense of betrayal: they had recognized Obama as a member in good standing of their class (aptly known as the ruling class) and supported his rise to power, yet his policies have brought about conditions in which it is impossible for them to prosper.

As Andrew Ross Sorkin has written recently in the New York Times:

Mr. Obama was viewed as a member of the elite, an Ivy League graduate (Columbia, class of ’83 . . .), president of The Harvard Law Review — he was supposed to be just like them. President Obama was the “intelligent” choice, the same way they felt about themselves. They say that they knew he would seek higher taxes and tighter regulation; that was O.K. What they say they did not realize was that they were going to be painted as villains.

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"I have sinned! Philandered...I'm sorry!" (Jimmy Swaggart, Feb. 1988)

MSM says: "LIAR! FRAUD! HYPOCRITE!...and you rustic idiots who believe him, MORONS! BRAIN-DEAD YOKELS! LED AROUND BY THE NOSE!!! IDIOTS!"

"Now about the mass-jailing, torturing and murdering of all those Cuban gays...um, sorry, really didn't mean to...wasn't my fault, actually.." (Fidel Castro, Sept. 2010)

MSM says: "AWWWWWWW...that's touching...we understand...when can we get you on Oprah for a standing ovation and a teary-eyed hug."

Unreal.

(H/T JRB)

The New Deal: History, Economics and Law taught by Thomas Woods. The technology is incredible, the content even more so. No matter where you are, you can be a student of Thomas Woods.

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We’ve covered some of the more exotic ways people can be tracked or monitored in the past (including some that don’t work) but the lawsuits, abandoned by the record industry as bad for business, have been adopted by a group of lawyers who don’t let a little hypocrisy stand in their way.

There’s a lot of misinformation about which companies and agencies can do what, and how they do it. People claim industry groups or random companies can search and send out letters at random, whereas the reality is the investigator must be authorized or they could be deemed guilty of copyright infringement themselves.

There’s also a lot of confusion about exactly how evidence is collected, with people sometimes believing that it can only be collected from corporate networks, or that private trackers are safe because investigators can’t share and so would be banned for their ratio. Much of this is untrue and these beliefs can make it easier to collect evidence.

The easiest way of all is to simply collect information from trackers. It’s an easy and quick way to do it, although as was revealed 2 years ago, it’s often quite inaccurate.

The next simplest way, which provides lots of data, is just to join a swarm and monitor. Some people believe that clients doing this will stand out, as modified clients will behave differently. The reality is that clients don’t have to be monitored at all.

Researcher Andrew Norton produced this video explaining how a vanilla µTorrent client can be used to identify and log peers without any modification or abnormal behavior.

The raw data shown in the video – all that’s needed for a lawsuit or allegation under most 3-strikes laws – is nothing more than basic communication data. However, it’s critical to note that this data, while it is evidence of activity, is NOT evidence of infringement in many cases.

We can’t testify that this is the method used by any company – they’re notoriously tight-lipped about their methods – but it’s quite possible that it’s being used and sold on as a very high priced service to customers. Selling simple and not always accurate or effective methods for thousands of dollars a week was revealed to be a key method of MediaDefender. Anyone reading this and intending to hire such companies would be advised to ask for a demonstration of their detection system first-hand.

It should, however, come as yet another wakeup call to those using blocklist-based software. Without any way to identify a client using this method, there’s no way to add its IP to the list. In fact, the public availability of block-list contents means it’s extremely easy to avoid being on them.

On the other hand VPNs, proxies and seedboxes will provide some protection, but the only real solution is to press for the peer-review of anti-P2P companies and their methods, but that doesn’t look like it will come any time soon.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

As businessmen, including many who supported Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, continue to go public with complaints about regime uncertainty and its discouraging effect on the economy’s recovery, some observers are speculating that the tycoons’ animus is driven at least in part by their sense of betrayal: they had recognized Obama as a member in good standing of their class (aptly known as the ruling class) and supported his rise to power, yet his policies have brought about conditions in which it is impossible for them to prosper.

As Andrew Ross Sorkin has written recently in the New York Times:

Mr. Obama was viewed as a member of the elite, an Ivy League graduate (Columbia, class of ’83 . . .), president of The Harvard Law Review — he was supposed to be just like them. President Obama was the “intelligent” choice, the same way they felt about themselves. They say that they knew he would seek higher taxes and tighter regulation; that was O.K. What they say they did not realize was that they were going to be painted as villains.

So, once again, Barack Obama’s presidency reflects that of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the well-heeled playboy-politician who ascended the political ladder while living very comfortably, owing to his forebears’ accumulation of wealth, and circulated with complete ease among the “best people.” (Note: In FDR’s case, the credentials were the reverse of Obama’s – Harvard College, graduated 1904; Columbia Law School, attended but dropped out in 1907, having already passed the New York State bar exam.) After Roosevelt became president, however, especially from 1935 onward, he was reviled as a “traitor to his class” because of his attacks on “economic royalists,” whom he blamed for the Depression and for the New Deal’s failure to restore prosperity. Perhaps before long the contemporary moguls will revive the American Liberty League.

Too many Americans think of Barack Obama as somehow alien to the established politico-economic order. Many accuse him of all sorts of affiliations and loyalties at odds with the preservation of that order. In my view, however, he is as American as apple pie – as American as Franklin D. Roosevelt. He was not born in a sharecropper’s shack; he did not walk six miles barefooted through the snow, uphill both ways, to attend school; he has always been a successful player in the upper reaches of the participatory fascist system that thickheaded Americans revere as “democracy in action” in the “land of the free.”

So, yes, the billionaires have a perfect right to feel betrayed. They accepted Obama as one of their own; they supported his rise to power, from his student days onward; and they bankrolled his election as president. But, now, after directing hundreds of billions of dollars toward politically well-connected firms in the course of the various bailouts and Fed effusions his administration has inherited, sponsored, or overseen, he has decided to make the Wall Street movers and shakers his whipping boys.

Before concluding that these cry babies are only getting what they richly (pun intended) deserve, we might well pause to consider that the Obama administration’s policies are, in fact — just as big-league investors and businessmen are increasingly saying publicly — creating regime uncertainty that seriously impedes the recovery of private investment, which must be an essential part, indeed, the very beating heart of any genuine restoration of prosperity.

This is truly the height of insolence.

Spanish officials thank Catholic Church for 'important role' in release of Cuban prisoners

Havana, Cuba, Sep 2, 2010 / 10:04 pm (CNA/Europa Press).- During a visit to Cuba, two officials from Spain’s Socialist Party expressed gratitude to the Catholic Church for its “important role” in securing the release of several political prisoners.

Leire Pajin and Elena Valenciano from the Socialist Party, praised the release of  political prisoners in Cuba and announced that six more newly-freed dissidents will be arriving in Spain tomorrow.

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Patent-enforcement madness often seems to have much in common with terrorism, but there is a bright side. It is helping more and more people think through the nature of competition, marketing, government privilege, what can and can’t be property, and other important considerations. It has been an educational opportunity for everyone, and here is a an excellent example: a beautifully argued and well-written post in The Register explaining that commerce isn’t built on ideas as such but on actual production and marketing. “Anyone can think up a brilliant idea. The difficulty is in doing something with it.”

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