Blackmoor Vituperative

HYPOTHESIS: People who care about facts look for them before expressing an opinion. People who don’t care about facts retain their opinion regardless of any facts presented. In either case, pointing out that someone’s opinion is not factually based is a waste of time.

When Steven Vicinanza got a letter in the mail earlier this year informing him that he needed to pay $1,000 per employee for a license to some “distributed computer architecture” patents, he didn’t quite believe it at first. The letter seemed to be saying anyone using a modern office scanner to scan documents to e-mail would have to pay—which is to say, just about any business, period.

If he’d paid up, the IT services provider that Vicinanza founded, BlueWave Computing, would have owed $130,000.

[…]

Vicinanza made the unusual choice to fight back against Hill and “Project Paperless”—and actually ended up with a pretty resounding victory. But the Project Paperless patents haven’t gone away. Instead, they’ve been passed on to a network of at least eight different shell companies with six-letter names like AdzPro, GosNel, and FasLan. Those entities are now sending out hundreds, if not thousands, of copies of the same demand letter to small businesses from New Hampshire to Minnesota. (For simplicity, I’ll just refer to one of those entities, AdzPro.)

Ars has acquired several copies of the AdzPro demand letter; the only variations are the six-letter name of the shell company and the royalty demands, which range from $900 to $1,200 per employee.

(from Patent trolls want $1,000—for using scanners, Ars Technica)

More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America — more than six million — than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.

(From The Caging of America, The New Yorker)

Some tragedies receive more media attention than others.

There’s a section of the article regarding the Bill Of Rights that some of my allies and adversaries in the realm of civil rights might find interesting. It’s something I would like to read more about.

…Stuntz startlingly suggests that the Bill of Rights is a terrible document with which to start a justice system — much inferior to the exactly contemporary French Declaration of the Rights of Man, which Jefferson, he points out, may have helped shape while his protégé Madison was writing ours.

The trouble with the Bill of Rights, he argues, is that it emphasizes process and procedure rather than principles. […] Instead of announcing general principles — no one should be accused of something that wasn’t a crime when he did it; cruel punishments are always wrong; the goal of justice is, above all, that justice be done — it talks procedurally. You can’t search someone without a reason; you can’t accuse him without allowing him to see the evidence; and so on. This emphasis, Stuntz thinks, has led to the current mess, where accused criminals get laboriously articulated protection against procedural errors and no protection at all against outrageous and obvious violations of simple justice.

People who blame weapons for crime or movies for violence have no interest in criminology, any more than people blame homosexuals for hurricanes have any interest in meteorology.

I don’t interpret the election results the way anyone else does. When given the choice between two virtually identical candidates and three other very distinct candidates, 98% of the country voted for the two virtually identical candidates, and the votes for those two candidates got split almost exactly in half. To me, that says that a) 98% of the country approves of our current domestic and foreign policies, and b) that the two major parties are very good at choosing candidates that appeal to nearly everyone, to the extent that choosing between them may as well be a coin toss.

I find the chest-thumping of the winners and the hand-wringing of the losers surreal. Half of the country wanted a Pepsi, and a very tiny fraction less than that wanted Coke. This means that Coke is no longer relevant, can no longer be seriously considered as a soft drink, should be removed from grocery store shelves and relegated to local convenience stores, and so on? This means that people who want Pepsi are morally and dietetically inferior (or superior) to people who’d rather drink Coke? It’s the end of the world and/or the beginning of a new era because a very tiny fraction of the population prefers one brand of carbonated brown sugar-water over another brand of carbonated brown sugar-water?

It all just seems a wild overreaction to a very tiny difference in preference between two extremely similar things.

Here are two meme images I made in response to the outrage over the cost of PBS, and the outrage over that outrage.

Here is an interesting article from Matt Bai: How Much Has Citizens United Changed the Political Game? The gist of it is that Citizens United may not have exactly the impact that people tell you it has (or will have). Which, in retrospect, really shouldn’t surprise anyone.

And here is a … not so much a rebuttal, because he doesn’t respond to any of the original article’s points… it’s a reply, I guess, from Russ Feingold. I don’t find it persuasive. “A new form of corruption”? Hardly. Matt Bai makes it amply clear that this form of corruption has been around since at least the 1990s (and in my opinion, since long before that). But this Feingold fellow was the ONLY Senator to vote against the so-called PATRIOT act during the first vote on it, so I’ll give his arguments my attention based on that alone.

I confess that the continued authority to selectively tax citizens in order to encourage desired behaviour disappoints me, but not because of Obamacare. I am mostly indifferent to the Affordable Care Act itself, because it will affect less than 2% of the people in this country in any significant way. My own health care costs will continue to rise, with or without it.

It disappoints me because it makes it less likely that the existing tax system will be eliminated and replaced with a fair tax (such as the FairTax), since the current tax system is rife with such selective taxation. For example, if there were no taxation benefits or penalties associated with getting married (or not) or having children (or not), there would no longer be any reason for the government to interfere in who could marry whom — it would be a purely personal issue between consenting adults, beyond the authority of government to regulate or prohibit (and that’s how it should be, in my opinion).

Had the selective taxation of citizens in order to manipulate their behaviour been declared to exceed the authority granted to our government, a great deal of the current tax code would have had to have been discarded. But it wasn’t, so it won’t be. Despite the wailing and gnashing of teeth, the Supreme Court’s ruling really only affirmed one thing: the status quo has been preserved. Which, ironically enough, primarily benefits the people doing most of the wailing.

I am disappointed, but not angry, nor terribly surprised. Life goes on.

I write to my Congress people every so often asking them to abolish the TSA (not reform, not privatize — abolish). If more people did so, at least the corruption would be more obvious.

I have been so busy with the house fiasco and work, I haven’t been feeding my fish as often as I should. Two of my larger fish are missing, and there are suspicious remains in the back of the aquarium. Apparently, even a normally placid fish will eat its brethren when it gets hungry enough.

They are the 99%.