09.28.05
Posted in General at 2:08 am by Clay
Today I found out that the whole Girl-Scouts-Get-Sued-By-ASCAP is a bit of an urban legend. Evidently it was more than someone at some local Girl Scouts council decided that, since the music they were using was a public performance, and that legally you have to pay for such things, that they were going to pay ASCAP for the right to since copyrighted campfire songs. So, one or two groups did that, and other groups decided to stop singing certain songs because they are still under copyright.
That chain of events morphed into a Wall Street Journal article that claimed that ASCAP had threatened to sue the Girl Scouts if they didn’t pay money to ASCAP. Now, mind you, the Wall Street Journal evidently interviewed someone from ASCAP who backed up the idea that the Girl Scouts should have to pay royalties(and honestly, I don’t understand why the Girl Scouts should have an exemption from our overbearing copyright law just because people think the idea is extremely stupid(which, to be fair, the idea most certainly is.).), but a couple of days later ASCAP said that they never threatened to sue anyone, and that it was all just a big misunderstanding. They then refunded any royalties paid by Girl Scout groups.
Now, I hope you’ll forgive me for not linking to lots of other sources to prove my point, but it’s 1) really difficult to find linkable sources for newspaper articles from 1996, and 2) it’s really difficult to find a solid source, as evidently the only actual “news” was the original Wall Street Journal article; everything else I can seem to dig up is columnists talking about how crazy it is that Girl Scouts would be sued for singing such copyrighted fare as “Happy Birthday”.
My real point in posting this is that finding this out brought me down to earth; I had been parrotting the line about ASCAP suing the Girl Scouts as one of my examples of how copyright is terribly overboard. The reality is much murkier than that, but I find it interesting that my general disdain for journalistic accuracy was somewhat thrown out the window because of what I believe. This is problematic because it’s exactly the sort of thing that I detest in other people’s thinking — e.g., the thought that, since Echinacea has failed to ever show any proveable benefit for colds, the tests for studying Echinacea must be wrong.
So, I fell into the trap of believing what I read, just because what I read was what I wanted to believe.
This also brought up a secondary point. My immediate thought was, “Well, even though the story isn’t true, the general gist of the idea is.” Which reminds me an awful lot of those people who defend “non-fiction” books that later turn out to be pure fiction, just because those books express some sentiment well.
I’ll make the claim that this situation is different, as what I’m personally after is reasonable copyright law, and the fact remains that the Girl Scouts are doing public performances of copyrighted songs. There are no “fair use” exemptions just because it’s for a good cause, and ASCAP could reasonably sue them, even though they didn’t.
Regardless of the actual facts, though, it’s a similar mindset to other people with other causes — the cause is more important than the truth.
I’d like to stay away from that. I hope you will, too.
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09.25.05
Posted in General at 10:07 pm by Clay
In the Wisconsin State Journal today I read an article titled, “Greenspan closing in on home craze” by Jay Hancock of the Baltimore Sun. It’s a warning article about how the federal reserve is evidently attempting to do something about the housing bubble.
I don’t have any problem with the idea of criticizing the federal reserve for doing/not doing something; after all, we all want the best economy for America. The following got to me, though:
…it’s an unsettling case of mission creep by a powerful government agency.
A 1977 amendment of the Federal Reserve Act requires the Fed to seek “maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates.”
Doesn’t say anything about stopping runaway real estate values.
So “stable prices” has nothing to do with “runaway real estate values”?
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Posted in General at 4:27 pm by Clay
To quote from a Lodinews.com article :
‘Intelligent design’: Religion or science?
By Ross Farrow
News-Sentinel Staff Writer
Last updated: Saturday, Sep 24, 2005 – 06:40:26 am PDT
It’s not evolution, but it isn’t creationism either.
Slight problem here:
Intelligent design is the theory that an intelligent being pushed development in one way or another. In other words, that humans and other stuff came about because of a sentient being, rather than random chance.
So, how is that a scientific theory? Is there any evidence? No. What sort of evidence could you get? You’d have to show evidence of a god. Therefore, Intelligent design is faith; it’s just not a particular faith.
Evolution, on the other hand, is science. Is evolution correct? I don’t know. It’s entirely irrelevent. The point of science is that we take the data that is available, put some sort of a framework around it, and then test that theory when new data comes in. Does new data not fit into the current framework? Then there’s something about the framework that’s wrong.
Evolution is not about “truth”. Religion is about truth. Evolution and science as a whole are about explaining, as best we can, given the evidence that we have. If the evidence suggests that something else is likely, than you can’t say that your theory is the most commonly accepted scientific explanation. You don’t get to have turtles explaining how the Earth stays where it does unless you have direct or indirect evidence of turtles.
….
I feel a bit stuck. This is an issue that I know I won’t be able to convince people on, yet I feel the need to rant about it, because I feel as though most people have a fundamental misunderstanding of science; science is about getting rid of all of your own assumptions and seeing what sort of results you get. The point is to question everything. Faith is searching for truth and accepting things that you can’t prove. Science helps explain how the observable world works. Faith helps explain the ineffable. Science is amoral, neither good nor evil. Faith is almost inherently moral, about good and evil.
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09.02.05
Posted in General at 11:10 pm by Clay
Let me start with a disclaimer: What’s going on in New Orleans is awful. I hope everything gets better as quickly as possible. I also hope that the gas shocks and whatnot don’t cause us too much pain or trigger a recession. Please give to the Red Cross. Not for Katrina, but for the next disaster, likely a local one that won’t receive the billions that Katrina will require and get, but horrible nonetheless.
With that out of the way, here’s a post from Boing Boing:
Feed : Boing Boing
Title : The Gulf (of Mexico) War
Xeni Jardin: Ned Sublette says:
as new orleans, now exclusively populated by a starving, parched skeleton crew of the abandoned descendants of slaves, comes apart at the seams:
the right has gotten their wish. they successfully made government ineffective. this is what happens when you take away the power of government. the point of effective government is to keep this from happening to society. and there is no better poster boy for the ineffectivity of government than the sitting president.
the literal meaning of homeland security is that you secure the land you live on, no? by now the absolute vacuum of leadership is becoming apparent even to TV viewers.
in his eerie disconnectedness to what’s going on around him, isn’t it starting to seem like bush is heavily medicated? he’s *zonked*, right?
do they have him take these long vacations so they can change his meds? what’s going on here?
he’s got to go. he’s got to go *now*.
Now, I expect this sort of thing over at dailykos.com, but not so much at BoingBoing. Yeah, the people at BoingBoing are more liberal, but mostly they’re silicon valley libertarians — the type of people who love the governator and disliked Fritz Hollings(retired D-South Carolina) for putting Hollywood interests ahead of consumer interests.
The thing is, it seems as though people are searching for someone to blame. A patron at my library mentioned how he had listened to a bit of talk radio, and most of the callers were calling about who was to blame. Some would say that this was God striking down the sinners. Others would talk about how the response would have been so much better if the people being rescued were white.
And evidently lots of people want to blame President Bush. Now, I agree with the posts sentiment that a lot of Homeland Security money is wasted; just look at La Crosse’s federal-government-paid $180k Bearcat.
But this is so far overboard that I can’t take it as a truly rational thought. “The right has gotten its wish”? Now, aside from the fire-and-brimstone, endtimes-are-near right-wing nutjobs, I’d imagine that there aren’t a whole lot of people who wanted a) lots of dead people, b) lots of property damage, and c) widespread economic shocks.
“this is what happens when you take away the power of government.” Okay, now let me get this straight: New Orleans had an old, known risky system for keeping the water from flowing where it should reasonably be flowing. Therefore, it’s the federal government’s responsibility to make sure that the (expensive) upgrades are done.
No. That’s called pork. Sure, there’s a whole lot of it shoved into every nook and cranny of any spending bill, and it would have been reasonable for a Louisiana or New Orleans politician to have gotten it inserted into the transportation bill. It still would have been pork, because New Orleans sitting below sea level is a New Orleans problem.
I doubt Bush-haters would want President Bush making sure that every city in America is spending enough money to take care of their own problems.
“he’s got to go. he’s got to go *now*.” This hardly needs comment. Suffice it to say that emotional rants like the one on BoingBoing are just partisan attacks that people wouldn’t do if the exact same thing happened with a different president.
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