What Should It Be Called?

What's the latin? Pax Mortis?

This false peace, the one of death, and those in service to this murderous cause, who insist on 'peace', even agreement, so that they can get on with the business of killing.

British conductor Edward Downes and his wife Joan, murdered at an assisted suicide clinic.

That their victims assent apparently makes it all okay. I suppose it makes things more efficient too. Attempts at self-defense merely make their job more troublesome. I suppose this is why they are murdering the babies, the old folk, and the infirm first.

There is no conflict on a dead world.

The Operative And The Eugenicists

From Serenity:

The Operative: I'm sorry. If your quarry goes to ground, leave no ground to go to. You should have taken my offer. Or did you think none of this was your fault?
Capt. Malcolm Reynolds: I don't murder children.
The Operative: I do. If I have to.
Capt. Malcolm Reynolds: Why? Do you even know why they sent you?
The Operative: It's not my place to ask. I believe in something greater than myself. A better world. A world without sin.
Capt. Malcolm Reynolds: So me and mine gotta lay down and die... so you can live in your better world?
The Operative: I'm not going to live there. There's no place for me there... any more than there is for you. Malcolm... I'm a monster.What I do is evil. I have no illusions about it, but it must be done.

At Southern Bread,

Dave's mentioned the nefarious Mr. Holden and, of course Ruth Bader Ginsburg startling admission that abortion was supposed to be about controlling unwanted populations.

Of course, in Serenity, there came a certain point where the true believer stopped believing, the sin of the government was too large and to obvious for him to ignore. What I wonder is, what would it take for Old Ruth to backtrack. Obviously she's a bit concerned that there is no positive pressure- i.e. pressure or incentive for the 'right' sort of people to have children. Indeed, we now have quite the opposite, with plenty of incentive to stay childless for the very intelligent. Education, career building, etc- a woman can run right through all her fertile years, ironically proving she's exactly the sort these eugenicists would like to breed- meanwhile those they don't like so much are still having kids despite their best efforts. They fail by their own metrics and yet still adhere to their cause.

But, too, what does it take for the people to tell them to shove off? The operative's statements, though they are dialogue in a sci-fi movie are nonetheless the statement of governments everywhere- they will kill children, whenever they think they need to. We know this to be true, whether it's outright, like abortion, or the so-called collateral damage of bombs in a war.

This is what folks should have been thinking about when they heard 'yes, we can.'
There is a realm in which we most definitely should not, regardless of the dreams in our heads.

Butter Your Eggs

This is one of life's awesome little pleasures I discovered:

Butter on hardboiled eggs. Just cut them in half and spread on some butter, or take out the yolks and mix them with the butter if you feel like being fancy. Sprinkle a little, pepper if you like, and YUM!

Ah, giving up grains is a big step, and its a little psychologically scary to cast off the mainstream medical advice and embrace saturated fat, but there are many, many rewards. Buttered eggs is one of them.

A Response To Life After Copyright

Dean Wesley Smith's Life After Copyright is a collection of scary scenarios like those used to justify the various bailouts and stimulus packages, and you can probably guess I think he's wrong. I know the world would be better off without copyright, indeed with out any intellectual property rights, just as I know that bank runs aren't the most dangerous thing in the known world that we must avoid at all costs. Let me give my predictions of what would happen if copyright dissappeared from the earth.

Lawyers begin to realize that they need to go get respectable jobs. They can no longer (assuming all intellectual property rights dissappear) use an artificial property right as a pretext to take real property from others. The cost of doing business plummets and companies everywhere can put out a product and market it without worrying about getting hit with a lawsuit.

Publishing houses, already pretty divorced from the industry of printing, embrace their new role as agents and publicizers. They need solid authors, so those with strong track records get good contracts for a number of books per period of time. New authors will likely go the print on demand route, but agents will be scouring the POD market, looking for those with talent.

The knock-off market is around, but it only serves as free advertising. Electronic copies are still annoyingly unsatisfying. Cheap, knock-off copies in print form show up after the original product comes out, and they serve also as advertisement. Many people who choose to use copies would not have bought the original in the first place, and if they like what they read, then they are actually more likely to buy the original. The fans of the author will buy the original, usually before the cheap stuff comes out.

At some point along the way someone tries to sell a book allegedly by a famous author. The famous author, meanwhile, says no it's not his work, or that it has been altered. This publisher is sued for fraud and loses the case. It becomes apparent that one can sell a faithful reproduction but selling stuff that isn't actually from whom you said it's from isn't okay. Suddenly those misguided souls who keep warning the entire world will implode because copyright doesn't exist anymore realize that perhaps they are a bit over the top. Publishers willing to invest in authors consistently make good profits, while the cheap knock-off companies find it hard to make any profit because most of the people actually interested in reading the author's work have bought it before they get the knock-off off the press. In addition, the publisher regulates public access to the author- events can be very lucrative.

So, at this point you may notice I am assuming something DW Smith isn't; all intellectual property is gone. You can get a pdf of Against Intellectual Monopoly by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine if you click on the title, for they actually practice what they preach. You can also listen to Boldrin on Econtalk, and, of course, there's Stephan Kinsella's Against Intellectual Property, also a pdf.

I am also assuming what is going on right now on the internet will continue and even explode forward; as the cost to create plummets, more and more people create more of everything. The good media generators, whether they are actors, musicians, writers, or journalists will either build up an audience on their own, or whatever the publishing/entertainment/news industry morphs into will get smart enough to spot and contract with good content creators early.

Perhaps what is most important is the value returned to the very people who need it most; the poor. What little they have now is valued at even less because we are valuing the intellectual in an artificial way, against the real. Why is this a problem? Resources are continually being diverted to people who have this government fabricated property right, and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out the poor generally aren't among them. We will likely never know the total effects, but just looking at one I.P. case, like the ghastly amounts of money SCO spent, basically destroying itself as an entity in an attempt to prove I.P. rights with regard to Linux, and realize that's just a tiny drop of the resources destroyed in this sad and pathetic game of destructive behavior. Lawyers, as well as certain companies that do little more than initiate lawsuits based on I.P. portfolios are not producing anything of value for the economy.

Authors, on the other hand are producing something of value. In fact, they may be among the very first to experience a beneficial re-allocation of resources, as publishing houses realize they no longer need to keep the lawyers on retainer.

Dereliction Of Duty

Coyote quoted a story in which House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer laughs about the fact that legislators do not read the bills they vote on. I have long thought that this should somehow be actionable. It is, at the very least, a grave violation of their oaths of office. Treason through willful negligence.

School Children Get Place

Snuffy is back, apparently with a passel of kids who know better than the education syndicate in the U.K.:

One of the smaller boys leans forward. ‘No Miss, none of that stuff is important. Well, I mean, it’s important, but we’d learn so much more if everyone in the class just listened to the teacher.’

Listening is a prerequisite for learning, which is what one does in a school. If you can't learn and/or don't want to learn, what is a school? That's right boys and girls- prison.

But in 21st century inner-city London schools, that notion is simply absurd. Go to school and learn? Pah! What nonsense. What are these children thinking? That’s so 19th century. Ed Balls would never have it. Children to take responsibility for themselves? Children having to meet certain standards or face consequences? Of course not. That would mean creating the kind of environment that my 15 pupils want: where schools would be places of learning instead of chaos.

Equal use is a vapid daydream that kills the only part of equality that we can get close to- equal access. In order to preserve equal access, you actually have to preserve the place and it's meaning. In places that have anything do to with education, you have to accept that some will excel, and therefore use more of the resource, while others won't like it so much and leave as soon as they are able.
It's truly horrible for everyone when we try to equalize use, and even worse when we try to equalize outcomes.

Ed Balls will, if he's allowed to, make life very rough for homeschoolers too. Seems, much like his American counterparts, to be dead set on making it pretty much impossible for children to learn anything. I don't suppose this is part of a plan to keep people dumb enough to think voting still works, is it?

Voice Versus Truth

When the poor cry out, we should hear them and respond in love.
When the ignorant (poor or not) make policy everyone is in trouble.
This corresponds in a small way with my previous post, because libraries in the U.S. are slouching towards mere entertainment precisely because of the voice of the 'poor'. The leftist revere this 'voice,' but it is a voice that ultimately pushes to buy blunt edged entertainment over anything that would inform or refine a human being. Similarly, the poor all to often fall for redistributive schemes which kill their economies. Instead of raising increasing everyone's welfare, they unintentionally (though I think the elite ideologues often do this intentionally) destroy everyone elses well being.

So, much depends on what precisely is meant by voice. In one case we are alerted to need, which we can handle by using our resources in charity. In the other case, our resources are stolen from us and squandered, often never seen again by us or those in need, but eaten by the leviathan.