Citation
Updates from January, 2011 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
-
mazsa
-
mazsa
Rightwing populist Viktor Orban is the last person in Europe suited to hosting the EU rotating presidency [...] Hungary, now effectively under one-party rule, can be populist, isolationist and poor, or it can seek foreign investment. But it cannot do both. [...] Criticism from Europe may not frighten the prime minister, but the spotlight is now on his whole country.
The Guardian, Editorial -
admin
My monograph Against Intellectual Property (Mises Institute, 2008) is now available in free epub format.
Stephan Kinsella -
admin
Posted Thu Nov 30 2000 13:39:15 your local time (10 years 1 month 4 hours ago) and read 243836 times: When the two towers that make up the World Trade Center were built, they were designed to withstand the impact of the largest airliner of the day, the Boeing 707 Intercontinental. The Empire State Building survived a B-25 medium bomber crashing into it on very foggy day. It was during the weekend when most people weren’t there, but still, 14 people died. Anyone wanna bet that the World Trade Center could survive an 767-300 impact?
http://www.airliners.net/aviation-forums/general_aviation/read.main/336291/4/ -
mazsa
What if Hitler gave you a cheese sandwich?
Zed A. Shaw: Why I Don’t Use Tor-
admin
-
-
mazsa
some governments have kept quiet, preferring not to stir up yet another controversy in the crisis-plagued E.U. That’s the wrong approach. Europe cannot allow a member government to flout fundamental freedoms without consequence. Some ready leverage is available: Hungary is due to host a European Union summit meeting in Budapest in May, with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton expected to attend. Mr. Orban should be given a choice between curbing his concentration of power and amending the media laws – or suffering the humiliation of having the European Union and the United States move or boycott his summit.
The Washington Post, Editorial: The Putinization of Hungary -
admin
Freedom of the press is at the heart of a free society. We hope that the Hungarian Government will soon resolve this issue satisfactorily and that it will not impact adversely on the successful delivery of the Hungarian EU Presidency.
Foreign Office (GB) -
mazsa
That’s the real issue, that’s the big modern problem; national governments and global computer networks don’t mix any more. It’s like trying to eat a very private birthday cake while also distributing it. That scheme is just not working. And that failure has a face now, and that’s Julian Assange. [...] Everybody wants everybody else’s national government to leak. Every state wants to see the diplomatic cables of every other state. It will bend heaven and earth to get them. It’s just, that sacred activity is not supposed to be privatized, or, worse yet, made into the no-profit, shareable, have-at-it fodder for a network society, as if global diplomacy were so many mp3s. Now the US State Department has walked down the thorny road to hell that was first paved by the music industry. Rock and roll, baby.
Bruce Sterling -
mazsa
The plans [the new media law of Hungary approved yesterday] clearly violate the spirit and the letter of EU treaties. It raises the question whether such a country is worthy of leading the EU. It’s a direct danger for democracy. The state will control opinion. Until now Lukashenko was considered to be the last dictator in Europe. When the law takes effect, that won’t be the case any more. / Die EU-Kommission muss unverzüglich gegen die Pläne vorgehen. Sie verstoßen gegen den Geist und die Worte der EU-Verträge. Es stellt sich die Frage, ob ein solches Land würdig ist, die EU zu führen.
Luxembourg Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn -
mazsa
merely informing people about indirect effects is far from enough to get more consideration of indirect effects in policy. Creating near-common knowledge about such effects might be sufficient if our fear was looking bad to those ignorant of indirect effects. But if the issue is showing that we feel, this won’t work either. Instead we’ll need to find ways to frame indirect effects so that strong emotional responses seem appropriate, to allow people to signal feelings via considering indirect effects. Easier said than done, I know.
Robin Hanson -
admin
Far too many patents are granted, they’re granted for inventions that are far too trivial and far too narrow, the patent office is far too poorly staffed to deal with them properly, and patent trolls like Myhrvold are allowed to sit back and do nothing for years and then suddenly start harassing corporations long after they’ve built up major businesses around supposedly infringing patents. It’s a disgrace, and it’s bad for innovation and bad for business.
Kevin Drum -
admin
If it is full democracy, then why have they hidden Mr. Assange in prison? That’s what, democracy? So, you know, as they say in the countryside, some people’s cows can moo, but yours should keep quiet. So I would like to shoot the puck back at our American colleagues, the pot calling the kettle black.
Vladimir Putin -
admin
wikileaks
-
mazsa
Hello all #isp of the world. We’re going to add a new competing root-server since we’re tired of #ICANN. Please contact me to help.
https://twitter.com/brokep/status/8779363872935936-
admin
-
-
mazsa
[Reasoning of judge who convicted Google executives of violating Italy's privacy law:] “There is no such thing as the limitless prairie of Internet where everything is permitted and nothing can be prohibited, on pain of a global excommunication by the people of the Web.
Quite the opposite, there are laws that codify behavior and create obligations which, when they are not respected, lead to a recognition of penal responsibility.
[The executives bore responsibility for the failure of oversight because at least part of the data-handling took place outside of Italy] in particular in the United States, the place where the servers belonging to Google Inc. are undoubtedly located.
Google Italy handled the content that was uploaded to the Google Video platform and therefore bore responsibility for it at least in so far as the [Italian] privacy law is concerned.
[The information made available by Google on its own privacy rules is] “totally inadequate or in any case so buried in the general conditions of the contract as to appear completely ineffective as far as the requirements of the law are concerned.
The guilty verdict was the result not of a failure to conduct a preventive monitoring of the material uploaded to its Google Video platform, but of “insufficient (and culpable) information about the requirements of the law.
The service was deliberately launched without monitoring and only later – given its enormous success – was the possibility introduced for users to report inappropriate content for the purpose of its removal.
The possibility was, in reality, only apparent (given that technical and personnel investments were ridiculously inadequate for the purpose).
In simple words: it’s not the writing on the wall that constitutes a crime for the owner of the wall, but its commercial exploitation, in certain cases and circumstances, can constitute a crime.
In any case, this judge, like everyone else, awaits the arrival of a ‘good law’ on this subject.”
-
mazsa
-
-
mazsa
There are two kinds of people in the world, those who believe there are two kinds of people in the world and those who don’t.
Robert Benchley -
mazsa
Pastor Niemöller spoke for the thousands and thousands of men like me when he spoke (too modestly of himself) and said that, when the Nazis attacked the Communists, he was a little uneasy, but, after all, he was not a Communist, and so he did nothing; and then they attacked the Socialists, and he was a little uneasier, but, still, he was not a Socialist, and he did nothing; and then the schools, the press, the Jews, and so on, and he was always uneasier, but still he did nothing. And then they attacked the Church, and he was a Churchman, and he did something—but then it was too late.
You remember those early meetings of your department in the university when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.
Milton Mayer -
mazsa
Currently the word ‘neo-medievalism’ is generally used in two ways. Focusing on how states have lost control over their domestic affairs, one details the rise of non-states actors, transnational networks, and international institutions. However, increasing interdependence and reduction in domestic capacities does not necessarily reduce sovereignty in the absence of new organising principles competing with the state. The European Union (EU) may represent an alternative view of neo-medievalism. [...] While the EU is already more than the sum of its states, states are not disappearing. While sovereignty may be diminished, authority structures are not in open competition, as would be the case if authority were truly overlapping. Because of this strong institutionalisation, the EU is far from the chaos and competition implied by neo-medievalism. Furthermore, neither of these models generates real issues of multiple loyalty.
Stephen Deets -
mazsa
The pulls of conflicting loyalties are not new. Country, church, corporation and family have always competed with one another, coexisting easily at times and uneasily at others. The issue, however, is not the conflict between overlapping loyalties in general, but between overlapping political loyalties. [...] The problems with self-determination, the rise of supranational authorities and modern, often electronically based, transnational relations all loosen the ties to geography and again increase the probability of multiple and conflicting political loyalties.
Stephen J. Kobrin -
mazsa
[...] companies and investors are realizing that everything we hold of value—metals, minerals, energy and real estate—are in near-infinite quantities in space. As space transportation and operations become more affordable, what was once seen as a wasteland will become the next gold rush. Alaska serves as an excellent analogy. Once thought of as “Seward’s Folly” (Secretary of State William Seward was criticized for overpaying the sum of $7.2 million to the Russians for the territory in 1867), Alaska has since become a billion-dollar economy. The same will hold true for space. For example, there are millions of asteroids of different sizes and composition flying throughout space. One category, known as S-type, is composed of iron, magnesium silicates and a variety of other metals, including cobalt and platinum. An average half-kilometer S-type asteroid is worth more than $20 trillion.
Peter Diamandis -
mazsa
We can distinguish several categories of elementary minds in relation to bootstrapping: 1) A mind capable of imagining, or identifying a greater mind. 2) A mind capable of imaging but incapable of designing a greater mind. 3) A mind capable of designing a greater mind. We fit the first criteria, but it is unclear whether we are of the second or third type of mind. There is also a fourth type, which follows the third: 4) A mind capable of generating a greater mind which in turn itself creates a greater mind, and so on. [...] Recently, in conversations with George Dyson, I realized there is a fifth type of elementary mind: 5) A mind incapable of designing a greater mind, but capable of creating a platform upon which greater mind emerges.
Kevin Kelly -
mazsa
Many of the challenges that countries now face — such as the global economic crisis and threats to the environment — must also be tackled on a transnational level. But the old international system, based on arrangements worked out by instructed representatives of national governments, is too cumbersome, too slow, and too narrowly crafted to solve cross-border problems. Recognizing this, academics and politicians have proposed a slew of initiatives for building new transnational institutions. Many of these suggestions consist of one overarching framework, such as a league of democracies, a strengthened United Nations, or a global federation. The more promising model, however, is less streamlined and more complex; it is based not on a single organization but on a mix of building blocks — building blocks like the PSI [ Proliferation Security Initiative].
Institution without an address
The PSI was designed to address what many consider to be the top security threat to the United States, its allies, and world peace: the acquisition or use of WMD by terrorists or rogue states. It was launched on May 31, 2003, by the United States, after President George W. Bush declared, “When weapons of mass destruction or their components are in transit, we must have the means and authority to seize them.” Initially, 11 countries joined the PSI, but the number of participants grew rapidly; more than 90 countries now take part, including France, Russia, and the United Kingdom (but not China). These states share intelligence, patrol the seas, and interdict ships that are suspected of carrying nuclear contraband. They have also attempted to expand these measures to international airspace.
Unlike most international organizations, the PSI has no headquarters or secretariat, no charter or rules. It has participants, not members. The U.S. State Department refers to the PSI as an “activity.” Plenary meetings are rare, and there are calls to make them even less frequent. The PSI has no council in which one member can exercise veto power. It has no multistate committees that must unanimously approve each target, as was the case for a while for NATO during its bombing operations in Kosovo in 1999. And it has no bureaucracy that must be paid for and monitored and that may hinder action with red tape, turf wars, or office politics.
Theoretically, each PSI participant acts on its own, sharing information and coordinating its actions with the others, especially those with navies in the relevant places. In effect, however, the PSI is led by the United States, the only country with a truly global navy, which then works with its major allies, other major powers, and a considerable number of small countries. […] it acts as a single standing global antiproliferation force led by one nation, with a rotating cast of volunteers joining the patrols and raids. The PSI is also unlike the coalitions that intervened in Iraq in 1991, Bosnia in 1995, and Kosovo in 1999. These were ad hoc efforts tailored to one situation and limited in duration, whereas the PSI functions continuously. In a world with no central government, the PSI provides a rudimentary police force.
The standby and operational nature of the PSI is what gives it strength. Compare the preparations necessary for a PSI mission with the steps needed to take similar measures the old-fashioned way: first, any such action might well have required the approval of the UN Security Council (which could have taken years to secure, if it was secured at all); then, a budget for the mission would have to have been secured; finally, the necessary troops would need to have been assembled and transported to the theater of operation. The PSI anticipates all these steps. It frequently holds joint training operations to work out in advance how countries will coordinate a mission.
It is difficult to gauge the ultimate effectiveness of the PSI, but it has been successfully employed about a dozen times already. [...]
Too legit to quit?
An effective international system relies on a combination of military force and legitimacy–on hard and soft power. The PSI’s special merit is that it commands not only a very considerable level of hard power but also a fair amount of legitimacy. The Bush administration was widely criticized for its wanton disregard for international (and domestic) laws and norms. In the case of the PSI, however, it followed a rather different course, taking pains to ensure that the initiative was consistent with international law.
The challenge the PSI first faced was the basic, international legal and normative precept that ships have the right of uninhibited passage in international waters and the right of “innocent passage” through national territorial waters. At the same time, the very goal of the PSI requires interventions that appeared at first to conflict with these long-established normative and legal concepts. But existing international law did provide some leeway. Article 19 of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea outlines the circumstances under which the passage of a ship is considered “prejudicial to the peace, good order or security of the coastal State.” Transporting nuclear contraband could qualify.
The PSI acquired another layer of international legitimacy in 2004, from UN Security Council Resolution 1540 [pdf], which calls on all states to take efforts against the proliferation of WMD. [...]
To further square itself with international law, the PSI draws heavily on bilateral agreements between the United States and “flag of convenience” states–countries, such as Liberia and Panama, where a large portion of the world’s biggest ships are registered for the sake of low taxes and lax regulations. [...] By 2007, the United States had such agreements with the Bahamas, Belize, Croatia, Cyprus, Malta, the Marshall Islands, and Mongolia. [...]
A model to copy
The PSI should be strengthened. Legal scholars should further develop the normative and legal rationales behind the PSI with the hope that transporting nuclear contraband across national borders will come to be viewed as such a gross violation of international security that it will be considered legal for any nation to use most any means to prevent it. Indeed, it has been suggested that such an act should be considered akin to slavery and piracy, two activities that have long been deemed to warrant violating the notion that ships should be free from interference on the high seas and be allowed innocent passage through territorial waterways.
Because of a mix of self-serving and altruistic motives, the United Kingdom promoted the norm to ban the transnational transport of slaves beginning in the late eighteenth century. As a consensus grew around it throughout the first part of the nineteenth century, the ban was gradually ensconced in custom, and a license to interdict ships that were suspected of transporting slaves became part of international law. [...]
Both the legitimacy and the military power of the PSI would be buttressed if the group’s mission and composition were expanded. So far, the PSI has been largely limited to the seas; PSI participants should move to also interdict nuclear contraband transported by air and land. […]
The PSI model could be applied to other international efforts — such as armed humanitarian interventions, emergency disaster relief, or campaigns to prevent the spread of epidemics — thus adding new building blocks to a new global architecture. At least one recent effort appears to be designed like the PSI. The Global Initiative to Combat Nuclear Terrorism, which was launched in 2006 by the United States and Russia and now counts 75 participants, aims to improve international cooperation in tracking nuclear terrorists and securing fissile material.
The limited expansion of international norms and laws, backed up by the military forces of major countries, may well transform the PSI into an ever more acceptable and capable standing global force. An expanded PSI could be an important element of a significantly more effective, and yet still legitimate, new global security architecture. Policymakers seeking to confront new challenges are right to call for new forms of governance to update today’s outmoded intergovernmental system. True, the PSI provides only one model for that system, a system that will have to be pieced together from a variety of elements. But when considering a framework for the future, it would be a mistake to ignore the precedent of the PSI.
Amitai Etzioni -
mazsa
Of course, there are obstacles. Oversized governments will defend their turf, more likely by sanctions than by overt violence. Witness the new G20 crusade against tax havens, threatening economic sanctions against all jurisdictions that maintain banking privacy against government tax snoops. Privacy jurisdictions are already capitulating. Both Free States and Seasteads are likely to deal with similar political obstacles. Free States can try to obstruct unjust federal interventions using a panoply of tactics adapted from the Baltic republics’ and Slovenia’s stratagems during the decline of the U.S.S.R. and Yugoslavia. The federal government is more likely to respond with political and economic pressure than with violence, but there needs to be political will in place to withstand such pressure — and that will doesn’t exist yet.
Jason Sorens -
mazsa
The Court has recognized that First Amendment protection extends to corporations. [...] This protection has been extended by explicit holdings to the context of political speech. [...] The Court has thus rejected the argument that political speech of corporations or other associations should be treated differently under the First Amendment simply because such associations are not “natural persons.”
Supreme Court of the United States-
mazsa
-
mazsa
-
mazsa
“With all due deference to separation of powers, last week the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests –- including foreign corporations –- to spend without limit in our elections. (Applause.) I don’t think American elections should be bankrolled by America’s most powerful interests, or worse, by foreign entities. (Applause.) They should be decided by the American people. And I’d urge Democrats and Republicans to pass a bill that helps to correct some of these problems.” http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-state-union-address
-
mazsa
Sen. Charles Schumer (N.Y.) and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairman Chris Van Hollen (Md.) will introduce their legislative counterpunch to the Supreme Court’s recent decision on corporate campaign spending the week after the Presidents Day recess, the Democratic lawmakers confirmed on Thursday.
SUMMARY OF CITIZENS UNITED LEGISLATION: http://electionlawblog.org/archives/schumer-vanhollen.pdf
-
mazsa
“The recent Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, allowing corporations and unions to spend freely on ads explicitly supporting or opposing political candidates, will worsen matters. The threat of unlimited amounts of negative advertising from special interest groups will only make members more beholden to their natural constituencies and more afraid of violating party orthodoxies.
I can easily imagine vulnerable members approaching a corporation or union for support and being told: “We’d love to support you, but we have a rule. We only support candidates who are with us at least 90 percent of the time. Here is our questionnaire with our top 10 concerns. Fill it out.” Millions of campaign dollars now ride on the member’s response. The cause of good government is not served.
What to do? While fundamental campaign finance reform may ultimately require a constitutional amendment, there are less drastic steps we can take to curb the distorting influence of money in politics. Congress should consider ways to lessen the impact of the Citizens United decision through legislation to enhance disclosure requirements, require corporate donors to appear in the political ads they finance and prohibit government contractors or bailout beneficiaries from spending money on political campaigns.
Congress and state legislators should also consider incentives, including public matching funds for smaller contributions, to expand democratic participation and increase the influence of small donors relative to corporations and other special interests.”
Evan Bayh: Why I’m Leaving the Senate
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/21/opinion/21bayh.html?hp=&pagewanted=all -
mazsa
-
mazsa
-
admin is discussing. 
mazsa
[...] late in the nineteenth century [...] yet another technical breakthrough enabled the separation of communication from transportation. First the telegraph, and a bit later radio, meant that communication no longer had to be considered as a form of light freight. Freed from material form, it took on light speed, enabling virtually instantaneous communication across the planet.
Berry Buzan and Richard Little (p.278)
mazsa
If new developments in the technology of commerce are now undermining the efficiency of the state as an autonomous taxing entity, fiscal pressures may produce a similar shift in de facto political authority away from the state and toward whatever international mechanisms are created to expedite the taxation of these new forms of commerce.
Roland Paris
mazsa
The anticipated growth of new communications technologies, including the Internet and other digital networks, will make it increasingly difficult for states to tax global commerce effectively. Greater harmonization and coordination of national tax policies will likely be required in the coming years in order to address this problem. Given that the history of the state is inseparable from the history of taxation, this ‘‘globalization of taxation’’ could have far-reaching political implications. The modern state itself emerged out of a fiscal crisis of medieval European feudalism, which by the 14th and 15th centuries was increasingly incapable of raising sufficient revenues to support the mounting expenses of warfare.
Roland Paris
Cf. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2045120