Bartcop Entertainment - Tuesday, 4 November, 2003

When "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter" came out, quickly followed by "Gee, Your Hair Smells Terrific," I'm sure we were all living in fear that we were soon to be overwhelmed by a glut of products with declarative statements instead of names. Luckily, that didn't happen, and we can all thank God that Viagra isn't called "Oh My God, I Can't Believe How Hard My Dick Is."

There are some other recent marketing ploys that haven't taken off, in fact they've only been tried once so they can't even be labeled "trends," but they are scary nonetheless in their implications.

Stots Corporation sells jigsaws, as in saws, you know, that cut wood. Go ahead and buy one, they look pretty good, but beware that when you read the small print in the license agreement on its TemplateMaster jig tool, you will find that it's a "license, not a sales agreement," that you don't actually own the product, it's been "licensed" to you, and "You may not... allow individuals that did not purchase the original Product [to] use the Product (without specific written permission from the Stots Corporation)."

This is a brand new practice I find pretty goddam scary. If this type of license agreement spreads to other consumer items, it'll soon be illegal to let your son use your car without writing to Ford and saying "May my son please use my car," to let your neighbor use your lawnmower without writing to Sears and saying "My neighbor's lawn is scruffy," or to let your president use your dildo without writing to Ann Coulter and saying "Is it okay if George shoves your action figure up his ass?"

Another new practice is "sneakwrapping." When you open the Lexmark replacement ink cartridge for your Lexmark printer, you break a seal that says, essentially, if you break this seal you agree not to try to refill this cartridge yourself or to sell it to a remanufacturer who will then refill it. There's actually a reasonable excuse for asking consumers not to refill cartridges themselves because if they do it wrong, they could screw up the printer, but what about letting professionals do it? What's the reasonable excuse for preventing that? None, actually, other than making more money for Lexmark, who recently sued a remanufacturer for simply refilling Lexmark cartridges. Turnabout is fair play so Lexmark was then sued by the Arizona Cartridge Remanufacturers Association for "false and misleading advertising." The judge just sided with Lexmark, which sets a precedent saying that basically manufacturers can say absolutely anything on the seal of a product, and once the consumer has broken that seal, they've legally agreed to whatever the agreement said.

It doesn't take much imagination to see where this slippery slope leads. Break open a package of absolutely anything and you have just agreed not to sue the company or disparage the product in any way, even if it gives you herpes.

If I were Philip K. Dick, I'd write a novel about a future society in which nobody owns anything, everything is licensed, and there's a renegade gang of mavericks called "Owners" who actually claim to have things called "possessions." They have to go into hiding, but they are pursued by a gang of "mothers" who claim that the renegades "broke the seal" when they were born and owe them restitution.

The Amazing Case of the Headline that Hasn't Read the Sub-Headline!

Two dead in Iraq helicopter attack

The U.S. death toll from a downed Chinook helicopter near Fallujah, has risen to 13, military officials said.

- CNN Quick News Newsletter, November 2, 2003 (it's fixed on the site so I can't give a link) -

Don't Tell Keanu

"Congress killed the Pentagon's 'Total Information Awareness' data mining program, but now the federal government is trying to build up a state-run equivalent," said Barry Steinhardt, Director of the ACLU's Technology and Liberty Program.

"In essence, the government is replacing an unpopular Big Brother initiative with a lot of Little Brothers," he added, noting that the program is receiving $12 million from the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security. "What does it take for the message to get through that government spying on the activities of innocent Americans will not be tolerated?"

Gee, if they got away with doing end-runs around the constitution and the popular vote, I don't see why they can't get away with an end-run around Congress. The program is called, are you ready for this, I kid you not, hold on to your hats... The Matrix.

Dueling Headlines

"Patrols at Iraq's borders say few infiltrators seen"

- Chicago Tribune -

"Calls to Jihad Are Said to Lure Hundreds of Militants Into Iraq"

- New York Times -

Brother Can You Spare a Dime

Websites like FHM and the Johannesburg Sunday Times are using Short Message Service and pay as you access to bill customers as little as 19 cents on their mobile phone accounts for access to the sites, which means the era of micropayments might be dawning. This is good news to people like me who are giving it away and losing money in the process. My site gets more than 1,000 hits a day. If I were to receive a micropayment of only a penny per hit, that would add up to enough to pay for the site and my electric bill, with enough left over for a bottle of wine. A dime a hit would pay the rent and buy me a car. Would you be willing to pay a penny or a dime to visit your favorite sites? I'm not the only one who hopes so.

Mr. Conspiracy Says...

Three of the four fires currently burning in California are suspected arson. The fourth was started by a mishap during a military training exercise. NOT ONE was accidental. So let me quote Dr. Len Horowitz...

Who's making money from the LA fires?

1)       The news media;
2)       The banks that will urgently sell reconstruction loans;
3)       The insurance companies that always pass new risks and losses onto consumers;
4)       The health care and drug industries that profit from the tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people sickened by the smoke and falling debris.

I would urge people to follow my friend's lead, and flee Southern California. "The best covert operation is one that occurs in broad daylight before everyone's eyes, yet no one sees anything," say our directors of military and central intelligence. Hours before the fires began near LA, the CIA raised our nation's terror alert. Insiders say we are likely to have another terrorist attack before the end of Ramadan, the Islamic high holiday. Some predict November 22.

The "next terrorist attack," I believe, is currently underway, under the cover of the LA flames. Above the clouds of smog, soot and smoke are CIA- owned helicopters likely spraying, besides water, chemicals if not biological weapons.

Saving NBC's Credibility

Republicans are going apeshit over the inaccuracies in the new mini-series about Ronald Reagan but not one single Democrat is raising a flag over the obvious inaccuracies in NBC's upcoming propaganda bullshit MOW about Jessica Lynch. Since Jessica still claims she doesn't remember a thing, NBC is taking the word of Mohammed Odeh al-Rehaief. His entire family was granted political asylum in the U.S. by the Bush administration, he's got a $500,000.00 book deal with a Rupert Murdoch publishing company, and currently has a job with a Washington lobbying firm founded by former Republican Congressman Bob Livingston, so who could deny his credibility? Everybody with a brain. Among other things, "Iraqi soldiers had abandoned their post at the hospital days before U.S. special forces moved in; American GIs were offered the use of a master key, but opted to kick the doors down Rambo-style instead; Lynch did not return fire at her Iraqi captors nor was she wounded or mistreated, as initially reported; and, perhaps the biggest surprise of all, days before her 'rescue,' Lynch's doctors attempted to take her via ambulance to American forces but were forced to turn back after being shot at." [attribution] Too bad we won't get a chance to see Jerry Bruckheimer's Saving Private Lynch, which looks much more interesting than NBC's version.

Photo Gallery of the Week

Surely you've got something better to do than see hundreds of pictures of a can of black beans in its travels around the world.

Piano Solos of the Week

Bradley Sowash has some beautiful new tunes posted here.

Insane E-Mail of the Week

Mystic River, the new movie being released this Wednesday is starring Sean Penn and Tim Robbins who have been known to spew hate speech against our current President, assaulting his character for doing what he is attempting to do with the war on terror, to protect Americans from further attack. Which has been very successful so far. These 2 liberal actors have sided with Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden and against our own country, as demonstrated by Penn's going to Iraq prior to the war in protest of our pending attack to remove the terrorist regime of Saddam Hussein, saying that we have no right to attack innocent people and that it was the Bush administration that is starting this war. Let us not forget 9/11/2001. I figure I have no way to let the liberals in Hollywood know that they are just actors.... and not representative of mainstream America, by myself. But if each one of us route this note to all of your friends who support our troops and the administration, and make sure that they do not go to this movie. Encourage all you know...... not to go to it. By doing this..... these actors won't be able to get a job. Look what it did for Alec Baldwin's career! He's a washed up actor that watches his mouth these days.

We have 2 days until this movie starts. Let the boycot begin. Route this to every loyal patriotic person you know and stay away from this movie with these anti-American activists. These are 2 very outspoken hate ministers and we can make a difference.

History Lesson from Hell

"Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few."
- George Bernard Shaw -

"We hope the firing will be more precise and efficient (next time), so we get rid of this microbe and people like him in Washington who are spreading disorder in Arab lands, Iraq and Palestine."

- Walid Jumblatt on rockets missing U.S. Deputy Defense Microbe Paul Wolfowitz -

"Shouldn't President Bush order U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to remain in Iraq indefinitely, despite the terrorist attack on his hotel over the weekend? Wouldn't Wolfowitz's remaining in Iraq help to inspire the troops, especially since they're stuck there indefinitely, like it or not? Given that Wolfowitz played a key role in plunging our country into the Iraqi mess, why wouldn't the honorable thing be for him to refuse to permit the terrorists to run him out of the country and instead bravely remain in Iraq, in support of the troops, until the war on terror is finally won?"

- Hornberger's Blog -

"Consumers are the real losers in today's ruling, because the Librarian of Congress is ignoring the rights of nearly everyone who has purchased CDs and DVDs."

- Gwen Hinze, EFF Staff Attorney, on the Librarian of Congress denying exemptions to copyright law related to consumers' use of CDs and DVDs that they legally purchase -

"All those who questioned the lie were right to do so. Chretien was right. Schroeder was right. Chirac was right. Blix was right. Michael Douglas was right. Michael Moore was right. Tim Robbins was right. Susan Sarandon was right. Sean Penn was right. Bob Graham was right. Cynthia McKinney was right. Jeff Rense was right. Daniel Hopsicker was right. Justin Raymondo was right. I was right and the millions of activists that marched in the streets around the world were right. There was valid reason to doubt.

"Those who believed the lie and promoted it, they were all wrong to the point of complicity. Blair was wrong. Rush Limbaugh was wrong. Jim Robinson was wrong. O'Reilly (who recently stated that anyone who did not agree with him was an idiot) was wrong (and an idiot). Clear Channel was wrong. ABC was wrong. NBC was wrong. CBS was wrong. Fox News was wrong. CNN was wrong. The dozen pro-war activists who made certain they stood between the press cameras and the anti-war activists were wrong. The local news-bitch who marched right past an anti-war demonstration to report on one of Clear Channel's staged pro-war events was wrong. And all of those who reviled, smeared and attacked those who have proven hindsight to be right, were wrong.

"If you believed the lie about the weapons of mass destruction, then congratulations, you have been made a total fool before the eyes of the rest of the world. Forget 'Polock' jokes, the new fashion rage will be 'dumb American' jokes. Like the dumb Americans who actually did tape up their houses with sheet plastic and duct tape and nearly suffocated to death. Or the dumb Americans who actually believed Iraq still had a credible military after a decade of crippling sanctions."

- Michael Rivero: The U.S. Government Lied To You -

"The Bush White House tried to intimidate me and to discourage others from exposing the lies they told to justify the war. Some senior people in the Bush administration betrayed our country by exposing my wife's cover at the CIA because they deemed their political agenda to be more important than our national security. Not so. George Bush's Administration has betrayed our trust. I know that personally."

- Ambassador Joe Wilson in his statement in support of John Kerry for President -

"'Fair, kind and true' is all my argument."

- Shakespeare: Sonnet 55 -

"The war for a legitimate digital-music store began in 1995, when a New York company called Sonicnet started offering singles for download. The artists were allowed to set the prices of their songs and to keep all the money from the download. Of course, in those olden times, a download could take anywhere from five minutes to five hours, and the sound quality was described by the company itself as 'better than an AM radio in a '72 Nova.'

"Clearly, Sonicnet's music store was more of a me-first venture than a moneymaker, but the message was clear: the Internet was a place for artists to control and directly profit from their music. But in most online services today that dream has been lost, with the services functioning as online arms of the record companies while the artists receive pennies (or fractions of pennies) for each download."

- Neil Strauss: Online Music Business, Neither Quick Nor Sure -

"Not only did [Diebold] go after the ISPs whose clients were posting the Diebold memos, it also began sending cease-and-desist letters to secondary sites that were reporting the controversy and merely contained hyperlinks to sites that were hosting the Diebold material. One such website and its ISP refused to accede to the DMCA takedown order and are being defended by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

"In other words, not only are you subject to DMCA takedown for what's on your own site, but you and your ISP are responsible for what might be on a site you link to. From a journalist's point of view, this raises some interesting questions about how one can fairly report this story and provide readers with resources for making up their own minds without incurring Diebold's wrath.

"When I asked Diebold spokesman Mike Jacobsen whether I could provide links to Diebold-targeted sites as Blackbox Voting or Why-War, he acknowledged I could but said that it was possible I could get a cease-and-desist notice. 'I'm not saying we're going to do it, but you would be at risk for getting a letter,' he said. 'Anyone that's hosting a direct link to someone hosting those files, we want them to understand this is our stolen property and we want those links to be removed. Looking at it from a legal perspective, we were advised the DMCA was the best resource for getting that done. All we're really requesting that the links be removed from the site, although it does seem that the ISPs wind up taking down the whole site.'"

[That link above to the Diebold memos is actually a link to a site that links to all the sites that have the Diebold memos. We'll see if Diebold comes after me]

- Ed Foster: Latest DMCA Takedown Victim: The Election Process -

"A new report by Human Rights Watch has found that American prisons and jails contain three times more mentally ill people than do our psychiatric hospitals. The study confirmed what mental health and corrections experts have long known: incarceration has become the nation's default mental health treatment. And while the report offers good suggestions on how to help those who are incarcerated, a bigger question is what we can do to keep them from ending up behind bars at all.

"The Los Angeles County jail, with 3,400 mentally ill prisoners, functions as the largest psychiatric inpatient institution in the United States. New York's Rikers Island, with 3,000 mentally ill inmates, is second. According to the Justice Department, roughly 16 percent of American inmates have serious psychiatric illnesses like schizophrenia, manic-depressive illness and disabling depression."

- Sally Satel: Out of the Asylum, Into the Cell -

"Having already decided upon its course in Iraq, the Bush administration demanded the fabrication of evidence to fit into an imminent threat. Then, fulfilling the driven logic of the Bush doctrine, preemptive action could be taken. Policy a priori dictated intelligence ala carte."

-Sidney Blumenthal: US intelligence is being scapegoated for getting it right on Iraq -

"Does the public need to know more about rape? Absolutely. Does anyone learn anything meaningful by seeing the photo or reading the name of Kobe Bryant's accuser? No. By choosing a photo of the woman in a sexually suggestive pose, taken on her prom night, the Globe has deliberately misinformed the public. Accompanied by the headline, 'Did she really say no?' The Globe is saying that this particular woman must have asked for it because she dared to bare her thigh at a high school dance. In doing so, the tabloid is sending a more subtle message: that anyone who ever vamped for the camera or otherwise expressed their sexuality, even as a joke, could not possibly have said 'no.'"

- Kelly McBride: Globe Publishes Prom Picture of Kobe's Accuser -

"When ordinary citizens complain about the titans of media abusing their power to shape public opinion, the complaint often revolves around the placement of a news item, not the story's content. There may be no journalistic judgment call more crucial than the simple one of location: what story gets front-page treatment and what gets demoted to a short in the back of the D section. Until recently these decisions have been made by professional news editors. Now, however, the power to declare what news is most important is being eroded by the Internet. Dozens of online services allow you to create your own personalized front page with headlines arranged according to your interests - what some have dubbed the Daily Me.

"Critics worry that so narrowly tailoring news to an individual's interests could ultimately create an ideological hall of mirrors, with right-wingers reading only about the latest abuses by the teacher's union and the ACLU, the left-wingers seeing nothing but stories about corporate greed and John Ashcroft. Just in time, an alternative to the echo chamber of the Daily Me has emerged. Instead of personalizing headlines to an individuals taste, a new generation of online services track the interests of hundreds of thousands of ordinary users, building a front page from their collective interests. Call it the Daily Us."

- Steven Johnson: Emerging Technology - How the Web Edits News - A new headline service lets the readers collectively decide what's important -

"As for the 'miracle' that had to be attested, what can one say? Surely any respectable Catholic cringes with shame at the obviousness of the fakery. A Bengali woman named Monica Besra claims that a beam of light emerged from a picture of MT [Mother Teresa], which she happened to have in her home, and relieved her of a cancerous tumor. Her physician, Dr. Ranjan Mustafi, says that she didn't have a cancerous tumor in the first place and that the tubercular cyst she did have was cured by a course of prescription medicine. Was he interviewed by the Vatican's investigators? No. (As it happens, I myself was interviewed by them but only in the most perfunctory way. The procedure still does demand a show of consultation with doubters, and a show of consultation was what, in this case, it got.)"

- Christopher Hitchens: Mommie Dearest: The pope beatifies Mother Teresa, a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud -

"You know what surprised me the most the first time I went into combat? There was no music."

- Allen Nelson: Vietnam vet -

"Some of the most damaging tools of the Justice Department's targeting of Arab Americans are executive orders and administrative changes in immigration law that have largely remained under the radar screen of many lawmakers and advocates. Just one example: there are over 13,000 Arab and Muslim immigrants in deportation proceedings because of the Special Registration rules that required nationals from 22 countries to sign up with the immigration authorities. Not one of these individuals has been charged with terrorism. Most are being deported for routine immigration violations like not registering a change of address that in normal times could be rectified in hearings before immigration judges. Many of the deportees are only out of status because the INS delayed processing their forms, or even just outright lost them. Families are being separated and lives destroyed because of selective enforcement of immigration laws that have been on the books for many years and are being used to intimidate and deport law abiding Arab and Muslim Americans."

- Karen Rignall: Beyond Patriotic -

"To produce the wine in Portugal, might require only the labour of 80 men for one year, and to produce the cloth in the same country, might require the labour of 90 men for the same time. It would therefore be advantageous for her to export wine in exchange for cloth. This exchange might even take place, notwithstanding that the commodity imported by Portugal could be produced there with less labour than in England. Though she could make the cloth with the labour of 90 men, she would import it from a country where it required the labour of 100 men to produce it, because it would be advantageous to her rather to employ her capital in the production of wine, for which she would obtain more cloth from England, than she could produce by diverting a portion of her capital from the cultivation of vines to the manufacture of cloth."

- David Ricardo: On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation [1817] -

"It is part of the genius of a great leader to make adversaries of different fields appear as always belonging to one category only, because to weak and unstable characters, the knowledge that there are various enemies will lead only too easily to incipient doubts as to their own cause. As soon as the wavering masses find themselves confronted with too many enemies, objectivity at once steps in, and the question is raised whether actually all the others are wrong and their own nation or their own movement alone is right."

- Adolf Hitler: Mein Kampf -

"Who's on the other side? People who think we are bad. Other side? No, let's not make it a war, we'll all be destroyed, we'll go on suffering till we die if we take the War Door."

- Allen Ginsberg: Liner notes to The Fugs album -