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This video is for the Noobs and Noob observers

In his book, The Audacity of Hope, President Obama writes “Our constitution places the ownership of private property at the very heart of our system of liberty. According to Obama adviser Doug Kmiec, President Obama would appoint Supreme Court justices “in the mold of Justices Stephen Bryer and David Souter”. Bryer and Souter have voted against every property rights case for the last 20 years. In a recent study, data shows that countries that protect the physical and intellectual property of their people enjoy nearly nine times higher GDP per capita than countries ranking lowest in property rights protections. The...

The article below, which asserts that conservatives are less creative than liberals, is just the usual Leftist bigotry, based on a very poor knowledge of the research literature. Creativity does not generalize much, meaning there is no such thing as an overall trait of creativity. So all that is shown below is that Leftists judge one-another as more creative and are more likely to take an interest in self-indulgent activities.I am reproducing the full article below so people can admire the propaganda effort. It sounds quite plausible and fair if you don’t know the underlying facts By Scott Barry Kaufman...

from the let's-do-business,-or-we-might-sue deptLast week, Microsoft was kind enough to invite me to sit down, one-on-one with Horacio Gutierrez, the company's VP and Deputy General Counsel in charge of intellectual property and licensing. As you might imagine, given my views on the patent system in general, and Microsoft's gradual embrace of the patent system specifically, he and I disagreed on a fair amount. We agreed that the patent system should be focused on encouraging innovation. We agreed that there were abuses of the system. From there, our views pretty much diverged, though the conversation was fun and lively. Gutierrez began...

Does vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin consider herself intellectual? You betcha! "And you have to be up on not only current events, but you have to understand the foundation of the issues that you're working on," Palin said in an interview with People magazine. "You can't just go on what is presented you." SNIP the Alaska governor told People that she has always been a "voracious reader" and named reading _ anything from biographies to historical works _ as her favorite thing along with her children and sports. SNIP Palin said if she and husband Todd had had a sixth...

Inventors, scientists, and researchers have been at the core of America’s success since our earliest days… With tight economic conditions and emerging economies, America’s innovation will be facing many challenges if Intellectual Property is not protected.

This is one of the most frightening things I've learned in a long time. Over in the US, a bill has passed the House of Representatives and is heading to Congress – with a huge amount of support. The PRO-IP bill, H.R.4279, significantly increases the state's power to detect and prosecute IP infringement, carrying with it a whole host of new law enforcement positions and capabilities. It establishes an IP Czar, someone with the job of overseeing zealous action on behalf of copyright and trademark owners, and includes such powers as the ability to seize equipment if it contains just...

If the Christian base of the GOP gets its way, "All government employees — federal, state and local — would be required to participate in weekly Bible classes in the workplace, as well as compulsory daily prayer sessions." We would all have to carry religious identity cards that "would provide Christocrats with preferential treatment in many areas of life, including home ownership, student loans, employment and education." Non-Christians would be indulged as second-class citizens, "but younger members . . . would be strongly encouraged to formally convert to the dominant evangelical Christianity." Homosexual sex would be illegalized, while "known homosexuals...

Neoconservatism is hard to pin down as discrete political theory; Mr. Podhoretz [prefers] "tendency." In any case, as a practical matter, it denotes the mentality of those who moved from somewhere on the political left to somewhere on the right, primarily during the late '70s. It had "two ruling passions," according to Mr. Podhoretz. On the one hand, the neocons were repulsed by the countercultural '60s radicalism that came to dominate the American liberal establishment. On the other, they argued for a more assertive, muscular foreign policy (at the time in response to Soviet expansionism). ... The "war on terror,"...

Stealth firm plays reversi with VoIP codeChinese software developers have reportedly reverse engineered Skype's internet telephony software to develop a clone. The unnamed company has developed a software client using the same protocol and encryption technology used by Skype. This software, which is still in the early stages of development, was used to call Charlie Paglee, co-founder of Voice over IP startup Vozin Communications. Although the software lacks features that indicate whether someone is online or instant messaging technology, Paglee reports that the mystery firm involved plans to add these features (along with stability improvements) and release a stable version...

Iranian author arrested in Tehran By Frances Harrison BBC News, Tehran A leading Canadian-Iranian intellectual, Ramin Jahanbegloo, has been arrested at the airport in Tehran. A prominent dissident cleric described Mr Jahanbegloo's arrest as "the height of lawlessness and insecurity". At a gathering to celebrate International Press Freedom Day, Mohsen Kadivar said Mr Jahanbegloo was one of Iran's philosophical journalists. The arrest has caused concern about freedom of speech as Iran comes under increasing pressure from abroad. Mr Jahanbegloo is a well-known Canadian-Iranian professor with doctorates from the Sorbonne and Harvard University. He has written and edited more than a...

SAN JOSE – U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales brought a simple message to middle school students on Thursday: Don't steal. “I'm the top cop in the U.S. and I want you to know that if you illegally download a game or music or a video it's stealing, just as if you went into a store and stole blue jeans,” Gonzales told 7th and 8th graders at Windmill Springs School in the heart of California's Silicon Valley. The lesson culminated an unusual four-day lesson on intellectual property and copyright infringement during which the nation's top law enforcement official became a classroom...

ONE of the best passages of “Gulliver's Travels” concerns his visit to the Grand Academy of Lagado. Gulliver is naturally bemused by the schemes of the “projectors” for making life more comfortable: extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, or training pigs to plough fields with their snouts. But what really shocks him is their “wild impossible chimeras” for fixing politics: “schemes for persuading monarchs to choose favourites upon the score of their wisdom, capacity and virtue; of teaching ministers to consult the public good; of rewarding merit, great abilities and eminent services.” For much of the past 200 years Europe has...

A couple of months ago, I received a phone call from a former student. "Hi, Art. This is Bill." "Bill?" "Yeah, Bill Kinderman!" Now Bill clearly expected me to remember him, but for the life of me, I just couldn't put a face to the name - or even remember that I had once had a Bill Kinderman in one of my classes. And here he was, excited to talk to me and eagerly updating me on all the events of his life since we had last seen each other. It was an awkward conversation, and my difficulties only increased...

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Children who are short for their age may perform more poorly on tests of intelligence than their taller peers, a new study suggests. The findings, say researchers, imply that some environmental factors may negatively affect both early childhood height and mental development. What those factors are is uncertain, but a stressful home life is one possibility, according to Dr. Scott Montgomery of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, the study's lead author. "Childhood stress can slow growth significantly," he told Reuters Health, pointing to evidence that children's growth can be impaired when parents divorce or...

More than 100 students, faculty and community members - about 20 of them protesters - attended controversial academic and activist Ward Churchill’s lecture in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. last night, both to listen and, for some, to attempt debate. Churchill, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder,...some questioned his credentials, viewpoints, and claim to Native American heritage. Advocates “any means possible” ... “Any means” can include the use of violence, ... “Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens,” in which he referred to victims of the 9/11 attacks on the...

One of the more appealing aspects about being on the Left is that you do not necessarily have to engage your opponents in debates over the truth or falsehood of their positions. You can simply dismiss your opponent as "anti." Anti-worker: It all began with Marxism. If you opposed communism or socialism, you were not merely anti-communist or anti-socialist, you were anti-worker. This way of dismissing opponents of leftist ideas is now the norm. Anyone, including a Democrat, who raises objections to union control of state and local politics is labeled anti-worker: "anti-teacher," "anti-firefighter," "anti-nurse," etc. This is how the...

ProfileGeorge Soros’s Right-Wing TwinMultibillionaire commodities king Bruce Kovner is the patron saint of the neoconservatives, the new Lincoln Center’s crucial Medici, owner of a vast Fifth Avenue mansion—and the most powerful New Yorker you’ve never heard of. By Philip Weiss (Photo credit: Courtesy of Bruce Kovner) After the opening-night performance of Tosca at the Met this spring, a handful of people found their way through a side door of the hall to the narrow corridor that leads backstage. One or two held flowers; a couple were in eveningwear. They were headed for the dressing rooms to congratulate soprano Maria...

/begin my translationChina, "A Pressure Cooker Which Can Blow Up Anytime"Seven Oppressions in China: an Analysis by Asia Weekly Ji Hae-bum hbjee@chosun.com  04/26/05  Chinese society  is like a 'pressure cooker' with its safety lid tightly closed. recent anti-Japanese protest served as a way to relieving pressure from 7 oppressions by (Chinese) authorities.  The latest (May 1st) issue of 'The Asia Weekly' in Hong Kong assessed, "For last 15 years, under the slogan, ' Stability is above everything else,' China repressed the freedom of public assembly, which was guaranteed in their constitution, thus closing the channel for expressing discontent and frustration. (Recent) Anti-Japanese protest  is...

The International Telecommunication Union is one of the most venerable of bureaucracies. Created in 1865 to facilitate telegraph transmissions, its mandate has expanded to include radio and telephone communications. But the ITU enjoys virtually no influence over the Internet. That remains the province of specialized organizations such as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN; the Internet Engineering Task Force; the World Wide Web Consortium; and regional address registries. The ITU, a United Nations agency, would like to change that. "The whole world is looking for a better solution for Internet governance, unwilling to maintain the current...

CHINA'S PIRACY DILEMMA – U.S. ACTION VIA WTO?Feb 15, 2005 - FreeMarketNews.comby Tim BrownChina’s protection of intellectual property rights is forefront in the news again. In January Vice-premier Wu Yi had told US officials and business people that China would need time to correct the problem of piracy. He provided huge numbers such as the confiscation of 10 billion pieces of fake goods as evidence that China is trying to solve the problem. According to a Newsweek article for the February 21 issue Beijing has been successful in eliminating pirated copies of its 2008 Olympics logo. Now music, film and...

The French, ever proud of their great thinkers, complain they have all but disappeared today. In Church circles it is the same. But are those fine minds out there, simply biding their time, waiting for the right moment? IN ENGLAND, “intellectual” is a dirty word; in France, being described as such is akin to consecration, something devoutly desired. Whereas the pragmatic English wear their learning lightly and wouldn’t be seen dead signing a petition as “a group of intellectuals”, the French parade their erudition proudly and expect their intellectuals – a recognised and revered class – who are naturally engages,...

From Yale to the University of North Carolina, liberal academia is being challenged by a new generation of conservative leadership. Credible tales of professors grading down conservative students have always run rampant. Biased lectures remain the unremarkable norm. One variable has changed, however. Liberal academia lacks its traditionally receptive audience. During the opening weeks of the Iraq war, professors were shocked by the absence of antiwar fervor among their pupils. Leading up to the 2004 elections, record numbers of undergraduates joined the College Republicans and other conservative organizations. Ingenious student protests, such as Berkeley’s affirmative action bake sale and Duke’s...

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Apple Computer has sued a popular Macintosh rumour Web site for allegedly distributing trade secrets, the latest in a string of lawsuits the company has filed to stop Internet leaks of details of upcoming products. The latest suit also lends credibility to recent rumours about a Macintosh computer without a display and an office productivity software suite that surfaced in the run-up to Apple's annual trade show held here next week, where CEO Steve Jobs typically unveils new products. Apple, in the complaint filed on Tuesday, sued Web site Think Secret and other unnamed individuals, claiming...

Intellectual Diversity In The Classroom Wednesday, December 8, 2004 by Bruce Bartlett Although conservatives complain loudly and often about liberal bias in the mass media, the truth is that one is far more likely to read a conservative perspective in the New York Times than hear it from a college professor. At least the Times publishes an occasional conservative on its op-ed page. At many universities, just finding a Republican anywhere on the faculty is problematic. Two recent studies by Santa Clara University economist Daniel B. Klein prove my point. In one study, he looked at party registration of the...

WASHINGTON -- Do you know who Harry M. Reid might be? Frankly I did not know either until he was quoted in the newspapers as having said on NBC's "Meet the Press" that Justice Clarence Thomas is "an embarrassment to the Supreme Court." He also asseverated that Justice Thomas's opinions "are poorly written." As he made these utterances recently on "Meet the Press" I concluded that the man must have some stature, unless, of course, the issue being treated on the show was small-town bigotry. Well, it turns out that this fellow Reid is a United States senator. In fact,...

While I agree ... in that intellectual diversity is crucial at an educational institution, I disagree ... that multiculturalism would not enhance the quality of education at Colgate. Rather, I see multiculturalism as one of the most powerful vehicles to intellectual diversity. This belief is not speculative, but based on historical evidence of American society as well as Colgate University itself. While the diversity initiative is focused on the racial demographics at Colgate, conservatives have shifted the focus to intellectual diversity, drawing a line to separate it from racial diversity. However, what is intellectual diversity? Is it simply the distinction...

Photo : AFP LONDON (AFP) - US pop star Madonna made a rare foray into politics, calling for her home country to withdraw its troops from Iraq during an interview with British radio."I just don't want American troops to be in Iraq, period," she said on BBC Radio."My feelings are 'can we just all get out?'," said the 46-year-old star, who lives mainly in London with British film director husband Guy Ritchie, who said she believes the US-led war will not help in the fight against terrorism.

At Harvard, a few of us stray from the "herd of independent minds." BY RUTH R. WISSE Monday, October 25, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT Last spring, I was surprised by a call from a reporter at the Harvard Crimson asking me to comment on my contribution to the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign. His inquiry was prompted by the disparity he'd discovered in donations by Harvard faculty of about $150,000 for Kerry to about $8,000 for Bush. (The figures have since changed but not the percentages.) I could have filled the whole issue of his paper with reasons for supporting Bush over...

WASHINGTON — When John Kerry speaks tonight he may promise, again, to cut corporate taxes and increase the size of the military by 40,000 persons. Both ideas are sensible — and tactical. They are supposed to blunt Republican charges that he stands on one side of a vast ideological chasm separating the parties. Democrats make similar, and similarly silly, charges about this election as the hinge on which American and world history will turn. What is strange about politics today is not just that it is so passionate — particularly on the part of Democrats unhinged by their loathing of...

When I recently had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Jay Bergman of Central Connecticut State University (CCSU), I couldn’t help but wonder, what’s a nice guy like this doing teaching in a school like that? When he complained in a letter to the local newspaper about the lack of intellectual diversity at CCSU, he cited as an example the day-long forum on slavery reparations in the United States held by the African Studies Program (ASP). Dr. Bergman pointed out that the same department was entirely mute on the subject of the enslavement of Africans by Africans taking place to this...

Israeli Arab Intellectual and Poet on Illiteracy in the Arab World, "Backward-Looking" Islam, and the Complex of Arab Secularists In an interview with the Jerusalem weekly Kol Hair on the occasion of the publication of his first book of poetry in Hebrew, Salman Masalha, an Israeli Arab intellectual and poet, speaks of what he sees as the problem of illiteracy, and thus thought, in the Arab world, of the fixation with the past in the Arab world, of the importance of educating women, and of the role of doubting and asking questions in the development of society and culture. Masalha,...

Less than a week after CBS’s John Roberts filed two reports about how Republicans are “furious” at President Bush, Sunday’s CBS Evening News, anchored by Roberts, showcased a story about a 50-something “Republican” couple in Ohio who are disillusioned by President Bush over his tax cuts, how he “lied” about Iraq and how he’s focusing on gay marriage when there are “a million domestic problems” that are more pressing. CBS on Sunday launched a new series, “American Voices,” and it just happened to highlight the “Republican” couple who criticized Bush from the left. Reporter Gretchen Carlson warned that “if what...

This article by David Horowitz and the two following (Sarah Habel's "Students for Academic Freedom: A New Campus Movement" and Stanley Fish's "Voice of the Opposition") all appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education. They represent the ongoing debate over Horowitz's Academic Bill of Rights and fight for intellectual freedom in our institutions of higher learning - The Editors. *I am the author of the Academic Bill of Rights, which many student governments, colleges and universities, education commissions, and legislatures are considering adopting. Already, the U.S. House of Representatives has introduced a version as legislation, and the Senate should soon...

WE LOVE TO PUT TURKEY INTO OUR MOUTHS each Thanksgiving. But why do we find this odd word “turkey” in our mouths, in our vocabulary? Finding this answer brings us to a smorgasbord of history, politics and culture that gives added savor to most of the foods of this Thursday’s feast. “About 1530, a new dish began to be put on English tables,” writes one cultural historian, “a fowl a little larger than the traditional goose, but with a lot more meat and a refreshingly new taste. “This bird,” the historian continues, “had been brought to England by merchants trading...

Squashing Intellectual Diversity at BrownBy Alex CarnevaleBrown University Post | September 9, 2003 As anyone who has read his many letters to the Brown Daily Herald or seen the copies of the Socialist Worker that grace the door of his office knows, Brown University’s Professor of English William Keach is a socialist. On my first day of class with him last year he announced his views but added that, of course, he wouldn’t enforce them on others, who were free to disagree with him. I’ve shopped enough of his classes to know that this is his regular spiel. On the...

The Coming Arab Rennaissance? In their own words… By Tom Adkins - CommonConservative.com If you listened to the chattering class, you might be tempted to think Arabs hate the United States of America. Watching Al-Jazeera, you might think Arabs are angry that Americans dared send our military troops to violate their sacred land. If you listen to the network talking heads and newspaper editors around the nation, you might be tempted to believe Arabs prefer their 14th century existence, and want nothing to do with democratic ideals that are not in synch with their religious dogma. You would be wrong....

CAIRO, April 6 — Early in the morning, while most of Cairo is asleep, Ahmed Kamal Aboulmagd watches the war on television and despairs over the path taken by the United States. Even in the gloom of 4 a.m., this is not a normal emotion for Mr. Aboulmagd, a sprightly man of 72 who has lived through more than his share of revolutions, wars and international crises, yet has maintained a marvelously sunny outlook. "We should never lose hope," he remarked the other day from his 18th-floor law office overlooking the Nile, a room crammed with books and brightened with...

MS, Hollywood: Mob rules pirate world By Declan McCullagh CNET News.com March 13, 2003, 11:42 AM PT URL: http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-992492.html WASHINGTON--Hollywood and Microsoft are uniting to warn Congress that their intellectual property is being stolen and resold by organized-crime gangs around the globe. Software and movie DVD counterfeiting is an acute problem, with criminal gangs operating factories in Russia, Malaysia and other countries that have weak copyright laws, Microsoft and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) said Thursday. Jack Valenti, president and CEO of the film industry group, and Richard LaMagna, a manager of Microsoft's antipiracy investigations, testified before a...

The adjective "intellectual," obviously of Latin origin, appeared in English, occasionally but infrequently, for many centuries; but An Intellectual, as a noun, designating a recognizable type of man or woman, came into use only around 1884. (It is so dated in the Oxford English Dictionary; I found it more than once in George Gissing's New Grub Street, published in 1891, describing literary life in London of the 1880s.) In other languages, too, the usage of the noun does not seem to have appeared before the 19th century. One -- to me, charming -- exception was the French un curieux, extant...

"Randy, what the heck is your boss high on?" I just finished reading Lockyer's position paper on the 2nd Amendment, and David Codrea's rebuttal. Both just went online here: http://keepandbeararms.com/information/Item.asp?ID=3505 Randy, what the hell are you guys doing over there? Lockyer's cite of Miller is a flat-out lie. Don't take my word for it, read the dang case: http://laws.findlaw.com/us/307/174.html Miller can be very easily read to guarantee the civilian ownership of military full-auto battle rifles! There's been an entire law review article done on the butchering Miller has been subjected to by lower courts: http://www.guncite.com/journals/dencite.html Hickman doesn't do any real...

DEMOCRATS running for the U.S. House and Senate this year have latched onto the issue of prescription drug prices like ticks on a bloodhound. If they aren't careful, their reckless feeding frenzy could seriously damage one of their most solid constituencies — artists. The Democratic argument boils down to this: large, greedy pharmaceutical firms are gouging the public by charging indefensibly high prices for prescription drugs. This argument breaks down into two parts, only one of which is on target. The solid argument is that the Hatch-Waxman Act, which governs patents for drugs, contains a flaw that allows big...

April 9, 2002 8:55 a.m.9/11 DenialThe French bestseller and its company. O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous. — Voltaire, 1767 Well, it did not take long for the ridiculous to find its way into print. In what is billed as the "first independent inquiry" into the events of Sept. 11, French left-wing activist Thierry Meyssan comes to the shocking conclusion that the Pentagon was not hit by American Airlines Flight 77. His book, L'Effroyable Imposture (The Frightening Fraud) is apparently a hot seller in his native land, the first 20,000 copies having been whisked off the shelves with more to...

Journalist says Arab rulers care more for holding onto power than taking real actionHala KilaniDaily Star staffIsrael’s current invasion of the West Bank has rekindled memories of the 1948 and 1967 wars, in which the Arabs were crushed, the Palestinians uprooted and Israel consolidated its stature as the mightiest power in the Middle East. But for intellectuals, the spillover in the streets of Arab countries this time around is sharply different, exposing what they see as the incompetence of Arab rulers, who now possess capabilities to fight Israel but are more concerned about holding onto their thrones. One such intellectual...