Jon Basil Utley

Murderous Soviet Communism

[audio:http://dissentradio.com/radio/07_10_11_utley.mp3]

Jon Basil Utley, former South American correspondent for Knight-Ridder newspapers and founder of Americans Against World Empire, tells the story of his father’s arrest and murder by the Soviet Communists at the Vorkuta Gulag, his mother, Freda’s world travels documenting the horrors of Communism afterward and the baneful influence of America’s Armageddonites on our current foreign policy.

MP3 here. (39:51)

Jon Basil Utley is associate publisher of The American Conservative and Robert A. Taft Fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute. A former correspondent for Knight Ridder in South America, Utley has written for the Harvard Business Review on foreign nationalism and was for 17 years a commentator on the Voice of America. He is director of Americans Against World Empire.

Keith Halderman

The Ruinous Drug War

[audio:http://dissentradio.com/radio/07_10_11_haldeman.mp3]

Keith Halderman, editorial assistant at the Trebach Institute and blogger at Liberty and Power, discusses the sordid history of America’s war against some drug users.

MP3 here. (38:48)

Keith Halderman completed his BA in International Relations at Pennsylvania State University and a BA in Social Science Education at the University of South of Florida. He holds a MA in American History from the University of South Florida. Currently, he is a Ph.D. candidate in American History at American University. He has published articles on the medical use of marijuana in the 19th century, the U.S. Army’s study of marijuana use in Panama conducted during the 1920s and Blanche Armwood the first Executive Secretary of the Urban League in Tampa Florida. His dissertation topic looks at marijuana prohibition in the 1930s from a Public Choice perspective. He is a long time activist with both the Libertarian Party and the drug law reform movement. He works as an editorial assistant with the Trebach Institute.

Some Weekend Reading

I’m blogging up a storm over at Taki’s Top DrawerHere‘s my Friday Evening Cyber-Stroll, with items on Ron Paul (the third party option), Gen. Ricardo  Sanchez (lashing out at the Bushites), and Chris Matthews (how the War Party tried to censor him). Here‘s a question: is neoconservatism an incurable disease? Here‘s a meditation on how hard it must be for the neocons to peddle Benito Giuliani as a “conservative” to the GOP base. And here, courtesy of Gen.Wesley Clark, is a visit to the future.

US Nullifies INF Treaty

Vladimir Putin is threatening to withdraw from the INF Treaty, and, as the world’s attention is fixed on the disaster unfolding in Iraq, the disarmament agreements reached in the waning days of the cold war are coming unraveled. The reason: the US is oufitting its East  European satraps with missile “defense” armaments, which has led the Russians to announce that “it will be difficult for us to remain within the framework of the treaty”, which mandates destruction of Russian and US intermediate range missiles, unless it is expanded to include Poland, the Czech republic, and any other former Russian vassals that buy into the latest wares hawked by the US military-industrial complex.

It’s absurd — and an insult to the Russians — to claim, as the Americans do, that they are concerned about a missile attack on Prague by … Iran. Baloney! As Putin put it, “It would be funny if it wasn’t so sad.” It’s clear who this is aimed at. The question is: why? Is there really no limit to the War Party’s ambition — do they mean to take on the Russians along with the “Islamo-fascists“?

This is why I hope we never explore the cosmos, and go to other planets: any intelligent life we find there is bound to be declared an Enemy.

AP — Lost in Cyberspace

In a lawsuit that epitomizes the sheer stupidity of the Old Media, and its complete ignorance of the new technology, the Associated Press is suing news-aggregation site Moreover — and parent company VeriSign — for copyright infringement for linking to its copyrighted material. The specific complaint, apparently, is that Moreover uses the lead in whatever story it links to as a means to entice the reader to click on the link and read the whole thing.

More than demonstrating complete ignorance of fair use laws, and utter cluelessness as to how the internet works, the thinking behind the lawsuit, if implemented consistently, would have put a stop to all footnoted quotations in scholarly works: after all, the authors “own” their own words and a footnote is nothing but the pre-internet equivalent of a link.

Working for Antiwar.com, a site that, in some sense, is also a news aggregator site — the model is Drudge – I really connected with this piece by Rich Ord, founder of NewsLynx:

“I remember getting personal calls and emails from virtually every site I linked to including the Wall Street Journal, Time Warner, L.A. Times and many others. The calls and emails usually started with the question, “Do you have permission to link to our articles?” Old media legal departments were clearly very green with the Internet. My typical response was, ‘No, we don’t have permission and if you would like us to stop linking and driving traffic to your site just let me know. However, we feel we have every right to link to your articles without permission because the Internet itself is based on the concept of linking.'”

If you only knew the headaches this non-issue has given us over the years. To have to deal with such clods, clumsy dinosaurs stumbling their way to extinction, went with the job. Didn’t they know we were doing them a favor by sending them traffic?

It isn’t just the Old Media mavens who just don’t get it. We had one idiot, the former Trotsky disciple-turnedneocon -turned Muslim Stephen Schwartz, who threatened to sue us for linking to a photo of his ugly mug. That photo, he screeched, isn’t our property. Well, uh, no, it isn’t – but by putting it out there on the internet, the owner voluntarily made it accessible to the world. To post it, and then object when someone stumbles  on it, is like parading around naked in front of an open window, and then complaining that your “privacy” has been violated when people begin to stare.  

The AP lawsuit represents a direct threat to the First Amendment, in that it would, in principle, lead to outlawing links without first signing some sort of agreement with the linked site. I share the concern expressed by Ord in his piece:

“What would be of concern to Google, Drudge and many others is a rogue ruling by a not-so-Internet-savvy Federal Judge that would put real restrictions on linking to news. So far, the prevailing standard has been the legal concept of fair use. Hopefully, this case is assigned to a judge who realizes that the Internet is based on links. The use of an article title and short summary has been considered fair use in past cases. However, I am not sure if the use of smaller versions of copyrighted pictures regularly used by Google News and Drudge will withstand this fair use test.”

One of the arguments being used by AP lawyers is that journalism schools teach entire courses on how to write a good lead sentence — and “stealing” them (by quoting them) ought to be a crime. Taking the argument further, we could argue that headline-writing is also a valuable art, entire courses are built around it, and to steal a headline and couple it with a link to the original material amounts to copyright infringement.

You can see where this is going. But pay-per-link is not a template that fits into the technology of the internet. Let them put up a Times-Select wall — you know, like the one that just came down — and they’ll find themselves completely isolated, lost in cyber-space, unvisited as well as unloved.

Lisa Graves

The End of the 4th Amendment

[audio:http://dissentradio.com/charles/aw101107lisagraves.mp3]

Lisa Graves, deputy director of the Center for National Security Studies, discusses the new House bill tweaking the power of the president to tap phones without warrants that they just gave him with the “Protect America Act,” the reduction of the rights of Americans to those of people on enemy battlefields and retroactive immunity provided to American corporations for conspiring with the government to tap without warrants.

MP3 here. (16:29)

Lisa Graves is the deputy director of the Center for National Security Studies.