unusualmusic_lj_archive | Entries tagged with wtfbbq???

New ACTA copyright treaty dodges the UN, poor countries and activists

Michael Geist sez, "The World Intellectual Property Organization may be best known for the Internet treaties that led to the DMCA, but in recent years groups like EFF, KEI, and Public Knowledge has helped to open things up and move toward a Development Agenda that better balances international intellectual property policy. That progress may be threatened by the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, which officials now acknowledge is designed to exclude WIPO, developing countries, and NGOs."

Moreover, the criminal provisions go well beyond clear cases of commercial infringement by including criminal sanctions such as potential imprisonment for "significant wilful copyright and trademark infringement even where there is no direct or indirect motivation of financial gain." Jail time for non-commercial infringement will generate considerable opposition, but it is the internet provisions that are likely to prove to be the most controversial. At the December meeting in Paris, the US submitted a "non-paper" that discussed internet copyright provisions, liability for internet service providers, and legal protection for digital locks.

While the substance of the treaty will remain fodder for much debate, Canadian officials recently hosted a public consultation during which they acknowledged the true motivation behind the ACTA. Senior officials stated that there were really two reasons for the treaty. The first, unsurprisingly, was concerns over counterfeiting. The second was the perceived stalemate at WIPO, where the growing emphasis on the Development Agenda and the heightened participation of developing countries and non-governmental organisations have stymied attempts by countries such as the United States to bull their way toward new treaties with little resistance.

Given the challenge of obtaining multilateral consensus at WIPO, the ACTA negotiating partners have instead opted for a plurilateral approach that circumvents possible opposition from developing countries such as Brazil, Argentina, India, Russia, or China. There have been hints of this in the past - an EU FAQ [frequently asked questions] document noted that "the membership and priorities of those organisations [G8, WTO, WIPO] simply are not the most conducive" to an ACTA-like initiative - yet the willingness to now state publicly what has been only speculated privately sends a shot across the bow for WIPO and the countries that support its commitment to multilateral policymaking. MORE

WHat the hell is WRONG with these greedy bloated assholes???? Stuff like this: Secret copyright treaty leaks. It's bad. Very bad.
The internet chapter of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a secret copyright treaty whose text Obama's administration refused to disclose due to "national security" concerns, has leaked. It's bad. It says:

* That ISPs have to proactively police copyright on user-contributed material. This means that it will be impossible to run a service like Flickr or YouTube or Blogger, since hiring enough lawyers to ensure that the mountain of material uploaded every second isn't infringing will exceed any hope of profitability.
* That ISPs have to cut off the Internet access of accused copyright infringers or face liability. This means that your entire family could be denied to the internet -- and hence to civic participation, health information, education, communications, and their means of earning a living -- if one member is accused of copyright infringement, without access to a trial or counsel.

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WHAT THE FUCK?

Dear Maine. You suck

Throughout the bitter campaign, supporters of same sex marriage had stressed that gay couples deserve equal treatment under the law, banking on Maine’s reputation as a “live and let live” state. Opponents repeatedly warned voters that if gays were allowed to marry, it would be taught in the public schools, a tactic that proved effective in California last year.
The Catholic Church was a leading supporter of the repeal campaign, even asking parishes to pass a second collection plate at Sunday mass to help the cause. The National Organization for Marriage also contributed heavily to the repeal campaign; it is under investigation by Maine’s ethics commission for possibly flouting state campaign finance laws by refusing to reveal its donors.

They say god made us all in his own image. Considering the fact that so many of us seem to be fearful, hateful, illogical, irrational cruel disgusting assholes, this is really not a recommendation.

In the meantime, there were some victories.

The anti-discrimination ballot proposal in Kalamazoo, Michigan PASSED!

Kalamazoo city voters decisively adopted an ordinance Tuesday that extends anti-discrimination protections to gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender individuals.
The ordinance passed 7,671 to 4,731, making Kalamazoo the 16th city in Michigan to adopt such a gay-rights ordinance that grants the protections in the areas of employment, housing and public accommodations.
The ordinance was approved in all but three of the city’s voting places. It also passed among heavy absentee ballot voting.
"There’s a lot of people who will wake up and breathe easier tomorrow knowing they won’t be fired or kicked out of their homes for being gay, lesbian or transgender," said Jon Hoadley, campaign manager One Kalamazoo, the pro-ordinance campaign committee. "It was astounding the overwhelming support that we had. Kalamazoo said this is what it wants."

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Meanwhile, it also looks like a same-sex ~~marriage~~ 'Everything but marriage' initiative in the state of Washington may pass as well, though it's too close to call this morning.

The trends looked positive for the measure, which would expand the state's domestic-partnership law.
It was winning by nearly 3-to-1 in King County, where about 30 percent of the state's voters reside, and also doing well in other Puget Sound-area counties. It was being soundly rejected across Eastern Washington and in many other counties.

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As pointed out in the Comments by a variety of folks, St. Petersburg, Florida has now elected its first openly-gay City Council member Steve Kornell, Chapel Hill, North Carolina elected its first openly-gay mayor Mark Kleinschmidt, one of the two people that will go into a run-off election in five weeks for mayor of Houston is Annise Parker, a lesbian, who was the leading vote-getter and, in Detroit, Michigan, Charles Pugh was elected as the city's first openly-gay Council member (despite having the Detroit Free Press and Detroit News both retract their endorsements of him in the past several weeks.)MORE

Sleeping While Brown

Colourface Epidemic Infects ANTM

We don’t usually quote directly from tipsters, but I am too stunned to paraphrase right now. Cassandra reports:

Each girl was given two ethnicities: Tibetan/Egyptian, Greek/Mexican, Moroccan/Russian, Native American/East Indian, Botswanan/Polynesian, Malagasy/Japanese. Five girls are white, one is Asian, and a few are donned in black face and all in “ethnic” outfits (a combination of an aspect of each culture, evident in the photos), which Tyra explains, “Every outfit is not necessarily what people of that culture are wearing now, it might not even be a necessary exact of what they’ve worn in the past, it’s a fashion interpretation of it.” Nicole, assigned to look Malagasy/Japanese, remarks how she’s always wondered what she looked like as a different race and that she felt she looked “exotic.” The girls had to somehow embody what people of those ethnicities were like i.e. Tyra saying, “Think Egyptian, think [insert ethnicity], think of what those people were like, etc.”

INSERT SCREAMS OF HORROR AND FOAMING AT THE MOUTH NOW.MORE

Tyra Banks is known for doing shitty stuff, WTF is this exactly? The link links to a Jezebel writeup that is much more gentle, but frankly they give Tyra too much damned credit. The woman acts the fool all the fucking time and I am sick of the stupidity. There is no fucking excuse, and i don't care about here frigging motive, this is straight up fuckery, and girl needs to get her head out of her ass.

Why the hell are we using our justified disgust with Christianity to be utter assholes to mentally ill persons?

No, ladies and gentlemen. This isn't funny. It's frigging immoral, imho. Do you think its easy for mentally ill persons to have relationships? Do you think its easy for them to find understanding persons, especially if they are able-bodied, who have the time and the understanding to stick with them through thick and thin? This is your abled-bodied privilege stinking up the place, yo. Not funny. In fact, EPIC FAIL.

DO NOT READ THE COMMENTS.

Ralph Lauren Fires Photoshopped Model For Being "Too Fat"

Filippa Hamilton, the 23-year-old model who was Photoshopped into a stick insect by Ralph Lauren, has revealed that the brand — which later apologised for the image — quietly fired her for being overweight.
Hamilton had counted Ralph Lauren among her clients since she started modeling at the age of 15 and she says that she considered the people who worked there her second family — at least until April of this year, when Ralph Lauren summarily fired her. The stated reason was that the label dumped Hamilton "as a result of her inability to meet the obligations under her contract with us." What Ralph Lauren allegedly told Hamilton's agency, Next, is that the ~~5'10"~~ 5'8", 120 lb model had become too fat to fit into its clothing.

Ralph Lauren's behavior since these images came to light, on the blog Photoshop Disasters, has single-handedly turned a small PR crisis into a full-fledged disaster. First, the company had its lawyers try to sue Photoshop Disasters and BoingBoing, the second blog to pick up the story, for copyright infringement for reporting on the ad. The threats — and the fact that Ralph Lauren managed to get Photoshop Disasters' ISP, Google-owned Blogspot, to remove the image — not only came across as ridiculous and bullying, but only served to draw hundreds of thousands of eyes to the story. (The Daily Mail, Huffington Post, Telegraph, Current TV, and Mother Jones, among other outlets, jumped on the story with more or less alacrity.)MORE

French Vogue shoots model in Blackface.

Seeking ever edgier territory, having dispensed with motherhood and cannibalism as sources of controversy, Vogue Paris took pictures of Dutch supermodel Lara Stone in blackface. Stop me if you've heard this one before!
...

The fact that the issue, dedicated to "Supermodels," contains no black models, should also have been noticed, and corrected.
Given Klein is American, it would be nearly impossible to even argue that the magazine didn't know what buttons it was pushing. It's kind of sickening to think that minstrelsy has become just another "reference" for po-mo fashion editorials to "appropriate" to show how "edgy" they are, "conceptually."

After painting Stone's body brown, the makeup artist then apparently painted parts of her white again.
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Treat your disgust by getting the latest issue of Arise Magazine, now on Barnes and Noble shelves near you.

WHO RAN AWAY FROM FINISHING HIS PRISON TERM.

YES VIRGINIA, THAT SHIT TRUMPS HIS MOVIE-MAKING ABILITIES.

ALSO Her reasons are NOT yours

I will not even BEGIN to address that Hollywood petition floating around.

4 sheriffs just pointed their guns directly at me!!! I am here sitting at the computer which has a direct line of sight to my backdoor. Saw these guys looking in the apartment next door. Next thing I know, I look up and they are all crouched out my backdoor, (My backdoor and patio are enclosed in mesh, by the way and then there is a glass sliding door) with guns pointed at me, demanding that I come out there. I'm like What the hell??? And I call Dad and he goes out there. Turns out that they are looking for a guy that used to live next door some months ago. And they told Dad that they saw the back door open...it was??? Really? and were thinking of coming into our apartment. To which I repeat...WHAT THE FUCK??!?!?!?

College president honors "diversity" by naming center for Dick Cheney

One of the biggest pet peeves on the right is the way that America's universities worship such "socialist" principles as "diversity" and "tolerance" -- so I wonder how they feel when a university president is citing "diversity and tolerance" as a good reason to accept millions of dollars in blood money from Dick Cheney for a new campus center.
It's hard to even know where to begin with the irony here: The man who sent more than 4,000 Americans abroad to die in his unjustified crusade, responsble for the Kafka-esque detainment and torture of prisoners, some of whom were innocent, at Guantanamo and secret sites around the globe, and who did more than anyone in U.S. history to create an international climate of distrust, is being honored with a center at the University of Wyoming to foster world understanding...to send Americans overseas and support foreigners studying in the United States.

Dick Cheney said his time as a student at the University of Wyoming laid the foundation for an "extraordinary career.""We hope that this center will provide the kind of support for Wyoming students to travel overseas, to travel internationally, to learn a lot of the lessons that we've learned over the years," he said.
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Is there anything or anyone that Obama will stand up for? I mean, if I had wanted a corperatized Republican, I'd have fucking VOTED FOR ONE. Silly me sacrificing my work study cash while at uni to help get him elected cause I believed me when he said it was about the people. I mean, Van Jones? he let go VAN JONES?????? Based on corporate astroturf group Americans for Prosperity and fucking Glenn Beck!?!?!?!This is the last fucking straw.

SURVEY FAIL! In which male just graduated Phd "scientists" decide to study slash fandom and write a book about how all these straight women are writing about gay men and its due to how their brains are wired due to evolution blah blah blah. *insert sciency goobledegook, homophobia, trans phobia, misogyny, ignorance, IP logging, unethical behavior, ignorance of their own discipline's research protocols, condescension, no idea how to screen for minors,no idea that they HAD TO screen for minors, no idea that working with humans means that they are actually doing social science, and that they need to follow a set of rules that apparently anyone who has had the least exposure to psych would know about (remember these are PHDs), no idea how to do statistics, (who the fuck changes the questions halfway through???)... and total pigheaded refusal to listen when all of these and more problems are pointed out.* You really have to see the links to believe it the heights of FUCKERY that these people get up to. The level of privilege that it takes for these twerps to swoop down and decide to write a book dripping with warped, fuckedup, ignorant theories on fandom and profit from it, and their dismissal of most every complaint that us subjects of their POS "research" have preferred, is RAGE-inducing. Which is bad for our researchers, for fandom is now hellbent on making their lives VERY uncomfortable indeed *cackles evilly* EDIT:

linkspam has LINKS. Much snark is available.

bossymarmalade issues a call for macros, which apparently duly answered. The beleaguered researchers have now locked their post. *more cackling* and now she calls for ratcheting up the pressure.

And then there is GATE FAIL! courtesy of the fuckers in charge of writing and producing STARGATE. They, well. Damn. They just...well FAILED SO FUCKING BAD OMG WTFBBQ!!!!!!!! i can't even, I mean the fail started huge and just blew up into breathtaking callousness and cluelessness and cisgender white able-bodied ppl vomiting up their rotten stinking privilege and ignorance over everything within the radius of that fucking POS Syphilis channel OMG WHY????????? And of course, there were the cisgender white ablebodied fans to back them up. Oh/ my. LORD *headdesk forever*

Look, between the political fuckery and the fandom/entertainment fuckery, I wanna just hide from the world, okay?

Fucking malicious poisonous ignoramus racist viper-in-human-form white woman tells Jewish man talking about universal healthcare in Israel "Heil Hitler!" Full incident from

karnythia commenters

Here is the entire exchange between Pamela Pilger and Samuel Blum. Pilger shouted "Heil Hitler" while Blum was giving an interview to Eyewitness News. Blum is Jewish.

All ye minority people who are telling me that the Republicans are good for us? FU. I ain't going NOWHERE near a party that boasts these POS fuckers. The party is racistly rotten from top to bottom even if its policies weren't solely for the further enrichment of the rich. Also, you blasted narrowminded ignoramus, MY TAX DOLLARS, WHICH I WORKED MY ASS FOR, SHOULD DAMN WELL PAY FOR ABORTIONS.

Did she really think that after telling him Heil Hitler, she was gonna get ANYWHERE with the whole "obama hates Israel!!!!!" argument? Really????????

I'd known about this for two days, and was trying to figure out how best to blog it, but En tequila es verdad take works:

Dept. of Irony: "Indian Muslim actor racially-profiled in U.S. while visiting to promote film about racial profiling of Muslims"

Way to prove the point, America:
This past Saturday, one of Bollywood’s most recognizable movie stars, Shah Rukh Khan, was detained because of his surname at Newark Liberty International Airport and questioned for over two hours before being released. The Wall Street Journal reports that Khan was in the U.S. to promote his new film about the racial profiling of Muslims...
Somewhere, an irony meter just exploded...

John C. Wright author of Chronicles of Chaos, among other things is a raging homobigot who thinks that gay sex is equivalent to bestiality and incest What is amusing is that he thinks that his homobigotry, when dressed up in nose-in- the-air snootiness, is actually intelligent. *eyeroll*

And he's an insecure racist asshole as well. Mohammedan?!?!?!!?!? "Inuit" insults HIM??? WT Fucking FUCK??? Thank the universe I am an atheist, cause if this is an representation of what's going into heaven, I would have been starting revolutions and rebellions already. Christ almighty save me from your followers!!!!

Thou hast the info. Do with it as thou wilt.

LOL Cat PORN

I hate you

avalon13 With the fire of a thousand suns!!!!

Current Mood: distressed

Healthcare update

The Agitator links to more taser atrocities

Police taser man in his bottom after arresting him

Warning: The following story contains graphic details:

BOISE - Two Boise Police officers have been disciplined by the Boise Police Department for "serious" policy violations after a complaint was filed that officers used excessive force during an arrest.

According to the Boise Community Ombudsman's report, in early 2009 police were dispatched to a house on a report of a fight between a man and a woman.

Police say they struggled to get inside the home to speak with the man. When police managed to get inside the home, the suspect was placed in handcuffs. The complainant alleged that he was Tased three times by police - once to his wrist, the second to the small of his back and the third to his buttocks.

Click the following link to listen to a police audio recording from the arrest.

The ombudsman's report states that the suspect was tased only two times after an investigation. One of those tases, however, was in the buttocks.

The use of force "was after he was handcuffed," said Ombudsman Pierce Murphy. "And it was in the most senstive, private areas, and accompanied by threatMORE

Gates Is Lucky Cambridge Doesn’t Tase

Henry Louis Gates is lucky Cambridge Police don’t use tasers. Anywhere else, it might have been different. Seriously, a quick Google News search of the last month alone reveals a barrage of police tasing incidents across the country one more barbaric than the other: grandmas, grandpas, the mentally ill, teens and even children. Some of these taser victims died. One (ok, in Australia) burst into flames, another was left with burns in his anus, and yet another, a 14-year-old girl, got it in the head — running away after a dispute with her mother over a cell phone (caution, graphic).
All — in varying degrees — needed to be “subdued” by police, and were. It is, after all, a most effective tool in that regard, especially when dealing with pregnant women, 16-year-olds with broken backs and 6-year-old boys. After reading news reports dating back to 2004 about the hyper-use of these 50,000-volt zap guns, it’s not difficult to imagine what might have happened if Gates were say, in Boise, and had hurled one more insult, used a few expletives, raised a hand or moved toward Officer James Crowley in a “threatening manner,” much like this guy, who was irate and scary, but nonetheless handcuffed and shackled, when he was Tasered in a Kentucky court on July 22.

When Reason wrote about Tasers in 2005, there were 6,000 law enforcement agencies employing Taser guns. The high-voltage weapons, according to the Amnesty International statistics in the report, “are used on unarmed suspects in 80 percent of the cases, for verbal non-compliance in 36 percent, and for cases involving ‘deadly assault’ only 3 percent of the time.” Today some 14,200 police departments use Tasers, along with countless school districts across the country. In Pennsylvania alone for example, Tasers were employed by police in 122 schools as of June.MORE

via:crooks and liars...

Erik Prince's company Blackwater (now known as XE) has been embroiled in controversy for years. Company employees have posted videos online of their own ruthless behavior and abuses against Iraqi citizens, and can be heard laughing off camera. We're now finding out that this brutality most likely came from the top, down from Prince himself -- former employees are finding their consciences and telling horrifying stories about their former boss:

A former Blackwater employee and an ex-US Marine who has worked as a security operative for the company have made a series of explosive allegations in sworn statements filed on August 3 in federal court in Virginia. The two men claim that the company's owner, Erik Prince, may have murdered or facilitated the murder of individuals who were cooperating with federal authorities investigating the company. The former employee also alleges that Prince "views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe," and that Prince's companies "encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life."

In their testimony, both men also allege that Blackwater was smuggling weapons into Iraq. One of the men alleges that Prince turned a profit by transporting "illegal" or "unlawful" weapons into the country on Prince's private planes. They also charge that Prince and other Blackwater executives destroyed incriminating videos, emails and other documents and have intentionally deceived the US State Department and other federal agencies. The identities of the two individuals were sealed out of concerns for their safety.

These allegations, and a series of other charges, are contained in sworn affidavits, given under penalty of perjury, filed late at night on August 3 in the Eastern District of Virginia as part of a seventy-page motion by lawyers for Iraqi civilians suing Blackwater for alleged war crimes and other misconduct. Read on...

It would be nice if the news networks would stop trying to dig up MJ's life and turn their investigative skills to this atrocity.

Digby sez:

DASH CAM VIDEO: http://www.cnjonline.com/video/?video...
Tucumcari Police Chief Roger Hatcher has been placed on paid administrative leave pending the outcome of an investigation into last weeks Taser shooting of a teenage girl.

Hatcher said he shot two Taser darts at Kailee Martinez, 14, Thursday while responding to a domestic dispute between the girl and her mother. One hit her in the head and the other struck her back.

Martinez said she was released from Albuquerques University of New Mexico Hospital on Sunday following a two-hour surgery to remove one of the darts from her head.

The surgery left her with 18 staples and six stitches.

"I feel good being home," Martinez said Tuesday. "It is a lot better than being in a hospital."

Martinez mother, Stacy Akin, said she drove her daughter to police headquarters after they fought about a cell phone.

Hatcher said the girl walked away from the police station and when he talked with Akin she had a bloody lip and scratches from a fight.MORE

The she links to a guest post on that cesspool of Repubublican crazies known as the Corner, in which a police tells us what we all know already, they are in authority and we all need to sit down and shut up and don't give them any lip. OR ELSE. The next jackass who tells me anything about protecting and serving will get a pile of expletives. Yes, I am that pissed at the mo'.

To make matters worse...Taser International has just announced an improvement to their abomination of a weapon. It can now fire three rounds without needing to be recharged. YIPPEEE!!!! I am sure we will all sleep better at night with this info. And fuck it, while they are at it, why don't they get some federal dollars for that shit, so that law enforcement can continue to torture people with them? I mean, stimulus and all, right?

After all, there are so many people to torture:In Mobile, Alabama this week, policemen used lethal force on Antonio Love, a deaf and mentally disabled man, who would not come out of the bathroom. Because he had a lethal weapon. An umbrella

And in something I should have blogged but managed to forget, which sucks:In the memory of Robert Mitchell can we please stop calling tasers nonlethal force?

Annndddd: Assault on Black Women - Tasered While Black After her toddler Murdered

Immigrants, of course tend to get some of the worst of police violence directed towards them:Homeland Security and racism

Of course, it is no wonder that those same racist, entitled, I-have-a-gun-and-a-badge-so-I-can-do-anything-bastards, pull these shenanigans: a study has found that ICE agents are breaking and entering people's homes to look for illegal immigrants. This because they are under pressure to fulfill their quotas.

The researchers sketch out a harrowing scenario of a typical home invasion:

There is story after story of ICE agents, armed with only an administrative warrant, yelling and banging on doors and then forcing their way into homes in the pre-dawn hours by pushing their way in if residents unlock their doors, and otherwise climbing through windows or kicking in doors. Some residents report being awakened by the presence of armed ICE officers in their bedrooms who illegally gained entry through unlocked doors.
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And, finally, we come to Sheriff Arpaio

In case you don't know who Sheriff Joe Arpaio is, he fancies himself as "America's toughest sheriff". By "tough", he means "racist, sexist, and costing Arizona money hand over fist". The Phoenix New Times has an entire archive based on this guy's antics, and it's updated regularly. Highlights of Arpaio's 17-year reign include breaking a woman's arm, crushing a prisoner's larnyx, taping women inmates in the restrooms, some financial funny business and the occasional baby death. MORE

And thats just the start. And why does he get away with his unlawful, illegal, sick twisted cruel fucked up behaviour that has cost the state 43 MILLION DOLLARS in lawsuits? Even though the crime rate hasn't moved?

Well. His district is full of mostly conservative whites. And great many of his victims are suspected illegal immigrants So he is powerful enough, therefore, to quash dissent.

I mean, I thought this was crazy: Sheriff Arpaio has suggested raiding the town of Mesa because the wife of a mayor there had the temerity to say during jury selection that Joe was not her hero..

But this:

The Phoenix New Times ran an investigation of Arpaio's real-estate dealings that included Arpaio's home address, which he argued was possibly a violation of state law. When the paper revealed that it had received an impossibly broad subpoena, demanding, among other things, the Internet records of all visitors to its web site in the previous two and a half years, sheriff's deputies staged late-night raids on the homes of Michael Lacey and James Larkin, executives of Village Voice Media, which owns the New Times. The deputies arrested both men for, they said, violating grand-jury secrecy. (The county attorney declined to prosecute, and it turned out that the subpoenas were issued unlawfully.)

Is fucking nuts. And he's untouchable.

And please please please don't make the mistake of thinking that these are isolated cases. Cut that the fuck out.

EDIT: via: