ALL MATT DAY AT REAL ART

Once again, I've let the links my old buddy Matt has sent me pile up in the Real Art in box. That can only mean one thing: it's now time for another All Matt Day. So, without any further ado, let's get to it.

Item #7,510: DeLay is evil

From Reuters via Capitol Hill Blue:

Police officials from across the country on Wednesday warned that dangerous assault weapons will flood U.S. streets if the ban on those guns expires next week but Republican congressional leaders expressed no concerns about letting the restriction lapse.

"I think the will of the American people is consistent with letting it expire, and so it will expire," Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, a Tennessee Republican, told reporters.

Asked why Congress wanted to legalize the military-style weapons again when public opinion polls found broad public support for keeping them illegal, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, a Texas Republican said, "We don't do things by polls."

And

Several pro-ban lawmakers repeated their call for President Bush to speak out for the continued prohibition on these weapons. Bush in his 2000 campaign backed the ban but has not worked for its extension.

DeLay said, "If the president asked me, it'd still be no.. It will expire Monday, and that's that."

Click here for the rest.

Of course, this was a few weeks ago, and the assault weapons ban, unfortunately, is now history. I knew about this when it was happening about a month ago, but I didn't really know about DeLay's cavalier comments on the issue. He is truly a sleaze-bag. Thanks to Matt for giving me more reasons to despise him.

From SiliconValley.com:

Torch-bearing mob of fair-use advocates marches on Capitol

Is the House intellectual property subcommittee an RIAA subsidiary? Clearly it must be if it's truly approved The Piracy deterrence and Education Act (PDEA). Sewn together from pieces of anti-peer-to-peer legislation exhumed and reanimated by clever little entertainment cartel trolls, the PDEA is a Frankenstein's monster of copyright law. Among other things, the law would create the first criminal copyright penalties for those who haven't engaged in willful criminal conduct.

Click here for the rest.

Okay, I must admit that I've benefited from file-sharing in a way that the RIAA wouldn't at all like, and I must also admit that I believe they've got a point. However, I still buy CDs and, frankly, the aggressiveness with which they've gone after illegal file-sharers coupled with their endless stream of bland, lame offerings at exorbitant prices has motivated me to say the hell with my legal purchases; I'm going to download as much as I can, those bastards. That is, this is a much more complicated situation than the black and white portrayal of "theft" offered by the recording industry would suggest. The bottom line is that technology has rendered their business model moot. It's time for them to figure out something that has some sort of economic sense to it, rather than depending on Big Government to do all their dirty work.

Next, a New York Times review of a new anti-Bush documentary, Hijacking Catastrophe:

A Plan to Create a New World Order

They suggest that the real reason for the war with Iraq is a two-decade, three-administration, neo-conservative master plan to--well, let's let Norman Mailer say the words, as he does in the film. At the end of the cold war, he proposes, the Republicans saw a "golden opportunity, now that Russia is out of the way, to take over the world." Or as the author Chalmers Johnson says on camera, without irony, they wanted to create "a new Rome, beyond good and evil."

You don't hear phrases like "take over the world" often these days without a James Bond movie review attached, but "Hijacking Catastrophe: 9/11, Fear and the Selling of American Empire" makes a convincing case with simple methods: talking heads, newspaper articles, an authoritative narrator (Julian Bond) and the occasional chart on military spending or the national debt.

The voices speaking out are not all wild-eyed liberals. In addition to predictable administration critics like Mr. Mailer, Noam Chomsky and Daniel Ellsberg, they include Scott Ritter, a former United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq; Stan Goff, a retired Army Special Forces master sergeant; and Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski (Air Force, retired), a former staff officer at the Pentagon. Their arguments appear to support the filmmakers' most serious accusations.

Click here for the rest.

This sounds like a pretty good film, even if the argument appears to be one I've been hearing for a couple of years now. It seems to me that the whole America-as-Rome point of view is totally obvious to anyone who is willing to look at the facts in an unbiased way. The problem is that Americans are extraordinarily biased: it seems virtually impossible to cut through the "America is a force for democracy and justice" belief drilled into children from their first day in public school. That is, the argument presented in this documentary is pretty difficult for most Americans to accept, despite is veracity. That's why we need more of this stuff.

Okay, that wraps it up for this latest installment of All Matt Day. I've actually got a few more links on hand that Matt sent me, so I'll probably be having another AMD soon.

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