Letter to Senator Elizabeth Warren about the CASE ACT S.1273
TO: Senator Warren and staff; whom it may concern
FROM: Henry Edward Hardy
SUBJECT: CASE ACT S. 1273 concerns, proposed revisions
DATE: October 23, 2019
Dear Senator Warren.
I am a strong supporter. We in Somerville Ward 7 love you and we have your back.
I want to share with you in more detail some of the concerns about the CASE ACT S. 1273 which I shared during my call to your office today.
Copyright is enabled by the US Constitution Article I, Section 8, Clause 8:
[The Congress shall have power] “To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.“
In other words, the social good desired is for all writings and discoveries to come into the public domain in a reasonable time.
The development of copyright law over the past century has gone instead in the direction of keeping copyright works out of the public domain for longer and longer times, and imposing more and more harsh punishments on violators, and moving into the domain of strict liability without regard for knowledge, or intent of the alleged violator.
“Copyright trolls” churn out hundreds of thousands of demand letters to try to bully individuals without the means to afford legal representation to settle on their terms. The people who will be the targets and victims of the CASE Act will be the most vulnerable and underprivileged members of society. Just missing a notice or failing to file the right papers in a timely manner could lead to a default judgment of $15,000 dollars or more.
A possible remedy for the CASE Act is to revise it such that:
* The plaintiff must show knowledge and intent by the alleged violator.
* The plaintiff must demonstrate with clear and convincing evidence that a specific accused person committed specific illegal acts on a specific day and time, in a specific place, in a specific manner, causing a specific harm. Not just Internet Protocol Number or MAC address matching over a range of dates.
* Fair use must be a specifically available and overriding defense.
* The plaintiff must document actual harm in a specific dollar amount.
* The accused who are indigent, disabled, or on public assistance must receive defense counsel at federal expense.
* There should be no elements of strict liability and the burden of proof must lie entirely with the plaintiff.
* There should be substantial punishments for those who misuse the statutory procedures to churn out false or unsupported claims. In particular, the ‘unclean hands’ doctrine should apply to plaintiff trolls who have already been found in violation.
Thanks for all you do and we love you!
Best,
Henry Edward Hardy
Trump Appears to be Unfit for Office
Trump Appears to be Unfit for Office
This is not normal. It isn’t normal for the President of the United States to call himself a “very stable genius.” Repeatedly. It isn’t normal for the President to refer to his own supposed, and indeed, hypothetical, “great and unmatched wisdom.”
It isn’t normal to threaten to destroy an allied country, NATO member Turkey, if they do what the President just told the Turkish President they could do.
It isn’t normal to call respected senior members of Congress traitors, or call for impeaching them, as if that was a thing under the Constitution. It isn’t.
I disagree profoundly with Mr. Trump’s behaviors and statements. I can’t offer an opinion about Mr. Trump’s policies or beliefs, because he blows every which way with the opinion of the last person he talked to, or the last thing he saw on TV or some crazed internet trollery.
Donald Trump is manifestly unfit for office. These past few weeks he’s eclipsed Richard Nixon and even the madness of King George and is saying things every day which are not only manifestly untrue, and self-contradictory, but which one sees and wonders where does this end?
Mr. Trump should not have access to anything which could be harmful to himself or others, much less nuclear weapons and a military which spends as much as the next ten military powers combined.
It is time, long past time, to remove Mr. Trump from office by legal means, whether that be by the 25th Amendment, Impeachment & Trial, or the ballot box. The sooner, the better.
letter to the New York Times, Trump’s Ukraine Call Was ‘Crazy’ and ‘Frightening,’ Official Told Whistle-Blower
Copyright © 2019 Henry Edward Hardy
Comments on Stephens article in NYT on Democratic Party issue positions
Comments on Stephens article in NYT on Democratic Party issue positions
The practical facts about immigration is that criminalizing it doesn’t stop it.
What it does is present the United States with a conundrum; imprison, intern and/or deport tens of millions of people, many or most of whom have American citizens in their immediate families, or see the rule of law trampled through non-enforcement of an unenforceable & morally reprehensible law.
The alternative to withdrawing from Afghanistan is to keep US forces there forever. How is that in US interests? The US attempt at nation building has been such a notable failure that the US has seen fit to exclude its own puppet government from the peace negotiations.
How is a state of permanent, unwinnable war preferable to peace?
The authorization for use of military force in Afghanistan was premised on the constitutional article regarding letters of marque & reprisal, an anti-pirate clause. Well, the Al Queda “pirates” have been defeated and UBL is long gone. And so should the US be from Afghanistan.
How is it that Mr. Stephens apparently believes that free, taxpayer-supported public education for all is economically unsustainable in the US, though countries such as Germany & Sweden apparently find a way to accomplish this. How bout less spending on permanent wars & dominance of the entire world through economic & military interventions?
Regarding health care, once again, how is it that Stephens believes that the US can’t do what Europe and Canada can in providing free, quality healthcare for all?
To a neoliberal friend
Friend, you are precisely correct in identifying classical liberalism and neoliberalism as being economic philosophies and nothing but that in the strict sense of the terms.
I am using the term liberal in the American political context where liberalism is identified with FDR liberalism which is classic liberalism plus social programs borrowed from democratic socialism and new left liberalism which adds civil rights and anti-war planks to that platform.
In the US political context, neoliberalism is closely identified with the Clintons and has the following characteristics:
* Economic neoliberalsim including deregulation of the banks and industry.
* Rejecting social welfare programs “end welfare as we know it.”
* Support for the military-industrial complex and agressive use of a combination of propaganda and support for pro-American puppets through organizations such as the national endowment for Democracy plus a program of covert assassinations and multiple limited wars abroad, carried out through a combination of pinpoint air attacks and assassinations plus military, training, intel and economic aid for “moderate” terrorist militias.
* Triangulation, the political strategy of running to the left in the primary as a “progressive who gets things done” and then adopting in the general and as a governing strategy a position just slightly right of the Republicans, on the assumption that will create a solid governing majority from the center plus the left, the latter of which will be forced to take whatever crumbs they can get rather than nothing, or the worse republican alternative.
Neoliberalism failed with the Great Recession, and triangulation failed with the DNC and HC’s corrupt manipulation of the primary process.
We supported blue dog, right wing democrats for 50 years and it ended with a kick in Bernie’s teeth at the Convention. A friend of mine told me a lot of specifics about how they were spied on by infiltrators, decredentialled, had their pages taken away, were physically prevented from sitting together in blocks, were shouted down at every time they tried to speak or chant, and were physically manhandled and assaulted by HC and DNC operatives bullying them.
My delegate friend from Brooklyn said it was the saddest and most upset he has been since his father died. I heard similar stories from a number of other people who were there as Bernie delegates and whom I know and trust.
The machine right wing and neoliberal delegates aren’t getting a Mulligan for that, sorry. Not going to happen that we just say no worries well that’s just politics.
If that’s just politics then back at ya. How you liking it so far?
We will never support another Clinton or Clintonian triangulator unless we get equal support for our positions and our candidates. Yes to cooperation and alliance, but no to this entitled assumption that left wing democrats must support right wing democrats, but not the reverse.
Copyright © 2018 Henry Edward Hardy
Vote for Hillary Clinton to continue these Bush-Obama policies
Vote for Hillary Clinton to continue these Bush-Obama policies:
Eternal, undeclared, illegal, aggressive war. In Libya, Syria, Iraq, Mali, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sudan, Chad, Somalia, Nigeria, Philippines, Honduras, and Yemen. Universal surveillance. General Warrants. Secret courts. National Security Letters. Endless imprisonment without trial or charge. Effective abolition of the writ of habeas corpus, notwithstanding that it is in the US Constitution Article I, Section 9. Black sites. Rendition. Special Ops death squads. Assassination of US citizens without trial or charge. Including juveniles. Robot bombs sent to assassinate more than 2,000 civilians so far in neutral countries with which we are not at war. Mercantilist trade policies such as TTIP, TPP, NAFTA. Okay, Hillary was for TPP and helped write it, until she was suddenly against it a few months ago. Fracking. Bailing out Wall Sreet, AIG to the tune of $318 thousand million dollars, then also bailing out big banks like Citi, who were already re-insured by AIG. But Obama could not find $20 billion to bail out Detroit’s pension funds, nor $60 million for public works to replace all the lead pipes in Flint.
Copyright © 2016 Henry Edward Hardy
About Scanlyze
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Scanlyze is an online magazine of essays, commentary, satire, and analysis. Were we half as clever, for inspiration we would take Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Swift, Montaigne, or Seneca.
“The men who create power make an indispensable contribution to the Nation’s greatness, but the men who question power make a contribution just as indispensable, especially when that questioning is disinterested, for they determine whether we use power or power uses us.”
John F. Kennedy, October 26, 1963
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