Read moreFurthermore, the text of the agreement reveals that U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) Ron Kirk has agreed to place the approval of “domestic stakeholders” (read: large corporations) on a level with that of the Congress. It is precisely this exalting of big business that has troubled many of the people’s representatives in Congress.
Recently Zach Carter of the Huffington Post reported that Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee’s Subcommittee on International Trade, Customs and Global Competitiveness, was stonewalled by the office of the USTR when he attempted to see any of the draft documents related to the governance of the TPP.
In response to this rebuff, Wyden proposed a measure in the Senate that would force transparency on the process. That was enough to convince the USTR to grant the senator a peek at the documents, though his staff was not permitted to peruse them.
Wyden spokeswoman Jennifer Hoelzer told HuffPost that such accommodations were “better than nothing” — but not ideal in light of the fact that the real work of drafting and evaluating legislation on Capitol Hill is performed by staffers who often possess expertise in particular areas of domestic and foreign policy.
“I would point out how insulting it is for them to argue that members of Congress are to personally go over to USTR to view the trade documents,” Hoelzer said. “An advisor at Halliburton or the MPAA is given a password that allows him or her to go on the USTR website and view the TPP agreement anytime he or she wants.”
A senator of the United States has to beg and plead and threaten legislation in order to be able to gain access to the TPP trade agreement, but corporate interests are given a password by the USTR that grants them a priori access to those same documents.
Now it is discovered that the chapter on intellectual property in the leaked TPP draft agreement launches another attack on U.S. sovereignty through the mandate that member nations enact regulations that requiring Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to privately enforce copyright protection laws.
These private companies — many of which are very small — would be forced to take upon themselves the responsibility of patrolling for and punishing any violation of the copyright laws by its subscribers.
Current U.S. law, specifically the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), would be supplanted by TPP Article 16.3. This provision in the TPP draft document paves the way for a new copyright enforcement scheme that extends far beyond the limits currently imposed by DMCA. In fact, it contains mandates more expansive than even those proposed in the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA).
ACTA is widely regarded as a threat to Internet freedom, as well as to the legislative power of the Congress. If ACTA is a threat than TPP is an all-out frontal assault.
Regardless of the merits of the DMCA, it is U.S. law and should not be subject to de facto appeal by the work of a body of internationalists who are not accountable to citizens of the United States.
Apart from the issues of sovereignty, putting such pressure on service providers is a threat not only to the owners of these small business, but also to Internet freedom, as well.
It is the good work of these ISPs that has created the Internet we know today. Were it not for the typically low-cost access these companies provide, the pool of readily accessible viewpoints, opinions, and news resources would be significantly shallower.
In a post-TPP world, ISPs would be forced to raise prices dramatically in order to cover the increase in their own overhead brought on by the requirement that they monitor and manage the websites they host.
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Read moreFinished Snake Widow. This was the second story I wrote for Hecate Snake Diaries, and was made right after The Snake and the Scorpion, so you can see my style leveled up during those two stories which I think is interesting. I also did caption boxes for it ahead of the writing, which in retrospect was really dumb, and it’s why the lettering is kind of more straight foward than the other entries in the anthology—there’s also a LOT more text.
It’s also the most shamelessly about my separation of any of the stories. When I was making it I just knew that every house felt haunted at that point, and my stomach was feeling like it was getting raped by demons of all shape. It’s okay though, HR Giger got me through. Embrace the nightmares, yeah?
So yeah now Hecate Snake Diaries is all finished. I just have to figure out how to wrangle it into a manageable PDF and then set it up for paid download. Which isn’t nearly as fun as every other stage of doing it, ha.
I’m pretty proud of it in the end. It’s not my first comic, or my longest(ophelia takes both of those feats) but I feel like this book ended up marking a huge progression for me as an artist, and I learned a lot making it. And beyond that, it’s the kind of comics I like. So I hope when I put the whole thing out, some people read it and like it. The next one will be even better.
It’s kind of interesting, I made this book across 3 different states, 3 different houses, and various states of hope or despair about my relationship—I can look at any page here, and remember where I was when I did it—which is remarkable because it was so many different places. Even within the same houses.
Read moreDon’t know exactly what this guy is about, except that he lives in the ground, and the ground is made of meat.
Global warming is often called “global weirding”, and the factors that have lead to this bovine sugar high are absolutely weird. Global trade and subsidies has combined with food science to create a glut of cheap sugar enhanced with cheap artificial flavorings and colors. Although the original article does not mention the specific brand of candy, from the photos it appears that they’re “rainbow belts” that, strangely enough, list corn syrup as their second ingredient after sugar. Not to mention that cows are ruminants. Even a “normal” diet of corn is fatal, over the long-term, for an animal that evolved to eat nothing but grass.
An example of how badly FUBAR the world food supply system is.
As Corn Withers in the Drought, Farmers Fatten Their Cows on Candy
(via worsethandetroit)
Read moreConsider: We are animals who can digest milk. But only because we first domesticated milk-bearing animals. When we did that, just a few thousand years ago, we genetically engineered ourselves
Read moreBut who knows what language its discoverers will understand in thousands or hundreds of thousands of years—or even if they will be human beings? Holtorf points out that a much earlier attempt to warn off future excavations, the Egyptian pyramids, were looted within a generation. “The future will be radically different from today,” says archaeologist Anders Högberg, who is also from Linnaeus University. “We have no idea how humans will think.”
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The sapphire disk is one product of that effort. It’s made from two thin disks, about 20 centimeters across, of industrial sapphire. On one side, text or images are etched in platinum—Charton says a single disk can store 40,000 miniaturized pages—and then the two disks are molecularly fused together. All a future archaeologist would need to read them is a microscope. The disks have been immersed in acid to test their durability and to simulate ageing. Charton says they hope to demonstrate a lifetime of 10 million years.
When the researchers measured the aphids’ levels of ATP — the ‘currency’ of energy transfer in all living things — the results were striking. Green aphids, which contain high levels of carotenoids, make significantly more ATP than do white ones, which are almost devoid of these pigments. Moreover, ATP production rose when the orange insects — which contain an intermediate amount of carotenoids — were placed in the light, and fell when they were moved into the dark. (via Photosynthesis-like process found in insects : Nature News & Comment)
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The Committee to Nuke Elysium 