Quick Roundup 110
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
EU to Regulate YouTube?
Unsurprisingly, officials from an entrenched bureaucracy see a new technology as a frontier for the expansion of their power.
[The British] Government is seeking to prevent an EU directive that could extend broadcasting regulations to the internet, hitting popular video-sharing websites such as YouTube.Equally unsurprisingly, the journalists covering this story, being members of an entrenched ideology, fail to note the irony of government functionaries rewriting the dictionary to avoid considering the only truly viable alternative to government throttling of the Internet: deregulation of television.
...
Ministers argue that while television programmes should be subject to minimum standards, the content of websites should not be subject to EU regulation.
Mr Woodward is proposing a compromise that requires EU states to agree a new definition of what constitutes "television". He said: "It's common sense. If it looks like a TV programme and sounds like one then it probably is. A programme transmitted by a broadcaster over the net could be covered by extending existing legislation. But video clips uploaded by someone is not television. YouTube and MySpace should not be regulated."
Happy Birthday!
Reader Michael Gold reminded me that the United States Navy celebrated its 231st anniversary this October 13 by pointing me to this nice Michelle Malkin piece. Zero Bubble marks it at Ultraquiet No More, where Rob, who is stationed at Hawaii assures us that the quake there was no big deal.
Gore Preaches to the Choir
Al Gore made a stop in Houston recently to preach his "Fifth Gospel", of global warming hysteria, to the congregations of around 20 churches in the Houston area so he could enlist their members in his fifth column against the industrial West, a trend I have commented on before.
Gore didn't preach the gospel, he preached green. As part of a nationwide campaign involving more than 1,000 churches, including 130 in Texas, the local churches showed Gore's global-warming film An Inconvenient Truth for free.Too bad this report wrongly credits global warming hysteria with being "scientific". If it had noted its nonscientific nature, it could have been far more interesting.
The viewings highlighted an unexpected and increasingly powerful movement: a banding together of scientists and religious scholars to raise public awareness about the role humans play in warming the world and to encourage action to reverse the trend.
"This is a movement that is growing exponentially in the religious community," said Paul Gorman, executive director of the National Religious Partnership for the Environment, an organization of American Jews, Catholics, Protestants and evangelical Christians he founded in 1993.
Gorman said scientists and people of faith -- divided on numerous issues from the tenets of Darwin to embryonic stem cell research -- are overlooking their differences to focus on the environment.
"We do not have to agree on how and why the world was created in order to work together to preserve it for posterity," he said.
As Debra Saunders put it in a recent column on the reception Inhofe's recent debunking speech received, "The important thing is to have faith in those who warn: The end is near." Thus two facts about this trip were much more significant than the touted alliance between what are really two religions: (1) That so many scientists are falling prey to a religious dogma dressed in the trappings of science; and (2) That the evangelicals hadn't jumped onto the global warming bandwagon long ago.
Cubans in Hot Water
Isn't it sad that a people with this much ingenuity are having to waste it on something so many of us take for granted?
Forget the murders for a moment. This is what all the spoiled brats (e.g., some of the commenters and hate-mailers for this post) wearing Che tee shirts are celebrating, though they'd never admit it. In fact, the fools would probably laugh at this picture and at anyone who pointed out that what it depicts is a direct result of their lofty ideals being put into practice.
-- CAV
4 comments:
Most of the critiques of the EU miss the obvious fact that it is completely unnecessary. If the EU ceased to exist tommorrow, nobody would be any worse off.
Indeed, From the looks of it, the EU is worse than unnecessary!
Just think, the whole of WWII in Europe could have been avoided if the states now doing so would have ceded their sovereignty to Hitler, who was the first to dream of the EU. All that fighting for nothing. Tsk.
In other areas of taking giants steps backward: Do you think that today's "scientists" who are now sacrificing their reason on the Green altar, are surprised that there are those calling for Nuremberg-type trials for "global warming deniers"? These folks ought to have taken a history course or two. (And, as an aside, I'd bet a dollar that many of those who are calling for such trials are the same ones who cry about the "torture" at Gitmo.)
The global warming folk have their own form of dhimmitude. Self-enslavement seems to be all the rage these days.
It never ceases to amaze me how some of the most ludicrous practices follow so inexorably from some of the most commonly-held "ideals" (e.g., mass poverty from the universal slavery of the able implied by "from each according to his ability to each according to his need") and yet so many people cling to the stupid notions so tenaciously.
I often wonder just what it takes for some people to question certain notions -- and wonder whether I am missing something.
But then, I sometimes think that I am lucky to miss whatever it is that I am missing....
Color me glad to be baffled, I guess.
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