Story from Reuters about a recent jobs summit. (H/T American Spectator via ECM)

Excerpt:

At a recent symposium, Intel boss Paul Otellini, a contributor to both parties, expressed concern about the “amount of variability in the system” created by the state of policy flux in healthcare, energy and tax policy. “It is very difficult to make a hiring decision,” he said. General Electric chief executive Jeffery Immelt, a strong supporter of Obama’s cap-and-trade proposal, added he would just like to “know what the rules are.”

All in all, a disturbing replay of the 1930s when FDR’s big changes left business reeling with uncertainty and confusion. The “devil you don’t know” and all that.

Small business is certainly with Big Business on this, particularly regarding the mercurial nature of healthcare reform. The substance of ObamaCare continues to morph daily — from the state of the public option to employer mandates to financing expanded coverage – as Senate leader Harry Reid scrounges for votes. On energy, the president will make big promises at Copenhagen even though cap-and-trade looks stillborn in the Senate.

As for financial reform, Senate banking committee chair Chris Dodd has proposed sweeping changes, while the Tim Geithner-Barney Frank version in the House seems beamed in from a universe where the credit crisis never happened. Compromise could prove elusive. Even Obama’s tax reform panel has delayed releasing its findings.

The thing you have to understand about business is that finding and hiring an employee is an expensive process. If this employee has to be laid off later because of government increasing tax rates or regulations, then that layoff poisons the atmosphere in the entire company. If you want businesses to feel comfortable about hiring, you need to convince them that you aren’t going to raise their taxes or expenses, unionize their work force, fine them for hurting the environment, or pass laws that encourage their employees to sue them for being offended, etc.

Legislative initiatives like card-check, health care mandates, cap-and-trade, ENDA, increased government spending, tariffs, “pay equity” laws, restrictions on executive salaries, capital gains tax hikes, etc., make businesses very risk-averse about hiring decisions. If Obama wants to attack businesses, these businesses may just leave the USA and set up shop elsewhere. But more likely they will just stay here and avoid hiring any new employees until the 2012 election.

By Eliot Van Buskirk

Tim Quirk, a senior vice president at the digital music service Rhapsody, used to front a band that was signed to one of the major labels, Warner Bros.

His experiences at Rhapsody taught him firsthand that it’s possible to build a big database that accounts for what each copyright holder is owed. However, he and others contend, major labels have no incentive to put such a transparent database in place — quite the opposite: They only stand to benefit by obfuscating the accounting process for middle- and long-tail bands and tracking their digital streams and downloads casually.

Quirk estimated that his band’s three out-of-print major-label releases should have earned between two and five times as much digital revenue as its four independently-released albums earned, given that they are “far more popular.”

But when he compared IODA’s payouts to Warner Bros.’ payouts over the same five-year period, he was shocked to discover the reverse to be true.

His band earned about $12,000 from the independent albums distributed digitally through IODA, but only $62.47 from Warner Bros., so $395,214.71 of the band’s advance remains unrecouped (meaning that it owes that amount against future royalties earned).

Quirk (right) doesn’t think his band will ever recoup that sizable advance, but it’s the principle of the thing. By refusing to update their accounting technology for dealing with revenue from digital streams and downloads — data that digital music services such as Rhapsody and iTunes already deliver to the label anyway — he claims major labels are letting all sorts of digital revenue slip through the cracks and into their coffers, not to mention absorbing large upfront royalty advances from music start-ups.

“We all know that major labels are supposed to be venal masters of hiding money from artists, but they’re also supposed to be good at it, right?” asks Quirk in his post.

The whole saga makes for a fascinating (if somewhat lengthy) read.

Clarification: Although Quirk’s post says he “doesn’t necessarily subscribe to [the theory] that labels and publishers deliberately avoid creating the transparent accounting systems today’s technology enables,” it also says, “what’s so weird about this, to me: they have the ability to tell the truth, and doing so won’t cost them anything.”

Update: Warner Music Group issued a statement: “As a matter of policy, we don’t comment on specific terms of artists’ agreements. Accurate accounting to our artists is a high priority for WMG. We take these issues seriously and Mr. Quirk’s implications to the contrary are flat-out wrong.”

Update: Rhapsody issued a statement: “Tim Quirk’s views are his own and do not reflect those of Rhapsody management. Rhapsody and our label partners are focused on ensuring that artists and copyright holders are compensated appropriately. After years of working together with Warner Music, we believe the company has made every effort to provide accurate accounting to its artists and copyright holders. The number of parties involved makes this a very complex problem to solve, but one that we, as an industry, are committed to solving.”

See Also:

• Streamlining the Search for Music
• Free Music Equals Net Profits
• Independence Day for Indie Bands
• Report: Beatles’ Rock Band Royalties Could Reach $40 Million
  
• Sony Buys Part of the Long Tail

(Image courtesy of Too Much Joy) Photo of Tim Quirk: Flickr/penmachine

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/12/major-label-messes-with-wrong-guy/

On Monday night, French media giant Vivendi and NBC parent company General Electric agreed to terms that clear the way for US cable giant Comcast to take a controlling stake in NBC Universal. An announcement from Comcast is expected within days. The proposed merger would create a media behemoth, and clear the way for an unprecedented era of media consolidation across cable, the Internet and broadcast television.

Be afraid. Comcast is both the largest cable company and the largest residential broadband provider in the United States: a $34-billion business with 24 million subscribers, reaching nearly one out of every four homes in the country. NBCU owns NBC, MSNBC, CNBC, Universal Studios, 27 television stations, and a host of other properties.

President Obama has promised that his administration would finally begin enforcing antitrust laws to prevent unreasonable consolidation of market power. If ever a media deal posed such a threat, this is it. The merged Comcast would be to media what Goldman Sachs is to Wall Street: “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money,” as Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi once described the latter.

It should come as no surprise that Wall Street and Washington are saying this is already a done deal: The media and telecommunications industry is second only to drug companies in how much it spends lobbying Washington. Its army of PR firms, lobbyists and sock-puppet think tanks is already blitzing the press corps and Capitol Hill. It’s readying Comcast CEO Brian Roberts for his close-up as a new media mogul and neglecting to mention the impact of this deal on everyday people.

Comcast has raised cable rates for years while raking in record profits nearly every quarter. It is anti-union. It cares nothing for independent, alternative programming. And if you’re a startup television channel, you can forget about getting a spot in Comcast’s lineup. Comcast will charge you far more for space on its lineup than you could possibly pay. Just ask Al Gore about his failed effort to get his Current TV a reasonable position in the cable lineup.

Let’s not forget that Comcast is the company that was caught illegally blocking peer-to-peer Internet downloads and then lying about it – earning a smack-down from the FCC for breaking Net Neutrality rules. And the company is known for blocking TV ads it didn’t like. The company’s track record of protecting the public’s interest isn’t exactly stellar.

And now, Comcast is set to control media across all distribution platforms. The company is threatened by the increasing amount of free content on the Net, and a public who is both watching entertainment on the Internet, and creating their own. NBC owns a major stake in Hulu, and Comcast likely wants to put the video service and all NBC content behind a paywall. Comcast and other cable companies are already putting the final touches on “TV Everywhere,” a paywall that requires a traditional cable subscription to watch online content owned by these companies. Comcast’s very survival depends on remaining the gatekeeper between you and the programs you want to watch, and it wants as little competition as possible.

Worse still, if the Comcast-NBC merger is allowed to go through, it will be the start of a catastrophic storm: a tidal wave of mega-deals by other content giants like News Corp. and Disney merging with distribution behemoths like Time Warner Cable and AT&T. In a nation where 98 percent of Internet users have only one or two choices of Internet service providers, we could witness a future in which a handful of phone and cable companies, merged with a handful of content companies, will put all premium content behind a paywall and make all other content hard or impossible to find.

ISPs’ content and applications — and those of their partner companies — will move at light-speed, while the rest of the Internet will seem like it’s still on dial-up. The result: homogenized corporate content, higher prices and fewer real alternatives so that distributors can prevent the “market fragmentation” that advertisers loathe. Sound familiar? The Internet will become the cable service of the 21st century — instead of the free and open arena for economic innovation, democratic participation and free speech that it’s been.

Some say that companies like Comcast are simply doing what they must to prosper. But we need to ask whether boosting Comcast’s bottom line is worth the cost to the rest of us. Such market power could destroy the promise of an open Internet and its unprecedented ability to amplify independent voices, reinvent journalism, and inspire new forms of entertainment.

The deal is expected to take at least six months to finalize, and it will possibly be more than a year for federal regulators to approve or reject the deal. The warped Washington conventional wisdom says that the deal is inevitable, but Free Press and our allies are rallying public opposition. The Obama administration has sharply criticized the previous administration’s weak antitrust record and promised vigorous oversight of anti-competitive deals — particularly those involving vertical mergers (like joining content and distribution companies) and innovation-focused industries like the Internet.

This merger is another major test of whether President Obama plans to deliver on his promises.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/josh-silver/mega-media-era-begins-gev_b_359386.html

photo: Bruno Manser Fonds

by Matthew McDermott

Here’s one solution to holding back loggers: Bruno Manser Fonds reports seventeen Penan communities in Sarawak, Borneo, Malaysia have proclaimed a new tropical forest reserve on their lands. The newly inaugurated Penan Peace Park will preserve their last remaining undisturbed forests from development, allowing tourism and preserving their culture.

Our Heritage Must Be Preserved
A former regional chief in the region, James Lalo Kesoh described the necessity of establishing the park:

As nomadic hunter-gatherers, we Penan people have been roaming the rainforests of the Upper Baram region for centuries. Even though we have settled down and started life as farmers sicne the late 1950s, we still depend on the forests for our food supply, for raw materials such as rattan for handicrafts, for medicinal plants and for other jungle products. Our entire cultural heritage is in the forest and needs to be preserved for future generations.

The Penan Peace Park consists of about 1630 square kilometers around the Gunung Murud Kecil mountain range, near the border of Indonesia.

The Penan people in the region have opposed logging in their rainforest for the past three decades, repeatedly blocking roads and taking direct action against encroachments.

Hat tip to Mongabay on this one…

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/12/malaysian-rainforest-tribes-establish-peace-park-push-back-loggers.php

Economic confidence may have spurred sudden demand for visas, college grads

By Patrick Thibodeau

WASHINGTON — Demand for H-1B visas has accelerated over the last six to eight weeks after being flat for months. This comes as the number of companies planning to increase college hiring is also on the rise. Together, the trends may be early indicators of an improving economy for skilled professionals.

Throughout summer and into September, demand for H-1B visas flatlined at about 45,000 visa petitions. But on Friday, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service released data showing that in two weeks alone it had received 3,300 H-1B petitions, continuing a spike that began in October that has increased the number of visas petitions to 58,900, approaching the 65,000 cap.

A separate H-1B cap of 20,000 for foreign workers who have earned an advanced degree from U.S. universities was reached in October.

If this demand for visas continues, the H-1B cap for the 2010 fiscal year may be met in a matter of days to early next year, according to estimates from a number of immigration attorneys.

An improving economic outlook and confidence in hiring may be driving this increase. The National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), an organization whose members include large companies of 7,000 employees or more that include tech firms, said that in its member survey for November that 28% of respondents planned to increase college hiring, compared with 17% in August.

“College hiring has started to look better, much better than it did,” said Ed Koc, who heads research at association. He said that anywhere from one-third to half of students in graduate programs are foreign nationals.

Koc also points out that the unemployment rate for college graduates holding bachelor’s degrees in October was 4.7%, down from 4.9% in September, according to U.S. labor data.

Sarah Hawk, who heads the immigration practice at Fisher & Phillips LLP in Atlanta, said she see a clear correlation between H-1B petition increases and student hiring. Companies that have workers on student visas are applying for H-1B visas in anticipation of improved budgets.

But Hawk and other immigration attorneys say the H-1B demand is now broader, and includes many occupations outside of IT.

Vic Goel, of Goel & Anderson LLC in Reston, Va., said he has seen an increase in H-1B visa petitions in the last six to eight weeks, but also “a significant overall decline in the number of H-1Bs that we are filing for pure play IT positions.” But he said, “I have seen slight increases in cases for school teachers, engineers, management analysts, product development roles [and other positions.]“

Brian Graham, of Strasburger & Price LLP in Dallas, said the increase in demand started in October. He is seeing “more interest in new hiring all across the board in different industries,” including high-tech, nursing, and, in particulr, gaming development such as for multi-player games.

Article Continues – http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9141648/H_1B_demand_spike_may_signal_improving_outlook_for_skilled_pros

By Tony Bradley

Nokia has filed a lawsuit against eight LCD manufacturers accused of collusion and price-fixing. Nokia is hoping to win damages to recover money it overpaid to the various companies for LCD displays for its mobile handsets.

The lawsuit includes Seiko Epson, Hitachi, LG Display, Philips, Samsung, Sharp, Toshiba, and Chunghwa Picture Tubes as defendants. Nokia has not specified the amount of the damages it is seeking, but the alleged collusion covers a ten-year period spanning 1996 to 2006, during which time Nokia claims to have paid inflated prices for the LCD displays.

Nokia said in a statement “Nokia has filed suits to recover overcharges it paid as a result of cartel activities which are currently under government investigation.” The statement further explains “When certain companies and management employees have already admitted participating in, or are indicted for, global price-fixing cartels involving components Nokia has purchased, it is reasonable for Nokia to seek redress.”

Fair enough. LG, Sharp, and Chunghwa Tubes have already admitted participating in the price-fixing cartel and have been fined $585 million by the U.S. Department of Justice, and AT&T has filed a similar lawsuit seeking damages related to the collusion.

The news of the price-fixing is nothing new, though, and the alleged collusion ended three years ago, so consumers are unlikely to see any benefit from the fines or lawsuits. Ostensibly, devices–particularly smartphones–could be less expensive if the price handset makers pay for the LCD displays isn’t artificially inflated.

The cost consumers pay for mobile devices is already subsidized by the wireless service providers. Even if the full price of a high-end smartphone dropped from $600 to $500, the carriers would most likely absorb the savings as additional profit rather than reflecting the savings by dropping the subsidized pricing even lower.

One potential benefit, though, would be that users may be more likely to pay the full price if the no-contract, non-subsidized cost was lower. Perhaps rather than waiting every two years for contracts to expire and upgrading with a new subsidized device, users would be able to simply purchase new devices at will as compelling new technology comes out.

Nokia’s legal team has been busy lately. Nokia also recently filed a suit against Apple, alleging that the iPhone infringes on a number of patents held by Nokia. Apple pales in comparison to Nokia in terms of handset sales volume, yet generates significantly more profit per device. Nokia wants a piece of that revenue pie.

Nokia has had a rough time la tely with stagnant sales, declining revenue, and a stale portfolio of handsets. Hopefully Nokia isn’t hoping these lawsuits will help it rebound, though. It should learn a lesson from watching AT&T’s recent legal circus and realize that you can’t litigate your way to success.

Tony Bradley tweets as @PCSecurityNews, and can be contacted at his Facebook page .

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/183485/nokia_lcd_suit_could_lower_handset_costs.html

Oh, but it is different this time, –right?

Tiger’s driveway and crash path. LOL!

Golf Digest is kicking its ass over its January cover:

BENEATH THE SPIN • ERIC L. WATTREE

The phrase “New World Order” says it all. But in our blind naivete’ and the belief that “it can’t happen here,” the vast majority of American people believe the phrase refers to the reshuffling, in terms of importance, of the various nations around the world. We fail to understand that the change is much more profound than that. The new world order not only applies to a geo-political reshuffling among nations, but the reshuffling of the internal economic structure within individual nations as well.

That means that as the world moves from many separate national economies to one global economy the class structure of the various nations of the world must be adjusted to accommodate the new state of affairs. In turn, that means that the high standard of living enjoyed by the American middle class since WWII can no longer be sustained in an economy where many of America’s competitors are paying their workers less per week, than many of us spend on lunch per day. That accounts for why American jobs are being outsourced to other countries, and Walmart, one of the largest retail corporations in the world, has based its business model on purchasing most of its merchandise from China in order to undercut the price demands of its competitors.

Walmart is a microcosm of the revised American business strategy under the new world order. One can look at Walmart’s business model, and the socioeconomic profile of its employees, and see exactly what direction American business, and our society, is headed as a whole.

Walmart’s business strategy is to hire easily replaceable and low skilled employees who are at, or very near, the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. It then takes advantage of their precarious economic condition to squeezes every dime of profit out of the company’s operation . They aggressively fight organized labor to hold down employee wages and benefits, and deny their employees anything approaching affordable health-care. That, essentially, is the American business model under the new world order.

Business is no longer a friend of the American people. Where business was once our partner in a symbiotic relationship, it is now a predator to consumers and employees alike. Our parents could pull into a gas station and a guy in a white shirt and bow tie would run out to check their oil and water, then put air in their tires as he pumped twenty-two cents a gallon gas into their tanks. I know – gas is no longer that cheap, but what happen to the service?

It was once considered unseemly for a woman to have to pump gas – I don’t think my mother even knew how to operate a gas pump. But now it’s become so routine in our culture that if you’re a passenger it’s no longer politically correct to even offer to pump the gas for a woman (“What, you think because I’m a woman I don’t have sense enough to squeeze a nozzle?”). Now my mother would not only have to pump her own gas, check her own oil, and put air in her tires, but they’d make her pay extra for the air. Think about that. They charge us for air!

The reason for that is greed. When the United States had a thriving industrial economy one class complimented the other. Labor was well paid and given the security of knowing that they had a job for life, so they had the confidence to purchased goods that the corporations produced. That allowed the companies that sold the goods to prosper, to the benefit of the investor class.

But now, in a global market, in order to remain competitive with countries that pay their workers just above slave wages, corporations have to squeeze every penny, and every concession out of the labor class that they can get. And since the heads of these corporations must make huge profits to justify their unconscionably oversized bonuses, they prey on their workers by undercutting their benefits and outsource the very jobs that the economy is dependent upon to sustain the corporation, and the nation. But since these corporate heads live from bonus to bonus and only think about themselves, they never stop to consider the negative impact of their irresponsible behavior.

So when Wall Street or the Fed announces that the economy is thriving, they’re not talking about the American economy as a whole – they’re only talking about the monetary return of the investor class. A thriving economy means they’re successfully squeezing the American worker to the limit, and gouging the consumer of every penny that he can afford to part with – and a few that he can’t. It is that kind of greed and irresponsibility that led to last year’s economic disaster, and nothing has changed.

In the global economy of the new world order, corporations no longer need the American worker to sustain their profits. Now that they can outsource their labor, and purchase and sell their goods overseas, the American worker is no longer a partner in the corporation’s viability. the worker has now been relegated to the status of field hand. The only time they need us is when they want to tap the treasury for our tax dollars to pay off their gambling debts.

And this is the very same group that the Republicans and Liebercrats are trying to protect. This is also the group that the wingnuts are fighting so hard to keep between them and their doctors. There should be no doubt in anyone’s mind that the Republicans are protecting the very same insurance industry that victimized us in Wall Street bailout. They took our money, now they’re using it to block affordable healthcare for the American people.

They were paid billions of dollars by large corporations to cover corporate gambling debts. AIG accepted corporate funds, knowing that they didn’t have the resources to cover the debts if the corporations got into trouble. Then when the corporations rolled snake eyes, AIG simply turned to the American people and said, you’ve got to cover these debts, or else. We and our clients are much too big to be allowed to fail.

An article in Wikipedia points out that “The AIG Financial Products division headed by Joseph Cassano, in London, had entered into credit default swaps to insure $441 billion worth of securities originally rated AAA. Of those securities, $57.8 billion were structured debt securities backed by subprime loans.” So not only did the American taxpayer pay off this insurance company’s debt, but we paid off a debt that originated in another country.

Now your money is being taken once again, but this time, they’re taking YOUR money, to pay YOUR representative, to block an attempt by President Obama to stop them from cutting YOUR throat in a time of crisis, just like they did the corporations on Wall Street. But there’s one very big difference – you and you’re family are not too big to fail, so without the benefit of a robust healthcare reform, you’re simply gonna bite the dust – and with the corrupt and able assistance of many of your very own representatives.

I’m sure that many are going to call me crazy socialist, and continue to tear up as Boehner, Lieberman, and the various other demagogues shuffle out and look into the camera with the solemnity of the pope. But just remember, when they tell you that they’re fighting for truth, justice, and the American way, the truth is so glaring that sometimes it slips through in some of the most unlikely places. Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) said the following:

“So this may be an audacious suggestion, but I would suggest we put aside the health care debate until next year, the same way we put cap and trade and climate change and talk now about the essentials, the war and money.”

So there you have it – “war and money.” That just about sums up your place in the new world order.

–
Eric L. Wattree
wattree.blogspot.com

Religious bigotry: It’s not that I hate everyone who doesn’t look, think, and act like me – it’s just that God does.

A Princeton researcher finds himself bombarded with demands to pay up after swapping adult movies online—but he didn’t do it. It appears to be another case of extremely-lazy IP “enforcement” using bad BitTorrent data collection.

By Nate Anderson

Content industries are pushing “three-strikes” Internet disconnection laws around the world, but how accurate are the detection methods used to bust online infringers? Princeton computer scientist Mike Freedman says that there’s still a big need for improvement after one of his projects attracted 100 warning and settlement letters in September 2009 alone, despite not actually sharing the files in question.

The root of the problem, he noted in a blog entry last week, is that some investigators do an absolute minimum of work before dashing off a warning letter. In this case, the “Video Protection Alliance” sent Freedman’s CoralCDN project letters without apparently verifying that CoralCDN was swapping the files in question; instead, it looks as though the Alliance grabbed IP addresses from a BitTorrent tracker and trusted the tracker to be totally accurate.

A BitTorrent tracker coordinates the various peers in a “swarm,” keeping track of which users have which bits of a particular file. When a new machine joins a swarm looking for that file, it is given a list of all peers which are sharing parts of it. The system isn’t necessary—newer “trackerless” BitTorrent setups can operate without a tracker—but it remains common, and it’s a simple way for investigators to quickly grab long lists of “pirate” IP addresses.

This only works if a tracker is passing out reliable information—a faulty assumption. Tracker operators aren’t interested in making their trackers simple enforcement tools for the content police, so some popular sites purposely add legitimate, non-infringing addresses to their trackers. The goal is to poison the well just enough that content owners can’t use tracker data with impunity, but not so much that it degrades performance of the swarm.

It’s hardly a secret, either, as groups like The Pirate Bay have publicly announced their support of the scheme. Academic researchers have known about it for years, too; a well-publicised study from mid-2008 found that “indirect” detection of infringement was a common practice, and that with little trouble researchers could even “frame” a device like a networked printer.

Some links to Freedman’s CoralCDN project were added to trackers for just this reason, and it didn’t take long before the letters began pouring in. According to Freedman, they aren’t simple warning letters, either; the Video Protection Alliance also demands that letter recipients contact it in order to pay a settlement, or risk a federal copyright infringement trial.

Indeed, settlements appear to be VPA’s entire business; the company exists to be the “fast, secure and convenient way to settle your copyright violations online” for a “nominal” fee. The fee is nominal enough to ensure that it’s cheaper to settle than to hire a lawyer. As the company’s FAQ says, “It is likely that the cost incurred to retain a lawyer will exceed the settlement amount offered. The decision to hire a lawyer is entirely up to you.”

VPA is a newcomer to the “settle or we’ll sue” world, launching earlier this year with a focus on “the adult industry.” Other firms such as MediaSentry (which used to do RIAA investigations) make it a policy to connect directly to infringers’ machines and download at least parts of files, but Freedman believes that VPA is taking a shortcut and just grabbing addresses from BitTorrent trackers, then blasting out its notices.

The takeaway is plain: we can argue about whether Internet sanctions and disconnections are good policy, and we can argue about how best to implement that policy and its safeguards, but any such policies that act on these accusations from rightsholders have to be grounded on good data. If not, printers, open content delivery networks, and plenty of individuals could find themselves in the Internet penalty box, trying frantically to prove a negative.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/11/using-faulty-data-to-demand-settlements-from-innocent-surfers.ars

Melly Alazraki

The case of Abbott Laboratories’ (ABT) cholesterol drug TriCor is quite interesting. The drug has been a blockbuster, and it has been under patent protection for decades. That’s right, decades. Now, Abbott has managed to seal a deal with generic drug maker Teva Pharmaceuticals Industries Ltd. (TEVA) that would stave off generic competition for TriCor — yet again — until March 2011 at least.

How did Abbott manage to keep TriCor under patent protection all these years? The story begins back in the 1960s, when the drug was discovered by the French company Fournier. It began selling the product in Europe in 1975 and Abbott licensed it in 1998. The drug’s underlying patent had expired by that time, but Abbott, which earns more than $1 billion in annual sales from the drug, found a way to patent it again … and again … and again.

www.britishblogs.co.uk

I read this article about the march of the world’s politicians towards Copenhagen, which continues in the face of the scientific scandal dubbed “climategate”. The author in the Toronto Sun gives the reason as the alliance of Big Government, Big Business and Big Green, which shrug off legitimate science. He suggests they stifled their own doubts about recent global cooling not explained by their computer models, manipulated data, plotted ways to avoid releasing it under freedom of information laws and attacked fellow scientists and scientific journals for publishing even peer-reviewed literature of which they did not approve.

The Trumpet.com goes another step further and publishes some of the more than 1,000 e-mails, released last week after servers of the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (cru) were hacked and the information was posted on the internet.

Investigate magazine’s TGIF Edition tonight confirmed the story with the director of Britain’s Climate Research Unit, Phil Jones, who said that his organization has been hacked, and the data flying all over the internet appears to be genuine.

“Jones said, ‘We were aware of this about three or four days ago that someone had hacked into our system and taken and copied loads of data files and emails.’”

Here’s the entire story and below are some sample from the e-mails, with all of them here in searchable format:

• Doctored data:

I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.

• Frustration with facts that do not support the global warming theory:

The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.

• Destroying evidence:

Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?

Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment – minor family crisis.

Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address.

We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.

• Blacklisting scientists who disagree:

I think we have to stop considering “Climate Research” as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board…What do others think?”

I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.

It results from this journal having a number of editors. The responsible one for this is a well-known skeptic in NZ.

The Hacker

The hack is believed to have been the work of a cru insider who has essentially blown the whistle on their operations. Some are calling the Climategate scandal the greatest in modern science. The documents definitely appear to confirm long-held suspicions of skeptics: that the global warming theory is a politically motivated farce.

The Wall Street Journal has tried to contact many of the scientists who sent and received the e-mails in question. It reports,

Some of those mentioned in the e-mails have responded to our requests for comment by saying they must first chat with their lawyers. Others have offered legal threats and personal invective. Still others have said nothing at all. Those who have responded have insisted that the e-mails reveal nothing more than trivial data discrepancies and procedural debates.

Yet all of these nonresponses manage to underscore what may be the most revealing truth: that these scientists feel the public doesn’t have a right to know the basis for their climate-change predictions, even as their governments prepare staggeringly expensive legislation in response to them.

Telegraph columnist James Delingpole has been alerting his readers to the shaky foundation under the global warming theory for years. On November 20, he wrote:

In September—I wrote the story up here as “How the global warming industry is based on a massive lie”—cru’s researchers were exposed as having “cherry-picked” data in order to support their untrue claim that global temperatures had risen higher at the end of the 20th century than at any time in the last millennium. cru was also the organization which—in contravention of all acceptable behavior in the international scientific community—spent years withholding data from researchers it deemed unhelpful to its cause. This matters because cru, established in 1990 by the Met Office, is a government-funded body which is supposed to be a model of rectitude. Its HadCrut record is one of the four official sources of global temperature data used by the ipcc. …

Climate Is Hijacked

We already know that the climate change nonsense doesn’t work because  Europe’s five-year-old cap-and-trade (a.k.a. cap-and-tax) market — the Emissions Trading Scheme — has done nothing to make the world cooler. The entire scheme does nothing more than “make hedge fund managers, speculators and Big Energy giddy with windfall profits, while making everyone else poorer by driving up the cost of energy, and thus of most goods and services, which need energy to be lighted, heated, cooled, grown, constructed, manufactured, produced and transported.”

Unfortunately, we’ve a long, long way to go before the public mood (and scientific truth) is reflected by our policy makers. There are too many vested interests in [anthropogenic global warming], with far too much to lose either in terms of reputation or money, for this to end without a bitter fight.

I’m thinking this was not the work of a hacker, but rather a disgruntled insider and there is, apparently, enough evidence in the papers & emails to be seriously embarrassing to the climitista alarmists. In my opinion, someone should give that ‘insider’ a Nobel Prize! Watch for a lot of spin being created to counter the impending dose of sunlight.

Further Links On The Subject

• BBC story (confirms hacking, nothing about the content)

• The Guardian (confirms; says skeptics think it proves a collusion)

• Foxnews (similar)

• The Telegraph (climate scientists accused)

• Lord Lawson calls for public inquiry!!! (update, Monday, Telegraph: join his GWPF)

• And so do Jim Inhofe & other GOP MPs…

• George Monbiot (a top AGW champion): shaken by a “major blow”; Jones should resign

• Hans von Storch: they should resign, science fixes itself (moderate climate boss, read the “News”)

• Zorita, Hans’s close colleague: Why Mann, Jones, Rahmstorf should be barred from the IPCC

• Boston Herald, CBS, Reuters, CNN, UPI, AP/ABC (similar)

• Wall Street Journal, Russia Today (tougher, more details about the content: 1st most read and 2st most e-mailed WSJ article at least in Europe)

• Additional newspapers (Climate Depot)

• Real Climate (confirms hacking, suggests that the climate scientists are frustrated angels)
• Glenn Beck YouTube Video on Climate Change cover-up
• Lateline video about this global warming cabala

Republican. Democrat. Libertarian. What do they stand for? Where do I fit? I can’t answer that for you. You have to answer it for yourself. I can direct you to a quiz that will help you determine it. The world’s smallest political quiz at http://www.theadvocates.org/quizp/index.html .

I can, however, give you my take on the parties and what they mean to me. My views can be boiled down short enough to fit in this post comfortably and still get the message across. For example, the Republican Party, they stand for big business. The Democrat Party, they stand for big government. The Libertarian Party, they stand for the individual. Is that short and sweet enough for you? Oh, you’d like a little more?

Well, let’s see. The Republican party has traditionally sided with GM, GE and Wal-Mart. They counted on the trickle down theory of economics. In other words the rich get richer and the people get more scraps from the table of big business. It works ok, but in recent years they’ve been trying to follow a more Constitutionally friendly agenda. Without much success, I might add.

Now the Democrat Party is totally different while being exactly the same. Confused? Basically, the Democrat party thinks that government can solve any problem from poverty to quantum physics. They claim to be for the working class while expanding the welfare state. Am I making this clear? No? That’s because they are very contradictory. At least with the Republicans you know how they’re going to screw you. The Democrats try to hide it. But the result is the same, you and I pay more.

The Libertarian party, contrary to popular belief, is the most conservative. They actually believe what the Constitution says. They are for the individual and his rights. They do desire to remove most of the barriers in the way of business as well. However, this can create a kind of “buyer beware” sort of climate. They believe in smaller government, just enough to get the job done.

I personally, am an Independent at this point. But if I had to side somewhere it would definitely be Libertarian.