“‘War’ with air quotes isn’t about achieving an objective. It’s about maintaining credibility!” http://www.thenation.com/blog/176091/when-war-not-war

is planning a research trip to the Labadie archive. Will be hitting the stacks in just over a week.

From ACIJ: “On Oct 5th, we will march in Birmingham for immigration reform. We need your help to give a great image and are asking you to be a volunteer. We have teams for Security, Cleanup, Tabling, Water Station, and T-Shirt & Bracelet sales. To volunteer please contact Evelyn at 256-577-8919. Thanks!”

Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS) and Students for a Stateless Society’s websites were attacked earlier this week by a Belgian racist and a copy-fascist lawyer he enlisted to try to censor our documentation of public racist statements made by him and his friends. We fought back by doubling-down on our free speech, documenting the story that they were trying to censor and also the abusive legal tactics that they were using to attack us. And we just won. The story’s here. At c4ss.org, because we are back on the air. http://c4ss.org/content/21587

Any kind of detail on matters like detailed grammar and intonation is really necessarily pretty speculative. Still, this is awesome.

http://c4ss.org/ We won. c4ss.org and s4ss.org are back on the air. More details coming soon on the bizarre resolution of the copy-fascist legal attacks on our websites earlier this week.

God I hate basically everything about ATL airport.

http://imgur.com/gallery/GtGp0tY Actually this is why paleontologists *should* play computer games. FTFY. h/t Anna O Morgenstern

J. D. Obenberger is the attorney who helped racist censor Olivier Janssens attack the Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS) with a bogus DMCA takedown notice, for accurately reporting the racist comments that he made in a public forum on Facebook. (See the bogus complaint e-mail that J. D. Obenberger sent to C4SS’s web hosting company here: \u003Chttp://pastebin.com/CxD9UsPj>. In case you’re wondering, J.D. Obenberger is very familiar with the aggressive use of bogus DMCA takedowns to suppress speech. He’s a professional porn attorney, whose practice does most of its work defending adult entertainment websites and helping them to attack “pirates” accused of copying their copyrighted images and videos. In this article he actually brags about the ability to use DMCA takedowns to get his way through extralegal intimidation, even when he knows he doesn’t have a case. http://www.xxxlaw.com/articles/4secrets.html Here are some choice bits, quoted under terms of fair use for the purpose of commentary and criticism: “Most US pirating boards are ashamed of what they do and live in fear of liability; US hosting companies are also pretty worried because they have a lot invested – and many of them don’t require any formality to effect a takedown. If you write the request for a takedown on a leaf of stale cabbage in magic marker, without stating any reason or offering any proof or affidavit pursuant to the DMCA, and transmit it by a casual, friendly courier, who works a garbage truck route running past their office and offers to drop it off for you, most of them will take it down fairly immediately, within hours, because they are more afraid of you and your attorneys than they are of the posters.” – J. D. Obenberger, Attorney at Law. “. . . The second dirty little secret is that a very tiny number of the videos released via the Internet are ever registered with the Library of Congress. You have no legal right to maintain any lawsuit for infringement on the basis of an unregistered copyright. Period. (Look at Section 411(a) of the Copyright Act.) While your copyright theoretically exists in US law and under the Berne Convention from the time that it is first reduced to a tangible medium (there are exceptions allowing preregistration of things that are first fixed at the time of transmission, like the 6pm Network News and Trailer Park Sally’s webcam show), it is a hollow and illusory right upon which no lawsuit can be maintained until you’ve registered it. On the motion of the defendant, it will be dismissed without prejudice.” – J. D. Obenberger, Attorney at Law. The racist Janssen’s copyright-thug attorney Obenberger openly discusses the utility of abusing legal processes and directing over-aggressive DCMA notices for the purpose of intimidating hosting companies into yanking content without due process. In this case he submitted a DMCA takedown notice in a case where he knows that his client has “no legal right to maintain any lawsuit,” nothing at all but “a hollow and illusory right upon which no lawsuit can be maintained.” Because, as he knows, skittish web hosts will jump at the noise and censor websites even though they have done nothing actionable and nothing wrong. Obenberger ought to be ashamed of himself for facilitating this kind of censorship, and Olivier Janssens ought to be ashamed of himself for stooping to enlist it in the effort to cover up his racist tirades.

Thanks to Roderick Tracy Long for the example. Here’s an argument. I maintain that it is deductively valid, and so if all of its premises are true, then the conclusion must be true. 1. This argument is a valid argument. (Pr.) 2. This argument has all true premises. (Pr.) 3. The conclusion of this argument is: “Mitt Romney actually won the election, and is now President of the United States.” (Pr.) 4. If an argument is a valid argument and has all true premises, then the argument is sound. (Pr.) 5. All sound arguments have true conclusions. (Pr.) 6. If the sentence “Mitt Romney actually won the election, and is now President of the United States” is true, then Mitt Romney actually won the election, and is now President of the United States. (Pr.) 7. This argument is a valid argument and this argument has all true premises. (Conj. 1,2) 8. This argument is a sound argument. (MP 4, 7) 9. If this argument is a sound argument, this argument has a true conclusion. (UI 5, 9) 10. This argument has a true conclusion. (MP 9, 8) 11. The sentence “Mitt Romney actually won the election, and is now President of the United States” is true. (Subst. 10, 3) 12. Mitt Romney actually won the election, and is now President of the United States. (MP 6, 11) QED. If the argument is sound, then the conclusion has to be true. If the argument is deductively valid, but the conclusion is not true, then at least one of the premises has to be false. But which premise is the false premise? And why is it false?