RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304441304579481402813331782?mod=Opinion_newsreel_7

In something of an irony, the patent system, designed specifically to promote and protect innovation, has never been particularly adept in dealing with new technologies. The federal courts are now awash in patent-infringement suits that they seem to have little real notion of how to resolve, and the Supreme Court is grappling with an appeal that may or may not define the extent to which a patent can protect software.

It might be instructive, then, to see how the patent system functioned with regard to a previous watershed moment in technological innovation: flight.

On Dec. 17, 1903, Orville and Wilbur Wright successfully flew an airplane over the windswept dunes of Kitty Hawk, N.C., but few people realize that for the next four years the Wright brothers refused to publicly demonstrate their miraculous machine. Before sharing their invention with the world, they wanted to be certain that they had secured a patent that would cover the very notion of controlled flight itself. Their intention—about which they were utterly candid—was to collect royalties on every airplane produced.

Then as now, the patent system the Wrights encountered was a bureaucratic labyrinth. In 1898, the Supreme Court profoundly changed the law by introducing a special category called the “pioneer patent.” In Westinghouse v. Boyden Power Brake Co., Justice Henry Billings Brown —the author of the “separate but equal” decision in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896—wrote that “a patent covering a function never before performed, a wholly novel device, or one of such novelty and importance as to mark a distinct step in the progress of the art . . . is entitled to a broad range of equivalents.” It was under that open-door interpretation that the Wrights filed for their patent.

It wasn’t long before other inventors, most notably Glenn Curtiss, developed a means for controlling an airplane that was superior to the Wrights’ pulley-and-cable system of “wing warping.” Wilbur and Orville, who had the backing of a potent consortium of investors, including Cornelius Vanderbilt, August Belmont and Howard Gould, brought suit in 1909 against Curtiss and numerous other airplane designers for patent infringement.

Curtiss laughed off the suit, insisting that his lever-based means of control—ailerons—was removed from and superior to the Wrights’ method. Curtiss continued to produce airplanes, incorporating a dizzying series of innovations, including wheeled landing gear, steering wheels and a way for airplanes to take off and land on the decks of ships.

Moscow’s flouting of treaties, international law and the Geneva Conventions is raising world-wide dangers.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304640104579485331656203834?mod=Opinion_newsreel_1

President Obama has repeatedly described Russia’s annexation of Crimea as illegal and illegitimate, but he also has sought to minimize the strategic significance of Vladimir Putin’s land grab. In fact, Moscow’s actions—including threatening “civil war” if Ukraine resists the orchestrated seizures of government buildings and uprisings in eastern Ukraine by ethnic Russian separatists this week—are more than isolated instances of law breaking. Russia’s behavior, and its legal and institutional justifications, are dangerously destabilizing the existing international system. What is the likely result? The use of force around the world will be encouraged, and the incentive to acquire nuclear weapons magnified.

The three basic principles of international law, reflected in the United Nations Charter and long-standing custom, are the equality of all states, the sanctity of their territorial integrity, and noninterference by outsiders in their internal affairs. Yet Moscow now insists that it has unique rights and privileges to protect the interests of Russian-speaking populations outside its borders and has special prerogatives regarding “historically Russian” territories that were not included in the Russian Federation upon the Soviet Union’s dissolution in 1991.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304640104579489693250973928?mg=reno64-wsj

John Kerry told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday that “Russian provocateurs” had infiltrated eastern Ukraine in order to foment “an illegal and illegitimate effort to destabilize a sovereign state and create a contrived crisis.” Also on Tuesday, the Pentagon announced steep cuts to U.S. nuclear forces, four years ahead of schedule, in accordance with the 2010 New Start treaty with Russia.

At this point in Barack Obama’s Presidency we should be used to the mental whiplash. But we still feel concussed.

So let’s slow down and follow the thread. Russia has seized Crimea and has 50,000 troops as a potential invasion force on the border with eastern Ukraine. The Kremlin is also abrogating the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, in which Kiev agreed to give up its nuclear arsenal—at the time the third largest in the world—in exchange for guarantees of its territorial integrity from Russia, the U.S. and U.K. That memorandum has now proved to be as much of a scrap of paper to the Kremlin as Belgium’s neutrality was to Berlin in the summer of 1914.

The Kremlin is also violating the 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which bans the testing, production and possession of nuclear missiles with a range between 310 and 3,400 miles. Russia has tested at least three missiles—the R-500 cruise missile, the RS-26 ballistic missile and the Iskander-M semi-ballistic missile—that run afoul of the proscribed range limits.

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/375369/print

Imagine a situation in which an earthquake destroys a suspension bridge over a deep canyon.

A passenger train is speeding toward the location, and those in charge realize there is a potential problem ahead but choose instead to argue about the ambient temperature in the passenger cars, the food service, and whether they will reach their final destination on time. A few people are quite disturbed when they learn of the tragedy about to unfold if the train isn’t halted, but they are labeled as “alarmists” who really are not sophisticated enough to understand the situation.

Obviously, I am referring to our nation and the impending disaster that awaits us if we continue on a course of ever-expanding government control of our lives, fiscal irresponsibility, unwise energy policies, and a laissez-faire attitude regarding our world leadership responsibilities.

Conservatives and other thinking individuals must recognize that we are in dire straits. They must adopt a sense of urgency in order to prevent irreparable damage to the concept of a nation where people are free to pursue their dreams without interference — as long as they are not harming others.

They should not be arguing among themselves over petty differences and refusing to support individuals who largely agree with them about the direction of the country but perhaps have some disagreements about issues that easily could be resolved after the disaster has been averted.

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/375347/print

The Democrats have made their midterm agenda clear: passing a minimum-wage hike, fighting the menace of the Koch brothers, and expressing loud concern about climate change without actually bringing a cap-and-trade bill to the Senate floor.

Minimum-Wage Hike: The arguments about the merits and consequences of raising the minimum wage have been hashed out elsewhere. For now, let’s focus upon how many workers would be affected by this: The Congressional Budget Office estimated that raising the minimum wage to $10.10 per hour would eliminate 500,000 jobs (with the range extending from very few to 1 million), and about 16 million low-wage workers would see higher earnings. The increased earnings would amount to $31 billion.

For perspective, the United States has a labor force of 156 million people, with 145 million currently employed. So the increased minimum wage would be good news for about 11 percent of U.S. workers.

The Koch Brothers: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s speeches about the menace of the Koch brothers are approaching a case of obsessive-compulsive disorder; he makes one nearly every day, and he devotes an entire page of his taxpayer-funded official U.S. Senate website to attacking the libertarian-minded philanthropists. (Strange, Reid doesn’t seem to mind the Koch Family Foundation’s donations to the University of Nevada at Las Vegas and the University of Nevada at Reno.)

Why are Reid and other Democrats focusing so relentlessly on the Koch brothers? In a mid-March poll, 52 percent of likely voters said they had never heard of the Kochs, 12 percent had a positive impression of them, and 25 percent had a negative impression of them. The Democratic turnout efforts may require a villain or bogeyman, or the Democrats may be beating the drums on the demonization campaign to intimidate other potential GOP donors. Give enough money to Republicans, and Democrats will stand up on the floor of the Senate to talk about how terrible you are, day after day.

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4255/us-foreign-policy-problem

Arabs and Israelis nowadays are both saying the same thing: “What is the matter with you people? You are going to walk away and you think your interests are going to be protected here?”

One of the things that has changed in this administration is that people who are fighting for democracy in places such as Turkey, Russia or China do not feel as if they have any moral or political support coming from Washington in a way that they have over the years.

Is this foreign policy reversible? My answer is yes for a number of reasons.

There was recently a remarkable article in the New York Times, based on an interview with the National Security Adviser, Susan Rice. In it, she described what the Times called the “new, modest U.S. policy in the Middle East.” Susan Rice said we have three goals in the Middle East:

Negotiations with Iran over its nuclear weapons program.
Negotiations with Syria over its chemical weapons program and over the war taking place in Syria.
Negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians over Middle East peace.

What is striking is that it really is the foreign policy of Belgium: negotiations, negotiations, negotiations.

The foreign policy of the United States is, apparently, now to be centered in the United Nations, Brussels and Geneva, where we have talks about Syria with the Russians and talks about Iran with Iran’s representatives.

What is missing in this formulation? In one word: power.

The president seems to regard power and the use of power pretty much the way he regards, for example, sexism — as if this is a problem we had in the past; in past decades we had to deal with this phenomenon, but we have overcome it. As if this is the great thing about the United States: that we have gotten beyond an old‑fashioned concept such as the use of power.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/09/us/brandeis-cancels-plan-to-give-honorary-degree-to-ayaan-hirsi-ali-a-critic-of-islam.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=0

The usual suspects are in a snit- Rashid Khalidi, CAIR, Ibrahim Hooper…..but please notice that Maya Berry, Executive Director of the Arab American Institute, an Arab advocacy group which ranks American legislators and candidates according to their support for Arab/Palestinian issues (read anti-Israel) also jumps into the fray against Hirsi Ali..showing again the nexus between Arab groups and apologists for radical Islam…..rsk
At first, it was bloggers who noted and criticized the plan to honor Ms. Hirsi Ali, a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Within a few days, a Brandeis student started an online petition against the decision at Change.org, drawing thousands of signatures. The Council on American-Islamic Relations, a civil rights and advocacy group, took note, contacting its members though email and social media, and urging them to complain to the university.

On Tuesday, a student newspaper, The Justice, reported on the controversy, and the Council on American-Islamic Relations sent a letter to Dr. Lawrence, referring to Ms. Hirsi Ali as a “notorious Islamophobe.”

“She is one of the worst of the worst of the Islam haters in America, not only in America but worldwide,” Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the group, said in an interview on Tuesday. “I don’t assign any ill will to Brandeis. I think they just kind of got fooled a little bit.”

In its statement, Brandeis said, “For all concerned, we regret that we were not aware of” Ms. Hirsi Ali’s record of anti-Islam statements, though those comments have been fairly widely publicized

http://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/

I rarely frequent movie theaters these days. Box office ticket prices are not the chief deterrent, nor the concession stand price of a barrel of popcorn or a box of Raisinets. Talkative members of audiences, and eardrum-splitting volumes of trailers are also deterrents, but they’re not why I avoid ticket windows. Rather it’s what’s showing in the theaters that stops me from sitting in the dark. I will make an exception, and pay for a ticket, if I think I ought to see a film. If I make the effort, it’s because I suspect there’s something odd about a film that I wouldn’t be able to identify unless I saw it instead of being misled or repelled by its trailers.

I happen to love movies. Good movies. Ones that uplift me, or instruct me in the art of storytelling, or enlighten me in some respect. But bad movies, or mediocre ones, have the same effect on me as does Andy Warhol’s poster of Campbell Soup cans. And there are far more of those films than there are of that anti-artist’s thirty-two soup cans.

I recently saw The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. I suspected that, like its predecessor, it was more than just a story about a girl good with a bow and arrow, coming from a circa 1930’s West Virginia-like coal town, and populated with characters whose names seem to have been the result of a Scrabble game with no rules. The setting wasn’t supposed to be a post-war or post-anarchy America governed by PanAm – excuse me, “Panem” – an oppressive government located in some high-tech run Imperial Rome-like city that’s full of evil men and a populace of perversely effete, gaudily dressed clowns entertained by a form of gladiatorial combat. The weird names — Katniss Everdeen, Peeta Mellark, Finnick Odair, etc., all vaguely Celtic – didn’t fool me one bit, either. It was all an allegory on America.

So I learned that both Hunger Games movies – I saw the first one, also, and there will be a third, to judge by the ending of Number Two – were political statements about the evils of technology and capitalism and civilization and how virtuous living the simple life at a subsistence level trumps technology and cities and badly dressed people every time. The “message” was as thoroughly embedded in it as it was in another fantasy, Avatar.

As the American consciousness has been progressively foreshortened, minimalized, and cramped over several generations – chiefly by a public education philosophy committed not so much to the acquisition of knowledge and the honing of one’s cognitive powers and rationality, as to what the Progressives and the government wish to have Americans focus on (anti-intellectualism, pragmatism, conformity) – so has the “I.Q.” of films diminished in terms of scope, scale and attention span. This has occurred, not overnight, but incrementally, in generational jerks and spasms, in syncopated tandem with the dumbing down and the engineered cognitive and cultural myopia.

Instead of adapting novels that require a modicum of literacy and an extended attention span to read and grasp – an attention span beyond what a text message or a tweet demands – we are getting movies more and more adapted from graphic novels. From comic books. And if not from comic books, then from juvenile or “young adult” novels, or computer games. And often a computer-game-inspired movie will loop back into an advanced version of the game.

http://www.americanthinker.com/assets/3rd_party/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/04/an_antiisrael_tourism_subterfuge_.html

Under the guise of experiental, educational sojourns in the Middle East, an ongoing, extensive tourism subterfuge of global proportions is at work today. This comprehensive and coordinated fraudulent operation includes travel agency fronts, terrorist groups, international NGOs, Islamists, and Leftists. They include such organizations as the Siraj Center for Holy Land Studies, Abraham Path, the Soros Foundation to Promote Open Society, and others.

All of them, whether unwittingly or intentionally, are part of an effort to turn tourists, college students, and Christian pilgrims against the Jewish state of Israel. Using the rubric of “a connection between people from the Middle East,” these travel expeditions underhandedly buttress a political agenda that delegitimizes and demonizes Israel. They are part of a scheme to fundamentally transform the Western world, by undermining Judaism, the root of Christianity, and moving on to the destruction of Christianity as well.

A look at one of the organizations involved in the efforts, Abraham Path, provides insights into how these groups have created a dangerous mix of supposed humanitarian organizations and Islamic supremacists.

Abraham Path partners with the United Nations Tourism Organization and Harvard Law School and receives financial support from the Riyadh-based, Alwaleed Bin Talal Foundation. Prince Talal, a Wahhabist, shortly after 9/11, admonished the United States to change its stance in the Middle East and turn toward the Palestinian cause, declaring, “Our Palestinian brethren continue to be slaughtered at the hands of Israelis while the world turns the other cheek.”

Talal implied that the U.S. position on Israel caused the 9/11 attacks. Offended by these statements, New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani turned down $10 million offered by the Saudi prince in the aftermath of the attacks.

http://www.city-journal.org/2014/eon0408gw.html

The New York City charter delegates the “control” and “administration” of the NYPD to a police commissioner appointed by the city’s elected mayor. It further grants the commissioner responsibility “for the execution of all law and the rules and regulations of the department.” By agreeing to a court-appointed monitor for the NYPD earlier this year, New York City mayor Bill de Blasio has violated those binding provisions. Bill Bratton, de Blasio’s choice for police commissioner—he called Bratton “the best police leader in the United States”—accepted the position knowing that the court-appointed monitor would be looking over his shoulder. Why? It’s a fair bet that Bratton hoped to salvage the policing techniques he pioneered during a previous stint as Gotham’s top cop, when he helped rescue New York City from its crime-plagued past.

As police commissioner under Mayor Rudolph Giuliani in the mid-1990s, Bratton called the patrol tactic properly known as stop, question, and frisk (but more commonly known as stop-and-frisk) “a basic tool” that is “the most fundamental practice in American policing . . . done every day, probably by every city force in America.” And, he added, “If the police are not doing it, they are probably not doing their job.”

Bratton was correct. In 1990, Mayor David Dinkins’s first year in office, an astounding 2,245 murders took place in New York. In 2012, after almost 20 years of stop, question, and frisk—and other innovative policing techniques—the number of murders had fallen to just 417, a decline of 81 percent. Other major crimes had similarly declined, despite a 10 percent increase in New York’s population. The verdict on stop, question, and frisk? New Yorkers won and criminals lost.