Puck

Sez Cory Doctorow:

Italy’s Berlusconi regime, already known around the world as an enemy of free speech and popular access to the tools of communication, has now floated a proposal to require Italians to get an “uploader’s license” in order to put any “moving pictures” on the Internet. The government claims that this is required as part of the EU’s product placement disclosure rules, which is about as ridiculous assertion as I’ve heard this month.

via Italy proposes mandatory licenses for people who upload video Boing Boing.

Washington state House lawmakers will hear testimony at 1:30pm [Jan. 13] in favor of a pair of bills seeking to significantly reduce state marijuana penalties. Members of the House Committee on Public Safety & Emergency Preparedness will debate two pending proposals, House Bill 1177 and House Bill 2401. House Bill 1177 seeks to reclassify the possession of forty grams or less of marijuana from a misdemeanor to a class 2 civil infraction punishable by a $100 fine. House Bill 2401 seeks to “remove all existing civil and criminal penalties for adults 21 years of age or older who cultivate, possess, transport, sell, or use marijuana.” This will be the first time state lawmakers have ever debated regulating marijuana production, distribution, and use by adults.

NORML representatives will be testifying in Olympia on Wednesday (Read testimony here.), and NORML Advisory Board member Rick Steves will also be hosting a public forum on the topic at Olympia’s Capitol Theater on Tuesday evening. If you live in Washington, you can urge the Committee to vote ‘yes’ on one or both of these measures by going here and here.

via Coming To A State House Near You: Legal Cannabis? | NORML Blog.

In past years, illegal commercial trawlers parked off Somalia's coast and scooped up the ocean's contents. Now, fishermen on the northern coast of neighboring Kenya say, the trawlers are not coming because of pirates.

“There is a lot of fish now, there is plenty of fish. There is more fish than people can actually use because the international fishermen have been scared away by the pirates,” said Athman Seif, the director of the Malindi Marine Association.

via Kenya fishermen see upside to pirates: more fish.

Over on High Country News, Kitty Benzar reports that the U.S. Forest Service, caving to its subcontrators, has proposed

to eliminate the 50 percent discount at national forest campgrounds that has been available since 1965 to holders of lifetime senior and access passes.

Seems there are just too many of us getting old and staying outdoor. That’s a good thing, right? The thing most folks don’t realize is that most national parks, and especially camp grounds, are managed by private companies.

Contracting out their management may be a convenience for the agency, but it’s little benefit for the visitor. For the public, it shouldn’t matter who’s cleaning the toilets or emptying the trash, as  long as the work’s being done.

Well, not quite: subcontrators can do the work cheaper than the Forest Service because non-government employees can be paid drastically less. Given that, though, Benzar’s point stands: it looks like the USFS did a bait-and-switch on existing senior-citizen passes:

The Forest Service encouraged Golden Pass holders to exchange their old passes for new ones, and many did. But pass holders were not told that when they did so they relinquished an important benefit [cheap access to parks and campgrounds]. The Forest Service claims that granting the camping discount for Golden Pass holders is no longer “practicable.” Let’s call it “bait-and-switch.”

Express your opinion about the proposed change. The public can comment on these proposed changes until Feb. 1.

NORML reports this in this week’s legislative update for Washington:

Legislators have pre-filed House Bill 2401, which seeks to “remove all existing civil and criminal penalties for adults 21 years of age or older who cultivate, possess, transport, sell, or use marijuana.” You can read the full text of the proposal here, and you can show your support for the measure by going to NORML’s ‘Take Action Center’ here. (FYI: Separate decriminalization legislation also remains pending, and may be supported by going here.)

Have I mentioned recently that I think prohibition is just plain stupid? Not to mention immoral and expensive….

When Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez gave U.S. President Obama a copy of Eduardo Galeano’s 1971 book Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, thousands of Americans bought the book, pushing it to the number two slot on Amazon.

Although Galeano’s trilogy, Memory of Fire, was published in English (and a couple dozen other languages), he has enjoyed only a cult following in the U.S. Memory of Fire will hopefully now receive a wider readership, perhaps carrying with it some of the other great but ignored writers of Latin America.

At once grand in scope but full of close-up details of the most personal kind, Memory of Fire traces the history of Latin America — the continent, its people, gods, plants and animals — from its origins to the present day. Galeano eschews the grand narrative tradition with its fascistic master tropes in favor of the strategic vignette, which opens for both writer and reader contemplative freedom in a vast landscape of possibility. For my money, Galeano’s approach is the honest one, and his latest book, Mirrors, proves why. Read the rest of this entry »

Parody is now a crime? Tell it to the Yes Men or anyone else in the long history of literature who has issued a critique through this tried and legally true form.

In an effort to raise money against the outspoken freshman Democrat [Rep. Alan Grayson of Florida], a Republican activist named Angie Langley has launched “mycongressmanisnuts.com” — a Web site that parodies Grayson’s re-election site, “congressmanwithguts.com.”

via Slashdot and FOXNews.com

In a first for Latin America, Mexico City's legislature voted to legalize gay marriage Monday night, changing “the city's civil code definition of marriage from the union of a man and a woman to the 'free uniting of two people.'”

via Mexico City Approves Gay Marriage | MetaFilter.

Via Slashdot:

“Surendra Pal, associate director of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) Satellite Centre says that Chandrayaan-1 picked up signatures of organic matter on parts of the Moon’s surface. ‘The findings are being analyzed and scrutinized for validation by ISRO scientists and peer reviewers,’ Pal said. At a press conference Tuesday at the American Geophysical Union fall conference, scientists from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter also hinted at possible organics locked away in the lunar regolith. When asked directly about the Chandrayaan-1 claim of finding life on the Moon, NASA’s chief lunar scientist, Mike Wargo, certainly did not dismiss the idea.”

The U.S. has long had a secret base on the moon manned by astronaut-spies with telepathic powers. Telepathy is used to communicate with Earth-based controllers in order to avoid detection by foreign powers monitoring radio frequencies.

Americans are still reacting to the news that a man got away with only a four-month jail sentence after shooting a bicyclist in the head in cold blood, in front of his three-year old child. In Germany, the web is buzzing about a sentence equally extreme, on the opposite end of the spectrum. Christopher-Felix Hahn, a student of theater science in Gießen, has learned he is banned from riding a bike, skateboard or any other “unlicensed vehicle” on the streets — for fifteen years.

via Student Caught Biking Drunk Banned from Cycling for 15 Years : TreeHugger.