Modern Feminist Narcissism and the Sperm Bank

There is far too much to cover in one article regarding the modern feminist movement as it pertains to social engineering, the degeneration of the family unit, and many of the ills we see today in modern society. Suffice to say though, that the movement as a whole has been a great disservice to humanity, and even to women in particular. Fatherless children is only one aspect of a much, much larger agenda, and in this piece we will be narrowing the view even further to focus specifically on women who deliberately become pregnant by anonymous sperm donors. But just to be clear, when we speak here on “modern feminism” we are not speaking about all women, or against any women, but against the socio-political agenda of the feminist movement that has actually done a great disservice to women and society as a whole.

Today, political correctness dictates that we are supposed to accept fatherless children as a sort of “new normal,” in direct contradiction to the laws of nature. We fancy ourselves gods, who can re-write the laws of nature on a whim, whenever we feel like it, and then act as if there will be no consequences for turning the natural order of things upside down. Children are meant to have a mother and a father. One can argue that point all day long in the interests of their modernist socio-political agenda, but the fact remains that our species, like so many others, reproduces sexually with both a male and female contribution of chromosomes. Balanced children will grow from the guidance and nurturing of both a man and a woman. Of course, there is tragedy in the world. One parent or another may be lost in some tragic accident, a war perhaps. But how do we suddenly make the jump to accept as normal, even preferable, what was once only the result of tragedy? The answer is simple. Narcissism. Unbalanced narcissism. The “I want what I want, and you can’t tell me no” mentality of our modern society, which is just as much a product of modern feminism as women wearing blue jeans. (Not that women in blue jeans is a bad thing of course.) Putting aside now the high rate of children raised by divorced parents, or born of unwed and unprotected sexual liaisons, we will maintain our focus here on the microcosm of clinical sperm donation. Of course, what we see here can be applied to the larger social arena as well, but unclouded by the arguments that often derail debate on the genuine core issues as the “blame” is tossed back and forth ad nauseum. When a woman chooses to impregnate herself clinically with anonymously donated sperm, then clearly there is no ambiguity when it comes to the responsibility of the pregnancy.

Now, there are a number of reasons why a woman might want to employ the services of a fertilization clinic. This article is not meant to be taken as some sort of assault on science, only to call into question the moral basis, or lack thereof, for certain applications. As with any knowledge, just because we can do something does not necessarily mean we should. So we will not question here in this piece when a clinic might assist a happy and stable heterosexual couple in joining their natural egg and seed. We will also put aside the debate as it pertains to deceased partners. The focus here is on when a woman solicits an anonymous sperm donor. In some cases, it might be that her mate is sterile, that the man in the couple does not have sufficient viable sperm to initiate a pregnancy. In other cases, the woman’s mate may be another woman, and therefore obviously, her sexual partner cannot provide the necessary component to initiate a pregnancy. In other cases still, the woman may be alone, for one reason or another, perhaps coming toward the end of her own natural viability as a mother and anxious to partake of the gift of life.

At first glance, these reasons seem, well, reasonable. It’s natural for women to want to be mothers after all. But wanting something does not necessarily mean it’s the right thing to do. One might really want to go out and buy a particular house, but it might not be such a good idea if you can’t actually afford it, or if the house happens to be in a very bad part of town. So let us look a little more closely at what is really at stake here. To see if the “wants” or perceived needs really outweigh the potential for negative consequences.

With a single woman who has not been able to secure a stable relationship with a man, we can chalk it up to a bad luck of the draw, perhaps. Random odds that sometimes go against emotional fulfillment. For one reason or another, every male suitor turned out to be not so suited. But we could also look at the woman herself. Perhaps the men she met were not so much the problem. It is just as likely that she herself was the problem. The product of this modern feminist agenda. It is little surprise that a woman who goes through life with an “I don’t need no man, I can do it all myself” sort of attitude, will in fact wind up by herself, without a man. A cold desert for a woman to be lost in no doubt. Caught between hating men for not meeting the undefined ideal of a perverted feminist agenda, and not fulfilling her own natural identity as a woman. Of course, some women don’t just wind up in that spot, but choose to, usually because of a career. But in either case, is such a woman really the ideal candidate for motherhood? A woman too busy with other obligations that she has no time to make a secure emotional investment in a man, yet somehow expects to have enough time to fill the role of both parents, with all the love, nurturing, and guidance that a child should receive? Or a woman so emotionally unstable, lacking in dedication, or of such abrasive personality that she has been unable to maintain a caring relationship with a man? This is not meant presume to dictate a woman’s choices or personality of course, only to examine whether or not they are really ideal candidates for voluntary and deliberate single-motherhood. It seems there is a high probability that a child is more of an object or a prize to fill a void created by their own selfishness and lack of fortitude. Just because a woman can bear a child, does not mean that she will make a good mother. A woman who, for whatever her reasons, cannot maintain an enduring stable relationship with a grown man is hardly an ideal candidate to maintain a balanced and stable home for a child over the course of eighteen years, much less a lifetime of devotion that a good parent will often commit to.

We also see lesbian couples who often seek out sperm donors so that they may become same-sex parents. This obviously flies in the face of any natural sense of parenthood, social constructs aside. Once again, this is not to denigrate a woman’s personal choices in any way, and we will leave the common debates regarding the morality of homosexuality at the door. Instead, we might conclude that homosexuality does indeed play into the natural order of things, just not natural parenthood. That homosexuality is a natural mechanism to prevent the overpopulation of our species. That folks like homosexuals and others who are unable to maintain a heterosexual relationship are the gatekeepers who are destined to cease the perpetuation of inherited natural traits that nature sees fit to extinguish as we evolve. If homosexuality is a choice by nature, and not the choice of the individual, then clearly it is also nature’s choice that a homosexual not bear children. If it were otherwise, we would all be androgynous beings reproducing asexually. So clearly here we have a natural inhibitor preventing lesbians from becoming mothers. (No inference should be made here that homosexuality itself is necessarily an inherited trait, nor that it is destined to become, or should be, eliminated through natural selection.) There are also strong social complications that will distress a child as it grows up in a household with same-sex parents. First, confusion no doubt as to the natural order of things on a biological level, and a need for explicit sexual education from a very young age. There is also the outside social influences that will complicate matters, right or wrong. Even if one sees homosexual parenthood as morally acceptable, a good parent would never bring a child into the world to be used a pawn to enforce their socio-political views and willingly subject a child to undue hardship. So in that respect, we again see the “I want what I want” attitude rear its head, at the expense of the child, regardless of what either nature or society have to say about it. As politically incorrect as it may sound, homosexual couples are not ideal candidates for parenthood any more than a one-armed man is an ideal candidate for the NY Yankees.

A third reason for a woman to seek out a clinical sperm donation is in a case where a woman’s male mate might not be able to produce his own viable seed. Again, it seems fairly reasonable at first glance. Of course, we have the natural selection argument here again though. That there are natural population inhibitors that we may be violating to allow this sort of procedure to go forward. But at least we see a greater potential for a stable home and upbringing in the traditional sense. Yet digging in a little deeper, we find not only the potential for serious problems, but the sort of problems that have actually occurred. A case outlined in a recent Associated Press article that you will find linked below, told of how a young woman of 20 years old suddenly found out that the father who had raised her had been infertile, and that her biological father was an anonymous sperm donor. The truth of the matter was revealed by her mother just as she was divorcing the man who raised the young woman as his own. So here we really get to see the ugly side of modern feminism, and surely this is happening more often than we will find in a news article. Here this woman used this man to be the father to a child that was not biologically his, and all of the financial support that went along with that no doubt. When she was done with the man, just as the child was grown, she divorced him and then she went ahead and severed the bond between him and the daughter whom he had raised. An act so narcissistic that her own need to be cruel toward the man she was now leaving outweighed the well-being of the daughter she had seen fit to lie to for 20 years. Was it really worth it?

Not according to Lindsay Greenawalt, the product of a donor conception, who wrote in her blog, “If I had to choose between being conceived with half of my identity and half of my kinship deliberately denied from me for eternity — or never being born — I'd choose never being born. We were created to carry a loss. A loss that no human being should have to endure.” Barked at by egotistical sorts, these children are often told to be grateful that they are alive, as if this heartache that their mothers cursed upon them was really some gift to be cherished. More twisted sense of reality brought to us by modern feminism and the notion that women can do whatever they want without consequences, and that the world should be grateful for their mere presence. Recent studies have shown that children conceived in such a manner are more troubled and depressed than their peers as they become young adults. But rather than questioning the practice, news articles and study groups instead point to the anonymity of the donors as the source of the problem, not the fact that these women chose this themselves!

The media is doing a bang-up job of ignoring the 800-pound gorilla in the room too, by deflecting, spinning, and emotionalizing the topic to suit the feminist agenda. We see articles like the one from the AP mentioned earlier, titled, “Sperm-donors’ kids seek more rights and respect.” Respect? Is there some sense of entitlement here, that they are somehow due more respect than any other child? That now society must make special allowances for the choices of a mother who also was filled with some self-centered sense of entitlement? Rights? What rights? This was the conscious and deliberate choice of their mothers. The child has no rights, or say in the matter, any more then if the mother was a Preying Mantis who slew the father post-copulation. And what of the rights of a donor who never had any intention of being anything more than an anonymous donor of chromosomes? Well, we have Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker to spin that angle saying, “The adult voices of donor offspring are a welcome counterbalance to an array of cultural forces aimed at further marginalizing fathers.” So somehow we are supposed to believe that reneging on or undermining anonymity contracts is not actually marginalizing the rights of these men? How about giving some rights to men paying hundreds, even thousands of dollars a month to kids they are never allowed to see? This society is so twisted and turned upside down that men who want to be fathers aren’t allowed to be, but those who don’t want to be, will be forced to, as if it were a favor to them, and that they should be grateful.

Here is a link to the AP article as it appeared on FOX News:

http://www.foxnews.com/health/2010/08/16/sperm-donors-kids-seek-rights-respect/


Now clearly we see that the real problem here rests with the practice of actually becoming pregnant through this method, not the fact that the donors wish to remain anonymous. To say any different would be to apply the sort of logic where you might blame the electric company for the fact that you stuck a fork in the socket and got burned. So why then the assault on the rights of the men, the donors, rather than on the practice by women of using those services? Well, the “it’s for the children” excuse will pull at the heartstrings of many Liberals, so now we need something to offend the Conservatives. How about brother and sister accidentally marrying each other because anonymity prevented them from researching their background? Well there were a few cases like that in the news in the past few years.

Here’s a case reported by the BBC where twins who were adopted separately wound up finding any marrying each other after they were grown, not knowing that they were actually siblings, and then were forced to have their marriage annulled:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7182817.stm

Now of course, the odds of such cases happening aren’t all that great, but that sort of thing is indeed possible, and even more possible when it comes to half-siblings or cousins as well. But even more pressing might be the need for medical information. The “right” of a child, or a child since grown to adulthood to have medical information of their biological paternal lineage. In fact, in some cases it could be seen as necessary to save a life, or to treat a debilitating disease.

These are all risks that the mother should consider before going ahead with this sort of pregnancy. There are so many risks, so many negative points to how it will affect the child, why would any reasonable woman actually go ahead with this sort of thing? The answer, a reasonable woman wouldn’t. Not generally speaking anyhow. There may be some exceptions of course, there always are, and many of these woman cannot be seen as downright bad mothers. But we are talking about the ideal here. What is really in the best interest of these children, and of society. Bringing a child into the world knowing full well that you are doing so deliberately putting them ad a disadvantage right from the start is not the sign of good responsible parent. That is the sign of a lonely, self-centered woman who puts her own needs before anyone else’s, including their own child. But rather than acknowledging that clear and simple premise, we have this convoluted campaign to shift responsibility back onto men and onto society for the deliberate choices made by these women.

Women who, by the way, are told that their choices are perfectly normal, so it’s not that we can really blame them either. Women are raised to believe that their actions have no consequences, that they can do as they please, while men and society pick up the tab and try to make the world a more comfortable place for them. This is where we see that the modern feminist movement is actually doing a great disservice to women, in the same way that a parent might spoil a child and let them run wild. One day, the child, or the women in this case, will have to pay the piper so to speak. For some women it may be the heartache of realizing just how much suffering they have actually condemned their child too by bringing them into the world without a father. For others, it will be an open assault against an inflated ego, when their child is not grateful at all to have been brought into this world. It’s no wonder women are more bitter and unhappy than ever before. They are trapped in a web of deceit. The modern feminist movement is no friend to them, it is an agenda put upon society, using women as pawns, for the shadowy figures who engineer the face of society to their own nefarious ends.

End like profiteering from misery. Think of all the dollars that could be had by stripping away donor anonymity. The lawyers could wind up having a field day with donors who might not have disclosed a family history of some affliction, or who hid certain facts about themselves which they refused to disclose. And now we have our “ah-ha!” moment. We start to get a glimmer of the real reasons why there is suddenly an assault on the anonymity of sperm donors. The lawyers are salivating at the chance to muck around in this sort of misery. The women and the offspring will be used as pawns as always, the face of irrational emotional appeal, but nevertheless quick to jump on that bandwagon when they are told that it is their “right” to demand compensation from the man. And the state? Will the state step in to stop such injustice? Absolutely not. They stand to profit from taxation, court fees, child-support processing, and will even be able to squeeze profits out of these matters that are found to be “criminal.” Already there have been cases in the news in the past few years where men were forced to pay support for children that were the product of in-vitro fertilization, for example.

Here’s an article from over three years ago that outlines some rather unjust rulings against sperm donors:

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2883/can-a-sperm-donor-be-forced-to-pay-child-support

After having read this piece, perhaps some have been inspired to exercise more critical thinking rather than simply going along with what is easiest, or politically correct. Truth is the enemy of these spin-pages in the mainstream news and the agendas which they are well paid to support. Perhaps you found yourself offended at some points reading this piece. Good, that means you actually stopped to think rather then just listening to the drone of propaganda and everyone patting each other on the back while society is torn asunder. If we were to take the AP article mentioned up above at face value, me might have concluded that donor anonymity is a social scourge, and that men should be appreciative to have their rights undermined. The suffering of the children is very real, but that emotional appeal is misplaced in calling for an end to donor anonymity, rather than an end to the practice of donor pregnancies right from the start. This is all just setting the stage for precedents that will be set in the coming years, as nationalized healthcare and the legal system ramp-up the genetic mapping of society through DNA identification. Privacy is of no concern to the powers that be, and there is in fact a concerted effort to do away with the last few vestiges of it that we have.

For further reading on those concerns you may enjoy reading other articles posted here at the MSMReview:

Electronic Surveillance of Your Fat

L.A. Touts Serial Killer Arrest to Quash Civil Liberty Concerns

Technology and Police Hypocrisy

Border War: The Blind Eye of America

While the United States has spent almost a decade chasing down an invisible, some might even say imaginary enemy on the other side of the planet, a very real war at home has been completely ignored by our political leaders and largely left out of the mainstream media. No one seems to want to talk about the fact that the U.S. is being invaded by a very real, active, and potent enemy. Headlines like "Marijuana plants seized" downplay what is happening here at home, while headlines like "Al-Qaeda mastermind behind slaughter of U.S. troops" dominate the short attention span of the average American viewer. The truth of the matter is far more chilling than any politician or mainstream media source will ever admit.

Let us set aside many of the more common debates about illegal immigration, such as the damaging impact on the economy, on labor bargaining, the tax burden, infrastructure, etcetera. Instead let us focus on the mortal danger posed to Americans as a people, which stems from our ignore-the-border policy and the nefarious politics behind it. Advocates of illegal immigrants would have you believe that most people who cross the southern US border from Mexico are simple hard-working law-abiding folk, and that only the occasional bad apple floats across the Rio Grande or tumbles through desert tunnels. The truth is that millions of sworn gang members, gang affiliates, narco-terrorists, and bona-fide political insurgents here in the US are illegal immigrants, to say nothing of your average run-of-the-mill rapists and murderers. These gangs and criminal enterprises are far more lethal and organized than some family in Iraq or Afghanistan protecting their home from rampaging troops out gallivanting through the desert. The subversive political agenda of Aztlan is a direct threat to the sovereignty of the US and well funded by narco-dollars. While we are out chasing ghosts on the other side of the world, we have been invaded by a guerilla armies, millions strong, harboring ideology of racial supremacy known as La Raza, and bent on the destruction of America as we know it. They are not here to take part in the American dream, but to overrun it.

This is not to say that all illegals are narco-warriors and racists of course. If there weren’t genuine working class people just trying to get by and feed their kids, there would be little to pull at the heartstrings of gullible Americans or make an effective camouflage for the murderous infiltrators. But rather than become Americans, most illegals would rather send money “home” or insist that America adapt to them as if we were the uninvited guest. If someone has just broken into your house, eaten your ice cream and pissed in your couch, it is naive to suddenly expect they will observe the rules and customs of the household, regardless of whatever justification is put forth for their behavior. But rather than addressing the broken lock on the back door, our political leadership ignores it and panders to the sympathizers. There is no nobility in racist ideology, there is no noble cause to reclaim lost lands because Latinos are not in fact indigenous peoples, illegal immigrants are not persecuted refugess seeking freedom in the US, this is an invasion and wholesale looting of America by very powerful, organized and violent criminal empires.

In Mexico there is open warfare among these factions, that has claimed the lives of an estimated 28,000 people in the last four years. That is roughly double the amount of deaths in Afghanistan for the same time period. Is this the Aztlan dream? Is this the promise of La Raza? Mexicos’s intelligence agency director Guillermo Valdes stated in a meeting with his President Felipe Calderon that drug violence in Mexico “is still growing” despite the government crackdown that began in 2006. Yet the US does not see fit to intercede by aiding Mexico to better their circumstances effectively, or at the very least to protect our own population from the spillover of the narco wars through political pressure and serious border security. There is no such tidy estimate as the one above for the number of related deaths in America, but it is safe to assume that most drug and gang-related deaths in this country lead back to the cartels. Prison gangs like the Mexican Mafia, and the brutal Salvadoran street gang MS -13 who are some 70,000 strong, have been imported here but take their orders from places south of the border. Everyday more violent gangs of illegals take up residence in the US while at the same time new chapters or “sets” of more traditional street gangs such as the Crips and the Bloods spring up in newly established communities of illegal immigrants.

While the director of Mexican intelligence reports that they have seized $411 million in American currency, and 84,000 weapons since their crackdown began years ago, here in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California one drug bust alone wiped out a pot farm worth $1.7 billion. Four times the value of Mexico’s four year war on drugs. After a similar bust in the Sequoia National Park two years ago, John Walters, director of the National Drug Control Policy, had this to say…

"These aren't Cheech and Chong plants. People who farm now are not doing this for laughs, despite the fact Hollywood still thinks that. “

These plots are not a few scraggly plants scattered around some hippie commune, but mega farms set up in huge swaths of commandeered soil in America’s national parks by Latin-American gangs using dangerous chemicals, fully armed para-military grade security forces and explosive booby-traps, while destroying the natural habitat. Investigations have concluded that a number of major forest fires have been caused by these invaders as well, in places where firefighters had to work with armed escorts and the people of surrounding communities were forced to flee. The profits from these crops are used to finance all sorts of other criminal activity and violence in communities throughout North America. Park rangers are desperately outgunned, and the innocent family on a hiking trip is in very real danger of never being seen again if they stumble across one of these farms.

So what is the Federal government’s answer to this danger? Well in an Arizona national park the answer appears to be making it illegal for an American to be on American land, rather than securing 3500 acres that includes part of the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge, where drug smuggling is so prevalent that the area was closed to civilians by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. This is, quite literally, a hostile takeover of sovereign American land and an open surrender by the US government, while we chase an imaginary terrorist organization half a world away. When you look at a map of the United States now, realize that the border you see is not accurate. The Federal government, willingly and without a fight has ceded territory to Mexican drug cartels. The border has been moved, and American soil has been conquered, without so much as a peep from the White House, or a fighting stand by American troops to defend against the invaders. If we shared a border with the Taliban would we tolerate such an assault? Are these invaders not every bit, nay, even more of a threat to the safety of Americans than radical Muslim fundamentalism? Between 2001 and 2007 there were 100,000 murders in America. Now let’s make a blatantly over-conservative guess that only 25% of those murders were drug or gang related. That would still mean that drug gangs have claimed better than ten times as many lives as the attack on September 11.

These well- armed insurgents here at home are better funded than Muslim extremists, are at least twice as active in Mexico as “terrorists” are in Afghanistan, support a doctrine of racial supremacy and are openly calling for the destruction of America. Yet both our political leadership and a huge cross-section of American society turn a blind eye, or openly give sympathy to the invaders as if it were some moral obligation to humanity that we allow them to shoot us, to burn us out of our homes, to rob us of our earnings, to destroy what we have built. The terrorists are right here, not off in some far away land. Their influence reaches all the way to the top echelons of power in the United States. How else can one explain the fact that neither former President Bush, nor our current President Obama has lifted a finger to fight these invaders and to regulate legitimate immigration? Meanwhile they execute a bogus war that was built on false pretense right from the very start. Conservative politicians did nothing to protect us from these insurgents, and I certainly don’t expect liberal politicians to do any better by openly supporting the invasion while actively blocking state and local authority from protecting their sovereignty and even the physical safety of their constituents. There is no exaggeration, we are in fact being invaded by terrorist insurgents who are better armed, more organized, and have greater numbers than the so called “al-Qaeda network.” Our own national political leadership has been subverted and is in league with these foreign invaders from the south. The government of the United States of America no longer represents the American people, but instead does the bidding of hidden powers with dark agendas.

While major media outltes are quick to support the sham called "the war on terror" reporting falsehoods and drawing all sorts of erroneous conclusions about conflict in the middle east, mainstream media sources have scant reporting on the subject matter of domestic insurgents, would certainly never call them what they are, and would not dare put the pieces together to make a factual conclusive report as we have done here. Nevertheless, here are some supporting links of information from both mainstream and alternate sources:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-10811870

http://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/08/08/pot.eradication/

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/06/17/lawmaker-warns-drug-cartel-danger-public-parks-intensifying/

http://www.examiner.com/x-35821-Immigration-Reform-Examiner~y2010m6d17-Our-national-parks-have-been-surrendered-to-the-Mexican-drug-cartels-wshocking-video

http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/2010/03/01/20100301pot-farms-on-public-lands.html

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/08/03/world/main6740078.shtml?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+CbsNewsTheEarlyShowPetPlanet+%28CBS+News%3A+The+Early+Show%3A+Pet+Planet%29

http://www.mayorno.com/WhoIsMecha.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajkAP_M4ZAM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNvqm_qgM5U

Book Burning in the Digital Age... and so it begins

The battle of the copyright is a long and sordid tale on the internet. Most folks are familiar with the old days of Napster, and the record companies suing the pants off of soccer-Moms because their kids had downloaded songs to the family computer. More recently as technology has continued to advance, we have seen movie companies also come into the fold along with the music companies, often suing to shut down websites that host torrent files of copyrighted material, as well as still going after the individual on occasion. At the end of the day though, most folks aren't overly concerned about those issues. Music and movies are creative expressions and public past-times for the most part, not exactly a priority in this day and age. It all sounds like a lot of hair-splitting over profits that no one really wants to be bothered with. Sure artists are entitled to make money from their work. But at the same time, when someone shells out $20 for a CD that has one good song on it, it's clearly a rip-off scheme by the recording industry too. A big ball of frustration and argument that is best left to the folks who have a vested interest in the fight. The whole debate has just soured many people to listening to music or watching movies at all. Easier just to flip on the radio or the TV and be done with it. Music and movies just aren't much fun as a hobby anymore, which is probably a bigger reason for any perceived loss of revenue for these big companies than anything else. Some folks have just decided to grow up faster than we would have liked to, wistfully leaving pop-culture behind to focus on more important issues. Like freedom of speech, perhaps.

Now anyone who has had contact with American society in the past fifteen years or so has heard all about these copyright lawsuits, and has probably heard the argument that it is all “really about freedom of speech.” Most of us never really bought into that though. It wasn't really about freedom of speech so much as buying a cable modem and ripping enough tracks to make a mix disc for the weekend, and to make it worth the money you were shelling out for the broadband connection. But as it turns out, these freedom-loving pirate pioneers might have had more insight than most of us ever gave them credit for. It's not just about ripping a free copy of some crappy pop jam anymore. The debates over sharing content over the internet are no longer the frontier of internet free-speech. The goalposts have been on the move it seems.

In 1993 there were about 50 corporations that controlled just about all of the media in the United States. Newspapers, magazines, radio, television, the works. By 2004, we were down to only five corporations controlling it all. Since the collapse of United Press International, the Associated Press has been the one and only national news service in the United States. This means that just about all the news you see is filtered through this one single company. Even local news from your home town is partially owned by the AP, as part of their agreement with smaller news agencies that make up their network. If there is a big enough story in your hometown, it gets handed up to the AP and sent out across the wires to be picked up by every other news agency across the country, as an AP article, not usually even giving a mention of your local hometown newspaper or reporter that broke the story. But in return, these smaller news agencies get to print other AP news, which accounts for just about anything that is being reported on any given day. This gives the AP a huge amount of leverage over how news gets reported, even if it does not originate with them. No news agency would dare defy the AP, and risk losing their agreement to print just about anything that is being considered news. It would be business suicide. The mainstream media in America is a network dominated by the AP. Not exactly an ideal arrangement for the promise of free speech. There was a time that we as freedom-loving Americans saw a singular state-controlled media as the hallmark of an evil totalitarian Communist regime, but would it really be any better to have a single corporation reporting all of the news rather than the state? Hardly. That would simply make it the hallmark of a Fascist totalitarian state rather then a Communist one. You see, Communism is what you get when the government controls business. Fascism is what you get when business controls government. In a nutshell anyway.

Thanks to technology, we still have a bastion of free speech with the internet. Even while your average American is content to sit back and zone out to regurgitated tabloid news, for many of us, the internet is as enlightening as it can be frustrating and confusing, navigating the back corridors of truth. The news here is not pre-packaged and heated in the microwave. It is raw, and requires critical thinking, cleverness, memory. In short, here you have to stop and think. If the truth is handed to you on a silver platter, it just might not be the truth, just like that might not be beef in that fast food taco. It's a shame that more folks aren't interested to look a little deeper into things, and are content to take the half-truths of the mainstream media as a complete source of important information. But at least the rest of us have the internet, this beacon of liberty and free speech. Well, for the moment anyway. It seems that our days may be numbered, and dwindling fast now.

Back in the summer of 2008, the Associated Press, a monolithic news agency with a litigious history decided it was going to set the precedent for how their material was disseminated across the internet, by issuing Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notices to bloggers and news aggregators they claimed were violating their copyright and additionally were accused of “hot news” misappropriation under New York State law. They had already slapped two companies with copyright lawsuits not long before, one in Florida. In essence, this was the beginning of the AP trying to force the entire U.S.-based internet to become another one of their subsidiaries under licensing agreement.

Now to really understand this, we need to have a look at what is called the “fair use” act. What it tells us first is that copyrighted material can be used without permission, for such purposes as “criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research.” Seems quite reasonable, but too bad it's not quite that simple. You see, there really are no set guidelines. Even from that list there can be any number of exceptions based on the nature of the copyright work, potential profits from someone who is citing the work, and so forth. It is all so completely ambiguous that they might just as well have said, “Use whatever you want at your own risk because it's all up to the judge anyway.” That's really no exaggeration. Rulings in one case will not necessarily be used as a precedent in the next, particularly in civil suits, though copyright violation can be a criminal matter as well. There are no set standards for selected content, length or proportions of quotations, or potential market impact. Nevertheless, it has still been used as a general guideline for everyone from internet bloggers to public school teachers. An example might be the playing of a movie in the auditorium of a public school for students. It may not be considered a violation of copyright because it is being used for educational purposes. But if that same movie were to be played in an auditorium full of families at the ice-cream social gathering where goodies were being sold to raise money for a field trip, that could very well indeed be ruled as a liability through public dissemination of copyrighted material. Many restaurants can no longer sing the “Happy Birthday” song to patrons on their special day because of the threat of copyright lawsuits.

Across the internet though, it has been generally understood by bloggers and members of discussion forums and so forth, that news reports are not treated with the same level of copyright scrutiny as other media such as movies and music. After all, news is a relatively public matter anyway. Granted, reporters work hard often risking life and limb to get their stories, other staff all do their jobs, the news agencies have their expenses and financial obligations to investors, but at the end of the day the events they are reporting on are public events that they are willfully sharing with the greater public. In print they share it with the public for pocket change, but on their own internet sites they even share the news for free, and quite often encourage viewers to share it on networking tools such as Twitter or an RSS feed. The profitability in news reporting is not in the news itself, but in advertising revenues from companies who know that people will see their ad when they come to find out the news of the day, whether it be in print, over the airwaves, or over the internet. So really, it is in the best interest of any news agency to get the news out there as far and wide as possible, so long as they are referenced in some way. Let's not forget the old adage “there's no such thing as bad press.”

Copying and pasting an entire article may be seen as not really acting in good faith on the part of the blogger, but so long as it is properly attributed, it really should not be of serious concern to a news company. It's not really going to cost them anything. No one is going to decide that they would rather see their mainstream search engine news in some backwater blog day after day where the articles may be missing pictures, related links, and be generally mutilated in a hack paste job. Most folks will want to go right to the source, and see a copy/paste job merely as reference for discussion. Adding a link to any pasted article is certain to drive traffic back to the original news site, with folks who might never have even bothered to check the day's news otherwise. When most internet users post these articles, they are not posting it to circumvent the original news services and are not claiming the articles as their own original material, they are posting for the purposes of discussion, not plagiarism. Whether it be to critique the report itself, the news source overall, or as a general discussion related to the news being reported, the news article itself still becomes secondary to our own expression of free-speech. In this way we see that even a fully copied article could be seen as fair use, as a reference in these discussions.

So understanding all of this, one really has to ask, what was really behind the aggression of the AP against bloggers and other websites? Especially when you have a look at some of the specific instances they had issued the DMCA notices for. Many did not even copy the same headline, all of them contained links back to the original AP source, and none of them were even full posts of the article. They were merely snippets of the article, with a link back to the original complete article. You would think that the AP would be thanking them, not trying to sue them. You can see that down in the corner here of the MSMReview we even have a host-provided widget installed that runs an AP headline ticker. Is that something that we can be sued for? Could we be sued if we posted those same headlines without the widget?

By the end of 2008 it appears that the AP decided to back off a bit, and admitted that they might have been being a bit heavy-handed in the protection of their media. But one really has to wonder what set them on in the first place to such an ill-conceived venture. The only potential loss of revenue might have come from the fact that many news outlets in their network will pull an article after a bit of time, and then charge a fee for retrieval from an archive. In this way, a blog or forum could be seen as archiving these stories and undermining a very minor potential source of revenue. How often do folks actually go ahead and pay for an article for which the link is no longer active for, and especially in comparison to the potential for referral traffic generated by articles posted outside of the original site? Moreover, do they charge your local library a fee for making old newspapers available to the public after the articles have been pulled from the website? Granted, the library already paid 50-cents for a copy of the paper, but if that token amount were really the issue, then why do they not charge to read the headlines on their own websites and the large search engine hosts?

It just doesn't make sense, there is something missing from this picture still. Now we come to more recent news. It seems that other news sources are now hiring outside companies to do their dirty work for them, having a go at the bloggers and forums this summer in a similar manner that the AP did back in 2008, but on a much wider scale, and even more aggressively this time. Are they really so desperate for quick profits that they are willing to cut off their noses just to spite their faces? Are they really willing to alienate readers, and in turn their advertising clients, to scrape a few bucks away from bloggers? Was the whole AP fiasco just a “testing of the water” to to gauge reaction to an assault on free speech?

Steve Gibson, CEO of Las Vegas-based Righthaven has been buying up newspaper copyrights for the sole purpose of scouring the web to find and then sue anyone who has posted material without permission. He is able to compel quick settlements based on the fact that even a single violation can be a penalty of $150,000. Righthaven already has hundreds of lawsuits in the works, but estimates that there may be billions of violations. That will not doubt put any nickel and dime blogs and web sites right out of business. Many blogs and forums that could be seen as a profit company because of ad placement through services such as AdSense, really are not actually profitable at all, and are generally operated for reasons other than profit, such as practicing free speech and engaging their fellow human beings in discussion on current events via the internet. But even for larger sites, the threat is potent, seeing how much they stand to lose for even a single violation if they fight it in court then lose. One large internet forum that generates about 5 million hits a month with their user-generated discussion forum on alternative topics has decided to fight the lawsuit on the grounds that the site itself did not actually post the material, but that a forum user did, and therefore rather than file a lawsuit Righthaven should have served the site with a DMCA takedown notice. So in this case, we see that this company operating on behalf of the Las Vegas Review-Journal has actually gone well beyond what the AP did two summers ago. They aren't even bothering with take-down notices, they are going straight for the lawsuit. It is also interesting to note that this representative of the media has gone after one of the largest alternative subject matter forums on the internet, where open-minded free-thinking is highly valued (even if critically scrutinized.)

In another case, one of the above-mentioned forum's primary competitors has also been the subject of an action by a company representing Reuters news service, the AP of the British-influenced world. Again coming under fire is a forum on alternative subject matter where open-minded free-thinking is courted (even if dreadfully manipulated.) That case is part of a campaign launched in March by California-based Attributor with their FairShare Guardian model. In one 30-day scan with this new model, they found 75,000 sites with copies of un-licensed articles. Rather than suing them in court, Attributor offers discussion on syndication, in which they can pretty much demand any price they want for the syndication rights from the alleged violator. If negotiations fail, they will contact ad agencies doing business with the site. In the case of the specific site mentioned here already, the ad agencies did indeed pull their ads, the site's primary revenue stream for covering operating costs. Attributor also notifies search engines and web hosts, who are obligated under the DMCA to take down material they know to be in violation. So in essence, these forums are forced to pay the licensing fee for what might otherwise be considered fair-use, or be shut down entirely.

Now we finally see a pattern emerging. First, the somewhat failed attempt by AP to shutter blogs and websites that they had zeroed in on for whatever reason. Now we see on one hand a venture to force settlements that will likely shut down many thousands of blogs and websites. And on the other hand, we see due-process completely circumvented by a company demanding what can be assumed to be exorbitant licensing fees, and also sure to shut down thousands, even hundreds of thousands of websites. But can all this really be seen as a measure to protect profits? Certainly not when you consider that these blogs and websites are what drive traffic to these news sources in the first place. So then, this really isn't about profits so much as consolidation. One doesn't need a hundred-thousand blogs directing traffic to a few news sites, if a huge chunk of the web is shut right down entirely, and traffic can be directed through a few select mainstream social networking sites. This is about control, not profits. Controlling what you see, how you see it, and even the discussions you have about it. Bloggers are being forced to report the news under the terms dictated by licensing agreements, and whatever fine print that might entail aside from kicking up a fee as if news reporting were some mafia cartel. That is not free speech. This is about controlling our collective memory by editing and pulling articles and by preventing accessibility to archived copies of original stories floating around on the web. And that folks, is the real heart of the matter. Digital book burning. Remove our collective memory, mold the present, and dictate the future.

Whoa now. Maybe that's a bit of a jump there. A few select very powerful media monopolies shutting down the internet piece by piece? Sounds like a bit of a stretch into conspiracy-theory land there, no? Surely the government would have something to say about this, would step in to defend liberty and the Constitution? We have been like Gunny Hartman in the movie Full Metal Jacket here, rummaging through the unlocked footlocker of internet dirty laundry to “just see if anything's missing here.” And suddenly we find the jelly donut. Or better yet, that something is indeed missing. Something big. Something along the lines of 73,000 blogs shut down in a single day, with the flip of a switch. Here we get a good look at the relationship between business and the government.


On July 9 of this year, Toronto-based Blogetry.com, an internet blogging platform and Wordpress host-provider with approximately 73,000 clients, went dark. Less than a week later, Ipbfree.com, a site used to create web message boards, suddenly went offline. The shutdowns came with no notice, no pending legal action, and no explanation at all for some considerable time. Since then, some information has come out about the shut-down of Blogetry.com, so we are going to focus on that, as the information surrounding the Ipbfree.com seems to be far more scattered and less reliable. It should be noted that no direct correlation between the two events has been confirmed at this point, but there were some interesting similarities between the two events. Both said they were shut down by outside influence and not coming back, that the user-generated content violated no copyright laws, and that those who ordered the closures were legally bound to non-disclosure.

Initial speculation was that the shutdowns were part of a sweep by movie or record companies cracking down on illegal downloads and hosting of related files, with the support of the Obama Administration who has vowed to support the entertainment companies. It was not an unreasonable conclusion to reach, as these shutdowns came right on the heels of a number of scattered seizures by the Department of Justice along with Immigration and Customs Enforcement of assets and websites related to alleged illegal file-sharing, as part of an ongoing initiative called “Operation: In Our Sights.” So there we are back to the beginning of this article, with the “menace of digital piracy” that we have all been hearing about for years. One sure-fire method for Federal agents to conduct a “witch-hunt” by going after alleged pirates.

Other speculation was that perhaps there was child pornography involved. Another fantastic boogie man to get the people all riled up while being the perfect cover for officials to go right ahead and do just about anything they please. Now please understand, MSMR in no way is trying to make light of child pornography, or excuse the activities of deranged persons involved in that garbage in any way, but having to articulate that point goes to show just what a raw nerve there is there in society for the powers that be to poke at when they want to distract us. Even when they yell pedophile, we still have the right, nay, the obligation to question authority. But in cases of illegal file-sharing, and even in cases of illegal pornography, due process must still be applied. No agency has the right to arbitraliy march in and shut down a whole chunk of the internet. There is a lot of legal wrangling that can sometimes go on for years to get a specific website shutdown, much less an entire server of 73,000 clients. The DMCA protects internet service providers from liability of user content, as pointed out in the case mentioned earlier with Righthaven. Not to mention the fact that these sorts of takedowns are usually very public affairs, with publicity being exploited as a deterrent as much as possible.
In these cases, the cloak of secrecy is disturbing to say the least. As it turns out, the owner of Blogetry.com was just as confused as his clients, and tried repeatedly to contact his web-host BurstNet, before their first enigmatic reply. In a message to owner Alexander Yusupov they stated, “We are limited as to the details we can provide to you, but note that this was a critical matter and the only available option to us was to immediately deactivate the server.” In another message they went on to say, “Please note that this was not a typical case, in which suspension and notification would be the norm. This was a critical matter brought to our attention by law enforcement officials. We had to immediately remove the server. “ They refused to give him any more information though, and would not even disclose the law-enforcement agency involved. Nor did they disclose the agency to CNET news, when they were granted an interview with BurstNet VP, Benjamin Arcus. The VP did disclose however, that the service was terminated at the direction of a law-enforcement agency that he could not reveal, and that it was not a copyright issue. So this wasn't about digital pirates after all?

The latest news coming out now is that the secret agency was actually the FBI. BurstNet has also reversed themselves and is now stating that it was their own choice to terminate the server, and that the FBI had nothing to do with the decision. So apparently BurstNet was not in fact restricted to this “only available option” as they had stated, but freely and willingly chose to terminate the server of their own accord, and have tried to justify the unprecedented action by leveling an accusation against Blogetry that there was a history of abuses, though the FBI has not accused Alexander Yusupov of any wrong-doing. What is being reported now is that the bureau had merely requested “voluntary emergency disclosure of information" regarding links to bomb-making instructions and an al-Qaeda hit-list of Americans which appeared on as many as one Blogetry hosted blog. Ah-ha! And there we have another boogie man folks. The ubiquitous yet imaginary al-Qaeda. (You will remember in a previous article here at MSMR where we pointed out that al-Qaeda is actually a government generated fabrication.) Mention al-Qaeda, bomb, or terrorist, and the FBI can instantly shut down 73,000 free-speech platforms without any due-process or oversight whatsoever because of what may have been one single alleged offender. In the post 9/11 era there is nothing “voluntary” about what is expected during an “emergency.” BurstNet has stated that they cannot restore any Blogetry data, even with the offending material removed. All of those blogs are just gone, completely wiped out. Of course we are supposed to believe BurstNet's revised position now, that they did not cave in under pressure by the FBI in the face of some alleged terrorist threat, and that they wiped out 73,000 blogs because of two alleged previous violations of their policies by Blogetry.. It doesn't seem that it really makes much difference anyhow at this point. Either BurstNet threw themselves under the bus, doing irreparable damage to their credibility and the future of their business to cover for the FBI, or they were in fact the ones who decided to pull the plug as they are stating now, making themselves the bane of free-speech advocates around the globe.

When all is said and done, it is now abundantly clear that these companies and government agencies working in concert, have begun dismantling large swaths of the internet this summer, with a three-pronged assault on liberty, through lawsuits, through cutting financing, and through direct action by blocking and terminating access to the internet. Make no mistake about it folks, this is the burning of books in the digital age. The only question is if you are going to accept the excuses ever-ready at the hand despots the world over, and then bow down to the march of the jack-boot, while gleefully chanting the rhetoric that it is all for our safety, all for our children, all for our own good as we spiral down into the pit of totalitarianism. This is it, our last chance, the end game. There is nothing else left for them to take, but these last bastions of free expression and liberty, where the news can be pondered and debated without censorship, where we can collect our memories and look back to them to see what our tomorrow has come to. Do not forget what you have read here today. Remember the burning of the books.

“Where they burn books, they will ultimately also burn people”

~Heinrich Heine

Here's to hoping that no one gets sued over this, but here are links to related material and articles:
http://www.corporations.org/media/
http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html
http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-20010877-261.html?tag=mncol;txt
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=964013
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-10692501
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/07/19/blogetery-owners-shut-down-bombs-al-qaeda/
http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2010/07/22/the-curious-disappearance-of-blogetry/