The conservative majority on the Texas state school board is pushing through a set of changes to History and Social Studies textbooks which present a view of these subjects more in line with politicized, right-wing thinking. The school board, made up of ten Republicans and five Democrats, is dominated by a conservative Christian bloc. None on the school board are experts in the field of History or Social Sciences, and have rejected the opinions given by those who are experts in those fields. The board is not interested in making changes across the board, but instead only in fields which have a political bearing. The changes reflect a definite bias toward conservative Christian biases. Therefore, it is blindingly clear that this is not a debate over balanced education, but rather the desire to dominate the education of children with political views rather than objective information.

Should you think this is exaggeration, then consider this board member as an example:

Board member Cynthia Dunbar, a graduate of Pat Robertson’s Regent University Law School and author of a book declaring that America’s founders created a theocratic government, opened the final board session with a prayer for “a Christian land governed by Christian principles.” She explained the ideology driving curriculum changes: “[N]o one can read the history of our country without realizing that the Good Book and the spirit of the Savior have from the beginning been our guiding geniuses. Whether we look to the first charter of Virginia, or the charter of New England … the same objective is present — a Christian land governed by Christian principles.”

Well, I’m glad the board members have no preconceived notions.

This will affect more than Texas: since so many textbooks are made for Texas’ large population, textbook publishers often apply these changes nationwide. This fact is not lost on the school board, the conservative members of which have obviously taken the cue from national conservative leaders and gone whole-hog with the now-popular out-and-out divisive wingnut strategy. That strategy is to claim a liberal bias which, if it exists, is mild, and “counter” it with such an outrageously one-sided bag of rabid right-wing polemics as to make one gag.

Among the proposed changes:

• increased emphasis on the ideas of Confederacy President Jefferson Davis;
• increased attention to Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich;
• new entries on the NRA and Phyllis Schlafly, replacing removed entries on Kennedy and César Chávez;
• requirements to study right-wing personalities such as Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, but no requirements to study left-wing commentators;
• critical analyses of “unintended consequences” of Title IX, affirmative action, and the Great Society;
• change in terms used–e.g., “capitalism” changed to “free enterprise,” “imperialism” where applied to the U.S. will be called “expansionism,” and references to a “democratic” society are replaced with references to a “republic”–not because of the meaning of the words, but instead because of their connections to political parties;
• slavery de-emphasized as a factor in the causes of the Civil War;
• “slave trade” now referred to as the “triangle trade”;
• insertion of critical analyses of Social Security and Medicare in the context of conservative critiques;
• increased scrutiny of the idea of separation of church and state;
• Thomas Jefferson’s role in U.S. history to be de-emphasized, while the roles of Christian personages such as John Calvin to be more prominent;
• lessons framing the United Nations as detrimental to U.S. sovereignty;
• watered-down coverage of the Civil Rights movement;
• insertion of lessons regarding causes and key organizations of the conservative movement, including the Contract with America, the Heritage Foundation and the Moral Majority;
• major political ideas examined under the paradigm of “Laws of nature and nature’s God”;
• the image of Joe McCarthy will be cleaned up; and
• where President Obama will be mentioned, he will be referred to, unlike all other modern presidents, by his full name–Barack Hussein Obama.

Well, these are hardly political at all, wouldn’t you agree?

All of this, of course, is supposedly to “remove the liberal bias” from existing education standards. In short, to counter what is claimed to be a perceived liberal bias, make the whole shebang blindingly conservative, knowing that the nation will tilt toward you.

Welcome to Fox Education.

Voltage Pictures, makers of The Hurt Locker, have officially filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia against “1 – 5000” John Doe defendants in “every jurisdiction in the United States” for illegally downloading and sharing their motion picture. In the suit (PDF), they allege “great and irreparable injury that cannot fully be compensated or measured in money.” Nevertheless, they are seeking to be compensated in money–specifically, pursuant to 17 U.S.C. § 504, at least between $750 and $30,000 per defendant, in addition to costs, attorney’s fees, and “other and further relief,” in addition to demanding that each defendant destroy all downloaded copies and never, ever even think of downloading any of their movies ever again.

In short, they have jumped on the RIAA bandwagon: file a massive, indistinct lawsuit against thousands of people in the hopes of (a) scaring file sharers into stopping their nefarious activities, and (b) raking in huge amounts of cash via what is essentially extortion writ large. It is expected that Voltage will offer “settlements” in the amount of $1500 per defendant, qualifying as extortion because, like any good nuisance lawsuit, the settlement will cost less than any defendant would pay in legal fees even if they successfully fight off the lawsuit. If all the defendants settled, Voltage would rake in $7.5 million. This assembly-line extortion is a new line of business for attorneys, just like class-action lawsuits as described in Grisham’s The King of Torts. They even go so far as to put the movies online themselves so they can more easily get the IP addresses of downloaders.

So, who are the defendants in the Hurt Locker case? Essentially, Voltage Pictures, makers of the film, have collected up to 5,000 external IP addresses, which identify only the general location of the people who downloaded the movie via BitTorrent, and have filed suit in hopes that this will allow them to legally obligate the ISPs serving those people to hand over the internal records which will provide enough information, they hope, to identify specific downloaders. ISPs who cooperate are not exactly innocent here–they make money off this as well, charging $32 to $60 for each IP address given to plaintiffs, citing costs for doing the search and notifying the address holder.

Voltage Pictures has the ability to carry out this kind of action this primarily because corporations were able to get laws passed which demand abusively large penalties for file sharing. The statute allows the plaintiff to “elect” (language used in the current suit) to take statutory damages between $750 and $30,000 per infringement, even if it cannot be proved that the defendant willfully committed the offense–meaning that if it were simply their liability, if it happened over their connection even without their knowledge, they could be still be forced to pay. I presume that this covers not having a protected WiFi network and a neighbor downloads the movie over stolen bandwidth.

If the file sharing is found to be willful, the penalty jumps to $150,000.

For file-sharing a single movie file. Yeah, that’s “justice.” The law allowing this is obscene and must be rewritten.

Let’s call this out for what it is: extortion. Legal or not, it’s is nothing less than extortion, a grab for cash by unethical means. Today, a film’s profits are measure in terms of domestic and international box office, as well as DVD rentals and sales. How long before proceeds from nuisance lawsuits are added as an element in determining the total earnings of a film?