Tonight's rant

["L. Bird" <pkeets@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Here's tonight's rant.  Names have been removed to protect the guilty. ;)

> If you stop the suppliers you make consumers become producers to supply 
> their demand.
>
> I know this is very simplistic, but supply side economics was never my 
> strong point.
You are right that supply side economics is what is going on here.  That's 
when the government directly supports investors and owners of big business 
with tax benefits, subsidies, laws, law enforcement, contracts, low-interest 
loans, etc., expecting that labor and consumers will evenutally benefit from 
all that wealth going to the investors and owners.  In practice, these guys 
don't share very much with the peons.

Here's the picture that's emerging:  If you have access to the discussion on 
igtc, you may have seen some of the articles posted on how much money is 
generated by the porn industry.  It's not just the Russian Mafia that's 
benefitting from child porn.  For every month that the Reedy's made 1.4 
million from their Texas gateway, charge authorization companies made 
something like 2-3 percent (about $35,000), and banks/credit card companies 
made $.20-.30 per transaction.  The ISP made a huge amount, too--you figure 
it had to have a lot of bandwidth to handle that much in downloads.  Etc, 
etc., and this is only one business that's generating this much in $$.  Add 
to that what consumers spent on the different sites inside the gateway, and 
you can see that this was a very profitable business for all concerned.  
Thus, American business has no real desire to monitor what's generating this 
much cash flow, and government and law enforcement look the other way.

You can see this in how reluctant they were to shut it down.  This site 
wasn't discovered by law enforcement; it was reported by a concerned citizen 
who had to really insist to get something done about it.  We're seeing a 
performance from the IWF today--aren't they coming across like stuffed 
shirts?  I get a strong impression that these are only figurehead 
organizations designed to make everyone think we're doing something about 
child porn, and their big function is to make bleeding heart speeches about 
it, collect donations and look after their fat salaries.  I suspect the IWF 
is really pissing Pete off or he wouldn't have siced the fans on them 
today--do you suppose he's asking what they did about his complaints?  
(Answer: nothing.)

Rather than go after the suppliers, law enforcement has been chasing after 
consumers, hoping for some sweet, high-profile cases like Paul Reubens and 
Pete Townshend so the public can see what a great job they're doing.

1. <whine> We can't do anything about child porn because nobody can police 
the Internet.

2. <wheeze> We can't do anything about suppiers and manufacturers in Russia 
and Asia because nobody cares.

3.  <sniff> Everybody just don't look, okay?  That way we can stop it. 
<haha>

The public has been brainwashed.  Sorry if I'm coming off a little cynical 
about this--I'm getting sort of pissed like Pete.


keets





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