The high court said early Monday that 75-year-old farmer Vernon Bowman of Indiana violated Monsanto’s patent rights when he purchased a mix of seeds from a grain elevator that he later planted on his Midwest farm. That mix included patented Roundup Ready soybean seeds manufactured by Monsanto that are sold under license because they can hold up against their namesake, a nasty pesticide regularly used on farms.Bowman argued that he could do whatever he wanted with the Roundup Ready seeds since he obtained them rightfully from a grain elevator and the terms of Monsanto’s licensing agreement under the patent did not apply to him. Under Monsanto’s terms, Roundup Ready seeds can only be harvested once and must not be saved or reused.“If they don’t want me to go to the elevator and buy that grain, then Congress should pass a law saying you can’t do it,” Bowman told RT in February.”If they then claim that I can’t use that, they’re forcing their patent on me,” Bowman he said to Huffington Post earlier this year. “No law was ever passed that said no farmers can’t go to the elevator and buy grain and use it, so to me they either forced their patent on me or they abandoned their patent by allowing it to be dumped it with non-Roundup grain.”On Monday, the Supreme Court decided unanimously that Bowman indeed violated the licensing terms.“By planting and harvesting Monsanto’s patented seeds, Bowman made additional copies of Monsanto’s patented invention, and his conduct thus falls outside the protections of patent exhaustion,” the court ruled. “Were this otherwise, Monsanto’s patent would provide scant benefit. After Monsanto sold its first seed, other seed companies could produce the patented seed to compete with Monsanto, and farmers would need to buy seed only once.”“Under the doctrine of patent exhaustion, the authorized sale of a patented article gives the purchaser, or any subsequent owner, a right to use or resell that article. Such a sale, however, does not allow the purchaser to make new copies of the patented invention,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote for the court. “The question in this case is whether a farmer who buys patented seeds may reproduce them through planting and harvesting without thepatent holder’s permission. We hold that he may not.”Monsanto’s practices both in the courtroom and on the farm have made the company increasingly the target of criticism in recent months. On May 26, an international series of rallies to protest Monsanto is scheduled to occur with demonstrations planned on six continents. … Read More
Big City Obstacles to Getting Home in a Disaster
Think about possible impediments to getting home in an emergency so you can plan ahead. … Read More
Olympus Has Fallen and Admission
When last seen on Hollywood soil, in the 2012 Red Dawn
remake, evil North Korean invaders had touched down in Spokane,
Washington, where they were quickly butt-kicked by a bunch of
teenagers. Having learned nothing from that experience, the Norks
are now back, and in Olympus Has Fallen, they’ve targeted
the White House, into which they manage to blast their way in just
13 minutes. Clearly, this sequester thing is having a more serious
effect on national security than anyone could have expected.
Director Antoine Fuqua, who made the steely Training
Day a dozen years ago, here delivers a movie that traffics in
the most shameless patriot-baiting readymades (a sad bugle
sounding, a bullet-riddled Old Glory rustling limply in the breeze)
while attempting to yank cheers with a succession of bad-guy
mowdowns (there are more headshots in this picture than might be
found at a SAG board meeting).
For a piece of elevator-pitch action fodder like this, the cast
is unusually heavy with stars: Aaron Eckhart, Morgan Freeman,
Melissa Leo. But none of these actors are given a lot to do.
(Eckhart spends most of the movie in handcuffs, Leo gets kicked
around a little bit, and Freeman looks very concerned and calls for
coffee.) The film’s focus is almost entirely on Gerard Butler, who
is also one of its 14 producers, and who may be hoping to
obliterate all memories of his last performance, playing a
leprechaun in the universally reviled Movie 43.
Butler is actually a solid action man, though. He plays Mike
Banning, a former Secret Service officer who was unjustly bounced
off the presidential security detail after a nasty limo accident
and now labors unhappily in the Treasury Department. When a plane
full of North Koreans comes barreling into D.C. airspace (with
surprising ease) and starts strafing the streets of the Capitol –
and blowing off the top of the Washington Monument, the bastards –
Banning immediately makes his way to the White House, which he
finds under assault by a Nork assault team. He manages to cap a
number of these assailants, but fails to stop them from
machine-gunning their way into the building. Soon their leader — a
hissable character named Kang (Rick Yune) — has some high-profile
hostages to play with: President Benjamin Asher (Eckhart) and his
VP (Phil Austin) and Secretary of Defense (Leo). On a TV feed to
the Pentagon, Kang demands the computer codes for every
nuke-equipped ICBM in the US arsenal. This can’t be good. (Kang
turns out to be an international terrorist, not an official
emissary of the North Korean government…although he’s based in
North Korea, and…whatever.)
With the president and vice president both indisposed, the
Speaker of the House (Freeman) is brought in, as constitutionally
mandated, to act as president. He is, as I say, very concerned.
Fortunately, Banning has managed to slip into the White House (with
surprising ease) and has begun greasing Norks left and right. He
continues to do so, and do so, and do so, until there’s just one
bad man left lurking — the hateful Kang.
There’s not much more to the movie than Banning’s lethal
progression through the halls and even the hollow walls of the
White House, blowing the face off every North Korean he encounters.
At the screening I attended, this rousing slaughter had its
intended effect on a sizeable number of people, who erupted in
applause every time a bad guy went flying away in a haze of blood.
These particular invaders are admittedly pretty hard to mourn,
though.
More dismaying is the primitive quality of the digital effects
in this movie. Some of the explosions and fires and plane crashes
on view are rendered at a level just a few steps above the White
House attack video posted by the real-world Norks on YouTube
earlier this week. (Talk about useful idiots — have these people
never heard of pre-release publicity?) This sub-par CGI was
concocted by effects houses in Bulgaria, Denmark, and China.
Under-employed Hollywood VFX artists are understandably up in arms
about this sort of outsourcing. And while it might make sense in a
bean-counting way, do we really need to see the beans being counted
onscreen? ; ; ; ; ; ; ;
Admission
Admission is a smarter movie than the average romantic
comedy, and while chugging along on the way to its inexorable happy
wrapup, it passes through some interesting social territory,
touching on issues of parenting, academic priorities, and
professional ethics. It’s also very funny in parts, with bright
performances by Tina Fey and Lily Tomlin. But the comedy and the
social observation don’t quite meld — you want a little more of
either one or the other — and when the movie’s over, you’re left
feeling somewhat under-gratified.
The picture was directed by Paul Weitz (Little Fockers)
and adapted — not slavishly, I gather — from a novel by Jean
Hanff Korelitz. Fey plays Portia Nathan, an admissions officer at
Princeton University. (Parts of the film were shot on-campus, and
there’s a weird suggestion that Princeton is the only school in the
country worth getting into.) Portia’s boss, Clarence (Wallace
Shawn), the Dean of Admissions, lectures his subordinates about the
need to look beyond mere academic excellence in assessing Princeton
applicants: sports are important, mixed ethnic heritage is always
good, and a disabled parent can be a plus, too. (Since author
Korelitz is married to a Princeton professor, these calculations
have a ping of accuracy.)
Portia makes an annual round of high schools to address
potential Princeton applicants. She’s glib (“Just be yourself”) and
candid (noting that of the 20,000 students who apply to her school
each year, 99 per cent won’t be accepted). One of her stops this
year is an “alternative” school called New Quest, located in rural
New Hampshire, where students are instructed not only in academic
subjects, but also such crunchy extra-curricular activities as
wood-chopping and animal husbandry. The school is run by John
Pressman (Paul Rudd), a barely remembered acquaintence from
Portia’s own student days at Dartmouth. John recommends to her a
student named Jeremiah (Nat Wolff), whose grades are abysmal but
who is nevertheless a brilliant autodidact. In addition, Paul has
learned that Jeremiah was adopted as a baby — and that he was born
on the same day and in the same area that the younger Portia (as
her roommate told him at the time) quietly gave birth to a male
child and then put him up for adoption. Portia initially resists
the implication that Jeremiah is her now-grown son, but soon begins
to wonder — and eventually undertakes a highly inadvisable series
of measures to assure his admission to Princeton.
Effectively complicating the plot is a Princeton professor named
Mark (Martin Sheen), with whom Portia has lived happily for 10
years. When he takes up with another woman, Portia feels
sandbagged. (Clingy emotion isn’t Fey’s strong suit, but she makes
it both funny and revealing.) There’s also another admissions
officer (Gloria Reuben), who’s competing with Portia to replace the
retiring Clarence. And then there’s Portia’s mother, Susannah
(Tomlin), a fire-breathing ’70s feminist who says she fulfilled
society’s expectation that she have children by copulating with a
stranger on a train, Portia being the result. Susannah is a monster
of self-sufficiency, and Tomlin is unsparingly abrasive in the
role; but she manages to mine laughs from this woman’s every chilly
wisecrack and withering glance.
It’s too bad that the movie is so seriously handicapped by the
character of John, who we realize from the outset is Portia’s
designated squeeze-to-be. Turning away from his wealthy background,
John has traveled the world doing nothing but good works in places
like Myanmar and Outer Mongolia. He has even adopted an African
child, a long-suffering boy named Nelson (Travaris Spears), who’s
tired of his father’s globe-trotting and wants them to settle into
a permanent home. John is perfect in just about every way — warm,
handsome, selflessly idealistic — and if he were played by anyone
other than the unconquerably appealing Paul Rudd, he could easily
be insufferable. He’s pretty hard to accept as it is.
Tomlin is something to see, though, and Fey once again excels at
portraying of a modern woman beset by very modern struggles and
expectations. But the movie’s attempted blend of serious subjects
with spirited comedy doesn’t really hold together.
Admission does have quite a bit to recommend it. If only
there were a little more. ; ; ; … Read More
I shook hands with a Klansman
AS THE POLISHED brass elevator doors closed, she pressed her back against the side wall. She was traditionally pretty, this legislative page, as most of the young female pages were. Her navy blue blazer fit well, although it bunched as she drew in her shoulders. She was probably a sorority girl or a political science major, or both.I nodded in silent greeting. Perhaps she assessed me, too, with my hippie-long hair tied in a ponytail, no make-up, T-shirt, and jeans. Just another random student worker. An English major, she might have thought, or something in the hard sciences.We were alone on a long ride along the 34 floors of the state capitol building.She glanced at me, her eyes troubled, her expression grim. “David Duke wants me to go to his office,” she said.For those who aren’t familiar with that name, or whose recollections are vague, David Duke became nationally famous after running for Louisiana’s governor in 1991. He had a documented past of carrying books and posters bearing Nazi swastikas while a student at Louisiana State University, served as the Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, and was the founding president of the National Association for the Advancement of White People.Continue Reading… … Read More
US college cancels classes over wave of on-campus hate speech
At least one person was also seen on Oberlin College’s campuswearing a Ku Klux Klan-style outfit in February, which is BlackHistory Month in the US. Numerous acts of vandalism targeted thecollege’s black, Jewish and LGBT students, according to the OberlinReview. It was the seventh racist incident at the school inFebruary.The school’s newspaper cited a note at the campus LGBTQCommunity Coordinator calling it the “Nigger + FaggotCenter.” Someone also wrote “Nigger Oven” on an elevator- along with numerous swastikas drawn in various places aroundcampus.After the reports of a student in Ku Klux Klan getup, Oberlin’sadministration had had enough, sending a message to the schoolcommunity.”This event, in addition to the series of other hate-relatedincidents on campus, has precipitated our decision to suspendformal classes and all non-essential activities for today, Monday,March 4, 2013, and gather for a series of discussions of thechallenging issues that have faced our community in recentweeks,” the statement read.Oberlin had already scheduled an event later in the week tocounter “racist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic messages spreadanonymously around campus,” the school’s Officer ofCommunications said, but that event was moved to Monday, along witha Rally Against Hate.As many as 460 students attended a February 13 demonstration inresponse to the vandalism, according to one student’scount. … Read More
“Modern Family” cast stuck in elevator
Three stars ABC’s “Modern Family” found themselves trapped in a crowded elevator for an hour en route to a fundraiser in Kansas City. Making the most of the situation, actors Julie Bowen, Eric Stonestreet, and Jesse Tyler Ferguson posted videos, photos and updates on Twitter until rescued by firefighters.[embedtweet id="307732710779154433"]Via ABC News: ;Continue Reading… … Read More
‘Scandal’: Mellie Has One Last Play To Convince Fitz Not To Divorce Her (VIDEO)
Mellie made one last desperate play to keep Fitz by her side on “Scandal.” After he’d declared that he was intent on divorcing her — despite her being eight months pregnant — Cyrus tried everything to get him to change his mind. But this is a Fitz post-shooting. He’d realized there was no time to wast anymore, so he wanted out.
Cyrus left it in Mellie’s hands, saying he didn’t know what to do. He had his hands pretty full with Hollis Doyle anyway. Olivia was certain Hollis had been behind the assassination, so Cyrus put out a hit on him. At the last minute, Olivia’s team learned that it wasn’t Hollis, but the hit was already in motion. Will Hollis die? He ended the episode in an elevator with his would-be assassin.
The person who put out the hit on the president remains unknown for now as well, but that revelation is likely coming soon. As for Mellie, she realized that Fitz and she had never been closer than when they were delivering their first two babies. So her hail mary play was to induce labor and force Fitz to come running to her side.
