"Where there is no vision, the people perish: but he that keepeth the law, happy is he."
-- Proverbs 29:18, King James Bible (KJV)

Saturday, April 29, 2017

Revised Decipherment of the Cerutti Mastodon Bone of California, USA

We have revised our initial decipherment of the Cerutti Mastodon Bone -- not by changing any of our illustrative markings or identified cupmarks, but differently interpreting those cupmarks and lines, putting Virgo and Leo higher up in the image, and in the lower part of the image adding Hydra, Corvus, Crux, the Large Magellanic Cloud, Carina, Vela and Canopus in Puppis.

We also now identify a bird and its corresponding cupmarks in the upper left as Cygnus and below it a triangular form as Aquila.

Below is the resulting NEW REVISED decipherment, which we have labelled "May, 2017" to keep it separate from the previous "April, 2017" decipherment, even though both are separated by only one day at the end of April. Usually, we do not publish decipherments immediately, knowing that revisions may be necessary, but here we wanted to get the work out quickly.

We have also corrected the spelling of Cerutti, which is not two R's and one T but rather vice versa....






Thursday, April 27, 2017

The Cerutti Mastodon Bone of California, USA as Astronomy ca. 6000-4000 B.C. perhaps by People of Haplogroup X (mtDNA)

Please Note: The sky map decipherment below was revised in part by Andis Kaulins two days later at http://lawpundit.blogspot.com/2017/04/revised-decipherment-of-cerutti.html, adding more star identifications and changing the position of Virgo and Leo to be higher up above the underworld of stars.
_______________

Archaeology and related professions suffer from their tendency to opt for a self-serving myopic assessment of the available evidence, too often without sober consultation of what "science" might call "good common sense".

When we take the evidence of genetic studies into account, then mankind migrated out of Africa no earlier than about 60000 B.C. according to the Map of Human Migration, National Geographic. Note that we reject and do not use the confusing and allegedly "politically correct" BCE and BPE labels, which are artificial ill-constructed academic notations with little practical value.

ANYONE, no matter what their academic credentials, suggesting the discovery of prehistoric human or human-like locations and/or artifacts outside of Africa that fall far much earlier than that date of 60000 B.C. -- when faced with the genetic evidence -- is likely to have made a colossal dating error in setting the chronology. That may be the case for the Cerutti Mastodon bone.

We have pointed out the above wisdom repeatedly over the years, most recently in our posting Bruniquel Cave "Ring" Construction in France Represents a Sky Map, But it is Not 176000 Years Old and Likely Not Constructed by Neanderthals.

We now are confronted with a report in the New York Times headlined Humans Lived in North America 130,000 Years Ago, Study Claims, reporting on a study -- published in the purportedly reputable peer-reviewed science journal Nature -- whose editors and reviewers need to start to do their homework -- titled A 130,000-year-old archaeological site in southern California, USA.

We are not going to go into any assessment of the radiometric procedures used in dating the Bone from the Cerutti Mastodon (CM) site in question, because it is not necessary, as there is no proof that the carvers of the bone broke the bone into pieces, as the writers of the article allege.

Rather, an old broken mastodon bone from an earlier age was arguably found and carved at some later time -- indeed, based on our dating below, probably carved by the still mysterious, but surely then seafaring people of Haplogroup X (mtDNA), who spread their astronomy in the New World at that time.

The New York Times article by Carl Zimmer writes:

"The bold and fiercely disputed claim, published in the journal Nature, is based on a study of mastodon bones discovered near San Diego.....

Some experts were intrigued by the research, but many archaeologists strongly criticized it, saying the evidence didn’t come close to supporting such a profound conclusion."

The key to this mastodon bone is not only the correct interpretation of the carved wavy lines, but also a host of other carvings and cupmarks on the bone. We can explain the wavy lines, as a bonus of our decipherment.

Anyone who thinks that he has seen all the carving on the mastodon bone when he or she has merely noted the wavy lines on it -- the easy part -- is greatly mistaken. We are reminded of Albert Einstein's famous phrase, that "I have little patience with scientists who take a board of wood, look for its thinnest part, and drill a great number of holes where drilling is easy."

There are numerous things carved on the bone, and we present simple and interpreted illustrations below of the lines and cupmarks made on the bone, all of which -- in our decipherment -- are astronomical in nature -- i.e. they represent "stargazing" in ancient times, we estimate ca. 6000 to 4000 B.C. with the stars near the Autumn Equinox to the left of the bone illustration as seen below and the stars near to the Spring Equinox to the right of the bone, as one is looking at the bone and as presented in the illustrations below. The Summer Solstice is then at the stars of Virgo (the main middle figure)

The head of Leo is to the right and can be viewed as either a human head or the head of a cat-like or dog-like creature. Behind that to the left is the head of human female with the wavy lines surely representing the watery underworld toward the southern stars of Centaurus, Lupus etc.

Marked at the left are the stars of Sagittarius and Scorpio, both near the galactic centre, as marked by heads of the deceased, since the ancients believed the souls of the deceased returned there. See my many postings on Avebury Henge and Stonehenge in the last year for an explanation.

Groupings of stars that are represented on the Cerutti Mastodon Bone may not in ancient days have been exactly comparable to our own modern constellations of course, but decipherment experience shows that the ancients adopted similar groupings, based on the brightest stars in the heavens.

Below is our decipherment of the Cerutti Mastodon Bone based on Letter to Nature 544, 479–483, 27 April 2017, doi:10.1038/nature22065 and the image reproduced in the New York Times article cited above.

Decipherment by Andis Kaulins, Traben-Trarbach, April, 2017:


The entire matter is rather elementary -- once one understands that the ancients carved mastodon and similar bones like this for important reasons such as astronomy, calendration and perhaps other shamanistic endeavors.

Monday, April 17, 2017

The International Law Firm "Paul, Weiss" Continues to Add to its Storied History of Excellence

The law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP
(shortened as "Paul, Weiss", "Paul, Weiss et al." or "Paul|Weiss")
continues to win awards and gain recognition in the legal sphere in 2017.
See that link.

Paul|Weiss is an international "Big Law" firm of attorneys headquartered in New York City with offices in New York, Beijing, Hong Kong, London, Tokyo, Toronto, Washington, D.C. and Wilmington, Delaware.

Having been a summer associate and associate in the corporate department of the firm in New York City, the LawPundit was gratified to read that US News - Best Lawyers had named Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP
the Corporate Law Firm of the Year in 2016.

Paul, Weiss et al. has a long, unique and storied history extending far beyond corporate law, so that recognition for legal excellence is nothing new.

For example, as written at that history:

"Each of the three women serving on the U.S. Supreme Court in 2016 began her career as a summer associate at Paul, Weiss."

Take a look at the quite amazing history of the firm.




Saturday, April 15, 2017

Futurist Ari Wallach at TED.com on Decision-Making and Long-Term Planning Tactics in Business and Society

Decision-making and tactics for long-term planning are discussed by futurist Ari Wallach at TED.com in Ari Wallach: 3 ways to plan for the (very) long term.

Rather than thinking just short-term, Ari identifies three long-term "tactics" we might consider following to get better results than we have been getting:
  • 1) transgenerational thinking (looking at things in terms of lifespans)
  • 2) futures thinking (Ari says "we've abdicated the future from the high priests in Rome to the high priests of Silicon Valley"), and
  • 3) telos thinking (stopping to think about "to what end" is it all?).

Friday, April 14, 2017

The Return of the Blackberry? A Nearly $1 Billion Arbitration Award Against Qualcomm May Help

The Return of the BlackBerry?

Pinsent Masons has the story at Out-Law.com in BlackBerry awarded $814.9 million royalty refund from Qualcomm

Will Increased "Big Data" Knowledge Dominate Decision-Making in the World of the Future?

At Forbes.com, Bernard Marr writes in The Complete Beginner's Guide To Big Data In 2017 that the future of the world will be forged increasingly through the use and application of "Big Data" to decision-making.

What does "Big Data" mean?

Marr writes:

"Big Data works on the principle that the more you know about anything or any situation, the more reliably you can gain new insights and make predictions about what will happen in the future. By comparing more data points, relationships will begin to emerge that were previously hidden, and these relationships will enable us to learn and inform our decisions."

Is Marr right?

Does increased "Big Data" knowledge mean power?

The future will tell us.


Saturday, April 08, 2017

The Incredible Life of William T. Coleman Jr.: A Black Man Who Was a Real Hero in the Fields of Law and Politics

There are few lives and careers so massively filled with impressive achievements as the life of William Thaddeus Coleman, Jr., who passed away on March 31, 2017 as the oldest then still living former Cabinet member.

Just read the obituary of William T. Coleman Jr. by Dennis Hevesi at the New York Times.

Coleman's life is celebrated at the Paul, Weiss Alumni Network at LinkedIn -- of which I am a member as a former Paul, Weiss associate -- via Brian Sogol, Alumni Manager at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP, who quotes current Paul, Weiss Chairman Brad Karp as follows:

Bill graduated #1 from Harvard Law School in 1946, served as the first African-American editor of the Harvard Law Review, and clerked for Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter (alongside Eliot Richardson).

Bill tried to land a law firm associate position in his home town of Philadelphia, but was rejected by every law firm at which he interviewed. Through a serendipitous encounter with then-Paul, Weiss associate (and later a respected federal district judge and dean of both Yale Law School and Penn Law School) Louis Pollack, Bill was introduced to Louis Weiss, interviewed at Paul, Weiss and was offered a litigation associate position. Bill commuted daily from Philadelphia to Paul, Weiss's New York office for three years (1949-1952). While at Paul, Weiss, Bill worked with Thurgood Marshall on the historic Brown v Board of Education matter, ultimately leaving the firm to join the NAACP to fight full time for racial justice. Bill spent the next 65 years breaking down barrier upon barrier.


Hevesi at the New York Times writes about Coleman inter alia as follows:

"His memoir, “Counsel for the Situation,” was written with Mr. Bliss and had a foreword by Justice Stephen Breyer. In it, Mr. Coleman reflected on his own life and on the American legal system, and paid tribute to the people who had influenced him — blacks and whites, Republicans and Democrats.

“They shared the strong conviction,” he wrote, “that individual talent, brilliance and effort can and will change the course of history.
”" [emphasis added by LawPundit]

__________
As noted in an April 3, 2017 correction at the New York Times to set the "small detail" facts exactly straight: "An earlier version of this obituary misstated the year Mr. Coleman graduated from Harvard Law School. It was 1946, not 1947. It also attributed a distinction to him erroneously. He was not the first black member of the Harvard Law Review; Charles Hamilton Houston had served on the board in the early 20th century. And the branch of the service that Mr. Coleman joined was rendered incorrectly. It was the Army Air Forces, not the Army Air Corps.



Tuesday, April 04, 2017

Impression Products, Inc. v. Lexmark International, Inc.: U.S. Supreme Court Oral Arguments: First Sale and the Patent Exhaustion Doctrine

The United States Supreme Court on March 21, 2017 held oral arguments on the first sale patent exhaustion case Impression Products, Inc. v. Lexmark International, Inc., which we previously discussed at First Sale and the Patent Exhaustion Doctrine in the Resale and Use of Printer Ink Cartridges.

The issue presented is formulated by the Supreme Court:

"15-1189 IMPRESSION PRODUCTS, INC. V. LEXMARK INTERNATIONAL, INC.
DECISION BELOW: 816 F.3d 721
LOWER COURT CASE NUMBER: 2014-1617, 2014-1619
 

QUESTION PRESENTED:
 

The "patent exhaustion doctrine"-also known as the "first sale doctrine"-holds that "the initial authorized sale of a patented item terminates all patent rights to that item." Quanta Computer, Inc. v. LG Electronics, Inc., 553 U.S. 617, 625 (2008). This case presents two questions of great practical significance regarding the scope of this doctrine on which the en banc Federal Circuit divided below:
1. Whether a "conditional sale" that transfers title to the patented item while specifying post-sale restrictions on the article's use or resale avoids application of the patent exhaustion doctrine and therefore permits the enforcement of such post-sale restrictions through the patent law's infringement remedy.
2. Whether, in light of this Court's holding in Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 133 S. Ct. 1351, 1363 (2013), that the common law doctrine barring restraints on alienation that is the basis of exhaustion doctrine "makes no geographical distinctions," a sale of a patented article-authorized by the U.S. patentee-that takes place outside of the United States exhausts the U.S. patent rights in that article.
 

CERT. GRANTED 12/2/2016"

The main question in this case is reflected by the precedent-based reluctance of the U.S. Supreme Court to support the alienation of chattels in commerce, here the first sale patent exhaustion doctrine, a legal issue that goes back hundreds of years to common law and Lord Coke (who has retained his name over the centuries in spite of modern oft overreaching intellectual property protection of generic and name terms):

We think that Justice Breyer's comments during oral argument in the above-cited case represent what the Supreme Court will likely decide on the main issue, based on the logic of Breyer's arguments [here excerpted by LawPundit]:

"JUSTICE BREYER: What about Justice Kennedy's question? I mean, Lord Coke had that very question in mind, I think, that -- that one of the problems with restraints in alienation of chattel is that the buyer may not know, and -- and moreover, it stops competition among buyers. Those are the basic two things that have led that as a kind of underlying principle.
...
Then why don't you require the person who sells it to just resell it with the requirement that they promise not to, you know, whatever it is?
...
[O]ne of the reasons that it's hard to get away with that is the antitrust laws in the contract area. And another reason is because Lord Coke said 300 years ago, you know, it's -- you get into a lot of trouble when you start trying to restrict this buyer who's got the widget and he would like to use it as he wishes. Now, that's been the kind of basic legal principle for an awfully long time.
...
There ... are all kinds of exceptions.

But to go back to your basic point underlying this, of course, any monopolist, including a patent monopolist, would love to be able to go to each buyer separately and extract from each buyer and user the maximum amount he would pay for that particular item.

Dentists would pay more for gold perhaps than someone who wants to use gold for some other thing. Okay? They'd like that.

But by and large, that's forbidden under many laws, even though it does mean slightly restricted output, and it also means a lower profit for the monopolist.

All right. Now, it's against that background that I think the law and economics professors, who are telling what is correct, that -- and the argument that you're making has to be evaluated. That's what I think on the first part.

All this precedent is very hard for you to get around. And I'm not talking about just Lord Coke; I'm talking about the Supreme Court precedent."

Saturday, April 01, 2017

EU Laws and UK Law As the Result of Brexit : The Example of the General Data Protection Regulation

The government of the United Kingdom has now invoked Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union and has thus formally triggered the UK intention to leave the EU, a separation widely called "Brexit" for short.

In two years, Brexit will finalize the divorce of the UK from the EU, but that divorce does not automatically repeal laws in force in the United Kingdom.

Brexit has many complex legal aspects, many of which will beset Europe and beyond for many years, among which is a widespread misunderstanding of how EU Law applies to UK persons and businesses in the interim ... and beyond.

Brexit itself does not nullify laws in effect in the UK.

As headlined at Out-Law.com:
Survey reveals UK business' misunderstanding on GDPR and Brexit.

The GDPR is the General Data Protection Regulation, which goes into effect in the EU before Brexit occurs.

The UK government has said that the GDPR will be adopted in the UK regardless of Brexit.

What happens thereafter is then up to the lawmakers in the United Kingdom.

°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°

Sky Earth Native America -- in Two Volumes
Native American Rock Art Petroglyphs Pictographs
Cave Paintings Earthworks & Mounds
Deciphered as Land Survey & Astronomy by Andis Kaulins

paperbacks in color print
Volume 1, 2nd Edition, 266 pages

ISBN: 1517396816 / 9781517396817
Volume 2, 2nd Edition, 262 pages
ISBN: 1517396832 / 9781517396831

Sky Earth Native America Volume 1-----------Sky Earth Native America Volume 2
by Andis Kaulins J.D. Stanford                                         
by Andis Kaulins J.D. Stanford
(front cover(s))  
 
  ------

(back cover with a photograph of the author and book absract text)