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Monday, 4 January 2010
A World of Megabeats and Megabytes
My 21st century started in 1998, when I got a new toy. It was the Diamond Rio PMP300, a flimsy plastic gadget the size of a cigarette pack. PMP stood for Portable Music Player. It had a headphone jack, and it played a recently invented digital file format: MPEG-1 Audio Layer Three, or MP3.
The Rio’s 32 megabytes of storage held a dozen songs at passable fidelity. Its sound was clearly inferior to a portable CD player; its capacity was comparable to a cassette or two. But the beauty of it was that it didn’t need any CD or cassette inserted, just digital files — copies of songs — loaded from a computer, to be changed at whim. They might come from albums people owned or borrowed; they might come, even back then, from strangers online. The Recording Industry Association of America sued to have the PMP300 taken off the market and failed — the prelude to a decade of lawsuits trying to corral online music.
It was already too late. For those who were willing to be geeky — learning new software, slowly downloading via dial-up — music had forever escaped its plastic containers to travel the Web. The old distribution system was on its way to becoming irrelevant. “You really think you’re in control? Well, I think you’re crazy,” Cee-Lo Green of Gnarls Barkley sang in 2006.
Because songs are small chunks of information that many people want, music was the canary in the digital coal mine, presaging what would happen to other art forms as Internet connections spread and sped up. For the old recording business everything went wrong. Sales of CDs have dropped by nearly half since 2000, while digital sales of individual songs haven’t come close to compensating. Movies and television (and journalism too) are now scrambling not to become the next victims of an omnivorous but tight-fisted Internet.
By now, in 2010, we’re all geeks, conversant with file formats and software players. Our cellphone/camera/music player/Web browser gadgets fit in a pocket, with their little LCD screens beckoning. Their tiny memory chips hold collections of music equivalent to backpacks full of CDs. The 2000s were the broadband decade, the disintermediation decade, the file-sharing decade, the digital recording (and image) decade, the iPod decade, the long-tail decade, the blog decade, the user-generated decade, the on-demand decade, the all-access decade. Inaugurating the new millennium, the Internet swallowed culture whole and delivered it back — cheaper, faster and smaller — to everyone who can get online...
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Otis Ferry: What I think of anti-hunting ‘idiots’
Otis Ferry with his hounds near Shrewsbury He is the son of rock star Bryan Ferry and works as an amateur whipper-in for the Middleton hunt in Yorkshire.
Even before we reach the sofa in the sitting room of his mother’s Kensington home, Otis Ferry, the 27-year-old pro-hunting firebrand and son of the Roxy Music singer Bryan, is in a state of barely bridled agitation. Agitation at the hunting ban. Agitation at Tony Blair. Agitation at lefties; at the way the whole country is going “lefter”. But mostly, he’s agitated at Simon Cowell, he gasps. He has just seen the X Factor maestro “on Newsnight, talking about the five key issues affecting people in Britain today”, he says.
“The war in Afghanistan, knife crime ... and fox hunting! He said, ‘It’s got to be banned.’ Well, Simon, it is already banned. Oh. Banned properly. Just the most bizarre thing you’ve ever heard. Unbelievable.”
Unbelievable, because a few days shy of hunting’s biggest annual event — thousands turn out to watch Boxing Day meets — even the joint master of foxhounds for the South Shropshire hunt is amazed that hunting is still getting such airtime.
“We’re in the middle of the biggest f***-ups in British history, the economy,” he continues, focusing his shrewishly handsome features on me and exasperatedly swinging his Converses up onto the coffee table. “The sheer shitness of our country ... Hunting affects 0.0001% of the population, and then you’ve got Cowell and some woman [Emily Thornberry MP] standing up and saying, ‘Can we have our PM’s assurances that he won’t let his government repeal the ban on hunting?’”...
@'The Times'
“The war in Afghanistan, knife crime ... and fox hunting! He said, ‘It’s got to be banned.’ Well, Simon, it is already banned. Oh. Banned properly. Just the most bizarre thing you’ve ever heard. Unbelievable.”
Unbelievable, because a few days shy of hunting’s biggest annual event — thousands turn out to watch Boxing Day meets — even the joint master of foxhounds for the South Shropshire hunt is amazed that hunting is still getting such airtime.
“We’re in the middle of the biggest f***-ups in British history, the economy,” he continues, focusing his shrewishly handsome features on me and exasperatedly swinging his Converses up onto the coffee table. “The sheer shitness of our country ... Hunting affects 0.0001% of the population, and then you’ve got Cowell and some woman [Emily Thornberry MP] standing up and saying, ‘Can we have our PM’s assurances that he won’t let his government repeal the ban on hunting?’”...
@'The Times'
You can read the rest of the story at the link. Yes he is a complete twat!
"What did you do in the style-wars Daddy?"
"What did you do in the style-wars Daddy?"
'Remember Naught' by Devilstower
I was nice about it. I didn't make any demands on 2000. I didn't fuss that we were nowhere near launching that manned mission to Jupiter's moons, that we hadn't broken regolith on the lunar base, or that Pan Am's service to the orbital hotel was very far behind schedule. I did not even demand that most basic right of every American -- my own flying car.
Now that it's 2010, I don't think I can be quite so generous. After all, I went into the decade a relatively young man with parents, grandparents, a series of novels on the shelves, and even a television show about to appear on (not then quite so ubiquitous) basic cable. I came out the other side with a cubicle job, an AARP card, and a lot of "out of print" citations on Amazon. Not exactly a tragedy, but it does leave me feeling that I'm entitled to a least a Nexus 3 to help out around the house. So be warned, 21st century teen decade, I have high expectations for you.
Now that the decade we still don't know how to name is in rear view (even if the "Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Seem" label is still very visible), there's been something of a movement to forget the last ten years. There are web sites, pundits, and television shows pushing the idea that we should just put the decade of zeros out of our minds, write it off as a lost period, and move on.
Of course, many people remember nothing about the naughts but moments of unmatched horror. To understand why, here's a simple experiment (animal lovers turn away now) involving rats and a tank of water. Rats can swim, but that doesn't mean they like it and a rat in the water is generally a rat in panic. Scientists tossed rats into a small tank of water in which a block of clear plastic had been suspended. Everywhere else in the tank it was so deep that the rat had to keep on paddling, but if the rat reached the plastic block it could climb up, rest, and shiver in relief. The scientists let the rats catch their breath, took them out... then tossed them back in again. It may seem cruel, but there's a point to it. On repeat visits into the tub, rats remembered where the plastic platform was and scrambled over to it much more quickly. But here's the kicker: rats given a compound that blocked the action of adrenalin on their first visit had a much harder time locating the platform on their return trips. In other words, they remembered better when they were terrified.
The same rules apply to us. If you think you remember the worst days more clearly, it's because you do. There's a good reason for this. For a primate making it's living back in the savanna, every moment of every day wasn't worth recording in the big book of memories. But the time you went down to the water hole and a leopard nearly jumped you? That one gets a page all it's own -- one with flashy stickers and a bright red border.
As tempting as it is to forget the bad times, the reason there's a whole friggin' biological system built around the idea of burning these events irrevocably into your cerebellum in 18pt type is so you don't do it again.
Here's the thing about the naughts: there was nothing magic about the numbers. It wasn't because of a double-zero in the middle of the dates that we launched an invasion that's cost the lives of thousands of Americans, the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and a trillion dollars plus out of the pocketbooks of taxpayers. We launched into that still unresolved idiocy because of bad policy based on the conservative philosophy of smash things first, think never. We went there because of a extreme version of American exceptionalism, one that views America as above the the rules of law and exempt from questions of morality. A view that says not only if the president does it, it's not a crime, but that if America does it, it can't be wrong.
It wasn't the decade that caused the economy to come down in tatters. It was a conservative approach to the marketplace that views government as the enemy, greed as the only acceptable motivation, and the only solution for disasters brought on by a lack of regulation as still less regulation.
It wasn't the calendar that brought down the banks, or American manufacturing, or American's influence around the world. It wasn't the date that did in our reputation or erased the budget surplus.
Don't forget the naughts, because this decade, no matter what anyone on the right might say, was conservatism on trial. You want less taxes? You got less taxes. You want less regulation? You got less regulation. Open markets? Wide open. An illusuion of security in place of rights? Hey, presto. You want unlimited power given to military contractors so they can kick butt and take names? Man, we handed out boots and pencils by the thousands. Everything, everything, that ever showed up on a drooled-over right wing wish list got implemented -- with a side order of Freedom Fries.
They will try to disown it, and God knows if I was responsible for this mess I'd be disowning it, too. But the truth is that the conservatives got everything they wanted in the decade just past
, everything that they've claimed for forty years would make America "great again". They didn't fart around with any "red dog Republicans." They rolled over their moderates and implemented a conservative dream.
, everything that they've claimed for forty years would make America "great again". They didn't fart around with any "red dog Republicans." They rolled over their moderates and implemented a conservative dream.
What did we get for it? We got an economy in ruins, a government in massive debt, unending war, and the repudiation of the world. There's no doubt that Republicans want you to forget the last decade, because if you remember... if you remember when you went down to the water hole and were jumped by every lunacy that ever emerged from the wet dreams of Grover Norquist and Dick Cheney, well, it's not likely that you'd give them a chance to do it again.
Because they will. Given half a chance -- less than half -- they'll do it again, only worse. Because that's the way conservatism works. Remember when the only answer to every economic problem was "cut taxes?" We have a surplus. Good, let's cut taxes. We have a deficit. Hey, cut taxes even more! That little motto was unchanging even when was clear that the tax cuts were increasing the burden on everyone but a wealthy few. That's just a subset of the great conservative battle whine which is now and forever "we didn't go far enough." If deregulation led to a crash, it's because we didn't deregulate enough. If the wars aren't won, it's because we haven't started enough wars. If there are people still clinging to their rights, it's because we haven't done enough to make them afraid.
Forget the naughts, and you'll forget that conservatives had another chance to prove all their ideas, and that their ideas utterly and completely failed. Again.
The point of remembering bad events is to stop them from repeating. So remember, and remind others if they start to forget. Because really, this is one trip to the water hole we can't afford to repeat.
Sunday, 3 January 2010
Fernando Torres will become the world's most expensive footballer if he leaves Liverpool in the summer.
Manchester City and Chelsea have made Torres their number one target but would have to splash out more than £140m in transfer fees and wages to land the Spanish superstar. Not only has Torres' value eclipsed the £80m Real Madrid paid for Cristiano Ronaldo, he can anticipate a salary offer of around £15m a year given the current inflated levels for the most wanted players.
It would require the biggest financial package in football history to secure a deal
City offered Brazilian Kaka a staggering £280k a week in their ill-fated bid a year ago, and Torres would comfortably match that.
Liverpool have made it clear they won't listen to any offers for their star striker and manager Rafa Benitez recently insisted he'd resign if the player was sold against his will.
But Liverpool also know matters will be out of their hands unless the club attracts investment and finish in the top four.
After years fighting against the financial troubles caused by the American ownership, the next six months will finally bring matters to a head at Anfield one way or the other.
If Liverpool don't sort themselves out off the pitch, their rivals intend to capitalise and are now openly targeting their most prized assets.
New City boss Roberto Mancini was appointed partly because his Arab owners believe he can assist in luring the top names to Eastlands.They didn't believe Mark Hughes had the same clout when it came to attracting a player of Torres' calibre.
They think the Italian has the aura required to tempt such a player, but realise only by ousting Liverpool from the top four will they have any hope of doing business.
Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich has also been pursing Torres for the last two seasons and believes Liverpool will be more vulnerable than ever unless Americans Tom Hicks and George Gillett Jr get out of the Merseyside club.
Torres became the quickest Liverpool player to reach 50 goals earlier this week as he kick-started his club's bid to retain its Champions League status.
Sport of the World revealed last weekend how the striker's ongoing commitment to the Merseyside giants is conditional on the club proving it can continue to match his ambitions.
Kop fans have been reassured by the Spaniard's determination to help Liverpool recover their position and make interest in him irrelevant.
But the only way they can do that longer-term is by securing massive investment to ensure next season the target is winning the Premier League rather than 'managing the debt,' as Benitez recently suggested.
Benitez has 'guaranteed' Liverpool will finish in the top four. His confidence is geared at reassuring his star striker that this season's onfield problems are a one-off and warning Manchester City and Chelsea to keep their hands in their pockets.
@'News of the Screws'
(And I am going to be his manager!!!)
140 million quid and an annual wage of 15 million quid.
Me and the Spacebubs are gonna be out practicing footie ALL day tomorrow!(And I am going to be his manager!!!)
Three of Scientology's elite parishioners keep faith, but leave the church
Mary Jo Leavitt
They advanced to the Church of Scientology's highest spiritual level, to "Operating Thetan VIII," a vaunted realm said to endow extraordinary powers of perception and force of will.But Geir Isene of Norway and Americans Mary Jo Leavitt and Sherry Katz recently announced they were leaving the church, citing strong disagreements with its management practices.
Isene left first, a decision that emboldened Leavitt, who inspired Katz. Such departures are rare among the church's elite group of OT VIIIs, who are held up as role models in Scientology. The three each told the St. Petersburg Times that they had spent decades and hundreds of thousands of dollars to reach the church's spiritual pinnacle.
All three stressed their ongoing belief in Scientology and say they remain grateful for how it helped them. Yet they took to the Internet — an act strongly discouraged by church leaders, who decry public airing of problems — to share their reasons for leaving. They said they hoped it would resonate within the Scientology community...
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Rap producer Shawty Redd charged with murder
UPDATE:
Music producer Demetrius Lee Stewart, known as Shawty Redd, is being held in a suburban Atlanta jail on a murder charge.
Henry County Police Capt. Jason Bolton says Stewart was arrested Friday morning.
Stewart is accused of shooting 35-year-old Damon A. Martin of Detroit in an argument at Stewart's home in Hampton, about 30 miles southeast of Atlanta.
The 28-year-old Stewart is charged with murder and was being held without bond in the Henry County jail Saturday. His first court appearance is scheduled for Jan. 12. Police didn't know whether Stewart has a lawyer.
Stewart has worked with Young Jeezy & Snoop Dogg.
Iran's younger, smarter revolution
The latest wave of protests won't be the last. Iran scholar Hamid Dabashi on a civil-rights movement centuries in the making—led by a generation that knows how to fight with brains.
The paramount question these days, six months into the making of the Green Movement, is will the Islamic republic fall? Is this yet another revolution in the making, like the one we saw in 1979? Or will the military apparatus of the Islamic republic crash through the streets of Tehran and other cities like a fully charged armadillo and turn Iran into a theocratic dictatorship, ruled by a military junta like Pakistan, clad in an ideological fanaticism borrowed and expanded from Mullah Omar and the Afghan Taliban?
The new generation of Iranians has now poured into the streets not with our habitual chants of “where is my gun,” but with their strange but beautiful incantation of “where is my vote?”
For the last six months and since Day One of this uprising, lovingly code-named the Green Movement (Jonbesh-e Sabz), I have consistently called and continue to call it a civil-rights movement. This does not mean I am blind to its revolutionary potentials, violent dimensions, or destructive forces. It does not mean that the Islamic republic may not, or should not, fall. I keep calling it a civil-rights movement because I believe that the underlying social changes that have caused and continue to condition this movement are hidden behind a political smoke screen. As our attention is distracted by the politics of the moment, I have kept my ears to the ground listening to the subterranean sounds and tremors of an earth holding some 200 years of an anti-colonial modernity in it sinuous silences.
Beyond the pale and patience of politics, and the attention span of a Twitter phrase, I have called this a civil-rights movement because I see something in that polyclonal green that defies augury. That color green is a sign that signals and means many things to many people, and no one is entirely in charge to legislate or regulate or incarcerate exactly what.
For 30 years—not just over the last six months—the Islamic republic has systematically distorted a cosmopolitan and multifaceted political culture and, by hook or by crook, shoved it down the narrow and suffocating chimney of a militant Islamism that is, of course, integral to that culture, but has never been definitive to it. From anti-colonial nationalism to Third World socialism (all with an enduring feminist underpinning) many things have been equally, if not more, definitive to that political culture. The Islamic republic, as we know it today, is not a state apparatus—it is the penultimate result of successive scenarios of a crisis of mismanagement: from the American hostage crisis of 1979-1981 to the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-1988, from the mass executions of dissidents in 1988 to the Salman Rushdie affair of 1989, and from then on the successive Gulf Wars, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and then, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the Afghan and Iraq debacles. From one trouble spot to another, the Islamic republic has managed to keep itself afloat over a sea of troubles. But it has never, over the last three decades, been in a position of permanence or uncontested legitimacy, so it could not suddenly lose it over the last six months.
As the Islamic republic managed its successive crises, a belligerent generation of oppositional figures and forces—now famously summarized in Pahlavi monarchists and mujahideen militarists—followed suit, not carefully choosing its enemies and effectively transmuted into them: undemocratic, dogmatic, cultic, frozen in a time zone beyond human reach. The Green Movement happened beyond the borders of banality and boredom that separate the Islamic republic and its opposition, hovering in a third space that gives life, liberty, and hope to those, the massive millions of them, beyond the reach of the closed society and its enemies.
This generation breaks all the rules. If you want to understand what is happening in the Green Movement, listen to the thunderous and defiant lyrics of the greatest Iranian rapper alive: Shahin Najafi. Look him up! Google him. He has two Facebook pages. If Iranian cinema of the 1990s was the vision and vista of Khatami’s Reform Movement, Shahin Najafi’s lyrics and music are the elegiac voice and loving fury of the Green Movement.
With the contorted character of the Islamic republic's constitution, and particularly the undemocratic obscenity of its office of the supreme leader, my generation of Iranians hit a cul de sac. We had nowhere to go. The new generation of Iranians has now poured into the streets not with our habitual chants of “where is my gun,” but with their strange but beautiful incantation of “where is my vote?” You may hear this generation chant, “I will kill, I will kill, he who killed my brother,” but watch carefully for the instant a basiji militiaman drops his helmet and finds himself in the middle of a chaotic embrace of streets and their claimants, men and women are rushed to have and hold him, pour water over his head to cool him off, kiss and cuddle him as the brother that he is, as they put a green scarf around his neck to make him one of their own. The color green: It means you are a descendent of the prophet of Islam; and it means the poetry of Forough Farrokhzad, the poet laureate of our most cherished moments of solace and solitude:
I plant my hands in the small garden—
I will grow green—
I know
I know
I know
And sparrows will nest and egg
In the grooves
In between my inky fingers.
I will grow green—
I know
I know
I know
And sparrows will nest and egg
In the grooves
In between my inky fingers.
These children you see roaming the streets of Iran with song and dance, they have all been hatched in those inky eggs our sister Forough planted in between her fingers inside that little garden. That’s why they are all so green and beautiful.
Began and continued as a civil-rights movement, its color symbolism running ahead of its politics, this uprising has seen phases of civil disobedience and shades of civil unrest—but its skeletal vertebrae is a nonviolent drive toward democratic institutions that the current republic will either accommodate and survive, or else resist and be washed aside. The evident similarities between what we are witnessing now and what we did some 30 years ago should be carefully assayed—there are similarities, but not everything round is a walnut, as we say in Persian.
To the persistence of this civil-rights movement, the collapse of the Islamic republic is almost irrelevant. The regime is collapsing from under the pressure of its own feeble constitution—a massive military-industrial complex on one side and a simulacrum of republicanism on the other. The course of the civil-rights movement is almost independent of that state apparatus. There is no possible scenario that will divert it from its main objective—of reaching the goal of liberty, the rule of law, democratic republicanism, civil liberties, civil rights, women’s rights, rights of the religious and ethnic minorities.
Adapting to this movement and its unfolding demands means one of three scenarios for the Islamic republic—in order of the desperation it faces: (1) dismantling the office of the supreme leader (Velayat Faqih) altogether but keeping the rest of the constitution intact, (2) reconvening a constitutional assembly to rewire a whole new constitution and put it to national vote; or else (3) discarding the very idea of an Islamic republic altogether and putting the next form of the government to a plebiscite.
Against this inevitability, a number of scenarios might also be tempted to impose themselves: the most immediate is an open military coup by the Pasdaran; the second is a combination of U.S./Israel-instigated economic embargo and military attack; the third is the internal implosion of the Islamic republic followed by a militant takeover and hijacking of the uprising by such militant opposition forces as the mujahideen or (with the help of U.S. and Israel military intervention) the monarchists, or a combination of both. All such possible scenarios have only one factor in common. They will categorically fail if they fail to recognize the nature of this movement as a inherently victorious, nonviolent, civil-rights movement that will demand and exact civil liberties—freedom of expression, freedom of peaceful assembly, freedom to form political parties, freedom to choose a democratic government.
The color green will remain the uncertain solace of this movement—no one will ever know what it exactly means—and that is a good thing. For it always means something contrarian, something contrary to what the people in a position of power thought it meant. It doesn’t. It never does.
Hamid Dabashi is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He has written 20 books, edited four, and contributed chapters to many more. He is the author of over 100 essays, articles and book reviews in major scholarly and peer reviewed journals on subjects ranging from Iranian Studies, medieval and modern Islam, comparative literature, world cinema, and the philosophy of art.
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