Friday, 19 August 2011

It was the double date we had looked forward to more than any other. Just before sunset on a hot August day in Los Angeles, we sat in a nearly empty hotel restaurant awaiting the arrival of one of the most influential husband-and-wife intellectual teams in history: Alvin and Heidi Toffler.
They may be octogenarians now, but pick up a copy of the Tofflers' most famous books -- Future Shock (1970) and The Third Wave (1980) -- and you will quickly wonder why anyone bothers to write the redundant meta social and political commentaries that drown us today. These books, written when we were children, contain such stunning and prescient insights, encapsulated in elegant yet racing prose, that they ought to be essential reading four decades onward. Indeed, you couldn't be blamed for thinking they had just been published this year.
Terms and concepts that are on the tip of everyone's tongue today leap off the pages: the crisis of industrialism, the promise of renewable energy, ad-hocracy in business, the rise of the non-nuclear family, technology-enabled telecommuting, the power of the pro-sumer, sensors embedded in household appliances, a gene industry that pre-designs the human body, corporate social responsibility, "information overload" -- and yes, right there on p. 292 of The Third Wave, the phrase Wired magazine can't get enough of today: "DIY Revolution." No wonder the book has been dubbed the "classic study of tomorrow." (Of the very few things they seem to have gotten wrong, or at least not yet right, is widespread polygamist communes...)

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Ayesha Khanna and Parag Khanna @'FP'

'Future Shock' documentary narrated by Orson Welles (1972)

Wrong Answers in Britain

Potential deal could lead to release of 'West Memphis Three'

The "West Memphis Three" could be released as early as today under a pending deal between state prosecutors and defense attorneys, legal sources and relatives of victims said Thursday.
If the deal is consummated in a closed-door hearing at 10 a.m. in Jonesboro, Ark., the three -- death-row inmate Damien Echols, 36, and co-defendants Jason Baldwin, 34, and Jessie Misskelley, 36, who are serving life terms -- would be free after 18 years behind bars.
The three then-teenagers were convicted for the May 1993 slayings of three 8-year-old West Memphis boys, all Cub Scouts, whose nude bodies were found hog-tied in a watery ditch in West Memphis.
"I've been waiting for this day a long, long time,'' said Dan Stidham, 48, Misskelley's original defense lawyer and now a district judge in Paragould, Ark., who continues to endorse his former client's innocence. "All I asked for was truth and justice.''
The arrangement involves the three defendants pleading no contest to lesser charges in return for their immediate release, according to legal sources knowledgeable of the deal. The sources spoke on condition on anonymity because a gag order forbids parties in the case from discussing it.
The surprise announcement Thursday by Circuit Court Judge David Laser of today's previously unscheduled hearing triggered a landslide of emotion from people connected to the case that shook Arkansas with prosecutors' assertions that the slain boys were victims of a ritualistic cult murder.
Years later, documentary films aired by HBO fanned a national movement endorsing the defendants' claims of innocence. Those documentaries, in turn, attracted several celebrities who helped fund a vigorous new defense with nationally known lawyers, private investigators and forensic experts...

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Jody Callahan and Marc Perrusquia @'The Commercial Appeal'

West Memphis Free?

WM3 leave prison with all belongings; source says they are not expected back

The West Memphis Three

3RRR - Subscribe NOW!

3RRR - the 'purrfect' radio station.

Jade has been subscribing for years...you should too!

Jade hard at work in the heart of the machine here at 'Exile Towers'

Making 'Making Mirrors' - a short documentary

A short documentary about the recording of the Gotye record Making Mirrors
Directed by James Bryans and Wally De Backer
Filmed and edited by James Bryans between January 2010 and July 2011, on the Mornington Peninsula, VIC, Australia

Smoking # 108

(Thanx Andrew!)

ROFL!!!

Punk spoke up for angry kids. Why won't today's bands follow suit?

An open letter to those who condemn looting

Part one

Part two

Rick Perry and the Neocons

HA!

We have been here before

There have been some sweeping historical claims made in the wake of last week's unrest, with commentators of left and right decrying an unprecedented collapse in moral standards, parenting and discipline among the young. There have been cultural claims too, with calls to blame African-American rap music from broadcast.
Here is the Daily Mail's Melanie Phillips, giving it both barrels with her assertion that:

The violent anarchy that has taken hold of British cities is the all-too-predictable outcome of a three-decade liberal experiment which tore up virtually every basic social value.
The married two-parent family, educational meritocracy, punishment of criminals, national identity, enforcement of the drugs laws and many more fundamental conventions were all smashed by a liberal intelligentsia hell-bent on a revolutionary transformation of society.
Those of us who warned over the years that they were playing with fire were sneered at and smeared as Right-wing nutters who wanted to turn the clock back to some mythical golden age.

From the left, here is the Daily Mirror's Paul Routledge, attacking foreign music and British materialism:

The mayhem erupted overnight, but it has been building for years. And putting more police on the streets – while vital to end the threat to life and property – will not solve the crisis.
I blame the pernicious culture of hatred around rap music, which glorifies violence and loathing of authority (especially the police but including parents), exalts trashy materialism and raves about drugs.
The important things in life are the latest smart phone, fashionable trainers and jeans and idiot computer games. No wonder stores selling them were priority looting targets.

On the BBC, there was the bizarre and clunking intervention by David Starkey, the historian of Tudor England, who complained on Newsnight that working class young whites had "become black", or as he put it:

The whites have become black. A particular sort of violent, destructive, nihilistic gangster culture has become the fashion... Black and white, boy and girl operate in this language together. This language, which is wholly false, which is this Jamaican patois that has intruded in England. This is why so many of us have this sense of literally a foreign country.

Allison Pearson blames frightened, cowed and unhelpful parents in the Daily Telegraph, writing:

How did we end up with some of the most indisciplined and frighteningly moronic youngsters in Europe? How come our kids are the best at being bad? There’s no use blaming the police; it’s the parents, stupid...A friend who works in an inner-London comprehensive with boys twice her size is not allowed to send them to the headmaster. Faced with full-frontal rudeness or casual violence, Clare must first follow school policy and ask, “Darren, are you ready to receive the discipline message?” ...During my childhood in the Sixties, teachers and parents were still on the same side; today, you would be a fool to take that coalition of adults for granted. Darren’s parents are likely to attend any conference on their son’s behaviour with a snarling attitude, and maybe a pitbull to match

These are bold claims, amounting to a thesis that Britain has been wrecked and transformed from a familiar, law-abiding spot to an alien hell hole in just three or four decades. But here is an odd thing, surely: go back precisely three decades and you get to the summer of 1981, scene of some of the nastiest riots in modern British history, when racially charged violence saw tracts of Brixton in south London and Toxteth in Liverpool burn for days...