I’m laughing because I’ve never been so sure about my disagreement with this sentiment. Everyone is scared about the Korea situation. HA! I’m more interested in what our governments are scared of. They are the ones that decide for war. For the first time in history, we are going to freely read the workings of diplomacy from the most powerful countries on the planet. This is how and what governing humans on the planet Earth communicate. Much of it we already knew, some might say. But what they forget is that we have only learned opinion to back those notions. Today we have the hard facts about Saudi pressure on the US for a war with Iran. How about these gems:

“The cables name countries involved in financing terror groups, and describe a near “environmental disaster” last year over a rogue shipment of enriched uranium. They disclose technical details of secret US-Russian nuclear missile negotiations in Geneva, and include a profile of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, who they say is accompanied everywhere by a “voluptuous blonde” Ukrainian nurse.”

“The cables published today reveal how the US uses its embassies as part of a global espionage network, with diplomats tasked to obtain not just information from the people they meet, but personal details, such as frequent flyer numbers, credit card details and even DNA material.”

“The most controversial target was the leadership of the United Nations. That directive requested the specification of telecoms and IT systems used by top UN officials and their staff and details of “private VIP networks used for official communication, to include upgrades, security measures, passwords, personal encryption keys”.”

“At the start of a series of daily extracts from the US embassy cables – many of which are designated “secret” – the Guardian can disclose that Arab leaders are privately urging an air strike on Iran and that US officials have been instructed to spy on the UN’s leadership.”

“These include a major shift in relations between China and North Korea, Pakistan’s growing instability and details of clandestine US efforts to combat al-Qaida in Yemen.”

… and there’s probably more to come. I didn’t even highlight everything. So, apathetics, cynics, and naysayers… I say this to you:

This information is more powerful than your opinion of its ability to make an impact. Maybe you think it won’t make an impact because the American public won’t care. I’m saying that you missed the gravity of this leak. This is bigger than majority opinion. This is now in the historical record and what ever we do now, whether it’s something good or nothing at all or whatever, well that’s something. Our actions now must be judged based on what’s out there for us to decide upon.

My personal hope is that we will begin to realize Chomsky’s insights from “Manufacturing Consent”. That the media establishment is out for your mind and your opinion to lean towards the benefits of the power elite.

But I am open and willing to understand what will actually happen in the world after today outside of my hopes and opinions. I just think that if your mind is open, you have much to hope for today.

Good luck, humanity.

Sure…

Devil’s Advocacy – a Media Ownership Perspective

In general, the media companies are just as eager to show you content (and advertising, which makes them money) as you are to see it. The problem is, programs are rarely owned outright by anyone. Music is licensed from someone, product placement is licensed from someone else, location fees are licensed from someone else, etc etc etc.

And those rights, to no one’s surprise, tend to be licensed for one region right now. In many cases, one country. Those rights also have very limited timeframes on them, and are administrated by organizations that get paid to say “no…” not to say “yes.”

So let’s say you’ve got a half hour show. It’s got one person in it, one theme song, product placement from one beer company and it takes place at one landmark. Pretend it’s an American show and we want to show it in the UK.

You’ve got a minimum of four rights organizations to deal with… and each organization has a different disposition towards any region on the planet. Maybe you can work out an arrangement with the beer company; they’re dutch anyway. SAG has reciprocity with the UK so we can figure out something but we’re already at two memos per episode. Maybe the landmark wants more money to license itself in the UK than it does in the states – okay, we can skunk that episode. Or can we? maybe our agreement with the beer company is that all episodes have to be shown. But what really sucks is that the song has already been licensed exclusively to another show in the UK… which is owned by another media company… that is fully willing to skunk you just to keep your show out of the UK.

So now the whole thing falls apart… unless you go back to the edit, change out the song to something else and attempt to re-release it. But now, are your licenses intact? Because you’ve changed the show. And you need to get the producers of that show, who have long since moved on to other things, to manage a lot of this, because they’ve got the work product. And they’re going to want to be paid to dig through old business records and why haven’t you been hiring them lately, by the way?

Then, of course, comes the fact that to do this, you need to get paid for it; nobody is going to let you show something for free that cost them a lot of money and if you’re getting paid, they want to get paid. So now you need to find advertisers willing to pay for a foreign show that their customers may not even know about. Or, you go with a worldwide outfit, and they’re making plenty of money on their own internet advertising channels, so they’re not going to pay you much. And you need to relicense music for this stupid thing anyway, and you’ve only got a limited window to make money on it anyway, and before too long,

“fuck it – if they want to see it that badly, they can bloody torrent it”

Starts to become the attitude of the creators of the show.

Believe it or don’t, there aren’t very many professionals in media that want to prevent you from seeing content. It’s just that everyone wants to get paid, and once you jump outside of the agreements that governed the show in the first place, everyone wants to get paid again. As much as possible. Because we all have to make a living.

So here’s the basic problem. There are different countries on the planet. They all have different licensing requirements, media structures, advertisers and consumers. And taking one show from one ecosystem and transplanting it in another, from a business perspective, is a hell of a lot more intricate, involved, and expensive than typing “.co.uk” instead of “.com.” And nobody likes it, and everyone is trying to do something about it, but short of every single player in media giving up and saying

“fuck it, we don’t really want to make money at this shit anyway, go ahead and watch what you want where you want when you want“

…things are not going to change very quickly, no matter how many angry letters you write to the internet.

[from here, thanks to Malician]

Now the question now, is…. How quickly are things moving today? What kinds of evidence can we see of media’s progress to become more online/international?

Appreciation level: Difficult

Wikipedia, for this definition, cites a man who went by “FM-2030“. An interesting person… he was born Fereidoun M. Esfandiary, son to an Iranian diplomat in 1930. His contributions to transhuman philosophy appear to be significant. He changed his name to such an odd form…

Firstly, to reflect the hope and belief that he would live to celebrate his 100th birthday in 2030; secondly, and more importantly, to break free of the widespread practice of naming conventions that he saw as rooted in a collectivist mentality, and existing only as a relic of humankind’s tribalistic past. He viewed traditional names as almost always stamping a label of collective identity – varying from gender, to nationality – on the individual, thereby existing as prima facie elements of thought processes in the human cultural fabric, that tended to degenerate into stereotyping, factionalism, and discrimination. In his own words, “Conventional names define a person’s past: ancestry, ethnicity, nationality, religion. I am not who I was ten years ago and certainly not who I will be in twenty years. [...] The name 2030 reflects my conviction that the years around 2030 will be a magical time. In 2030 we will be ageless and everyone will have an excellent chance to live forever. 2030 is a dream and a goal.”

When FM-2030 died of pancreatic cancer in 2000, he became the first person to be vitrified. Vitrification is newer technique of preservation… wow, he was cryofrozen in the year 2000. That makes me think of Philip J. Fry. heh. Crazy cool stuff.

So, read some more here and continue on…

I saw this idea (on reddit) that “computers and the internet… IS, an actual expansion of our minds, expanding our sense of ‘reality’, and, in fact, may well be the next stage of Transhuman transformation, and it is occurring now…globally.”

Other additions,

[Well, I'm 76 and like most old farts I forget, words, facts, names.

But, now I have the internet clipped to my belt, and I don't know if it's "transhumanism", but at the very least, it's a prosthesis for a failing brain.]

[Pictures for Sad Children #101, #102, #103]

[This:

>I hope you don't waste your life in the mean-time waiting for one.

Does not logically follow from this previous exchange:

>Yeah transhumanism is very pretty thinly veiled "heavenly reward"-type religion.

>All I know is that I got 1 bad leg and cant wait to get a cyborg one.

Initially you misrepresented one of the burgeoning steps of transhumanism, then when someone pointed out its direct and tangiable reality you redirected his comment back toward a non-sequitor, implying that transhumanists "sit around" and do not contribute to the technology that may make full transhumanism possible.

I suppose you are not familiar with the prevalence of artificial limbs.]

[This conversation makes good points too]

If you’ve read this far then I hope it’s dawn on you how relevant transhumanism is to the internet. ghdiel and hsfrey, on reddit, made a good point about how computers and the internet are extensions of our brains. So good a point that I don’t really have anything else to add right now. I’m drinking a Carlsberg and filling my brain with fascinating information that has nearly nothing to do with my daily life. [Nerd/Geek] high five to you too, reader!

[ADDITIONAL: This entire thread is awesome. It features discussion about the idea of the internet becoming a panopticon. Rad ideas, dude.]

Check out these cool items

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE68M40S20100923?feedType=nl&feedName=usoddlyenough

http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/298053

“In other countries, its obviously not strange for a centre-right government to be re-elected, but this is Sweden, it’s a never before seen phenomenon,” said SvD.

The Sweden Democrats have gain representation in the Swedish Parliament which has ended the majority dominance of the Social Democrats since 1932. This Sweden Democrat party is known for their overt xenophobia and racist tinge.

The Swedish paper, Svenska Dagbladet (SvD), summed up the drastic change with these three points.

1. A centre-right government without a majority,
2. A crashed social democracy,
3. A kingmaker party with roots in the far-right.

UPDATE: http://www.swedishwire.com/component/content/article/2-politics/6284-massive-demonstrations-in-stockholm-against-rising-far-right

The real secret of magic is that the world is made of words, and that if you know the words that the world is made of you can make of it whatever you wish.

We have to stop CONSUMING our culture. We have to CREATE culture. DON’T watch TV, DON’T read magazines, don’t even listen to NPR. Create your OWN roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are — NOW — is the most immediate sector of your universe. And if you’re worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered. You’re giving it all away to ICONS. Icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that, you want to dress like X or have lips like Y… This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion. What is real is you, and your friends, your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears. And, we are told No, you’re unimportant, you’re peripheral — get a degree, get a job, get a this, get that, and then you’re a player. You don’t even want to play that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that’s being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.

Because the fact is, what blinds us to the presence of alien intelligence is linguistic and cultural bias operating on ourselves. The world which we perceive is a tiny fraction of the world which we can perceive, which is a tiny fraction of the perceivable world, you see. We operate on a very narrow slice based on cultural conventions. So the important thing, if synergizing progress is the notion to be maximized (and I think it’s the notion to be maximized), is to try and locate the blind spot in the culture — the place where the culture isn’t looking, because it dare not — because if it were to look there, its previous values would dissolve, you see. For Western Civilization that place is the psychedelic experience as it emerges out of nature.

My notion of what the psychedelic experience is for is that we each must become like fishermen, and go out on to the dark ocean of mind, and let your nets down into that sea. And what you’re after is not some behemoth, that will tear through your nets, follow them and drag you in your little boat, you know, into the abyss, nor are what we’re looking for a bunch of sardines that can slip through your net and disappear. Ideas like, “Have you ever noticed that your little finger exactly fits your nostril”, and stuff like that. What we are looking for are middle size ideas, that are not so small that they are trivial, and not so large that they’re incomprehensible. That middle size ideas that we can wrestle into our boat and take back to the folks on shore, and have fish dinner. And every one of us when we go into the psychedelic state, this is what we should be looking for. It’s not for your elucidation, it’s not part of your self-directed psychotherapy. You are an explorer, and you represent our species, and the greatest good you can do, is to bring back a new idea, because our world is in danger by the absence of good ideas. Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness. And so to whatever degree any one of us, can bring back a small piece of the picture and contribute it to the building to the new paradigm, then we participate in the redemption of the human spirit, and that after all it what it’s really all about.

-Terence Mckenna

First, this is bullshit. I fully understand the horrors of the holocaust. It was terrible. It was one of humanity’s lowest points ever. Germans, forinstance, are now totally afraid of nationalism (except on special occasions like the world cup or something) and too many of us in the West still make an exception to the implications of looking the other way for free speech and thought (no matter how fucked up it is) only when it concerns the Holocaust. Why, then should we, as Westerners, feel that we should fine these (stupid) people when we all think what they said was terrible anyway? Frankly, I’m more offend of the backwards direction our forms of democracies have taken. My country is probably one of the worst forms (or best) in backwards movement from the enlightenment but the ideas that founded this country are not totally dead yet. We still have the ACLU around and even if they don’t win every battle they should win, they will still go out and fight for anything that curtails the rights of expression (no matter how fucked up). Thank God for the ACLU (and Wikileaks).

It’s up to us, as people, to create a better culture of thought in order to progress and not to attack/censor/fine those that seek to destroy that idea. Let us be enlightened people and not feel threatened by a stupid comic that everyone knows is stupid anyway. Speaking of comics, I’ll just say that I believe in the right for the Muhammed comic to exist but it was obviously culturally and religiously insensitive and a bit in poor taste. That comic did make a good point in the point it was making, though….

tl;dr the Dutch too the low road in handling this recent case and that’s a trend in the West that needs to stop. Also, a Holocaust denial comic and a Muhammed comic are both in very poor taste and stupid but should be allowed to exist without a court case.

ok… /this rant

Next, I just found out that an American Federal appeals court just showed that there may be a drawback to the idea that all ideas should exist with support or disapproval from the government. America is very culturally christian but it is certianly not a christian nation. Many fundamentalists have a problem with this concept. Many militant athiests have a problem with the culturally dominant christians being allowed to express themselves by using assets of the government. They fought the ten commandments being displayed outside of a courthouse, for instance. While their cause is just, they are overlooking the cultural sensitivity other Americans have. This is a dick move (as heard on reddit) even though they’re right. The crosses on highways use religious symbolism but their purpose is to memorialize the fallen and to remind passerbys of the delicacy of life. That second part is the true meaning of those crosses and this militant athiest group are stepping on the toes. In the long run, though, it sets a progressive and positive precendent. Seperation of church in state is very important and in these days, it still requires that we as citizens enforce this idea so that future generations are free to have the ability and space to expand their minds, with or without a religion. So, I mean it this time when I say, “AMERICA. FUCK YEAH”

tl;dr the drawback is that the people have the right to offend each other and it is good.

On the way to my hometown I flew past the great lakes.  It was the first time I had ever encountered one or at least the first time I bothered to notice. It was nothing like I had ever seen before. The scale of this body of water is strange! And it was gorgeous…. all at once, I could see both sides of the lake yet I’m sure one side could not see the other. I was high on the immensity of the natural world that I needed to really blow the roof, so to speak. I shoved my head as far down as my window seat would allow so that I could look up at the dark in order to contemplate the boundary of the atmosphere and the impossible infinite space intersecting our little pale blue dot.

I looked over at the man sitting next to me. This 45 year old man in his important first class seat with his important looking luggage and Clancy novel for light reading. Surely this man would appreciate what was going on at the window… not! Ha! Before I could finish congratulating myself on being the only person in first class to notice the amazing moment of fat lake/atmosphere/infinite space… it was gone. The plane tilted left. Ha! “Don’t be such an idiot with the beauty you’re given, son”

Damn it. whoops, ok. Well, it was great anyway, wasn’t it?

Watch these videos in order. It’s a science/art/science sandwich.

Skip ahead to 4 minutes for this last one.

I’m a german/paraguayan and I have lived in germany for 3 years, paraguay for 7, mozambique for 8, and just spent 4 years in college in the US (off to the netherlands for gradschool soon).

One thing that I learned while in the US is that most of the population suffers from a fundamental delusion: the idea that their society is the “freest” “most democratic” society on the planet and that they are the guiding light in bettering this world. This is a fantasy that MANY MANY americans accept as fact, either intellectually or simply emotionally.

The truth is that while the US is a much kinder, more generous and more nurturing world power than there has ever been in history, which I readily acknowledge, this picture of america is entirely false. The worst part of it is that few americans recognize it and see any sort of criticism along these lines as either snobby, pretentious european-ness (no huge fan of europe either, although I believe several european countries, canada, and a few east asian/oceanic countries provide far better models than the US) or 3rd world jealousy and playing-the-blame-game.

Like all previous world powers, the US is an imperialist power that has contributed to the oppression, disenfranchisement, emproverishment and exploitation of the vast majority of this planet. It has raped and pillaged foreign people’s from the first natives that it slaughtered on its future home soil to the creation of a vast network of US-sponsored right-wing dictatorships in latin america. It is complicit in the inhumane prostitution and abuse of the working class around the world while proclaiming itself its savior.

Even more condemning, in my mind, is how it has managed to swindled its own people. Living in the US has taught me one thing above all else: the matrix is real. There IS a veil that is being pulled over the eyes of 90% of the population so the richest of the rich can keep everyone else enslaved. Powerful private interests have hijacked the institutions of the state and used them to spin a narrative that most people are blind to, and like agents, they are a part of a system they depend on so thoroughly that they are willing to give their lives to protect it, even though it has been carefully designed to ensure their serfdom. The avarage american has watched his rights and wealth erode before him and done nothing.

America IS the new roman empire. Like the roman empire at the time, it can rightfully claim to have the newest technology, the freshest philosophy, the most powerful military, the wealthiest citizens. It does, in a way, as it claims, carry the torch of civilization. Like rome, under this fantasy lies a perverted empire in which people live oblivious to their own misery, ignorant of their role in the bigger picture, willing to sell out his neighbor for scraps at the table, hateful of those who have their interest at heart and adulating those who have tied them to their ball and chain. Like rome, it has spread the disease of dependence and servitude beyond its borders in the name of progress and freedom, and has come to use up every natural resource in its reach until it can move on to the next location or find a new people to subjugate. Like rome, it will eventually be replaced by a new super power that spins its own, different narrative, and with that veil of obfuscation replaced by a new one, its past crimes will come to light clearer and more intensely.

Poetically, by that point, the nations of the world will have found a new overlord and a new oppressive ideology that serves only the rich and powerful and doesn’t need to TAKE peoples liberties, because people will readily GIVE THEM UP. The vast majority will not realize that if they only stood up for themselves, their lives could be unimaginably better. They will believe they are living in the bestest, most awesomemest society in the world, and any dissenting voice or force attempting to change anything will be decried as utopian, idealist, naive and ill-informed. And the cycle will begin anew.

WAKE UP! THE CAKE IS A LIE!

I thank america for having some of the greatest people and ideals I have ever encountered. The ideals of america are some of the purest, most morally defensible and logically sound in the world. Its reality is entirely different.

/rant

Just quickly sharing some stuff and then I’m gone!

Reddit has great conversations on /r/anarchism. Here’s a current fav.

In America, if grocery chains are bringing in high profits, they are heroes and their business model emulated regardless of the impact on consumers (unless it affects their ability to keep purchasing in the near future). In Norway, a minister has decided to investigate.

Sushi eater? Yeah, I love it too. This was a great read.

Orwell’s diary entry on the day the French surrendered.

The Celtics lost today. Leah and I walked through Allston and saw way too many riot police. Scary.

Also, went to the ICA and the Harvard Natural History Museum. Saw some tattoo art, blue poisonous frogs (impotent), and glass flowers. Ate a turkey sandwich, cliff bar, odwalla drink, and brownie. Pizza later. Tea with honey and milk.

Reading The Martian Chronicles (Bradbury) and soon reading The Fourth Part of the World (GOOGLE IT, LAZY).

that big oil spill… yeah, it’s really big. I’ve always wanted to see a satellite view of the disaster but it seems that the media won’t show any footage. Don’t you love NASA? http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/videogallery/index.html?media_id=14418484

I am a mehnaissance man.

Heinlein:

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

Now dance…

Back in my radical college days I was brainstorming ways of revolutionary future living. Inspired by Abbie Hoffman, I remember considering how we in Austin’s local leftish community should focus more on activities that just give stuff away like food not bombs and free schools. In this political context, I had the idea that we should all teach each other Spanish and attempt to reach out, solidify relations, and organize with our comrades south of us in places like Mexico, Central, and South America. In another context, I also had this idea to find the cheapest bulk CD-R’s that we put the current popular shitty music on it and just give it away hoping people wouldn’t buy it in stores, perpetuating the culturally enslaving mindfuck of the recording industry. Why would anyone pay for the latest shitty Green Day CD when hundreds of copies where being handed out on 6th street? Screw you, RIAA! But anyway, the idea is that we can tear down the old crappy world we love to hate by creating this change outside of the rules of this “old world” yet inside of the emerging infrastructure of our “new world”. In other words, lets make everything more like linux. Linux is a totally free and open source operating system and it’s able to run on all our computers. Get it?

So, something amazing is happening on Reddit. If you’re not in on what reddit is about, then what the hell are you doing on the internet (don’t say porn)? Go to reddit and lurk around awhile. Once you get the idea of what the community is like, create your own clever username and find  a bunch of cool subreddits to add to your frontpage. You’ll thank me later.

A little about reddit (you can skip this if you’d like):

My favorite quality of redditors (reddit users) is that we all have a deep appetite for sharing all forms of knowledge and education (here’s an example). If you’re a redditor and you need help with something, there’s bound to be another redditor who, for just the thrill of sharing their own knowledge, will tell you what you need to know or at least link you to a google search result sarcastically implying that you’re stupid and should have tried googling your answer first (helping example). Don’t worry, we’re mostly friendly and don’t take anything personal. Reddit’s favorite topics usually include computer programming, sciences, maths, history, politics, cute kittens, narwhals, bacon, and confessions. Reddit loves the things you love and there’s probably a subreddit for it too!

The University of Reddit

So, back to that something amazing that’s happening on Reddit and how it relates to free culture and the point of this whole post. A few days ago, a sub-reddit was created to begin to organize a completely free and user run university and if you’ve been reading this far, you’ve discovered I had a point. The support among users is highly enthusiastic and the quality of professors seems to be very good. The idea of all this nonsense is that the average redditor, if credible, can apply to be a professor and teach a course. The mods approve you and your course but it’s really up to the class to decide how qualified you are. Find that subreddit right here.

I’m really tired and should go back to bed so just browse around this thing. Apply for a class (you’ll need a reddit account). Learn something!

I leave you with an autistic artist that is reddit’s favorite person right now and a cool story about a child’s drawings from the middle ages being a big source of what we know about the old city of Veliky Novgorod. Oh, and squarepusher: