A PETITION

From the Manufacturers of Candles, Tapers, Lanterns, sticks, Street Lamps, Snuffers, and Extinguishers, and from Producers of Tallow, Oil, Resin, Alcohol, and Generally of Everything Connected with Lighting.

To the Honourable Members of the Chamber of Deputies.

Gentlemen:

You are on the right track. You reject abstract theories and little regard for abundance and low prices. You concern yourselves mainly with the fate of the producer. You wish to free him from foreign competition, that is, to reserve the domestic market for domestic industry.

We come to offer you a wonderful opportunity for your — what shall we call it? Your theory? No, nothing is more deceptive than theory. Your doctrine? Your system? Your principle? But you dislike doctrines, you have a horror of systems, as for principles, you deny that there are any in political economy; therefore we shall call it your practice — your practice without theory and without principle.

We are suffering from the ruinous competition of a rival who apparently works under conditions so far superior to our own for the production of light that he is flooding the domestic market with it at an incredibly low price; for the moment he appears, our sales cease, all the consumers turn to him, and a branch of French industry whose ramifications are innumerable is all at once reduced to complete stagnation. This rival, which is none other than the sun, is waging war on us so mercilessly we suspect he is being stirred up against us by perfidious Albion (excellent diplomacy nowadays!), particularly because he has for that haughty island a respect that he does not show for us ^[1].

We ask you to be so good as to pass a law requiring the closing of all windows, dormers, skylights, inside and outside shutters, curtains, casements, bull’s-eyes, deadlights, and blinds — in short, all openings, holes, chinks, and fissures through which the light of the sun is wont to enter houses, to the detriment of the fair industries with which, we are proud to say, we have endowed the country, a country that cannot, without betraying ingratitude, abandon us today to so unequal a combat.

Be good enough, honourable deputies, to take our request seriously, and do not reject it without at least hearing the reasons that we have to advance in its support.

First, if you shut off as much as possible all access to natural light, and thereby create a need for artificial light, what industry in France will not ultimately be encouraged?

If France consumes more tallow, there will have to be more cattle and sheep, and, consequently, we shall see an increase in cleared fields, meat, wool, leather, and especially manure, the basis of all agricultural wealth.

If France consumes more oil, we shall see an expansion in the cultivation of the poppy, the olive, and rapeseed. These rich yet soil-exhausting plants will come at just the right time to enable us to put to profitable use the increased fertility that the breeding of cattle will impart to the land.

Our moors will be covered with resinous trees. Numerous swarms of bees will gather from our mountains the perfumed treasures that today waste their fragrance, like the flowers from which they emanate.

Thus, there is not one branch of agriculture that would not undergo a great expansion.

The same holds true of shipping. Thousands of vessels will engage in whaling, and in a short time we shall have a fleet capable of upholding the honour of France and of gratifying the patriotic aspirations of the undersigned petitioners, chandlers, etc.

But what shall we say of the specialities of Parisian manufacture? Henceforth you will behold gilding, bronze, and crystal in candlesticks, in lamps, in chandeliers, in candelabra sparkling in spacious emporia compared with which those of today are but stalls.

There is no needy resin-collector on the heights of his sand dunes, no poor miner in the depths of his black pit, who will not receive higher wages and enjoy increased prosperity

It needs but a little reflection, gentlemen, to be convinced that there is perhaps not one Frenchman, from the wealthy stockholder of the Anzin Company to the humblest vendor of matches, whose condition would not be improved by the success of our petition.

We anticipate your objections, gentlemen; but there is not a single one of them that you have not picked up from the musty old books of the advocates of free trade. We defy you to utter a word against us that will not instantly rebound against yourselves and the principle behind all your policy.

Will you tell us that, though we may gain by this protection, France will not gain at all, because the consumer will bear the expense?

We have our answer ready:

You no longer have the right to invoke the interests of the consumer. You have sacrificed him whenever you have found his interests opposed to those of the producer. You have done so in order to encourage industry and to increase employment. For the same reason you ought to do so this time too.

Indeed, you yourselves have anticipated this objection. When told that the consumer has a stake in the free entry of iron, coal, sesame, wheat, and textiles, “Yes,” you reply, “but the producer has a stake in their exclusion.” Very well, surely if consumers have a stake in the admission of natural light, producers have a stake in its interdiction.

“But,” you may still say, “the producer and the consumer are one and the same person. If the manufacturer profits by protection, he will make the farmer prosperous. Contrariwise, if agriculture is prosperous, it will open markets for manufactured goods.” Very well, If you grant us a monopoly over the production of lighting during the day, first of all we shall buy large amounts of tallow, charcoal, oil, resin, wax, alcohol, silver, iron, bronze, and crystal, to supply our industry; and, moreover, we and our numerous suppliers, having become rich, will consume a great deal and spread prosperity into all areas of domestic industry.

Will you say that the light of the sun is a gratuitous gift of Nature, and that to reject such gifts would be to reject wealth itself under the pretext of encouraging the means of acquiring it?

But if you take this position, you strike a mortal blow at your own policy; remember that up to now you have always excluded foreign goods because and in proportion as they approximate gratuitous gifts. You have only half as good a reason for complying with the demands of other monopolists as you have for granting our petition, which is in complete accord with your established policy; and to reject our demands precisely because they are better founded than anyone else’s would be tantamount to accepting the equation: + x + = -; in other words, it would be to heap absurdity upon absurdity.

Labour and Nature collaborate in varying proportions, depending upon the country and the climate, in the production of a commodity. The part that Nature contributes is always free of charge; it is the part contributed by human labour that constitutes value and is paid for.

If an orange from Lisbon sells for half the price of an orange from Paris, it is because the natural heat of the sun, which is, of course, free of charge, does for the former what the latter owes to artificial heating, which necessarily has to be paid for in the market.

Thus, when an orange reaches us from Portugal, one can say that it is given to us half free of charge, or, in other words, at half price as compared with those from Paris.

Now, it is precisely on the basis of its being semigratuitous (pardon the word) that you maintain it should be barred. You ask: “How can French labour withstand the competition of foreign labour when the former has to do all the work, whereas the latter has to do only half, the sun taking care of the rest?” But if the fact that a product is half free of charge leads you to exclude it from competition, how can its being totally free of charge induce you to admit it into competition? Either you are not consistent, or you should, after excluding what is half free of charge as harmful to our domestic industry, exclude what is totally gratuitous with all the more reason and with twice the zeal.

To take another example: When a product — coal, iron, wheat, or textiles — comes to us from abroad, and when we can acquire it for less labour than if we produced it ourselves, the difference is a gratuitous gift that is conferred up on us. The size of this gift is proportionate to the extent of this difference. It is a quarter, a half, or three-quarters of the value of the product if the foreigner asks of us only three-quarters, one-half, or one-quarter as high a price. It is as complete as it can be when the donor, like the sun in providing us with light, asks nothing from us. The question, and we pose it formally, is whether what you desire for France is the benefit of consumption free of charge or the alleged advantages of onerous production. Make your choice, but be logical; for as long as you ban, as you do, foreign coal, iron, wheat, and textiles, in proportion as their price approaches zero, how inconsistent it would be to admit the light of the sun, whose price is zero all day long!

Notes:

^[1]

A reference to Britain’s reputation as a foggy island.

[…]

And of course, in this, we substitute music that is freed by its being turned into numbers (data) for the sunlight in this beautiful piece.

Decorating yesterday, without a radio, 2 Kate Bush thoughts.

1. The Man With The Child In His Eyes

This song has the most perfect, beautiful ‘ooooh’ of any song, surely. Yes, it does, and i did call you surely. It’s not lascivious, giving come-hither looks or being downright dirty like other oohs I could mention. It’s a luscious, loving, wonderfully rounded, beautiful ‘oooh’, the kind you’d have sung to you by the person who loves you most dearly.

2. Bloody pigeons

Thanks to her last album, Ariel, I now can’t hear a wood pigeon cooing without thinking ‘A sea of ho-ney, a sky of ho-ney’.

After home taping in all it’s guises, the P2P explosion, the poor music industry has to deal with this – Prince has ‘given away’ his latest album, apparently pocketing at least £250,000 from the deal with the Mail on Sunday. And what do we hear of this groundbreaking deal, where an artist has retained control of his ‘product’ and redefined how the public get to access it? Well, mostly the bleatings of commercial rip-off middlemen like HMV, who’s industry representatives whine…

The Entertainment Retailers Association, described plans to “dump” 3m Prince CDs onto breakfast tables on Sunday as wasteful given his albums do not sell in anywhere near those volumes.

The group has slammed Prince’s giveaway as devaluing music and taking record stores for granted.

Referring to MoS plans to distribute almost 3m copies on Sunday, the group said: “This is nearly twice the number of CDs sold by Prince in the UK over the past 13 years.”

Or they make veiled threats like…

“The Artist Formerly Known as Prince should know that with behavior like this he will soon be the Artist Formerly Available in Record Stores,” said Quirk in reference to the 1990s when the star stopped using his name.

“It’s an insult to all those record stores who have supported Prince throughout his career,” he said.

An insult to record stores!? The same record stores who make far more per CD than the artist does? I can see why that would be insulting. Prince has decided that, instead of making £80,000 (on less than 80,000 sales of last album 3121) and handing far more to record stores and marketing men, he’ll take £250-500,000 from a newspaper and save his fans a lot of money. All while distributing 2.5 million copies! How insulting!

And the coverage he’s got for this album is astonishing. Reviews everywhere. Meeja luvvies falling over themselves to express an opinion. The Grauniad slighted by the fact that Prince chose a rag capable of selling 2.5m copies rather than go for ‘cool’ by shipping a fifth of that with the Observer.

And then there’s complete tripe like this, from the Scotsman. Headlined ‘a new threat to music’, there’s no need to dissect further. And all the comments on the piece see right through it. Fergus Sheppard, Media Correspondent, you are owned by the industry on which you comment, and irrelevant to the public to whom you correspond.

Prince, good on you.

Ther love songs start at dusk, at first drifting across from the other side of the river. The bamboo groves on the mountain opposite are bathed in the gold of the lingering rays of the sun while this side of the river is already cloaked in night. Young women in groups of five or six come to the river bank, some standing in a circle and others calling their lovers. Melodious singing rapidly fills the vast night. Young women are everywhere, still with their parasols up and holding a handkercheif or a fan. There are also some thirteen- or fourteen year old girls who are just becoming aware of boys.
In each group one girl leads the singing and the other girls harmonize. I observe that the lead singer is invariably the prettiest of the group, I suppose choice by beauty is a fairly natural principle.
The voice of the lead singer rises in the air and I can’t help noticing her utter sincerity. The correct word is perhaps not “sing”, for the clear shrill sounds come from deep within so that body and heart respond. The sounds seem to travel from the soles of the feet then shoot up between the eyes and the forehead before they are produced – no wonder they’re called “flying songs”. It is totally instinctive, uncontrived, unrestrained and unembellished, and certainly devoid of what might be called embarrasment. Each woman exerts herself, body and heart, to draw her man to her.

[…]

So-called civilisation in later ages separated sexual impulse from love and created the concepts of status, wealth, religion, ethics and cultural responsibility. Such is the stupidity of human beings.

Gao Xingjian on Miao courting.

————–

Our singer is called Josephine. Anyone who has not heard her does not know the power of song. There is no one but is carried away by her singing, a tribute all the greater as we are not in general a music-loving race. Tranquil peace is the music we love best; our life is hard, we are no longer able, even on occasions when we have tried to shake off the cares of daily life, to rise to anything so high and remote from our usual routine as music. But we do not much lament that; we do not get even so far; a certain practical cunning, which admittedly we stand greatly in need of, we hold to be our greatest distinction, and with a smile born of such cunning we are wont to console ourselves for all shortcomings, even supposing—only it does not happen that we were to yearn once in a way for the kind of bliss which music may provide. Josephine is the sole exception; she has a love for music and knows too how to transmit it; she is the only one; when she dies, music—who knows for how long—will vanish from our lives.

I have often thought about what this music of hers really means. For we are quite unmusical; how is it that we understand Josephine’s singing or, since Josephine denies that, at least think we can understand it. The simplest answer would be that the beauty of her singing is so great that even the most insensitive cannot be deaf to it, but this answer is not satisfactory. If it were really so, her singing would have to give one an immediate and lasting feeling of being something out of the ordinary, a feeling that from her throat something is sounding which we have never heard before and which we are not even capable of hearing, something that Josephine alone and no one else can enable us to hear. But in my opinion that is just what does not happen, I do not feel this and have never observed that others feel anything of the kind. Among intimates we admit freely to one another that Josephine’s singing, as singing, is nothing out of the ordinary.

[continues]

I have been wondering about how the removal of DRM from the EMI catalogue could be interpreted (aside from the ‘EMI: gods or geniuses?’ waffle), given the continued poor state of EMI’s finances and the ongoing speculation about the Warner group’s possible buy out of the ‘major-independent’.

As a going concern EMI looks increasingly ropey, removing DRM could be a short term attempt to boost sales and increase share activity making an earlier [Warner] bid more likely.

Warner is very much pro DRM by its removal EMI could be attempting to tempt a buyer that will reimpose DRM in order to stifle the spread of (official) unrestricted download material. I also imagine that if this is the case at the very least a number of headline performers will be asked to sign new contracts for [Warner] and less profitable product lines will remain DRM free as a sop/testing ground.

There have been some great demos in the post recently. A DVD:

and a cassette:

are two examples.

Both of these were intriguing in content and presentation. Neither had begging letters in them with attached ‘band’ photos, shitty lyrics, sob stories, threats or other nonsense that we throw straight into the bin. The DVD came by itself in the Jiffy® bag you see, in a plain black case. The cassette came in a hand cut cardboard box. The case had a hand folded liner on fine paper and the only writing in the whole package was the stamp that you see on the body of one side of the housing.

This is more like what we want!

You must watch Afro Samurai. The music is by The RZA. It is a stone cold classic.

cj bolland gets back to what he does best, stompers with an eery rhythmic precision, only this time employing very sophisticated effects and mix editing …. check out the new album at http://www.last.fm/music/CJ+Bolland/The+5th+Sign

There’s been a great deal of blogging about DRM recently waht with the Steve Jobs talk and EMI’s willingness to go DRM-free. Something I haven’t read much about is EMI’s motivation for dropping DRM, it is obviously intended to increase sales of EMI controlled produce but writers haven’t made the link to EMI’s recent woeful finances. The point being rather than leading the market (in terms of businesses) it is actually following the market (in terms of (non-)consumers). EMI is feeling the pain of being a dinosaur stranded in a post-meteor desert (which they absolutely deserve for turning once wonderful mute into a back catalogue scraping machine) and is trying (probably too late) to evolve.

As a business it has no guaranteed income and is forced to listen to what people actually want to buy. In sharp contrast to the sort of business that sucks up taxpayers money via useless government contracts and thinks it will be able to tell the electorate where to stick its vote. But I digress.

From, “What right does the fact that you are a popular and successful pop-star give you to comment on political and local matters?” Tony Wilson

To, “what is your favorite colour”. Edith Bowman

PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS! PRESS!

I just saw this:
http://speak.ytmnd.com/

Which brought me to here:
http://www.custommusicrecords.com/

Via the google…

I like it!

Do you have a spare moment?
Or two?

Gun shots ring out in the Bagdad night
Enter GI Joe in the Palace hall.
He sees the Iraqis in a pool of blood,
Cries out, praise god, we killed them all!
Here comes the story of Saddam Hussein,
The man the The Great Satan came to blame
For somethin that he never done.
Hanged in a prison cell, but one time he could-a been
The champion of the world.

Three bodies lyin there does GI see
And another man named Musta, movin around mysteriously.
Thats the way we do it, he says, and he throws a grenade
We are robbin your country, I hope you understand.
And we aint leavin, he says, and he stops
Its a hard job being here like we’re your cops.
And forever wer’re gonna be your cops
And they arrive on the scene with IEDs flashin
In the hot bagdad night.

Meanwhile, far away in another part of town
Achmed and a couple of friends are drivin around.
Owner of ‘best taxi driver of Bagdad’ crown
Had no idea what kinda shit was about to go down
When GIs pulled him over to the side of the road
Just like the time before and the time before that.
In Bagdad thats just the way things go.
If youre Iraqi you might as well not show up on the street
less you wanna draw the heat.

Achmed had a partner and he had a rap for the cops.
Him and Jamal were just out drivin around
He said, I saw two men runnin out, they looked like terrorists
They jumped into a white car clenching their fists.
And miss GI just shook her head.
She said, wait a minute, boys, these ones aint dead
So they shot them there for all to see
And though these two could hardly more innocent be
They told all that they may have been guilty men.

Four in the mornin and they haul Rashid in,
Take him to Abu Ghraib and they bring him downstairs.
Lyndie looks out through one open eye
Points, glad you brought him in boys! he ready to die?
Yes, heres the story of Saddam Hussein,
The man the The Great Satan came to blame
For somethin that he never done.
Hanged in a prison cell, but one time he could-a been
The champion of the world.

Four months later, Bhagdad is in flame,
Chavez in south america, fightin for his name
While Haliburton still in the robbery game
Jihadi are puttin the screws to GI, lookin for somebody to blame.
Remember that murder called ‘911’?
Remember the man who they said got it done?
You think he’d like to play ball with the law?
Think it might-a been that phantom that you saw in Pakistan?
Just you forget the name of that man.

Dumb Joe Sixpack said, Im really not sure.
Uncle Sam said, a poor boy like you could use a break
You just dont get it, you dont know what’s at stake
Now you dont wanta have to pay five bucks a gallon.
Youll be doin society a favor.
That sonofabitch is brave and gettin braver.
We want to put his ass in stir
We want to pin this nukular gig on him
He aint no gentleman jim.

Saddam could take a man out with just one punch
But he never did like to talk about it all that much.
Its my work, hed say, and I do it for play
And when its over Id just as soon go on my way
Up to some paradise
Where the trout streams flow and the air is nice
And ride a virgin along a trail.
But then they took him to the jailhouse
Where they try to turn a man into a mouse.

All of Saddam’s cards were marked in advance
The trial was a pig-circus, he never had a chance.
The judge made Saddam’s witnesses drunkards from the slums
To the white folks who watched he was a revolutionary bum
And to the Arab folks he was just a crazy nigger.
Not one doubted that he coulda pulled the trigger.
And though they could not produce the gun,
The judge said he was the one who did the deed
And the all-white military jury agreed.

Saddam Hussein was falsely tried.
The crime was mass murder, guess who testified?
Only his enemies and they both baldly lied
And the newspapers, they all went along for the ride.
How can the life of such a man
Be in the palm of Uncle Sam’s hand?
To see him obviously framed
Couldn’t help but make me feel ashamed to be from a land
Where justice is a game.

Now USUK criminals in their coats and their ties
Are free to drink martinis and watch the sun rise
While Saddam got hung in a ten-foot cell
An innocent man in a living hell.
Thats the story of Saddam Hussein,
But it wont be over till they clear his name
And leave the land he was from.
Hanged in a prison cell, but one time he could-a been
The champion of the world.

Thanks Bob… And thanks to the dude who mailed it to me.

Spire on Saturday was extremely good. First some great beer in KoKo bar (Goodramgate), which used to be a fabulous shop selling a myriad of bottled beers and now a lovely, cosy bar run by the same man. From the window we watched images of the East Window of the Minster projected onto the scaffolding that will continue to cover it for years to come.

The concert itself was a mix of classical, religious organ pieces, some accompanied by piano and tape, some vocal pieces, some individual chants, and solo offerings from Fennesz, Jeck and BJ Nilsen. Fennesz played in the Chapterhouse, with transmission into the Nave. It was interesting to wander from one place to the other, feeling the changing acoustics and feel of the rather subdued (for Fennesz) sounds.

For me, Jeck was the surprising highlight. From listening close to his set-up at the front of the Nave,  I wandered to the far end. Here, instead of the intense, personal feel of close quarters, his samples and loops of various organ and church sounds filled the huge space wondrously. It felt like the memories of centuries of ceremonies breathed themselves from the stones to fill the void. Something vaguely familiar, borderline comforting, yet still ethereal and untouchable swirled around, the huge and reverberating space preventing the sounds from coming into anything but the softest of focus.

Nilsen tried his best to send everyone into a coma, and it failed to move me at all. However, a final set of organ and vocal pieces including some Pärt sent me home with a warm glow inside.

Calling all composers – eleven notes in under eleven days
Could you compose a short piece to be performed on York Minster’s chime bells on Saturday 20^th January, as the pre-concert introduction to Spire a striking, magical exploration of sound and space which invites you to think again about the church organ?
This is your opportunity to step into the shoes of one of Britain’s most famous composers – Michael Nyman, who was due to perform a new work, but now has to be at the Sundance Film Festival.
The time slot is from 6.45 to 7.00pm and the promoters – SightSonic, Touch and the University of York – are hoping to feature two or three short works.
“It was a great shame that Michael had an unavoidable conflict, but we see this as an opportunity for other composers”, said Peter Boardman, chair of SightSonic. “The idea came out of a conversation with artists Paul Kaiser and Marc Downie of the OpenEnded Group, whose new work is being projected onto the East End of the Minster until 28 January. They set the challenge of composing for eleven notes in the remaining eleven days available.”
Dr. Tony Myatt, University of York Music department, who will be among the selectors, described the chime bell keyboard as a set of wooded levers – like a carillon, but not chromatic. “It has 11 notes, a diatonic scale spanning a 10th plus a sharp fourth. Considered in C, the keyboard is C to E’ (octave + 2 tones) plus an F#. The notation that I played was written in C, but the bells sound in D. The keyboard is played with the base of the hand (a vertically oriented loose fist, playing almost with the side of the knuckle of the 5th finger), normally using alternate hands. Some limited two part writing is also possible. I would estimate that one of the skilled Minster players could play semiquavers at  crotchet = 90. Because the keyboard is manual, only two notes can be played at any one time.”
The selected work will be performed by one of the members of the York Minster Society of Change Ringers. Entries should be sent to peter.boardman@york.gov.uk.
Spire has been performed at cathedrals and churches in Geneva, Linz, Amsterdam and Brussels in Europe and in Newcastle and Leeds Town Hall in the UK.  This production is a partnership between SightSonic, Touch and the University of York’s Concert Series, by kind permission of the Dean & Chapter of York Minster.

[…]

Any composers amongst us? I know there are…

Spire

Tickets

Minster

Brown to end Blair’s terror strategy

[…]

Mr Brown, who backed the 2003 Iraq invasion, said he had since learned that only so much could be achieved against terrorists and religious fanatics by brute military force, intelligence, security work and policing. In terms that will appeal to many Labour supporters but anger Mr Blair — and some in Washington — he said the fight to stop “extremist terrorist activities” would only be won after world leaders triumphed in a peaceful battle for “hearts and minds”.

Suggesting that he would not follow Washington into any future military action against rogue nations such as Iran, Mr Brown said the kind of “cultural war” fought by the West against Communism in the 1940s and 1950s could be a “model” for the next chapter of the war on terror. […]

Telegraph

Gordon has no clue at all. Thats because he doesn’t understand the era that he is in.

There can be no ‘cultural war’ in this age, because of…The Internets.

All the people he is talking about waging a cultural war against are already completely immune from cultural attack; this is why they are in a state of unprecedented cultural cohesion and frictionless networking.

For example, have you ever noticed the insanely great music that accompanies the ‘Juba’ videos, or those ‘messages from the front’ where IEDs blow up armored vehicles? There is a huge culture of ‘Nasheeds‘ music made from only the human voice, which are:

Nasheeds (Arabic: ??????; also spelt Nasyid in Malaysia) are Islamic-oriented songs. Traditionally, they are sung a cappella, accompanied only by a daff. This musical style is used because many Muslim scholars interpret Islam as prohibiting the use of musical instruments except for some basic percussion. Despite what might be considered a handicap, Nasheeds are spreading across the music network as many people admire the purity and simplicity of the music.

Look at the guys in that nasheeds.com link. They are not going to swallow any propaganda, no matter how much it is sugared, and whats more, they are putting out their own thoughts ideas and music that outclasss and outperform anything that Gordon ‘The Grotesque’ Brown and his UK based PR scum-bags could ever come up with, the main reason being that they are on the side of righteousness.

The only way PM in waiting Gordon G. Brown can ever hope to take the UK off of the shit list is to REPENT and to totally disengage in the bogus ‘War on Terror’ and completely drop all of its hideous side effects. That means immediate withdrawl from all countries where this US led insanity is taking place, repealing all Bliar’s anti-terror legislation and measures, and promising never to follow The Great Satan into the abyss again. He might even consider paying reparations for the crimes that were committed by his government.

That is the only thing that will put it all right. You cannot tell one billion people that their religion is the new Communism that needs to be defeated, and then expect to win. Not only is Islam not analagous to Communism, but even if it was, the tools of any ‘cultural war’ are in the hands of everyone with a cellphone. Every blogger, email writer and text messager is a soldier in this war. There is no way that you can defeat that. To get a good understanding of what an insurmountable task this would be, should you be stupid enough to try it, read, ‘In the Shadow of the silent Majorities‘:

The whole chaotic constellation of the social revolves around that spongy reference, that opaque but equally translucent reality, that nothingness: the masses. A statistical crystal ball, the masses are ‘swirling with currents and flows,’ in the image of matter and the natural elements. So, at least, they are represented to us.

Written in 1978 and first published in English in 1983, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities was the first postmodern response to the delusional strategies of terrorism. At a time when European terrorists were taking politics into their own hands, Baudrillard was the first to announce that the “critical mass” had stopped being critical of anything. Rather, the “masses” had become a place of absorption and implosion; hence the ending of the possibility of politics as will and representation.

The book marked the end of an era when silent majorities still factored into the democratic political process and were expected to respond positively to revolutionary messages. With the masses no longer “alienated” as Marx had described, but rather indifferent, this phenomenon made revolutionary explosion impossible, says Baudrillard.

The mass absorbs all the social energy, but no longer refracts it. It absorbs every sign and every meaning, but no longer reflects them… it never participates. It is a good conductor of information, but of any information. It is without truth and without reason. It is without conscience and without unconscious. Everybody questions it, but never as silence, always to make it speak. This silence is unbearable. It is the simulation chamber of the social.

As a mere shadow cast by power, the silent majority and its hyper-real conformity have no meaning and nothing to say to us. To that, terrorism responds by an equally hyper-real act equally caught up from the onset in concentric waves of media and of fascination.

It aims at the mass silence, the masses in their silence. It aims at the white magic of simulation, deterrence, of anonymous and random control, and by the black magic of a still greater, more anonymous, arbitrary and more hazardous abstraction; that of the terrorist act.

Remarkably prescient, Baudrillard’s meditation on terrorism throws light on post-September 11th delusional fears and political simulations. MIT Press

“A ‘cultural war’ fought by the West against Communism in the 1940s and 1950s” cannot and will not work in the 21st century. The Mass will not accept any message, as Baudrillard points out so cleanly for us. The Internets prevent any lie from taking hold for too long, and they (The Internets and the people who operate in them) are getting stronger and stronger and better and better at doing this job.

Gordon Brown is an idiot, an member of the murder Inc. cabal cabinet, a criminal, a liar, a man without any new ideas, a man without morals and a real threat to the UK if this is the best quality of his thinking. Anyway, a man guilty of mass murder has no place being in charge of this great country. But I digress.

Check out these websites, where you can get your own Nasheeds:

http://www.islamway.com/
There are some Nasheeds buried in there; good luck finding them!

http://www.anashed.net/anashed/ashretah/jwad_al_fjr.html
This site has ‘the one with the horses’, ‘Jawad Al Fijr’ that you hear in all the videos.

http://www.nsheed.com/sounds/sounds.php?mqtaa=24
For the ladies?

http://nasheed.worldofislam.info/
500 megz of nasheeds here. Leech away.

http://www.streetdawah.com/nasheeds.html
Collections on CD.

Entitled A Weekend in the City, it’s a quasi-concept album detailing Okereke’s thoughts on life in London in the 21st century. ‘East London is a vampire/It sucks the joy right out of me’ – the declamatory climax of the album’s opening track ‘Song For Clay (Disappear Here)’ is but one of the many startling images contained in Okereke’s lyrics.

[…]

Oh, please. Teen angst poems and hideously crass, cringeworthy imagery do not make for novel insights into the human condition.

I’ve been searching for the young soul rebels, I can’t find them anywhere, where have you hidden them?
Serves me right for reading the Observer, I suppose. This poor young thing is being feted as the Dylan for the Blair generation, and will have his face crushed into the mud when the stampede for the next, next DFTBG happens.