Think about it:

• A bearded man who lives in a secret remote location. Everyone knows where he lives, but no one can get to him.
• NORAD can track him. But they cant track him down.
• He has a legion of helpers that help him deliver ‘presents’ to everyone everywhere by magic. He can deliver presents to all good citizens in one night. He can blow up a building that was not hit by a plane in one day, without the weeks needed to rig it for controlled implosion.
• He is believed in by people with child like minds as a result of lies told by people who know how the world really works.
• Despite living in a remote place, he knows everything about everyone.
• You can write letters to him, and somehow, they will be delivered. Somehow, letters from him are delivered to millions by the internets.
• People who grow up stop believing in him, and then buy their own presents for themselves and their loved ones.

Now, let us find out what it’s REALLY about:

Bin Laden: Should Governments Perpetuate the Bin Laden Myth?
Austin Cline,

Problems with the Bin Laden Myth:
Although Bin Laden was originally based upon the figure of Old Nick, a patron saint of big government, today Bin Laden is wholly secular. Some people object to him because he is secular rather than religious; some non-religious object to him because of his religious roots. He is a powerful cultural symbol which is impossible to ignore, but this doesn’t mean that he should simply be accepted without question. There are good reasons to dispense with the tradition.

Governments Have to Lie About Bin Laden:
Perhaps the most serious objection to perpetuating belief in Bin Laden among citizens is also the simplest: in order to do so, Governments have to lie to their citizens. You can’t encourage the belief without dishonesty, and it’s not a “little white lie” that is for their own good or that might protect them from harm. Governments should not persistently lie to citizens without overwhelmingly good reasons, so this puts supporters of the Bin Laden myth on the defensive.

Governments’ Lies About Bin Laden Have to Grow:
In order to get kids to believe in Bin Laden, it’s not enough to commit a couple of simple lies and move on. As with any lie, it’s necessary to construct more and more elaborate lies and defenses as time passes. Skeptical questions about Osama must be met with detailed lies about Osama’s powers. “Evidence” of Bin Laden must be created once mere stories of Osama prove insufficient. It’s unethical for Governments to perpetuate elaborate deceptions on citizens unless it’s for a greater good.

Bin Laden Lies Discourage Healthy Skepticism:
Most citizens eventually become skeptical about Bin Laden and ask questions about him, for example how he could possibly travel around the whole world in such a short period of time. Instead of encouraging this skepticism and helping citizens come to a reasonable conclusion about whether Bin Laden is even possible, much less real, most Governments discourage skepticism by telling tales about Osama’s supernatural powers.

The Reward & Punishment System of Bin Laden is Unjust:
There are a number of aspects to the whole Bin Laden “system” which citizens shouldn’t learn to internalize. It implies that the whole person can be judged as naughty or nice based upon a few acts. It requires belief that someone is constantly watching you, no matter what you are doing. It is based upon the premise that one should do good for the sake of reward and avoid doing wrong out of fear of punishment. It allows Governments to try to control citizens via a powerful stranger.

The Bin Laden Myth Promotes Anti-Libertarianism:
The entire Bin Laden myth is based on the idea of citizens giving up liberty for safety. There’s nothing wrong with staying safe, but Bin Laden makes it the focus on the entire life of the citizen. Citizens are encouraged to conform their behavior to Governmental expectations in order to receive ever more guarantees of safety rather than keeping their liberty. In order to make Terror watch lists, Government pays close attention to what informers tell them their neighbors are doing, effectively encouraging an unbridled STASI style informer based police state.

Bin Laden is Too Similar to Jesus and God:
The parallels between Bin Laden and Jesus or God are numerous. Bin Laden is a nearly all-powerful, supernatural person who dispenses rewards and punishment to people all over the world based upon whether they adhere to a pre-defined code of conduct. His existence is implausible or impossible, but faith is expected if one is to receive the rewards of safety. Believers should regard this as blasphemous; non-believers shouldn’t want their kids prepared in this way to adopt the police state and the loss of their civil liberties.

The Bin Laden “Tradition” is Relatively Recent:
Some might think that because Bin Laden is such an old tradition, this alone is sufficient reason to continue it. They were taught to believe in Osama as citizens, so why not pass this along to their own? The role of Bin Laden and false flag terrorism in modern life is actually quite recent — the mid to late 20th century. The importance of Bin Laden is a creation of cultural elites and perpetuated by business interests and simple cultural momentum. It has little to no inherent value.

Bin Laden is More About Governments than citizens:
Governmental investment in Bin Laden is far larger than anything citizens do, suggesting that Governments’ defense of the Bin Laden myth is more about what they want than about what people want. Their own memories about enjoying freedom may be heavily influenced by cultural assumptions about what they should have experienced. Is it not possible that kids would find at least as much pleasure in knowing that Governments are responsible for terrorism, not a supernatural stranger?

The Future of Bin Laden:
Bin Laden symbolizes terrorism and perhaps the entire ‘war on terror’ like nothing else. An argument can be made for the importance of the CCTV camera as a symbol for safety (notice that there are no reduction in crimes from them), but Bin Laden personifies terror in a way that groups cannot. Bin Laden is, furthermore, a very secular character by now which allows him to cross cultural and religious lines, placing him in an important position for the entire world rather than for Christians alone.

Because of this, it’s plausible that giving up on Bin Laden will mean abandoning much of the ‘war on terror’ altogether — and perhaps that’s not such a bad thing. There’s a lot to be said for people dismissing the anti freedom, militarized police state of modern America and focusing instead on the freedoms of the Constitution. Ignoring Bin Laden would symbolize this choice. There’s a lot to be said for adherents of other religions refusing to allow Bin Laden to become part of their own traditions, representing an intrusion of Western culture into their own.

Finally, there’s also a lot to be said for nonbelievers of various sorts — humanists, atheists, skeptics, and freethinkers — refusing to be co-opted into a religious obedience. Whether Bin Laden in particular or the ‘war on terror’ in general is treated as defined by government or religious traditions, neither are religions which nonbelievers are part of. Government has strong secular elements, but those are primarily commercial — and who is going to invest themselves in a holiday all about commerce and who can spend the most money on credit?

The future of Bin Laden will depend on whether people will care enough to do anything — if not, things will continue on the same course they have been on. If people care not to be taken over, borg-like, by America’s ‘war on terror’, resistance may reduce Osama’s status as a cultural icon.

[…]

http://atheism.about.com/od/christmasholidayseason/p/SantaMyth.htm

Thank heavens.

Now maybe liars in search of a cause like ‘creator of teh internets‘ Al Gore, and the pig ignorant ‘no more thought’ Sheryl Crow and her ilk will pipe down the bullshit.

Or maybe not; it will only be when the press start to ask them proper questions that they cannot answer (or when their bs is trashed off camera by scientists embarrassing them into a little curled up mess) that they will realize that the jig is up and they had better put up or shut up but either way sod off with their hysterical anti-human, anti-science religious nonsense which is on the verge of becoming a major embuggerance thanks to the nincompoops at the UN and their legislative boosters.

I’m stuck in bed with a vomiting bug…. yes, you’re glad you’re not here. Surfing… searched the Blarchive (for what, I no longer remember) with keyword ‘simple’. Got this result about the life of a research scientist… In the end, I got a grant for £250K, but, 4 years later, this post only needs a few simple substitutions:

My contract is up in [March]. And I am sick and tired of the method of employment for researchers. I’m [older now], a good record, [9] years of post-doctoral experience, and there is almost zero chance of getting a permanent job in basic research. It shouldn’t be this way. I am expected to write grants to provide another 2 or 3 years of funding, after which I am expected to write grants to provide another 2 or 3 years of funding, after which… There is no observed value of basic research by the public, and the government know we have no choice but to put up with the system as it stands simply because they will not provide backing for permanent jobs. In fact, they are being cut.

It depresses me, truly it does, and not just on a personal level. It is exploitation of the nature of scientists (those who I work with, at any rate); we want to do science, we want to do good science very very much, it is in our hearts. And it is this ‘weakness’ that means we can be exploited.

So. I am fed up with it. I need some security, or at least a sense of worth, some feeling of support by those that hold the readies. And these things are lacking – note the substantial reliance of British science on charitable donations. This is not The Way It Should Be.

La plus ca change… n’est pas?

Anyway, I just read the entire Blarchive page and it cheered me up, took my mind off my stomach for a while, brought a glow to my sallow cheeks.

Merry Christmas, Blogdialians! (Once a blogdialian…)

The extra serendipity, the Blarchive page encompasses today’s date!

And finally… peace and love to all Blogdialians. Your wisdom is still working its magic.

Da BAWMB the Bass .. … … Diarrhoea and Vomiting Bug Powder Dust

snarfed from here.

Ladies and gentlemen…

This is a REAL jacket that is being seen in all the big cities.

It’s like something straight out of a 2000AD street scene….astonishing; true dystopian fashion, sci-fi reality leaking into now…or has ‘the future’ arrived? If so, then what on earth comes next?

And let’s not forget that wearing a mask in public is illegal in some countries; how long do you think it will be before some jackass somewhere calls for these hoodies to be outlawed?

Whilst trawling around for a suitable image to vividly demonstrate this hoodie in a sci-fi context, I cam across this astonishing image:

I do believe that is a photo of Patti Smith, next to Jerry Cornelius as drawn by Moebius!

Snarfed from here.

Parisians…’they love Patti Smith’ It’s true!

Looks like the ‘intelligence agencies’ smell the coffee and do not want to get the chop from a Ron Paul Presidency and strongly Constitutionalist Congress. There is a video out there where a Ron Paul supporter promises that not only will Ron Paul become president, but that they are going to, “replace the congress with people who follow the Constitution”; if this sentiment is wide spread, CIA will know about it and will now be trying to undo the perception that they are a tool for warmongers, regime changers and mass murderers.

Or maybe not.

Look at the news of this report:

Israel contradicts US findings on nuclear Iran

Mark Tran and agencies
Tuesday December 4, 2007
Guardian Unlimited

Iran claimed today that its peaceful nuclear intentions were clear after US spy agencies concluded that Tehran had stopped its nuclear weapons programme in 2003.

Asked about the US national intelligence estimate (NIE) report that has undermined the hawks in Washington, Iran’s foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, told state radio: “It’s natural that we welcome it when those countries who in the past have questions and ambiguities about this case… now amend their views realistically. The condition of Iran’s peaceful nuclear activities is becoming clear to the world.”

[…]

In its assessment, which was made public yesterday, the US NIE on Iran, a consensus of 16 intelligence agencies, concluded that Iran had suspended its attempt to build a nuclear weapon. The unclassified summary marked an abrupt U-turn in the US view that Iran was intent on acquiring nuclear weapons, undercutting administration warnings about Iran’s intentions.

[…]

However, he said: “We cannot allow ourselves to rest just because of an intelligence report from the other side of the earth, even if it is from our greatest friend.”

[…]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/iran/story/0,,2221663,00.html

My emphasis

The obvious thrust of this report is not what Israel thinks of it, but that the report has been released at all. It is in absolute contradiction to Murder Inc.’s plans to attack Iran. Its release is signifigant; we all remember that it was the sexed up dossiers and bogus intelligence that was used to falsely drag USUK into an illegal murderous war. Now it seems that these agencies are trying to clean up their act. But why? Why should they care now that Iran or any other country is about to be attacked? Why are they now deciding that telling the truth inexpedient or not is the right thing to do? One conclusion is enlightened self interest. If they feel under threat from the Ron Paul Revolution, they might conclude that stopping another illegal and murderous NeoCon crusade action would be a good way to take the heat off of them. Once again, who knows.

Finally, the words of Ehud Barak (triplet digression: Ehud Barak Obama!) are going to come back to haunt Israel. A Ron Paul Presidency and Constitutionally minded congress is going to say with absolute unanimity, “what has that country on the other side of the earth got to do with The United States of America? Even if they are our greatest friend”.

UPDATE

BBQ:

[…]

‘Astounding’

“This is an astounding conclusion,” said Mark Fitzpatrick of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.

“The assessment in 2005 that Iran had a nuclear weapons programme was based on evidence from a hard drive handed over by defector.

“Since then Western intelligence agencies have tried to find out if Iran had continued with that programme. In fact, they have decided that it did not.

“This is a new and important development. It removes any possibility of a military strike in the next year. There would be no substantive cause and no public support.

“It also shows that lessons have been learned from Iraq. The US intelligence agencies are determined to show their independence from political influence.”

[…]

 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7126429.stm

‘The assessment in 2005 that Iran had a nuclear weapons programme was based on evidence from a hard drive handed over by defector ‘ Another Chalabi move – all these ‘defectors’ are liars and power hungry monsters. This is transparent to anyone with half a brain cell. But I digress; it seems that everyone now thinks that the heat is off and that at the very least, the intelligence agencies are distancing themselves from Murder Inc.

Plenty of time for that trip to Isfahan!

Anyone with any doubts about just how ‘over’ the NIR and ID cards are should have those doubts washed away by this, from the Times:

[…]

Ms Smith had many inquisitors. The first was the senior Labour MP Keith Vaz, who is deeply oily but that makes it all the more slippery when he asks a good question. After the events of last week, he demanded, was she planning to look again at how to protect ID scheme data. As his words oozed over us, like treacle over sponge, Ms Smith just sat there. She did not jump up, eager to inform. Instead she looked over at her Immigration Minister, Liam Byrne. He popped up and trumpeted: “The House will know that, where there are lessons to be learnt from last week’s events at HMRC, then it is right that we learn them.”

This was clearly nonsense. Ms Smith nodded away earnestly. Why? Could this really be the Home Secretary? Was she in charge? Perhaps we should check her biometric data just to make sure. David Davis, the Shadow Home Secretary, knows exactly who he is. He is her tormentor. He can smell weakness but he asked a simple enough question. “If the Government gives away your bank account details, that is a disaster but you can change your bank account,” he noted. “What precisely do you do if the Government gives away your biometric details?”

Here was another chance for Ms Smith to tell us of her strategy or, at least, to pretend to have one. Instead she said: “Biometrics will link a person securely and reliably to his or her unique identity.”

No one looked reassured. I cannot think why: surely the news that our biometrics can link us to ourselves can only be good, but Ms Smith, or her impostor, struggled on, to loud barks of laughter. “The current plan for the national identity register is that biometric information would be held separately from biographical information, thereby safeguarding against the sort of eventuality that you are talking about.”

Mr Davis, looking like a shark who had just had a tasty snack, asked her about a European information-sharing scheme called Project Stork. “How are we going to prevent a repetition of the disaster of the last few weeks when sensitive personal data is held not by one government but by 27?” Ms Smith looked flummoxed. I don’t think she knew about Project Stork. Again, this was worrying. Wouldn’t a real Home Secretary have a clue about this?

[…]

Yes indeed; it looks like the computer illiterates in the House of Commons have all suddenly woken up to what biometrics really mean, and it has happened because either they or someone they know has been violated; so large was the recent violation that there is no way that a single member of the house was not affected.

Absolutely Brilliant. You could not have designed a better demonstration of how the NIR and ID cards are dangerous.

Members of the house are now speaking like we and the many others against this madness have been speaking for years. It is now well and truly OVER.

Now we hear about ‘Project Stork‘; so many words and images come to mind. But I will defer.

Fears over pan-EU electronic identity network
By Philip Johnston, Home Affairs Editor

New concerns have been raised over the Government’s multi-billion-pound ID project as it emerged that Britain’s identity database could be shared with 26 other European Union countries.

The Home Office is taking part in a scheme, codenamed Stork, which aims to make all EU electronic identity networks ”inter-operable” within three years..

Michael Wills, the data protection minister, yesterday conceded that the ”deplorable” loss of 25 million records had implications for the ID card scheme.

“We are going to obviously have to look at the national identity register in the light of all this,” he told Parliament’s joint human rights committee.

”We are going to have to learn the lessons. Everything will have to be scrutinised and then we will assess it again.”

However, Mr Wills said this did not mean the ID scheme – due to start next year for foreign nationals – would be scrapped

[…]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/11/27/nidcards127.xml

There cannot be anyone now, thanks to the DVDR fiasco that does not instantly understand the full implications of this. Everyone in the UK now has first hand, intimate knowledge of what this means; it means that your personal information will no longer be personal, it will be sown to the wind and spread to every corner of the globe. It will be a violation without precedent, even WORSE than the violation of the DVDR release, since, as Rt HON Vaz points out, you can change your address and bank account but you cannot change your face or fingerprints and once they are out there, they are out there forever.

The question everyone is now asking; do I want my face, fingerprints, address, date of birth and all of the other pieces of information the NIR will collect on me in the hands of, say, the Germans?

The answer, from Land’s End to John o’Groats is a resounding ‘NO’.

Anyone who signs up for ID cards now is totally insane, or has been living under a rock for the last two weeks. There is nothing you can do about your data being in the DVDR release, but there is everything you can do about staying off of the NIR / ID card database.

All you have to do is refuse to comply, and your data will never enter that system. If enough people refuse, the whole scheme will become unworkable and collapse.

There is a problem however, with passports. Something needs to be done about the new generation passports and accompanying database and the poor sheeple that have applied and been issued with them. They are all going to need to be recalled as too dangerous to be used. They then need to be replaced with ISLAND (Intrinsically Secure Legally Acquired Named Document) Passports.

As you know, the ISLAND Passport system allows you to be issued with a secure document that does not depend on a centralized database for verification and does not violate your rights by assigning a unique number to you.

It is entirely possible to reduce the amount of passport fraud without rolling out an Orwellian surveillance system.

But you know this!

Henry Porter is almost 100% awake. Read his latest piece, where he gets is all right except for right at the end, where he say, in his sleepy headed manner:

[…] It is clear we have a short time to act. A high-profile, independent public inquiry is needed to examine the accumulation of personal data by the government, how it is stored, what it is used for and where the risks to security occur. An important aspect is the technology. Is it desirable for multinationals with no stake in this country’s traditions of privacy and freedom to be installing the systems that will control us? I very much doubt we will get such an inquiry because it would strike at the heart of Labour’s grasping and incompetent megalomania. But it is worth the opposition pushing for it.

I receive hundreds of emails each week from people asking what they can do. The first is to join a local group set up by No2ID, one of the best run campaigns I have seen. Terri Dowty’s Action for Rights on Children (Arch) and Helen Wilkinson’s the Big Opt Out both do very good work, as does the Our Kingdom website. We should write to our MPs – especially Labour MPs – and to local newspapers; contribute to blogs and phone-ins. We should talk to our friends and colleagues about what has been done by Labour’s centralisers and mainframe men, who Anderson properly identifies as Marxist controllers in another guise.

Each of us should understand that personal information is exactly that – personal – and that the government has only limited rights to demand and retain it. The scale of its operations and the innate weakness of the systems is a very grave concern to us all.

What is needed – and here I hope someone is listening – is a mass movement on the lines of the Countryside Alliance, which goes across all parties and absorbs the skills and expertise of countless activists. Now is the moment to create a movement in defence of our privacy, security and freedom.

henryporter@henry-porter.com

Guardian

Poor poor Henry!

A Public Enquiry? ANOTHER Public Enquiry? Are you totally INSANE? Just what on earth will another ‘Foxes guarding the henhouse’ opertaion do to stop this insanity?

You see, this is the writing of someone who is not yet completely awake, despite the loudest ever alarm bell ringing right next to his sleepy head. He still believes in the process of ‘democracy’ and the once great institutions of the British, which are now totally at the mercy and control of Murder Inc. We must give credit where credit is due however, and really, Henry Porter has done more than most to help get this problem the exposure that it needs out to those living under rocks without internets.

Proof of the last part of his awakening will be his public commitment to disobedience, like Dame Shirley has done (that line is bullshit. he has already done this, and said he will not submit. a.). No self respecting person will sign up for this nonsense. No self respecting person will willingly submit to it. I will not submit to it. My family will not. My friends have all said categorically that they will not.

What say you Henry? (Said, done and dusted. a.)

You can join all the groups that you want, but as we have said on BLOGDIAL so many times if there is mass non participation the whole scheme will collapse. You are under no obligation to obey laws that are harmful to you or others, and ID cards are a perfect example of this.

In conjunction with joining anti-ID groups like NO2ID, it is very important that people pledge not to cooperate with the system, on an individual and business level.

The business level is more important than the individual, because business is used as a proxy control mechanism by government. All businesses must be forced to give a commitment that they will not cooperate with the ID card / Database state controls. All those who will not give that written commitment must be boycotted. In the end, the power in any country boils down to the money in your pocket as an individual.

Airlines that do not clearly state they will not participate in the data collection crimes should be lightning boycotted. All it will take is a single week of no passengers to bring them to their knees. Once this happens the measures will be dropped. I guarantee it. And by the way, airlines are a perfect example of control by proxy. They are handed edicts from government and then obey them without any regard to the human rights and dignity of passengers. They do it seamlessly and in a fine grained way through their use of databases as a normal part of their business, handing over the cost free spoils to governments under threat of prosecution. Well, the threat of non existence is more frightening to them than any fine for non compliance and this is what it is going to take to make them do what is correct.

Finally, here is a comment attached to the Henry Porter piece. It is brilliant and very enlightening, and was previously touched upon in a post by Meau²:

There already is direct action, by criminals, corrupting the DNA database by deliberately seeding their crime-scenes with other people’s DNA – eventually making this 800 million pound database a next to useless white elephant.

http://www.scotlandonsunday.com/scotland.cfm?id=902562003
“But rank-and-file police fear that calculating criminals with a grudge against members of the force could manipulate the system to damage the careers of innocent officers.
Members of the Scottish Police Federation believe criminals could deliberately contaminate the scene with officers’ DNA, either to implicate them in serious crimes or to give the impression that they had planted evidence.
A federation spokesman said: “A point made by many of our members is that it is relatively easy for anyone so minded to obtain DNA traces of a police officer – for example from a discarded cigarette butt – and to deliberately contaminate a locus with it.”

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/being-human/mg18725163.800
“Police in Manchester in the UK say that car thieves there have started to dump cigarette butts from bins in stolen cars before they abandon them. ”

http://www.out-law.com/default.aspx?page=3436
“Databases on this scale change the nature of society.
For instance, if a criminal were to deposit someone else’s DNA sample at the scene of a crime, then that someone else might have to prove themselves innocent.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/crime/article/0,,1835971,00.html
“The court heard how in order to substantiate her claims, which she made in a letter to the board of Dr Falkowski’s hospital trust, Maria Marchese had obtained one of his used condoms from a rubbish bin and had transferred a specimen of his semen on to a pair of her own knickers.
She handed the underwear to police and Falkowski was arrested, although the case against him was eventually dropped. “The professional consequences were
devastating,” Dr Falkowski told the jury: “I lost my private practice, my reputation was irreparably damaged.”

Paul Nutteing

Awesome.

Once again, those who protect themselves by not submitting to any of this will never be fished out by ‘DNA / fingerprint seeding’ of crime scenes. If however, they manage to put every sheep in the UK in the DNA and or fingerprint database…. the consequences do not bear thinking about.

What the above refers to is obvious, mainly the presumption of innocence lost (OMW a triplet!), and like it says in Meau’s post, the police will simply say, “the computer says you did it, therefore you did it”….until it comes to THEM of course, and the logical conclusion to this is that all police will be put on a special DNA white list along with legislation saying that whenever their DNA is found at a crime scene they are to be presumed innocent!!

Mark my words.

This is a short film which vividly explains the concept of liberty as it relates to a human being.

It is explained in a way that even the Eloi can understand.

“All Clear”

If you have an iPod Touch or an iPhone and you surf over to BLOGDIAL, you will see that we have a special theme installed that switches the blog to shrink down mode. Thanks to these incomprehensibly cool people for releasing the theme and plugin.

I’ve used many types of mobile phones over the years (including SAT phones), starting with a Mitsubishi MT3 followed by a few Nokis’s in the middle after a break, then a Sony Ericsson P-800, and finally a Sony Ericsson P-990i.

I say ‘finally’ because that is the last of that type of phone I am going to buy. Uless they really clean up their act, ie, adopt the Linux based open platform and give me a compelling reason to switch. That means total out of the box transparent integration with whatever boxen I am using, no hassle no excuses no bullshit. The Sony Ericsson P-990i is a buggy slow piece of garbage, with an OS that is a step BACKWARDS from the P-800. It doesn’t play nice with anything, the battery life is short and frankly I am astonished that they released it at all.

The iPhone is a different matter entirely. Not only is it very fast, beautifully designed and rock solid, but when it is jailbroken you can run just about anything on it.

The camera is shitty, you cannot transfer files by bluetooth out of the box from another device to it, it doesn’t record video, and lots of other things are either primitive or missing but then, this is the first version of it, and even in this state it is the best mobile phone ever. Oh yes, and there is Apple trying to lock it down every time they release an update for the firmware…but that’s part of the fun!

The most important missing element is the ability to select files and then transfer them by bluetooth or wireless. Once someone comes up with that, then it will be really exiting; people will be able to transfer music and videos between devices…and all sorts of cool things can happen.

Imagine setting the iPhone free to create ad-hoc mesh networks like the OLPC does then you could do all sorts of cool social networking things as well as file sharing. I’m sure it will all come to pass shortly. This platform is going to be so widely deployed that these apps are absolutely inevitable.

Zardoz speaks to you, his chosen ones.

You have been raised up from brutality to kill the brutals who multiply and are legion. To this end Zardoz your god gave you the gift of the gun.

The gun is good.

The penis is evil.

The penis shoots seeds, and makes new life, and poisons the earth with a plague of men, as once it was. But the gun shoots death, and purifies the earth of the filth of brutals.

Go forth and kill!

Five years ago I wrote about the film Zardoz, in a 2002 BLOGDIAL style:

“The future seen here falls very much in the 1970s vision of the future as seen by the likes of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), The Andromeda Strain (1971), THX 1138 (1971) and Zardoz (1974) that the future had either become or was becoming such a place of technological perfection that we were all in danger of being drowned in sterility. Here society has been made perfect (some nicely futuristic locations in Dallas) but in all of it there seems a sense of serene dissatisfaction. One of the film’s most potent images is a frighteningly decadent one where a group of bored partygoers detonate trees with a flaregun. Although ironically of all 1970s dystopian futures Rollerball’s is the closest to actually having come true with its visions of a corporate elite ruling the world and cathartic ultra-violent sports being used to placate the masses – if you have any doubt about this look at the popularity of the Superbowl and the WWF. (Although contrary to what the film here says, both of these obtain mass catharsis through the promotion of individuality rather than its suppression).”

and then again in 2006.

If you have never seen this film you really must take a good look at it, because it is one of the best films ever made, and deals with what we are starting to deal with now.

The film from the above list that is much closer to foul fruition is Rollerball, another priceless classic that is so close to home that it is uncomfortable to watch. The best part is the debate between Jo..but wait, you have to see this film!.

It was very hard for people of the 70’s to imagine that a corporate controlled world was possible, because people of that generation were the ones who had ‘Social Studies’ class that taught them about The Constitution, The Bill of Rights and the Founding Fathers.

Now that the young people are deliberately NOT instructed about freedom, this Rollerball world may yet come into being. All it takes is the wiping out or dumbing down of one generation to destroy everything and return to the feudal system.

A short film, which uses The Conet Project as its soundtrack, mixed with the voices of bloggers, comes to Channel 4:

Flat Earth is a desktop documentary, which takes the viewer on a seven minute trip around the world so that we encounter a series of fragments taken from real peoples’ blogs. These fragments are knitted together to form a kind of story or singular narrative.

The visual effect is not unlike that of Google Earth, although significantly here, nearly all of the visual material for, “Flat Earth” is taken from satellite imagery freely available on the web. This is with the exception of the close-up imagery from outside USA, which had to be paid for non-commercial use and a series of images taken from Flickr under Creative Commons attribution license.

“Flat Earth” is an Animate Projects commission with Arts Council England and Channel Four Television. Animatics work is by Cavan Convery and we worked on the script with Steve Rushton.

I have a preview DVD of the film, and it is a rather beautiful piece of work. Exceptional and insightful I would say.

Here is the website for the makers THOMSON & CRAIGHEAD.

And the commissioners.

The clocks change shortly, which brings us to this fascinating piece of information. Islam forbids ‘intercalation’, which Wikipedia says is:

Intercalation is the insertion of a leap day, week or month into some calendar years to make the calendar follow the seasons or moon phases. Lunisolar calendars may require a combination of both adjustments.

The solar year does not have whole number of days, but a calendar year must have a whole number of days. The only way to reconcile the two is to vary the number of days in the calendar year.

In solar calendars, this is often done by adding to a common year of 365 days, an extra day (leap day or intercalary day): this makes a leap year of 366 days.

The Decree of Canopus, which was issued by the pharaoh Ptolemy III, Euergetes of Egypt in 239 BC, decreed a solar leap day system.

In the Julian Calendar as well as in the Gregorian Calendar that improved it, intercalation is done by adding an extra day to February in each leap year. In the Julian Calendar this was done every 4 years. In the Gregorian calendar years whose number is evenly divisible by 100 but not 400, were exempted in order to improve accuracy.

The solar year does not have a whole number of lunar months either, so a lunisolar calendar must have a variable number of months in a year. This is usually 12 months, but sometimes a 13th month (an intercalary or embolismic month) is added to the year.

ISO 8601 includes a specification for a 52-week year. Any year that has 53 Thursdays has 53 weeks; this extra week may be regarded as intercalary.

The determination of whether a year has intercalation may be calculated (Julian, Gregorian and Hebrew calendars), or determined by observation (Iranian calendar).

Absolutely fascinating.

Here is a page that explains it further in the context of Islam:

Annulling intercalation

In the ninth year after the Hijra, as documented in the Qur’an (9:36-37), Allah revealed the prohibition of the intercalary month.

The number of months with Allah has been twelve months by Allah’s ordinance since the day He created the heavens and the earth. Of these four are known as forbidden [to fight in]; That is the straight usage, so do not wrong yourselves therein, and fight those who go astray. But know that Allah is with those who restrain themselves.

Verily the transposing (of a prohibited month) is an addition to Unbelief: The Unbelievers are led to wrong thereby: for they make it lawful one year, and forbidden another year, of months forbidden by Allah and make such forbidden ones lawful. The evil of their course seems pleasing to them. But Allah guideth not those who reject Faith.

This prohibition was repeated by Muhammad during the last sermon on Mount Arafat which was delivered during the Farewell Pilgrimage to Mecca on 9 Dhu al-Hijja 10 AH:

O People, intercalation is an addition to unbelief, through it [God, Allah] leads the unbelievers astray: they make it permissible one year and forbid it [at their mere convenience] the next one to elude the timing of what God forbade, so that they make permissible that which Allah forbade [fighting in the forbidden months], and forbid that which Allah has made permissible [fighting in other months]. And [now, this year] time has turned the way it was the day God created Heavens and Earth [The intercalary months since the creation of Heavens and Earth have all canceled out (summed up to whole years)]. The year is twelve months, four of them are forbidden, three successive: Dhu al-Qi’dah and Dhu al-Hijjah and Muharram; and the Rajab of Mudar which is between Jumada and Shaban.^[4]

The three successive forbidden months mentioned by Muhammad (months in which battling is forbidden) are Dhu al-Qi’dah, Dhu al-Hijjah, and Muharram, thus excluding an intercalary month before Muharram. The single forbidden month is Rajab. These months were considered forbidden both within the new Islamic calendar and within the old pagan Meccan calendar, although whether they maintained their “forbidden” status after the conquest of Mecca has been disputed among Islamic scholars.

File under, “you learn something every day!”.

Homemade bread, unsalted butter, organic beetroot & lettuce, dill dressing

2007 is turning out to be a terrible year for the music industry. Or rather, a terrible year for the the music labels.The DRM walls are crumbling. Music CD sales continue to plummet rather alarmingly. Artists like Prince and Nine Inch Nails are flouting their labels and either giving music away or telling their fans to steal it. Another blow earlier this week: Radiohead, which is no longer controlled by their label, Capitol Records, put their new digital album on sale on the Internet for whatever price people want to pay for it.

The economics of recorded music are fairly simple. Marginal production costs are zero: Like software, it doesn’t cost anything to produce another digital copy that is just as good as the original as soon as the first copy exists, and anyone can create those copies (meaning there is perfect competition and zero barriers to entry). Unless effective legal (copyright), technical (DRM) or other artificial impediments to production can be created, simple economic theory dictates that the price of music, like its marginal cost, must also fall to zero as more “competitors” (in this case, listeners who copy) enter the market. The evidence is unmistakable already. In April 2007 the benchmark price for a DRM-free song was $1.29. Today it is $0.89, a drop of 31% in just six months.

P2P networks just exacerbate the problem (or opportunity) further, giving people a way to speed up the process of creating free copies almost to the point of being ridiculous. Today, a billion or so songs are downloaded monthly via BitTorrent, mostly illegally.

Eventually, unless governments are willing to take drastic measures to protect the industry (such as a mandatory music tax), economic theory will win out and the price of music will fall towards zero.

When the industry finally capitulates and realizes that they can no longer charge a meaningful amount of money for digital recorded music, a lot of good things can happen.

First, other revenue sources can and will be exploited, particularly live music, merchandise and limited edition physical copies of music. The signs are already there – the live music industry is booming this year, and Radiohead is releasing a special edition box set of their new album for £40.00 simultaneous to the release of their “free” digital album.

Second, artists and labels will stop thinking of digital music as a source of revenue and start thinking about it as a way to market their real products. Users will be encouraged (even paid, as radio stations are today) to download, listen to and share music. Passionate users who download music from the Internet and share it with others will become the most important customers, not targets for ridiculous lawsuits.

The price of music will likely not fall in the near term to absolutely zero. Charging any price at all requires the use of credit cards and their minimum fees of $0.20 or more per transaction, for example. And services like iTunes and Amazon can continue to charge something for quality of service. With P2P networks you don’t really know what you are getting until you download it. It could, for example, be a virus. Or a poor quality copy. Many users will be willing to pay to avoid those hassles. But as long as BitTorrent exists, or simple music search engines like Skreemr allow users to find and download virtually any song in seconds, they won’t be able to charge much.

http://www.techcrunch.com/

Of course, we wrote about this and released our entire catalogue under the FMP in 1999, before there was a Creative Commons, Bittorrent or any of the cool ways that people use to share music.

The Conet Project is a perfect example proving what we did was correct, and how it can work for other people. It has been downloaded over 200,000 times from the Internet Archive alone (it is mirrored at Hyperreal where they do not keep any stats) so I would guess that the number is at least double that taking all the mirrors past and present into account, and all the private sharing that we encourage.

We have sold many copies of TCP and demand is still strong for it; opening your archive allows you to reach more people than ever, and those that value what you do will buy other products from you and license your work.

It has taken eight years for people to finally start to wake up to this, and even today, there are still buggy whippers who trott out the same rubbish arguments against freeing music railing against Prince for example, for giving away his new CD.

The above article is very good, and there is a howler in there:

With P2P networks you don’t really know what you are getting until you download it. It could, for example, be a virus.

MP3s cannot contain viruses…heh.

but lets go further. The impact on music culture will be absolutely enormous. Everyone everywhere will be able to get any music they read about as they read about it or have it reccomended, and not only that, you can now get the entire catalogue of an artist in a single movement, so that you can study their body of work, become familiar with it and then use it to inform your own work.

This is a highly significant development. In the past, it was very difficult to do this both in terms of tracking down the physical sound carriers and then paying for them. This was especially true of classical music. People used to use cassettes to trade rare music, which once again, involved buying of cassettes, the manual copying of them and distributing them. All of these steps made the cassettes more valuable than the music on them, and because they were ‘bootlegs’ the psychology surrounding them bumped the price up because someone was taking a risk to bring this sound to you. I wont go into the generational loss of quality caused by making tape to tape copies.

Today however, none of this is a factor. Getting any music you like is a near frictionless process; the only barrier being the one time initial learning curve; understanding where the music lives and how to use the tools to get it. Once you have those in place, the only problems you encounter are that there is not enough time to listen to everything, finding people you can trust to introduce you to new music, and a place to store it all.

There are also some other effects that we have an interest in.

If the quality of people who make music is low, we might never again see a flourishing of amazing groups. If the quality of music makers is high, then access to everything that has been recorded will be used as a blacklist ensuring that we get something really new and interesting. If word of mouse works efficiently however, it will bring us whatever small number of great artists who are out there and they will instantly rise to the top of who is being downloaded / listened to; that is the other payoff of this new era – ‘the death of the underground’. No one will be stuck in the absurd ghettoes of the past, where artists were ‘underground’ thanks to the inefficiencies of the market, meaning, money, distribution and journalists. Money doesn’t count anymore, distribution is now frictionless, and music journalists are almost completely irrelevant, since anyone with an MP3 blog and good taste is as powerful as any journalist.

The pyramidal structure of music culture has been dismantled and it is now in the shape of a two dimensional network of nodes, each listener being a transmitter and receiver of the music itself and information about the music. With LastFM, the very act of listening to music turns you into a node that recommends and promotes music.

All of this is a good thing. Combined with the astonishing tools that are now available to everyone for free, if the people who make music are up the challenge, they can make whatever they want and find people to listen to them. And not only find people to listen to them, find all the people in the world who are capable of understanding what they are doing. This is a very important and significant step forwards.

The old evils of the huge record companies will die with them, but this does not mean that the ecosystem that surrounds music will completely die. The lawyers will always have a role to play. Music still belongs to the people who create it, and those laws need to be enforced. Licensing and the revenues from music need to be controlled and monitored – in the short term, people will still make a fortune from radio airplay for example.

What has happened is that an inefficiency and an evil have been removed from the music distribution equation, but more importantly, human beings will have better, more enriched lives thanks to freed music. We will inevitably, I believe, get more variety and richness from new artists, and certainly there is for all intents and purposes an infinite amount of old music to charm and thrill us.

We are also at the very beginning of a greater understanding in the general public of just what it takes to produce music. Radiohead fans are showing that they are not irresponsible; they understand that the group need money to live and they are paying for the music they are downloading – even though they can get it for a price of zero. This is highly significant, and demonstrates that people are not actually stupid, and will pay to get more music if that is what they need to do. This means Radiohead get all the advantages of free music AND the advantages of running a central place to download from. I have no doubt that other groups will follow Radiohead, and that still more groups will devise their own tweaked systems to nickel and dime their fans to keep everything running.

Finally, what happens next is that the people who came up with these ideas in the first instance and those that saw it coming and who put their money where their mouths are will get the credit that is due to them. The people who thought and who still think that freed music is ‘no good’ (“I worked very hard to make my music, I don’t just want it out there for anyone to get for nothing”) will of course, not be heard or hear-able by anyone, and they will totally disappear from culture.

Many years ago, fourteen to be exact, I saw an episode of a science fiction programme that shocked me. I couldn’t remember anything about it other than the words in a single scene that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. It was a scene in a police station where one officer called one of his colleagues a “Stupid Blanco”.

What triggered my memory about this phrase and the series was the all the recent heated talk about the invasion of illegal immigration in the usa, the proposals for amnesty etc etc.

Thanks to The Internets^™ I managed to find information about the series where this scene came from by searching for the phrase “Stupid Blanco”; the series was called ‘Time Trax’ and it is (was):

a Prime Time Entertainment Network[2] American/Australian co-produced science fiction television series that first aired in 1993. It is about a police officer who has been sent into the past to track down and return convicted criminals who have escaped into the past. This was the last new production from Lorimar Television.

Premise

In the year 2193, over a hundred criminals became fugitives of law enforcement by travelling back in time two hundred years, using a time machine called Trax. Darien Lambert (Dale Midkiff) was a police detective of that period who was sent back to 1993 in order to apprehend as many of the fugitives as possible. He was assisted by SELMA (Elizabeth Alexander), an extremely small but very powerful computer (described as equivalent to a mainframe)—disguised for the mission as an AT&T MasterCard—who communicated through a holographic interface which took the visual form of a prim British nanny (SELMA was an acronym for Specified Encapsulated Limitless Memory Archive). Lambert was also equipped with a MPPT (Micro-Pellet Projection Tube) disguised as a keyless car alarm remote, which could stun the target or engulf the target in an energy field which would render him transportable to the future, at which point Selma would execute the transmission sequence to send the criminal on his way. Lambert’s biggest enemy was Dr. Mordecai Sahmbi (Peter Donat), who was responsible for sending the fugitives to 1993, and who tried several times to kill him.

Captain Lambert, fearing the possible consequences of altering the timeline, did not actively attempt to interfere with the natural flow of history, although he frequently left messages for his colleagues in 2193 (via the ‘personals’ sections of assorted newspapers). The series made occasional allusions to a theory of parallel timelines as a way of skirting the issue of temporal paradox; essentially, it implied that the time travellers went into an alternate past so that their actions there had no effect on the 2193 “present.” However, the series rarely pursued this point – probably because if Lambert was really in a parallel timeline, he would be unable to leave messages to his colleagues. Also, fugitives are sometimes seen using knowledge of the future to their own ends, which would also be impossible under the ‘parallel’ theory. The series did not have a proper ending – as of the final episode, Lambert was still in 1993 and had not yet completed his mission.

[…]

Wikipedia

Under the section named Terminology & Technology, you can find the phrase that sent my head spinning:

Blanco
It is the 22nd Century’s most abrasive racial slur. It is a reference to Caucasians, who are now a minority.

Bingo.

All the ‘European Americans’ who are shouting at the top of their lungs against the tidal wave of mass unchecked illegal immigration from Mexico and the abominable ‘North American Union’ will be frightened to death of a future where the most abrasive ‘racial slur’ applies to them.

It is destined to be called ‘the ‘B’ word’ no doubt.

This was the first time (on television) that I ever saw the issue of America becoming a Spanish speaking country treated in any serious way. I imagine that it is something, an idea, so repugnant to the current majority American English speaking public that no television company would normally finance its production.

The fact is that unless something is done to stop it and American English is legally adopted as the language of the nation and the Spanish language is actively rejected and suppressed, then america WILL become a spanish speaking nation from coast to coast. Already it is the case that over one third of the people in California speak spanish.

Then again, thanks to the internets, we learn that Spanish in america is in fact, nothing new, and as far back as 1870, California enshrined Spanish as one of the languages that the law is delivered in:

California’s first constitution approved an important recognition of Spanish language rights: “All laws, decrees, regulations, and provisions emanating from any of the three supreme powers of this State, which from their nature require publication, shall be published in English and Spanish.” By 1870, English-speaking Americans had become a majority in California. In 1879, California promulgated a new constitution under which all official proceedings were to be conducted only in English; this clause remained in effect until 1966. In 1986, California voters added a new constitutional clause by referendum stating that “English is the official language of the State of California.” However, Spanish is still spoken widely throughout the state, and many government forms, documents, and services are available in both English and Spanish.

This is an issue that has a long history. It can be a source of humor if the population is intelligent however.

On a trip to Quebec in the 80’s I saw a red octagonal ‘STOP’ sign that had been altered with red spray paint (identical in colour to the red of the sign so as to render the spray indistinguishable from the original paint) so that the ‘S’, the top sides of the ‘T’ and the curve of the ‘P’ had been sprayed out to make the sign read ‘101’.

This, which I didn’t know at the time, was an absolutely brilliant piece of political defacement.

I started to see the number ‘101’ grafittied all over the place, and of course, being the curious sort, asked my kind hosts, “what the heck are all the 101s all over Montreal?!”.

It transpired that the state of Quebec was going through a language war between the French speakers (“luh”) and the English speakers (“ay?”).

The ‘101’ refers specifically to:

The Charter of the French Language (also known as Bill 101 and Loi 101) is a law in the province of Quebec, Canada defining French as the only official language of Quebec.

[…]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charter_of_the_French_Language

And so, that red octagonal ‘STOP’ sign was brilliantly, and with utter inspiration, transformed from being just a ‘STOP’ sign into a ‘STOP Bill 101’ political statement.

Pure unadulterated Genius!

The French of course, with a beautiful language as their deadly weapon, were not outclassed.

I saw something that made me laugh out loud one day; someone, someone stupid, simply grafittied ‘101’ on a wall somewhere, as so many dumb people did back then, to which the following text was subsequently added by another, more inspired artist:

‘Dalmatiens’

Oh how we laughed!

Despite the inspiration of the graffiti artists, this was a deadly serious problem and people felt very strongly about the whole issue. Emotions were running high, and there was a noticeable split in Montreal between the French speakers and the English speakers.

and it got serious:

The Charter of the French Language, though popular among a majority of Francophones, has been poorly received by many anglophones and allophones. The enforcers of the Charter, widely derided in English media as the “language police” or “tongue troopers”, are able to levy fines of up to seven thousand dollars per offence to punish those who are not in compliance with the law (“Titre V”, 2004). The charter is claimed by opponents to have caused up to 244,000 people to emigrate from Quebec to other provinces since the 1970s. [21]. Many companies most notably Royal Bank and Bank of Montreal (which even considered removing “Montreal” from its name), moved their major operations to Toronto. Many angrily blame the Charter for hindering Montreal’s economic development, arguing about the status of English as a language of international business.

The Office québécois de la langue française (OQLF) (which is commonly referred to as l’Office) provides several warnings before resorting to any legal sanctions. Alleged abuse of its power has led to inflated charges of racism and harassment being levelled against them by members of minority groups (Martin 2004). The OQLF urged stores to remove imported kosher goods that did not meet labelling requirements, an action perceived in the Jewish community as an unfair targeting that coincided with a high-profile case against the well-known delicatessen, Schwartz’s (B’nai B’rith, 1996). In 2002, unreliable media accounts reported cases of alleged harassment of allophone merchants who refuse to speak French. (Gravenor, 2002).

and very silly:

One of the specifics of the Charter is insistence of French instructions for all products. During the 1990s Pokémon craze, the then PQ-led government pushed for the publication of French-translated Pokémon cards, lest Wizards of the Coast and the various stores selling the cards be fined. A line of French cards was produced, but did not gain as much value among collectors as the original English and Japanese versions. However, the cards used the Pokemon names from France, because they were merely imported from France or reprinted from France’s cards and not produced for Quebec (most Quebecers knew the Pokemon from their English names, because the video games in Quebec were in English, and the Quebec French dub of the Pokemon anime used the English names).[22]A line of French Yu-Gi-Oh! cards was also produced for Quebec, but it sold rather poorly despite high demand, and only the first two starter decks, first expansion set, and promotional movie cards were released. Other French versions of games (such as Axis & Allies) were merely imported from France, like Pokemon. Some, such as Dreamblade, Heroclix and Star Wars Miniatures, do not have French versions at all, but only short French product descriptions on the package.

As of 2003, all video games sold in Quebec must include French instructions. Stores holding unused games with English-only instructions will be fined for each individual offending copy and see their merchandise seized.

Now, I use the word ‘silly’ but the fact is that these people are taking the threat of the destruction of their culture seriously, and are taking steps to stamp out or at least control English.

There are still Americans who say, “this is america, speak it or beat it”…cough… and essentially, that is what the Royal Bank of Montreal did; they beat it.

And there you have it. If you want to preserve English as the language of the USA, you have to introduce legislation to mandate it, and then get ready for a war over it.

Of course, in a truly federated country like america should be and was designed to be, if New Mexico goes 100% Spanish that is their business, and not the business of the Federal Government.

What a life!