unklesleazy (Post by Pacman) Peter Christopherson's book of condolence
http://unklesleazy.tv/
Friday 26 November 2010
Disparity and consequences
Technology – particularly the Internet – was hailed as “the great leveler” in the early days, and indeed it many ways it has been.
But I was struck by a comment on someone’s post today, that both of his grandchildren – 4½ and 7½ – were getting iPads in their xmas stockings. “Really?” I thought. Those things are not cheap, and I don’t believe childproof.
But what struck me wasn’t the obvious display of disposable income (shocking to my thoroughly calvinist upbringing lol – still working on that), but that those kids are being handed – handed- the future keys to success: technical aptitude. And what that means is increasingly society will be delineated by the “haves” and “have nots”, since the kids in the “haves” group will have such a clear, relevant advantage.
Now I’m not a social crusader. I get that “life isn’t fair” and that there have always been inequities between the rich and poor, with all the associated privileges, be it access to better food, medicine, investment opportunities, recreation, etc. But it just seems that there’s never been something with quite as much power to create so much disparity. The kids with early access and education using it will thrive in the future, the rest will not.
We need to make sure that the kids in the “have not” group have at least a chance of success in the future where technical savvy is a requirement. Moral obligations aside (I’m not a fan of using morals to make an argument), but from a pragmatic perspective: among the ranks of those underprivileged kids could be the next brilliant programmer, leader, designer who makes life better for us all.
I’m sure all of this has been dicussed and anticipated many times, one of the results being the “One laptop per child” program. But we need to ensure that in the US as well, we provide a system that supports the training and development tools to all the kids in our country. How else are we as a nation going to stay competitive on a global basis?
(BIG thanx to Linda, who explores "the intersection between technology, business strategy, and psychology" at her wonderful blog.
Go on subscribe - you know it makes sense!!!)
Richard Lloyd's apres Thanksgiving smoke!
Richard enjoys a little Tobacco, after dinner with the Patterson's. No photoshop here baby, just Richard doing what he does best -- stuff nobody else would dare to...(Unless you an an Ononomou Indian from Venezuela)
Via Facebook
Is This Really the End for Ahmadinejad?
Casual Iran observers tend to portray the country's most prominent political division as that between fundamentalist hard-liners and secular moderates. In reality, however, the struggle for Iran's future is a three-way fight waged by the different branches of conservatives that control the parliament, the presidency, and the theocracy. The Green Movement may have stalled, but the parliamentary opposition to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has only grown stronger and more assertive over the past year -- culminating in a recent push to charge the president with abuses of power warranting impeachment. Those efforts are coming to a halt under orders from Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who fears that the parliament's attempt to assert itself against the president will also be at the expense of his own power base, the country's conservative mullahs.
In fact, this isn't the first round of infighting among Iran's leaders. In July 2009, legislators warned Ahmadinejad that they would seek to oust him as the chief executive if he continued acting in an autocratic manner. Ahmadinejad responded by claiming the executive branch is the most important one of the government.
Ahmadinejad has also clashed with parliamentarians over his prerogative to influence the activities of the Central Bank. As financial hardships mount on common Iranians, in part due to mismanagement and in part from international sanctions, their elected representatives are blaming the president and his bureaucrats for the economy's woes.
It's a naked power struggle that has cloaked itself in ideology. Ahmadinejad and his cohorts in the executive branch of Iran's government increasingly reference secular Iranian nationalism. They recently celebrated an exhibition honoring Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Persian Empire over 2,500 years ago; they have also been known to castigate influential mullahs for diminishing Iran's greatness, going so far as to encourage the separation of religion from the government. Meanwhile parliament speaker Ali Larijani and his legislative supporters present themselves as adherents to the fundamentalist traditions of Shiite Islam and as true believers in the velayat-e faqih, Iran's system of governance by Muslim jurists.
But at its root, the infighting is motivated by differences over pragmatic political strategy. At a time of economic stagnation and international isolation, Iran's power players are all competing to put their stamp on national crisis management...
Continue reading
Jamsheed K Choksy @'FP'
Damien Hirst’s Medicine Cabinets
Among the most iconic pieces in artist Damien Hirst’s controversial body of work — a bizarre mix that includes dissected animals, a pickled shark, dot paintings, spin paintings, butterfly assemblages, a rotting cow’s head, and diamond-encrusted skulls — are the Medicine Cabinets.
The first two cabinets, which were made in 1988 by the then 23-year-old Hirst in his London kitchen, contained pharmaceutical packaging from his recently deceased grandmother’s medicine cabinet. He followed these sculptures, Sinner and Enemy, with a suite of twelve cabinets that were titled after the tracks on the Sex Pistols debut album, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols. Four of the medicine cabinets from the series were exhibited in Hirst’s degree show at Goldsmiths College of Art in 1989, but the whole group has never been shown together — that is, until now.
New York’s L & M Arts has assembled the artist’s Sex Pistols medicine cabinets, along with Sinner and Enemy; a monumental four-part cabinet, titled The Sex Pistols, from 1996-97; and a cache of actual Sex Pistols’ memorabilia into a comprehensive overview of this important chapter in Hirst’s dynamic career. The gallery also collaborated with the artist’s publishing company, Other Criteria, to produce a catalogue that includes an essay by art scholar Arthur Danto, some punk prose by the notorious James Frey, a catalogue raisonné of the complete medicine cabinets, and a hilarious conversation between Hirst and former Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones, who’s an outspoken radio disc jockey in Los Angeles.
Damien-Hirst: Medicine Cabinets is on view at L & M Arts through December 11.
Paul Laster @'Flavorwire'
The graphic language of Peter Christopherson
RIP Peter Christopherson
I learned today of the passing of one of my creative heroes.Peter Christopherson.
I wouldn't call him a household name but his design work as part of Hipgnosis is sure to be found in many households.
These classic album covers for Pink Floyd and the early solo albums of Peter Gabriel are some of his best know works as a graphic designer.
Christopherson was also a key member of the highly influential Throbbing Gristle.Again not every body's cup of tea.
But without TG there would be no Nine Inch Nails or Depeche Mode for a start.
Peter also made his mark as a director.He directed several commercials and music videos for the likes of Silverchair, Robert Plant, Paul McCartney, Van Halen and more.
A true creative renaissance man. He will be sorely missed.
Stan Lee @'BrandDNA'
(A sad day indeed Stan!)
NaomiAKlein UK students R showing us all how it's done. Don't want 2 get robbed blind? Make your country ungovernable. #thanksgiving
♪♫ NIN - Gave Up (Broken)
trent_reznor I awake to sad news. RIP Peter Christopherson - friend and huge inspiration. http://bit.ly/fAwO6G http://bit.ly/dIvd3V
Wikileaks documents show Turkey helped al-Qaida
...Other documents show that the US has supported the PKK, which has been waging a separatist war against Turkey since 1984 and has been classified by the State Department as a terrorist organization since 1979. The US military documents call the PKK "warriors for freedom and Turkish citizens," and say that the US set free arrested PKK members in Iraq. The documents also point out that US forces in Iraq have given weapons to the PKK and ignored the organization's operations inside Turkey...
Primal Scream to work with Kevin Shields on Screamadelica 20th Anniversay reissue
Primal Scream have just announced that they will we releasing a remastered version of their seminal 1991 album Screamadelica in March next year to mark the 20th Anniversary of the album’s release. Exciting as this is, turns out that not only have they remastered the album, but they got legendary My Bloody Valentine guitarist Kevin Shields to help out in the process along with original producer Andy Weatherall.
Speaking to NME, singer Bobby Gillespie said that Shields was an obvious choice for the project. “He’s just really good with sound and frequencies, we thought it was a fun thing to do. Kevin, Andrew [Innes,Primal Scream guitarist] and myself went down to the mastering room. Kevin’s the one person in the world that all remastering engineers would hate to see walking into the studio, when we walked in the guy nearly had a fucking heart attack!”
Shields has worked with the group before, playing with them live from 99 to 06 as well as working on their album Xtrmntr and Evil Heart.
The reissue that will see see the album repacked with bonus material, falls in line with the band’s Screamadelica live shows, that will see the band play the album in it’s entirety for the first time, the show landing on our shows in January as part of this year’s epic Big Day Out festival.
Michael Carr @'Musicfeeds'
Thursday 25 November 2010
A simple change in the law could open up online access to the BBC's archives
In the melee of the last days of the Labour government, among the casualties were clauses in the digital economy bill that would have solved the intractable problems that stand in the way of giving public access to this country's great archives of radio and television programmes.
Think of George Orwell and W H Auden, of Laurence Olivier and Peggy Ashcroft, of any British artist or musician you can name. The BBC's archives are a treasure trove of their work, of interviews with them and discussions and documentaries about them.
But the BBC can't make them available to us, as it would like to, because of the prohibitive administrative costs of clearing the rights.
All this was set out in the Digital Britain reports that prompted the inclusion of those clauses in the bill. After running a pilot project to clear the rights for 1,000 hours of archive programming for online use, the BBC calculated it would take 800 people three years of full-time work to clear the rights to its archive, assuming that all rights owners could be found and that every one was prepared to grant the rights.
At a time when the BBC has just had hundreds of millions of pounds removed from its annual income for the next six years, its archive project is not going to be given the kind of money it would need to spend on administrative work of that scale.
But nor should it need to when there is a simple, fair and equitable solution at hand.
The government should move now to reintroduce the orphan works and extended collective licensing provisions, which the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats were instrumental in removing from the digital economy bill when they were in opposition.
They sided with a lobby campaign mounted by photographers against these provisions, effectively sealing up archives in which photographs either form no part (radio), or in which they are of relatively small importance (television).
Reintroducing those provisions now would give us legitimate access through online on-demand services to that wealth of dramas, documentaries, histories, debates and interviews that can tell us so much about the society and world of which we are the inheritors.
We can read about it in books, but radio and television tell it and show it in ways that the written word cannot match. Rights owners have nothing to fear: the statutory scheme was designed to safeguard their interests, to ensure they would receive fair remuneration and that the integrity of their rights would be respected. Few of them would prefer their work to be made available on illegal services instead, but where there's a vacuum, that's how it will be filled.
Buried in the depths of David Cameron's plans to create a silicon valley in London's Olympic park was a statement that all digital media content providers should welcome, and the importance of which deserves more recognition than it has been given. The accompanying review of the UK 's intellectual property regime is to look at "barriers to new internet-based business models, including the cost of obtaining permissions from existing rights holders".
Creating a silicon valley in London's East End, however, will not be an easy task. By contrast, what a simple thing it would be to steer a short enabling bill through parliament to remove the barrier that rights-clearance administrative costs pose to opening up the broadcasters' archives.
Stephen Edwards @'The Guardian'
Peter 'Sleazy' Christopherson RIP
chris_carter_ Our dearest beautiful Sleazy left this mortal coil as he slept in peace last night. Words cannot express our grief.
Chalmers Johnson Dies at 79; Criticized U.S. Role in World
Chalmers Johnson, an Asian studies scholar who stirred controversy with books contending that the United States was trying to create a global empire and was paying a stiff price for it, died Saturday at his home in Cardiff-by-the Sea, Calif. He was 79.
The cause was complications of rheumatoid arthritis, his wife, Sheila, said.
Dr. Johnson, who considered himself a longtime cold warrior, was a consultant to the Central Intelligence Agency for many years. But after the collapse of the Soviet Union he became concerned that the United States was increasingly using its military presence to gain power over the global economy.
In “Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire” (Metropolitan Books, 2000), Dr. Johnson wondered why America’s military spending continued to rise after the cold war had ended. He concluded that through a network of more than 700 strategic bases around the world, the United States was committed to creating global hegemony. And he worried about the consequences for American democracy.
It was a theme he expanded upon in three subsequent books, “The Sorrows of Empire” (2004), “Nemesis” (2006) and “Dismantling the Empire” (2010).
Summarizing the series in “Dismantling the Empire,” Dr. Johnson said that “blowback” means more than a negative, sometimes violent reaction to United States policy. “It refers to retaliation for the numerous illegal operations we have carried out abroad that were kept totally secret from the American public,” he wrote.
“This means that when the retaliation comes, as it did so spectacularly on Sept. 11, 2001, the American public is unable to put the events in context. So they tend to support acts intended to lash out against the perpetrators, thereby most commonly preparing the ground for yet another cycle of blowback.”
To maintain its empire, he said, the United States “will inevitably undercut domestic democracy.”
In a review of “The Sorrows of Empire” in The New York Times, Ronald Asmus, a deputy assistant secretary of state under President Bill Clinton, wrote that the book was “a cry from the heart of an intelligent person who fears that the basic values of our republic are in danger.” He added that it “conveys a sense of impending doom rooted in a belief that the United States has entered a perpetual state of war that will drain our economy and destroy our constitutional freedoms.”
E. B. Keehn, past president of the Japan Society of Southern California and a former lecturer at Cambridge University, said in an interview on Monday that Dr. Johnson “did not go into his work with an agenda.”
“If the data pointed to a conclusion that made people uncomfortable, including himself,” Dr. Keehn said, “he would never shy away from it.”
That was true not only of the “blowback” series, Dr. Keehn said, but of Dr. Johnson’s studies of Chinese Communism and of the role Japan’s government played in its economy.
His 1982 book, “MITI and the Japanese Miracle” (MITI stands for the Ministry of International Trade and Industry), challenged conventional wisdom with its premise that Japan was a “capitalist developmental state” that combined government industrial strategy with free-market forces. His ideas contradicted those of economists who insisted that Japan’s economic rise was almost entirely based on the free market.
The heavily state-influenced economic model that Dr. Johnson elucidated can now be seen in South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and China. “This,” Dr. Keehn said, “is how you can have a contradiction that the world’s last remaining powerful Communist country is also the world’s greatest rising capitalist success.”
Born in Phoenix on Aug. 6, 1931, Chalmers Ashby Johnson was one of two children of Katherine and David Johnson Jr. After graduating from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1953, with a degree in economics, he served in the Navy in the Korean War; it was the start of his fascination with Asia. “His assault boat landing craft was constantly being repaired in Yokohama,” his wife said, “so he started to study Japanese.”
After receiving his master’s degree in 1957 and his doctorate in 1961, both from Berkeley, he joined the university’s political science faculty. He headed the China Center at Berkeley from 1967 to 1972 and was chairman of the political science department from 1976 to 1980. In 1988 he moved to the University of California, San Diego, to teach at its new School of International Relations and Pacific Studies. He retired in 1992.
Besides his wife, the former Sheila Knipscheer, he is survived by his sister, Barbara Johnson.
Dennis Hevesi @'NY Times'
I thoroughly recommend 'Blowback'
Burn Baby Burn
Tens of thousands of students and school pupils walked out of class, marched, and occupied buildings around the country in the second day of mass action within a fortnight to protest at education cuts and higher tuition fees.
Amid more than a dozen protests, estimated by some to involve up to 130,000 students, the only significant violence came in central London. Late in the evening a crowd rampaged near Trafalgar Square, smashing windows on buses, shops and offices, including the Treasury.
Earlier a small group of young protesters, many of school age, tried to break through police lines. Others seized on an unattended police van, smashing windows and scrawling graffiti along its side.
The coalition government condemned the protests, saying they were being hijacked by extremist groups. The education secretary, Michael Gove, gave a notably combative response, urging the media not to give the violent minority "the oxygen of publicity", a resonant phrase associated closely with Margaret Thatcher's efforts in the 1980s to deny the IRA television coverage.
Gove said the government would not waver, adding: "I respond to arguments, I do not respond to violence."
In contrast Nick Clegg, the deputy prime minister, whose pre-election pledge to oppose increased tuition fees has made him the focus of student anger, spoke of his "massive regret" in having to rescind the promise.
"I regret of course that I can't keep the promise that I made because – just as in life – sometimes you are not fully in control of all the things you need to deliver those pledges," he told one of several angry callers to BBC Radio 2's Jeremy Vine Show. "Of course I massively regret finding myself in this situation."
But said that the fact the Liberal Democrats had been forced into a coalition, and that the country's finances were worse than they had anticipated, meant they had to accept "compromise".
Asked about his reaction to footage, earlier in the week of students, hanging him in effigy, Clegg said: "I'm developing a thick skin."
In a further sign of the developing pressure on the government's cuts programme, Len McCluskey, the new leader of Unite, Britain's biggest trade union, put himself and his union at the forefront of "an alliance of resistance". In an interview in the Guardian, McCluskey says: "There is an anger building up the likes of which we have not seen in our country since the poll tax."
The biggest single protest was in London, where an estimated 5,000 people – many of them noticeably younger than those who took part in the previous mass protest on 10 November – spent hours "kettled" in Whitehall as officers sought to prevent a repeat of the chaotic scenes when protesters burst through police lines to storm the Conservative party headquarters. Thousands more marched elsewhere around the country while others staged sit-ins at university buildings.
About 3,000 higher education students and school pupils gathered to protest in central Manchester, where there were four arrests, and a similar number gathered in Liverpool. A crowd, estimated at 2,000 people, protested in Sheffield, with about 1,000 doing so in Leeds and 3,000 in Brighton. There were scuffles in Cambridge as crowds climbed over railings in an apparent attempt to storm the university's Senate House.
But the scenes endlessly replayed on TV news channels came from central London. Two officers were injured, one suffering a broken arm, with 11 other people hurt. Police said 32 people had been arrested. As with the violence a fortnight ago, it was carried out by a minority of the crowd as many others shouted their disapproval.
One 19-year-old art student was pictured trying to stop masked marchers attacking the van. "We're going to be portrayed badly in the media," she shouted at them. "We're just wrecking a police van."
After being forced to apologise for the mayhem two weeks ago when fewer than 250 police were unable to marshal a crowd of more than 50,000, Scotland Yard sent almost four times as many officers onto the streets and quickly penned marchers into a section of streets.
Late last night some parents arrived at the police cordon pleading for their children to be released. The worst violence erupted after 6pm as officers let the marchers leave.
Steve Jobs and Apple Cut Deal with Murdoch, Showing Contempt for Core Users' Liberal Orientation
It's enough to launch an Apple boycott by progressives: Steve Jobs, master innovator of those hipster devices of choice, just delivered a kick in the teeth to Apple's most ardent fans with news of his deal with Rupert Murdoch for an iPad-only newspaper to be known as The Daily, to be made available through Apple's App Store. Subscriptions will go for 99 cents per week.
The New York Times’ David Carr reports that other, unspecified publishers have sought the kind of deal that Murdoch struck with Jobs -- a subscription-based newspaper app -- only to be rebuffed. He hints at a possible quid pro quo in Murdoch's decision, as CEO of News Corporation (the parent company of the FOX Broadcasting Company), to allow Apple to sell certain Fox shows on iTunes for 99 cents an episode -- against the wishes of other Fox executives.
Go to any coffeehouse frequented by progressives, and you'll enter a world that looks like a grubby version of an Apple Store: MacBooks, iPhones and iPads abound amid the tables splashed with java and banana loaf crumbs.
If Apple were a political party, progressives would be its base. Before Apple was a multi-gajilliion-earning company, progressives embraced its products as an antidote to the cumbersome operating systems and meglomaniacal reach of Microsoft. Without the stalwart, almost cult-like support of progressives, Apple wouldn't have survived its catastrophic decision in its early years to offer its operating system only to consumers who purchased its hardware, while Microsoft earned great profits by offering its operating system as a stand-alone product. The early Apples were quirky, often clunky machines with tiny monitors, but progressives loved the vision that created them. For their loyalty, progressives are about to see Murdoch get the first crack at developing a "news" product specifically for the spectacularly successful Apple iPad tablet.
I have to put "news" in quotes, of course, because Murdoch's primary aim has little to do with the delivery of news: it's all about propaganda. Even legitimate news products, such as the newsroom content of the Wall Street Journal, also owned by Murdoch's News Corp., simply exists as a legitimizing delivery device for the paper's editorial-page content, some of it created by two of Murdoch's own community organizers: columnist John Fund and editorial board member Stephen Moore, both of whom shill, as AlterNet reported, for the programs of David Koch's Americans for Prosperity Foundation. But I digress. Kind of...
Adele M. Stan @'AlterNet'
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