The worst thing that can happen to movies and free news is for Disney to gobble up Fox Studios and yet another news channel..

There is a reason a hundred years ago antitrust laws , and labor laws and child labor laws and unions came to be… because we learned the hard way… unchecked capitalism and greed is indistinguishable from tyranny and murder.

Companies were literally killing people to make a penny more in profit.

Let us not go backwards.

Say no to Disney gobbling up another studio and another network and news division. That would make them even more, the makers of truth..

Too much power for any company or any man.

Comcast is no prize, but in this situation, having them buy the Fox portfolio, it is clearly the lesser of two evils.

 

Here endeth the Lesson.

 

Google’s Android Tablets vs Apple’s IPAD2, Microsoft, Oracle, British Telecom, Ebay!

Who would have thought that I would be on Google’s side on anything, much less feeling sorry for them.

But true to the axiom the enemy of my enemy is my friend, that’s exactly where I am at with Google, at this point in time.

The Android platform came onto 2011 like a breath of fresh air, and its meteoric rise gave the mobile market something it hasn’t had in many a year… choice, and true competition, relief from the Apple Juggernaut.

But that choice came at a price… Namely a feeding frenzy of the most powerful companies in the world all deciding to destroy the Android Platform, Google, itself no lightweight, finds itself having to deal with no less than 6 Mega-Massive Lawsuits, from companies with revenues in excess of billions of dollars each.

The companies lined up to protect their entrenched, monopolistic and consumer enslaving business models and technologies are Oracle, Apple, Microsoft, Ebay, GeMalto and as of today British Telecom. And that’s just counting the ones suing that are valued over a billion dollars.

You add them all together and you have as stated… a bloody feeding frenzy.

With companies using flawed to the point of destructive Software Patents, to stifle innovation and destroy competition.

These Goliath’s don’t want to win customers through creating better products, heaven forbid, they want to sue, and legislate and license and otherwise utilize “Al Capone style” Protection racket schemes, to sell the American people and the world… only their product. Typically overpriced, often severely crippled products. Take the Ipad that is lacking basic design features such as USB and HDMI and SD ports, and it’s only the competition of Android (which does offer these ports) that is making Apple have to address these glaring omissions on their tablet in each successive new model.

So again I’ve had, and had my share of problems with Google, their search engine and email and pretty staggering abuses of privacy and personal freedoms, from digitizing and uploading massive amounts of books, to the detriment of authors and publishers, to extreme methods of uncovering and mapping public and private networks/wi-fi hotspots, to generally being one of the privacy problems on the Internet rather than one of the solutions.

So imagine my surprise that it is Google, for self serving needs to be sure, that through the android platform, offers us, the consumer, the best chance at real choice and real innovation to hit the technology scene in decades. Android isn’t perfect, it’s in its infancy, and as Carrier IQ and malwaqre scare show, it has growing yet to do. I’d like it to get the chance to grow.

And further, Google’s Android platform, in an economic environment that has been going from depression to depression, has actually been allowing businesses to flourish in a way we have never seen in the mobile market. That competition thing again, that is the first excitement, and first upswing in terms of substantial new products, and new players we’ve seen in the market, the first good sign in the economy.

And the Goliaths rather than wanting to compete, and win or lose based on product merit in a flourishing everybody makes money environment, seek instead to sue the Android Platform into a coma, and all the watershed business, and economies of scale, and diversity, and yes choice… that has built up around it… sue them out of business. And continue an economic outlook and policy, that further disenfranchises the bulk of people and companies, in favor of a very few companies and a very few people. Moving ever quicker to an unsupportable age of masters and slaves. And I tell you now, in that age… when the poor man has nothing left to lose… the fall for the rich…. shall be steep.

Apple particularly has been blatant and disgusting in their global attempt to monopolize the mobile market. To allow this monopolization and indeed chilling of innovation and competition is to sign the death warrant of liberties both subtle and gross in America and in the world. It is to Grandfather these six companies in… not as providers of services and technologies to customers, but as imposed entities, protection rackets, selling their products to the American people and the world at the barrel of a lawsuit.

It cannot stand.

And not only is Google the sole large capital company to defend open source, but they are also one of the few big cap companies to battle the media provider rape of the American people that is this horrendous SOPA Bill now, brokered by the same companies suing Google, winding it’s way into law in our congress. Which once done will make freedom of speech on the Internet, like competition, an endangered species.

Find out where your representative stands on this ‘Patriot Act level of wrong’ bill.

Tell them today to oppose the SOPA bill.

So as odd as this is for me to say, I’m rooting for Google, not just to win all six court cases and get to maintain a non-crippled Android, but further to deal a death blow to this horrible ‘its time is passed’ concept of Software Patents.

The enemy of my enemy being in this case… my friend.

All I had to say.

For more on all this go to Eff.

Now go… Defend something. While you’re able.

Kazushi Sakuraba MMA Royce Gracie Japan’s Folly and National Treasures

It’s damn near inscrutable, the things that go through my mind.

And the odd, out of the blue things that will take stage center in my attention.

In a very busy, holocaust strewn news day, a conversation with co-workers gets me thinking about mixed martial arts. We talked about some local schools, one that teaches Jujitsu among other disciplines, and has to its credit a Gracie as a teacher. And discussing Gracies always gets me onto the topic of Sakuraba, The Gracie Hunter.

Sakuraba is not a name known in the UFC dominated Americas, but for those who let their exposure to MMA extend beyond the borders of the US, Sakuraba a few years ago, fighting almost exclusively in the Japanese PRIDE fighting league, was one of the most celebrated names in Mixed Martial Arts.

Depending who you ask… he still is.

He gained world-wide acclaim for his defeat of living legend Royce Gracie. And he didn’t just beat Royce Gracie, a man who for a long time WAS not just the most domineering and feared fighter in mixed martial arts, but arguably was Mixed Martial Arts… Sakuraba destroyed Royce Gracie. It’s not putting too fine a point on it to say he humiliated Royce Gracie, walked through him like he wasn’t there.

All these years later and the fight is still in rotation throughout the Internet. This led to what amounts to a family fued, with Gracies lining up to avenge Royce’s defeat. Sakuraba, stoic and game, took on all comers.

4 Gracie fights. 4 Gracie victories. (Though recently Royce in 2007 came back to avenge his defeat)

In a field of walking monsters, of engines of destruction, it’s hard to explain what makes Sakuraba special, what makes him stand out if you haven’t seen those early fights. He was clearly not the biggest, not the strongest, perhaps not the fastest, definitely not the most brutal or the most intimidating, but this ex-performance wrestler, what he had… was an all around skill unlike anything anyone else had brought to the table, he was technically the most exciting and skilled fighter I had ever seen, he could beat you standing up, or on the ground, and his heart— his heart was the stuff they make movies about. They write ballads about.

And there was something amazingly likeable about him. He got in the ring, this stoic but seemingly affable enigma, and he beat you in a chess game of moves, of holds, of submissions, of punches, and you knew, the way people who saw Jack Johnson, or Joe Lewis or Sugar Ray Robinson or Hagler or Hearnes or Ali or Foreman or Holifield… you knew, you were seeing something pure, violence distilled into something not far removed from… art.

Some odd mating of the technical wizardry of a Roy Jones, with the heart of a Roberto Duran.

Yeah years ago when I discovered Sakuraba, he quickly enshrined himself for me, as what this always questionable sport of MMA could be about, at its best. Not cracking people skulls open, or pit bull brutality, but technical wizardry, and sportsmanship. I think that’s what came across in the fights of Sakuraba, yeah this was a tough guy, but he walked into the ring, with respect, both giving it and getting it, not like an animal, but like a man.

But even then, I could see, he was taking too many hits. And just as the sport outgrew Royce Gracie, grew better, tougher meaner, by his example, Sakuraba’s popularity brought an ever more devastating class of opponent to his door. Men often weight classes heavier than him, and men increasingly younger, stronger, and more brutal than him.

Life being what it is I tuned out of the mixed martial arts scene for the last few years, but often I would think of the wizardry of the man called Sakuraba. My discussion with my coworkers piquing my interest enough to do an internet search of recent Sakuraba news.

I came across ever more recent fights. And what I saw…increasingly sickened me.

I’m not one overly given to sentimentality. Well maybe I am. God knows someone needs to be these days.

But I think the most important thing for a fighter is to have someone who cares about him in his corner, someone he can trust with his life. Because ultimately a fighter’s manager, should be there to preserve the well being of his fighter, to defend him, when he is no longer capable of defending himself.

Sakuraba obviously has no such person in his corner.

I watched a recent fight with Sakuraba, a Japanese PRIDE fight, where the Gracie Hunter, this poet of the ring, where he was literally kneed in the head over twenty times, until his skull cracked.

—-

Yes, I said until his skull cracked.

And the referee, just let it go on. And his corner-men just let it go on, and the crowd just— let it go on.

And Sakuraba, he could have yielded, he could have surrendered, but because he is Sakuraba, he to his detriment does not know how to yield. That is why he is the stuff of legend, and that is why I fear for him continuing to fight. He will endure, everything you throw at him even onto his death… he will endure.

And he, has nothing left to prove. He shouldn’t have to. But he is a warrior, he will not yield, that’s why it’s important for the referee and his corner to be there to keep a competition from escalating into a bloodbath.

And increasingly at Sakuraba’s fights… they’re not doing their job.

And it’s enough to make one both sick and mad.

A lot of people talk about the rules of UFC and how it’s weak compared to PRIDE, and I was one of them. But Let me tell you something, thank god for the rules of the UFC. Because what I witnessed happening to Sakuraba is not a sport, it’s a travesty. It’s putting pit bulls in a ring until one dies. The referee should be admonished at the least, and more likely fired and charges laid against him. Sakuraba’ cornermen, his manager and friends, should be ashamed of themselves for allowing the butchery to continue. Obviously with the first couple of blows, the fight, the contest is over, stop the damn fight.

I mean Sakuraba was, is a fucking national Japanese Treasure, and they let him increasingly get nearly murdered in the ring, for no good reason. The contest was over long before the 2nd knee landed, and I’ll tell you something about a knee to the head, it doesn’t take a fighter to hurt you with a knee or an elbow to the head, just about anybody’s knee or elbow will do the job, so when you have a 200lb, trained fighter, whose knees and elbows can break stones, you don’t want anybody getting hit more than once or twice by such a fucker if you can help it. Cause the only possible outcome of such abuse is brain damage or murder.

Sakuraba is older than me, and I’m older than Methuselah. And seriously there’s no way he cannot have brain damage, with the abuse he has taken. Someone, his manager, his friends, the Japanese fight board really needs to tell him, “you know what, you’re the greatest, but… in the ring is not the place for you any longer. You’re not as fast as you were, and you’re getting tagged too much”.

So here’s hoping the karma of this message gets out there, and maybe infects people, who infect people, who infect people, and it gets back to Sakuraba’s people that… “hey… you did us proud warrior… now time to rest”.

At least I hope so.

Because for Sakuraba to die in the ring is a waste of a great warrior who would be better served training a new generation of Sakurabas.

Here endeth my rant.