What Spencer Tracy and Stanley Kramer’s 1960 INHERIT THE WIND has to say to the current sitting UNSUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES in 2022

 

“Henry Drummond: Can’t you understand? That if you take a law like [abortion rights] and you make it a crime —, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools? And tomorrow you may make it a crime to read about it. And soon you may ban books and newspapers. And then you may turn Catholic against Protestant, and Protestant against Protestant, and try to foist your own religion upon the mind of man. If you can do one, you can do the other. Because fanaticism and ignorance is forever busy, and needs feeding. And soon, your Honor, with banners flying and with drums beating we’ll be marching backward, BACKWARD, through the glorious ages of that Sixteenth Century when bigots burned the man who dared bring enlightenment and intelligence to the human mind!”

 

I don’t know if you can say it any better than that. Even if you have never watched the movie, go look up just that performance by Spencer Tracy, it is one of the greats. Ostensibly about Evolution, the quote also works well for voter suppression, civil rights, and female contraceptive and abortion rights.

And here’s the thing… I’m not in favor of Abortions. It is too my mind a crushing thing. But here’s the thing it is even more a crushing thing to the woman who needs it. No one is in favor of an Abortion. The Abortion itself is not a pleasant or sought after thing. It is a thing of circumstance and for the one who has to make that choice… necessity.

A man does not want anyone telling him what to do with his guns, yet for some reason they feel women should have less rights over their own body and reproductive choices than men demand for inanimate objects. Unless you are going to raise that fetus into adulthood, and support mother and child comfortably for the duration, you don’t get a say over her private choice.

By the pro-life argument, applied to men, women should have the right to tell you what to do with your sperm. Why stop with the fertilized egg having rights that trump the host? Why not also grant the sperm rights that trump the host? Taken to that standard — masturbation or sex for any reason outside of procreation should be considered as much a crime as abortion. If pro-lifers had to apply their nonsensical extremist standard to men that they apply to women, I guarantee you the pro-life movement would find itself quickly and drastically devoid of supporters.

I’m being a little facetious here but you get my point.

 

 

 

And here 62 years removed from INHERIT THE WIND, from the enlightenment that gave us that courageous movie and that courageous speech, we find the grand children of that enlightened age…  marching backward. Buoyed by the not yet dead relics and slaves of a much romanticized “never was” antebellum glory, and the dream of Reich… that in reality— was never more than a nightmare.

Living out the fractured dreams of men who had their chance and squandered it, and want the young to go backward into their follies and their lament. Old fools leading young fools… into the Holocaust.

What a waste of energy and lives and potential.

Here in an age of science fiction and possibilities, to be led by Dinosaurs into regression and cannibalism and witch-hunts… to go crawling backwards as a nation and a species… when so many have given and sacrificed so much… for the rights you would let the vermin of an atrophied age… defecate on.

I think we should not allow that.

I think we should fight.

 

I think The Supreme Court, The Trumps, The Nazis, The KKK, The loss of Journalism and Newspapers, The usurping of media Mass and Social by the interests of elitism and hate, the proponents of the rights of gun manufacturers and corporations…. I think we should fight them all.

And by fits and starts… drive them into the sea.

Click the banner above to get involved.

Like, comment, subscribe, but most of all… think. In an age where so few do, …think, ponder, ruminate, and with a clear and focused mind—- say ‘this far, no further’.

May God, whichever God you bend your knee to… Keep you, and preserve you, and strengthen you, not to in all things be right (that is the stance of the zealot and the enemy) but rather the empathy to draw a line, between right and wrong…. and the conviction and the strength to hold and fight for that line.

 

Youtube Channel of the Day : CEREAL AT MIDNIGHT and why Physical media Matters in the age of Digital!

 

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsVgZNzzvedehALS-dTIFhA

 

CEREAL AT MIDNIGHT –  Is the only Youtube channel devoted to physical media, DVDs, CDs, Blu-Rays, etc that I am subscribed to. Just a great channel, with a personable host, showing his love for physical media.Love his channel, highly recommend it for all fans of physical media. They have a nice recent episode, perfect for Halloween, and the films of the great Vincent Price.

For those of you saying either ‘what is physical media?’, or ‘boo! hiss!’ to physical media, here is me… about to break it down.

Here is the thing, streaming is fine, and VOD is fine, and Hulu is fine, and Spotify is fine, but at the end of the day, it is all vaguely out of your control. And we live in a Millennial age where the mob thinks nothing of bigger issues such as Anti-Trust and eradication of public domain and setting up a Monopolistic regime, with no viable competition, just as long as they get to see Avengers in the same movie as Fantasic Four. If you don’t understand that, do a search for Disney, and add all those words i just mentioned… and maybe when the searches return… a lightbulb will go off.

We live in an age where the masses think nothing about the loss of privacy and human rights, as long as they get to easily scream at people in their MMOGonline game.

 

Between you and your entertainment is various levels of gatekeepers, from your ISP to your cloud storage, to your streaming platform. And we live in a bullshit age of witch-hunts and ‘me too’ bs bandwagon jumping, where people can get fired and vilified before they have a day in court, and programs and movies  can be censored or altered based on the screaming of the uninformed mob, or soundtrack altered due to rights issues.

Where you don’t have to be proven guilty, you just have to be attacked like you are.

So suddenly that movie you love, may or may not be available depending on licensing agreements, and it may or may not be the same edit of the version you grew up with. It could be censored to comply with the sensibilities of fools, or the fear of companies , that faceless twitter trolls will say bad things about them.

‘I hate, hate, hate… Peter Pan!’ In my best Dustin Hoffman, Hook Voice.

God bless the child that has his own.

Here’s the thing, gatekeepers, businesses are always behind the curve, and seldom do anything for the good of the people, or posterity. They do it because of expedience and the bottom line, and that is contrary and in direct opposition… to culture. The health of it, and the growth of it.

We here in the 21st century have access to movies from the Silent age of cinema, and radio shows from the dawn of sound, and TV shows from the infancy of the medium, not because of businesses, but in spite of them.

It was collectors decades ago, when businesses could not perceive the idea of a radio show being listened to over, or a television show being re-watched, or a movie after its initial run being rescreened, it was collectors, just normal people like you and I, who preserved these things, when the gatekeepers, burnt the films, and erased the tapes, and recorded over the video tapes, it was collectors who saved much of the early history of mass media. And it was collectors who ultimately taught them, the gatekeepers, the businesses,  to value these things, if not for the love, then for the monetary value it could generate.

But still, for all the teaching, Businesses and the Gatekeepers, while they have definitely learned to monetize, and secure the rights to everything they create, they still have not learned to respect the creations.

The creations remain to them as mercurial and open to change as a ledger balance. While they control art, the gatekeepers and businesses do not understand art. And therefore art will always be at risk in such hands. Will always be at risk in the hands of accountants.

So end of the day, I love having all these shows and movies and music, available via gatekeepers, via VOD, and Hulu, and Spotify, and Itunes, etc.

But end of the day, have your hard media to fall back on, against the day that ISPY or AIRPLANE or HOUSE OF CARDS or insert show here, is not politically correct to view or hear or watch.

End of the day, do not trust the things you love… to gatekeepers. Own the shows you love in a form that no gatekeeper can edit at their whim, or remove, or bar you from.

So that is one reason I’m a fan of CEREAL AT MIDNIGHT. It is a reminder that physical media is still out there, and can be picked up affordably. And is worth picking up.

Here endeth the rant! 🙂

The NSA, Programs of Terror and Crime and the rights of the Governed

I find it interesting how the attention is focused on the young man who to my mind, did his duty and put the interest of the American people’s right to know, above the interest of a few shadowy spooks right to play god.

The Government is the servant of the people, and when it forgets that, it forfeits its right… to blithely be obeyed.

It forfeits its right to unquestioningly… govern.

There are such things as illegal orders and illegal acts, and any soldier’s or representative’s ultimate duty is not to his government but his country, and the moral imperative to know and act when those two things diverge.

The defense of the NSA in their criminal enterprise boils down to “our actions have stopped potential crimes”.

To that I would answer… you can not preserve freedom by eradicating freedoms, and you can not preserve the law by breaking the law.

Full stop.

That road lies in dark places that we have been before.

The NSA attempts to justify it like all overreaching totalitarian regimes justify anything, that their ends justify their means. And that has never been remotely true, and is not in this case. The NSA’s claim to have stopped acts of terror, misses the truth, which is… they have traded their greater acts of terrorism for others’ smaller, potential acts of terrorism.

It’s like Nazi’s Germany’s answer to any petty and supposed crime of the individual was the magnitude greater crime of the state, such as concentration camps. That we are walking down that road with the American government today is obvious and clear, from Darpa designing ever more sophisticated machines to kill men (in the event enough of our military wakes up to the idiocy of murder and assassination as government policy, well of course we need unquestioning machines there to do it instead) to the barbaric state of our prisons… we use the threat of terror to support an increasingly terrorist American Government.

It is a hypocrisy that must be recognized… clearly recognized… and opposed… vigorously opposed.

The person’s name we should be broadcasting is not the young man, that the culpable press (in the payroll of the very interests getting rich treating the common citizen as criminal before crime) calls demeaningly “whistle-blower”, it’s the ones who run the NSA. The shadowy directors and heads of the NSA and CIA and FBI and all those acronyms that hide their big crimes under the lie of persecuting small ones.

They are like the lynchmob hanging and castrating boys for whistling at women, they use the lie of petty crimes, as a smokescreen to commit great ones.

We’ve cut so many social and humanitarian programs for supposed lack of funds, yet so much of your tax dollars go into a black hole, where abhorrent individuals do abhorrent things under the lie of doing it in the name of “National Security” or “for the people” when the truth is, they do it for the reasons it has historically been done, they are diseased animals in positions of power and no one has told them no.

No one has put them down.

“No.”

And “Get down.”

It’s a start.

Maybe instead of cutting programs to feed and clothe and inspire and employ our citizens, maybe we start closing down the acronyms. This country ran before them, I reckon we’ll run after them.

And maybe run a damn sight better.

On Kinect, Face Recognition, Gaming, the war on Privacy and Tomorrow’s Tech Today!

So there is typically method to my madness.

Not always, but typically.

All laptops and tablets come with handy dandy cameras, pointed at your face. With Flash and Javascript and now the new html5 turned on, there are sites you can browse to, that without user intervention can turn on your camera and start snapping pics.

Any number of sites you can go to and see fools, without the good sense to cover their camera when not in use, undressing in sight of the laptop or webcam or hear their conversations when they are off camera, and they think the computer is asleep.

If that just scared you, even a little, it shows only… that you are still sane.

What I have just described, that’s the technology of yesterday. Not only have hackers been using it for years but so have ‘legitimate’ companies, that sell software that does just that, turn on the cameras and mics of a laptop remotely, without the user being aware. Ostensibly the idea for most companies is to use this in laptop retrieval, should the laptop be stolen. But any technology is more often used in salacious ways before constructive.

Example being, the first widespread use of pictures and video on the Internet was the female form.

Denise Milani pic courtesy of Tlcoldiesbutgoodies

For obvious reasons. Sex as they say… sells.

And all new forms of communication, to achieve widespread adoption… use sex to sell themselves to an un-trusting population. Whether it’s men in the wilds of Wyoming, being able to pick up this new fangled device called a phone, and hear a woman’s voice, an operator, speak to them for the first time, or the still common practice of draping a beautiful woman across a new car or motorcycle… it’s the allure of that oldest of motivations that drives new things.

So while the purpose of such technology may have been theft retrieval, by taking pictures of the person in possession of the laptop, then using a combination of GPS and IP address to determine their location, then notifying law enforcement; the truth is… that technology is in more widespread use, to invade privacy.

And as I said, that… is yesterday’s technology.

It’s got nothing on the technology of today, and tomorrow.

Ah, the joys of always on technology.

You know we have a whole generation raised on the idea of giving everything to the Internet, and not questioning or requesting safe-guards on individual liberties.

There’s a reason why we have (had much stronger) wiretapping laws, because there is the assumption that privacy is a central right of man. But what happens, generally through entertainment, through ease of use, is we give away rights, we relinquish the assumption that men have rights.

Take CANDID CAMERA, a show which began in syndication in 1948, before its most popular CBS run from 1960 to 1966… made it a national sensation. The show,virtually single-handedly shaped consent-less video recording as something harmless.

This show, funny, watched by everyone, often not in the best taste, but still had America laughing, was a show about video-taping people when they were not aware of it, and had more than anything to do with defining that as something innocuous. And suddenly in the pursuit of entertainment, a right you had with audio recordings, namely ‘a recording without your knowledge is against the law’, became lost with video recordings.

“Most audio recordings without consent of one or all parties are illegal…. Most video recordings are legal with or without consent.” — UVU

Yes, after the fact they still have to get you to sign a waiver to broadcast the video, but as far as taking the video of you without your permission (through a TV show, through pursuit of ‘fun’ and ‘social media’) that has became a defacto standard.

By not questioning the rights and boundaries being overstepped, those rights became lost. and that’s why we have the surveillance heavy society we have today, because in the pursuit of ease of use, and fun, and jokes, the masses gave up a fundamental expectation of privacy. And things like Face-book and You-tube and reality television are the 21st century extensions of the axiom: ease of use = deterioration of rights.

So we have a whole generation growing up with a pretty invasive technology in, of, and around them at all times. And what begins as entertainment today, that you have a choice in: Kinect, Siri, Face recognition; becomes obtrusive corporate policies and laws of the land tomorrow, that you don’t have rights to dispute, to adjudicate, to deny.

If you don’t care about your computer potentially having the mic and camera turned on remotely, without your knowledge or intervention, than this post isn’t for you.

But it is for those of us who want to have the right to disseminate our information, data, video, audio; when and to whom we choose. Or to have the right to not disseminate that info if we so choose.

But here’s the thing, increasingly pursuit of social media and ease of use and gaming is, by the very nature of the technology being used, incompatible with concepts such as privacy.

So a young generation, going by the mandate ‘I don’t have nothing to hide! I want my fun!’ is going for the immediate pleasure, seeing any technology infiltration as harmless. Here’s the thing it’s not about ‘having nothing to hide’ it’s about ‘having the right to choose who you share with, and where your boundaries begin, and where they end’.

That is a part of socialization that is being lost in this mad rush of always on technology, and ‘trusted’ computing and ‘cloud’ computing, and strangers as ‘friends’.

Who we are as people, who we become, is a lot about developing for ourselves our boundaries, and more importantly the people we let into and out of those boundaries. It’s about developing judgment and values and trust. And what is happening in a post Face-book, You-tube, Kinect world is a society where, like the 1950s audience for CANDID CAMERA, you have relinquished the right to boundaries… even in your home.

The Microsoft Kinect Device controller, is not just about motion detection, the underlying principles of it, which have not yet been scratched; is more than a face recognition machine, dressed as a game sitting in your living room recording your family.

It is a head to toe biometric unit, that is capable of mapping you, and identifying you from your brother or sister or father. It’s a wonderfully advanced whole body scanner… and database.

That’s the part that’s lost on people… Database. It’s a database with a map of your family that can phone home, and store detailed data about you and yours on remote servers. And call Microsoft what you will, but short-sighted and stupid is not among their sins. Kinect is an experiment, taking place in the consumers home, that has so many more profitable applications, beyond gaming.

So it’s more than a controller to create more accurate avatars to interact in 3D games. Its potential is to create a biometric representation of you, as unique as a fingerprint.

Why? Because it’s the holy grail of a new age of on-line transactions and commerce.

Think of the potential of Kinect, really think of it. A society that is becoming increasingly wired, and increasingly house bound, can shop virtually in immersive 3D environments. Banking done like you are playing the most stunning 3D game ever, but done with a unique, and for the purposes of commerce and law, legally binding avatar. An avatar that in terms of how your body moves and how it reacts (eventually incorporating heat ranges, and electromagnetic patterns), can tell potential advertisers more about you then you can tell about yourself.

I can see a day when Kinect biometric pattens are sold to advertisers just like home addresses and email addresses are sold today. So advertisers can tailor directly to you based on the things the pattern tells them, whether you’re balding or having menstruation issues or skin issues or an unhealed limp. Or how about Kinect used in the future to do on-line job applications, and submit a bio-metric pattern, like a signature with your application. Or perhaps even used as a rudimentary polygraph test.

You open the door for motion detection, body mapping, facial recognition, probability analysis in the comfort of your home, for the benefit of ‘entertainment’ and ‘ease of use’ and like that CANDID CAMERA audience of the 50s, you’ve relinquished the assumption that privacy in your home, or of your person, is in any way… a right of man. But you haven’t just relinquished it for yourselves, you’ve relinquished it for future generations, and that may be a path… worth pausing on.

So am I telling you not to buy Kinect, or to surf without Javascript and Flash and with HTML5 disabled? And to put a sponge bob sticky on that camera when not in use? Or to be wary of the technologies you bring into your home?

Nope, I’m not telling you any of that.

I’m only telling you there are no rights of man, without the effort of men to preserve those rights.

Every man, every woman, every child, the rights they would ensure, must be jealously, fanatically even, guarded… from even the seemingly most innocuous intrusion or, they will, in the fullness of time, be taken from you. They must be guarded even from yourself and such easy answers as ‘entertainment’ and ‘ease of use’.

I’m saying Nero fiddled while Rome burned, and I would hate to think a whole generation was playing games on Kinect while, things far more valuable… burned away.

For more on conect, both pro and con, see the following links:

123Kinect
Popsi

Those are just parts of the argument, research it for yourself… and decide.

As far as checking out your camera:

Here’s a pretty simple, and straightforward way to see how accessible your camera is (it is NOT one of the hacking sites I was mentioning earlier. At, least I don’t think it is :)) without your express permission.

Once on the site, on a less secure system, you may see your face if you click the button (on some really insecure systems you’ll see your face whether you click on the button or not). I’m not responsible for any pop-ups or hacking or viruses that may invade your system. or anything that occurs should you visit the site.

It appears to be an innocuous site, but I don’t own it, and am not affiliated with it, so I can’t vouch for it; beyond saying my system, which is pretty secure, was unaffected by the site. Your mileage however, may vary. Responsibility for your security, like anything on the Internet… is yours.

As it should be.

If anything you see on that site disturbs you, like your face staring back at you, look again at the paragraph where I mention javascript, flash, html5, and a sponge-bob sticker. 🙂

Daily Booth

I hope you’ve found this article of help. If you have, please toss some likes and comments this way; as well as using the button on your left to purchase the snazzy pdf/epub article I have for sale. Also go to the WEDNESDAY WORDS column and purchase nifty books, using the showcased links. Thanks!

Digital Revolution: Discussing the Greedy and the Ungoverned, And Entertainment as prelude to War!

I feel a rant a’ coming.

You new to the blog may want to skip this one. You old timers… jump in… the water is like you like it, deep and treacherous. 🙂 .

Or be mollified by the following disclaimer:

This is an imaginary story. The following is all fiction except for the parts that are true… I leave you to determine the one from the other…

*********

There are a lot of great things about the digital revolution, not the least of which is the ubiquitousness of content. Which makes this sense of foreboding I have about the coming bad, a bit troubling.

I think you have… to have been around before cable, before on demand, before 500 channels, before DVD or CD, before Internet household presence, before even the home computer to truly appreciate just how amazing are the strides made in many areas, not least of which is the creation and dissemination… of entertainment and information.

If you are a movie fan you can, without leaving your house, have at your viewing pleasure just about every film made in the last 100+ years of cinema. More, you can have films from multiple nations, multiple languages easily subtitled into your language.

As a film fan who was around during the age of VHS, I remember that just locating a cult or foreign film was a HUGE production. You had to find those resellers/stores often in the back of magazines, send away for the catalog, then order the film.

And with the Internet it made that search a bit easier. Allowing you to stumble across someone’s site who had a VHS movie you were looking everywhere for. And you would get the VHS tape, and it would be a third generation, copy of a copy, really not good quality, but at the time— you were just elated to have it, and be able to see this film that you couldn’t find anywhere else.

It was that way with everything: Books, records, cassettes, lps, and then Laserdiscs DVDs and CDs. The Internet being a huge way for resellers to connect with buyers. And fly by night companies came and went.

But a few questionable startups, Ebay and Amazon among them, grew legs and found themselves not just a fad, but soon a fixture of this Internet phenomenon. And all these shaky startups, these microsofts and apples …these cowboys that proliferated in a time before software patents and lawsuits to stifle competition, began to thrive.

Suddenly content in digitized formats, and the explosion of storage capacity created an age of ready access, on demand availability, of almost everything.

Great. Wonderful. Beautiful. I mean this has allowed for the rise of podcasts, one of the greatest audio revivals since the dawn of radio. And if you’re an Itunes or Hulu or Archive.org patron, it’s just opened up the history of entertainment to anyone with an Internet connection and the desire to explore. That’s the great part, That’s the wonderful part of the digital revolution.

Here’s the bad part. The digital revolution is not being driven by quality concerns or for love of the medium, it is being embraced by decision makers because of two reasons 1/cost savings and 2/control.

I understand both those things in moderation, but moderation is a word that business doesn’t really practice. Cost savings has come to mean some suspect things, two of the most disturbing is the replacement of physical media, and part and parcel of that… is the elimination of the reseller.. the middleman.

I like resellers, I like mom and pop shops, I like middlemen, and I think gearing an economy to do away with that whole part of the conversation, is to gear the economy to in essence do away with a middle class of any kind. It is gearing an economy toward those who own and those who work and pay— landowners and serfs with no middle ground.

And a lot of people think nothing of it, because it’s just book stores, or comic stores, or DVD stores closing. But let’s extend the same thing to McDonald’s.

What if automation tomorrow allowed McDonald’s to do away with the middleman, the franchises?

What if they could get the food to you the consumer without going through a middleman? Say click a button on your laptop, and the food teleports into your hands, whatever. Stay with me here. Because technology gives you the ability to do something, should you do that thing? Is that thing necessarily the best thing for your company, your customer, your economy?

That’s a heck of a question, and I don’t pretend to have the answers. But what I’m saying when it comes to the digital revolution with books, dvd, cds, and the thousands of stores and businesses and millions of employees we are making obsolete, I feel as though no one is even asking the obvious questions, among them… ‘Should we do it this way?’

I feel big business is not looking beyond their own pockets, to see see what is best for their customers and their country. And that’s a very nationalistic thing to expect of a company, to think in terms of their country. But considering our congress in its infinite wisdom allows companies to actually have a say in drafting the laws of a country, ie basically gives to companies greater rights than citizens, I think it’s not too much to ask from those companies the loyalty of citizens.

And those companies that cannot, for whatever reason of conflict or commerce, think in terms of what is best for America— should not have the right to lobby our Congress and make laws for America.

So I view these companies making these grandiose and sweeping changes to America, without regard for the good or ill it will bring… as a great danger for our nation. For any nation. To have someone who has no concern for your nation, making policy in your nation… leads us to the world outside our door.

From gas at $4 a gallon to Americans struggling to keep their homes.

And entertainment is part of it as well.

The elimination of physical media plays into this, creating a market where there is nothing to resell, and worse… nothing to really own. So no need for your favorite DVD reseller, because DVDs are being prepared for the pasture.

You want to view this film, you buy it digitally from the studio for the price they set, and in the absence of any ability to resell– their price is unmoderated by a free market. In other words they can charge whatever they think the market can bear.

While a lot of people embrace this idiocy that a company’s only priority is to generate more income for their stockholders, that’s flawed thinking that led to our recent market melt-down. It comes back to what I said, about a company working withing a nation, has the same inherent priorities as a citizen within that nation…and that is to do no harm to that nation.

And more and more, the actions of companies working within sovereign shores is to do nothing but harm, is to shatter economies, devastate populations, victimize neighborhoods. Actions that if done by someone not hiding behind the mask of incorporation… we would call… acts of terror.

I’m saying that the joys of itunes today, and Amazon kindle today, and digital comics today, and Warner on Demand today, extrapolated on their 25 year plans into tomorrow… points the way to an America completely shorn of any gradations between the few ultra rich oligarchies and the masses of struggling poor.

I’m saying a war of economies, without fail… drives far more literal and bloody wars.

I’m saying don’t be so quick to jump on the bandwagon of eliminating DVDs, eliminating CDs, eliminating physical books, eliminating middle men— because you’re going to find that in a society shorn of middle men to moderate the greed and abuses of those on the top to those on the bottom, the joys of immediate gratification today, will spell the horrors of rampant price gouging, inflation, and poverty tomorrow.

And in the absence of true ownership (digital, in reality of how it is disseminated, being something that is rented… not owned), suddenly you may find those 99cent prices give way to $99 dollar prices, when you have allowed them to destroy or outlaw all other ways of you getting that product.

And how long before some products, are deemed unacceptable to make viewable via streaming or priced out of being readily available for viewing.

Historically, ethnically diverse items are oft at risk for obsolescence through marginalization. The most politically active films of Ousmane Sembene (CEDDO, CAMP DE THIAROYE, and GUELWAAR) never received DVD releases in his lifetime, and to this day are still not available on DVD (THIAROYE had a spotty release before disappearing).

Rather than freeing films and filmmakers from the tyranny of commerce (which digital has the potential to do), under the auspices of the greedy and the ungoverned you’ll see more marginalization and more control over the ideas disseminated to the masses.

So the lesson? Not to allow these companies, Itunes/Apple, Sony, Disney, Microsoft, Netflix, Time Warner, etc… to be ungoverned.

And how much is our entertainment a smokescreen for our aggressions? How much is our entertainment, the last, best drug, or the last, best cheerleader, for the aggressions of our time?

And how much do our aggressions allowed, ignored, take out of America?

The reports of America’s decline are rampant. They are in every aspect of our everyday life, the skyrocketing inflation that has destroyed many a nation before America, is all throughout America.

But our eyes in America, are filled and dazzled and misdirected… by such false fire, that the obvious becomes… indistinct. Almost invisible.

But not quite. If you take the time to look, the signs are there.

In-fact once you are looking in the right direction, (‘got my mind right boss’) the signs are clear and present. America is well on the way to becoming a third world nation, it is being pushed to these ends.

I said pushed.

With your tax dollars, and the blood of your children… the rich have just spent the last few decades pacifying (ie invading and toppling) African/Middle Eastern nations and carving a new western acceptable pleasure nation for themselves, an entertainment nation, where all the studios are in a hurry to setup shop, and a middle East Disney World and Marvel World and all the 3D rides and luxury and cinematic excess you can want is being built there. It is called Abu Dhabi, this paradise, and it is being built over the bodies of the massacred.

Infact, a cynical man might even say it’s very similar to the way, in the wake of World War II, the allied forces led by the US and Britain, set up the Israel state, by pretty much massacring the millions of Jews and Arabs and Nomads, who already lived in that region.

And yeah I did say Jews. We weren’t just killing Arabs to setup Israel. The region was already home to Jews, who lived without issue, for generations next door to Arabs. Unfortunately most of them weren’t Western acceptable Jews, they weren’t European Jews… that is to say they were Black.

So these Jews, and Arabs, and Nomads woke up one day to find the rest of the world was calling their home Israel, and they weren’t invited to the house warming. And then the missiles came.

So similarly the Middle East we’re bombing into existence today, is being done so, over blood both ancient and irreplaceable. All so that the rich have a place to vacation… while America burns.

I’m such a cheery, glass half full guy aren’t I?

But seriously, it begins simply. As all our falls do.

It begins with a laugh.

With you laughing with them. With the ones who will eviscerate you.

It begins with us rolling over the simple rights of the many for the grandiose greed of the few.

So… don’t make it easy.

Resist.

At every step, ask of them and ask of yourself… ‘Who profits from this and who loses?’. And by your answer to that question, will you know the nature of your nation and the nature of yourself.

And by your answer to that question… be ruled.

Here endeth the lesson.

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Woah! Only here on this blog, can you go from digital disenfranchisement to the fall of nations. 🙂 And even crazier is— the line between the two should be ridiculous, it should feel far-fetched. It should feel… ludicrous.

But it doesn’t.

It should feel like a laugh. But it doesn’t.

It I have to be perfectly honest, it feels like…

It feels like we’re running out of time.

Einstein and the Rights of Man

Einstein understood it best.

He understood the central conflict of our age, the conflict of man and machine.

He saw the failing behind the wonders of a new age, that we were not so much making something new, as losing something old.

“Our Technology grows faster than our humanity” he wrote on that windswept day.

And the whole of the last century, the 20th century, was an affirmation of that statement. A war of man and machine. As industrialization to cut costs and maximize profits, strove to make humans more machine like and machines more human. The capacity of humans shrank, as the limits of machines grew.

By the end of the 20th century Man was the mindless drone performing repetitive tasks, while machines were the wunderkinds and geniuses of a new age.

Einstein understood that the 20th century had become an age of tradeoffs. We stopped growing, evolving and handed it to machines to do for us.

That we had taken the magic that was within us, this glory of Shamans and Wiccas and spirits, and had traded, externalized it, taken it away from the creatures of the wet and the warm, and imbued it into a cold, stark, controllable entity of tomorrow.

The conflict of Man and Machine, the theme of the 20th century, was the displacement of wonder, the restructuring of magic.

In the 20th century we gave up trying to be heroes and holy men and decided to be predictable and comfortable.

We redefined humanity as something disposable and common.

The 20th century was ultimately a move to diminish the very rights of man. The move away from the concept of man, to other manageable concepts like worker, drone, statistic, to concepts devoid of ‘I’.

The whole push of the 20th century toward obedient machines with the adaptability of men, and adaptable men with the obedience of machines.

And if the 20th century set the stage for such a bleak and dystopian present, then the 21st century has clearly been set in motion to be the age wherein we must war over the rights of Man, and either nobly win, or meanly lose…. our Freedom.