Archive for March, 2010

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The Tea Party? The Coffee Party? Wake Up. It’s The Corporate Party

[ 1 Comment ]Posted on March 21, 2010 by admin in Politics

Sunday, March 21st, 2010

The real power in this country lies in the hands of corporate interests in ways most people don’t understand.


For some unsettling insights into who’s
really running things, check out the
DVD or the book “The Corporation”.

When it comes to politics, I sometimes get the feeling lately that I’m having one of those weird anxiety dreams where all the surroundings are basically familiar, but everything is just a little different somehow, and everyone else knows what’s going on except me. When you have a bunch of mostly working-class people calling themselves “teabaggers” marching against the party that historically has been on their side calling legislators niggers and faggots, and the best response that the liberal intellectuals of the country can muster is a contrarily-named coffee party, you have to pause and ask: what really is going on here? Well, after doing more reading and research on the topic than I’d really care to, I have a bit of an opinion forming. Almost every problem that I see in America right now can be traced to one basic source. Corporatocracy. Whether it’s the corruption that ensues from regulatory capture by way of DC’s revolving doors, or the travesty that is the current health care battle, or the incredibly unsustainable and unhealthy diet and food production process in America, it can all be directly traced to corporate interests. I’ve longed for a third party for some time now, and was too dense to realize it was right here all along. It’s big business. Whether it’s campaign donations, lobby dollars, or the direct infiltration of the government via the aforementioned “agency capture”, Global and national corporations are clearly more powerful than government today. And the sick part of the big joke is that the GOP will probably deflect attention from their profoundly corporatocratic beliefs by using the widely misunderstood term corporatist to call Democrats fascist corporatists (which will be partly true, in an odd way) and both groups of voters will buy into their side’s spin. The irony of course being that both parties will be telling some twisted version of the truth, while benefiting personally as people of wealth and power by keeping the citizenry split down the middle, pointlessly hoping for a democracy-based solution.

Do You Have To Be A Matzochist To Celebrate Passover?

[ 3 Comments ]Posted on March 20, 2010 by admin in Holidays

Saturday, March 20th, 2010

In spite of having tons of Jewish friends, they never invite me to Passover dinner. Maybe I shouldn’t complain. The “bread of affliction” doesn’t sound very tasty.


Be your own wrathful old testament
deity with the 10 Plagues Toy Set

I have a strange tendency to get things backwards. As a white Anglo Saxon male, I should be all set. I should just go get my MBA and take the position I don’t deserve at the “rich white guy club” that I could have just for not being black, Mexican, a lesbian, or whatever. But no. I have to go through life shunning my entitlement and wallowing in my fascination with other cultures. Which has been fun, for the record. As a result of my open-mindedness and rejection of my glass ceilingless birthright, I’ve been the manager and only white guy at a Chinese restaurant, been awarded “honorary gay person” status by both genders, and been the only white guy in a funk trio briefly. But one thing that has passed me over repeatedly is – ironically – Passover dinner. I have lots of Jewish friends, but only one of them has invited me to Seder, and she was only Jewish because her mom converted, so things felt a little “by the booky”, more like a Sesame Street “hey kids, let’s look at how the Jewish people live” evening instead of a natural holiday experience. So Passover remains a mystery to me. If you read the rather dryly factual Wikipedia entry, it sounds like a grisly, depressive event to celebrate. Slavery, a wrathful, old testament deity inflicting plagues and killing firstborn children, and lambs’ blood being smeared on doorways. Scary stuff. So hey, if you’re Jewish, give me a ring this year. I’m keeping the evening open. I don’t think I’ll be hanging around for all seven days though. Read the rest of this entry »

Cam McAzie, Punk Rock Bagpiper – Video Kilt The Radio Star

[ 1 Comment ]Posted on March 19, 2010 by admin in Music

Friday, March 19th, 2010

Aussie punk rock buskering bagpiper gives new meaning to “down under” when he dons his kilt and combat boots


Excuse me mate, I believe
your bagpipes are on fire.

When I was a kid my father used to terrorize me by putting on the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards bagpipe album that featured the hit single Amazing Grace. The odd thing was that it wasn’t the bagpipe music that terrorized me, it was my poor tone-deaf dad’s quarter-step-flat droning voice as he sang along. The bagpipe music I loved. Yes, in spite of jokes like “Why do bagpipers walk when they play? To get away from the sound“, and the fact that the original purpose of bagpipes was to scare the enemy off the battlefield when conventional weapons weren’t doing the trick, I’ve always felt a certain connection with the reedy drone of the instrument. At the same time I’ve never found true gratification with its use; in spite of a lengthy list of bands that have put the pipes to use, no-one’s quite hit the mark for me. You’ve probably heard the more familiar examples like Peter Gabriel’s Come Talk to Me (that link is an awesome stage clip by the way), half the catalog of Afro Celt Sound System, or more recently Eminem’s Bagpipes From Baghdad, but I bet you’ve never heard of Cam McAzie, the BadPiper. Leave it to a country founded by criminals and scoundrels to produce the world’s most rebellious player of the world’s most outcast instrument. McAzie brings new meaning to the term “down under” when he dons his kilt and combat boots, preens his mohawk, and starts pumping his punk rock pipes. Check out the vids below, and another one I threw in for fun, by the Mudmen. Know of any cool uses of bagpipe you’d care to share? Read the rest of this entry »

Does Government Control The Media Or Is It The Other Way Around?

[ Comments Off ]Posted on March 18, 2010 by admin in Popular Media

Thursday, March 18th, 2010

I think we’ve been worrying about the wrong Big Brother.


I think this poster has it backwards

Quite some time ago, San Francisco radio figure Wes Nisker said If You Don’t Like the News, Go Out and Make Some of Your Own. Apparently Rupert Murdoch, Jack Welch, and other media moguls took his advice. I’ve been fascinated with the literally Orwellian evolution of media control in America over the past decade or two that began in earnest with the deregulation of the Reagan years and has resulted in ten or fewer media companies owning everything. Which is a bad enough thing in itself, but gets really bad when those same companies control the government as well. As a well-conditioned media consumer, I was so busy Facebooking about my emotional knee-jerk reactions to liberal and conservative media pundits that I had forgotten that this behavior of mine was all part of a vast Orwellian 21st century robber baron plan. That is, until I was reminded of this fact last week when I finally saw the 2005 documentary Orwell Rolls in His Grave. It’s a shame that the makers of the film didn’t package the product a little differently; the title gives off a paranoid post 9/11 vibe that detracts from the substance of the film, which is an insightful exploration of the corporate media dominance of what you see, read and hear as a result of influence peddling and Washington’s unprecedented revolving door policies of late. Much like Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent, the film wallows a bit too much in what seems like academic hand-wringing, and plays the Orwell angle a little too hard. The fact is that Orwell wouldn’t be rolling in his grave, because the film effectively makes the case that we’re living exactly the way Orwell envisioned things. I’d still recommend the film, and if you’re interested in this topic, the totally unrelated book The The Elements of Journalism, which explores a similar topic, i.e.: the failure of journalism as a result of the purely profit-driven decision making that has replaced “real” news with entertainment. I sometimes lament that most whistleblower-oriented documentaries – like Food, Inc., Outfoxed, and virtually anything by Michael Moore – end up coming across as liberal whining in the end. It would be inspiring if someone managed to produce a less partisan documentary that just looked at the apalling truth of it all. Yes, the Bush White House that was brought to us by Project For A New American Century was indeed Orwellian in its lies and doublespeak, but the real evil is not the party they claimed to represent, it’s the pathological behavior of the media companies that seek control of government through agency capture. America *needs investigative journalism, hard hitting documentaries, and gutsy exposés more than ever right now. But don’t expect to see them in a major theater in an era when Disney blocks the distribution of a Michael Moore film for telling too much of the truth about George Bush. Fortunately, at least for now, we have the Internet, so you can watch entire films like Orwell Rolls in His Grave on line . Read the rest of this entry »

How The Personal Computer Will Bring The Apocalypse

[ 1 Comment ]Posted on March 17, 2010 by admin in Technology

Wednesday, March 17th, 2010

In the end, it won’t be terrorists or a nuclear holocaust that do us in, it’ll be some dumb e-mail that YOU opened.

Imagine if you could take control of every Windows-based computer in America. Even if your control were limited to something simple like turning them off or blocking basic web access, you would be wielding remarkable power. Everything from air traffic control to communications networks to emergency services and military operations rely in some way on Windows. This may sound like a hackneyed plot for an 80′s “cyberwar” movie, but is it? You’ve almost certainly heard about how Chinese hackers managed to hack Google because of security flaws caused by the US government, and more recently about how the Iranian government claimed to crack down on US-backed cyber activists. Or how the hilariously named Russian hacker group the Russian Business Network is back in business, allegedly nailing Citigroup for millions of dollars. Or how last year’s Conficker worm created a 12 million computer botnet. Maybe you think this sort of thing won’t happen to you because you keep your anti-virus updated, or that if there were really something to be paranoid about, it would make the news. Well, the fact is, it’s estimated that 89% of corporate security breaches go unreported, and it’s fairly common (but under-reported) knowledge that financial institutions are routinely blackmailed by hackers, based on the idea that the payout is cheaper than a consumer “run” on the bank. I have to admit I felt fairly safe until just recently, when I found my system was compromised by Conficker payloads. This little worm supposedly died out last year, but is still apparently on the loose, doing who-knows-what. I was especially stunned by getting it; my system runs AVG Antivirus, MalwareBytes, Spybot, and Ad-Aware, is behind a firewall, and I NEVER open unknown attachments or files without first scanning them. So how did it happen? My best guess is that when I helped a client with their malware-infected, internet-disabled laptop, it hopped on a thumb drive on its own, and jumped onto *my computer on its own. Who knows; the fact is that none of my existing protection caught it, and I had to resort to some pretty savvy rootkit detectors to reclaim my system. After spending hours researching and fixing the problem, I’m utterly unconvinced that I’m in the clear; I still have to do a huge backup, reinstall, and make sure my backup files aren’t infected. Why? Because as Microsoft itself put it way back in 2005, when it comes to rootkit infections: Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid. So what can you do? Well, if you’re an idiot, you could argue that one should switch to a Mac (don’t get me wrong, I use both, and love my Mac), but that is simply not true. The fact is, we’re doomed. You may as well kick back and watch the tech apocalypse unfold.

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