new strip
via mattbors.com
The State of the Music Business
Head over to Huffington post to read the full article:
John Mellencamp: On My Mind: The State of the Music Business.
Over the last few years, we have all witnessed the decline of the music business, highlighted by finger-pointing and blame directed against record companies, artists, internet file sharing and any other theories for which a case could be made. We’ve read and heard about the “good old days” and how things used to be. People remember when music existed as an art that motivated social movements. Artists and their music flourished in back alleys, taverns and barns until, in some cases, a popular groundswell propelled it far and wide. These days, that possibility no longer seems to exist. After 35 years as an artist in the recording business, I feel somehow compelled, not inspired, to stand up for our fellow artists and tell that side of the story as I perceive it. Had the industry not been decimated by a lack of vision caused by corporate bean counters obsessed with the bottom line, musicians would have been able to stick with creating music rather than trying to market it as well.
Goodbye Dubai | Smashing Telly
Short of opening a Radio Shack in an Amish town, Dubai is the world’s worst business idea, and there isn’t even any oil. Imagine proposing to build Vegas in a place where sex and drugs and rock and roll are an anathema. This is effectively the proposition that created Dubai – it was a stupid idea before the crash, and now it is dangerous.
Dubai threatens to become an instant ruin, an emblematic hybrid of the worst of both the West and the Middle-East and a dangerous totem for those who would mistakenly interpret this as the de facto product of a secular driven culture.
The opening shot of this clip shows 200 skyscrapers that were built in the last 5 years. It looks like Manhattan except that it isn’t the place that made Mingus or Van Allen or Kerouac or Wolfe or Warhol or Reed or Bernstein or any one of the 1001 other cultural icons from Bob Dylan to Dylan Thomas that form the core spirit of what is needed, in the absence of extreme toleration of vice, to infuse such edifices with purpose and create a self-sustaining culture that will prevent them crumbling into the empty desert that surrounds them.
via Goodbye Dubai | Smashing Telly – A hand picked TV channel.
The end of our civilization
The end of our civilization. If you believe in global climate change and Al Gore, which I do (both) then as much as Gore doesn’t want to say it because it would be counter-productive for him to, our civilization is on the path to self-extinction.
Why should we fight to get our economy growing again? Isn’t growth the whole problem? Shouldn’t we see the economic downturn as not only inevitable, but as our last hope for salvation? These are fair questions imho.
The inescapable truth that no one wants to speak out loud is that we have too many people, and we’re adding more people at too fast a clip. The planet can’t sustain what we have now without destroying the climate, yet we haven’t done anything to limit growth.
So maybe this isn’t the biggest downturn since The Great Depression? Maybe it’s bigger than that. Maybe this is a corner-turn for the human race, maybe last September was when it finally occurred to us, collectively, that we couldn’t keep going as we were going, and we hit the brakes in the way the Invisible Hand does. Maybe the efforts to “jump start” the economy won’t work, and maybe that’s as it should be, and maybe that’s a good thing?
Population: The elephant in the room
Fundamentally, we need to ask what is the greater threat to human welfare: the possibility that humane efforts to address population growth might be abused, or our ongoing failure to act to prevent hundreds of millions, even billions, dying as a result of global ecological collapse?
via BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | Population: The elephant in the room.
There are some people – at the top of the economic pyrimid – who benifit greatly by being able to sell their products to huge populations. We wont hear the Gates foundation proposing population control for instance. Of course these same people can afford to puchase large swathes of real estate for their own use.
Orange Free State
orange Free State South Africa
I have been driving around the Free State near Smithfield South Africa recently, perhaps there is a political reason the Free State used to be called the “Orange” Free State, but it certainly is orange these days.
John Martyn – Lyrics – Solid Air
via John Martyn – Lyrics – Solid Air.
You’ve been taking your time
And you’ve been living on solid air
You’ve been walking the line
And You’ve been living on solid air
Don’t know what’s going wrong inside
And I can tell you that it’s hard to hide when you’re living on
Solid air.
Smithfield photos 2008
Alison doing the banshee
I realise that i have not put up a single photo from 2008 – these arent so bad – perhaps a little heavy on the corny sunsets:
Nelson Mandela’s message to Barack Obama
Dear Mister President,
We are greatly honoured to join the millions around the globe congratulating you on taking office as the President of the United States of America. We believe that we are witnessing something truly historic not only in the political annals of your great nation, the United States of America, but of the world.
Your election to this high office has inspired people as few other events in recent times have done. Amidst all of the human progress made over the last century the world in which we live remains one of great divisions, conflict, inequality, poverty and injustice. Amongst many around the world a sense of hopelessness had set in as so many problems remain unresolved and seemingly incapable of being resolved. You, Mister President, have brought a new voice of hope that these problems can be addressed and that we can in fact change the world and make of it a better place.
We are in some ways reminded today of the excitement and enthusiasm in our own country at the time of our transition to democracy. People, not only in our country but around the world, were inspired to believe that through common human effort injustice can be overcome and that together a better life for all can be achieved.
Your Presidency brings hope of new beginnings in the relations between nations, that the challenges we all face, be they economic, the environment, or in combating poverty or the search for peace, will be addressed with a new spirit of openness and accommodation.
There is a special excitement on our continent today, Mister President, in the knowledge that you have such strong personal ties with Africa. We share in that excitement and pride.
We are aware that the expectations of what your Presidency will achieve are high and that the demands on you will be great. We therefore once more wish you and your family strength and fortitude in the challenging days and years that lie ahead.
You will always be in our affection as a young man who dared to dream and to pursue that dream. We wish you well.
Sincerely
Signed N R Mandela
The Wild Frontier at The Times » Blog Archive » Nelson Mandela’s message to Barack Obama – full text.
Rian Malan | Books | The Observer
I ask him the question that has been nagging, the question that lay at the heart of his book and at the heart of the country: is his vision of South Africa born of objective analysis or psychological necessity? Is it out there in the city, or inside his head?
‘The thing was,’ he says, ‘if I had been born black in this country would I forgive me, people like me? Would I fuck. I would cheer for Mugabe as well. It seems so logical to me. South Africa needed to have this really brutal dialogue with itself: black South Africa would say, “Look, you came here, you stole our lands and our cattle, you raped our women, you destroyed our lives completely, we hate you.” And white south Africa would respond, “Yes, but look at you now in your BMW with your cell phone; everything about you would not be like that if we had not been here. It cannot possibly be as simple as just to say race no longer matters in South Africa.’
Tim Adams travels to Johannesburg to meet the controversial writer Rian Malan | Books | The Observer.
Michael Seitzman: Sarah Palin Naked
Stop voting for people you want to have a beer with. Stop voting for folksy. Stop voting for people who remind you of your neighbor. Stop voting for the ideologically intransigent, the staggeringly ignorant, and the blazingly incompetent.
Vote for someone smarter than you. Vote for someone who inspires you. Vote for someone who has not only traveled the world but who has also shown a deep understanding and compassion for it. The stakes are real and they’re terrifyingly high. This election matters. It matters. It really matters. Let me say that one more time. This. Really. Matters.
Mbeki and the Butcher of Khartoum
Mbeki’s siding with the Butcher of Khartoum is painful and incomprehensible. That the African Union must be maintained as a viable organization should never necessitate a choice between what is just and legal, against what’s politically expedient. The African Union should be an instrument of justice for all people of the African continent. What we have seen over the years is complete disregard of human rights in Africa, as dictator after dictator have ridden roughshod over their countrymen while others stand by the sidelines, with wide bemused grins.
Sadness weighs heavily on my heart as I look at many of these African rogues. It is even more painful and disappointing when one considers Mbeki who came onto the African stage with so much promise, so much hope for the poor of the continent. I judge Mbeki on a different scale, than, let’s say, Arap Moi, the former Kenyan dictator, because Mbeki’s of a purer pedigree and his tutorship was clean and democratic. He after all had Mandela’s blessings.
Sadly, Mbeki’s problem is not an uncommon one; it happens time and again when mere mortals try to fill the shoes of gods. After Mandela stepped down, many wondered if Mbeki had the character, intelligence and judgment to stand half as tall, half as upright as Mandela. Ten years have proved that Mbeki is a leader with feet of clay; a man of impaired judgment – one whose missteps include allowing himself to be hood winked by the likes of Khadafy.
The country he inherited could have been so much that it’s not now. His neighbors to the north had so much potential that has been leached by the tides of time, raw ambition and hunger for power; and pathologic hesitation on Mbeki’s part.
How, one wonders, could Mbeki be so blind as not to appreciate the horrors of AIDs among his own people? What illogical genius could have convinced him that Uganda’s success against HIV/AIDS with their ABC strategy was an aberration, and the dying South Africans were fiction? Knowing that Mbeki was sacrificing his own brothers and sisters to some inexplicable delusion, we waited, as HIV/AIDS continued to claim more South African lives. Mbeki could have saved them; he opted not to.
Mbeki could have saved Zimbabwe’s millions from the mad ambition of Robert Mugabe. He must have known that white farmers and the land they farmed, were used as pawns in Mugabe’s diabolical political gambit — a way to win votes and to remain in power — no matter that Zimbabwe’s economy was washed down the Zambezi. Youth must distinguish itself by forcefully restraining megalomaniacal old men.
By opting to do nothing, 3 million Zimbabweans are now in exile in South Africa, where hundreds were slaughtered by his own citizens out of fear that their livelihood was jeopardized by the immigrants. Prosperity needs champions; progress and human well-being need their own soldiers and committed advocates.
The disparity between South Africa’s haves and have nots continues to be pronounced. There has been no restitution for those dispossessed by Apartheid. Mbeki has ignored lessons he should have learned from Zimbabwe and Kenya, that: land reform should be tackled head-on; in the open and as judiciously as possible. The danger is land distribution is used by politicians to reward their cronies or to win votes. Even as Mbeki vacates the presidency, South Africa finds itself on a perilous perch. Every attempt should be made to defuse the likely explosion of the landless against the landed in South Africa.
Mbeki’s support of Al Bashir is but one failing among many; it was at first puzzling. It shouldn’t have. Mbeki is one of those black Africans, who watched the torture and killing in Africa from the sidelines; more concerned with the war the ANC was waging against the apartheid regime, than on the Arab murder and genocide against blacks in the Sudan. He is not much different from many sub-Saharan black leaders who think of Arab leaders as benevolent and benign; Arabs who reward them by delivering presents to their palaces in their impoverished countries.
Failing states
Failing states | On the brink | Economist.com
An annual index of failed states produces gloomy news for Africa
SOMALIA, ruined by civil war and foreign invasion, is considered the worst example of a collapsed country, according to an annual index of failed states produced by Foreign Policy magazine and the Fund for Peace, a research organisation. The top four spots on the index are all occupied by African countries, with last year’s leader, Sudan, falling a place. Africa is also heavily represented in the top 20, a list made up of enduring basket cases. Each country is given a score for a dozen political, military, social and economic indicators; the more unstable a country, the higher its total score. Zimbabwe has gained a place since last year and, given the current turmoil, could see its prospects worsen again.
