Stuff Channel

The title is what I consider to be the chant of the ignorant, the greedy, the people I nicely refer to as “generation Diss”, who disrespect anyone and everything that doesn’t give them all they want for free.

ACTA is a trade agreement and treaty between many nations (most except the usual suspects), which seeks to define and redefine the nature of copyright works, distribution, and such. It’s a complex subject, best covered in this article. It has far reaching implications, and the one that has the vocal minority of moochers and file traders upset is provisions for a “3 strikes” or similar structure that would require ISPs to be a little more diligent about what their networks are used for.

In simple terms, the current internet is a wild west scenario. Everyone has a horse, a gun, and a covering over their face so nobody can recognize them, and many choose to use this to steal from others. They will say it isn’t stealing, just “copying”, but in the end, they have something of value without having either paid for it or having the rights to it, which in most people’s worlds is either stealing or receiving stolen property. Either way, there is a small but vocal part of the internet user community that is concerned that ACTA will pull away their masks and leave them exposed, suddenly unable to do all the “free” things they have been doing before.

News flash for the freeloaders: If you cannot do it in the real world, why the heck should you be allowed to do it online? You cannot carry your laptop into Best Buy, open a DVD, and make a copy for yourself and leave, why should you be allowed to do it online? Worse why should you have anonymous protection to do it online, with the ISP standing in the way shielding you? It is insane to think that basic acts which would be illegal in person in the real world should suddenly become legal because you can do it remotely.

Too bad for those who would mooch everything and pay for nothing: The free ride may be coming to an end.

Let me start out by saying I am not a Democrat (or a Republican for that matter). I don’t have a horse in the race, and I don’t care the outcome so much. I should also point out that while I am not a big supporter of Obama, I would say that he has done a better job that the Bush that was there before him.

Now, on the the birthers.

What are birthers? These are the people who are somehow convinced that Barrack Obama cannot be the President of the United States because he was (according to them) not born in the US. Now, there is a record of birth for Barrack Obama in Hawaii, but they take his Indonesian school records (where he was listed as barry soetoro, his fathers last name). Now, if this is the smoking gun, the “clue” that they all point to, I would suggest that they need to get a clue themselves.

It isn’t unusual for school records to show a shortened version of a kid’s name (especially when the name is in English in a country where English is NOT the main language) and combine it with his step father’s name (which is why he went to school in Indonesia). But it is clear that his mother only remarried when Barrack was 6, and this man (Pak Lolo Soetoro) is not Obama’s father. So this smoking gun is debunked pretty much right out of the gate.

The next birther theory is that Obama was born in Kenya. Now, it is true that his real father Barrak Hussein Obama Sr, is from Kenya. However, there is absolutely no indication that the birth happened in Kenya. In fact, an American living in Kenya would very likely return to the US to assure that their child was born in the US, that they got high end care during and after child buirth, and that their child was a US citizen.

It takes all of about 30 seconds to dismiss the Birther’s logic, as none of it adds up. That some seemingly intelligent people such as Lt. Col. Terrence Lakin, a doctor in the military. He refused to take orders because the commander in chief (the president) was not born in the US, and therefore cannot be President. I am amazed to see seemingly smart people turned into slack jawed mouth breeders.

The reality is that many in the birther movement are there because they have racists tendancies. Rather than saying they do not like a black man in the White House, and don’t want to serve under a black man. They can’t say that because they know everyone will mark it down as racist. Instead, the create this amazing birther conspiracy, which has been debunked any number of time (and can easily be debunked as I have shown above). They call him Barry Soetoro, they call him a muslim, they call him all sorts of things, but in the end, Barrack Obama is the lawful and elected President of the United States.

Between the Birthers and the Tea Baggers, it would appear that the right wing of US politics is sinking into angry little groups of political infighters, rather than a force that can take on the Democrats in the long run. The Republican party really needs to step up to the plate and take charge, or risk being run over by the mouth breathers and yahoos that are currently running the show.

As I mentioned back in April, it was getting clear that it was time for Larry King to Retire. While I am sure that my blog entry made not a wit of difference to the old guy, I think that time and reality have finally caught up to Mr King. He announced this week that he will be retiring from his show after 25 years (about 10 years too many, many people think), and will only appear on the air for special events and whatnot.

The bad news is that, just like that persistant old person fug that must be in the air of his studio, Larry King will linger until November, effectively killing CNN in the rating for another season. Instead of being a gentleman and stepping down before the start of the new broadcast season, he will linger on, much to the delight of Faux News and MSNBC.

Replacement? Well, the one tapped at this point as likely to get the job is Piers Morgan, currently a judge on Americas Got Talent. This of course assumes that CNN will continue to run a 9PM snoozer interview show, forever damning their viewership to drop. I am personally hoping that if they go with another interview / talker show, that they push it later and stack it up against Leno and such, giving us perhaps a more news oriented talk option at 11, and allowing stars like Anderson Cooper to bring their in depth news coverage into prime time where it belongs.

It is said that bad things happen in threes, and this week’s RIP list pretty much sums that up. Dennis Hopper, Gary Coleman, and Rue Mcclanahan all passed away in the last few days, kicking in many memories of 60s, 70s, and 80s culture.

Dennis Hopper is probably best known for his role in Easy Rider, the 60′s look at two bikers going across country for kicks, drugs, and girls. More recently, Hopper had been the spokeman for a retirement planning firm, which certainly shows how times flies. He died of cancer way too early, at 74.

Rue Mcclanahan is best known for her roles along side the late Bea Arthur, first in the wildly successful show Maude, and then on the Emmy Award winning The Golden Girls. Her career spanned stage and the screen, and passing leaves only Betty White as the last of the Golden Girls with us.

Gary Coleman is the best known for his childhood role in the immensely popular show Diff’rent Stokes, where he played the wise cracking younger son Arnold. He died as a result of a fall, at a young 42. Since his time on the TV show, he has spent much of his career as a sort of classic B list celeb, moving from odd project to odd project, often making fun of himself and his small stature, and getting into trouble often enough to keep his name in the news.

Three stars in a week, it’s never a good time to see them go. RIP all of you, your contributions to our common culture will live on for you.

One of the amazing things about the internet is how fast news spreads. The other things that is amazing about the internet is just how slanted major media sources can be. Once again, Matt Drudge and his Drudge Report site lead the way with ignorance and hateful attacks. This is a site now solely dedicated to slamming President Obama and the Democratic party, such that almost any other news is either second place or not mentioned at all.

Today’s big headline? “Whitehouse Blocks Chef Tweets”. That’s right, the most important news of the day in the Drudge universe isn’t the fiery rioting in Thailand, it isn’t taliban claims to have attacked a US base overseas, and it certainly isn’t the sex scandal that has multi-term Republican Mark Souder resigning after being caught in an illicit affair with one of his staff. Nope, it’s all about how the Whitehouse isn’t allowing a guest chef to tweet his every movement leading up to a formal dinner later this week. All this combined with Matt’s wonderful selection of images, always trying to find the one image that shows people off at their worst.

Do you feel informed? You should feel outraged. Drudge claims 30 million visits in the last 24 hours, and means that 30 million people are now more informed about a tweeting issue instead of a Republican involved in a sex scandal. How can that be good or useful? This isn’t the first time that I have mentioned the drudgereport’s tendacies to sit on the conservative side of things, but damn,this is blantant and willfully trying to cover something up. Nasty.

It’s a shame, Drudge use to actually do news. Now he just does one sided slams. Maybe he is angling for a seat as Rush Limbaugh’s side kick or something.

Illegal file sharing fans are in a funk the last little while following the Grokster decision and rulings against major player The Pirate Bay, and now they have more to be concerned about. In a decision handed down in US Federal Court this week, Judge Wood ruled Lime Group, parent of LimeWire software maker Lime Wire, and founder Mark Gorton committed copyright infringement, induced copyright infringement, and engaged in unfair competition.

This decision is a real key for music and movie industry types who have been fighting mostly a losing battle against torrents, file traders, and sharing sites. The Grokster decision from the US Supreme Court pretty much set the scene for this ruling, making it clear that sites or companies that encourage or induce people to violate copyright are themselves responsible. The LimeWire case goes one step further in a sense, making the founder mark Gorton personally responsible, and not protected by his LLC that actually distributes the software.

This is an interesting case also because it confirmed that the Grokster decision can stand next to the original Betamax Decision, which declared VCRs and similar devices legal because they had signfiicant non-infringing uses. While P2P can be uses for non-infringing activities, such as sharing unix distributions and WoW patches, the reality is that pretty much every torrent or P2P gudie site is packed full of obviously infringing materials.

These rulings may also have an effect long term on the outcome of the Viacom v YouTube case. Clearly, YouTube has claimed their stake on the internet with very lax rules regarding use submitted content, but they have also moved (after other cases) to put in filtering and are fairly prompt to handle DMCA notifications from copyright holders. But many also feel that YouTube grew from nothing to the largest video sharing platform by using copyright violating materials, and items submitted to the court shows that YouTube founders were apparently aware of this and may even have encouraged it to grow the site. The use of clips of popular TV shows like Family Guy and other prime time staples were common in YouTube early years.

With a Surpreme Court ruling and now the LimeWire decision in a Federal Court, it appears that the pendulum is swinging back towards rights holders on these issues. Will it stay that way?

There has been much discussion the last year or so about the ratings decline at CNN. Since Lou Dobbs left, the numbers if anything have gotten worse, perhaps making Lou seem like the only smart one in the bunch. Christiane Amanpour wisely signed on to ABC to host This Week, and likely to do more journalistic work much more in the public eye. All this against a background of CNN slipping to third in the news channel ratings, now behind MSNBC.

This New York Post article talks about the situation with Larry King to some extent. He is signed through mid 2011, and he pretty much seems to have no desire to retire. Yet, the numbers are in and things seem to be pointing only one way for CNN as a whole and a weeknight schedule that is tied around his 9PM prime time talker.

In this New York Times article, you can see that the latest ratings show that “Mr. King’s audience dropped 43 percent for the quarter and 52 percent in March. He dropped to 771,000 viewers for the quarter from 1.34 million in 2009. More alarming perhaps, Mr. King, whose show has been regularly eclipsed by Rachel Maddow’s on MSNBC (and is almost quadrupled by Sean Hannity’s show on Fox), is now threatened by a new host, Joy Behar on HLN (formerly Headline News.) “. Effectively, CNN’s main network is being eaten up by it’s sister channel, the inappropriately named “headline news” which is also more of a talker than a news channel anymore.

Right now the tide is against CNN for many reasons. Foremost is that the Obama revolution has started to galvanize people to the right and center right, away from the more liberal / centrist opinions of the CNN on air staff, and more towards the left leaning fox news or the more strident groups at either end of the spectrum. Celebrity interviews and such are nice, but the current culture of instant TMZ and Perez Hilton gratification makes Larry King’s interviews often out of date or over taken by events even as they happen. The lead in from Campbell Brown is soft, and even Anderson Cooper is losing out, dropping audience even as he has traveled around to cover the news such as in Haiti. The other issue for CNN is that viewers trust them for the news, but they seem to tune away from their talkers. With a soft news cycle for the last year or so, it has been hard for CNN to get people to tune in when there isn’t news.

Finally there is King himself. At 76 years of age, has he reached the point where he can no longer connect with a younger audience? I can’t imagine too many people under 40 wanting to tune in to see what grandpa has to say, and I think that this is key to the overall decline of CNN. With King’s show right in the middle of the evening, it makes it hard for viewers to stay tuned in for the whole evening of programming. I personally cannot stand to listen to Larry King, even during one of his “breaking news” shows where CNN somehow feels obligated to let a talk show host deliver news and interview people. He is enough to make me tune out, and apparently many others are doing the same.

My suggestion for CNN is this: Give Larry King his retirement party already. Put the news hour back at 8PM, start Anderson Cooper’s show at 9PM, and then bring in some actual talk show magic at 11PM to compete right in the time frame people are more comfortable with celeb talker shows. Maybe try out Joy Behar at that time. Stop trying to out talk Fox News, that isn’t going to happen. The liberal / centrist message isn’t strident enough to amusing enough to keep viewers, Fox has that market sewn up and MSNBC is working hard to get the other part of it. CNN needs to just go back to what they do best, update their on air staff to people under 70, and give it another shot. Sorry Mr King, but even a king needs to know when to cede his throne.

A recent rash of celebrity sex scandals has made me wonder how all of this has come about. Is there more cheating going on in Hollywood, or has scandal become so fashionable that nobody tries to avoid it anymore? Actually, I think the real answer is money and the 15 minutes of fame.

Tiger Woods’ well publicized sex scandal has made instant stars out of any number of girls. Many of these girls appear to have either sold their stories for cash to the tabloids, or have used their Tiger connections to boost appearance fees or generate press. Anything connected to Tiger Woods is money, that is for sure, and being attached to him in such an infamous way is certainly not hurting these girls too much. In fact, more supposed players keep coming out of the woodwork, so it isn’t like shame is driving them to hide, now is it? Tiger has done a well publicized stint in rehab, and his near triumphant return to golf has be closely watched – and well marketed by one of his few remaining sponsors, Nike.

Jesse James situation is even a little weirder, because he is married to Sandra Bullock, who many consider just too damn sexy to stay away from. Yet, Jesse has been connected to a collection of tattooed girls, odd Nazi references, and even weirder group sex stories that will have you shaking your head. When you look at those girls and Sandra Bullock, it is really weird to think anything would have happened at all. It seemed that pretty much every nut job with a tattoo was coming out claiming to have some sort of sexual relationship with the West Coast Choppers builder. Jesse has apparently also gone down the rehab road, and already fallout comes with the cancellation of his “Jesse James is a Dead Man” series, which had actually done pretty well on SpikeTV.

The latest scandal involves movie star, cop, and martial arts master Steven Seagal. This one is particularly weird, if only because the charges leveled by a former model are so out of character for him as to be a little hard to swallow. Kayden Nguyen alleges that she was hired to be a personal assistant, but upon starting the job she discovered it was more about being his personal sex toy. It’s a bit of a head shaker for sure. The question now will be how many more girls will suddenly come out of the woodwork to claim their 15 minutes of undeserved fame?

ultra conservative matt drudge sour grapes post

The conservative media and the Republican Party that often seems to run it are having a very, very bad day today. The US House of Representatives passed President Obama’s health care legislation by a good margin last night (7 votes over), and so the law will likely hit the President’s desk soon and become the law of the land.

What is disappointing is to see the sour grapes. Matt Drudge who runs the Drudgereport has been particularly horrible in how he has covered the administation, and now with the passing of the law he has gone into a sort of conservative mourning. I guess they manages to “Rahm it through”, right Matt?

Conservative media as a whole needs to grow up, stop calling people names, stop throwing mud, and deal with the issues!

One of the interesting subtexts of the “FREE!” revolution is in order for musicians, artists, whoever to make a living, income still has to be generated. Since musicians are no longer suppose to sell their music on shiny plastic discs, and because of infinite distribution, the question comes up: How does a musician make money?

The answer, according to the Cynical Musician, is to find the Big Dope.

Who is the Big Dope? Well, the Big Dope is the one person out of a hundred (or thousand, or million) that is willing to pay you significantly more for something than it is really worth, because they are a “fan”. You know, they pay $90 for a band hoodie at a concert, even though it’s a $20 hoodie you could get at Wal-Mart with $1 worth of silk screening on it. They are the dope, because by paying for this hoodie, they have helped to pay for probably 200 people to enjoy free music.

The prices of concert tickets are on the rise as well. “FREE!” supporters like Mike Masnick at Techdirt will tell you it’s a good thing that artists are making more direct money, and that the increase in spending on live shows is a good thing that makes money for all artists. However, people rarely look at the increasing concert ticket prices, which see top acts often selling tickets in the hundreds of dollars for a 2 hour (or less!) show. In the UK, even acts like Bon Jovi are trying to push tickets at nearly $500us a seat. There is no indication that more people are attending live events, and every indication that people are just having to pay more for the same events. Key in this is that lower end artists (without the big followings) aren’t going to see any more of the money, because it is going to the top few percentage artists who are able to dramatically overcharge for their tickets, merchandise, etc.

Just as importantly, in the UK and Swedish studies, it has been shown that consumer spending on music has been flat for a number of years. The dollars gained in live music ticket sales is money lost on recorded music sales. What that means is that while music consumption is at an all time high, the income from selling music is dropping rather than rising. Everyone paying for the live music is in effect giving a subvention to those who choose to download music for free.

As the Cynical Musician points out, it’s the “anyone but me” syndrome. People don’t care who is paying, as long as it isn’t them. Everyone else is paying, but the actual music consumer isn’t.

Don’t be the big dope. Don’t buy the over priced merchandise, don’t pay for over priced tickets. Support your favorite bands by buying their music on CD, through Itunes, whatever, and show your dislike for a system that searches only for dopes.

Well, two races into the 2010 season, and NASCAR, aka NAPCAR, is already showing some serious signs of crumbling at it’s foundations. The sheer volume of empty seats in California this past weekend, even noted on the NASCAR.COM site, shows that things are not all good and going to plan.

Over the winter, all sorts of changes have come to NASCAR, seemingly somewhere between rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic and wild desperation. Viewership in 2009 was way off, attendance was way off, and even the official collectables / t-shirt company has been in financial trouble. A number of tracks “revamped” their seating, which is to say that they got rid of many seats and changed around others. Daytona got rid of a back stretch grandstand and replaced it with a fan fun area, and they announced that none of the back stretch seating will be open for the July 4th weekend races. Richmond lost almost 20,000 seats, and overall NASCAR tracks apparently lost more than 100,000 seats for events from 2009 to 2010.

NASCAR made some major rule changes, put the driving “back in the drivers hands”, and have announced that the rear wing on the CoT (Crap on Track, I think) will be ditched in favor of the more familiar blade spoiler, which has been a part of stock car racing for as long as I can remember. It was little surprise to most fans that when the CoT took over, the best racing was actually in the Nationwide series, as the cars were the older style blade cars and just ran better. NASCAR also added more green white checker attempts to try to get a green flag finish to races, and so on.

Yet, two races into the season, attendance is down, and just as importantly, viewership is down. If a product is in demand but people can’t afford it, they will watch it on TV. NASCAR faces the hard reality that fewer people are turning up to the events and fewer people are watching on TV. Only the presence of one Danica Patrick has given them a ratings boost for their undercard series, which have done better than last year.

In the end, the big problem for NASCAR is their ill conceived attempt to become a national sport. Not every market wants or will support a race by buying tickets, and the California situation is a perfect example. All the population in the world, a rabid car culture, and half filled stands. NASCAR also has too many look-a-like tracks, D shaped 1.5 mile ovals that often produce dull follow the leader racing. These are tracks designed to make the track owners happy, not to produce good racing. All this is against a background of classic shorter tracks without NASCAR dates, yet that would likely pull better crowds and produce a better racing event. Rockingham has new owners and is apparently doing well with series like Pro-cup and others, and even North Wilkesboro is back in action with racing back at this classic facility.

NASCAR would do well to forget their overdone plans and slide back to the things that made them popular to begin with. Without that, the deck chairs will look nice but the ship will continue to sink.

As a long time fan of the Deadliest Catch, since the time before the show existed as was just part of the a Dangerous Jobs series, it saddens me to report that Captain Phil Harris, the gruff but loving master of the F/V Cornelia Marie passed away on February 9th, as a result of complications from a stroke suffered less that two weeks ago. Captain Harris had some past serious medical problems including blood clots (one that passed through his heart at one point), but had recovered well and returned to work. While offloading in St Paul during the crab season, he suffered a stroke and went into a coma. While he came out of the coma, he finally did succumb a few days after. His two sons work with him on the boat and appear on the show, and they posted this:

It is with great sadness that we say goodbye to our dad – Captain Phil Harris. Dad has always been a fighter and continued to be until the end. For us and the crew, he was someone who never backed down. We will remember and celebrate that strength. Thanks to everyone for their thoughts and prayers. – Jake and Josh Harris

RIP, Captain Phil Harris, we will miss you.

While it may be a shocker to some, the “resignation” of Lou Dobbs from CNN has pretty much been a foregone conclusion for a while. CNN as a network is floundering badly these days, unsure of it’s direction. But Lou Dobbs has been sure of his direction, going from a reasonably friendly Newsy guy to a nasty attacker who’s strident opinionated messages were just not hitting the mark.

While he is mostly not wrong (such as with the problems of illegal immigration in the US), his last few years have been marked with repeat returns to the same themes, often appearing to fill quiet news days with illegal immigration outrage stories that were often puffed up to make them bigger than they seem. Some people have suggested this has come as CNN has tried harder to compete with Fox news on the “strident shill” level, which is something that more liberal media seems very poor at doing. Instead of coming out as the champion of the average guy, Lou Dobbs started to come across to me more and more as someone with an axe to grind rather than a series of solutions. Certainly, his inferences that President Obama may not be American enough to be President didn’t win him any fans.

Lou Dobbs hasn’t said where is going to next, but he will still be on syndicated radio and is “looking at his options”. Some have suggested that he might end up at Faux News, where a strident axe grinding attitude seems to go over better. Read more of the story here.

It’s almost a traditional thing now, the Tom Cruise dead rumors seem to come up about two or three times a year, more often when he is doing something nutty. Recent stories have peopel from inside his camp reporting on his weeks of trying to use his Scientology powers to dominate door knobs and other inanimate objects. It’s sort of up there with his classic jump around on Oprah thing. Whatever the deal, there is no truth to Tom Cruise having a heart attack, Tom Cruise falling off a building, Tom Cruise falling off a cliff, or Tom Cruise dying in some other manner, at least not yet.

Xenu must wait another day, I guess.

I have been a lifelong racing fan, I can remember watching the highlights of NASCAR races on Wide World of Sports long before it became an every week, 12 hours per day extravaganza that is it today. In the last few years I have been less and less enamored with the product, and thought it was only me. But recently, I have noticed more and more people publically calling out NASCAR’s top series with names like NAPCAR and such.

Well, the capper I guess was this past weekend’s race in Talladega, typically one of the wildest and highest speed races, where a combination of engine restrictor plates and aerodynamic tricks get together to make the cars run pretty much in a pack. The only way to get ahead most of the time is bump drafting, where the back car pushes the car in front, making them both move faster. After a terrible wreck at the end of the last race here, NASCAR outlawed this practice this time out. The results? Well, let’s just say that the drivers showed than about 450 out of the 500 miles of the race was meaningless, and paraded around single file in a freight train so dull that driver Tony Stewart was heard asking his crew to tell him something interesting so he didn’t fall asleep. The ABC commentators for the race could obviously see this race has turned into a snoozer, and rather than deny the truth, they repeated over and over the fact that NASCAR had diddled with the rules to make this happen.

Well, it seems that NASCAR doesn’t like when someone points out the obvious: NASCAR got all huffy and spokesman Ramsey Poston said that “ABC missed a lot of very good racing”.

News flash Mr Poston: There was no good racing. For the first 400-450 miles, it was follow the leader, let’s not use up our equipment, throttle off cruising so painful to watch, it was beyond understanding. The only thing that saved the race for most of the “fans” was that in the last 5 laps, the aero package and rules came together to destroy pretty much half the field in two seperate wrecks that both involved violent rollovers.

Don’t get made an ABC, they told the truth. NASCAR (or is that NAPCAR) needs to wake up and smell the coffee, look at all the empty seats and closed seating sections at the tracks, and remember that “it’s the racing stupid”, before they are shrunk back to being a regional series without national coverage. Ratings are down for a reason, and it isn’t because ABC says you are boring.