It’s so easy to be a pirate these days

While waiting in line at a local Spotlight Video the other day, I happened to peer over at a long line of tables filled with videos for sale at slashed prices.

This is not a pitch to go running to your nearest Spotlight to gorge on cheap movies, but rather, a reflection, because while I stood there staring, I thought, “Who actually bothers to buy movies anymore?”

It’s a valid question, considering just how easy it is for someone to jump on their computer, search for their favorite movie, television show or music album, click, download, watch and repeat.

Regardless of whether it’s legal or not, you’ll find few young adults and teenagers, armed with fast Internet connections, large hard drives and spare time, not downloading a variety of media free of charge.

And what do these recording companies and movie distributors expect? Blast the children with hip, cool advertisements featuring the hottest celebrities of the time while pumping the current chart-topping track, and then ask yourself, Did we give them a chance to say no?

It’s the afterthought of advertising. So effective are the meme-like slogans, catchy songs and visuals that when those digesting this media, who end up craving the product presented to them, don’t have the funds to purchase said product, theft becomes very attractive.

To further entice this download-crazy society to circumvent the cash register and board the giant pirate ship, you have computer and communications technology advancing to a point where you can easily purchase a cheap hard drive that could store hundreds of movies with ease, downloaded from that 500-megabyte connection that can bring home a DVD-quality film in less than 10 minutes.

Of course, people can sidestep the abstract idea that it’s against the law to illegally download. Problem here is, it’s an abstract idea until you get caught, slapped with a warning or worse, a half-million dollar lawsuit. No, the laws, in reality, will do little to prevent people from downloading.

So why is it happening anyway? Why is a society so used to paying exorbitant amounts of money for DVDs and CDs turning to downloading illegally? There you have it: the costs!

Twenty dollars for a CD or DVD. That’s a killing for these recording and movie companies when you consider that the traditional breakdown for a sold CD only provides the artist with 15 cents to the dollar at most. Artists make their money through concerts and merchandising, not albums, which are more a marketing tool than anything else.

Rising media costs, more profits for the companies instead of the artist, more advanced technology and advertisements that make us want, want, want — that’s why when I look at those movies with reduced prices, I can’t help but laugh. But hey, I still rent movies.

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Originally published in The Eureka Reporter

iBlog, iFacebook, iVote

Call us Generation Y, the iGeneration, the Indigo Children or DotNet.

Our generation plugged into MP3 players, talking on cell phones, blogging, Facebooking and Googling our little hearts out online — we’re taking over, and you don’t even have to unpeel us from the monitor screens.

When social networking sites and media from all across the world began appearing on our monitors at light speeds — unless you have a dial-up modem connection, you poor soul — Gen Yers had nothing better to do than to explore sites like MySpace and Google — heck, even Wikipedia.

All that information, what does it really mean for Gen Y? It made us not want to participate in conventional politics. It made us skeptical.

It should be no surprise to the men and women of simpler days past that technology changed the dynamics of power for individuals.

Back in the day, you had to spend hours in a library doing research on a topic. Now, you spend minutes online to retrieve tons more data on virtually any topic you want. That’s power.

Members of Gen Y, born within a disputable time period of 1978 to 1995, rode the coming digital revolutionary wave that completely immersed those born later in a torrent of information.

Growing up on Nintendo, AOL and CD players changed the way Gen Y processed information — think short attention spans. Think what?

In fact, the vast amount of knowledge available at Gen Y’s techno-savvy fingertips brought them into a virtual world packed with Web sites competing for our attention. Being online, it bypassed the traditional filters to learning — like narrow-minded, agenda-driven teachers, who still mold student minds today.

Look at polls and news articles and you see that Gen Y is in fact disengaging from normal politics, not contributing as much to political campaigns and not expressing themselves at a polling booth near you.

Blame technology? Not even.

Although Gen Y seems to be as skeptical of status quo politics in this country as scientists are of the existence of God, more youngsters seem to be expressing themselves through direct political action and education, both online and in person.

They’re involving themselves in the community, boycotting corporations with horrible business practices and having political conversations with others in an attempt to persuade them.

Members of that generation, like so many in this country, felt disenchanted with skeptical electoral practices in major elections since the turn of the century. Why vote when the U.S. Supreme Court decides the winner? Why care when the hyper-consolidated media handpicks the candidates that make it onto television, into print and on the airwaves.

That kind of control provoked the recent viral Web 2.0 campaigns of Howard Dean, Ron Paul and Barack Obama, which show the power the often-touted-as-apathetic youth can wield when they band together and focus their political energies.

The digital world gives the youth an opportunity to participate like never before. That empowerment, that sense of importance that you, as an individual, may somehow be directly involved in a process kept close and restricted by this country’s elite for so long, is a force of reckoning that will show its true value in November’s election.

Oh, and that apathy talk earlier, youth voter turnout steadily climbed through 2006 and broke records this year. If that trend continues, this country will see an explosion of untapped potential at the polls that may in fact change the very direction of this country for years to come.

Watch out, this generation has broadband and a purpose.

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Originally published in The Eureka Reporter

We didn’t stop the fire!

If you’ve been living in a cave, or in your school books, the Olympic torch is making its way to key cities worldwide in the lead up to the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing.

Usually, star athletes from respective nations run the torch around one of their cities in tribute to the games in celebration of peace.

I won’t bore you with all the history, but the Olympics started as a 9th-century Greek sporting event where blood-hungry phalanx dropped their spears and picked up a throwing disk. People could travel freely across Greece without fear of violence during the games.

If you know anything about Greek history, that’s pretty damn impressive. Too bad the Chinese government can’t find a minute to put down their guns, batons or whips.

Yes, I’m talking about the 57-year occupation, and repression, in Tibet, the sweatshop conditions of Chinese factories (though its getting better), the Great Firewall of China and the military support of the genocidal Sudanese government.

I could go on, but these are a few examples of what symbolizes China today, politically. It’s no surprise that tens-of-thousands of angry people took to the streets worldwide in protest of China hosting the Olympic games.

Concerns over the safety of the torch began in London, on April 6, when police and protesters clashed. By protesters, I mean both the pro-China, supporters of the games, and the pro-Tibet, boycott cheerleaders.

Several times. those against the games almost seized the torch from the hands of athletes before being beaten back by Chinese security and horse-mounted English police.
Then the torch moved to Paris, where the torch lost its flame several times. French police say it was a technical malfunction, even though CNN reported that the flame went out twice during fights between police and protesters.

All the while officials in San Francisco, the torches next step, grew concerned about what chaos would erupt there. Chaos was an understatement.

Rather than a traditional torch run by athletes, officials gave the torch a grand tour of the city’s waterfront during a nice bus ride. The route changed multiple times, much to the sadness of protester and supporter alike.

So devious was the move by Mayor Gavin Newsom that San Francisco County Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin compared him to the premier of China, with his “secrecy, lies, misinformation, lack of transparency and manipulating (of) the populace.”

This is a travesty for all sides. In the name of not repeating the melee images between protesters and police, the mayor of San Francisco denied every person the right to cheer and jeer the torch. Most of the time, people were chasing the torch around the city. At least it was a nice day in the Bay that day.

Don’t get me wrong, I understand the reason why Beijing got the games. By having China – a country with an atrocious human rights record – host the games, it could force Chinese leaders to clean up their act…maybe even their environment (even the International Olympic Committee warns of the high level of air pollution there).

Yet even with the spotlight focused on the country, you have the violent repression of protesters in Tibet weeks earlier. Have labor conditions been improving? There have been strides in that direction. Yet you can’t forget about the flood of investment by multinationals eager to sponsor the games, and even after the repression of Tibetan protesters, still back the country.

And that’s what it really comes down to isn’t it. Multinationals rallied to China during the Olympic selection process in 2001. In fact, that same year China joined the World Trade Organization, forcing it to adopt economic policies to open up its market more – that’s 1.3 billion people mind you in what was one of the last communist countries in the world.

I think the question that should be asked in this Olympic-games debacle is how much of the support for these games being hosted in Beijing have to do with further “freeing” the markets of China, cause certainly doesn’t seem to have anything to do with how the country treats its own citizens, or those they occupy for that matter.

Americans polled realize a U-turn is in order

News keeps getting worse for the country, and Americans nationwide are being to see the fissures in the way things have been run for the past seven years.

In a New York Times/CBS News poll conducted between March 28 and April 2, 81 percent of Americans thought the country had “pretty seriously gotten off the wrong track.”

The New York Times and CBS News conduct this poll with the same exact questions every month or so. The last time so many people disapproved of the direction of the nation was back in the early 1990s.

Guess who was president then? No really, take a wild guess.

Now, you should always be wary of polls. I mean, what does the average American know? They act on emotion, can be easily swayed by long-winded, impassioned speeches.

Seriously, what is wrong with this country? The liberals would have you think everything is crumbling! Run and hide. And the poll reflects that.

Get this, the most important problem facing the country in this poll is the economy. Give me a break. The economy is fine, even if 66 percent polled think we’re in a recession.

A recession is such a nasty word anyway. Instead, let’s use phrases like a sleepy economy, or out-to-lunch economy.

This is so silly, I mean the economy. It’s not like 80,000 people lost their jobs in March or anything, or that the national unemployment rate rose to 5.1 percent – the third month in a row that those numbers are on the rise.

If that doesn’t sell you that this poll is a liberal-created façade, look at this number – 28 percent approve of President George W. Bush’s job.

Come on people! He invaded Iraq and look how safe we are now. Got to give credit you know, we haven’t had a terrorist attack on the American mainland – cough – homeland since the Anthrax scares.

Not that the war is costing the country that much. I mean numbers are numbers, and $600 billion is just another number.

Seriously though, to see this kind of concern before the economy really hits the fan should cause concern. This is simply the consequence of cutting taxes, waging wars across the world and subsidizing industries that make tons of money in the first place. Perhaps we should re-evaluate those policies instead of the ingenious “stimulus” package that treats symptoms and not the disease.

Black hole devours Earth, maybe…

Most tales of apocalypse speak of grand nuclear wars, far-reaching global epidemics and the good old 2012 pole flipping, freeze-the-whole-world-over worry. Well, add one more doomsday scenario to that list: black holes.

Black holes sucking up the Earth seems far-fetched to say the least, but people in the scientific community take the possibility so seriously that two physicists took action.

That’s what I’m talking about, get down on that gravity-sucking space anomaly! There’s sure as hell nothing else of importance going on.

The issue revolves around a particle accelerator, a device used to smash atoms, outside Geneva due for completion this summer.

Physicists plan to use the $8 billion accelerator, called the Large Hadron Collider to “recreate energies and conditions last seen a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang.”

The project alarmed two physicists who claim that the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) downplayed the risk of this accelerator creating a tiny black hole that could destroy the Earth, and maybe even the universe.

On March 21, physicists Walter Wagner and Luis Sancho filed a lawsuit in Honolulu to seek a temporary restraining order to stop CERN from proceeding with the project until it creates a safety and environmental assessment report.

No this is not a dream or sci-fi movie. The concern over accelerators creating black holes is nothing new in the physics world.

“The possibility that a black hole eats up the Earth is too serious a threat to leave it as a matter of argument among crackpots,” said CERN theorist Michelangelo Mangano.

Legal obstacles aside with an American lawsuit against a European organization, there have been reports of these colliders producing what could be called black holes.

A New York-based particle accelerator produced a fireball whose core had “a striking similarity to a black hole.”

Other reports showed that, theoretically, a particle accelerator could be used to create a tiny black hole.

“An astronomical black hole forms when enough matter is squashed into a small enough space to reach a critical density. According to theory, the same critical density could be reached if two particles slam violently together, creating a tiny black hole.”

What the heck would us humans do with a black hole anyway? I guess we could research it. Harness it as an energy source. Go for a ride down the gravity hole. Back to this lawsuit.

Despite all of the war and tragedy in the world, these two physicists chose to fight the black hole battle. It will be interesting to see where the lawsuit goes, and whether this particle accelerator goes online.

And you can’t blast someone for doing what they love, no matter how crazy it is. Let this be an inspiration to all those peoples out there who are wary of taking action. If you’re that passionate about a cause, go for it, especially before a black hole eats you up.

Photo illustration by yours truly.

Brace yourselves! Bush lied about Iraq!

It may be hard to believe, but more evidence points to President Bush and his crew lying about why the U.S. should go to war with Iraq. No seriously. The opposite of truth. You know, when you tell people something so they go along with you, even if what you want to do is illegal and not in those people’s interests. Yeah that’s it.

The blow this time came from a non-profit investigative journalism group called The Center for Public Integrity. The group decided to create a huge database packed with all the statements Bush and his crew told the media, and Americans, that have since been proven false.

The study found at least 935 false statements made between Sept. 11, 2001 and Sept. 2003. That’s about 380,000 words. All this in at least 532 occasions, ranging from speeches, briefings, etc.). Bush alone made 232 false statements about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and 28 false statements about links between al Qaeda and Iraq. Others in the Bush crew added this, one of the country’s largest attempts by government to deceive the public into war.

This group should get a round of drinks for digging through hundreds of interviews, speeches, video, and what-have-you to compile this one-stop shop of on-the-record lies by Bush, by Cheney, by Rice, Powell, Wolfowitz, Fleischer and McClellan. Seriously, you ever try to listen to Bush speak?

To cover all the lies in detail would take more space than had here at the moment. But, the two biggest lies worth looking into is the WMD claim and the al Qaeda/Iraq connection. So why would an American president lie to the public. That can’t happen! This is a democracy…

Well, even in democracies, people lie. And who benefits? Ask oil companies like Exxon-Mobil that broke the world record for profits earned in 2005 – $39.5 billion! Just four-years earlier, when oil was $20 a gallon (those were the days), oil companies were struggling to make profits. With oil floating around $100/gallon, wonder who benefits.

Not just Big Oil. Every bullet is pressed from the defense industry. Every stealth bomber is crafted from the aircraft industry. Every military base needs a logistics company like Kellogg, Brown and Root. This is not a conspiracy. This is capitalism. And when you follow the money trail, people like Bush, Cheney and Rice are connected with these industries.

So you’re the president of the U.S. and you want to invade an oil-rich country under U.N. sanctions for more than 10 years. Many of your advisers are former Big Oil execs. That oil-rich country is negotiating oil contracts with other countries like China and Russia. Attacking that oil-rich country would make billions for your friends, and possibly your crew. That country is not a threat. What do you tell the public…you tell them this.

Big Brother is watching you, and you, and you..

Sometimes getting an award is a good thing. Something to celebrate. A trophy to display to your friends. Bragging rights. Well, some awards should be swept under the carpet, never to be found. One such award was given to the U.S. at the end of 2007, and it isn’t something to brag about.

The U.S. joined the ranks of such stars as Russia, the United Kingdom and China when it comes to privacy rights. The U.S. received the worst rank for privacy rights – getting an award as an “endemic surveillance society.” Its rank dropped from “extensive surveillance society” after Congress further eroded privacy rights, and it was revealed that the FBI is creating the largest biometric database in the world.

The English-based privacy rights group Privacy International has highlighted, since 1997, the status of many countries when it comes to protecting a person’s privacy. The group looks into things like a country’s constitutional guards to privacy and surveillance on its own people.

In a country that acts as a leader of freedom, the lack of privacy protections doesn’t fall in line with the rhetoric. Since President Bush took office in 2001, civil liberties and individual rights have slowly been eroded by laws like the Patriot Act. On August 4, 2007, Congress gave the government a blank check to wiretap all telephone and electronic communication from the U.S. to another country without a warrant.

That’s not all. The FBI will be creating the world’s largest biometric database at the cost of $1 billion. Biometrics include fingerprints, DNA and physical descriptions. The database would give the FBI the ability to easily identify Americans whether a criminal or not. Moves by the government like this helped to add to the “deteriorating” privacy rights in the U.S.

This obsession with identity by the U.S. government can be connected with the state of its prisons. In 2005, 1 in 136 Americans were behind bars. The U.S. also has the gold metal for the most amount of its own people in prison in the world. This obsession with security raises fears by critics of an impending police state.

So is Big Brother watching you? You bet. Stay tuned for May when the REAL ID Act comes into full effect, a law that will require state IDs to fall into federal standards, including a “common readable technology” that includes RFID chips. These constant attacks on privacy will only leave all Americans naked, exposed and shaking in the wind.

Map from privacyinternational.org.