Posts by Russell Brown
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Stop giving them money, borrow against the strength of your own economy and invest in local infrastructure projects to stimulate internal consumption and generate more jobs.
That's a huge repositioning of their economy, and undermines one of their primary goals of recent years -- to prop up the value of the $US all those bonds they buy are denominated in. If they stop buying the bonds, the value of the bonds dives anyway. All messy.
But yeah, you might be right.
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Could we drop this argument?
I'm feeling a strong sense of deja vu, and it's harshing the buzz I get from simply being alive.
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I agree with your point Russell, it is a good one.
And I'm really pleased to see you back, Mark.
My favorite quote at the moment is from Bryce Edge who manages Radiohead – “If you have 50,000 fans you have a business model”, he is correct in that it is about having a smaller number of people who truly believe in you and then looking after them and keeping them for a long period of time.
And if that became the way things worked, it'd be great -- a situation where both sides of the deal had a degree of commitment to each other.
It's interesting that eMusic very clearly states its target audience is "**music fans**, over 25".
Music discovery, where you might not dig the same thing next year (or even next day) is a bit different. But every time I use Hype Machine, I think that I'd cheerfully kick in a little money every month just for the fun it brings me.
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Great. I'll be there. I may be slightly late as I have to transport a bunch of opera singers into town from Onehunga
There's a joke in that somewhere ...
so if a free drink could be saved for me (bloody free-loading arts practitioners) I'd appreciate it!
Done.
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Butting in: on Thursday is it okay for those of us from Wellington to attend if we are in town? If so, do we have to wear something that identifies us as visitors to the city? A Hurricanes away strip for example?
I hate fancy dress, so no need for that.
But HELL YES, do come along and meet everyone else. It'd be great to see you.
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Real world US debt is closer to 125% of GDP.
Not quite Iceland, but ...
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Incoming!
Several leading wingnut blogs have been stating as stone-cold fact that Obama's rapturous audience with US troops in Iraq was faked, and that soldiers were provided with cameras and ordered to take The One's picture -- because any fool can see from press pics that "all the cameras are the same models."
Uh, no, actually.
It's like a great tide of weirdness.
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Incoming!
A fascinating Homeland Security threat assessment report on right-wing extremism is on the wires.
It doesn't perceive a present danger of violence, but notes the trends in the 1990s, leading up to the Oklahoma City bombing and looks at where risk might arise. It actually seems fairly sober.
The wingnuts have gone completely nuts over it. Drudge has it splashed across his front page, pointing to a Washington Times story, which is currently unreachable under the load of traffic.
And WorldNet Daily is all over it. Check out the comments.
Why do they hate America?
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Clearly those 'significant costs' are being covered somehow
But there's still a problem that isn't just the preserve of music, but most internet media -- the advertising revenue is simply spread too thin across too much inventory.
For all the tub-thumping from the PRS about YouTube, that was the problem there -- just not enough revenue per page. It was *not* that Google/YouTube was somehow evil, it just didn't want to run the service at more of a loss than it already is.
Spotify is going to face exactly the same problem -- there's some money in it, but the incremental revenue is bloody small, especially in a recession.
But, like I say, the music industry isn't alone in grappling with that.
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From the Sourcewatch article on the John Birch Society. Forgive the long quote, but it's very interesting:
In October 1964, the Idaho Statesman newspaper expressed concern about what it called an "ominous" increase in JBS-led "ultra right" radio and television broadcasts, which it said then numbered 7,000 weekly and cost an estimated $10 million annually. "By virtue of saturation tactics used, radical, reactionary propaganda is producing an impact even on large numbers of people who, themselves, are in no sense extremists or sympathetic to extremists views," declared a Statesman editorial. "When day after day they hear distortions of fact and sinister charges against persons or groups, often emanating from organizations with conspicuously respectable sounding names, it is no wonder that the result is: Confusion on some important public issues; stimulation of latent prejudices; creation of suspicion, fear and mistrust in relation not only to their representatives in government, but even in relation to their neighbors."
The Statesman article went on to charge "that there are many local communities in which the tactics of the extremists have made life miserable for good citizens . . . through spying, nocturnal phone calls, economic and social pressures, stoning, even bombings, and other tactics alien to the American way of working out political decisions. … An unchecked increase in this kind of propaganda is degrading the American political dialogue to such a point as to damage our self-respect at home and our reputation for public responsibility abroad. These radical, reactionary positions are undermining American Democracy."
Birch Society influence on US politics hit its high point in the years around the failed 1964 presidential campaign of Republican candidate Barry Goldwater, who lost to incumbent President Lyndon Baines Johnson. Welch had supported Goldwater over Nixon for the Republican nomination, but the membership split, with two-thirds supporting Goldwater and one-third supporting Nixon. A number of Birch members and their allies were Goldwater supporters in 1964 and some were delegates at the 1964 Republican convention. The Goldwater campaign in turn brought together the nucleus of what later became known as the New Right, many of whom had been groomed by the Birch Society but whose more pragmatic members realized that the group's conspiracism and its affiliation with racism and anti-Semitism were impediments to electoral success. Birch Society members also authored several widely-distributed books that promoted conspiracy theories and mobilized support for the Goldwater campaign:
A Choice, Not an Echo by Phyllis Schlafly, suggested that the Republican Party was secretly controlled by elitist intellectuals dominated by members of the Bilderberger banking conference, whose policies were designed to usher in global communist conquest. "A Choice, Not an Echo" became one of Goldwater's campaign slogans.
The Gravediggers, co-authored by Schlafly and retired Rear Admiral Chester Ward of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, claimed that U.S. military strategy and tactics were actually designed to pave the way for global communist conquest.
Schlafly is still considered respectable enough to have a column as Townhall.com. And of course, we have our own star, in the form of former Act Party vice-president, and commie-sleuther and longtime "student" of the very JBS-influenced cult Zenith Applied Philosophy, Trevor Loudon.
Loudon played a significant role in feeding the US crazies "revelations" about Obama's crypto-communist past last year. It would've been a bad smell in most political parties, but in Act, they made him vice-president!
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