Politics, Re-Spun

Ambient Media Has Now Killed Off Broadcast Media

Time of death: 11:14pm, Saturday, August 15, 2009. And I’m qualified to call it because of how media works today. See below if you don’t get it yet.

This clip above is the most important 4 minutes and 23 seconds of the rest of your 21st century. Watch it.

If you’re like me, much of the data in this piece will be new to you and somewhat astonishing. I had to pause it a few times because I don’t read as fast as young people today, I suppose.

If it’s not all new, it’s because you likely already get how communication will exist for the rest of the 21st century.

Simply: linear consumption of communications, broadcasting, is gone.

We are in a 3D world of ambient information and simultaneity.

Get up to speed or be left in the 20th century.

One-way broadcasting via TV, radio and newspapers to passive recipient consumers is dying fast.

Newspaper circulation is declining rapidly. Soon we’ll see cable TV subscriptions declining fast as information is just everywhere.

I have virtually no need for subscriber TV anymore. The half dozen shows I watch are available for downloading in less than 20 minutes from torrent sites within hours of their broadcast on the east coast. And half the shows aren’t available in Canada without delays of months. I don’t like to wait.

News is online. Hockey? I’m still working on that one. When I figure it out, out goes my cable TV subscription for good.

The internet is a crucible now, it always has been. It is forming new means of communication. Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube have survived the burning. New forms will continue to emerge as the new printing presses. When they become ubiquitous, newspapers, TV and radio will finish their tailspin.

I spent many of the last 12 months working up a design to convert some of my editorials into op-eds for community newspapers. I have written recently how community papers are newly critical in sustaining democracy. I still believe this, but I’ve altered my sense of time about this.

Community papers are still generally owned in blocks by media oligarchs. We’re seeing daily newspapers and regional TV stations dying. We’ll see media oligarchs suffer at the core some more.

Community papers won’t have a chance to become critical for democracy until the current ownership mode burns out, leaving new forms of democratic communications to emerge as a phoenix rising out of putrid ashes.

But along side concrete [as opposed to electronic] media in the future, the wired world of ambient media will define a new relationship of information. Community papers of the future will not be so linear and broadcast as they are now. They will be more vibrant and interactive…as much as that can happen through periodical publishing on paper.

So, hold on to your crash bar for the wild ride ahead. And you can join me on the deathwatch of the CanWest media chain as today their stock price is at $0.14. Click on the 5y chart to see how they’ve fallen. All they are is biased, right wing TV, radio and newspapers and some lame web portals, all pretending to be objective because their model is pre-post-modern. They are a dinosaur stumbling over a cliff. I will not miss them and I will toast their demise as I welcomed the departure from this earth of Milton Friedman and Pinochet.

And what I’ve learned tonight is that I can’t convert a media activity in the 3D ambient media world into a 2D linear, broadcast media world by sending my editorials into community papers.

I can’t yet imagine how the future of media will look. I’ve never understood “the medium is the message” as fully as I do now, but I also know that in 5-10 years I’ll understand it far more profoundly as the internet crucible continues burning.

I must go spray some kerosene on the fire now. Join me?

Healthcare as a Human Right for Americans?

Americans have had it rough, what with their rabidly individualistic, anti-communitarian history and social policy.

From that, they have a hard time embracing things of the common good, like healthcare being a human right.

The current debate, with the wingnut lunacy of greedy hyper-individualists wanting to keep poor people without healthcare that others would have to pay for, is quite hard to follow. It’s rife with red herrings.

And the Canadian system is awesome, of course, except for how our own right wing, greedy, hyper-individualists are trying to destroy it through defunding it. Our healthcare crisis is a result of right wing governments privatizing, turning off the taps and trying to bankrupt and impair the public system so people will demand market solutions with health insurance companies poised to make billions off this new desire to pay for what we’ve gotten for free for four decades.

So, in looking for sound analysis of what is happening in the USA, I’ve read Greg Palast slamming Obama for giving backrubs to the healthcare oligarchs, but it looks like that’s the brokerage politics working because in reading Joshua Holland’s analysis, 10 Awesome Things That Would Happen If Health Reform Passes, seeking an achievable solution likely means not destroying the insurance companies and Big Pharma. Yet, anwyay.

Holland:

So let’s get past the fearmongering and look at some of the highlights of what’s really in the more progressive legislation working it’s way through Congress. The proposals aren’t perfect. As I’ve written before, in their current form, the bills fail the test of having a truly “robust” public insurance option, and as such has limited potential for cost savings.

But they are also substantial reforms that would go quite a way toward beefing up the health and economic security of a lot of American families if enacted.

via 10 Awesome Things That Would Happen If Health Reform Passes | Politics | AlterNet.

And in the mess is the new boycott of the otherwise progressive Whole Foods. Why? Their CEO is a rabidly individualistic hater of common social policy:

“We are all responsible for our own lives and our own health,” Mackey wrote yesterday in the Wall Street Journal. “We should take that responsibility very seriously and use our freedom to make wise lifestyle choices that will protect our health. Doing so will enrich our lives and will help create a vibrant and sustainable American society.”

Capitalism first [along with his profits], the health of the vulnerable and poor comes second.

So let’s cross our fingers and hope community, cooperation and the progressive ideals that the majority of Americans possess–despite how the corporate media tries to convince them otherwise–will allow them to see through the rhetoric and nonsense and embrace a real improvement in their human rights.

It’s time to get with the 20th century, America! And while we fight off our own greedy, for-profit healthcare ghouls, we’ll help you get into the 21st century soon!

Nigel Lawson: Public Enemy #1

First a neoliberal champion, now Lawson actually welcomes climate breakdown!

It will be a frosty night in Ottawa in October when the grumpy Lord Nigel Lawson spends an evening with the Fraser Institute celebrating neoliberalism and daring climate breakdown to challenge our adaptability. For $195 you can throw heaping stares of disdain at the fellow who was such a major champion of Thatcher’s decimation of social programs in the name of corporate greed.

Not satisfied to remove economic supports for the vulnerable in Britain, Lawson has written a new book that, as the Fraser Institute plugs it below, says the UN’s IPCC is a political correct gang who are not bright enough to realize that human adaptability is eager for a challenge like climate breakdown because, of course, all 6.5 billion humans are in a politically and economically vibrant position to be able to see our planet alter into something far more threatening and merely roll with the punches!

I suppose the right wing has moved past denying climate breakdown and now they’re just arguing that we can simply adapt to it. Don’t worry, be happy.

Fraser Institute 5th Annual Canada Strong and Free

featuring Lord Lawson

Monday, October 5, 2009 · Chateau Laurier Hotel · Ottawa

Join Mike Harris, Fraser Institute senior fellow, as he hosts the 5th Annual Canada Strong and Free Gala Dinner with Lord Nigel Lawson, former UK Chancellor of the Exchequer and Secretary of State for Energy.

Lord Lawson helped British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher re-engineer the UK economy through deregulation, privatization, and tax reductions that resulted in widespread job creation and business investment. Lawson has now turned his attention to global warming with a new book, An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming, in which he argues that the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has become a politically correct pressure group that fails to consider human potential to adapt to any global warming that may occur.

Join us as Lord Lawson explains why additional government control of the economy threatens to do far more harm than good and how proposed climate change policies will exacerbate the damage.

via http://www.gifttool.com/registrar/ShowEventDetails?ID=1804&EID=4620.

We’re Failing Our Grandchildren on Stopping Climate Breakdown

Our grandchildren will hate us for our informed inaction on climate change. I refuse to bear this.

I’m watching a National Geographic documentary on climate breakdown right now on the Knowledge Network. Saharan dust storms are madly increasing the rates of asthma and decreasing the health of sea fans on the reefs…in the Caribbean!

The increase in effects of GHGs in the last 30 years has increased the Saharan dust flying to kids’ lungs in the Caribbean. We KNOW this. Pleading ignorance is an offense to my children’s children.

US satellites are documenting more and more decline in ice. Are we acting yet? Only in a greenwashing way. Click on the photos to read about what is happening while we embrace mostly inaction.

New polling indicates real inconsistencies. Strong majorities of citizens in some countries are demanding more action, while similar sizes in other countries are dancing with complacency. Two of the latter countries are China and the USA. Together, those countries can eradicate efforts by the rest of the world.

We have to massively reduce our energy consumption in how we live, work and consume. We must force our leaders to lead in this.

I know I’m going to answer to my grandchildren. I already blame my parents’ generation for somewhat ignorantly contributing to many of our current problems, not the least of which are massive materialism and consumerism. How much more will we be judged by our descendants for ruining their world, knowing that we know better. The answer? To a degree I refuse to accept passively.

Alarmism and reactionary pleas seem to be increasing, policies seem to be improving somewhat, but we’re squandering our handful of years left to make the massive changes necessary to avoid breakdown. Now, shake your head and read this. And let’s get busy.

Think about how you will look your grandchildren in the eye. I’m not looking forward to that conversation.

“Axe the Tax”: NOW We Need that Campaign!

While the Axe the Tax campaign ruined the BC NDP’s green credibility last year and helped lose the election, it is time for an Axe the Tax campaign now with the regressive HST.

The government is consistently lying that it will save money by harmonizing the logistics of tax collection. They simply refuse to respond to complaints against the reality that they are also removing so many goods and services that are exempt from the PST right now. This is nothing new from this neoLiberal gang.

While the NDP is going through several internal reform movements since it squandered its chance to remove this anti-social government, one thing is sure: the party needs to do a better job of education, including, listening to and motivating members to be activists.

Judging from the mobilization so far against the regressive HST, this may be a good focal point for building a social movement within the party to improve BC and destroy this neoLiberal government.

Nearly nine out of 10 British Columbians oppose the new harmonized sales tax and believe it will hit them where it hurts — their pocketbooks.

via British Columbians overwhelmingly reject harmonized tax.

Shirley Bond’s Marie Antoinette Complex

shirleybond The heat wave continues-imagine being loaded on an Air Canada flight and then sitting on the tarmac in the heat for an hour – yup it was me!10:45 PM Jul 29th from web

Shirley Bond should keep using Twitter so we can see a better sense of her lack of empathy and perspective. Former Minister of Education and Deputy Premier, now Transportation Minister Bond, you’d think, would get some training in how not to offend the poorest 95% of British Columbians with her tweets…and how to update her Twitter profile to recognize her demotion in the cabinet shuffle.

Since her government refuses to choose to fund health care properly, BC’s health authorities are $360m in the hole. I personally know people who will suffer physical and mental trauma because of this. Many of us do.

Choosing to not fund education will mean hundreds of teacher layoffs and thousands of classes over the legal class size limit: a law the neoLiberals themselves enacted.

I’ve sat in hot planes on tarmacs. But I’m not responsible for massively increasing the misery of hundreds of thousands of British Columbians. So she gets no sympathy from me.

And while she doesn’t say “let us all eat cake,” the reverse is “weep for my suffering despite all of yours that I have caused.”

Give me a break.

I Am a Free Speech Zone: No Mayor Can Waive My Charter Rights During the Olympics

Granted, I’m not a lawyer. I consider myself at best a pretend-lawyer [I prefer "lay-lawyer"] so when I dispense legal advice I add a standard disclaimer that I’m not real. We’re all lucky, though, that David Eby is a real lawyer, even those around here who have drunk the Olympics Boosterism Kool-Aid[tm].

But when it comes to my Charter rights, I don’t believe I need to be a lawyer to understand that former Vancouver Mayor Larry Campbell doesn’t have the right to suspend my Charter rights, even if I gave him permission, which I would never do.

While the Charter includes right at the top a limiting statement making my rights “subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society,” I don’t believe the intellectual and political sanitation of communication to appease the International Olympic Committee is a reasonable limit or a part of a free and democratic society.

So as I’m following the dance of lawyers and cops around what kind of free speech zones I’ll be able to express myself in, I found David Eby’s piece today interesting, particularly in that it informed me of the [sadly not isolated] grand act of hubris of Larry Campbell in pledging to the IOC that I don’t need all my Charter rights at all times in all places during the Olympics:

the 2003 contract signed by Larry Campbell waiving Charter rights in Vancouver for the Games, and the bylaws passed recently by Vancouver city council giving that contract effect.

via A tale of two papers: Olympic bylaw coverage | David Eby.

Check out Section 47 at the bottom of page 23 of the Vancouver-IOC Host City Agreement to review such limitations. And read Eby’s piece on Section 47 here.

I simply don’t accept this.

Free speech violations as part of a sanitization campaign for global PR is not an acceptable limitation of my Charter rights.

This is why I am asserting that I am a free speech zone. And I’m proud that as I read David Eby’s piece today, I also received today my order form for the “I am a Free Speech Zone” t-shirt and underwear from COPE.

So it’s time now to order your shirt and undergear to remind yourself and others that you won’t tolerate the Olympics Sanitation Machine to come to my country and tell me I can’t express myself when the world is watching.

And our test over the next 6 months is to wear these t-shirts to events where the thought police would have some interest in controlling expression: places where the premier or prime minister may skulk around, Olympic venue opening parties, you get the picture. It’s time to see if our Charter still means anything now that the IOC ghoul is haunting our communities.

So buy your t-shirts and underwear. And wear them proudly because the phrase is part of the creative commons, something the IOC would never understand.