I musta been a sheep when they passed this . . .

from BoingBoing

Australia puts out for Hollywood with new copyright law

Australia is finally reforming its backwards copyright law, which made it illegal to record shows off the TV and radio, and to rip CDs for personal playback. However, in the process, they proposed a new law that is even more backwards -- one that prohibits watching your recorded shows more than once, one that doesn't allow you to make backups of your CDs, and that doesn't let you loan them to friends.

Australia's digital TV standards come from the DVB, a standards-setting body that is in the midst of creating one of the worst, most restrictive crippleware DRMs ever conceived of. With this new law in place, the "super-broadcast-flag" envisioned by DVB will be a slam dunk in Australia.

It's funny: the Hollywood cartel couldn't get the US to adopt the Broadcast Flag, so they went and sold this bill of dubious goods to Australians. You'd think Australia would be smarter than that: it's pretty sad to be the easy-lay nation that Hollywood turns to when it can't convince America to put out.

Are there any wingnuts out there can't see that this bit of Yankey Doodle Gob-jobby is gonna get Costello into heaps of pain when his yooth demographic runs outa music! As Beazley's world still runs on vinyl, mayhaps someone will tell him that this will deliver votes from a mob that normally don't interrupt their grazing for anything . . .

Beazely! - Sheep Have Ipods!

They shoot Boomers, don't they?

One of my Grandfathers rode out of Colac to collected three Gallipoli Stars. His father drove the Cobb & Co Mail coach right up till a new fangled motor-lorry forgot to drive itself home when the 90-year-old bushie fell asleep at the "reigns". The other Gramps was the son of an immigrant Welsh Chemist who settled in Narrabri. An educated 16-year old in 1914, Pop took one look at situation in Europe and promptly became a cabinet maker at the Enfield Rail Yards in Sydney - an activist, atheist and socialist preacher, a Cabinet Maker to the Cockies.

These two didn't know each other, and never had that great debate that formed and polarized both branches of my family. I listened to both sides, agreeing with each in turn, but never together. The twin mirrors merged into an extended dialogue that a hapless and naive adolescent stitched into a world view that is, at once, immensely tolerant of others and totally at odds with the shallowness of human perception.

Now I bin grey'd and confused for so long - it ain't news . . . somewhere, out in the dreaming, there's a mob of post- boomer generations who mumble, unhelpfully, about grey nomads, Jews, wogs, etc. (If you thank us for the toys, kiddies, you can blame us for all the crap.) It was our parents who had the bejesus scared out of them by WW II, it was me (a boomer) who took advantage of the folks who swore "never again", again. In that great public push after the war - in a profound desire to ensure the world didn't repeat the mistakes - the UN flag was raised as an alternative to the misery.

(The UN is dead now. It gave up its soul when it couldn't stop the Coalition of the Willing from eating Iraqi kids, live to air, for material gain. The UN died defending its powerful patrons, the UN allowed itself to take sides and this just isn't survivable for a global umpire.)

The generation I exploited in the 60s was the same generation that fought over and destroyed a fair part of the civilized world in WW II. After getting the blame for 60 million deaths there was no way they were gonna profit from it unmolested. (I was only nineteen.) They had clearly, demonstrably failed their civilian populations and they got booted up the arse by their own kids - us hippy boomers. Then, reality sets in . . . they'd let us win.

Mum and Dad somehow didn't trust what their folks had taught them, after two world wars, the "blind obedience to authority" trampoline was pushed aside because it was dangerous to kids. The boomers are those protected kids, the 60s student hippies were outraged by authority when conscription meant the jungle nightmare. The revolution was as inevitable then as it is now. The boomers are a lousy demographic to pick on if you rely only on big brother sound bites.

The boomers, in my mirrors, became evenly divided - those who cherished their children directly, no matter what came along, and those who never really met their kids - they were busy making the bucks and giving their kids every advantage possible, way into the future. Both were compelling arguments until theMarket chose sides. Suddenly half the population had money and theMarket covering its bum, those who chose their kids over consumerism were, and are, vilified as "hippies, layabouts, welfare cheats, etc". Hippies are anti consumerist and hostile to economic fundamentalists. As a consequence, half the population thinks it's their sacred duty to imagine hippies and all the socialist/social democrat pinkos as the enemy.

In theMarket's ken, you are simply
a.) Profiting from it
b.) Working for it
c.) Contributing to it
or
c.) Hell spawn, witch, hippy, commie, etc.
The entire industrial revolution is based on this work ethic.

Most Boomers remember that for every drug-encrusted radical out there there was a straight dealer working the crowd. We grew out of the drugs and got on with it, but the profiteers followed along like hags until they finally regained the power and completed the revolution, The wheel is coming around again - theMarket is at "top-dead-centre". Shit! Do you need a degree in Tantric Activism to know it's time to start banging on the bars. Some things need to be repeated, ad nauseum, in this case it's both the message and the music - "Freedom is a constant, eternal struggle". Were genXers watching T.V.? Why did they stay so quiet for so long? Feel free to abuse me, please, it would be a sign of life, at least - I'm nowhere near as scary as the bloke paying your wages.

So where did things go wrong? "All the way with LBJ" had been soundly routed, so the second wave of teenagers chilled out and switched on a MacTelevision. By the end of the seventies the 12-14 year old GenXers were firmly understood by theMarket and bracketed with the "greed is good", "buy now, pay later" and "Ronny McD is your best friend" advertising and, fuck me, it's "life's too hard" and home to mum and dad to bitch about the boomers - this is not my story, it's yours. As I keep telling my four 20-somethinks.

The only truth I heard from Keating was when he called Australia the "arsehole of the world" and the "banana republic" jibe. He didn't mention that there is no difference between a banana republic, an oil republic or a democratic republic - If you're a one-trick pony and that trick isn't sustainable then the market can and will dictate your social outcomes. Australia has many crocodiles and just a few trick holes in its geography - these holes are protected as places of worship, a source of eternal wealth for the theMarket believers, in 20 years they will be old bones, a smile on the dial of the crocodile.

If boomers are to be dealt with as a group, then they are no different than any other group of humans, across time from America to Rome. Greed is life's minimum requirement, whether animal or insect, the ability to curb greed is the mark of true civilization (at least in my treehouse), hence my disdain for capitalism - it legitimizes and rewards larceny.

Australia is just another street walker, pimped hard by the market till she's so old and ugly her own kids will be ashamed of her. If you're serious about the future, take yer dick out of your wallet and give the old girl a break.

Pot Verses the DopesWhoDon't

This extract is from the Economist - A frightful little Nun put me on to it.
(theHippy long ago escaped the drudgery of "scalpel and Wax" but cutting and pasting in moderation is cool while the chuffer is warming):

IF CANNABIS were unknown, and bioprospectors were suddenly to find it in some remote mountain crevice, its discovery would no doubt be hailed as a medical breakthrough. Scientists would praise its potential for treating everything from pain to cancer, and marvel at its rich pharmacopoeia-many of whose chemicals mimic vital molecules in the human body. In reality, cannabis has been with humanity for thousands of years and is considered by many governments (notably America's) to be a dangerous drug without utility. Any suggestion that the plant might be medically useful is politically controversial, whatever the science says. It is in this context that, on April 20th, America's Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued a statement saying that smoked marijuana has no accepted medical use in treatment in the United States.

The statement is curious in a number of ways. For one thing, it overlooks a report made in 1999 by the Institute of Medicine (IOM), part of the National Academy of Sciences, which came to a different conclusion. John Benson, a professor of medicine at the University of Nebraska who co-chaired the committee that drew up the report, found some sound scientific information that supports the medical use of marijuana for certain patients for short periods-even for smoked marijuana.

This is important, because one of the objections to marijuana is that, when burned, its smoke contains many of the harmful things found in tobacco smoke, such as carcinogenic tar, cyanide and carbon monoxide. Yet the IOM report supports what some patients suffering from multiple sclerosis, AIDS and cancer-and their doctors-have known for a long time. This is that the drug gives them medicinal benefits over and above the medications they are already receiving, and despite the fact that the smoke has risks. That is probably why several studies show that many doctors recommend smoking cannabis to their patients, even though they are unable to prescribe it. Patients then turn to the black market for their supply.

In America, this [research] is impossible. But it is happening in other countries. In 1997, for example, the British government asked Geoffrey Guy, the executive chairman and founder of GW Pharmaceuticals, to come up with a programme to develop cannabis into a pharmaceutical product.

At the start of this year, the company made the first step towards gaining regulatory approval for Sativex in America when the FDA accepted it as a legitimate candidate for clinical trials. But there is still a long way to go.

And that delay raises an important point. Once available, a well-formulated and scientifically tested drug should knock a herbal medicine into a cocked hat. No one would argue for chewing willow bark when aspirin is available. But, in the meantime, there is unmet medical need that, as the IOM report pointed out, could easily and cheaply be met-if the American government cared more about suffering and less about posturing.

Do you think that Sativa and her children are a bigger threat to health than a big mac in a Parramatta Road café? Sorry, rhetorical. I'm fresh outa figs.

Our drugs enforcement industry (including the regional cages you see round many country towns) chews up somewhere in the order of eleventy billion dollars per year to maintain. (I made that number up.) I do wonder about the numnuts who are prepared to pay so much for a "small government, low taxation, devil-take-the-loser" kind of society. Just so long as the disabled get reamed they're prepared to abandon their Tory/Conservative principles and let the Government balloon into this caricature that chases kids around playgrounds with beagles. (Sorry Snoop, Woodstock has no sense of humor.)

Drugs are currency, they're not illegal because Joe Blow might harm hisself and his neighbors, or because society may fall apart - they're illegal because that's what gives them value! Col. Oliver North was Hopalong Regan's personal guns-for-drugs dealer. To legalize drugs would would do to the White House what banning the Yen would do to the NYSX.

Ice and meth would disappear overnight if you stopped the profitable manufacture of the precursor to it all - pseudo-ephedrine. (Ephedrine itself was banned decades ago.) That wouldn't help that 2 or 3% of the population biologically destined to chemical addictions, though. They'll always find something new.

Chemical addictions we can see and ameliorate without resorting to violence - it's the insidious, invisible addictions loose in every human's psyche that are driving our culture raving mad. Prohibition is one symptom of that, religion is another. Zero tolerance is a religio-facist Utopian ideal, demonstrably unrelated to the human condition. All of this is maintained by fools, incapable of thinking critically for themselves, screeching self-righteous dogma.

Do you think Afghanistan could have been taken without the Northern Alliance - the drug warlords? Shouldn't the DEA arrest those mothers, rather than some babe with an ekky in her purse? Oh, right, that's different somehow. Let the Twerp who is without sin decide . . .