Tonight you're mine, completely...

This film looks really, really good - i wan to see it... dagnammit!!

I tried translating the word document on their site from german to english using babelfish, and i thought the translation was so hilarious i'd have to share it with the world...

Statement of the producer "the zero-sums game" is a documentary film turned by Austrians in California, Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica over the life generally and the Surfen in the special one: a film essay of the own kind. For what do Austrians, Central European inland countries out, want to bring a straight film over the Surfen? That sounds nevertheless similar, as if Jamaikaner turn a film over the ski driving. Completely correctly: Our perspective on the topic Surfen and everything that has to do thereby, is a conceivablly atypical. But exactly therefore we have the possibility of near-happening as Austrians in the way selected of us to the vordergruendige main topic of this documentary film - riding on waves -: those of the being astonished. Beside as authentic a representation of this fascinating sport and its culture as possible it concerns to convert a longer journey the tension elbow inherent in stranger of countries cinematic. The spectator is to take part in the journey of of Los Angeles until Costa Rica - with all its philosophical short-circuits and kulturanthropologischen presumptions. Somewhere between "Endless buzzer" and "Easy Rider" and embedded into of Herwig the bricklayers composed sound scape; however provide with that typical-Austrian humor: We are the Hans Moser of the weltmeere, we are beginner, the wave become the absolute metaphor. With the Surfen it goes itself around the ideal utilization constantly changing conditions on a wave. With the production of this film it concerns to experience the constantly changing conditions during this journey not as obstacle which can be bridged to make but it straight the article of the film. The zero-sums game is a film over the Surfen with the means of the Surfens; an argument with the topic Surfen in physical, psychological and philosophical regard. The last attitude will be a total one of unaffected, perfectly breaking waves. The Zuseher - probable a Central European, who confessed at best on a Snowboard - must be able to understand the circumstances at this time already as ideal and at best directly into the water to go want: Half it pulled it, half sank it. Apart from all geographical ethnologisch informative criteria this necessity remains as emotional peak point. The Zuseher there to lead, is the filmemacherische challenge. The conditions of the things In the spring 2003 we had not many more than Pick UP a Truck and the idea to turn a film after somewhere over a Surfreise from Los Angeles in Costa Rica. In the autumn 2003 the concept stood, to Christmas the team. From Jaenner to April 2004 we turned here which can be seen Trailer over 70 hours in California, Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica on data processing, Super8 and 16mm, to air and in the water and that are a first view of this adventure to obtain. Since September 2004 on the raw cut of the film in Los Angeles one works. At Jaenner 2005 the second, supplementing turning phase begins. Afterwards the film is toned by Herwig bricklayer. The completion is planned in the spring 2005. Afterwards we want to present the film on festivals.

Pilger Address to Columbia University

I haven't posted in such a long time, but this piece by pilger prompted me to do so...

If we journalists are ever to reclaim the honour of our craft, we need to understand, at least, the historic task that great power assigns us. This is to “soften-up” the public for rapacious attack on countries that are no threat to us. We soften them up by de-humanising them, by writing about "regime change" in Iran as if that country is an abstraction, not a human society.

stephen frets well...

I haven't blogged for ages!! Recently started a new job so things have been a little hectic.

For now, check out Stephen Fretwell who I saw on last weeks "Other Voices" on RTE... the boy done well, he done very well....

His album is the next thing on my shopping list...

Racist Attacks in Ireland...

mike myers brother?...

playing for profit...

Kurt Cagle has another good piece on trends in the US economy, the state of play in the IT sector and the development of a layer of independent techies who are able to make a living without doing a "real" job, some of them buying and selling game credits on ebay. I worked with a guy in the states who used to make decent money on the side selling everquest characters and items over the internet and that was more than 5 years ago - i wonder if there's been an "everquest millionaire" yet?

It set me wondering about a trend i've been thinking about a lot recently. It seems to me that in the developed countries and particularly among the more affluent in those countries there has been a massive increase in unproductive labour - gaming, gambling, stock market speculation, property speculation etc. On a recent visit to bradford in the UK i was taken aback by the amount of casinos and gaming halls in a city it's size (pop. 295,000). The numbers of people gambling online (poker, sports, betting exchanges) has mushroomed in recent years throughout the UK and Ireland (I don't know the figures for the US, but i'd guess they're similar).

At the same time, huge chunks of the productive labour (labour that actually adds value to a commodity) in these countries is being outsourced to India, SE Asia and Eastern Europe where wage rates are lower and the markets have been rapidly opening up to the capitalism. The bourgeois politicians like to call it "the Service Economy" and it's going to affect us all in the years ahead. The conclusion i'm slowly reaching is that this is a serious change in the current period of capitalist development - the beginnings of a period of decay and reverse which could lead to big struggles ahead. If we think about the decline of the Roman Empire at the beginning of the first millenium AD or the gradual decline and overthrow of feudal society between the 1500-1800's i get the feeling we are in the middle of the same process with capitalism. The revolutions and wars that happened early in the 20th century across the world were the first sign of serious problems for the capitalist system but none to date have succeeded in moving society forward into a new, more stable and more democratic social and economic structure.

The current trends in the developed countries are likely going to cause huge upheavals as capitalism blindly thrusts forward in the hunt for new markets and increasing profits. Workers in the G7 countries are already feeling the effects of cheaper foreign labour in job cuts and downward pressure on wages. Workers in China, India and Latin America are becoming increasingly militant as the harsh realities of the free market and the colonisation of their industry and services by western capital gathers pace. We can see these trends bursting out all over the world with the recent Irish Ferries dispute in Ireland, a pre-revolutionary situation in Bolivia, and escalation of Maoist rebel activity in india, and many other flashpoints around the globe. I'd expect to see an increasing polarisation of society in the coming years, across religious (Christian v Muslim) and class (Worker v Boss, Socialism v Imperialism) lines as the trend hardens and people are forced to choose sides. I wouldn't be surprised if we see an emergence of the far-right in Ireland (probably cheer-leaded by Kevin Myers!) and we are already seeing a re-energising of the left here.

Any thoughts or comments appreciated (if anybody every reads this!) -)

wikipedia wars...

Kurt does a good piece on the recent furore surrounding inaccurate information on Wikipedia. It seems the right have seized the opportunity to wail and gnash their teeth over the rampant democracy infecting the internet. Wikipedia is always my first port of call when i want to do some research and it's really a model for what the internet can be in a truly democratic society. I always did wonder with wikis in general what would happen if people maliciously started editing/deleting information - the whole concept operates on trust and can easily be abused. It looks like they'll have to come up with some sort of editorial process to ensure this kind of thing can't happen, and i guess that will kill a lot of the spontaneity of it and allow it to be controlled...

There's also a good summary here.

Blurred Vision 2020...

Following on from Pinter's speech, check out the US Department of Defence's Joint Vision 2020 on the future of american defence policy... these fuckers will blow the whole joint up unless we stop them...

To really scare yourself about how insane these people are, read joe ronson's book - it is truly mind-boggling!

Pinter's Nobel Speech...

Thanks to seano for this one:

It's a strange moment, the moment of creating characters who up to that moment have had no existence. What follows is fitful, uncertain, even hallucinatory, although sometimes it can be an unstoppable avalanche. The author's position is an odd one. In a sense he is not welcomed by the characters. The characters resist him, they are not easy to live with, they are impossible to define. You certainly can't dictate to them. To a certain extent you play a never-ending game with them, cat and mouse, blind man's buff, hide and seek. But finally you find that you have people of flesh and blood on your hands, people with will and an individual sensibility of their own, made out of component parts you are unable to change, manipulate or distort.

And here's a good piece by Pilger on the man himself - hear! hear!

text to speech...

ding dong...

Well, I haven't posted on here in the longest time. Am currently working on about 3 different projects and looking for a job, so it doesn't leave much time for getting my thoughts up here.

For today, I'll just post up a few interesting links I came across:

In this post, Jon Udell talks about disruptive technologies on the web and draws some sound conclusions about how to give your web service the potential to disrupt:

These are the ideal conditions for what economist Hal Varian calls "recombinant growth." When it's viral, of course, such growth can also become cancerous. Malicious e-mail is the famous example, and it raises an interesting question. Most of us have learned by now to never click on executable e-mail attachments, even when they appear to come from friends or colleagues. Why then were users of these bookmarklets willing to ignore the warning (in some browsers) that the links contained possibly unsafe code? Here's the difference: digital identity. Although we can bind digital identity to e-mail messages by signing them, almost nobody does. The cumbersome mechanics of the PKI (public key infrastructure) certificate have made it a mainstream nonstarter. As a result, we can trust no one. That policy is formalized in the emerging white-list-style e-mail services, which classify all messages as spam unless the sender has registered with the recipient.
Blogs work differently. Instead of n-way authentication, there is only one-way authentication. Each author authenticates to a hosting service to post there. Each blog is bound to and emblematic of its author's identity. The popularity rankings that the blog indexers incessantly churn out are also measures of trust. As a longtime blogger, I've built trust that comes partly from speaking consistently over time with a credible voice and partly from peer validation expressed in the currency of links. Everyone can see that to violate that trust by spreading malicious code would be a self-destructive act.
If you're creating a Web service that you hope will have a disruptive impact, the lessons are clear. Support HTTP GET-style URLs. Design them carefully, matching de facto standards where they exist. Keep the URLs short, so people can easily understand, modify, and trade them. Establish a blog reputation. Use the blog network to promote the service and enable users of the service to self-organize. It all adds up to a recipe for recombinant growth.

And talking of potentially disruptive services, check out these:

This site allows you to keep track of books you are reading, films you are watching and music you are listening to and to share your lists with the world. I've started my own list here.

... and this site allows you to share books you have read with the world... grrrrooovvvyyy...

the special one...

the end of publishing as we know it...

august already!!?!...

Have been incredibly busy of late, so i’ll just post up a few links for today. I have tons of things I want to post on right now, but not enough time or enthusiasm to do it at the moment…

Kurt Cagle discusses ATOM and it’s implications for publishing and syndication. I just love the way he puts things together in a really interesting and dialectical way. Go Kurt!

David McWilliams has another good piece on the credit bubble in Ireland. It’s interesting that he has been calling this for 4 years now but conditions particular to the Irish housing market combined with an upturn in the US economy have contributed to the continuing growth in house prices and private borrowing here. How long can it continue? It looks like it will continue to grow in the short term with continuing high immigration, low unemployment, liberal lending policies from the banks and the influx of SSIA money into the market from next year. However, the bigger the bubble gets, the louder the bang will be when and if something happens to hurt the Irish economy.

And finally, a piece from the Economist on the Chinese economy and how it seems to be assuming the role of the engine of global capitalism. I was at a talk on this last week and while the Chinese economy is growing at a tremendous rate, the ex-Stalinist bureaucracy in China are facing huge challenges to their attempts to liberalise the economy. It looks like a turbulent period ahead in China.

Enjoy…

piracy unlimited...

a bunch of us today started a discussion on setting up a pirate radio station so i thought i'd post up some links that came from the discussion:

• first, an inspirational piece on setting up a pirate radio station. love this quote:

  We need an alternative media to bring alternative viewpoints and to give us access to music and art and poetry and other forms of expression...It's fundamental to the democratic process. If you don't have an open media that's freewheeling and chaotic and a wonderful mess, you don't have democracy.

• a potted history of radio in ireland
• a list of Irish pirate radio stations that existed before the government crackdown in 1988
• Dublin's Power FM

Thanks to Paddy for the last three links...

free books....

Project Gutenberg produces books in electronic form (ebooks) which are freely available to the public. These ebooks may be read on a computer using a simple text editor or viewer. The books are in the 'public domain' and there are over 16,000 available. All have been prepared by volunteers and cover the areas of light literature (Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, etc.); other literature (Shakespeare, Moby Dick, Paradise Lost, etc.) and reference (Roget's Thesaurus, The Bible, dictionaries, etc.). Many of the books, which have an 'Australian flavour', may be accessed from this site. Others may be accessed by visiting Project Gutenberg in the United States.

london calling...

grand larceny...

pop go fuck itself...

Well, the live8 charade is almost at and end and i'll be very glad to see the back of the bono and bob show for the time being. it's been stomach churning viewing most of the way and i can't help having the impression that this is just one massive ego trip for the majority of the "artists" involved. the patronising and arrogant attitude these people have to the general public and especially to the african people is staggering. It's no wonder they're so cosy with blair, bush and brown - their minds are wired in the same way. the whole live8 jamboree has done nothing but distract and defuse the real protests on the streets of edinburgh and will do nothing to change the economic slavery being suffered by billions worldwide.

For an alternative view of proceedings, check out pilger here and workers power here. David Mcwilliams also has a good analysis of how the debt was created and reading this just drives home the point of how ludicrous it is to expect the people who represent those who created the problem (the big multinational corporations and network of global finance) to solve it. Wiping out the debt will mean a massive crisis in the global economy and a massive loss of control for the G8 of their ever expanding network of markets worldwide. The only way to stop the debt is to mobilise the masses in the impoverished countries of the world to overthrow a system that guarantees their economic slavery.

On another note, a journalist for the NY times has been jailed for refusing to reveal a source - "democracy" is a beautiful thing, innit?

trotsky on stalinism...