Abstract: I feel inclined to apologize because this essay begins with my personal situation and perennial complaints and exasperations. I should be wiser then this; at least by now. On the boulevards of the wasteland it's every dog for himself. Every smug pontificator must proceed "as if" what they put forth is not a narrow minded distortion of their subject but a critical and objective analysis, meant not to narcotize and assure but to "inform and enlighten."

Blessed are those who are indifferent to the suffering of others, for they shall be paid large sums of money.

To begin,

EMI, Britains member of the global music monopoly, has been less then inspiring in recent times. Not only according to me, but according to their shareholders who recently chopped off 16% of it's market value. The company itself is famous for hiring what are known in the industry as "hair and teeth" artists, young, attractive, blah, blah. It's the classic Brit business paradigm of judging people by the style of their clothing and what wine they order at lunch. I will spare you the names of their discoveries of late, because you never heard of them and probably never will.

My two comments are personal and general. On a personal level just what is it about the ALF they don't understand? He puts out the equivalent of a CD a month and has for years, in part because computers increase productivity ten fold. If you can't increase productivity ten fold you're doing something wrong. As far as quality, can you spell Handel? Great composers come in all shapes sizes, colors and creeds, but very rarely they look like fashon models. Grow up you jerks.

Secondly the advantage of centralization, mergers and big companies overall is lower CODB. (I can beat that with productivity, but it's a special case.) The disadvantage of centralization, especially in publishing, is one store, no matter how big, is not going to give you the depth and variety of a dozen. EMI"S problem is there is no Decca to keep it in line and focused. Publishing is like clothing. If you only had three sizes, little, medium and big, people won't buy the clothes because, irregardless of price or promotion, they don't fit. As the business section of the Times said,"the way forward may be to find and market more bands that sell decent numbers of moderately popular records." Exactly. And how do you do that? You, by legislation, assure the viabilty of many smaller companies. In the US the problem is so bad that it has spread from the business sector to negatively impact on the responsiveness of the social order as a whole. That is to say that along with contraint of trade has come an unprecedented constraint of freedom of thought and expression.

And, if I may expound upon this a bit, in America the top Universities are world class. The further up the scale you go in terms of post graduate learning the further ahead of everyone else the American schools are and this, whether anyone likes it or not, dovetails neatly with the needs of the information age. Because what computerization does is it delivers massive productivity gains. In our own field ALF, with his barrage of programs can do what it takes at least a dozen people to do the old way. We'll leave aside for the moment the question as to whether he can do it as well and likewise I am not suggesting that major firms don't have access to not only the same, but far better software and hardware. One can make a case that in areas where unity of design matters,"too many cooks spoil the broth." As Descartes said too many architects and you get a building that either looks like every other building or doesn't look like a building at all.

So, in comparison to previous eras for maximum productivity you need fewer but more highly trained and skilled people. That's why I mention the "dark side of the information age" is that vast swathes of the public are simply not needed any longer. This is the unavoidable and unspeakable truth.

I almost hate to admit it but it is a convienent fiction to proceed in our understanding of social changes as if they are entirely the result of the actions, good or bad, of individuals. As Neil Stephanson said, quoting a historian of the Victorian age, the pendulum swings and those people we see as the major figures are just going along for the ride. A realization of what I am saying can bring both despair and hope. The despair is when we realize that the destiny of the masses is not going to be shaped to any large extent by their leaders, or even, I daresay, by their degree of understanding. Because what and how we choose to understand is determined by our outlook and history. The hope is there when we realize that we are individuals and as such we can determine for ourselves and make of ourselves something that will have a place in the overall social order.

To really understand what I am saying though one has to disabuse themselves of two myths. First is the myth that somehow those in the ruling order are of a completely different makeup as you. You have to be carefull with this however because conditions affect people. You can't just walk into a position that requires a high skill level, be the skills technical or social, and perform that role by osmosis. There are two false poles of opposition in this belief. One is that it's not what you know it's who you know. For example I realized this when I first met guys who had come out of prep schools in the northeast. I had been at the top of my class in high school and what is more it had required very little effort. There was nothing really very challenging about high school. Perhaps to some extent that was good because I took the opportunity to explore things not on any curriculum. I was the opposite of the fellow who takes basket weaving to push up the grade point average. This in the short term worked against me, but now in later life I find there's not a few things I don't have to do because I already have. The guys who'd been to prep school on the other hand had been challenged to perform and thus were used to "cranking out" a four or five hundred word paper in an evening. Besides that, of course, they were all wealthy and had had an enriched environment from childhood, enriched both in terms of what they were exposed to and in terms of what they were not exposed to.

If one however considers the vast difference in education and environment between the priviledged and the commoner the degree to which some commoners succeed is impressive. Partially it's a matter of numbers. A percentage of the priviledged will not, for whatever reason, take to the enhanced learning they are offered and a percentage of the commoners will be intensely motivated, for whatever reason. And finally, in most cases as the hegemony of the superior caste expands and forces the formerly free commoners further into servitude the need for overseers, defenders of the superior caste, increases.

The first myth then we can say is of individual merit, in the extreme case, of the divine right, granted by God, for his chosen to rule the immoral, obese and degenerate. A comic book version of this myth is the celebrity culture. I call to mind one time I was in a Internet cafe' where MTV was on the TV. It is dedicated of course , to the celebrity culture in one of it's lower forms and so it was telling the public what kind of sandwiches the "artist" it was promoting preferred. As I recall the announcer in all seriousness told the audience she liked chicken sandwiches and didn't care for boloney. Ergo, if you want to be star, eat chicken sandwiches :-) It seems silly, but then we realize basketball players may often make many times their players salary in product endorsements, and who knows, they might not even like chicken sandwiches.

The second myth is that of the "system", in other words the idea that the environment can be effected by individuals. As if all you have to do is elect the right President and in a month or two you'll be living la dolce vita. This notion, which cannot be said to be entirely wrong, is propagated and enforced by the adjacent information systems, meaning media. The reason we call ideas myths, in this context, is not, as sometime, because they provide universal pardigmatic stories, but rather because they are untrue to the extent that they suggest such stories will directly effect the individual.

Please note what I am saying is being said on a note of some optimism. If we know what the problems are and have done things to correct them we are in a far better situation then if we blindly assume there are no problems. Therefore I am optimistic to the degree that the system is not completely monolithic. The notion that is you keep your nose clean, work hard and pray to the official God you will succeed may be a lie, but no one is forcing you to believe it. Let me rephrase that. Plenty of people would like you to believe it, and plenty will attempt to force you to believe it yet the only reason they fail is because they don't have the power and ability to make you believe it. As Abe Lincoln said, "You can't fool all the people all the time" As well, it may seem cruel, but to some degree the delusions that the majority of people suffer under provide a relative advantage to those of more discerning ability.

If I may digress for a moment into comparitively current events one reason we can suggest that the Republicans have been so successfull in recent years and decades is thus. Let's, for the sake of argument suggest all members of the elite cohort are crooks. Naturally the vast majority don't think of themselves as such but as far as I am concerned they are guilty by association. After all I don't see them refusing to be paid exorbitant salaries or refusing to accept tax breaks They may, in their minds not be crooks, but they are not crazy either and I am a very forgiving man, I can forgive them for not being overly eager to staunch the flow of blood money into their hands, pocketbooks, bank accounts and special saving accounts for the childrens eductation. (Mustn't forget that:-)

The Republicans then are honest crooks. They tell you right up front they are going to help themselves and screw the blacks and non anglos. In terms of political debate they sweep away the false mask of altruism and don't even bother with elaborating issues of complexity. They want to win because that way they can transfer large amounts of money to their friends and supporters. It's cut and dried. Whereas with the Democrats you're buying a pig in a poke. The Democrats betrayed the working man when they rolled over for Reagan and they never made up for it.

Plus, in a system of pay for play it is simply easier and less controversial to give a million to one man then to give a hundred thousand to a hundred. There's less paperwork. I am not being facetious here. I'll illustrate what I'm saying with a true story. An author had had a best seller and a year or two later was making the rounds of NYC cocktail parties asking people for loans of ten thousand to be paid back when she had her next book out and one woman said "Well, why don't you just ask more people for less money?" The reply, "Then I have to say thankyou that many more times," (As it happened the next book was only moderately successfull, because of presales, and that was that.)

So. in the allocation of power we apply Occam's razor. Given two corrupt men seeking the same office we choose the one with fewer friends. I have a friend who's a TV critic and he's good at it. He's one of the very few that doesn't adopt an elementary school book report approach and instead at least tries to look under the hood and see how and why things happen. But sometimes he's like Dan Rather, complaining about the air conditioning not working while the building is burning down. And I am increasingly less then thrilled about the notion that everyone in power is and has to be corrupt, if only because it predisposes us to judgement on the wrong critera, namely "what's in it for me?" It's a hell of a way to run a railroad.

The great wisdoms are always ambigous. Polonius in Hamlet gives the reasoned man's outlook clearly and yet his same desire never to go over the edge, one way or another mirrors Hamlets own indecision and in a beautiful and telling moment Polonius, who is forver hiding away his true feelings is stabbed to death while lingering behind a curtain. Tom Jefferson, perhaps in a moment of exasperation said people would be far more intelligent if they would just stop reading newspapers. These wisdoms apply very much in the information age when it seems the more information one gets the less one knows. Consider love. It's much easier to fall in love the first few times, and for the one who has either paid or been paid for love many times after awhile becomes a distant fairy tale, unobtainable.

Innocence is lost painfully and regained slowly, if ever.

Returning to our theme within a theme now, just to bring you up to snuff, we are up to the second myth which keeps us believing there's no hope to advance and even survive without someway selling ourselves into bondage. That is the idea that the nobility is an inherited estate and irredeemingly locked away from entrance by the peasant class.

Unfortunately this is more and more the case. Don't get bent out of shape by the word peasant. For example a little more then ten years ago television programming was made by independent companies who sold their programs to networks which broadcast then. In varied forms that modality existed in other industries as well, they were known sometimes as subcontractors, and suffice to say yours truly managed to pick the absolute worst time to start up an independent media company. The reason subcontractors existed is because there were laws and those laws because of the collapse of the political system were obliterated. The choice then was either work for a network or change jobs and the de facto result was plumeting salaries for those employed, much like in the music industry. And the difference between what Herb Alpert, Ahmet Ertegan or Berry Gordy could make as startup music companies and what their successors could make, eg myself, is on the order of millions of dollars. Maybe that will help you understand my perspective and persistance in, if not setting this wrong right, then complaining all the way to the grave.

My all time favorite Jerry Wexler story goes like this. Jerry was a producer who with Ahmet started Atlantic records by recording in an empty apartment on the west side. He was at the board in one the defining moments of the twentieth century, when Aretha Franklin recorded "Chain of Fools."

But anyway a little earlier Otis Redding had been a truck driver for for, I think the Pinetoppers, and he'd done "Shout Bama Lama" and there was something about him, other then his good looks: impeccable timing and could go from a shout to a whisper. Some label offered him 50 grand to sign and he an Jerry have lunch and Wexler says "I'll give you thirty," and Otis says, "But the other guys offered me 50," and Jerry says, "So what, I will actually pay you the 30 and not just promise it" There you go. Talent. Trust. Without these things, in music at least you won't go anywhere.

Just like mom and pop restaurants or small town hardware stores independent media companies have a hard time of it. Perhaps we have no right to claim special status. I have to consider that. If that were the case I'd have to switch arguments from abridgementof free speach to the harm done, not only to me, or to the industry as a whole, but to the consumers If you say people can only buy from monopolies then they can only buy what the monopoly sells. That is the present case and it is the Tamlinmediacos position that nothing short of complete dissolution of said de facto monopolies is acceptable or legal under both common buisness practices and the constitution.

The question is "Is there anybody out there?" Sure there's people that read blogs and they use them to glean ideas and it all adds to the overall dialogue, but personally I am not wild about the format. I'd rather be doing something else then this. I don't mind it but one aspect of it that bothers me is the ideas of necessity are short form and as well are in the language of words, rather then the visual language or the musical language. I also can understand how my concerns may not be what are thought to be the concerns of the general public. But this is a way I can keep from doing nothing. If that is all it is then it must suffice.

Words like free market I find particularly galling in the current environment. When we ask ourselves just how monolithic is the rule of the overlords then the myth we must be very carefull to understand is that like a pendulum there is some absolute optimal balance point. There may be and in questions of rights and priviledges balance is ever of formost importance Besides which, there are more then a few who predict with near certainty that the present mess, economic mess that is, in the US will explode. That doesn't comfort me at all.

Furthermore I am willing to say that the creation of feudal economic structures is not inherently a US problem. It just hit the US hardest because it was furthest along the road and it's actual cause is the entirely new electronic technology. As I've said in the past this technology is differerent from manufacturing because it alters not only the way we live, but they way we think. Feudalism, with Kings and fuedal orders, castes and strict information control was not the property of one nation. It spread throughout europe and was the result in an odd way of literacy. The weapons were there but it required the organizational abilities of those who could count and write to form the estates that created serfdom as well as nobility.

So a collapse of feudalism in the US doesn't mean it will collapse globally and indeed, if people only had their heads on straight they'd see that the imminent collapse of the American economy will leave her wide open to takeover by the very same global powers that adopted her methods of social order.. Ironically it may well be then that the surviving elites will turn to the same people who nowadays they dismiss as roadkill.

As to the present however I'd like to refer to something Lawrence Lessing of Stanford University mentions about how feudalism, both in it's archaic and contemporary forms, works. Feudalism is, in simple terms the concentration of decision making and wealth into very few hands and the belief that no person deserves more then they need. Ergo a peasant doesn't need to know how to read. or how to use a sword and therefore both things which are encouraged for nobles are against the law for peasants. Obviously these distinctions must be enforced The right of property says you have a right to own the land you either inherited or were given and the people on it. The first right. of land ownership, was easier to maintain since the land did not try to escape the way slaves always have. In the same way it is easier to maintain possession of physical property then intellectual, which has a tendency to escape into other peoples minds, thoughts and dreams.

Were it possible to erase the cognition and memory of stolen experience I can imagine Disney, for one, insisting upon it.

Feudalism however as a system had to be protected as well. This meant that if you were for some reason of a mind to set your own serfs free and turn the castle into condominiums you would be breaking the law by weakining the feudal system itself. The very act of setting the peasants free would be a suggestion that they did not have to be slaves in other places and therefore destructive of the social order.

One sees this happen in the contemporary scene all the time. If you were to to a state and say "We're not going to operate as feudal state anymore. Hence the business will no longer control the electoral process," It goes without saying that would bring business interests from other states and all over the country to see that the reforms are wiped out - not primarily because the particular state is such a moneymaker, but because in proving Democracy could work in one state it makes a strong case that the justifications of feudal rule in other places are not needed.

What this boils down to, both in terms of copyright law and in the overall questions as to how much knowledge is to be permitted the underclass (approximately 80% of the population) is that, for the feudal heirarchy to flourish, not only must it protect it's own property and see that it's message is heard but it must work as assidously to deny others the possession of property and the possibility of they getting their message out. The crucial and not often understood reason is not that a small voice would or could threaten a big voice but rather that the existance, the very existance itself, of a small voice undermines the basic premise which is that only big voices have value.

This is what I refer to in the abstract at the head of this essay as "the thing I should be wiser about". Knowing this also then explains the ease of co-option. To coin a phrase you do not shoot the message you shoot the messenger.In questions of power and wealth the concern is not what is sold, but rather who is paid for what is sold.

To repeat, yet again, the message is not the threat. It can be obfuscated, twisted, reinterpeted and watered down untill the reactionary may pose as the revolutionary. The threat is not to the component of the order, and indeed, like feudal barons fallen out of favor, large corporations do occassionally crash or come into being, rather the threat is to the order itself. A feudal baron, or modern corporate warlord, spends most of his, or her time, looking across at the other warlords, but the one thing that they agree on is that the peasants must not be freed.

To best accomplish and maintain this requires two thrusts into the body of a democratic state or society. They don't, as far as I know, need to be done in any sequence but rather each proceedure reinforces the other. They are that you must convince people that freedom of speech and thought is not important but rather trivialities in light of the greater need for security. I myself did not at first understand how deeply the question goes to the essentials required for a free society. Like many, perhaps most, I glibly replied "What's the sense of being free if you are dead?"

I did not give freedom of speech the respect it must have even though my attitude in fact was hurting me. Because the abridgement of freedom of speech, when all financial considerations are removed is based on a fundamental lie.

I am not saying the world is not a dangerous place. What I am saying is that if we are to survive we must be able to recognize the dangers correctly. In the middle ages people were encouraged to fear the devil and all his wiles as a means of making them seek security and order in the most controlled environmentone can think of, namely slavery. This was done, successfully, despite constant evidence that the church was largely a province of people who knew a good thing when they saw it.

I jest mankinds real nemesis is not illusion, for we have eyes to see, but confusion, for what we see is then fit into schemes and understandings that often place the cart before the horse. The two most radical, and distasteful, to Americans, explanations for the WTC attack are 1) It was encouraged by Americans as a sort of Riechstag fire, to solidify military control. This idea, in lieu of evidence, I just don't want to hear about. 2) The other is that it was a symbol of a nation that arbitrarily has been raping the rest of the world. This idea doesn't give me a great deal of pleasure either but it gives us a clear cut example of how the confusion paradigm works.

Let's, because we have to, work under the premise that nothing is proven. There's an effect, the attack. There are two candidates for the cause. One is it was done by evil people to hurt the Americans, the other is it was done by rational people to teach the Americans a lesson by hurting them. Since this is a thought experiment we might say the true cause is some combination of both, as yet undetermined, and leave it at that. But in the real world, like myself not wanting to hear the arguments of those who claim some Americans knew about and wanted the attack to occur, for their personal benefit or to "toughen up" the country, the only acceptable cause is that bad guys done it. In other words it places absolute judgement upon a relative question.

We do this all the time. That a person is poor, or a drug user does not expiate their committing criminal acts, even if percentagewise it explains it. But going to the next level, upstream, you have to ask whether you want the satisfaction of getting to punish bad guys or or would you like to see the number of bad guys reduced?

Without freedom of speech there is no way forward. One is trapped in an endless dialectic. We must not doubt that some like this. These are those who own, operate, and charge us for the use of the "dialectic machine."

This touches on deeper questions then appear at first, questions as to what is language, what is meaning? Is an apple baked into a pie the same thing as an apple floating in the ocean? To shout "fire" in a crowded theater is one thing, to shout "fire" in the theatre of operations on a battlefield is another. To take Justice Holmes famous saying a step further the act of shouting "fire" in a crowded theater is sometimes not so much an affront to the public order as an affront to the order of law itself and these are two different things.

For example in a system where slavery is accepted and legal, such as America had untill the civil war, there may be dozens or hundreds of laws determining the status and proper usage of slaves, that is to say, one's personal property, and they all are legitimate. They may well make sense in a common sense way. No court in such jurisdictions could, even if they wanted to, justify not enforcing them,

However, this begs the question, because no matter how elaborate and "fair" the treatment of slaves is made the context itself, the underlying assumption can be disputed. This is directly analogous to the problem of media monopolies. There can be hundreds of laws determining the correct proceedures for such monopolies to say for example "assure objectivity" but they are a waste of time. They are like Ptolemaic epicycles, needed to fit what is an incorrect map on to a stubbornly resistant solar system. Whether such laws harshen or soften by incremental degree a fundamentally unfair system is of little or no import. There is no acceptable face of slavery. My father learned this and I have too.

Concommitant with and contingent on the abolition of free speech is the dumbing down of the society. Here there are two means coming into play which serve the same end. That end, lest we ever forget, is the creation of a caste system and the death of the American Dream of equality. This is happening now and has been happening for decades. Curiously it is almost like a religious order where intead of creating a heaven on earth we are creating a heaven and hell on earth. Heaven for the nobility and hell for the majority.

The first of two means by which this is happening is the expansion of the notion of property the the consequent marketization of things previously held be be thought to be public priviledges and responsibilities. I am not so much talking about the literal "selling off" of natural resourses as I am referring to things like access to libraries, schools, medical care and housing. Replacements are being created but they are replacements meant to fit and futher the feudal order where you get what you pay for and not what you need. To turn a song lyric on it's head you can always get what you want but you can't always get what you need.

The second means is what Mr. Lessing has coined "the law of code", meaning computer code. When you buy a physical object, a book or a chair, you are free to sell it or give it to someone else. With computer code, for instance, some software authorizes by linking it's registration code to a specific computer, and that's that. Transfer of ownership is difficult and if the company goes out of business. impossible.

Can you imagine if everytime you walked into a store you had to give your name and address? And many firms are not satisfied with selling you something. They want an ongoing relationship. I dread now buying a new computer or upgrading because of all the hassles installing and registering. If it were one program that would be easy, but when there are many the organizational aspects themselves become overwhelming.

And while many of us grumble, we accept the hassles of registering because we understand someones got to get paid, but code is not human. Often if you forget to dot the "i" you just get a message saying "incorrect access" and it's up to you to figure out what's wrong. There's no leeway, no degree. It's digital, baby and that means you are either on the bus or off.

These may seem like trivial concerns but when one's application for a heart transplant goes though the neural net and someone types age 74, instead of 44 because the seven is over the four on the keyboard and they are typing fast, the neural net doesn't know that. In what we call "meat world" the persons standing there in front of the decision maker and they can see the applicant is not 74 years old, but the computer is blind in that sense, unless the code is good enough to note discrepancy between birth date and given age, but then if the code knows birthdate it won't ask ypour age and you can do a typo on birthdate as easily as anywhere else.

These are not hypotheticals but contrast the two weaknesses of digitalization. These weaknesses however are not perceived as such by the new world order, rather they are held to be positive virtues in that they in the first case strengthen and make more valuable ownership and in the second place the onus and responsibility for adminstrative proceedure on the user.

I jest that one of the greatest lies, which in light of experience is not so common anymore is that computers decentralize power and information. That lie had to be told if the systems were to be sold . It's sounds funny, but it used to be that right or wrong if you were sold a bill of goods you'd go back to the store and give them a piece of your mind and get a refund. On the net you can't do that. Caveat Emptor.

We've long joked that the Congress Building should be turned into a roller rink, because as a bricks and mortar institution, like the British Parliament, it has outlived it's usefullness. Like the Roman Senate it exists largely for appearances sake with the real power having devolved to the supreme leader who gains his support via direct top down propaganda/communication with the public through the massive information distribution system at their disposal

There is much literal truth to this as in the case of the millions of documents which are being replaced by digital storage. As code becomes the decider and enforcer of what was once law not only will prisons and police forces be computerized but the process of adjudication can't be far behind. The accused of tomorrow will stand before a digital eye scanner, place their personal ID card into the slot, place the criminal activity card into the other slot and in milleseconds will have his bank account or future wages reallocated, have a unbreakable GPS collar wrapped around his neck or be vaporized if perhaps he's a three time loser.

Judges will be obsolete because digital decisions have no discretional variance. Those hard and fast judgements will permeate all society, sending people down paths from which there is no escape.

The question that faces us is what to do with all the empty court buildings. Obviously they will be sold to the highest bidder, but should not there be some statue, arch or other monument, for continuities sake,to remind the slave population of their great good fortune as subjects of the new world order?

Call me old fashioned, call me sentimental, but I say "yes". Perhaps the old lady Justice herself, complete with sword and scales, and carved into the plinth upon which she stands, will be the motto of the new world order.

"Authorized Access Denied"

To return now to the matter of Britain. I wrote a few hundred words yesterday and then hit the wrong button and lost the file. I was not unduly upset and complimented myself on finally getting beyond caring about such things. The superior man faces fortune and misfortune with the same expression. As well, I've written so many good pieces over the years and each one would get my hopes up. I'd think "Someone will pick up on this and offer to pay me to write more."But no one did.

And as I said there are other things I'd rather be doing. Where ALF has it over me, and most of us is he can do what he wants anytime he wants. I'd rather be working on larger projects. That is what I have trained for. Even at this late date I do not know if I will or can stay in England. Protestations aside I don't require large sums of money. Bergman has Faro Island, Twain had the cottage at his sister-in-laws in Buffalo and even I believe Tolstoi had a writing area. To create world class material you need isolation, no phone calls, no clubbing, no talk shows. And that is what I do. As to whether succefully or not is a matter of opinion,v although one could go so far as to suggest that world class is not commercial, for the reasons I enumerated above dealing with the neccessity of the warlords not allowing their servants to outshine them.

So England to me is a place to get away from it all. When one grows up in the shadow of Manhatten even London is something of a backwater, hick, town. I've covered some of the basics both good and bad about Britain but there's one aspect that I believe I as an outsider perhaps can call to the readers attention. The Americans famously cannot see themselves as others see them. And at heart they don't want to. British and European papers and books are constantly examining and sending reporters to the US but the interest is not reciprocated. Before I left the US I suggested to a writer, with connections, I'd be able to present a Yanks View from Abroad. No reply No reply. No bloody f*cking reply.

Of the great truths we can say they are hidden from us for two reasons one is we don't want to see them, and is part of why they are great truths. The other is, since they are great truths they impact on us and we have little or no impact on them. In other words there's nothing we can do about it. This observation leads all the way to the greatest truth of all which is we will die and there is no afterlife, no cosmic oneness, no nothing.

I can say this but you probably can't either because I am a superior man or because you get paid and know what will maintain that. Take you pick.

This leads to what I am about to say.

Britain has seen for the past half century the cream of it's talent in all fields go to America, where the big money is. So above a certain skill level she am got big problems. The computer systems across the board, rails, banks, telecoms, even government have an unbelievably high down time percentage. It's not the hardware, it's not the software, it's the lack of personnel. The French and Germans don't have that problem because the people they educate stay put.

See? How simple it is to say? The bright side however is the economy, whether Tory or Labor, will be in the hands of people who have respect for potentialities. The corruption is nowhere as ingrained as in the US and hence the crash that everyone is predicting for the US won't destroy England Britains relation to the world marketplace is stable Like all societies that have been around awhile they know the virtue of custom, in all it's senses of the word.

And realistically can you ask the upper eschelon in any country or any industry to invite in those who will replace them? Supposing the entire managerial class is Britain, are second raters, the last thing they want on anyones agenda is a effort to keep the capable people from immigrating en masse to the US. If I was 102nd in my class I'd be buying for the top grads for anywhere as long as it was far, far, away.

If I, (incredible as it may seem,) was the smartest kid in Brighton, say, I'd get the hell out too. Er, remember the bane of England is the class system? A little perfunctory background is the empire was built by people more then willing to go to SA,or India, or Singapore, because there was opportunity there and none at home. The exodus to the US is a continuation of that process. What makes it problematic is that now only the best qualified people are leaving taking with them just the skills England desparately needs. The bright side is that if the US economy goes south then the wandering children will, like Prester John and Ozzy Osborne, probably return but, untill the US economy crashes, which is probably not long off people here just have to get used to anything more complex then pre war, precomputer age services being unreliable. I don't mind it. It's like camping out in Oxford.

But to expect the Brits who remain, especially those who benefit, to mention these things is a pipe dream.

The Tamlinmediaco has been fighting Los Angeles for years now over the same thing. . They don't give a damn how good we are. They want their boys on the front pages and the magazines and the personal interest stories and the rankings of the biggest moneymakers and we want our boy there. So I understand perfectly well how desparately the incompetant will cling to their positions and how they must resort to any strategem or underhanded scheme because they they can't win otherwise.

And finally somewhat trivially, but personally the music scene in the UK is based on musicians being first and foremost entertainers. ALF, with all his complexity and depth is like a scientist among school children here. Lennon and McCartney, (or, if Paul reads this, McCartney and Lennon) were abberitions, atavisisms, and one can see why were it not for George Martin they would have never succeeded. They would have been as talented but the industry would have failed them as it almost because they didn't look like Bobby Vinton.

Martin is an old man now. I have his companies address, kept it on my desktop for weeks with the intention of writing a letter saying,"Would you have a listen?" He's about a half hours drive from here. But I could not do it. It is not polite to ask favors of the great. Such codes, beliefs, intuitions, go far deeper then I could possibly explain, but if we are to remain true to who we are then we must not part from them no matter what the cost, if needs be, to the grave.

There's just a basic difference between American and British rock and roll. The Brits don't have country and they don't have blues. It's like Brit Cavaliers and American roundheads. People laugh at the seriousness of C/W heartbreak songs but theC/W audience doesn't and ALF doesn't.

Whether you like it or not, and I don't particularly, the definitive American rocker is Bruce Springsteen, straightforward, no nonsense. U2 is acceptable because they are Irish and you can't be Irish and not understand suffering The Brits, especially the ones who seem to get hired and promoted by the industry here, are comparitively speaking, chuckleheads, which all the old farts like because it doesn't threaten anyone and is like, happy.happy,joy,joy. Their rulers like them that way, with much style and lifestyle and conveniently blind with fashionable addictions that somehow never manage to kill them, but keep them in the tabloids constantly. They are of little use to us.

ALF is different from all these characters however. The object is to be a world artist not a national artist.

But this doesn't mean there's nothing for America to learn from Britain. One thing all Americans need to learn is to live in the moment, rather then always putting off gratification 'till tomorrow. They need to learn to accept that some people are better then others. Each of us is good at something. Even if you are a street sweeper, a rat catcher, or anything, as long as you do your job well, that's all that really matters.

Because waiting for the old America to come back is a losers game. There is now an aristocracy. How it came about does not matter. Every society , sooner or later, sufficiently advanced separates into the nobles and the peasants. If it wasn't the great transfer of monies begun under Reagan, the next administration would have done the same thing. We know this because every administration since then has pursued the same policies and each time the wheel goes 'round, year by year, the ability to fight it grows weaker and the power and control of the aristocrats over every aspect of life grows stronger. The British know this and they have learned to live with it and it's about time the Americans did as well.

It's not the end of the world. It's the end of a way of life, of some peoples dreams but if those dreamers are relying on help or a magical solution I pity them for they are in for a rude awakening. Look around you. Who is addressing the things th concern you directly? Who's talking about getting you a job, about health care? No one, Because they have jobs and homes and they want to keep them and they know the best way to do that is to make believe you don't exist. For years we fought that and where did we get? Nowhere. Count the dead. Count the dead on the streets You don't see any? You need glasses.

dream sequence

Cyberpunk Catechism


Okay, then. One last thing.

Again, what is the problem?
The problem is the MAYA.

What is the MAYA?
Chaos and death

Elaborate.
The restructuring of belief in a way such as to create hegemony over people by an elite group.

What is the basis of the elite status?
Violence, greed, and lies.

Has this happened before?
Yes, it is a characteristic of all human societies sufficiently advanced.

Define "advanced"
Though the cycle of cultural evolution

Is this justice?
Cannot be answered

Can it be fought?
Yes

Can it be defeated?
No

Will we survive?
Cannot be answered

We keep rolling the questions over, examining them in new ways when we feel we've exhausted the possibilities of the old. The more desparate we get the further down into previously axiomatic premises we are willing to go and discard. So, what if what we are facing, and have been talking about over the years is *not* a function of the technological empowerment of centralized wealth? The technology then is a powerfull fascilitator, but it is not the origin. We can believe this because there have been tyrannies before computers, cable tv and radio.

What centralized wealth does, through it's servant, the government, is actually a brute force mechanism for creating belief. Goebells is an example since his three characteristics of effective propaganda were 1) The big lie, 2) constant repitition of message and denial of presentation of counter messages and 3) artistic/technical sophistication. All can be thought quanitative aspects. That calls to mind one weakness of centralized wealth which is that it must make alliance with some form of the artistic community so as to create the confusion between the sophistication of the message and it's truth.

For the pharonic dynasties to flourish it was needed to establish in the minds of the subjects that the Pharoh was a God. This required contant effort and indeed a form of proof. The Gods, both living and divine, of that era and place are now, as Shelley reminds us,now long gone,but the proof,in the form of the pyraminds of Giza, lives on.

There's an old hacker's understanding that if you get caught by the government you at least will go to a trial and get a set sentance or aquital whereas if you are hit by a hate group, or other hackers it's much more covert. Swift Boat Veterens and Conservative Religious lobbies likewise are overt. They may be funded and organized by hidden elements but they are out front about what they do.

In other cases for example wealthy companies may hire people to post praise of their products in chat groups and forums, as well they can exert influence over newspapers and other forms of media to if not instigate unwarrented praise then at the very least prevent any negative things being said about their product. This can be done in various ways. As is said in the intelligence community the best agent is the one who doesn't know they are an agent, so too the most effective bribery takes place when the subject is unaware that they have been bribed. Like the aged millionaire with the young wife they prefer to believe they have, like Mr Trump, a "magical personality."

In a similar way there's the "pump and dump" a very common proceedure where anonymous sources spread misinformation concerning a stock's value, allow the price to rise and then sell prior to the inevitable clarificaton of the stocks true value.

The person who writes under the name "Caleb Carr" proposed another variant of these proceedures which is the creation of false documents discrediting those we'd like to destroy. As the saying goes bad money drives out good. A document could be created for example that said Abe Lincoln was paid large sums of money by New England War materials businesses assure there would be a Civil War, and that he henceforth purposely rebuffed all offers of compromise from the south and did everythingpossible to antagonize and insult them." The document could be a total lie and I for one cannot think offhand to whom such a document would benefit, but it would be believed in some quarters and would be impossible to disprove.

I jest that American leadership has been so obviously in the hands of centralized wealth in recent years it's hard to think of anything worse to accuse them of that has not been said, but nevertheless someone besides myself has read the Carr book, as evidencedby the little trick played on CBS. Although we must not accept prima facia the conclusion that it was bot a trick played by CBS on itself.

As Jerry Garcia said of Tom Wolfe writing about the electric cool aid acid test, Wolfe, being a writer tended to focus on the role of Ken Kesey, another writer, whereas in Jerry's mind the real focal point was Neal Cassidy (aka: "Dean Moriarity" in On the road") So too, the import of documents may seem greater in the minds of people oriented to writen things, yet the spread of disinformation is not the sole perogative of the government. As I stated before much of the ethos of competition and private enterprise, those hallowed phrases, can be seen as merely a childish distrust of the rule of law which is promoted naturally by those who fear law the most, namely criminals and those of wealth illgotten,

While the language of, and methods of, warfare has become acceptable in business when it attacks fresh markets there is a reluctance on the part of markets to adopt similiar responses. In warfare misdirection of the enemy is a critical function. This is done both to protect true targets in defensive terms by encouraging the attack of false targets and to help the success of offensive operations by making the enemy unaware of where the attack will come and hence indecisive as to where to place defencive fortifications.

"Maps were sent", said my friend and teacher, Al Jesson. And maps once sent, if not proven or disproven by evidence, are reproduced. It is the function and beauty of a free society to question. Questions do not need, nor should they ever require , justification, The advantage of a free people is that we, unlike centralized wealth can ask questions, pose possibilities, and unlike our opponents in the ranks of centralized wealth our questions are not answered before they are asked. Let us use this advantage. It may seem small and inconsequential but it is a pivot upon which we may lift the earth.

Long live the Virtual State

-Tamlin

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