The Null Device
2001/11/29
Bootywhang, gothic style: Apparently having milked the Trenchcoat-Mafia satanic teen-tantrum theme for all it's worth, shock-rocker Marilyn Manson wants his next album to make people want to have sex. Fucked-up, twisted, gothic, mutually abusive sadomasochistic sex, of course; being a good goth, Manson is theming his next grab for the teen-angst market on the Marquis de Sade.
Read: Stanford technology law professor Lawrence Lessig spoke about why expanded copyright laws pose a threat to culture:
"The period of copyright primacy is going to end up as a huge hole in the cultural record."
Lessig said a major problem is the fact that copyrighted material simply vanishes because corporations aren't interested in keeping all that they copyright commercially available. Such material "falls into a black hole where no one will have access to it," he said.
The oligarchy strikes back: courts uphold DeCSS ban on linking to source code, and dismiss the Felten lawsuit against RIAA.
Stating the bleeding obvious: It's increasingly clear that, today, the US is not a democracy or a republic (of the people), but a corporate oligarchy, in which the preservation of profit is sufficient justification for anything from draconian restrictions on speech (such as the DeCSS decision) to atrocities overseas (think of all the repressive regimes propped up by the US to get cheap oil/labour/resources, from Guatemala and Chile to Saudi Arabia). Sure, there may be "democracy" (read: a system with two superficially different major parties, rigged in such a way that voting for anyone else, whilst not illegal, is a waste of a vote), but with the power corporate interests hold (from providing the sensory apparatus of most Americans through the media to all but buying favourable laws), US democracy is something more akin to pro wrestling on cable TV than to any meaningful participatory system.
As for the US being a republic, it is such if one defines a "person" as a
corporation, specifically excluding private individuals.
</RANT>
Anna (Meg's ickle sister) recently found a copy of a 1936 book titled The Art of Kissing, which she takes apart in her blog. It sounds quite irritaining.