Rob Newman’s History of Oil

Set aside a solid 45 mins to watch this, because it’s really impossible to stop once you get into it.

I must admit, that Scott Horton guy has some amazing guests on these days, even though he does have a rather loopy voice and a fixation on one particular ’08 Presidential candidate. Er, not that we at Megamachine would know anything about fixating on one particular candidate…

The notion of Clinton or Barack Obama demanding passage of the Gravel plan was amusing, but no more than Gravel’s other foreign policy views. He asserted that Russian President Vladimir Putin is “much smarter than our president” and said Iran is “not a threat to us.” The United States, he said, should tell Iran “we’re sorry for what we did in 1952. . . . It’ll work like magic.”

Until the SC debate and this announcement, the Gravel campaign was being ignored by the MSM, and now is being cited as comic relief, so I guess we’re right on Mohandas K. Gandhi’s schedule:

First, they ignore you.
Then they laugh at you.
Then they fight you.
Then you win.

Just think about the point the system has reached, when proposition as obvious as the following are considered too hilarious to take seriously within “polite society”: that a) the ostensibly anti-war party (D’s) ought to be using its Constitutional powers to end the war it “opposes” and b) that the leader of a country (Putin of Russia) who, since 2000, has unquestionably improved the strategic and economic position of his nation against all odds is more astute than the leader of a country (Bush of the US) who squandered all his initial advantages and irreparably damaged his country’s previously high standing. Such a system is like a hollow husk, ripe for the first gust of wind to disintegrate it.

I feel a warm breeze coming from the Gulf….

*no link, because I no longer promote malignant tumors within the body politic.

Have any of you opinions on freeware or shareware audio programs for the Mac (or Linux ones which can be ported to Mac Os X 10.4 Intel)?

Disederata (desired functionality): capturing audio streams to .mp3 files, turning microphone input into .mp3 files, converting any formats (.ogg for instance) to .mp3.

Freeware would be prefered, but if there is a shareware program out there that performs several functions, or performs one function particularly well, it would be worth consideration.

Over the next several days, I will be trying a few out myself and offer my reactions.

Audio Recorder for Mac does a decent job of recording input from the microphone into .mp3 and is free.

Next goal: software for capturing the stream coming through the sound card to .mp3.

I ended up downloading, installing and purchasing Audio Hijack Pro for capturing streams and creating podcasts.  At $32, I think it’s a bargain for what it does.

Thanks for Tudsy for suggesting the very fine freeware Audacity.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t have all functionality I need in the Mac version.

What would still be nice to find is a free or reasonably priced program that would convert printed text to streams or podcasts, similar to Acrobat Reader’s “read out loud” feature, but with quality high enough that would be bearable.   Megamechanics encouraged to send in their suggestions in exchange for the potential high honor of being thanked by name (or nom de plume) on this blog and, in cases of true merit, commendation as a Defender of the Technate, First Class.

Flammende Rose, from the Nine German Arias by Handel, sung by a countertenor and accompanied on period instruments.

A playlist mainly composed of Misha Maisky playing the Bach Cello suites. Good to put on as background music while typing.

Another playlist with a very generous selection of Bach choral music by different performers.

Readers are invited submit their own favorite Youtube videos of classical music performances in “comments”

1) In spite of having announced his candidacy almost one year before the front-runners, Sen. Gravel remained a complete unkonwn. Sen. Gravel was invited to only the first debate in South Carolina hosted by MSNBC, and none of the subsequent ones run and televised by CNN, and was scarcely mentioned by any of the media prior to the April 26 S.C. debate.

2) After his powerful performance in the first debate, the media covering the event purported to see him as a clown offering comic relief, and one who wouldn’t be seen or heard from again. But thousands of people who had never heard of him before that night went to the ‘net and began promoting him via numerous individual blogs, but also social networking and internet sites where users, instead of proprieters rate and promote content, such as digg. These particularly promoted the videos posted on YouTube by users. The videos then seen and re-promoted, by links, to many more people than would have ordinarily seen any of the debate at all.

3) Some of the more inspired among those among the internet crowd signed a petition to CNN and the organizers of the June 3 debate in New Hampshire to relent and invite Gravel. Eventually, after the petition garnered more than 5 thousand signatures and his website received as much traffic (for a few days at least) as the fully funded candidates, CNN did invite Gravel to the next debate.

And this is not an isolated sequence of events: it seemed that something similar happened with libertarian dissident candidate Ron Paul on the GOP side. What these events portend is a loosening of the grip of the big centralized media, and its replacement by a more distributed, but in some cases, self-directing mass of users. This phenomenon is related to, but distinct from the “netroots”, which are usually thought of as being based on such sites as Moveon.org, Dailykos, and Talking Points Memo. Although such sites in their own way take a chunk of power away from established media conglomerates such as The Times/Washington Post “liberal” axis and the Wall Street Journal/Fox News “conservative” axis (strong caveats are understood about using such labels–but they can’t be helped if one wants to refer to such things succintly), they also are open to the charge, quite justifiably so in some cases, of carrying water for a more established group or ideology–in the cases I have mentioned, the Democratic Party–at the expense of accuracy and broad representation of viewpoints. The social media, being (apprently) the result of a self-organizing “mob” seems to circumvent that problem.

The respect in which the elite is to blame for its own gradual loss of control over the flow of information is obvious, the main source being the systematic shutting out of viewpoints with wide constuencies among the public–or at least, of wide interest to the public–but not in line with the corporate agenda. This has gone hand in hand with the corporate consolidation of the old media, continuing to this moment with Murdoch’s bid to buy the Wall Street Journal. A topical, but clearly related source, is the extent to which they allowed themselves to become shills for government insiders pushing all sorts of dubious claims–now revealed to be false–about the extent and nature of Iraqi weapons programs in 2002. Being revealed now through work such as the Bill Moyers’ series “Buying the War” these flagrant derelictions of duty are having an impact on credibility.

The downsides of this trend are a little less evident than in the Case of I, the Rise of Opposition to the Military-Industrial Complex, but are discernable nonetheless. The first is that people will mistake the sort of modest preliminary victory that can be won by the social media–such as getting a hitherto ignored candidate a little TV exposure–for a substantive victory. Thus, the initial victory will not be followed up by the real-world organizing and in-depth persuasion needed to sway people and change their thought-patterns, and any gain will simply fizzle. In this way, the time spent on promoting ideas via social media may prove to be wasted. The second is that the various well-funded actors with their own agendas will learn how to use and manipulate the social media under the disguise of ordinary users or grass-roots groups. To some extent, this seems to be what occured in some of the “Color Revolutions” that occured in 2004-5 in Russia’s near abroad: Western financed groups and local groups with particular economic interests and agendas posed as citizens’ movements by using the organizing and social networking tools associated with the anti-Communist and anti-Authoritarian revolutions of the early ’90s. I doubt that Americans are any more savvy at avoiding these sorts of feints, but as yet the social media is still not powerful enough in comparison to the established media to make it worthwhile for American corporations to invest the resources needed to manipulate it to their own ends. This is something to watch out for, though.

To follow soon: “Part III: Re-examining the Constitution of 1787″

The most timely and self evident trend: the final realization on the part of the activists and voters and donors who worked to bring about the 2006 Democratic Congressional victory they’ve been played.

The representatives in DC will take no concerted action to ending the US War in Iraq–and no “top tier” candidates feel any urgency to end it either. This directly ties in to the appeal of the last person to filibuster against a major war, and the use that Gravel is making of his Senatorial history as a draft-ender in his campaign. This augurs a more amorphous, but potentially much more significant trend: the growing consciousness (even, “class consciousness”), on the part of a large, young group that lies well to the “left” of the elite consensus of national security policy, that no one within the “acceptable” range of political opinion (Edwards to Giuliani, say) represents their viewpoint. Gravel taps into this with his head-on rhetorical assault on the military-industrial complex and making the direct linkage (which hasn’t been heard of in at least 20 years) of the amount of money spent on “defense” and poor funding for education and other domestic programs. The elite largely brought this state of affairs about by first raising, then dashing, the prospect of a “peace dividend” (remember that from ’92?) at the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The “threats” of Saddam and China filled in for the Soviet Union as justification of the outsized military for a little while (precariously!) until the “War on Terror” and the US-manufactured Iraq-Afghani choas (and now the “gathering threat of a resurgent Russia”–also manufactured) definitively removed any thought of a peace dividend. The potential for mischief here is, objectively speaking, very slight. It is almost inconceivable that anyone would be elected to high office without knowing the difference between protecting the vital interests of the US abroad–namely, the consistent flow of energy–and peripheral concerns of interest only to special pleaders. If there is a danger, it is that a well-intentioned reformer will move too quickly, and without fostering sufficient understanding from the public, to cancel defense porkbarrel projects, disregarding the great extent to which the current US economy depends on strategically pointless military projects. Such failure to lay the groundwork may induce a putsch by formerly coddled contractors, probably disguised in some legal form such as impeachment on trumped-up charges.

Parts 2) and 3) to appear soon…

Every time I hear of “journalistic courage” in the U.S., I can’t help comparing it to this guy. When you’ve found someone who, without any formal support structure or means of extracting income from it, set up his own chalkboard publishing whatever bulletins he believes to be accurate, even when they offend a local tyrant known for atrocities involving child soldiers, a local tyrant who once ran on the slogan “He killed my ma, he killed my pa, but I will vote for him”–when you’ve found the equivalent of that, then get back to me.

Although they’re hardly putting as much on the line as him personally, some of our better bloggers in this country are beginning to fulfil the truth-telling role epitomized bySirleaf. Check the blogroll on the bottom of this page for a few of the “high-tech” approximations of Daily Talk available to the discerning reader.