A Black Feather, A poison pen...
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Grrrarrrgh
Just a series of rants today:
First of all, The RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) has dedcided to sue individual downloaders. The major labels are of the impression that since fewer and fewer people are buying the increasingly vapid glut of unoriginal, easily compartmentalized, homogenized predigested, prefabricated shit that they're selling at the expense of everything else and not factoring in the increase in CD prices versus the downturn in the economy, that they now need to sue individual downloaders to recoup their so-called "losses."
My first reaction to this is to not want to ever buy another CD again and go out and buy a better computer with a full complement of CD burning gear (right now i only own an "internet appliance")
hey, fuck 'em... if they want to play hardball, then consumers (especially the more discriminating among all of us who actually want more from our musical selection than just a flavor-of-the-month who will make one or two albums and then disappear back into the "where are they now" file once their novelty has worn off.
Artists who buy into tha argument that they are being ripped off by downloaders are being duped by their labels since, as i understand it, a lot of artists anymore see the bulk of their money come from touring anyway. The labels themselves take the biggest hit, but since they have become more and more a market for disposable commodity acts and yet raised the price they charge the average consumer, they deserve to be appropriately reamed in return, especially considering that since the advent of CD's the manufacturing costs of CD's has actually kept going down, they eliminated the "longbox' packaging that CD's used to come in. If a company is going to go into a snit that they suddenly aren't raking in revenues comparable to those of small and developing countries, then i'm sorry, but they'll get no sympathy from me.
(Later today.... 3:30 PM)
I've been listening to a lot of political discussion lately and something has struck me funny just now.
considering the hardcore, old-fashioned conservative (slightly-more-than-)borderline) fundamentalist agenda she promotes, shouldn't Ann Coulter get off her soapbox, shut her mouth get back in the kitchen and bake something, since that what her value system calls for anyway. Seen and not heard, if ya know what i mean.
Also, while we're on the subject of Ann Coulter, i would like to paraphrase her in taking the piss out of one of her more blatantly stupid remarks. Her original remark was about the dumbass known as John Walker Lindh, the "Amerian Taliban" stating that he should be publicly executed as an object lesson to liberals to show them that "they can be killed too, otherwise they will just turn into outright traitors."
Here goes, Annie:
We ought to publicly execute Eric Robert Rudolph to make an example out of him so that radical rightwing goofballs know that they can be killed too, otherwise they will just turn into outright wacko terrorists.
END PARAPHRASE
Seriously, the Olympic Park bombing was an international incident and a terrorist act (to say nothing of his other two bombings). Why haven't we deported his dopey ass to Guantanamo and let him hang around with the other religion-inspired terrorists... could it be because he basically holds true to an even less diluted version of the views of our US Attorney General John "1984" Ashcroft? Why isn't Donald Rumsfeld on the news threatening to drop bombs on that little town in North Carolina that basically sheltered this guy the whole time he was on the run and why isn't FOX (or shouldn't that more appropriately be FAUX) News branding them all as terrorist sympathizers... oh yeah, dopey me, i forgot, that's their target audience
And don't get me started on that blowhard Bill O'Reilly, while we're on the subject of FAUX News. Awfully thin-skinned for being someone who like to play the hard-ass. Between his whining about his exchange with Al Franken on C-SPAN a few weeks ago (What's the matter, Billy-boy, i guess your interpretation of being in an unfairly disadvantaged position in a debate means you can't cut someone's mic the minute they disagree with you, aww, boo-hoo, poor, poor Billy), and his griping about how someone needs to rein in some of the opinions of his critics on some of the weblogs that are out there, i just can't bring myself to feel anything more than a heightened degree of contempt for the guy, and even more for the people who spout back his opinions like they were Gospel.
seventy plus days later, still no WMD's.
The argument that "Hey. at least we got rid of Saddam" rings pretty hollow coming from the people who helped build that sick fuck in the first place
maybe more later..
EVEN LATER STILL, 11:35 PM
In other news today, The big story... Strom Thurmond died. 100 years is a long time... just glad he was apparently no longer the same mad who ran for the presidency in 1948... just hope Trent Lott doesn't use the man's funeral as another venue to make stupid comments based on that past. Maybe the Senator from SC wasn't a segregationist anymore, but after the remarks a few months back from Lott at Thurmond's birthday and what it exposed is that a number of his colleagues in the house and senate probably haven't let the acorns of their ideology fall too far from that particular tree
7:43 a.m. - 2003-06-26
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a jump to the left - a step to teh right
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