Amon was asking me how to rip DVD’s a couple of weeks ago, so why not share with the rest of you the link I gave him:
How to rip a DVD: A Tutorial by Elliott Back
I’ve been using this method for ripping DVD’s for a couple of months now with no hassles.
I’m sitting here at the computer with A Current Affair on in the background (for some reason) , and the current scare-mongering topic is outsourcing. They’ve taken the predictable stance of complaining that “Australian jobs”* are going overseas, and this is bad for everyone.
However, these are the exact same people who whinge when things in the supermarket start costing more! As we know, labour costs is a massive part of the cost of producing products and services**. So which is it – protecting “Australian jobs”, or cheaper shit to fuel your consumerism?
* I use quotes because I can’t really see how someone can claim a job as “Australian.” Sure, an Australian may happen to be doing a job at a certain point in time, but do we call them “Indian jobs” when they go overseas?
** As an example, about 60% of IBM’s annual cost in Australia is labour.
I am creating a new category “recommended readings” so you can let us all know good books, blogs, magazines, etc… That you have read.
First off I am going to recommend “The World Is Flat” by Thomas L Friedman; if you want an idea of where the globalised world is heading i strongly recommend this book. I guarantee you will be amazed at some of thin things that are going on in the world of business today.
I can honestly say that most of us have no idea just how much the world is changing with because of the internet. I know it sounds cliché but if you read this it will give you a little bit of an idea. So many jobs and skills are becoming completely commoditised (not sure if this is entirely the right word) and while this is not a new phenomenon you will be surprised at just what can be done for next to nothing anywhere in the world.
At almost 600 pages long it does require a bit of commitment from you to read but believe me it is a good read and very well written.
This is a transcript of Bill Moyers acceptance speech for the Harvard Medical School Prize Award. I think a couple of you have read this, but if you haven’t then I strongly recommend.
British and US mythology about the second world war ignores our own crimes and legitimises Anglo-American warmaking
Richard Drayton
Tuesday May 10, 2005
The Guardian
In 1945, as at the end of all wars, the victor powers spun the conflict’s history to serve the interests of their elites. Wartime propaganda thus achieved an extraordinary afterlife. As Vladimir Putin showed yesterday, the Great Patriotic War remains a key political resource in Russia. In Britain and the US, too, a certain idea of the second world war is enthusiastically kept alive and less flattering memories suppressed.Five years ago, Robert Lilly, a distinguished American sociologist, prepared a book based on military archives. Taken by Force is a study of the rapes committed by American soldiers in Europe between 1942 and 1945. He submitted his manuscript in 2001. But after September 11, its US publisher suppressed it, and it first appeared in 2003 in a French translation.
We know from Anthony Beevor about the sexual violence unleashed by the Red Army, but we prefer not to know about mass rape committed by American and British troops. Lilly suggests a minimum of 10,000 American rapes. Contemporaries described a much wider scale of unpunished sex crime. Time Magazine reported in September 1945: “Our own army and the British army along with ours have done their share of looting and raping … we too are considered an army of rapists.”The British and American publics share a sunny view of the second world war. The evil of Auschwitz and Dachau, turned inside out, clothes the conflict in a shiny virtue. Movies, popular histories and political speeches frame the war as a symbol of Anglo-American courage, with the Red Army’s central role forgotten. This was, we believe, “a war for democracy”. Americans believe that they fought the war to rescue the world. For apologists of the British Empire, such as Niall Ferguson, the war was an ethical bath where the sins of centuries of conquest, slavery and exploitation were expiated. We are marked forever as “the good guys”and can all happily chant “Two world wars and one world cup.”
All this seems innocent fun, but patriotic myths have sharp edges. The “good war” against Hitler has underwritten 60 years of warmaking. It has become an ethical blank cheque for British and US power. We claim the right to bomb, to maim, to imprison without trial on the basis of direct and implicit appeals to the war against fascism.
When we fall out with such tyrant friends as Noriega, Milosevic or Saddam we rebrand them as “Hitler”. In the “good war” against them, all bad things become forgettable “collateral damage”. The devastation of civilian targets in Serbia or Iraq, torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, the war crime of collective punishment in Falluja, fade to oblivion as the “price of democracy”.
Our democratic imperialism prefers to forget that fascism had important Anglo-American roots. Hitler’s dream was inspired, in part, by the British Empire. In eastern Europe, the Nazis hoped to make their America and Australia, where ethnic cleansing and slave labour created a frontier for settlement. In western Europe, they sought their India from which revenues, labour and soldiers might be extracted.
American imperialism in Latin America gave explicit precedents for Germany’s and Japan’s claims of supremacy in their neighbouring regions. The British and Americans were key theorists of eugenics and had made racial segregation respectable. The concentration camp was a British invention, and in Iraq and Afghanistan the British were the first to use air power to repress partisan resistance. The Luftwaffe – in its assault on Guernica, and later London and Coventry – paid homage to Bomber Harris’s terror bombing of the Kurds in the 1920s.
We forget, too, that British and US elites gave aid to the fascists. President Bush’s grandfather, prosecuted for “trading with the enemy” in 1942, was one of many powerful Anglo-Americans who liked Mussolini and Hitler and did what they could to help. Appeasement as a state policy was only the tip of an iceberg of practical aid to these dictatorships. Capital and technology flowed freely, and fascist despots received dignified treatment in Washington and London. Henry Ford made Hitler birthday gifts of 50,000 marks.
We least like to remember that our side also committed war crimes in the 1940s. The destruction of Dresden, a city filled with women, children, the elderly and the wounded, and with no military significance, is only the best known of the atrocities committed by our bombers against civilian populations. We know about the notorious Japanese abuse of prisoners of war, but do not remember the torture and murder of captured Japanese. Edgar Jones, an “embedded” Pacific war correspondent, wrote in 1946: “‘We shot prisoners in cold blood, wiped out hospitals, strafed lifeboats, killed or mistreated enemy civilians, finished off the enemy wounded, tossed the dying into a hole with the dead, and in the Pacific boiled flesh off enemy skulls to make table ornaments.”
After 1945, we borrowed many fascist methods. Nuremberg only punished a handful of the guilty; most walked free with our help. In 1946, Project Paperclip secretly brought more than 1,000 Nazi scientists to the US. Among their ranks were Kurt Blome, who had tested nerve gas at Auschwitz, and Konrad Schaeffer, who forced salt into victims at Dachau. Other experiments at mind control via drugs and surgery were folded into the CIA’s Project Bluebird. Japan’s Dr Shiro Ishii, who had experimented with prisoners in Manchuria, came to Maryland to advise on bio-weapons. Within a decade of British troops liberating Belsen, they were running their own concentration camps in Kenya to crush the Mau Mau. The Gestapo’s torture techniques were borrowed by the French in Algeria, and then disseminated by the Americans to Latin American dictatorships in the 60s and 70s. We see their extension today in the American camps in Cuba and Diego Garcia.
War has a brutalising momentum. This is the moral of Taken By Force, which shows how American soldiers became increasingly indiscriminate in their sexual violence and military authorities increasingly lax in its prosecution. Even as we remember the evils of nazism, and the courage of those who defeated it, we should begin to remember the second world war with less self- satisfaction. We might, in particular, learn to distrust those who use it to justify contemporary warmongering.
· Richard Drayton is senior lecturer in history at Cambridge University.
It seems apparent that creativity is becoming a dying breed in many ways. The commercialisation and mass production of media, music, entertainment and writing is producing a society deprived of creativity. We are turning into a society that eats up our pre-chewed homogenised input, then spits it out for the ‘next thing’. Longevity is on the decline as turnover is more important than creating something that will be remembered next month let alone next week.
So what is responsible for the disappearance of creativity?
This is just a bit of a rant from me.
Just saw the news of yet another high school shooting in Colorado. It just dumbfounds me that people over their still think it is their god given right to own a bloody gun.
Now I can understand if you live on a farm or in the bush etc… And I do realise guns have their place (albeit small) place in society but giving every single person the right to own an easily concealable handgun is in my mind fucking ridiculous!
It is just crazy that one of, if not the most powerful non-profit organisation in the USA is the NRA! I will give you one example of this organisation using their lobbying power for what I consider to be bad. (From wikipedia)
“In 2004 the NRA successfully opposed renewal of the federal assault weapons ban of 1994, which banned many features of certain semiautomatic rifles and certain types of removable magazines, against a campaign to make the ban permanent and/or expand it. The ban expired at midnight, September 13, 2004.”
Does anyone else see a causal relationship with the number of shooting deaths in the USA and the number of gun owners?
http://mirror.bom.gov.au/products/IDR664.loop.shtml
Irony, looks like a tsunami is approaching the coast fro the inland.
Checking this post past the next half hour probably will mean the storm has passed, but those of you who will check it should have some fun with it.
Anyone for hailstorm golf???
I recent heard a segment on Triple J’s Hack program that discussed the high profile of sport and sporting elites in contrast with the relative lack of recognition of intellectual achievement and the intellectuals themselves.
The main point was that Australians are undeniably sports mad love their sporting hero’s which is not a bad thing however there seems to be a lack of recognition for intellectual achievement and the intellectuals themselves. This comes in the form of lack of funding for the arts and intellectual pursuits as opposed to sport, as well as lack of recognition in the media and popular culture.
This has been made even more prevalent in the wake of VSU as the federal government still gives funding to universities specifically for sport. Of course there is the argument that VSU was never about easing the fiscal requirements for poor uni students but was instead a ploy to stop all extra curricular activities besides sport on campus e.g. political groups which are for the most part “leftwing”.
Anyway enough of the political side of things; I want to talk about what some of the callers said on this subject.
One woman rang up who is currently completing a PHD at uni and also plays netball for the uni. Her opinion was that it is not necessarily a bad thing that sport has a much higher place in mainstream society for a number of reasons. For a start she will always have her career and her intellect which can be furthered her entire life and while she cannot talk to the average punter about her line of work (something in science from memory) it is quite nice to feel somewhat unique because of her chosen field of study. She also made the point that most people are smart enough to be successful in their academic pursuits with hard work where as you really do need to be in the top 5% to be a successful sporting star. Sport is her release from her work and it is a medium through which everyone can relate because of its prevalence in society.
I can’t remember everything she said unfortunately so the point is not as strong as it was when I heard it but it still gives you an idea of her perspective.
The next caller was a sport writer for a newspaper. Now I thought this guy was a little too one sided in the favour of sport in that he sometimes sounded like he was belittling academic pursuits but he did make a few points that I want to share.
One point is one that is not entirely correct but as far as mainstream society goes it is pretty accurate. It was that sport is generally held in higher regard then academic pursuits because sport feeds our intense desire to compete with each other and see how we rank up against people. I thought for a second that this can also be sad for intellectual achievements until I thought about it a little more. Without trying to sound like snob, we all have a decent level of education and also hold intellectual achievements in reasonably high regard but the a lot of people don’t. Therefore the achievements they hold in the highest regard are usually sports related. This caller also threw out some rhetoric about being an obese society and how more sport would significantly reduce the rate of obesity in Australia. This is a bullshit argument because I believe that education is just as important in fighting this problem. I would even argue that it is even more important as with the right education people can make up their own mind about exercise and diet etc… but that is a whole new argument for an entirely different post.
Now to my position; I am as are all of you a lover of sport. I play it, I watch it, I buy sporting apparel and merchandise, and I know how important it is in our society. I do however think that more does need to be done to raise the profile of intellectual pursuits in Australia. While sport is great, sport alone does not create economic growth and prosperity. It does not help raise the living standards of whole communities. What does however are innovation and technology, science and engineering, and education and health (If I am wrong here Al, please correct me). So perhaps we should all be doing something to raise the profile of intellectual achievements.
I know that America will be in trouble in the next 15 years if something is not done about the lack of funding going into science and engineering education (a problem you can thank the Bush administration for). Countries like India and China (where intellectual achievements are held in very high regard) are catching up and they are catching up fast.
Anyway enough of me, I want to hear what you all think.
To post on this new blog you click on “admin” under the “meta” section and it should take you to your “dashboard”.
If you want to post a pic or file you need to upload it then click on the file and “send it to editor”
Also, remember to put your post in a category. If it doesn’t fit any then create an appropriate one. Only use one category as well.
If you have any problems or questions just post them here.
