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Having it Both Ways

The State of Virginia just passed legislation that tries to give some force to the so-called “shrink-wrap software agreement” you supposedly agree to every time you install a software package on your computer. The software industry is “ecstatic”. This is their “crown jewel” of legislative achievements. If you wonder what “soft” money in politics really means, this is it.

Now, the naïve and gullible reader will ask himself a simple and natural question: why? Why would the software industry be so happy about a law that seems to make it illegal to do something that it has, supposedly, always been illegal to do? That is, violate the shrink-wrap agreement on your software application?

For fifteen years, we have all been installing these software applications and clicking on the ubiquitous “I Agree” button every time before being allowed to install the application.

Imagine if you read in the paper tomorrow that the government of Ontario was passing legislation making it illegal to speed on our highways. You would be rightly perturbed. If this legislation makes it illegal to speed now, why did I pay my tickets before this legislation was passed? Right….

The consumer-citizen has the right to make a few logical deductions here and invoke the natural right of expediency in order to respond to this blatantly hypocritical piece of legislation.

1. All software issued before this legislation was passed can be freely copied and distributed as you please. Obviously if the shrink-wrap agreement now has the force of law, it did not have the force of law before. So go ahead– copy away! Give Office 97 to all your friends! Make sure everyone you know can play with Photoshop 5.0! Sell copies of Quicken 98 at your fruit stand! All of these products were sold subject to agreements that, according to Virginia, did not have the force of law.

2. Since the principle of secondary contract agreements that take effect after a transaction is concluded (the shrink-wrap agreement is entered into after you already bought the software, when you install it on your computer) is now enshrined in law, the consumer should also take advantage of it. For example, you can send a letter to Microsoft saying this: “Acceptance of my payment for Microsoft Office constitutes an agreement between Microsoft and the purchaser that the purchaser will be compensated at his average hourly wage for any time spent attempting to recover work that was lost due to the deficiencies and instabilities of Microsoft products.”

You may be aware of the fact that, in spite of the shrink-wrap agreement, which states that the purchaser must return the software to Microsoft and receive a refund if he or she does not agree to the terms, Microsoft virtually never, in fact, refunds your money. Neither will the store that sold you the Microsoft product.

So get yourself a good lawyer, because it’s going to be a ride. Here’s what might happen: Microsoft will reject the agreement and demand that you either agree to the shrink-wrap license as it is written or… or what? Return the product? Ha ha! Now, I’m not so cynical as to think the worst of everybody, but some people obviously will simply make a copy of the product onto a CD and then return the original disk to Microsoft.

Fat chance. Microsoft knows that.

If enough people try this, I think we could have a real movement going.

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Cities

Why do we, the taxpayer, pay for roads? Ever think about it? Whether you want to or not, you kick in thousands of dollars every year to pay for roads. Well, you say, you like the roads. You use the roads a lot. But what if someone told you that you could save a lot of money if we just got rid of most of the roads and spent about half as much money on public transit? Who says this is the only way to move people around?

Have you ever thought about cities? Cities suck, big time. I know, there’s all sorts of glamour and excitement about “downtown”, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about suburbs and neighborhoods and freeways. I’m talking about the homeless and the panhandlers and squeegee kids. I’m talking about traffic tie-ups, pollution, and over-crowding. Cities suck, big time.

Why do we have so many problems in our cities? Whenever people talk about big social problems, like drug abuse, teen pregnancy, and crime, they tend to blame social and cultural developments. Kenneth Starr and his repressed buddies on the Republican Right, like to blame the sixties, with all that evil rock’n’roll and anti-authoritarianism and draft evasion and lifestyle experimentation and, later, feminism. That’s why our society is falling apart. Liberals, on the other hand, tend to blame our oppressive economic system. We don’t share enough of what we have with those in need. We need to pour money into projects that will revitalize our cities. We need a higher minimum wage. We need more development.

No one seems to realize that cities, with all their problems, didn’t happen by accident. Most of us used to live in the country. Then, around the turn of the century, we began to mechanize the farms and build factories. So jobs moved from agriculture to industry, and industry located itself in cities, because they needed the transportation and support industries and other resources that were located in the cities. So people moved to the cities. These people needed places to live. So developers started building houses and apartment buildings. As more people wanted to live close to their jobs, the prices of these houses went up higher and higher. People were forced to move into apartments, or farther and farther away from the downtown.

So how do you get these people to work? How do you get them to sports stadiums and art galleries and malls? You have two possible options. First, you can build a whole bunch of buses, trolleys, and streetcars, so you can move fifty or sixty people at a time fairly efficiently. Doesn’t that make sense? Why have sixty huge automobiles clogging up the streets, filling the air with carbon monoxide, wandering around looking for a place to park, when you can have just two or three streetcars? The streetcars drop you off and then get out of the way. Cars stay there, taking up miles of valuable real estate. Look at all the parking lots and parking garages in the downtown of any major city? They are ugly and useless. The cars just sit there all day. They just sit there, waiting for the owner to finish his work or his shopping or whatever. What a waste!

Public transit isn’t the only alternative we’re talking about here. New York City had developed a very interesting, complex set of pneumatic tubes throughout the downtown area in the early 1920’s. These tubes moved small items through large buildings fairly fast and efficiently. Then General Motors got some of their cronies elected to city council and they voted to replace the pneumatic tubes with stinking, clumsy, big GM trucks. This was not a magical strategy developed by the “free market”. It was sabotage.

You can spend so little on public transit that you make it necessary for anybody who can afford it to buy their own cars. The result, in Chicago and other major U.S. cities, is that only the poor and destitute use public transit. Nobody listens to the complaints of the poor, so public transit is often poorly maintained and unsafe. All the money goes into highways instead, and cops to patrol the highways, and signs, and lights, and parking lots. When all those people in their own cars clog up the streets, you just keep adding new highways to accommodate them. And when those highways get clogged up, you start demolishing neighborhoods and dividing communities with great big ugly freeways. And when they get hopelessly clogged, like the 401 is now, every day, from Mississauga to the Allen Expressway, you suddenly realize that you have a serious problem with no solution. That, in fact, is what they now realize in Toronto, Canada’s fastest growing city. They can’t build any more freeways—it’s too expensive and people are too smart: they won’t let you just plow their neighborhoods under anymore. But the 401 can’t handle all the traffic coming into the city. So what do you do? If you’re Toronto, basically, nothing. People waste hours and hours every day sitting in their cars staring at the trunk of the car ahead of them. It is not unusual for a citizen of the metropolitan Toronto area to spend four hours of his day, every day, sitting uselessly in his car. Chances are also pretty good nowadays that he’s driving a four-wheel-drive sport utility, sold to him on the illusion that it would provide him with a liberating sense of adventure and freedom.

What many people don’t realize is that the government pays a huge subsidy to the automotive industry by providing us with endless highways, traffic lights, streetlights, bridges, freeways, police, and parking spaces. And don’t forget the cost of hospital emergency wards which spend a lot of time treating victims of accidents. The subsidy is way, way more than it would have cost if the government had simply developed public transit more effectively, and required car-makers to make their own roads and bridges. Hardly anyone would own cars today if that had happened. Think about that, the next time you start rhapsodizing about how great the “free market” is. Do you love your car? Well, you can love your car because every taxpayer in the province is chipping in to make highways for you to drive on.

A number of things happened in the 1940’s and 50’s that created many of the social problems we have today.

Firstly, people started to do pretty well for themselves. They made money. And, thanks to the huge government subsidy of the auto industry (especially the Interstate system in the U.S.), many people could afford cars.

Secondly, developers began to build a new type of residential community: the suburb, which was designed around the principle that everyone would have a car. The suburb was located away from the downtown (cheap land), which meant a lot of people had to drive their cars around in order to get to work. Public transit doesn’t work very well in the suburbs because of all the winding streets and the low density of population.

Thirdly, effective birth control allowed families to reduce the number of children they would have. This, in turn, allowed women to re-enter the work-force more quickly. It allowed numerous families to send their children to college who otherwise couldn’t have afforded it. It changed the character of the family.

Fourth, the tax base shifted away from the inner city and out to the suburbs. As a result, city governments lost their ability to pay for the upkeep of downtown areas. These areas decayed, housing prices plummeted, the poor moved in with even more social problems, unemployment among the inner city poor soared, drug and alcohol addiction increased, and so on and so on.

In the 1960’s, this was all no secret. Sociologists and social scientists understood very well the negative effects of urbanization. Lewis Mumford wrote some sensational, amazing books on the development of cities. We studied them in high school as late as the early 1970’s. Too many people living too close together tended to develop strange behavior patterns. Most of us have heard about the girl who was raped and murdered while dozens of her neighbors leaned out of their high-rise windows and listened, and not a single one of them decided to call the police and go to help her.

The suburbs are no better. Instead of communities, where people know each other and interact with each other at local businesses, and operate schools together, and build playgrounds together, and help each other out, people barely know their own neighbors, because they can travel to see their friends, in their cars, and you don’t want to get too friendly with a person who lives just 30 feet away from your lawnmower.

But nobody could do anything about urbanization. It was easier to blame hippies or blacks or other minorities, or a decline in “family values”, or softness on crime. That way, you could elect fascist leaders, give more money to the police, sentence people to thirty years in jail for possessing marijuana, and execute developmentally delayed adults for murder. This, apparently, is more satisfying to some people than reconsidering the huge subsidy to the auto industry.

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Bezos

Americans love to believe that with hard work, determination, and a bit of brains, anyone can be successful and rich. Like Bill Gates. Or Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon.com. Or Jim Barksdale, the former CEO of Netscape.

This belief in this myth of equal opportunity is one of the reasons that America, of the industrialized nations, is the harshest on the poor. It’s your own fault. If you had only worked harder and studied harder and saved your money, you could have been successful. See—look at Bill Gates! Look at Jeff Bezos! Look at Donald Trump, Paul Allen, Stephen Ballmer, Michael Dell…! They all started with nothing. They worked hard. They became rich. You can too.

Americans need to believe in this myth, or else they would feel badly about kicking people off welfare, or locking them up for twenty years for robbery or drug offenses, or executing them for murder. We don’t care about your disadvantaged youth. We don’t care about the hopelessness of your life. We don’t care about how you have been treated by others. You broke the rules. You had a choice. You have to pay.

Time Magazine chose Jeff Bezos as its man of the year. Why? Because he is rich and successful. Time Magazine can’t imagine that Americans would want to be like someone who is smart or creative or compassionate or fair, unless this guy is really, really rich. We all want to be rich! But we don’t want to think we are greedy. And thus the myth-making begins. And because the poor have no voice in our civilization, there is no one to counteract the incredible nonsense you are going to read about Jeff Bezos in Time Magazine.

This is the Time Magazine version of Jeff Bezos: a young man with amazing talent works hard to develop his skills. He is rewarded with good jobs, through which he hones his already impressive managerial abilities. He notices the internet (well after the really smart people did). He has a brilliant idea (an idea that isn’t really new). He convinces people to invest in his idea (using connections he already had). He pushes his idea forward with passion and intelligence (other people’s passion and intelligence). He demonstrates brilliant leadership (he bullies his employees).

Suddenly, bingo, he is filthy rich.

He is worth about $24 billion dollars right now. I’m not kidding. And to emphasize that he has earned every penny of this obscene amount of money and that he deserves all this fabulous wealth, Time Magazine includes pictures of Bezos rushing here and there, leading meetings, shouting at people, jumping up and down—what a busy, industrious man! He leads a meeting at which people toss out ideas. Brainstorming! Bezos selects the great ones and puts them into practice. Wow! What a genius! He deserves every penny of that fortune!

What Time Magazine doesn’t want you to believe is that Jeff Bezos got rich because he was already rich or because he was lucky or, heaven forbid, because he was possessed of an overwhelming lust for wealth. In other words, the difference between you and me and Jeff Bezos is not that he has money and we don’t. And it’s not that Jeff Bezos knows powerful people who help him out at every turn and we don’t. And it’s not that Jeff Bezos is just plain lucky and we’re not. The difference, according to Time, is that he is more virtuous than we are. That’s why he has $24 billion dollars and we have big balances on our Visa cards. And an economic system that creates men like Bezos, and Gates, and Michael Eisner, and Mike Tyson, and Michael Jordan, and so on and so on, is good, because it rewards virtue.

Uh… scratch Mike Tyson.

Now the truth is a little different from the gospel according to Time Magazine. The truth is that, yes, Jeff Bezos works hard, and yes, he is smart. But there are lots of hard-working, smart people out there, and they aren’t as rich or famous as Jeff Bezos. So why is he different? He didn’t think up the idea of doing commerce on the internet, and he certainly didn’t think up the internet, and he certainly didn’t write the software that handles orders for his company. But he did have friends with lots of money to invest. In other words, he had rich friends, and his family was well-to-do, or he wouldn’t have had any rich friends. And these rich friends are richer today because they were already rich. And the truth is that he was also just plain lucky. He started his business at the right time. He received favorable publicity at the right time. He has investors who are willing to put up with a pile of losses for a long time on the somewhat irrational faith that Amazon.com will eventually make money. And he has a host of people mad with investment fever who really think they’re going to cash in big-time on this Amazon.com property.

And those people may be in for a very rude surprise. I’ll get back to that in a minute.

This is the truth about most “self-made” men and women. The first thing they do, when they hit the jackpot, is attribute their success to the qualities in themselves that are perceived to be “virtuous”, like hard work and dedication. They look back at their lives and suddenly everything they did seems to have been consciously directed towards the spectacular result. It must be very, very hard for a very rich person to not believe that he or she deserves success, just as it is very, very hard for a poor person to believe that he or she deserves to be poor. [I just read an article about Lottery winners that said the same thing; furthermore, it highlighted the fact that people who were suing the winners because they weren’t in the pool the particular week they won, also have that same sense of entitlement. 2011-02]

The funny thing is that Amazon.com is not really successful at all. It lost $350 million last year. It does not look like it is going to make a profit anytime soon. So why is Bezos considered a success? Because the stock market thinks that most people think that Amazon.com is going to be wildly successful, so Amazon’s stock keeps rising, making his initial investors very, very rich.

[2022-04-12: I was wrong about Amazon not being successful, though it is somewhat more complicated than simple profitability.  Amazon churns through an unbelievable volume of purchases while it’s actual net profitability at any given instant is questionable.  It doesn’t matter, and I didn’t foresee that net profitability would not matter in the way that it doesn’t today.]

It is quite possible that Amazon’s stock will completely collapse next year. It is quite possible that Amazon will never make a penny. But Jeff Bezos will be very, very rich no matter what happens. When a company collapses, the workers lose their jobs and frequently their pensions and insurance and often even their back pay. The top executives drive off in their limos to “new opportunities” with big fat golden parachutes in their pockets.

If you look at the wildly rich entrepreneurs of the past twenty years, you will find that not a single one of them actually had the genius to invent the device or process that made them rich. The people who did have that kind of genius—real genius—are still working for a living, teaching, or inventing, or researching. And when you read about them, you quickly realize that they were driven by a desire to know, to learn, to improve things. Who is Tim Berners-Lee? Who is Gary Kildall? You don’t know? They made Jim Barksdale and Bill Gates rich. Ah… .now you see. They were the real geniuses. They had ideas. They made them work. Then someone else with more money and the determination to make more money came along and cashed in. I don’t mind if you think Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates is smart because they made a lot of money. However, I think it is really disgusting when they start trying to credit for things they have no right to claim the credit for, and when we begin to explain their success as the product of inventiveness or virtue rather than acquisitiveness.

They were driven by a desire to make a pile of money. They put all their energies and intelligence into the idea of making money. They knew how to negotiate deals that were more beneficial to themselves than to their partners. They knew how to drive employees to work hard for modest pay. They knew how to drive competition out business.

Bill Gates is the classic case here. As the Department of Justice investigation has shown, Microsoft cheated and lied and bullied and extorted it’s way to the top. None of Microsoft’s products were really very good at all. DOS 1? DOS 2? DOS 3.0, 3.1, 3.2, or 3.3? Heaven help us—DOS 4! (DOS 5.0 was okay, if five years behind the Mac). Windows 3.0? Give me a break! Windows 3.1? Garbage. Even Windows 95 and Windows 98 are still full of bugs. Internet Explorer and Outlook are minefields. They can’t get it right.

But Gates was smart enough to negotiate brutal agreements with companies like Compaq, which required them to pay for a copy of Windows for every computer they sold regardless of whether the purchaser wanted Windows or not. Brilliant! And illegal. Would you please deduct $24 million from your $500 in profits? Thank you– now don’t do it again.

And he was smart enough to change the API’s on Windows 3.1 so Word Perfect for Windows would crash and Lotus 1-2-3 would choke. He was smart enough to realize that by “giving” away Internet Explorer for the moment, he could drive the only competition for the most important market of the next 25 years out of business: Netscape. That is called “dumping”. It is usually illegal.

And Jeff Bezos was smart enough to realize that he could make his prices very attractive and then whack people with “shipping and handling” charges. Smart move.

And Time Magazine, which can conceive of no higher purpose for the Internet than to shop on-line, chooses him as “man of the year”.

Will Amazon be a big success five years from now? Consider these factors.

Bezos says he plans to expand Amazon’s offerings to all kinds of products other than books. All of these products will require extensive delivery services. I’ve never liked delivery services. I think there is a ceiling here. Someone has to be home to receive the deliveries, if it’s something that doesn’t fit into your mailbox. And if all the items ordered are not ready on time, you have to make two, or three deliveries, or delay the order. Orders also tend to get mixed up– we don’t pay delivery boys very much and can’t expect much better from them. I still think we are society of people who drive their cars around and pick up things. I don’t think we want to have everything delivered. The next genius will think of way to reduce the cost of driving around.

[Again, I was wrong.  I didn’t foresee that it would be cheaper for Amazon to abandon products on your doorstep and suck up the losses from theft and misadventure than it would be to make sure someone actually received the package and signed for it.  My bad.]

IBM and other companies are working on a electronic paper, that can receive books electronically via the internet. Music is already changing to a format that doesn’t require a delivery: MP3. Maybe that’s why Amazon is diversifying as quickly as they can.

Amazon’s service charges are outrageous. They are brutal. Time didn’t mention anything about that!  [Amazon has since modified their service charges so that many products can be delivered “free”.]

But, hey, if you think other people believe that Amazon is going to make a pile of money, you might be wise to invest in it.

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The Capital Gains Deduction

The “capital gains deduction”.

Do you have any idea of how absolutely outrageous this idea is? I’ll bet you don’t. That’s why wealthy corporations and citizens have seized upon it. They think they can pull one over on us. And they might be right. Because you don’t know how outrageous this idea is.

A lot of businessmen in Canada in the U.S. have been asking the federal governments of those two countries to increase (or create) a thing called a “capital gains deduction”. A capital gains deduction is a tax write-off that individuals can use to reduce their tax liability for profits they have made on investments. The Americans presently have a limited Capital Gains Deduction; Canada does not. That is, it has no capital gains deduction at all. The real question is, why should there even be one? Canada has it right.

If you work for three years at minimum wage, you might make about $25,000. The government taxes your income. You have to pay your fair share of the costs of roads, policing, defense, health care, education, and so on. You have to work hard to earn that money. You don’t like giving a chunk of it to the government, but that’s life.

Of course, you don’t pay as much tax on $25,000 as you do on $250,000. Why not? Well, for one thing, someone who makes $250,000 uses a lot more of the resources that the government provides to make those earnings possible. Without hospitals, schools, roads, and so on, no one is going to make a lot of money. Someone who makes a lot of money does so because he has lots of buildings, vehicles, telephones, employees, and so on. He also benefits more from the protection offered by the police and the military than that poor schmuck making $25,000 does. So it seems fair enough that they pay a larger share of the costs of providing those things. Besides, he is able to pay more. It’s healthy for our society to contribute what is needed to strengthen the entire community, not just ourselves.

Suppose that instead of actually working for that money that you earned it on investments instead. Let’s say you put $5,000 into Amazon.com and a few years later that $5,000 was worth $30,000. Then you sell your shares. You have made $25,000 without having to lift a finger, except to call your broker. You took a reasonable risk, and you were amply rewarded for it.

A lot of wealthy investors would like you to believe that the $25,000 they earned on investments is special… like Ralph in the Simpsons. It should not be taxed. Why? Well, the real reason is because they are greedy and they don’t want to pay their share of the tax burden. But they will tell you that it is a good thing that people invest in the stock market and the government should encourage such investments by eliminating the tax on the profits of such investments.

Isn’t work a good thing? Isn’t it a good thing that you go to a job everyday and actually contribute something to the economy? Why shouldn’t the government encourage that, by not taxing your income?

Well, the real reason is because you don’t get to shake hands with your congressman very much, and you don’t get to sit at the head table with him at big banquets to raise money for his PAC (Political Action Committee) and you don’t get to schmooze with him on some yacht out in the Gulf of Mexico so you can explain to him, in person, just how important it is that you not have to pay taxes on your income.

You have to understand two simple things about the Capital Gains Deduction. First of all, every deduction the government gives to an individual or corporation that can be applied to taxes that are owed the government is exactly the same as a hand-out. It is the government handing cash over to these individuals or corporations. It is like welfare, except that it is for the rich.

The rich would have you believe that a deduction is different from a hand-out. They’re right: only the rich get deductions because the poor don’t have money to invest. It’s a way for the government to give even more to those who already have a lot.

The second thing you have to understand is that the profit realized from capital gains is just like any other income. There is nothing holy about it. There is nothing charitable or humanitarian about it. It is the profit earned by rich people on investments. They keep this profit. It doesn’t benefit anyone but themselves. It certainly doesn’t provide any benefits that are not also provided by a working wage.  [All right– obviously, investment is good for the economy.  My point is, it’s just as good as wages, not better.]

And these people have the unmitigated gall to tell you that this deduction will be available to all Americans, regardless of race, colour, or creed. This is possibly just about the most cynical statement ever made about the tax burden. All those welfare mothers in New York? Right. They have the same opportunity to reduce their taxes as Donald Trump. All they have to do is invest $25,000 or so in the stock market. Gosh. It gives me a warm fuzzy feeling just thinking about it.

What these people are saying is this: we want to let everybody else pay for the government. We would like to keep our money.

The problem with their arguments, of course, is that people in Canada and the U.S. have already gone absolutely hog-wild with investments. Mutual funds, pension funds, unions, teachers, doctors, everyone is getting a piece of the action. The idea that the government needs to provide an additional incentive for people to invest in the stock market is absolutely bizarre.

You may think, well, everybody hates taxes. Isn’t it a good thing when you get to pay less? It sure is. So let’s all pay less. Let’s go to Ottawa and make an appointment with Paul Martin and tell him that we want a “working wage tax deduction”. We want the government to remove our tax liability (give us a hand-out) and make our wages tax-free. That would be great, wouldn’t it? The trouble is, Paul Martin would immediately say, “but where would I get the money from to run the country, if we don’t tax wages?” And we would shrug.

Ah… you may have noticed the absurd element in the above scenario. You go to Ottawa and make and appointment with Paul Martin? Ha ha!

But Paul Martin would never to meet with you, would he? Well, he might.

All you have to do is tell him that you are very, very rich.

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Lee Harvey Oswald

Did Oswald Shoot Kennedy

No, of course not.

In 1978, Edward Jay Epstein published a book called “Legend: the Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald.” He tries to show that Oswald had very suspicious ties to Soviet Russia and Cuba. He doesn’t quite go so far as to say that Russia or Cuba planned Kennedy’s assassination, but he clearly lays out the groundwork for such a conclusion.

The book was published by Reader’s Digest. If that doesn’t tell you enough about it (condensed books for condensed brains), then consider that Epstein has no problem with the “magic” bullet which supposedly went through Kennedy’s neck, John Connally’s ribs, wrist, and thigh, and emerged without a mark only to appear on the wrong stretcher in Parkland Hospital, so that it could be definitively “traced” to Oswald’s rifle. Nor does he tell you that the palm print taken from the rifle, which matched it “conclusively” to Oswald, was only “found” by the FBI after the Dallas police had already concluded that the rifle bore no finger prints at all. Nor does he mention that the bullets used to kill police officer Tippit were not, in fact, traced back to Oswald’s personal handgun and that, in fact, they could not have been fired from Oswald’s gun.

But, gee, those are just facts. There’s better material in “Legend”. The best part is Epstein’s nodding and winking as he describes Oswald’s suspicious behavior in New Orleans. What did Oswald do that was so suspicious? Well, he marched around handing out “Fair Play for Cuba” leaflets and appearing on radio stations.

Now, suppose for one minute that Oswald was, in fact, a Soviet or Cuban agent, sent to assassinate Kennedy in retaliation for the Bay of Pigs. Come on, you can do it. After all, he lived in Russia for several years and had a Russian wife. After all, he spoke fluent Russia.

So let’s say that some crazy day in 1960 or so, the KGB decided to shoot Kennedy. If you were a KGB officer, who would you choose to do the deed? Remember—if it is shown that you were behind the assassination, you would be in BIG trouble. For one thing, your own leaders would be fair game. For another thing, Cuba certainly would be invaded and re-colonized by the Americans. And of course, there was always the possibility of all-out war.

So who do you choose for this important task? Your cleverest, most experienced, most self-disciplined agent? Wrong. You choose an ex-marine defector with a Russian wife. You send him to America for a few years. You have him march around in New Orleans demonstrating and agitating on behalf of Castro’s Cuba. Then you send him down to Mexico to the Russian and Cuban embassies and have him loudly argue about getting a VISA to Cuba quickly because he can help the communists out by committing all kinds of violent crimes in the United States. You make sure the CIA gets all of this on their “hidden” cameras with the telephoto lenses.

Epstein is an idiot. His book is remarkable not because it defends the Warren Commission but because it simply pretends that none of the weird things about the Kennedy assassination even exist. In the thirty years since Kennedy’s death, most of the basic, confusing facts remain confusing. Part of the problem is that there are a lot of nut cases on both sides. But considered simply and directly, these facts certainly raise suspicions.

Oswald was a pretty smart guy who spoke fluent Russian, married a Russian woman, defected to Russia, defected back to the U.S., agitated for Cuba, tried to re-defect to Russia in October, 1963, worked at a map printing company that did secret work for the U.S. military, and sent a very, very strange note to a man named Hunt shortly before the assassination. He would have been a monumentally stupid choice for the Russians or Cubans to assassinate Kennedy.

Oswald is repeatedly described as having “fled” the scene. If he had been trying to escape Dallas, he could have gotten into a taxi at any time and driven off. Instead, he went home, and then to a movie theatre. He retrieved a pistol on the way. Think about these actions. If you had just shot the President of the United States from the building you worked in, would you go back to your home?

Witnesses to the Tippit shooting persistently denied that the man they saw was Oswald. Yet the FBI and the Dallas police continue to insist that the man they saw was, indeed, Oswald. Witnesses reported being harassed by investigators when they did not report the “correct” version of Tippit’s shooting.

Epstein believes that the problem with the magic bullet is easily solved. He simply decides that Oswald started firing sooner, while Kennedy was still out of view. Even the Warren Commission couldn’t be so bold, because the Zapruder film shows rather definitively that Oswald did not fire before the limousine drew behind the freeway sign.

The pristine bullet cannot have been the same bullet that shattered Connally’s wrists and ribs. It simply can’t. It was planted on the stretcher in the Dallas hospital (the wrong one, apparently) to implicate Oswald.

Oswald was spotted drinking a coke and having his lunch about 40 seconds after the last shots were fired. It is barely possible for a man running full speed to make the distance from the sixth floor window to the 2nd floor lunch room in that time. But according to several witnesses, including a police officer, Oswald looked cool, calm, and quiet, as if he’d been standing there for some time.

No fingerprints were found on the rifle at all. The FBI, much later, claimed to have found a palm print on the stock, underneath the barrel. This was after the Dallas police had already stated publicly that there was no fingerprints on the weapon. So Oswald wiped the gun clean of prints and made it down to the cafeteria in 40 seconds?

Shortly after the shooting, the police asked the manager of the warehouse for a list of all missing employees. We are told that it was found that only one employee was missing: Lee Harvey Oswald. In fact, several employees were missing, but the police announced that they were searching only for Oswald.
The police obtained Oswald’s address from the Depository and broadcast it to all the police officers in the vicinity. The trouble is, this address, Elsbeth St., had been Oswald’s address six months earlier, before he began to work at the Book Depository. The address he had given to the Book Depository, and which was recorded in his employee file, was different. Where then, did the police really obtain this address from?

Jack Ruby was able to walk through a large group of police officers right into the basement of the police station, precisely at the moment that Oswald was emerging from the cell area, and shoot him precisely where underworld assassins shoot someone they really want to kill efficiently: in the stomach, the vital organs. By doing so, he ensured that no trial would take place, during which the evidence, and Oswald’s links to the intelligence services, would have been probed.

Just imagine a good defense attorney analyzing the Warren Commission’s single bullet theory, in court. Just imagine hearing all the witnesses testify that they heard shots and saw smoke coming from the grassy knoll. Just imagine a thorough dissection of the planning of the parade route, the actions of Roy Kellerman or William Grier – the slow-footed driver of the limo—and the rest of the secret service agents who had been up late the previous night partying. Imagine a thorough discussion of how and why Oswald obtained a job printing spy photographs considered top secret by the U.S. military just months before the assassination. If Oswald was a “lone nut”, he was the most well-connected lone nut in history. Imagine parading the Parkland doctors up to the stand to testify, as they did to the media immediately after the shooting, that the fatal bullet entered Kennedy’s forehead, not the back of the head, and that the throat wound was one of entry, not exit. Imagine a Grand Jury digesting the fact that the Parkland doctors were all deeply experienced with gunshot wounds, while J. Humes, the autopsy surgeon, had almost no experience in that area. Imagine how quickly a defense lawyer would have noticed that the frames of the Zapruder film, reproduced in Life Magazine, and in the Warren Commission Report, had been placed out of order, so that, coincidentally, they appeared to show Kennedy’s head snapping forward with the fatal shot, rather than backwards as it really did. Image a cross-examination on the question of why no finger-prints were found on the rifle, though Oswald could not have had enough time to wipe them off and run down to the second floor cafeteria on time to be spotted and questioned by a police man 40 seconds after the last shots were fired.

The lead attorneys for the Warren Commission, relying primarily on evidence supplied to them by the FBI, consistently ignored, degraded, or ridiculed any evidence that did not fit the preconceived “lone nut” and “single-bullet” theories of the assassination. The Commission report is riddled with omissions and inconsistencies, but the most glaring problem is the way eyewitness testimony is presented as reliable and demonstrative when it supports the Commission’s conclusions, and then ridiculed as unreliable and conjectural whenever it does not. Witnesses who saw a single gunman in the sixth floor window are triumphantly presented as damning proof of Oswald’s guilt. But other witnesses saw shooting from behind the grassy knoll, and saw bullets hit the curb (which would have meant more than three shots were fired) and saw a second man in the same window. In other words, the Commission’s only standard of truth was that which corresponded to its preferred theory of how and why the assassination took place. It was not an investigation at all. It was a rubber stamp. As a result, even people who believe the Commission’s conclusions do not bother defending the Commission report itself.

Top cabinet officials were on a plane bound for Japan at the moment of the assassination. White House communications were cut shortly afterwards. Neither of these two elements by themselves are suspicious, but, taken together with the other facts, they are positively eerie.

After years of reading just about everything there is to read about the Kennedy assassination, I’ve come to the conclusion that there are a lot of nuts out there who derive perverse satisfaction in proving to themselves that everyone, from the CIA to the KGB to the Mafia were all involved in Kennedy’s assassination. Possibly the worst expression of that view would be Oliver Stone’s movie hodgepodge, “JFK”, which combined every theory from the lunatic fringe into one incoherent, rambling, and chaotic film.

David Lifton, in “Best Evidence”, tackled the autopsy itself, at Bethesda Naval Hospital, and suggests that a brilliant team of conspirators managed to alter the body between Dallas and Washington, so that it appeared as if Kennedy was struck from behind. He goes too far. His mistake is that he believes that the conspirators were capable of such meticulous and foolproof planning. I don’t think the conspirators would have had any way of guaranteeing themselves access to the body for a sufficient length of time to accomplish the deed. It’s too preposterous. But he also believes that the body was “altered” to show that shots had come from behind. There’s no need to grasp at straws here—the existing autopsy report is riddled with inconsistencies.

The truth is that Lee Harvey Oswald, displaying not the slightest inclination for leftist politics, joined the marines. While he was with the marines, he was probably recruited by one of the U.S. intelligence services. He was trained in the Russian language. He began to publicly criticize capitalism and the American government in a way that seems utterly bizarre and ostentatious, unless, again, you assume there is some covert reason for him to make himself known as a communist. Then he “defected” to Russia. He tried to convince the Russians that he had information about spy planes to sell them. The Russians smartly realized that he was a plant and ignored him, even after he married a Russian woman named Marina. Having failed in this subterfuge, the American intelligence agency pulled him out by having him “renounce” his “defection”.

Back in the U.S., Oswald, who probably only married Marina as part of his cover, lived alone, and did a lot of strange things. He demonstrated on behalf of Cuba, but also tried to join a Cuban anticommunist organization. His office was in the same building and adjacent to an office used by men with direct links to U.S. intelligence agencies, including Guy Bannister. He had regular contacts with the FBI and other U.S. federal government agencies. (After he was arrested for distributing leaflets, and FBI agent came to see him and spent more than an hour talking to him in jail.) He briefly worked for a coffee company in New Orleans that would later sent a raft full of employees to NASA!

It should be noted that Marina did not tell the Warren Commission what it wanted to hear, until months after the assassination, after intensive questioning by the FBI, the Dallas Police, and other government agents. Members of the Warren Commission thought she was lying, because her story varied so much from the initial interviews. Their mistake was that they assumed she had lied in the beginning, and not after months of police harassment. Oswald’s mother, Marguerite, insisted that her son had been working for the government. She too was coached by the investigators until she, sort of, got the story right.

Then, in Dallas, Oswald worked for a printing company that received contracts from U.S. military intelligence, printing photos taken by spy planes. He offered to kill Castro for the U.S., and then offered to commit terrorist acts for Cuba. And so on, and so on. None of these activities make any sense unless you believe that Oswald was working for U.S. intelligence and the general plan was to have him infiltrate communist organizations or governments, and that when these plans failed, they periodically came up with other tasks for him, the purpose of which he himself probably barely understood. Shortly before the assassination, he sent a plaintiff note to a Mr. “Hunt”, begging for an opportunity to discuss his “situation”.

Then the purpose becomes clear. Think about it. If a real “lone nut” had shot Kennedy, and escaped, the entire nation would have turned every stone searching for him. There would have been a huge investigation. There would have been powerful suspicions. There would have been grave questions about the changes in policy Johnson introduced—especially towards Viet Nam. Perhaps the Secret Service would actually have been require to fire their incompetent agents, including William Grier who, upon hearing shots fired, put on the brakes!

There might have been an inquest, a trial, deeper investigations by a Grand Jury. If the slightest substantiated suspicion had fallen upon Naval Intelligence or the FBI or the Secret Service, the political dynamic of the entire decade would have changed. People would have demanded that someone “clean up” the government agencies suspected of involvement.

The best way to dissipate such suspicions is, of course, to throw suspicion elsewhere, and to convince the public that a single “lone nut” committed the crime. Now remember, you have to think about how it was planned, now how it actually turned out. In my view, the assassination was actually botched, and came out far messier than the conspirators had planned. The Zapruder film, for example, caused grave complications, for it provided a precise time-line of the sequence of shots.

In any case, the plan was for Oswald to be positioned where he could be made the patsy. Perhaps he had been ordered to guard the sixth floor of the Depository on the day of Kennedy’s trip. Oswald had already begun to realize he was being set up, but had no idea of what for.

If Oswald was indeed employed by the U.S. intelligence community, it would not have been difficult for the conspirators to position him in the building, direct suspicion towards him, supply the police with incriminating evidence, and arrange for him to be shot while “resisting arrest”.

The real shooter is on the sixth floor, but there is also quite likely someone behind the picket fence on the grassy knoll. They fire roughly at the same time, when Kennedy is in the best position for the shot from the grassy knoll, the best possible location for a fatal shot. The shooter in the Depository escapes in a Nash Rambler, as several witnesses suggested, while protected by numerous other agents. The shooter behind the picket fence disposes of his weapon and then joins a group of “hoboes” in a nearby railway car. Other conspirators, identifying themselves as FBI agents or Secret Service agents, prevent witnesses and police from following him quickly enough to identify the suspect, but witnesses from the the overpass see the puffs of smoke and locate the source of the shots, and find cigarette butts and footprints behind the fence.

Oswald’s background as a communist defector is ideal. The police and FBI—who despise Kennedy– immediately understand that the U.S. government will not want to go to war with the Soviet Union, so they downplay Oswald’s communism and play up the “lone nut” theory. So the conspirators correctly surmised that they could have their cake and eat it too. Top government officials could suspect that the Soviet Union was actually involve, while conveniently ignoring the implications and tacitly approving the Warren Commission’s conclusions.

The Warren Commission wishes only to placate an anxious electorate. It is clear from the notes and minutes of their meetings that nobody on the commission had a serious interest in uncovering any new facts. Nobody seriously wanted to suggest, at any time, that a conspiracy exists. Failing to kill Oswald at the movie theatre—too many police officers and witnesses around, probably—the conspirators arrange for Jack Ruby to burst into the Dallas police station at the exact moment Oswald is being moved. Ruby himself dies of cancer four years later after alluding to dark plots and explosive revelations.

My suspicion is that the FBI was not directly involved but it was well-known that Hoover hated Kennedy and liked Johnson—he was frequent dinner guest at Senator Johnson’s home in the 1950’s—so the FBI could be counted on to cooperate. In January, 1964, Johnson appointed Hoover head of the FBI for life, in spite of the fact that he was beyond the age of compulsory retirement. This was Hoover’s fondest wish. Reporters who knew Johnson well were astonished. They had understood that Johnson knew that Hoover was a dangerous, excessively powerful bureaucrat. Why would he extend his term?

The effects of Kennedy’s assassination are, of course, illuminating.

  • The Viet Nam war continued, as Johnson rescinded Kennedy’s decision to withdraw.
  • The military-industrial complex grew much, much bigger and richer.
  • A conservative Democrat replaced a liberal Democrat.
  • The CIA, which Bobby Kennedy had been trying to control, was given a free-hand to continue it’s sponsorship of various coups and insurgencies around the world.
  • The cold war grew more intense.
  • The oil companies (including several owned by the powerful Hunt family) grew rich.

Does it seem all that unlikely that the assassinations of King and Robert Kennedy were also part of a continuing strategy to maintain real control of the U.S. government?

Richard Nixon, who was in Dallas on the day of the assassination, may have benefited the most from Kennedy’s death. He eventually became President himself, of course. But I doubt he was a conscious part of the conspiracy. In fact, there is a lot of evidence to suggest that Nixon later on tried to take on the same elements of the intelligence community that conspired to assassinate Kennedy, and lost, big time. Except that this time, instead of having his brains blown out, he was impeached, and Gerald Ford, who sat on the Warren Commission (yes, he did!), became President. Since then, it’s been Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton. Carter and Clinton, like Johnson, are conservative Democrats. Reagan and Bush are Republican. There has not been a “liberal” president since Kennedy, and Kennedy was a moderate liberal at best. Johnson was a liberal on domestic social policy, but an unregenerate hawk on the war in Viet Nam, and military policy.

I believe the conspirators grew wiser, and, noting the continued obsession with John Kennedy’s assassination, realized that their goals could be achieved with less risk, by simply destroying, politically, those it believed were a genuine threat to their control, and buying off the rest. The result is a striking trend in the U.S. economy that shows wages for the average work as completely stagnant for the past twenty years, while over-all wealth has increased by an incomprehensible margin.

The long-term result of Kennedy’s death is what we live with today. This bizarre infatuation with huge, expensive weapons, by governments that declare that they are obsessed with reducing taxes. The inability of either party to nominate a genuine outsider for the office of President. The vastly overblown Lewinsky scandal. Colin Powell. Large, expensive military bases that remain open though they have no military purpose. Congress voting budget increases to the Pentagon that the Pentagon did not request. All very strange.

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Yamahaha

You can play a complete Mozart concerto with one finger. It’s true. All you need is the Yamaha “Disklavier GrandTouch” electronic piano.

This keyboard instrument is programmed with actual great performances by famous musicians and orchestras. The keyboard “prompts” you for each key that you are supposed to play, and automatically provides the amazing accompaniment.

My question is, why would anyone want such a device? Why why why?

If you were to buy this keyboard primarily for the pleasure of hearing the music already programmed into it—the “great performances” by well-known musicians– why wouldn’t you just buy a CD of the same music and play it on your stereo? Or an MP3 file and play it on your computer? Or, if you wanted the thrill of seeing the music itself scroll by, how about a midi file? This has got to be the world’s largest, clunkiest, clumsiest, stereo system.

If you already know how to play music, why would you want to buy a piano that is programmed to play music performed by other musicians? What kind of satisfaction would there be in having the computer “accompany” you? Is it possible to be moved or inspired by an algorithm? Would you be proud of your performance?

And if you don’t know how to play music, why would you want to deceive yourself into thinking that you can, by sitting behind this keyboard?

Who would you think you were fooling?

As technology advances, the dreamers and schemers at the big and not-so-big high-tech corporations keep coming up with idiotic ways for you to spend your money. At $10K a pop, this keyboard is a particularly bad value. What kind of a society invests so much money into deceiving itself? This instrument represents the cosmetic surgery of creative talent. If your breasts are too small, you have them augmented. If your penis is too small, you buy a gun. If your brain is too small, you buy a Disklavier GrandTouch.

* * *

Consider some other deviant hybrids from ages past:

  • the programmable typewriter (with the tiny LCD screen). It cost as much as a computer, for less than 1/10th the functionality.
  • the moped
  • the umbrella hat

and of course, one of the real winners for instant technological obsolescence:

  • the winmodem

Personally, I think those big camper trucks—Winnebagos– are the same thing, but obviously people have yet to be convinced. You see them everywhere. They’re too big to travel around with in cities, and too small to provide a comfortable home on the go. They cost $45,000+. Think about that. How many days a year do you use it? Ten? Twenty? It would cost about $2,000 to stay in a good motel for twenty days. It would take about twenty years for the Winnebago to pay for itself. And that’s only if you don’t include insurance or gas.

Get a car and a trailer, I say, or, better yet, go to a motel. And if you really want to play the piano, take lessons. And if you can play the piano, buy a piano. And if you want to program music into a keyboard, buy a midi-compatible keyboard and a computer. That will only set you back $3,500. And you get a computer out of the deal as well.

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Reversed Progress

Here is an illustration of backwards progress.  Yes, I know, all these pictures are reduced to 72 dpi for display on computer– these are illustrations.   To give you real samples to analyze with me, I’d have to post some files that are very, very large, to show what the pictures look like, for example, at 400 dpi. However, anyone with an actual collection of photos can verify my argument.  You can  see that the black and white photos from the 50’s and 60’s have better resolution than the Instamatic or Polaroid shots from the 60’s,  70’s, and 80’s.

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Kodak Brownie Picture, 1950’s.  Large negative format = decent print.

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Brownie Picture – 1960’s still quite decent.

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35mm black and white, 1960’s: very sharp.

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Brownie colour photo, 1960’s.

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Instamatic Picture, 1960’s. 


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Pocket Camera, 1977.  Ever try enlarging one of these sandbags?

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Polaroid Picture, taken in 1980’s. Yecch.  To the turtles too.

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35mm colour, 1992

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Norman Rockwell

I never liked Norman Rockwell paintings. They had this kind of smug middle-American arrogance to them. Every one of them seemed to shout at the viewer: “Why would anyone in the world live other than we as Americans live? We’re so great!” They are the most purely American of artifacts. They idealize conservative American values: church, boy scouts, the military. In a portrait of a citizen speaking out at a city hall meeting, Rockwell seems to say, yes, in America, the average citizen has a say in the way things are run around here. Right. The average citizen and the Fortune 500 and the military industrial complex and Rush Limbaugh. But I’ll bet that guy speaking up at that meeting got his parking ticket reversed.

Later in life, however, he began to turn out works that actually alluded to real problems in the real world: “The Problem We all Live With” shows a black girl about to enter a segregated school, surrounded by marshals, whose faces we cannot see. Very moving. Politically correct, of course. But artists are supposed to be visionaries. They’re supposed to be true to a powerful inner voice tell them that this is the way things are no matter what anybody else says. Rockwell was not exactly ahead of the curve here: he did his painting in 1964. Even the U.S. Federal Government was on-board by then.

Norman Rockwell died in 1978 at 84.

There have always been those who argue that Rockwell was a GREAT artist who belongs in the company of Picasso, Millet, Miro, Pollock, or maybe even Andy Warhol (ha ha). Why, they ask, should an artist be held in contempt, just because he is popular? We need to revise our opinion of Rockwell. We need to put his “Fixing a Flat” right up there on display next to Bacon’s “Man in a Box” and Monet’s “Lily pads #4,378”. .

Well, people can revise their opinions of anything they want. Sometimes, when the obvious has been with us for so long, and for good reason, it becomes fashionable to assert that the obvious was never true. William F. Buckley Jr. decides that “Tail-Gunner” Joseph McCarthy was a hero after all. William Goldman decides that John Lennon was a jerk. Everyone is supposed to go: oh! How brilliant! He saw what everyone else missed! Rockwell really is a brilliant artist!

The thing is, sometimes things are obviously true because they are, well, obviously true. Anyone who has seen the video tape of McCarthy holding a hand over a microphone and smirking while whispering to his aide, Roy Cohn, surely suspects that the man was an idiot. And anyone who has tape of John Lennon talking to reporters from his “bed-in for peace” knows that he was a lovable idealist who wished harm to no one and was far less foolish than he appeared.

But Rockwell a great artist?

No, he isn’t. He is a great illustrator. But you can’t be a great artist if you are constantly pandering to your audience. Rockwell clearly selected subjects and meanings that he knew his audience would accept, adore, and admire, and he presented these subjects and meanings in an idiom that was utterly conventional. Here you are: you imagine that Americans, in the late 20th century, still go down to the fishing hole, or stop at the side of the road to skinny dip on a hot day, or glance with awed respect at little old ladies who pray before they eat their meals in a restaurant. Dream on. These are popular images because they appeal to people’s illusions about themselves. That’s not art. That is propaganda.

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It somehow doesn’t surprise that Rockwell did also did advertisements for Crest and Jell-O and other companies. I don’t think Rockwell was embarrassed. Why should he be? He was an illustrator.

Rockwell himself certainly believed he was an important artist. He did a painting of a man standing in an art gallery staring at a Jackson Pollock splatter

rockwell2.jpg (23179 bytes) painting.

 

You can’t see the face but you can picture the quizzical expression from the body language. The man is fair: he’s giving the painting a chance. He’s staring at it, trying to understand it. But you know and I know that the painting makes no sense to him. And that, to Rockwell, is all that there is to modern art.

Rockwell seemed proud of the fact that he was able to credibly, he thought, recreate the Pollock painting himself, using the celebrated splatter technique. Nothing to it. I could paint like that if I wanted to.

Well, I kind of agree with him. Abstract art, or non-figurative art, or whatever you want to call it, has followed it’s own course into oblivion and self-parody. It has become an industry of critics, painters, galleries, art teachers, and students, all trying to define the absurd, all attempting to establish themselves as authorities or experts on something that ridicules expertise and authority.

But I’m not ready to say that the public is right either. Rockwell isn’t the only figurative painter in the world. Van Gogh, Rembrandt, Delacroix, Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Boticelli, Van Eyk, and even Picasso, were all figurative painters at one point or another, but it’s not hard to see that there is a substantial difference between their work and Rockwell’s.

And the public never accepted Van Gogh in his own time. He sold one painting in his entire life. One. So if Rockwell had had any guts– and insight– he would have paired that painting with one of a rumpled Frenchman scratching his head while standing in front of “Starry Night”.  That would have been a far richer, more subtle comment on modern art and the average American consumer.

But that would have made the opposite point that Rockwell intended. It would have shown that the public can be absolutely, totally, completely wrong about what is “good” art. It would have shown that the vast majority of people can be utterly foolish. It would have proven that it was quite possible for a mere illustrator to be the most popular artist in America.

This all begs the question. Is modern, abstract art, and its various derivatives, any good? The public has thrown up their hands. They don’t know and they don’t care.

 

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Reversing Progress

Progress that isn’t

Innovations that took the world by storm while leading us backwards

Have you ever looked closely at photographs from the 1950’s? Then look closely at photographs from the 1960’s. Colour! Right! Great, eh? Except for one thing: resolution. Try this—try scanning in your pictures on a computer. Set the resolution to 600X600. Chances are, your black and white pictures from the 1950’s look great, especially if they were taken with a typical Kodak Brownie. Chances are your pictures from the 1960’s look like shit, especially if they were taken with a Kodak “Instamatic” or one of those awful, disgusting, contemptible, “pocket” cameras.

Do your photos all have that nice, flat, “satin” finish? Right. That’s what you want, right? Because it looks so nice. Right. Well, scan those in, and you’ll see why I always order my pictures printed on “glossy” paper. Do you want to know when and why they invented “satin” finish? That’s right—in the 1960’s and 70’s. That’s right—when they invented those crappy little camera’s with the lousy little negatives and plastic (not glass) lenses. The satin finish makes those pictures look better than they really are because, with a satin finish, you can’t notice the lack of detail.

Now look closely at a Polaroid photo, if you have one. Well, you probably don’t have very many. Why not? First of all, they weren’t much of an improvement over the Instamatic. The resolution is a little better, but the colour reproduction is not as good. But, as everyone knows, Polaroid pictures were very expensive, compared to other colour pictures. And anyway, I never could figure out why anyone would want a picture instantly, while you could still see the thing you were taking a picture of. I suspect that the biggest use of Polaroid cameras was for pictures you might be embarrassed to send to the local photo shop for processing.

Then we really did have progress. In the 1980’s, everyone went 35mm. Good photographers had used 35mm for years, but in the 1980’s, the general public suddenly developed an appetite for better pictures and these complicated but excellent cameras became quite popular. One of the reasons they became quite popular was because they suddenly became automatic or semi-automatic. You still generally had to focus the camera yourself, but shutter speed and aperture could be set automatically. Good. That’s progress. Look at the pictures from the 1980’s. Aren’t they great? Well, they would be, except that we still use that ugly satin finish. Why? The pictures were now good enough to look good, once again, on glossy paper. So why do most processors still use the satin finish?

Probably because many people still use the stupid little “Instamatics” and pocket cameras, and a lot of people buy disposable cameras, and the processing companies will be damned if they have to buy two kinds of paper.

So now it’s 1999. And what do we have? The electronic camera! Hurray! Progress again! But wait a minute. Look at those prints! They’re awful! What happened? Well, how about that. For a mere $1200 you can now buy a camera with a resolution of 640 by 480: the same quality as a Kodak “Instamatic”. Yeehaw! And you even get to give up your telephoto, wide-angle, and zoom lenses for a good old-fashioned fixed-mount single-lens camera! [Note: a decent 35mm photograph has a resolution of 1200×1200.]

I can’t believe that people are going out and spending over $1,000 for electronic cameras with a single fixed lens such poor resolution. Why? I figure these cameras should sell for about $125. Even better, someone should market an adapter that lets you shoot electronic photos on your existing 35mm equipment, so you can keep using your valuable lenses, flashes, filters, and other accessories.

The one part of electronic cameras that makes great sense is the cost of processing. Zilch. Zero. Nothing. You just download it onto your computer.

Do you realize that anything that cost nothing will eventually be worth nothing? Electronic photos will never be valued as highly by people as printed photographs are. But that does mean that your old printed photographs will be valued very highly, in the future. So don’t throw them out. They will be loved, as artifacts of an age of strange progress.

Other products that took the world by storm but were inferior to the products they replaced

  • VHS (replaced the vastly superior Betamax).
  • Microsoft Windows (annihilated OS/2, Geos, the Macintosh, Amiga, and numerous other superior operating systems).
  • the CD: a lot of people won’t believe this but a well-made turntable attached to a good amplifier produces better sound than the best CD player does. This is because sound has to be filtered and reduced in order to fit on a CD. Imagine if the same amount of innovation and design that was invested in the CD had been invested in turntables. So why did CD’s win? Because transportation is one of the largest costs of distribution. You can transport about five times as many CD’s as LP’s in the same space. But, as the music industry quickly discovered, you can charge the public more for the CD! The CD case is also one of the worst designs ever foisted on an unsuspecting but gullible public—it’s flimsy and awkward and stupid.)
  • the computer mouse (the truth – and every good keyboardist knows this— is that the keyboard is way, way faster for doing anything on a computer than a mouse is. The difference is, a mouse makes it possible for any moron to use a computer. The mouse has a legitimate use for graphics, but that’s about it. That’s commercial progress, but not a technological improvement).
  • the ball point pen (replaced the elegant fountain pen, and the utilitarian pencil, with this sloppy, blobby, leaky contraption). And how come you never see ads for pens anymore? Kind of strange, isn’t it? Remember all those Bic ball-point pen ads, showing how indestructible they were? We still see ads for disposable razors and diapers and toilet tissue—why not for pens?
  • rear-wheel drive (don’t forget that front-wheel drive was invented not in the 1980’s but in the 1950’s. It lost out to American-made rear-wheel drive behemoths for almost 30 years, until the Japanese proved it’s superiority, a thirty-year detour of unimaginable mass idiocy).
  • television (vs. high resolution tv. do you realize that you’re looking at a color picture that was designed in the 1950’s and first mass-produced in the 1960’s? Yes, your television picture is obsolete, but nobody wants to invest in the hardware required to improve it. The U.S. government has finally shoved the industry, kicking and screaming, into the next century, with requirements of HDTV broadcasts within the next five years. By that time, of course, the technology will be outdated again.)
  • Sound in Movies: If you ever in your life summon the self-discipline and determination to do something unusual and exotic, go to the video store and pick up three or four of the better silent films and sit down one night and watch them. Until you do, you probably have no idea of what was lost when films gained sound. Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin were unparalleled geniuses whose work almost disappeared entirely when sound was introduced and the movie-going public flocked to see and hear the novelty. Try Chaplin’s “City Lights” or Buster Keaton’s “The General” and remember, there were not computer-generated special-effects in those days and Chaplin and Keaton did their own stunts. And what did we gain in sound? Movies shot entirely in rooms in studios. It took years for the camera to regain it’s mobility and for Hollywood to master sound editing and effects. For all that, name a single movie produced in the last twenty years that is as good as “City Lights”, if you can.
  • Winmodems- the “mopeds” of the computer world. Real modems do a good deal of the work of converting packets of internet data into digital 1’s and 0’s so your computer can understand them. Winmodems shove all of this work onto your computer’s main CPU. Think about that. If Windows 98 is so fast on your computer that you would just love to slow it down a little so you can save $50 on a modem—please go for it.
  • And while you’re at it, you might want to look at this beautiful typewriter with a LCD display I’m trying to sell….

So why are Winmodems so popular? Did you ask for one? Did you tell the computer dealer—”hey, I think it would be a great idea if my next modem slowed my computer down a little”? No, you didn’t. But the profit margin on Winmodems—which actually consist of nothing except a pipeline from the phone line to your CPU—is much higher than on real modems.

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Photoplay and Copyright

Photoplay

I just can’t leave the issue of copyright alone. It comes up everyday in one situation or another.

Today, it was my son remarking that he wasn’t allowed to use an Albrecht Durer woodcut as the basis of a project he was working on because his teacher was afraid it would violate some rules of copyright and plagiarism. He argued that a painter who has been dead for 400 years can’t possibly have any works under copyright anymore, and that it isn’t plagiarism if you acknowledge the use of the work. This teacher was so paranoid of the copyright police, however, that she still refused permission.

Here’s an interesting fact. Though most “classic” paintings are no longer under copyright, a photograph of the painting can be.

Whoa! Let’s think about that. Let’s think a lot about that, because a lot of museums, including our own Art Gallery of Ontario, won’t let you take pictures inside their galleries anymore. Even when the paintings are hundreds of years old, as in the case of the “Old Masters” show they did recently. So if you can’t take your own picture, then you have to get a copy from somewhere else. A logical place to look is in an art history book with lavish illustrations. But, according to the copyright police, you can’t copy that picture because, though the work of art itself is public domain, the photograph of it is not.

[Added 2022-04-12: I am pleased to note that many museums do, in fact, allow photography of the art work, as long as you do not use a flash.]

Now, photographers who create original pictures can definitely copyright their work. If I am walking along a boulevard in Toronto and I see a bum who looks like Mike Harris poking through a garbage bin and I take a picture and then publish it in the Toronto Sun, that is my copyrighted work. I saw the image. I took the picture. I chose the aperture and the angle and the type of film. If I was a professional photographer, I may have developed the picture and printed it myself. I may have edited it on my computer, before handing it over to the Sun for publication. Fair enough. It’s my work. I deserve to get paid for it. Let’s leave aside the question, for the moment, of whether or not the bum should also get paid. The photograph has a certain value because of the intellectual and physical effort of the photographer. That seems pretty fair.

However, the same photographer walks into the Louvre in Paris and snaps a picture of the Mona Lisa. His goal is not to create something new and original (unless, like Marcel Duchamps, he wants to put a moustache on it). His goal is to create an exact, faithful rendering of the original, so that art students can study it in a text book at a mediocre high school somewhere in Peoria. The value of the image is determined entirely by the value of the work of Leonardo Da Vinci that went into it. But since Da Vinci has died years and years ago, the image has now become a part of cultural heritage, for all to share.

So why is this image copyrighted? Legally, in fact, it is. That’s an outrage. It isn’t entitled to copyright protection anymore. It really isn’t. It’s absurd. I refuse to accept this copyright. I refuse to acknowledge it. If I choose to scan that image into my computer’s memory and show it on my web page, I will.

Here’s another interesting case of aggressive copyright imperialism: the company that sells sheet music to high school bands insists that the band is not allowed to make any copies of the actual sheet music itself, no matter what. No photocopies, no overheads. But, we are told, the copyright laws apply to intellectual property, not physical property. Remember, this is why you can’t copy software or music CDs. Because even though you own the physical disk, it is the content of the disk that is protected.

So if a school buys sheet music for the entire band, and decides to prevent the paper copies from deteriorating by photocopying them and handing the copies out to band members, there should be no problem. Remember, the school has paid for intellectual property to be used by each student in the band. What difference does it make whether they read it off the original print or a copy of it? The school didn’t buy half a copyright. It didn’t pay $20 a sheet for paper. It paid for use of copyrighted material by each member of the band. If so, there is no ethical or moral reason why the band can’t access that material in any way they choose, including computer screens.

If that is true, there should be no obstacle to making copies of the protected material for your own use. For example, I used to tape all of my vinyl LP’s as soon as I bought them, in order to minimize the wear and tear on the fragile plastic itself. I paid for the LP. I own a right to use the intellectual property on it.

Well, the record companies are finally coming around to the fact that they can’t very well have it both ways. If the copyright applies to the physical object, the CD itself, than either the intellectual property is what is copyrighted—in which case you can make as many copies as you want for your personal use—or it’s the physical object that is copyrighted, in which case you can make as many copies as you want for almost anybody.

Who else should get Copyright Protection by These Standards?

My son plays bass in a high school orchestra. They recently issued a CD as part of a fund-raiser. They carefully obtained the correct copyrights for any piece of music that was not public domain.

However, my son frequently improvises the bass line. So he creates, through his own original and unique thought processes, a piece of music that is utterly his own. Should he be able to demand royalties for each CD sold?

That bum that looks like Harris—he owns his face, his hands, his ragged clothes. He owns his posture, the look on his face, the minute the photograph is taken. But it is the photographer who collects the royalty, not him. He doesn’t even get a share.

And who should get copyright protection but doesn’t have it yet…

That’s right—you and me. Your name and my name. Your address and my address. I chose to move to this address and I chose to have this particular e-mail address. I hereby copyright it. No use without permission. I’m not kidding. If you use my name and address on your printed envelope or your electronic mail, you owe me $50.

I register a software package I have purchased to do my home accounting. The software company sells my name and address to another software company, with the result being that I get more garbage in my mailbox, inviting me to subscribe to some stupid investment service. How dare they? What right do they have to sell my name? Who decided that I can’t copy one of their software applications to give to a friend—who would be pleased with the favor–but they can sell my name to another software company—to my great annoyance?

So I propose a simple act of parliament or congress that simply assigns the copyright of a person’s name, and his address and any other personal information, including medical or credit histories, to the person him or herself. Done. From now on, anybody who wants to sell this information must pay a copyright fee to the owners. The only exception would be the standard copyright exception: research, journalism, and reviews. Done. Justice at last.