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Wesley Snipes: Demolition Man

February 1, 2008 / TiamatsVision

According to the Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog, actor Wesley Snipes was “found not guilty of federal tax-fraud and conspiracy charges Friday, but was convicted on three misdemeanor counts of failing to file a tax return”. Looking into this a bit further, I found an article which states that he “appears to have associated himself with not one but two radical extremist groups, each with a long history of criminal activity. In addition to being advised by Eddie Ray Kahn (pronounced “Kane”), an IRS antagonist since 2000, Snipes appears to own a fraudulent trust of the sort that recently earned anti-tax activist Arthur Farnsworth a conviction for tax evasion (he is scheduled to be sentenced in Pennsylvania later this month). It’s not the best company to be keeping if one seeks to maintain good standing with the U.S. government. But what makes the case truly bizarre is the anti-tax movement’s deep association with anti-Semites and white supremacists.”

It is also rumored that he has ties to a “bizarre Georgia-based black nationalist cult, the United Nuwaubian Nation of Moors-an apocalyptic organization that preaches a ripped-from-the-X Files m?lange of UFO lore, Egyptian mythology, Afrocentrism, and conspiracy theory. The group is led by self-styled prophet Dwight “Malachi” York, who in 2004 was sentenced to 135 years in prison for a litany of convictions including tax evasion and the sexual abuse of more than a dozen children of his disciples.”

How did he become associated with two different groups with radically different views? They found something in common. The anti-tax movement.

(via Radar)

Bill Gates Issues Call For Kinder Capitalism

January 25, 2008 / TiamatsVision

“Free enterprise has been good to Bill Gates. But today, the Microsoft Corp. chairman will call for a revision of capitalism. In a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the software tycoon plans to call for a “creative capitalism” that uses market forces to address poor-country needs that he feels are being ignored. “We have to find a way to make the aspects of capitalism that serve wealthier people serve poorer people as well,” Mr. Gates will tell world leaders at the forum, according to a copy of the speech seen by The Wall Street Journal.

Mr. Gates isn’t abandoning his belief in capitalism as the best economic system. But in an interview with the Journal last week at his Microsoft office in Redmond, Wash., Mr. Gates said that he has grown impatient with the shortcomings of capitalism. He said he has seen those failings first-hand on trips for Microsoft to places like the South African slum of Soweto, and discussed them with dozens of experts on disease and poverty. He has voraciously read about those failings in books that propose new approaches to narrowing the gap between rich and poor.”

(via WSJ)

Two Old DeLanda Interviews

October 19, 2006 / Klint Finley

I actually thought I’d posted these before, but I can’t find them in the archives anywhere. They are older interviews, but they’re a good introduction to DeLanda.

From the Zero News Datapool:

Don’t call me Gaia. The Gaia hypothesis is a very interesting point. […] Philosophically, it is a terrible mistake. It is a terrible mistake precisely in the neo-materialist sense because it takes the metaphor of the organism, it sees life, living flesh as the most magical thing that happened on this planet. This is of course a chauvinism, a kind of organic chauvinism on our part. It takes the metaphor of the organism and applies it to the whole planet. Now the whole planet is alive, that what Gaia is. Not only do you call it an organism, you also give it a goddess name just to make sure you are ridiculous enough. The way out of this is to think that the planet is indeed something special, but it what Deleuze and Guttari called a body without organs, which is the exact opposite of an organism. It is a cauldron or receptacle of non-organic life, a body without organs. Because it can be alive in the sense of being creative and generating order without having genes or having organs or being an organism. In my view, the very fact that the atmosphere connected with the hydrosphere can generate things like hurricanes and cyclones and all kinds of self-organizing entities means that indeed the planet, even before living creatures appeared, was already a body without organs, a cauldron of creativity, a receptacle of spontaneously emerging order.

And here’s Erik Davis’s interview with DeLanda from Mondo 2000:

I have my shaman there, since I was like 19, this woman called Julietta. She is a direct heir of a long, long line of Mazatec knowledge.

I hate mysticism. I’ve always hated the whole idea of taking psychedelics and then going, “Western science is bullshit, let’s turn to Eastern philosophy.” I always strive to have a materialist explanation for what’s going on. I always thought that matter had much more to it than just this inert stuff that sits here. And now I’m being proved right.

Think about the Game of Life [computer-based cellular automata developed by mathematician John Conway]. At first the rules of interaction of the little cells in an abstract space were so simple that everybody thought it was a game. Then they found ladders and glider-generating guns spontaneously forming. So this tiny, abstract, stupid space all of a sudden began exploding with possibilities.

DeLanda’s Markets and Anti-Markets series

April 27, 2006 / Klint Finley

For those unfamiliar with him, this interview serves as a good introduction.

Markets, Antimarkets and Network Economics.

Markets and Antimarkets pt. 1.
Markets and Antimarkets pt. 2.
Markets and Antimarkets pt. 3.
Markets and Antimarkets pt. 4.

Markets and Anti-markets in the World Economy.

Markets, Antimarkets and the Fate of the Nutrient Cycles.

Via the Manuel DeLanda Annotated Bibliography.

Rambling: micropayments, outsourcing, and the digital divide

February 28, 2004 / Klint Finley

Not too long ago Glenn Reynolds said:

And although quite a few people have downloaded it for free (and even sent in donations), many of them have emailed to say that they’d rather pay cover price for the actual book than download it for no charge.

This seems to me to suggest that free downloads don’t do much to cannibalize actual sales.

I’m pretty sure Reynolds originally mentioned that he might need to reconsider the rules he learned in economics 101 when he originally posted, but that comment is gone now.

And this story is hardly rare… Cory Doctorow’s book has sold well. And while of course book downloads are very different from music downloads, but iTunes certainly hasn’t done bad. Hopefully this success will transfer to stuff like mperia as well.

Personally, I think the prices are still too high. There was a thread about micropayments on Margin Walker (last summer was it?), in which Andy from South Africa pointed out that while 10 cents to download an article might not be much to us in America, but in another country that’s a lot. But what if it was 10 cents for an entire book or magazine? Or 10 cents for a year’s subscription to a web site/e-zine? The idea here is to make up the sales in volume, Wal-Mart style. And with more and more people getting internet access, and outsourcing giving jobs and internet access to people who have never had money to spare before, there’s I think there’s a strong possibility for people to start global cottage industries using micropayment systems.

Also, Clay Shirkey makes a point that people don’t like being “nickel and dimed” and that subscription based models tend to be preferable. Not sure he’s right, look at eMusic. It used to be an all you can download service, now, like iTunes, it’s a pay as a you go.

more: Bruce Sterling on Somolia / Me: The digital divide, organized labor, and smart mobs / Digital Divide narrowing?

Old Manuel DeLanda Interview

November 30, 2003 / Klint Finley

Now I know why Abe’s always talking about this guy:

“Instead of the peasant that shows up to the market to sell a certain amount of corn, here you have a wholesaler with a huge warehouse where he stores all the corn he can. If the prices are too low, he can always with drawn certain amounts from the market, put them in the warehouse, and artificially make the prices go up. When the prices go up, he then sells the rest of the corn at these high prices and he makes a lot of money. But, of course, he is manipulating demand and supply. He is not being governed by these anonymous forces. He is not being subject to self-organization; he is organizing everything in a planned cunning way. And so, because economists use the word “market” to describe both, that is one of the main confusions I see in contemporary thought.

We need another word to describe these organizations that are large enough to manipulate markets. A word has been suggested by historian Fernand Braudel and it is a very simple one: “anti-market.” Why? Because they manipulate markets. And so today, in the United States, there is a very strong political movement, mostly by the right wing, and Newt Gingrich is perhaps the most well known politician in this regards, who are trying, as they say, shrink the size of the government, let market forces have more room to operate. But, of course, translated into the terms we?ve just introduced, what they really want to do is let anti-market forces run wild. They don?t really want small producers and small manufacturers and bakers and printers and mom-and-pop shops to have more room to manoeuver and make money. They want national and international corporations to have more room to manoeuver. They want to shrink government so that there are less regulations to keep international and national corporations from doing what they want.

Zero News Datapool: An Interview with Manuel de Landa

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