I was on the phone this morning with an old friend from the music biz.

I was trying to find out what rumours he had heard about a particular company that I am doing some research on, and also trying to find out whether my friend would be interested in getting involved in the company if the opportunity presented itself...

He told me that he wasn't particularly excited by the music business anymore. He is investigating getting involved in organic farming instead... which is actually pretty reasonable. After all most of the people who were successful entrepreneurs in the music business didn't just have good ears. They were prescient about how culture works.

And my friend is no exception. He signed some pretty big acts over the years - both in the UK and in Australia. His real talent was understanding what the public was going to do next, but about 18 - 24 months before they decided to do it.

And when you think about it, in a $200 a barrel-of-oil-world there are going to have to be some big changes to the way we live.

It may be imperceptible to many, but the signal are all there for us to read: This morning in the Sydney Morning Herald hidden in plane view in the story about "rail cheats" was the following quote: "However, with soaring patronage on the rail and bus networks, the Government is under pressure to solve the ticketing problems that have plagued the network for decades."

Why do you think there is soaring patronage? Easy, because of the increased fuel prices. You don't have to be Einstein to figure that out. And this is just the beginning. As oil prices continue to rise, people will be moving out of the car and into the train/bus. And when they get there, they are going to find that the systems are broken. And meanwhile the NSW government is still going to be deliberating over how to spend another billion on improving a road system....

But back to organics. The other thing that is going to happen is declining availability of food and increasing price.

The only solution is going to be "to eat local".

That will mean not just eating foods that are grown nearby, but eating produce that is in season. We are going to have to relearn what dishes to eat in the various seasons. Restaurants and grocery stores that get this will be able to clean up. The opportunity is in making a necessity of life into something that is cool, something that is good for the planet, and something that tastes good. And real food that is from the right season really does taste better too!

Some call them muckrakers, others call them investigative reporters....

Nieman Reports have an issue that is devoted to the subject... got some interesting insights there...

Here is some of the essay by Stuart Watson on TV....

My Fuji Xerox printer has been on the fritz over the last couple of weeks. I needed to print a letter so I went to the Office Works in the local town to print it. I saved the letter onto a memory stick to make it easy.

OfficeWorks wanted to charge me $5.50 to download the letter from the memory stick to one of their PC's! And then charge me for the printing on top of that! What a total rip off!

Instead I went to an internet cafe a couple of blocks away and got the two page letter printed for fifty cents...

Back to the printer - this is another rip off. I have had the Xerox laser printer for a couple of years. It cost originally about $600 which was a pretty competitive price at the time. So now it appears that the ink cartridges need to be replaced. And boy are they expensive! About $170 per cartridge. And there are four cartridges...

The moral of the story seems to be that it is substantially cheaper to buy a new printer when the first cartridge gives up the ghost. This is why we have landfill overflowing with e-pollution in this country....

Where is the climate going? Is it getting warmer? Or are we heading for a mini ice age as some people believe?

I wonder whether what we are getting to is neither one or the other, but more a matter of chaotic weather.

I saw a story that in Scotland they are having the best snow season in ten years. But I think what is more disturbing is the news that climate scientists have found that there is a significant change in the salinity in the antarctic region and that this may have "profound effects on the earth's currents".

"So-called Antarctic bottom water helps power the great ocean conveyor belt, a system of currents spanning the Southern, Pacific, Indian and Atlantic Oceans that shifts heat around the globe.

"The main reason we're paying attention to this is because it is one of the switches in the climate system and we need to know if we are about to flip that switch or not," said Rintoul of Australia's government-backed research arm the CSIRO.

"If that freshening trend continues for long enough, eventually the water near Antarctica would be too light, too buoyant to sink and that limb of the global-scale circulation would shut down," he said on Friday.

Cold, salty water also sinks to the depths in the far north Atlantic Ocean near Greenland and, together with the vast amount of water that sinks off Antarctica, this drives the ocean conveyor belt."

A tip of the hat to Steven Noble for sending me the link to a video by Gerd Leonhard about Music 2.0.

Gerd has a really interesting take on how the music industry needs to focus on what the consumer wants to buy and how and where she wants to engage, rather than the music industry focusing on how they want to sell their products to the consumer...

The problem that remains of course is that the ecosystem in the music business is much more complex than people generally realize. And the key area which is not easily understood is the role of the songwriter. The songwriter assigns his or her rights to a publisher and often the publisher assigns some limited set of rights to a collecting society. Somewhere in there one of these organizations license the record producer to enable the production and replication of the master recording. Its at this point that it becomes seriously difficult, and nowadays more than ever.

The reason for this is that when the music business was young and pre-digital, there was a significant cost associated with manufacturing, warehousing, printing, distributing product. With the advent of digital that cost goes virtually to zero. But the regulatory structure that is in place means that publishers (and through them, songwriters) are still being paid as if the record company had all that overhead.

The result is that the margins going to the record companies have increased massively. The publishers - I imagine - want a bigger slice of the cake....

The reality of course is that they should all move their focus onto how to make a transaction easier for the consumer. And that is the focus of the video and book by Gerd. Definitely worth looking at.

There is a heightening awareness of what may become a cost to society of our reliance on technology. An article in New Scientist explores the issue.

It is only available to subscribers, so I googled the headline to try to find out who might have posted it. Within nanoseconds I had found a full version of the article at this blog which I then blogged about at the GRMP blog.

Isn't it remarkable - the very technology that makes things so easy to find, also makes it incredibly easy and perhaps inevitable, that the material that is available by subscription is available free. And I think that it makes the point that the business model of subscription is one that is at risk because of the googleization of media.

But the important point of the article is that the more complex systems become, the more potential there is for system failure.

Here is an interesting and great resource for when there is nothing to watch on cable!

FreeDocumentaries.Org has an enormous library of material that is riveting viewing!

They say that they honour all copyright laws, although I think that they may be pushing the whole idea of "its better to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission" line.

Here is the trailer for one movie that they have in the library...

William Wordsworth wrote sometime in the 1800's:

The world is too much with us, late and soon,
Getting and spending we lay waste our powers...

I remember the quote from school some 50 odd years ago - so hopefully it is right.

But the point is that it so true of us today. We are all pre-occupied with spending, with self, and not with what is really happening.

What is really happening is that Dick Cheney and his buddy, George, are moving the world ever closer to not just another war, which would be bad enough, but a nuclear war.

And whether Iran is good, bad or indifferent, nuclear is not an option in my book. Nor is another unprovoked first strike on another country.

Here is what Paul Craig Roberts has to say about it. (He was the Assistant Secretary to the Treasury during Reagan's time in the WH). Its worth reading the whole article...

The US Congress, the US media, the American people, and the United Nations, are looking the other way as Cheney prepares his attack on Iran.

If only America had an independent media and an opposition party. If there were a shred of integrity left in American political life, perhaps a third act of naked aggression--a third war crime under the Nuremberg standard--by the Bush Regime could be prevented.

On March 30, the Russian News & Information Agency, Novosti, cited a high-ranking security source: "The latest military intelligence data point to heightened US military preparations for both an air and ground operation against Iran."

According to Novosti, Russian Colonel General Leonid Ivashov said "that the Pentagon is planning to deliver a massive air strike on Iran’s military infrastructure in the near future."

The chief of Russia’s general staff, Yuri Baluyevsky, said last November that Russia was beefing up its military in response to US aggression, but that the Russian military is not "obliged to defend the world from the evil Americans."

On March 29, OpEdNews cited a report by the Saudi Arabian newspaper Okaz, which was picked up by the German news service, DPA. The Saudi newspaper reported on March 22, the day following Cheney’s visit with the kingdom’s rulers, that the Saudi Shura Council is preparing "national plans to deal with any sudden nuclear and radioactive hazards that may affect the kingdom following experts’ warnings of possible attacks on Iran’s Bushehr nuclear reactors."

And Admiral William "there will be no attack on Iran on my watch" Fallon has been removed as US chief of Central Command, thus clearing the way for Cheney’s planned attack on Iran.

The Iranians don’t seem to believe it, despite the dispatch of US nuclear submarines and another aircraft carrier attack group to the Persian Gulf. To counter any Iranian missiles launched in response to an attack, the US is deploying anti-missile defenses to protect US bases and Saudi oil fields.

Two massive failures by the American media, the Democratic Party, and the American people have paved the way for Cheney’s long-planned attack on Iran. One failure is the lack of skepticism about the US government’s explanation of 9/11. The other failure is the Democrats’ refusal to begin impeachment proceedings against President Bush for lying to the Congress, the American people, and the world and launching an invasion of Iraq based on deception and fabricated evidence.

If an American president can start a war exactly as Adolf Hitler did with pure lies and not be held accountable, he can get away with anything. And Bush and his evil regime have.

Hitler launched World War II with his invasion of Poland after staging a "Polish attack" on a German radio station. On the night of August 31, 1939, a group of Nazis disguised in Polish uniforms seized a radio station in Germany. Hitler announced that "last night Polish troops crossed the frontier and attacked Germany," a claim no more true than the Bush Regime’s claim that "Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction." Hitler’s lie failed, because his invasion of Poland, which began the next day allegedly in reprisal for the Polish attack, had obviously been planned for many months.

Iran is a beautiful and developed country. It is an ancient civilization. It has attacked no one. Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty. Iran is permitted by the treaty to have a nuclear energy program. The Bush Regime’s case against Iran is based on the Bush Regime’s desire to deny Iran its rights under the treaty.

The International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors have repeatedly reported that they have found no evidence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program. Despite all the disinformation from US Gen. Petraeus and other Bush Regime military lackeys, Iran is not arming the Iraqis who are resisting the American occupation.

If Iran were arming insurgents, the insurgents would have two weapons that would neutralize the US advantage in the Iraqi conflict: missiles to knock down US helicopter gunships and rocket-propelled grenades that knock out American tanks. The insurgents do not have these weapons and must construct clumsy anti-tank weapons out of artillery shells. The insurgents are helpless against US air power and cannot mass forces to take on the American troops.

Indiscriminate American violence has reduced Iraq to rubble. The civilian infrastructure is essentially destroyed--electricity, water and sewer systems, medical care and schools. Depleted uranium is everywhere poisoning everyone, including US troops. There is no economy, and half or more of Iraqis are unemployed. Literally no Iraqi family has escaped an injury or a death as a consequence of the US invasion. Millions of Iraqis have become displaced persons. A developed country with a professional middle class has been destroyed because of lies told by the President and Vice President of the US. The Bush Regime’s lies are echoed by a neoconservative media, and have gone unchallenged by the opposition party and an indifferent American public.

In Afghanistan, death and destruction rains on even the smallest village from the air. America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are wars against the civilian populations.

Just as the world could not believe Hitler’s next horror and thus was always unprepared, the Iranians despite all the evidence cannot believe that even the Great Satan would gratuitously attack Iran based on nothing but lies about non-existent nuclear weapons.

Iran’s only chance would be to strike before the US delivers the first blow. Instead of using its missiles to take out the Saudi oil fields and to sink the US aircraft carriers, instead of closing the Strait of Hormuz, instead of arming the Iraqi Shi’ites and moving them to insurgency, Iran is perched like a sitting duck in denial even as the US and its Iraqi puppet Maliki move to eliminate Al Sadr’s Iraqi Shi’ite militia in order to avoid supply disruptions and a Shi’ite rebellion in Iraq when the US attack on Iran comes.

It is important to emphasize that Iran is making no moves toward war. Having tamed, blackmailed, and purchased Congress, the US media, and US allies and puppets, Cheney might delight in the arrogance with which he can now attack Iran free of any restraint or fabricated provocation.

On the other hand, he might cover himself by orchestrating an "Iranian provocation" to justify his attack as a response. But like Hitler’s planned attack against Poland, Cheney’s attack on Iran has long been in the works.

On March 29 the Associated Press reported that Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi "poured contempt on fellow Arab leaders" at the Arab summit that day. Gadhafi told the Arab "leaders," many of whom are on the American payroll, that their American masters would turn on them all, just as America turned on Saddam Hussein after using him to fight a proxy war against Iran.

Saddam had once been an ally of Washington, Gadhafi reminded the Arabs, "but they sold him out." Gadhafi told the American puppets, "Your turn is next."

Gadhafi asked, "Where is the Arabs’ dignity, their future, their very existence?" If Arabs remain disunited, he predicted, "they will turn themselves into protectorates. They will be marginalized and turn into garbage dumps."

Indeed, it is this disunity that permits the US to bomb and murder at will in the Middle East.