Jeff Richards Web Diary

Tuesday, July 15, 2003

Listening To Music I love my toys. Mine are usually the expensive kind. I recently purchased a Sony Net MD player. It’s a very usefull advance in the technology of digital music reproduction, if you are not into pirating music for sale or to your friends. Sony owns a lot of the music production business, so its understandable if they try and protect their profit margins from piracy. In return they give you a nice little piece of equipment. I have about 600 CDs and growing. Music is a wonderful addiction. The problem is for those of us 40 something’s who have what one regards as a treasure trove of loved music is listening to the damn things. You would have to spend a lot of time going through your catalogue. You also tend to forget some nice riff or song or album if you haven’t played it for a while. The advantage of the Net MD is in the Sonic Stage software that you put into you computer. It has an integrated compression system that allows you to put around 10 CDs per gig. So I put in thirty to fifty CDs into the hard drive. The software can randomly select the tracks. I am surprised at the listenability of random selection. It can go from genre to genre, making the next track an interesting surprise. I decided to load up a large number of tracks from genre box sets, in this case two box sets ‘The Secret History of Rock and Roll’ (tracks from the first half of the 20th century.) and the controversial selection of Ken Burns’ Jazz. Then a wide ranging selection from C&W (Johnny Cash) to Jazz, Rock, Jazz Rock, Garage etc. etc. Random selection gives you a good appreciation of the connections among musical genres. In any case, it’s all from my own collection. Tuesday, 15 July 2003 2:41:27 PM    comment []

Australia and the Nuclear Option. I have this feeling that deep in the heart of the Australian state apparatus there are preparations for to produce nuclear weapons, or at least move a few steps forward in the manufacturing processes. I wrote the previous paragraph a few days ago. Yesterday, in the Adelaide Sunday Mail I read an article on this very issue, about the way in which Australia was taking a few steps closder to making the atomic bomb, primarily through the upgrade at Lucas Heights Reactor and by the creation of a nuclear storage facility in northern South Australia. If these plans are being realised, then the political consequences of this will be very interesting, particularly for the Australian Labor Party. One can be certain that the Green Party will be resolutely opposed to the nuclear option. What about the ALP? It should not be taken for granted that the parties of the left will simply oppose the nuclear option. The French Communist Party for example, has supported a nuclear French state. I am sure that there will be a looming battle in the ALP about the nuclear option for Australia. Many Australian Nationalists might see the nuclear option as a road to an independent foreign policy. With a growing number of states in the process of making atomic weapons and long range delivery systems, there must be a view within policy making elite that the time has come for Australia to do the same. The same nationalists might argue that as long as Australia does not have atomic weapons then we will grow increasingly dependant on the United States. The current governments move to strengthen ties with Washington is indicative of the growing concern in Canberra with the proliferation of nuclear weapons among medium sized states. Monday, 14 July 2003 1:38:52 PM    comment []

IRAQ There is a certain amount of perverse joy one feels when we hear of the troubles the United States is facing in Iraq. Still, it couldn’t be too much fun being a soldier in a place where you just cant relax. There must be a great trade in illegal psychoactive substances going on. I wonder what the drug of choice is in this war. I suspect it is probably speed in its different forms. Policy makers in the Washington must be getting that sinking feeling. Slowly but surely the body count rises, with no end in sight. I don’t think I have heard any news coming out of Iraq suggesting the return of political stability. To make things worse the credibility of the reasons for going to war are being questioned every day. It will be interesting to see whether a well organised resistance to the American and British occupation forces evolves, and how this will relate to the remnants of the Baath Party. I have argued in the past that an organised resistance is separate but interlinked to Baath Party forces. The same applies this time. The party will only be able to partly influence the resistance struggle. It is possible ( but not likely in my view ) that the Baath Party might be overtaken by other organised leadership groups (say Communists or Islamists). It is also possible that the Baath might seize control of the resistance. If the occupation forces are not able to restore political stability and create some kind of state administration, then the resistance will grow to the point where it will become a contender for state power. There will be two processes that will be fascinating to watch. One process will be the further disintegration of the existing state authority. The other will be struggle for the leadership of the resistance. Friday, 11 July 2003 1:36:53 PM    comment []