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I second that one about KFJC , and Spliff Skankin, their Reggae DJ.

And as a former KFJC DJ, who currently works at 3 radio stations on the Mendocino coast, I still "tune in" to KFJC on the web when I can.

Also, folks might try their local community radio stations , the low power one's in particular, as they often feature "new" music.

And by "new" I mean music that one hasn't likely ever heard before, not necessarily "new" by calendar date.

Another source of new music is on KZYX , where they have several musically "adventurous", late night shows offering some non-RIAA music.

"Up All Night" with DJ Pete, and "Sonic Attack"/"Music Out of Bounds" all feature "new" music.

And theres an exceptional Reggae show every other Friday night from 10 to Midnight called "Heavyweight Sound", hosted by DJ Larry, and he features rare, vintage 7", 10", & 12" Rock Steady, Dub, and Reggae singles.

Sorry, no Bob Marley... or Shinehead... etc., but unless you collect rare Jamaican singles, it WILL be "new" to you.

Also my two late night radio shows on KZYX where I attempt to play at least 35% or more, of "new" music every show, and as much "good" non-RIAA music as I can find.

And then there's Jamendo , with 5750 published albums, and ALL for FREE.

On jamendo, the artists distribute their music under Creative Commons licenses, and via BitTorrent or eMule to legally distribute albums at near-zero cost

There's some ripping good music on this website, and ALL of it RIAA free!

Does this mean that we'll get some decent radio stations back? Clear Channel effectively ruined the radio for me, NPR being the only remaining reason to turn it on.

Well, for me that would be Democracy Now!, which you can may be able to hear broadcast somewhere, depending on where you live, e.g. KPFA, in the SF Bay Area, and WBAI in the New York area. In general, the Pacifica stations do a decent job of "alternative" broadcasting, provided you don't mind the almost exclusively left-wing focus.

Also, there are many, many small college stations (and other non-coms) scattered around, usually located at the bottom of the dial. They also all have internet streams these days:

• KZSU
• KFJC
• WFMU
• WREK
• WRCT
• KALX
• KUSF
• WNUR
• KSPC
• KXLU
• WPRB
• KTRU
• KALW

For me, it's not the AM/FM limitations so much... It's just the suckiness of the music. If you set this thing up to record each unique song played in a 24 hour period on one particular station, you'd have just 20 different songs. Radio plays the same songs over and over again. Once you've recorded one days' worth of broadcasting, you'd be set for the next month... or whenever the radio station refreshes their playlist.

Your only exaggerating a little bit, but you're essentially describing only commercial radio. In many places around the country there are alternatives to that, college radio stations and non-profits like the Pacifica stations, and you'll hear a wide variety of stuff broadcast there.

Of course, they also all tend to have some form of internet streaming going, so this by itself would not be a reason to do capture of FM signals (possibly you might like to do this to get higher audio quality and to reduce bandwith usage).

It is, by the way, an odd peculiarity about all the buzz about "podcasting" making radio broadcasting more democratic: when I actually listen to amateurs playing DJ, it seems really unimpressive... college stations on the other hand, have something of a tradition of exploration of new music to fall back on, they're pros at the business of being amateurs.

A quick list of stations that might be worth a listen:

• WRCT
• KZSU
• KALX
• KUSF
• KFJC
• WNUR
• WREK
• WFMU
• KSPC
• KXLU
• WPRB
• KTRU

College radio is great listening too, and most college stations have online streams. I like WTBU out of Boston University -- amazingly eclectic programming schedule.

There's a bunch of good stations out there... a quick list that I've got on hand:

• Pittsburg: WRCT
• Georgia: WREK
• New York: WFUV
• Los Altos, CA: KFJC
• Berkeley, CA: KALX
• San Francisco, CA KUSF
• Davis, CA: KDVS
• Stanford, CA: KZSU

In my area (near Apple HQ in fact), there are quite a few good radio stations, none of them owned by Clear Channel / Infinity / Disney / etc. Not everyone is as fortunate as I am, but nearly everyone has a nearby NPR affiliate at least.

No KALX. No KFJC. A "search" feature that silently returns nothing. Passwords emailed in the clear. And you just refer to pre-existing radio streams. Did you ask those stations before trying to make a buck on their streams? (Probably not necessary, but definitely polite.) Are you going to contribute to the public radio stations you carry? What happens during pledge week / month?

If you appreciate noncommercial media, you may want to support them. If you live in the US, you are likely near a PBS television station and an NPR radio affiliate. If you're really lucky, you may have some excellent college radio stations or a Pacifica affiliate. I particularly enjoy KFJC and support them every year. Some broadcasters may not be actively soliciting funds during this period (KFJC for example has its yearly fund drive in October), but I'm sure they'd be willing to accept donations at any time.

If, for example, I love bluegrass, but I'm not near a radio when a good bluegrass show is on, then it would be nice if I had a device that could record the program for later enjoyment. This is an issue for me because the radio reception in my office is terrible.

I'm not sure about this particular product though. I haven't read the fucking article yet.

Last I heard, "HD Radio" was compressed using MPEG-4 AAC. I forget the bitrate, but it's likely around 128 Kbps. This is real good, but not CD-quality. Eric Weaver Chief Engineer, KFJC, 1993-1997

As long as they don't take out my favorite College radio station I don't care. Who the hell listens to radio anyways?

You don't have to stop purchasing CDs to stick it to the RIAA; you just have to make sure that the artists/labels that you do buy are not members of the RIAA. You can use the RIAA Radar to see if a purchase would be giving any money to the RIAA or not.

There are hundreds of labels releasing music that is independent of the RIAA. Start listening to college radio stations towards the bottom end of the dial! Many of these stations broadcast online as well - WFMU, KDVS, and KFJC are great stations that focus on independent, non-commercial music.

There's a world of sound out there most people never hear. You don't have to be a slave to the major label marketing executives and the RIAA!

Here's a short listing of some I know about (thanks to another poster for reminding me about KDVS):

• Pittsburg: WRCT
• Georgia: WREK
• New York: WFUV
• Los Altos, CA: KFJC
• Berkeley, CA: KALX
• San Francisco, CA KUSF
• Davis, CA: KDVS
• Stanford, CA: KZSU

One thing to remember about college radio is that it changes constantly from program to program... there's often very litte of an attempt at presenting a consistent sound as in commercial radio. So don't just listen once or twice to a station and assume you know what they're about. Maybe you should look for an online program schedule to figure out when to listen.

a great idea. also please be advised that some of the best rated college stations do webcasts as well.

(i guess my west coast prejudices are showing- i'm sure there's great ones on the east coast and midwest, etc as well)

Posted by Michael Fraase, 3/23/02 at 9:54:46 PM.

When elephants dance, its best to get out of the way. Thats exactly whats happening now as the entertainment industrythe recording, publishing, and motion picture industries, mainlyattempts a worldwide intellectual property power grab with two distinct targets. Think of it: a coup and a lock on all published content in the same year, amazing isnt it?

Target number 1 is the average customer: anyone who purchases software, an audio CD, an electronic book, or a movie on DVD. The entertainment industry sees customers as pirates, plain and simple. In their collective minds eye, we all have a wooden leg, eye patch, and a filthy talking parrot on our shoulder. While the Constitution grants customers certain rights with regard to copyrighted material, the entertainment industry very much wants to separate us from those rights.

Target number 2 in the sights of the entertainment industry are technology behemoths like Microsoft, Intel, IBM, and Apple. These companies, in the perverse worldview of the entertainment industry, make the toolscomputers mostlythat allow customers to practice their piracy.

Let me point out that I am a copyright owner, as is everyone else who has ever created a work in tangible form. Thats all authors, for short. Authors are almost never members of the entertainment industry club. The entertainment industry hates authors almost as much as they hate customers. Sometimes, especially when authors get uppity, the entertainment industry hates authors much more than customers. Until recently, authors have always been seen to be at least a marginal threat while customers were seen as merely necessary annoyances.

To complicate matters by at least an order of magnitude, the consumer electronics manufacturersthe companies that make stereos, VCRs, and DVD playershave aligned with the entertainment industry. At least some of them, and at least to some extent.

Unfortunately for usboth authors and customerswere likely to get squished as these elephants dance. The intent of the entertainment industry, believe it or not, is to outlaw personal computers. As security and cryptography expert Bruce Schneier explains it to Mike Godwin: If you think about it, the entertainment industry does not want people to have computers; theyre too powerful, too flexible, and too extensible. They want people to have Internet Entertainment Platforms: televisions, VCRs, game consoles, etc.

Copy-protected CDs

The recording industry is selling shiny plastic discs that contain music that cant be copied to or even played on some customers equipment. Philips, the owner of the CD format says these discs cannot be called CDs because they do not meet the standard of what a CD is. Sony, one of those weird hybrid companies that, as a member in good standing of both the technology and entertainment industries, finds itself on both sides of this issue says it cant guarantee the audio quality of these discs. The technology used to protect these discs sometimes prevents the discs from playing on computer CD-ROM drives, DVD players, and other devices specifically designed to play standard audio CDs.

Sales of recorded music are down 10% in the United States over the last year. The recording industry blames this downturn not on the economic recession, not on the crappy music that theyve released in the past few years, but on Internet piracy.

And its only going to get worse. Hilary B. Rosen, president of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) told Congress on 28 February 2001 that the practice of copy-protecting audio CDs would expand in the United States. If technology can be used to pirate copyrighted content, Rosen wrote in her response to a Congressional query, shouldnt technology likewise be used to protect copyrighted content? Surely, no one can expect copyright owners to ignore what is happening in the marketplace and fail to protect their creative works because some people engage in copying just for their personal use. Her pal, Michael Eisner, head of Disney, said he was tired of being finessed by the technology industry, whatever that means.

Unfortunately for Eisner, Rosen, Disney, and the RIAA, personal useand more importantly the rights associated with that use of copyrighted materialis exactly why copying of copyrighted material is not just allowed, but mandated by the Constitution. That some individuals illegally sell copied CDs or distribute copies of the music on the Internet is immaterial. In fact, fairly casual observation indicates that if customers are treated like criminals they will indeed begin to behave like criminals.

It has become common practice for music-loving computer owners to legally transfer audio CDs they purchase to .mp3 format files on their computers. The copy protection technology employed by the recording industry prevents such transfers by adding distortions to the music of the recordings. The industry insists that these distortions are inaudible when the disc is played on a standard CD player but result in pops when the music is transferred to a computer. In any case, its usually impossible to tell whether or not a disc includes the copy protection technology; in general, the copy-protected discs are not labeled.

Ironically, or probably not, .mp3 player manufacturers could easily defeat the copy protection technology, but they fear doing so would risk prosecution under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) which prohibits the bypassing of copy protection systems. In 1999, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that .mp3 players did not violate copyright law because customers have the right to space shift music they have purchased.

Moral rights

Interestingly, the act of using the copy protection technology is much more prevalent in Europe. Most European countries, unlike the United States, recognize an artists moral rights in the work they create.

Moral rights are a package of intellectual property rights granted to the original creator of a work, and include:

• The right of integrity;
• The right of attribution;
• The right of disclosure;
• The right to withdraw or retract; and
• The right to reply to criticism.

These moral rights are separate from the economic copyright that these days generally transfers from an author to a publisher and they can survive the author. The idea originated with the French, who believe that any creative work, by definition, includes the personality and character of the author. Where copyright is a property right that can be transferred, moral rights are part of the authors personality and character and non-transferable.

The first two moral rightsthe right of integrity and the right of attributionare especially important because they are codified as international law in the Berne Convention. The United States claims its intellectual property law complies with the Berne Convention, but this is just two instances where it doesnt.

The most important of these rights is the first, the right of integrity. Basically it prohibits an authors work from being distorted in any way that would harm the authors reputation and dates to the 1957 French law of droit au respect de l'oeuvre. Its a safe bet that a cross-reference over which the author had no control would be seen as a distortion of the work.

Seemingly, in Europe at least, an artist could make an argument against the production of a copy-protected version of her work on the sole basis of moral rights. Especially in the case of an audio CD to which distortion is intentionally added by the publisher.

In the United States, Representative Rick Boucher (D-Virginia) appears to be taking the point position in questioning the behavior of the entertainment industry. He believes that instead of using copyright to obtain fair compensation for the works theyve licensed, the copyright owner industryincluding the recording industryis attempting to exercise complete dominance and total control of the copyrighted work.

And just how much money does an artist receive in the form of royalties? Use Moses Avalons royalty calculator to figure it out.

A DMCA rewrite?

Representative Rick Boucher (D-Virginia) plans to introduce legislation that would regulateand maybe outright bancopy-protected compact discs. Boucher reportedly has concerns about customers buying copy-protected discs without knowing it and the compatibility problems inherent with the copy protection mechanism. In an interview with Wired News, Boucher said, The big problem initially is that consumers have no information that is complete and reliable about the disabilities which attend copy-protected CDs. These CDs will not play in DVD players, not play on personal computers (and) not even play on all CD players.

Boucher isnt talking about what kind of legislation he might introduce to accomplish his goal of protecting audio CD customers, and the possibilities are intriguing. At the simplest level, legislation may require copy-protected CDs to carry a warning label. At a more interesting level, Boucher may try to rewrite the DMCA. In fact, Boucher announced that he would introduce such legislation last July and reiterated his commitment to that approach in early March of this year.

Internet radio

Under the U.S. Copyright Offices interpretation of the DMCA, Internet radio may be a thing of the past. KFJC, KPIG, and RadioParadise may all be goners. Why is this tragic? Because any of these stations are orders of magnitude better than the sorry excuse for radio available on the traditional dial.

Internet radio is routing around an obsolete and unaccountable industrys safely padded environs and making a difference. Corporate radio sounds exactly the same from coast to coast because it is exactly the same. Sit and watch that website for a few minutes; if it doesnt nauseate you, itll damn sure hypnotize you.

Adding to the arsenal of tools deployed by big media is the Copyright Arbitration and Royalty Panel (CARP). CARP met secretly for the past several months and issued the CARP Report in late February. The keystone of this report is steep licensing fees for webcast music. Lets be clear: compulsory licensing is a good idea, consistent with the intent of copyright law. Usury licensing fees for small webcasters is not.

KPIG responded almost immediately with a plea to save the Pig from the digital slaughterhouse:

Independent webcasters such as KPIG are facing a grave threat to our existence. It may be an evil conspiracy on the part of the big record companies and corporate webcasters, ormore likelyits just a dumb mistake. In either case, KPIG could soon be liable for huge music usage fees ($5,000 - $10,000 per month) that would make it impossible for us to stay online. For background on the issue, see The Death of Web Radio? below and the SaveInternetRadio.org website.

Doc Searls, in his article Bizarre vs. Bazaar, eloquently sums up the combination of DMCA and CARP as the destruction of the Net as a commons and its replacement with a plumbing system for the distribution of content (a word hardly used in a shipping context before Big Media got all drooly over The Promise of The Net).

A brief history of copyright

Copyright, until this recent entertainment industry power-grab, has always been a delicatemaybe even precariousbalance between the rights of the author to benefit from his or her work for a short period of time and the rights of the rest of us to innovate and benefit from those works when they fall into the public domain.

The Constitution granted Congress the power to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries. Originally, the Copyright Act of 1790 established the limited times of copyright protection of 14 years with an option for the author to renew the copyright for an additional 14 years if he or she were still alive. That copyright term was good enough for the first 100 years of intellectual property in the United States. During the next 100 years, Congress extended the copyright term 11 times.

Certain uses of a protected work that would ordinarily be seen as infringing are specifically allowed for education, criticism, etc. These uses are allowed under the fair use provision. The core concept of fair use is that, in general, any use that does not exploit the commercial value of the original is permissible.

The fair use statute recognizes four criteria by which a use can be determined to be fair or unfair:

1. The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2. The nature of the copyrighted work;
3. The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted wok as a whole; and
4. The effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

William S. Strong, in The Copyright Book: A Practical Guide , provides an interpretation for working writers:

As a general rule a critic or reporter should not quote at any one point more than two or three paragraphs of a book or journal article, a stanza of a poem, or a solitary chart or graph from a technical treatise.

The Net allows ordinary citizens to exercise their fair use rights in ways never imagined by the entertainment industry. Subsequently, the reaction is to pressure innovation by extending the copyright term for any given work. In October, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear a case that will likely determine the legitimacy of the most recent copyright term extension, the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998. This law extends the copyright term to the life of the author plus 70 years. In the case of works made for hire in which a corporation owns the copyright, the copyright term is now 95 years.

While one side of the entertainment industry was pushing, an activity that eventually became the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, the other side was pulling. That activity eventually resulted in the DMCA. Designed specifically to control the uses that can be made of published works, the DMCA makes it illegal to circumvent copyright-protection technology. The result: the entertainment industry controls not only what you see and hear but the methods and devices with which you see and hear it. Even if the copy-protection is circumvented to enable the fair use of a published work, it is prohibited and deemed to be a criminal act.

Digital TV

According to Mike Godwin, digital television is the tipping point in the war between the entertainment and technology industries. Never mind that every time the entertainment industry shoots itself in the foot, the technology industry comes to its rescue. Remember in the 1970s when the movie industry was in a deep funk and that vampire Jack Valenti said that VCRs would kill it for good? As it turns out, the VCR revived the film industry. The film industry was failing not because of customer VCR usage but because they were putting out epically craptacular films. Just like the recording industry todaywhen in doubt blame those dang customers.

Anyway, Godwin says digital television is the flashpoint because its quality (technical, not artistic) is way too good and unlike DVDs, its unencrypted and has to stay unencrypted to be useful. Oh, and the pesky FCC regulations say that broadcast television signals must be sent unencrypted.

The purveyors of digital television think they have the answer: digital watermarks. They think thats the answer for the online distribution of music, and any other digital content as well. Unfortunately for them, in order for a watermark to be used to restrict copying of digital content, consumer devices used to play the content will have to have technology included thats capable of receiving those watermarks. That would require the cooperation of the technology industry, and that cooperation has not been forthcoming.

Godwin cites the theory of Edward Felten, a computer scientist at Princeton, holding that any sort of tagging system that is undetectable by the user will likely be easy to remove.

Digital rights management

Perhaps the weirdest part of all of this is that the technology industry is just as enamored of protecting intellectual property. Theyre just going about it in a minimally different way. Digital rights management (DRM) is the battle cry of the techheads. And where they differ from their entertainment industry brethren is the question of government mandates. The technology industry wants to lock up published content just as badly as the entertainment industry; they just dont want the government (or anyone else) telling them that they have to. Remember that the entertainment and technology industries both lobbied heavily in favor of the DMCA.

And then there are the schizoids, the companieslike AOL Time Warner and Sonythat are so large that they find themselves on both sides of the fence depending which way the wind blows.

SSSCA > CBDTPA

The Security Systems Standards and Certification Act (SSSCA), kept on a leash but regularly trotted out by Senator Fritz Hollings (D-South Carolina), chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, can best be thought of as a sort of appendix to the DCMA. It is clearly designed to further extend legal protections for digital content owned or licensed by enormous media conglomerates.

According to the draft language of the bill, it would be illegal to create or distribute any interactive digital device that does not include and utilize certified security technologies approved by the Commerce Department. Even though MIT professor and RSA Data Security co-founder Ron Rivest has referred to the proposed legislation as the Digital Rectal Thermometer Security Act its really just mandatory corporate welfare for media conglomerates subsidized by the actual creators and consumers of intellectual property.

Felony penalties for distributing copyrighted material without the certified security technologies fully enabled or using a computer that circumvents those technologies are up to five years in prison and fines up to US$500,000.

Even worse, the proposed legislation calls for manufacturers of digital devices and the media conglomerates to collaboratively develop a copy protection system. If, after two years, they cant come up with a mechanism both industries can live with, the federal government will specify a standard. Hollings bill fails to include the actual creators or users of content in any of the machinations.

Should we be surprised that four of Hollings top campaign donors are media conglomerates?

Predictably, the politicians split along party lines over the SSSCA. Or, more accurately, the split is along the lines of entertainment industry campaign contributions. Democrats, who received US$24.2 million in contributions from the entertainment industry tend to support the idea of legislating the protection of copyrighted material in digital form. Republicans, who received a relatively paltry US$13.3 million in entertainment industry contributions usually oppose the SSSCA, claiming it is too interventionist.

In mid-March 2002, the other shoe dropped. Senator Hollings, better known as the Senator from Disney, transformed the SSSCA into the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act (CBDTPA) and ceased his tip-toeing around. The CBDTPA is real legislation, and enjoys the support of five other co-authors: Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), John Breaux (D-Louisiana), Bill Nelson (D-Florida) and Dianne Feinstein (D-California). Just think, one more author and they could have been the seven dwarves. The CBDTPA would require all digital deviceseverything from fax machines to MP3 players and computers (as well as the software that runs on them)to be equipped with embedded copy protection schemes, approved by the federal government.

Whats most disturbing about this is relatively paltry sum it took to buy this legislation. During the 2002 election cycle, only two of the dirty half-dozen were in the top 20 recipients of soft money from the entertainment industry. So far in the 2002 election cycle, Hollings has received only US$19,000 and Stevens has taken only US$39,621. To get the real story, we have to look back several election cycles:

Senator

2002

2000

1998

1996

Total

Fritz Hollings (D-South Carolina)

$19,000

$32,750

$215,284

$43,300

$310,334

Ted Stevens (R-Alaska)

$39,621

$69,900

$109,521

Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii)

$49,852

$49,852

John Breaux (D-Louisiana)

$120,920

$120,920

Bill Nelson (D-Florida)

$47,550

N/A

N/A

$47,550

Dianne Feinstein (D-California)

$211,638

$211,638

$849,815

Theres no question why Fritz Hollings carried the water for this puppy, is there? But check those senatorial links in the table carefully because they tell the even bigger story of who the top contributing industries were for each politician. In every case, the entertainment industry scored big in the top 20 contributors for every Senator. And remember the 2002 campaign cycle isnt over yet. Not hardly.

So, how much does it cost to get your bill through the Senate? Looks to me like itll come in right around US$1 million.

Enter DigitalConsumer.org

The technology industry was quick to respond to the CBDTPA threat by launching DigitalConsumer.org and its attendant Consumer Technology Bill of Rights. Launched by two of the co-founders of Excite, DigitalConsumer.org is basically trying to protect the fair use rights of customers in digital media. The groups principles, outlined in the Bill of Rights are deceptively simple:

1. Users have the right to time-shift content that they have legally acquired.
2. Users have the right to space-shift content that they have legally acquired.
3. Users have the right to make backup copies of their content.
4. Users have the right to use legally acquired content on the platform of their choice.
5. Users have the right to translate legally acquired content into comparable formats.
6. Users have the right to use technology in order to achieve the rights previously mentioned.

The depth and breadth of support this lobbying group will receive remains to be seen. Some of the precepts are in direct conflict with the interests of some of the largest technology industry members. Microsoft, for example, almost certainly wants to be the digital rights management company of record and is none too keen on, say, items 2, 3, 4, and 5.

A solution

The solution is actually quite simple and requires only three steps:

1. Revert the term of copyright to 14 years, immediately and retroactive to all existing works.
2. Recognize moral rights in the works authors create, like every other civilized country on the planet. Make it immediate and retroactive to all existing works.
3. Prohibit any corporation from owning a copyright. Corporations create nothing; theyre consensual hallucinations and exist at our pleasure. I dont know about you, but Im not much pleased any more.

The basis of the problem is found in a single court ruling: Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad. In this 1886 dispute, the U.S. Supreme Court found that a private corporation was a natural person under the Constitution and enjoyed the same protections as a citizen under the Bill of Rights. Corporations from that point forward were granted all of the rights and freedoms of a private citizen, yet none of the responsibilities. We made a mistake; hey, shit happens. Its not too late to fix it.

Huh? So a radio station like kfjc with 5-10,000 or so listeners would still have to pay hundreds of dollars a day? I donate 250 dollars a year to them because I love their programming I don't think they or I could afford these new rules.

Um, where the hell are you getting your disks? My sister and her friends do this exact thing and get a 50 pack of CDRs for ~10 bucks and the CD for like 10-12 bucks. Shop around. White noise generator and KFJC are the only things I listen to and neither one requires the purchase of anything. I gave up on music for the sake of music and have instead begun using music for the sake of noise.

I'm fortunate enough to live in an area (San Fransisco Bay Area) with a large number of college radio stations, so there's usually something good on the radio. However, I was visiting some friends recently (in the San Fernando Valley) and noticed that the radio dial there is full of crap. I ended up listening to the internet feed for KFJC while I was there. Sometimes "Why not just listen to the real radio" isn't enough.

My favorite radio station, KFJC, has a show by anti-fascist researcher Dave Emory. Now, I don't buy everything that Dave says, but he sure is interesting to listen to (I like conspiracy theories). One of the topics he covers very frequently is the "Bormann flight capital organization", which involves "Nazi in exile" Martin Bormann evacuating a lot of wealth from Germany, starting in 1944 -- apparently because the Nazis were anticipating a loss in the war and wanted to start up operations elsewhere. This ties in with the "South American Nazis" you may have heard about (or whose card you may have played in Illuminati! by Steve Jackson Games).

One thing that Dave Emory keeps talking about is the fact that Bertelsmann has been acquiring a great deal of the publishing industry. He seems to think that this is part of the Bormann organization's plans for worldwide fascism or something. Frankly, this is one area where Dave starts losing me -- I think he's too quick to connect things that are German with attempts to found the Fourth Reich (using economic conquest rather than military conquest).

So anyway, given the recent BMG partnership with Napster, I initially thought that the "Nazis on Napster" article might parallel some things I've heard on various Dave Emory programs. Life got just a little bit more surreal for a few seconds, until I started reading further.

My favorite radio station, KFJC, has a show by anti-fascist researcher Dave Emory. Now, I don't buy everything that Dave says, but he sure is interesting to listen to (I like conspiracy theories). One of the topics he covers very frequently is the "Bormann flight capital organization", which involves "Nazi in exile" Martin Bormann evacuating a lot of wealth from Germany, starting in 1944 -- apparently because the Nazis were anticipating a loss in the war and wanted to start up operations elsewhere. This ties in with the "South American Nazis" you may have heard about (or whose card you may have played in Illuminati! by Steve Jackson Games).

One thing that Dave Emory keeps talking about is the fact that Bertelsmann has been acquiring a great deal of the publishing industry. He seems to think that this is part of the Bormann organization's plans for worldwide fascism or something. Frankly, this is one area where Dave starts losing me -- I think he's too quick to connect things that are German with attempts to found the Fourth Reich (using economic conquest rather than military conquest).

So anyway, given the recent BMG partnership with Napster, I initially thought that the "Nazis on Napster" article might parallel some things I've heard on various Dave Emory programs. Life got just a little bit more surreal for a few seconds, until I started reading further.