Slashdot Mirror
Jello Biafra's H2K Keynote
Hyena writes "Jello Biafra's surprisingly brilliant H2K address is now available online compliments of 2600, with many more H2K panels to follow. Expect further civil unrest in coming years." Here's a description of the speech written at the time. Despite being given at H2K, it isn't technical in nature, it's primarily a reflection of Biafra's decidedly anti-establishment views.
Jeezis, that was a stupid comment. Ralph Nader's been talking like this since Pintos were bursting into flames 25 years ago. Jello's been a shrill and hilarious antiestablishment crusader since before the Macintosh - maybe even before your birth, or at least since the last time you read a book critically.
I bemoan the lack of historical perspective displayed by today's high-tech "leaders." Fuck, put down your anime and look around, people.
I've put up a mirror of the mp3 of jello's speech here
"Now you see that evil will always triumph because good is dumb."
Ralph Nader will continue to talk like he does now, like he did 25 years ago, until he gets a chance to be in to act on his demands. Right now his goal is not to be president; it is to get whomever becomes president to acknowledge and deal with his concerns. If he really thought he would win his election, he would be much more conservative, because he would have to do what he says, and what he says is not realistic.
I think the whole vision is flawed. A consumer advocate is focused on being a consumer. That's evolutionary change, but if we want to go beyond being consumers, we have to reject that notion altogether, and realize that we are the ones giving money and power to corporations. Any fundamental change has to be based on that.
If you are modding me down because you disagree with me, use the "Flamebait" category, not the "Troll" one.
Jello Biafra is clearly a hypocrite, and the original poster was pointing that out. He hates it when OTHER people tell him how to live his life (and try to control who can listen to his music), but he wants to control other people and tell them how to live their lives (maximum wages, no SUVs, etc). Although I wonder how he intends to enforce any of his wacky ideas if he gets rid of the army and the police...
Yawn. Another fascist in anarchist clothing.
And if your incoherent ramblings are the best arguments a Biafra supporter can muster, it's not too shocking that no one outside of his fellow fascists takes him seriously.
-jon
Remember Amalek.
I'd like to see a link to some further information on this "screwed out of royalties" assertion-- even to some crackpot Geocities punk 14-year-old-made web page that starts off with "i heard from somebody who heard from somebody...". Otherwise it's simply rumor-mongering and libelous. The only thing I've heard about a rift between Jello/AT and the other former DK band members is that he refused to release DK songs for use in Gap commercials-- for which they sued him on the grounds that he was unfairly impeding the work and preventing them from cashing in on their success (and this info is available at the AT site). Never mind that providing the soundtrack for a Gap ad runs 180 degrees counter to the spirit of any DK song.
I do not have a signature
From Biafra's Bio:
1985
Infamous Senate anti-music hearings are staged by Senator Al Gore and his cohorts as a favor to his wife Tipper and her calling themselves the Parent's Music Resource Center (PMRC). Among the PMRC's demands were the censorship through a labeling system of warning stickers, the "Reassessment of contracts" of artists whose lyrics are, "sexually explicit", "anti-Christian" or mention suicide or homosexuality. "Expert witnesses" called by the Washington Wives blame rock music for gang violence, suicide, murder, devil worship and sexual perversion. Frank Zappa stands virtually alone in opposing the PMRC and sensing their significance. The music industry above and below ground keeps their head in the sand, preferring to sleep through the hearings.
April 15, 1986
Two weeks after Dead Kennedys are publicly targeted by Susan Baker of the PMRC, Biafra's house in San Francisco is raided and torn apart by a squad of Los Angeles and San Francisco police officers. Cops even ransack the cat-box hoping to find - well? ask them. "Frankenchrist" albums and Giger posters are taken from the house and the Alternative Tentacles/Mordam offices.
June, 1986
Biafra and four others are charged in Los Angeles with one count each of "Distribution of Harmful Matter to Minors". They are the first people in American history to face criminal charges over a record; three years before the attack on 2 Live Crew. Biafra and other supporters form No More Censorship Defense Fund to cover the money to fight the charges. Defendants face a possible one year in jail and a $2,000 fine. The law had never been used before. The L.A. City Attorney's office admits to L.A. Weekly reporter Don Bolles that they kept files on several other PMRC-targeted musicians, but chose Biafra because it was, "a cost effective way of sending a message". The prosecuting attorney later says one of his goals was to destroy Alternative Tentacles. Fund-raising and the ensuing media circus delay the completion of the follow-up album to Frankenchrist, the appropriately titled Bedtime for Democracy .
August, 1987
Charges against Biafra and the other defendants are dismissed after a three-week criminal trial in Los Angeles. Even though Frankenchrist was not found to be obscene; Biafra, Dead Kennedys and Alternative Tentacles records are subsequently banned from a multitude of chain stores nationwide. This is exactly the type of de-facto censorship Tipper Gore and the PMRC had in mind. By this time, controversy has vaulted Biafra's spoken word performances from coffeehouses to the college lecture circuit, where he is brought in to "lecture" on censorship. For the first time the media is more interested in Biafra's political views than music-industry shoptalk on his latest music album. His documentation of Tipper Gore and the PMRC's ties to fundamentalist Christian extremists is no longer dismissed as lunatic. He also appears as an FBI agent in the Tim Robbins-John Cusack film, Tape Heads, wearing the same blue pin-stripe suit he wore at the trial.
________________________________________
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Cause it seems to me that Jello has his finger on the Big Picture.
I mean, individual hackers have the power and yes, we indeed have seen individual hackers pull off impressive tricks! Witness the recent Microsoft hacks...
But I think he's able to explain just WHY there are Men In Black, why they ARE concerned with people claiming individual liberties, etc. But what exactly do you DO with this power? What do you fight for and why? He's got half a clue.
Or at the very least, he can give some historical background on movements for freedom and the kinds of problems they come across. "Hey, you want to demonstrate against the DMCA. GREAT! Here's what to expect. HINT: pack your gasmasks."
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
RE: Its men like Jello Biafra that DESTROY your freedom. His idea of freedom is to do as he says or he'll smash you with his fist.
But be that as it may he has got some experience at annoying the powers that be.
My comment was if you want to see what the status quo is and get some insight as to how to smash same, talk to someone who's tried. And who's paid the price for it (RIP Dead Kennedys)
Don't worry about smashing with fist - didn't some new school punks smash his kneecaps in?
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
Yeah, tell that to the DKs he screwed out of royalties. Biafra's another free speech for me, but not for thee big government nutbag.
How is this guy anti-establishment? Maximum wage? Getting rid of SUVs? WTF?
Basically, he seems to advocate big government, telling people what they can and cannot have, and divvying up the proceeds. Sounds like an extreme version of what we already have to me.
This just reminds me that I've got to vote Browne this time around, if at the very least to keep kooks like this out of power...
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
Go find local free radio stations and contribute tech expertise to them! There are always plenty of people willing to play CDs, DJ them with lots of pauses and dead ear, and play songs with Carlin's dreaded Words You Can't Play. But whether these places have decent technical backing is very much another story. If you can, help this sort of activity!
I wonder what having Jello (lead singer, Dead Kennedys, the best band ever) speak at H2K will do to the people's view of hackers. He's been anti-establishment since as long as I can remember, and he's been said to be one of the smartest speakers (or singer) against government. So this will make "hackers" look like anti-establishment anarchists. Then when I tell people that I'm a hacker (reffering to hardware) I'm automatically branded as an anti-establishments anarchist (sure I am that, but let's ignore that for now).
It was nice, though, to hear his thoughts on the matter, and after I'm finished with the Real player stream, I'll fire up "Frankenchrist" or "Give me convienince or give me death".
Okay. I was wrong. It was not a Gap ad, but a Levi's ad. Other than that, this is the same lawsuit, in which without transcripts it is very hard to tell to what extent any royalties were withheld and under what circumstances. Jello admits in at least two other articles I've read that some royalties went unpaid (although this sounded more like a math problem than anything) and it appears that he would have paid these immediately had there not been this commingled issue of the "failure to promote" the back catalog. It is impossible to tell what portion of the $200K award was related to royalties and which part was related to revenues lost by not accepting the deal from Levi's. This whole case is an excellent example of the complete failure of the intellectual property laws in the US. There is no clear owner to the old DK tunes-- certainly not to the albums as wholes. There was no written business plan around the band, so who has what rights to what becomes pretty grey in this instance. What is obvious is that the US legal system is prepared only to decide oppositional cases and is highly unlikely to work toward any synergistic or creative solution to this problem. I'm surprised that the members of DK haven't figured out a solution like giving everyone a digital master copy of the audio for these albums and forcing everyone to come out with modified cover materials, or to do whatever else they might want (like making a "Best of..." compilation, or selling the rights to certain songs (and since four of them would have the selling rights, this would result in bidding wars :) )). I mean, it's not a black and white case of Jello being a dink and the other guys being screwed. At least that's my take as a long time fan of both DK and Jello's solo work. Certainly I think failing to cash in on the band that wrote the song "Anarchy for Sale" is not a crime, nor suitable grounds for a monetary lawsuit.
I do not have a signature
The ideal ticket for the next election might be Jesse (Ventura) and Jello. They would *really* rock the vote.
Actually Jello is running in this election under the green party he is just not doing ANY campaigning. I guess running for mayor all those years back gave him a bad taste for campaigning.
Learn more about Jello at the Alternative Tentacles website. Also, you can order his new CD (the one mentioned on the H2K front page) here.
-matt
My moment of clarity came back in the eighties with two inch story the local paper buried in the TV listings about a shipyard labour strike in Gdansk. It was, of course, the strike that led to separation of Poland from the Eastern Block and the eventual collapse of the USSR. Arguably, the most important story of a generation, pushed to the back for more fluff about sports, celebrity and road closures.
Now that would be cool.. followed by David Bowie on the state of the ISP industry, Peter Gabriel on the latest VR developments and Dave Stewart and Penn Jillette discussing Linux driver issues.
Any sufficiently advanced man is indistinguishable from God
Glad to see there's a cure for cancer.
Actually, no thanks to Jello, we currently have effective treatments for almost all forms of cancer, as long as they're caught in time. We can attack malignancies with surgery, radiation, and/or drugs. Probably a couple hundred thousand people a year are given a shot at surviving cancer thanks to these weapons. Still others get to live a couple years longer than they otherwise would have. Although you can raise some valid questions about quality-of-life in the latter case, hardly any terminal cancer patients seem to want to check out early.
So what has Biafra done for the fight against cancer? What has he done for anything, for that matter? Whining doesn't count. His attitude sounds like exactly the wrong solution for any number of problems.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
...about the information age causing a "vietnam like" battle between corporate greed and the people.
:-)
Personally, I'm not sure it will happen any time soon. Everyone I knew in college that was a radical is driving an SUV now.
They don't like me anymore, either...snif snif
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
Just as "punk" acquired a new sense during the 19th century, so it has acquired a new sense during the latter half of the 20th century. That this new sense of "punk" was popularized among the urban white ethnic criminal underclass of Manhattan should be no surprise given the active pursuit of gender ambiguity by that subculture during the initial stages of gay liberation that were centered in the same area and among the same fashion leaders that gave rise to the punk rock genre.
Seastead this.
If you were at H2K you'd remember me.. I was the bloody shouter. (Hey, don't knock it. I got the red shirt and all access ;)
I would, however, doubt that Da Gov'na and Jello would run together. Great he abandoned the Reform Party like a sinking (into corporatism and reactionarism) boat and declaredc himself a neo-independant. (Besides, he's said he's happy as The Sworn Protector Of Minn-e-SO-ta.)
Jello's speech and Ralph Nader's candidacy have inspired me to announce I will run for Congress in 2004, whose election will be one day before I turn 25. (I'll still be eligible, I hope, because I *will* be 25 upon inauguration.)
I used to be someone else. Now I'm someone better.
Real life is underrated.
Main Platform:
- Enact a maximum wage
- Abolish the Military
- Withdraw from NAFTA and the World Trade Organization
- End the war on drugs
- End Police Brutality
- Lower the Voting Age to Five
- Education Reform
Other Ideas:- Limit junk mail to one 3 x 5 card per mailing
- Ban drug and lie-detector tests of employees and students, and forbid the drugging of schoolchildren against their will.
- Give out giant waterproof Yuppie Parasite decals containing a skull and crossed cell-phones to be plastered by
concerned citizens on all sport utility vehicles until they are eradicated from urban and suburban areas.
- Convert giant sports stadiums into homeless shelters until the maximum wage imposed on today?s sports stars
funds the necessary low-income housing.
- Fight gentrification by allowing those under siege to spray whipped cream on those who flaunt their upwardly
mobile invader status until the interlopers leave town.
And, finally:________________________________________
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Reading through the different comments regarding Biafra's speech I felt that a lot of folks missed the mark on what Biafra was trying to say and why it was important. Biafra's speech does have a lot to do with technology. Looking back over the past few years the "geek" has lost a lot of personal freedoms that Baifra hit upon. Just one example is the DMCA. Think about it, it is actually illegal, a punishable offense, to posses software that allows to you to watch DVD's that YOU purchased on your Linux box. How can this not be directly related to technology and the geek? Sure, maybe some geeks don't own a DVD player as of yet, but this law has aspects that are more reaching than just DVD's. Already restrictions are being imposed on new technologies such as the HDTV that prevents you from recording programming. The geek has lost a lot of personal freedoms over the years. The insania has been going on for years, even as far back as 1985 with the raids against Steve Jackson games, maybe even further. Biafra simply talked about why he believes why things like the DMCA get signed in to law, or why people have their computer equipment basically stolen from them by Federal Agencies. It is all related.
for those who like DK and jello in general, go check out LARD (cdnow link).
:)
lard is an industrial rock group with jello biafra and al jourgensen from ministry. they have the same sort of anti-establishment views dk and biafra have pushed, with a slick metal sound.
go check it out.
--
One of the benefits of prosperity and reward for hard work is the freedom to indulge ourselves in whatever makes us happy
Ok so humans tend to do what makes them happy, big surprise! The thing is that many people don't bother with much outside that, save the world or have sex with the person of your choice? Most people would SAY save the world, yet in reality they will go for having sex, because of the two options its the one that makes them feel good. The only way to turn this around is to make people more aware of themselves, of how limited they are, only then can they start to make the bigger choices for themselves, thats what confronts our species at the new millenium, self destruction in a wave of over indulgance, or can we grow up, and start take wider responsibilities for ourselves. Technology has its place in helping to get to the later, for all the pr0n and warez on the Net you'll also find snippets of truth, will they, the masses listen? I hope so, I know there is little that I can do if I am the only one pointing out things that will make people uncomfortable I will not get very far, we will only make a difference if we have a critical mass, showing the world what they don't want to see, it will take time, and I do believe we have a chance.
Any sufficiently advanced man is indistinguishable from God
I fully realize that malaria and a couple of other awful tropical diseases are completely off the personal radar of most of the world's population of computer users, and thus of slashdot readers, and so I apologize to one and all for sounding pedantic, but this inane statement needs to be put down hard.
While drug companies have developed vaccines for some diseases that once upon a time plagued populations that could pay for the drugs, Malaria, Cholera, and Dengue Fever, to name just three, continue to kill millions of people every year. Research into vaccines which could save these millions of poor folks lives has been very slow, simply because there is no money to be made in it. Basicly it's an altruistic enterprise, so vaccine research does attract funding from rich donors, concerned governments, and international organizations.
But what it does not attract in any significant amount whatsoever, is research funding from pharmaceutical companies. Money spent on Viagra does not go to research a malaria vaccine, or a cholera vaccine, or a dengue fever vaccine.
Personally, my experience has been with Malaria. Having spent a considerable amount of time in certain parts of the world where that nasty disease is endemic, I can assure you there is no "cure" for it. There are prophylactic measures that can be taken, among them some expensive drugs. By expensive I'm thinking of Lariam, which costs $US5 to $US10 for a week. Protection with Lariam is not a reasonable notion when you are talking about preventing malaria in a population of folks who earn one dollar a day if they're lucky. Lariam or one of the other drugs will work on the individual scale, but not on the population scale. And there are also treatments which can ameliorate the syptoms of the infection, but in most cases the disease doesn't really ever go away completely. Certainly there are traditional herbal remedies used by people for thousands of years, and I'm sure some of these work to an extent, but they are no substitute for a vaccine. A vaccine is the only real cure for the malaria problem, and that is what Jello Biafra is talking about.
What's needed is basic vaccine research. With a vaccine you can protect a whole population in the cheapest and (hopefully) most effective manner.
Not really meaning to say a nice word about that man in Redmond, but Bill Gates's philanthropic work is the way to go. If the the market won't fix this problem (and this is a problem where the market does not provide incentives) then people and governments, and maybe some of those corporations, need to step up to the plate, and make up for this particular deficiency of the market.
I've gone on long enough. If anybody cares enough and wants me to dig up links, say so and I'll post later, but a decent google search will supply you with all the info you could ever want on these issues and then some.
Ed
What a dreary world people like Jello would have us inhabit. One of the benefits of prosperity and reward for hard work is the freedom to indulge ourselves in whatever makes us happy. If it's reading tabloid tales of the rich and famous, so what? If CNN and USA Today could make a buck printing the sort of stuff he finds important, they'd do it in a heartbeat. His unspoken criticism is that people aren't interested. Tough luck there, Jello.
"If I have seen further than other men, it is by stepping on their glasses." - Michael Swaine
When I lived there o so many years ago. He came in surprisingly well, say 5th out of 20 or something. He's obviously not Scoth: he hasn't mellowed with age.
--
Infuriate left and right
Read A Million Jockers, Punks, and Queens: Sex among American Male Prisoners and its Implications for Concepts of Sexual Orientation and discover where the show-biz "punks" go the word "punk" from.
Seastead this.