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.
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.
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Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
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".
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.
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.
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