Sunday, July 18, 2004

Site Overhauled

Site reformat here at APWIH has gone swimmingly well.
I *am* going to miss the graphic flames I had on the sidebars, in the previous, beta version, but they ran into the default 'blogspot' ad banner that runs across all these blogs by default, and gave the page a really dated, busy look.
Not to mention cheesy.
Looks like I have no excuse not to post here more frequently, especially since I added this BlogThis! button to my mozilla/netscape browser.
Be nice if Google came out with a Google Toolbar button for Linux browsers as well, since both the tinyurl and now blogthis! buttons werk with this browser.

How hard can that possibly be?


UPDATE: 11/14/06: Wow, it's been over two years that I've let slide by without doing much with this site. Considering that I've got just as much to say as anyone else and may have insights that others may not have on the Issues Of The Day, it's kind of retarded on my end to have done this. In light of that, A Pen Warmed In Hell has just gone through another revamp, with a cleaner, less cluttered look that will hopefully be more attractive and accessible to the world at large. I built it, now let's see if they'll come.

Monday, April 26, 2004

The war on the War on Drugs full transcript JACK COLE, RADIO ONE INTERVIEW:

Hamish: Now,12 years as an undercover narcotics dealer, you must have seen some interesting things:

Cole: "A few. Yes. I saw a lot of horrible things, and most of the horrible things were the things we were doing to young people by destroying their lives in this War on Drugs."

Hamish: What sort of things did you see that you thought the police, or the War on Drugs, were responsible for?

Cole: "Well, the war on drugs was really responsible for about 99% of all the things that we attribute to the, quote, 'drug problem.' Which truly should be attributed to drug prohibition because it is prohibition that causes the sale of drugs to become an underground market and the fact that it's illegal artificially inflates the values of these virtually products by up to 17,000 percent increase between where they grown, mainly, in third world countries, like as you know, Afghanistan, Colombia, and where they're sold in Los Angeles, or New York City, or maybe right here in Dunedin. 17,000 percent increase - that creates an obscene profit motive, making many people willing to kill each other in the streets in order to control their little end of the market."

Hamish: So I guess you'd be of the opinion that the problems caused by the government's stance on drugs far outweigh the problems caused by drugs on the individuals themselves?

Cole: "Absolutely. Beyond any doubt. And we don't suggest that drugs are a great thing. At LEAP we think drugs are a poor choice - we just don't think people should be arrested for making that choice. You're not arrested for making a choice of drinking alcohol, or smoking tobacco, and those are the two worst drugs known to human beings. In my country, in the United States, tobacco kills 430,000 people every year. Alcohol kills another 110,000 - I'm not talking about people who get drunk and run off the road and kill themselves; I'm talking about just ingesting that, because it is a poison and it will get you, All the illegal drugs combined in the United States kill less than 12,000 people. So 12,000 is a lot of people, but I would suggest that any drug warrior who says that we have to continue spending 69 billion dollars - which is what we spend every year to fight the war on drugs in the United States - 69 billion dollars in order to destroy the lives of the 1.6 million people we arrest for non-violent drug violations every year, in order to somehow save 12,000 lives, when we're killing 540,000 with these other two legal drugs, they're being just slightly disingenuous."

Hamish: That's true. While you were in the New Jersey police force, were you committed to the cause? Did you completely believe in what you were doing?

Cole: "Well not for the whole time, but I certainly did when I joined the narcotic unit. I spent 14, almost 14 years actually, in narcotics and 12 of it actually working narcotics - the last two, as you just mentioned, I was working terrorists - but when I started I was absolutely convinced that drugs were the scourge of the earth. I mean, I grew up in looking at things like the old movie that everybody laughs at today, thank goodness, Reefer Madness, and Man With the Golden Arm, and all these things, and I actually believed that these were terrible drugs. I thought I didn't have drug problems, I grew up in Kansas in the middle of America, and I thought we don't have any drug problems out there. The people with drug problems are the people who might smoke a joint on a Friday night. But looking back I had major drug problems: I used to get falling down drunk on alcohol about once a week when I was 14 with all my mates out there. And I smoke two packs of cigarettes every day for 15 years - so I had major drug problems. I just didn't realise that these things were drugs, you know."

Hamish: True. So what did see during that working as a narcotics officer, or what was it that changed your mind. What was it that changed your mind, changed your attitudes toward drugs, or at least the drug laws, the way they're enforced?

Cole: "You mean, was there an epiphany?"

Hamish: Yeah, was there an epiphany, were there any specific incidents?

Cole: "Well, there really was an epiphany. There were several things: the first thing that really threw me was about three years into working undercover, working with these folks, it suddenly occurred to me that I like a lot of the people I was working on, better than the people I was working for. They seemed to be a kinder, gentler group of folks that weren't nearly as likely to stab me in the back. And I came to understand that this is not a war on drugs - it's a war on people. In the United States over 87 million people above the age of 12 have used an illegal drug - that means that this is literally a war on people. It's a war on our children, a war on our parents, a war on ourselves."

Hamish: And it's not just a war on people as well, according to you, the problems in enforcing drugs means it can become a very racist issue.

Cole: "I think racism is what it turns on, really. Racism is what all the drug prohibition has been based on when it started, and I truly believe that's the reason it continues today. For instance, I understand you have a terrible problem with it in your country too, the Maoris are arrested about 5 times the rate the European-type folks here, well in my country, although a federal household survey that's done every year shows that 72% of all the people involved in drugs, whether it's a dealer, a user, or whatever, are white. Only 13.5% of them are black. But once you see the arrest statistics you suddenly see that 37% of all the people arrested for drug violations are black. 42% of all the people in federal prison for drug violations are black. 60% of all the people in state prisons for drug violations are black, causing the FBI to come out on their uniform crime reports last year with the statement that a young couple giving birth to a black male baby, today in the United States, has an expectation of one-in-three that that child will spend time in prison. One-in-three: just imagine that. If we only changed one word in that sentence - if we changed 'black male' to 'white male' - we would have ended the War on Drugs 30 years ago. Because we wouldn't have stood for it."

Hamish: That's very interesting. That's very true. How pervasive, then, is this anti-drug hegemony in the police force in the States. How strong is this vein of 'Drugs are the Demon'?

Cole: "Well that's a very good question. And it's a very hard thing to answer. When I speak one-on-one, when anyone at LEAP speaks one-on-one, to other police officers, the almost all agree with us that the War on Drugs is a terrible shame and a failure. But they're not likely to speak out publicly about it because it's the way they make their living. And LEAP, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, was created just about 18 months ago we went public with it, and we grew in that time from 5 founding members, of whom I'm one, to over a thousand members, with over 60 speakers living in six different countries. In the last year we gave over 500 hundred talks, and this coming year we expect closer to 2,000 talks, so we are getting the word out. And the interesting thing is, when we talk to people, when they actually hear about the horrors that have been created by this War on Drugs, they were never aware of it before. And I'm sure that we're carrying 80% of our audiences, that say well, this argument you have is so compelling, so logical, first off: why didn't I ever hear about it before, and of course the reason is because the drug warriors have had the bully pulpit (??) for the last 34 years of the drug war, but now we're out there, and as soon as they hear it they say it only makes sense to end this: let's end prohibition, let's legalise drugs, legalise them so they can be controlled and regulated, and kept out of the hands of our children. At least until our children old enough to make a rational decision, whether they want to use these things or not."

Hamish: That's some very interesting points you make there. You can't be very popular with the Bush administration.

Cole: "Ha ha, that's true."

Hamish: Do you face any pressures from those quarters?

Cole: "Not so far, because I don't think we're enough of a thorn in their side yet, but certainly as we grow we will. There's no doubt we will."

Hamish: Do you think that's a strong current to swim against - the propaganda that the Bush administration is putting out there?

Cole: "Well sure, and they have some rather strong allies: all the Drug Lords also feel that these laws should exist, because if we legalise drugs today, tomorrow the drug lords and the terrorists in this world would be out of business - they wouldn't make another penny on drugs. And when I say terrorists, I really mean terrorists. You know, Osama bin Laden made almost every penny that he ever got from selling heroin out of Afghanistan - mostly in the United States, a lot in Europe, and now coming down this way - it's true he was given 300 million dollars by daddy as an inheritance, which sounds like a lot to you. But think about someone fomenting wars in countries: 300 million dollars as you know won't even last a day. But if took that 300 million dollars 25 years ago, as he did, and invest it solely in heroin, you'd be worth hundreds of billions of dollars today, and very well capable of fomenting wars around the world."

Hamish: So you're definitely pushing regulation rather than prohibition, and when do you want to see this happen?

Cole: "Yes, and we're not just talking regulation: we like to say legalisation. And of course when the drug warriors talk about it, they say, 'Oh yeah, they want to legalise drugs so we can all go out and party. That's not the definition. The definition of legalisation is a process whereby you can control and regulate something. Right now we leave the regulation and control of drugs in the hands of all the gangsters and murderers and terrorists out there. And that's the wrong people to control drugs. And you were asking about when? Well, I would say sooner rather than later. But if we legalise drugs tomorrow, it would be too late as far as I'm concerned, because today we're going to destroy a lot more young lives by arresting people." INTERVIEW CONDUCTED AT CRITIC

Cole: "Let me explain to you how this all started. When I started working under cover it was the beginning of the war on drugs. The war on drugs was actually coined and created by Richard Nixon in 1968. It had nothing to do with the war and very little to do with drugs. The reason he started it was he wanted to run for President of the United States, and he wanted something that would get him votes. He knew if he was a strong anti-crime guy that would get him some votes but, boy, if he could be in charge of a war, you know, wow, and as we all know, it worked, he was elected. His first year in office he managed to get the US Congress to pass Bills that would give massive funding to any police department willing to hire officers to fight his war on drugs. And to give you a slight idea how massive these programmes were: we had a seven-man narcotic unit at New Jersey State police, for as long as I was in there up until then, it had always been perfectly adequate for the job we needed to do. Then overnight in October 1970, we went from a seven-man unit to a 76 person bureau - all paid for by federal tax dollars, not a penny came out of the state or local government. This was a major windfall for police administrators, and this was replicated across the entire United States. It was a huge huge amount of money. And I became an undercover agent that time. I was one of 76 people brought in for that - they just designated one-third of us undercover, I happened to fall in that one-third, and that's where I spend the next fourteen years of my life. When we went out and hit the streets we were supposed to hit drug dealers, and that was not an easy job in 1970, for a couple of reasons. For the first reason, we didn't really have much of a drug problem at all in the United States, in 1970. And what little drug problem we did have was mainly soft drugs: drugs like marijuana, hashish, some LSD, psilocybin mushroom type things. Hard drugs like methamphetamine, cocaine, heroin were virtually unheard of back then. Certainly unheard of compared to what they are today. So when we went out there to arrest these folks, we didn't know exactly how to do it, we had never fought a war on drugs before, our bosses knew nothing about how to fight a war on drugs - but they did know one thing: they knew how to keep this federal cash cow being milked in a personal barnyard. And they had to keep that federal money coming in because they had just hired 76 troopers to replace us on the road when they brought us in. And they had to keep that money coming because they had to pay their salary every year from then on. So how do you do that when you really don't have much of a problem? And when I say it's not much of a problem, statistically the likelihood of anyone in the United States dying as a result of the drug culture in 1970 was less than the likelihood of them falling down the steps in their own house and killing themselves. It was less than the likelihood of them choking to death at their own dinner table, on their own food. And as far as I know we haven't started a war yet on stairways or food. But we did start a war on drugs. And because we couldn't find drug dealers, because they weren't on every street corner like they are now, and in every school like they are now, they sent undercover people like me to infiltrate small friendship groups of young people. Young people in college or high-school or in-between. Maybe ten or fifteen kids. And on a Friday night one of those kids might say, "Hey, do you wanna get high? School's out, we're off to work" - very similar to what the kids said in my friendship group when I was young, only it was alcohol we were getting high on. And if anybody said yes, then one of these young people would say, "Well I've got access to the family car, I can make the ride into the city," because back then you had to drive all the way to New York city [from NJ] to get your drugs, because they weren't easily obtained. And that person would go around and take orders from all these friends - maybe someone would want two drugs, someone would want a hit of acid, that's the level of drugs we're talking about. They'd drive in and they'd pick it up, then they'd come back and they'd hand it out to the folks that had done it. One night it would person A would do it, the next night person B, next person C would have access to a car - I'd stay until I got 'em all. Because I would be one of those friends and they'd be picking up a couple of hits of acid, or a joint or something for me. And that wasn't the only way you could get hit. You didn't even have to have money exchange hands at all. Even though they weren't making the money - they were just making the run into town; they probably didn't even get paid for their gas. But as you know, drug use is a very social thing, certainly soft drugs - sit around and pass the joint around, take two tokes and hand it to the next person - well, if I happened to be the next person, I would pretend to take a toke on a joint and knock the flame off the end of it and put the rest in my pocket, and that night I'd submit it as evidence, as evidence that the person that handed it to me had committed a felony, and had become a drug dealer. Because the way that all the laws are written, they say that it is illegal to distribute a controlled dangerous substance, then gives the list of the substances. Doesn't say anything in there about getting money for it - just the mere handing from one person to the other gets the job done. So these people weren't drug dealers; these were drug users: people who were just accommodating friends and stuff. But when we'd get maybe 85 or 90 of them together that we'd got some drugs off of, we'd swoop into their neighbourhoods or cities in 5 o'clock in the morning, where 350 cops kick their doors down, drag them out in chains, and when we released it to the media, these were big-time drug dealers. So by the end of the year we had all kinds of drug dealers, as far as the media was concerned. And then that wasn't enough. We also lied about the amounts of drugs we were seizing, because back then hard drugs were almost unheard of. A decent seizure for a local or state police officer hitting a house might be one ounce of cocaine. Or one-quarter of an ounce of heroin, or methamphetamine. But when we'd go in, if we'd seized an ounce we'd look around and see if there was any cutting agent - milk sugar, lactose - and if we found any, say four pounds of lactose and one ounce of cocaine, somewhere between where we'd seized the drugs and the state lab, that would all magically become cocaine, which is very easy: you just accidentally drop the small package in the big one and shake it once. As far as the state's concerned it's all cocaine."

Hamish: Does this sort of thing still happen?

Cole: "No, it doesn't still happen because we didn't have to lie about it after a while. The drug 'problem', in quotes, took legs of its own and began to run away from even the lives of the drug lords. But that wasn't even enough. Then we lied about the values of these now-inflated weights of drugs, and the way we did that is in 1970/71, when I'd buy coke on the streets in ounce packages, I'd pay $1,500 an ounce for it. When I could get it. But if we seized an ounce we'd never tell the media that. We would to the media, 'Today we an ounce of cocaine with,' and you've probably heard this term before, 'with an estimated street value of $20,000.' Just ratchet up the price a little bit - who's to question? And if they do question, who are they going to go to ask those questions? Us. And we could always justify it in some way. And it made our bosses happy and that federal money kept flowing, because it was like the War on Drugs was an absolute necessity."

Hamish: Did it ever rack on your conscience doing that sort of thing?

Cole: "Well, when I say 'we', I'm not speaking about me personally, I'm speaking about everybody out there doing this - I wouldn't do those things. And it bothered me a lot to see other people doing it. You're darn right it did. But that's what was going on overall. And, you know there's a lot of paradoxes to the War on the Drugs, and just as you say, do we still do that? No, I don't think we do, because first paradox I realised was that we didn't have to lie about this very long. Somewhere near the end of the first year, as I say, the drug problem got legs of its own, began out-running even the lives of the drug warriors, began expanding exponentially, nobody could even get a handle on it. And I personally, and everybody at LEAP thinks that law enforcement bears a great deal of responsibility for what happened. For accepting a war on drugs in the first place, when it was such a low priority item as far as police should have been concerned. But more importantly for inflating the number of dealers out there, the weights of the drugs that we were getting, the values of those drugs - I'm sure that there was a lot of poor people caught in the ghettos of our centre cities, huge cities, with no hope for the future, no way out of those ghettos, no jobs, no education, who looked around and said, 'Hey, everybody's making a fortune at this. Why not me? Everybody's doing it.' So by the end of the first year we had lots of volunteers. And the drug problem just took off."

Hamish: Did you find it scary being undercover at all? Perhaps not in those early years, when drug use wasn't so prevalent,

Cole: "In my earlier years was when I did find it scary; it's when everybody finds it scary. When you first go out there, and we had been trained that drug users were some kind of demons: I almost horns must be growing out of their heads, you know. They were the Other - we were the good guys, the were the Other somehow. And we'd always been told that's someone's who high on any of these hard drugs would just as soon kill you as look at you - you know, they'll do anything to get their fix, and all these myths. By the time I'd been in it for a few years, I learned that the people I was working on were just like me - they were just people. The only difference was they wanted to put something in their body that I didn't want to put in mine. But there were good ones and bad ones and in-between ones. That's why I say it's a war on people, not a war on drugs. And actually the last five years I worked undercover I even quit carrying a gun because I just thought it was more problems than it was worth, and I thought I could talk my way out of anything. I just didn't see that there was hardly any danger at all out there for a police officer working undercover. I learnt in the first place that somebody would have to be insane to be a drug dealer and find out that the person trying to buy from them is a cop and cause them any harm at all, because if you found that out before you made the sale, all you want to do is get away from there - you don't want to hurt the cop, because if you hurt the cop there's going to be thousands of cops after you. And if you just walk away, you're home free."

Hamish: Did you ever have a time when people suspected you're up to something as an undercover cop?

Cole: "Never. Never was I made from someone being suspicious of me. Never happened in fourteen years."

Hamish: What are some of the uglier things you've seen during your time, as an undercover agent?

Cole: "Well I think the really ugly things that bear on my mind are the things that the police did. Because we were trained to fight a war on drugs - because of that metaphor - we felt like we had to have an enemy, and the enemy when you're trying to fight a war becomes the citizens of your country. And when you're fighting a war that's a very very terrible metaphor for policing in a democratic society, because when you're fighting a war it's no holds barred. And the holds that we didn't have to barred anymore were the holds on our constitutional rights, which we would just stomp on. Our fourth amendment right in the United States against illegal search and seizure. We would illegally search people all the time, because we felt like 'we're fighting a war, we're the good guys, and no matter how we get these guys, it's worthwhile because we're taking them off the streets and that's our job.' So that's why so many get involved in not telling the truth on the stand when they're testifying about drug cases. And you almost never find that in other cases. All these violations come from drug cases. For instance, you can read a whole lot of newspapers, see a whole lot of newscasts and never hear anything about anybody violating someone's rights in say a murder investigation, or say a rape investigation, but when it's drugs it's different, because we're fighting a war on drugs. Because we were fighting a war the police officers thought that the courts weren't doing their jobs correctly - they used to talk about revolving door justice - you know, in and out so quick - and they'd complain in my country that the criminals that they'd just arrested for a drug violation were back on the street before they could finish typing up the report - which was probably true, in many cases. But in the United States we have the right to bail: if you make bail, you get out. So what's the matter with that? It doesn't mean you're released; it just means you're out until your court case comes up. But the police couldn't see it that way, they said they were getting out on the streets and right back to dealing. So they started applying what they called 'street justice'. And street justice meant doing any despicable thing you could to these people. The worse the better, because it was just one more reason that they wouldn't in the future dare to try using drugs again. So when we'd go in, for instance, to search a house, early on, when we started this war on drugs, we'd go in to execute a search warrant. We'd go in the house, we'd kick down all the doors, always. Whether they needed be or not, you know, you just kick them in, it's just part of the street justice - they had to repair their doors. Go inside to search the house, arrest everybody in the house, turn over drawers and the beds and just break things, just as part of the search, just automatically. And it's always thought of as street justice. And then if you arrested everyone in the house because you found some drugs there, when we brought them out in chains and put them in the police cars and drove off, we just left that shattered door wide open, so anybody could go and steal anything they wanted. We didn't care: that's all the more reason that they'll never do this again."

Hamish: Did that happen? Did people go into those places?

Cole: "Oh, absolutely it happened. Certainly. And who could they go to to complain? The police? Hardly. So those were some things I felt were horrible. Horrible. We'd hit houses - and of course, mainly you're hitting the house at 5 o'clock in the morning so you're guaranteed that the people are there asleep. You go in to get some guy that's sold some drugs to someone, and the police would hit the house, kick down the door, go in, and maybe the guy that sold it is the son of the parents who live in the house. But when we went in the house, you know, we'd grab him, we'd grab everyone; everyone's down on the floor and they're handcuffed at first, until you get a chance to search the house, and secure it so nobody can get to guns and everything. Some times these people's mother would be naked in there. It didn't matter. Down on the floor and handcuffed. Didn't give them a chance to dress, or do anything. Just because with this kind of embarrassment, maybe they'd really keep their son from using these drugs again. So it was all these terrible things."

Hamish: Was there every any physical abuse?

Cole: "Oh, sure. There was always physical abuse. Tremendous physical abuse. People get slapped around all the time. And worse. About any degrading thing you can think of I saw occur out there. And it was terrible. Terrible, terrible." So that is what comes first in my mind when I think of bad things I saw out there. I saw other things out there that some of the cops said, 'Oh, this is the worse thing ever!'. And this went toward fighting the war on drugs. Occasionally we'd got in to search a house - or to search a person, maybe they're out bringing - a man's wife or girlfriend might be coming to the prison to visit, and be trying to smuggle in drugs to the guy. And when we find the drugs - and the drugs might be in the diaper of the baby that she has with her, hoping that they won't look there, and when the police find this, it's not, 'Well, she tried to smuggle drugs in the diaper of a baby, it didn't work,' it's, somehow the fact that it was in this diaper of the baby was like, 'She's chancing poisoning the baby with the drug,' which is just baloney. You know, the drugs were in a plastic envelope, it's not going to hurt the baby - but it's always that those people were demonised for whatever they did. Demonised. And here, I can remember that was a big one, and after a couple of those that was always the thing that would be cited, 'These people will even use their babies to smuggle drugs,' and all this. Well, yeah, they did, but didn't hurt the baby."

Hamish: At the moment, in Dunedin - do you know about BZP? These party pills, they're basically caffeine pills,

Cole: "You know, you can overdose on coffee - if you sat down and drank 18 cups of coffee, you'd be up for a week, and you'd feel like hell. Especially if you were doing it with alcohol. Don't we learn something from that? You don't do it anymore."

Hamish: One of the things that was highly amusing for Critic was that immediately after these five kids had visited the hospital, the detective at the Dunedin central police station came out in public saying these drugs should be banned, and the Otago Daily Times, which is an ultra-conservative, it's dubious as to whether it's actually news reporting coverage, had headline banner saying "Police urge ban on party pills," and a little headline above it saying "Dangerous Drugs on Dunedin's Streets" about these caffeine pills. Is this a predictable response?

Cole: "Absolutely predictable. And what I would say is, we brought three speakers from LEAP here to talk all over your country. We didn't bring them in to try to tell you how to run your business. You've got your own country, your own laws, you should do whatever you want to do - but we did come here to warn you something: to warn you, 'Don't follow us down this path of prohibition and zero tolerance added to it, because this is what you get. And this is the path to destruction, it's the path to disaster - we've been doing it for 34 years. In that 34 years we've spent half a trillion dollars on the War on Drugs. Every year no we're spending 69 billion more to fight this war. Every year we arrest 1.6 million people - mostly young people - for non-violent drug offences. The courts are absolutely clogged with all these cases - so clogged that some civil cases languish in the courts for 15 years before they can even get heard. Our prison system has quadrupled in the last 20 years, making building prisons in the United States the fastest growing industry. There's 2.2 million prisoners in the United States today. And growing. More per capita than any country in the world. And to put that in context for you, the United States has 4.6% of the population of the whole world; we have 22.5% of the world's prisoners. Right there in that land that we call 'the Land of Freedom'. Now there's something wrong with that picture to me. And the horror of it is with all these lives we're destroying every year, and all this money so ill-spent, today drugs are cheaper, they're more potent, and they're far easier to get than they were 34 years ago when I started buying them on the streets. Now, to me that is the very essence of failed public policy. When something's failed that long and that miserably, it's time to look for some alternative. And that's why we at LEAP say the alternative is 'end the War on Drugs, end drug prohibition.' Just like we in the United States ended alcohol prohibition in 1933. I mean, we've done all this once, we should have learned something. We ended alcohol prohibition in 1933, why? Because during alcohol prohibition we had the highest murder rate in the history of the United States; the highest rate of corruption of public officials in the history of the United States; and we ended it, and the year we ended it both those things fell right down to almost nothing, and they stayed down there until 1968 when we declared war on drugs. And with the new prohibition we've gone way past most of those figures now, and it's just going to get worse."

Hamish: What's going to have to happen for this war on drugs to end? Would a change in the administration help things?

Cole: "Not much, no. It's not just the Bush administration. The Clinton administration made more stringent laws. Both sides, no matter who we put in there, just buys into the War on Drugs. No, what will make the change is an organisation like LEAP. We founded our organisation and modelled it on Vietnam Veterans Against the War. This was before your time, but we believed that those people had such unassailable credibility when it came to speaking out against that horrible war, because they've been there done that: 'It's wrong and we've got to get out.' And how do you argue with someone that's been there and done that? And we feel we have exactly the same credibility when we speak out against the War on Drugs. And that's why all the speakers in LEAP, and board members, have to be current or former drug warriors, either police, judges, prosecutors - we even have former DEA agents who are speakers for us. So there's a lot of folks out there that understand this, and it's growing everyday. And this is what will make the change because as we speak to people, publicly, there's so many people out there that are on our side: they don't even know that they're on our side, until they hear what is actually happening with the War on Drugs. They hear what kind of horrors we've really created, and they say, 'This is so logical, this is so compelling an argument, naturally we have to end the drug prohibition, we have to legalise drugs. And when we say 'legalise drugs' we don't mean party, which is what the drug warriors would have you believe: we mean legalise it so that you can control it and regulate it and keep it out of the hands of our children."

26/04/2004
Hamish McKenzie, Editor of Critic, Otago University's student magazine, in Dunedin, New Zealand

Sunday, March 28, 2004

Richard A. Clarke & The White House Reaction to the 9/!! Hearings




I fucking don't even begin to know where to start with these fucking people....


I know, let's say we start with that cocksucking bitch, Presidential NSA Presidential Advisor, Dr. Condi Rice.

One may say, given the vociferousness of her attacks on Dick Clarke, that 'the Bitch doth protest too much,' and isn't it funny how she's past adamant about not testifying under oath, publicly, yet she's burning up the airwaves all week long, on all the major news shows, with a star turn to be done tonight on '60 Minutes.'

What's up with that?

Then her comment from last year:

that....

Wait for it......

“No one could have predicted that they would try to use a…

hijacked airplane as a missile..."


I'm not the only one out here in webland that has noticed that this very scenario was a plot point in a Tom Clancy novel, Debt of Honor, where his All-American Wet Dream, Jack Ryan becomes US President when a 747 is smacked into The Capitol during a Joint Session of Congress, killing the President, mere moments after Jack Ryan was sworn in as Vice President, thus making him President of The United States of America, and shit.

All of a sudden nobody in the WH reads Tom Clancy?

Please.

Even money this is where Al-Qaeda got the idea in the first place.

Nothing's more encouraging to me when my Government keeps playing me for a fool, shows how much respect they have for me and their fellow Americans.

Wednesday, January 1, 2003

The Crook I Worked For

This is too funny.

Found this by accident when I was looking for something else.

I worked briefly for this guy in a legit biz he had doing student loan refinancing.

But man, is he as crooked as the day is long.

And even with his legit biz that's making him millions, (which he doesn't pay the people he has working for him properly), boy oh boy, is he a miserable asshole.


I may be poor right now but at least I'm not him, and unlike him were I to renew my Series 7/63 NASD Licenses I could trade stocks again, since, unlike him, I wouldn't have to put any "Yes" answers on my U-4 form.

So who's better off?

He also tried to extort $10 million bucks from Fox Broadcasting founder and USA Networks CEO Barry Diller.

Surely I can find a better caliber of people to work for in NYC than this while I wait for A Pen Warmed In Hell to become self-supporting.

~nyc

SECURITIES EXCHANGE ACT OF 1934
Release No. 44266 / May 4, 2001

ADMINISTRATIVE PROCEEDING
File No. 3-10473


In the Matter of

RICHARD A. PREISIG, JR.

Respondent.


:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:


ORDER INSTITUTING PROCEEDINGS
PURSUANT TO SECTION 15(b)(6) OF
THE SECURITIES EXCHANGE ACT OF
1934, MAKING FINDINGS AND
IMPOSING REMEDIAL SANCTIONS

I.

The Securities and Exchange Commission ("Commission") deems it appropriate and in the public interest to institute public administrative proceedings against Richard A. Preisig, Jr. ("Preisig") pursuant to Section 15(b)(6) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 ("Exchange Act").

II.

In anticipation of the institution of these administrative proceedings, Preisig has submitted an Offer of Settlement ("Offer"), which the Commission has determined is in the public interest to accept. Solely for the purpose of this proceeding, and any other proceeding brought by or on behalf of the Commission or to which the Commission is a party, Preisig, without admitting or denying the findings set forth herein, except as to the Commission's jurisdiction over him and over the subject matter of this proceeding, which is admitted, consents to the issuance of this Order Instituting Proceedings Pursuant to Section 15(b)(6) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, Making Findings and Imposing Remedial Sanctions and to the entry of the findings and the imposition of the remedial sanctions as set forth below.

III.

Accordingly, IT IS ORDERED that said proceedings be, and hereby are, instituted.

IV.

Based on this Order and Preisig's Offer, the Commission finds the following1:

A. Preisig, age 30, resides in New York City. From approximately June 1995 through August 1996, Preisig was a registered representative associated with the Melville, NY branch office of Investors Associates, Inc. ("Investors Associates"); upon leaving the Melville office in or about August 1996, Preisig continued to be associated with Investors Associates until approximately June 1997.

B. During all relevant times, Investors Associates was a broker-dealer registered with the Commission pursuant to Section 15(b) of the Exchange Act, with headquarters in Hackensack, New Jersey. At the relevant time, the firm had approximately seventeen branch offices and employed approximately 500 registered representatives. The firm ceased business, except for liquidating trades, on approximately June 12, 1997. Its corporate charter was revoked by the State of New Jersey on February 16, 1998, and its broker-dealer registration was cancelled by the Commission on September 22, 1998.

C. From September 1995 through August 1996, Preisig participated in public offerings of Interiors, Inc., Compare Generiks, Inc., Perry's Majestic Beer, Inc. and other securities (collectively, the "House Stocks"), many of which were penny stocks within the meaning of Section 3(a)(51) of the Exchange Act and Rule 3a51-1 thereunder.

D. During his tenure at Investors Associates, Preisig became a "floor manager" at the Melville office, despite not having obtained the proper industry license. In that role, Preisig reported directly to the co-owners of the Melville branch, trained other brokers, wrote scripts for other registered representatives to follow with regard to the House Stocks, and provided general motivation for other registered representatives to sell the House Stocks in a boiler-room environment.

E. As the effective date for each House Stock offering approached, Preisig illegally pre-sold the offering by soliciting orders for the securities in advance of the effective date of the offering. Preisig consistently failed to disclose material negative information concerning the issuer of each House Stock. Preisig used, and trained other registered representatives to use, an assortment of fraudulent and abusive sales practices to obtain orders for the House Stocks, including the use of scripts that he wrote which made baseless price predictions for each stock. In creating the scripts, Preisig conducted no independent research, never reviewed the issuer's financial statements or otherwise attempted to verify the outrageous claims contained in the scripts.

F. As part of his pre-selling efforts for each House Stock offering, Preisig typically required his customers to commit to purchasing a large number of shares in the aftermarket in exchange for the opportunity to purchase a small allocation of shares in the offering. The prices for the aftermarket shares, however, were pre-determined by others at Investors Associates, not by a legitimate market. Once each offering was completed, Preisig continued to aggressively and fraudulently sell House Stock to his clients, including to clients that had participated in the offering, a practice known as "upticking."

G. When Preisig's clients called him to place a sell order for a House Stock, Preisig used various means to dissuade or obstruct his clients from selling those shares, including making fraudulent misrepresentations about the prospects and value of the issuer. If a particular client insisted on selling shares of a House Stock, Preisig would process the sell order if he had a matching purchase order from another client for the same House Stock. The two transactions were then effected by Investors Associates through a "crossed trade." In so doing, Preisig prevented shares of the House Stock from "leaking out" into the open market and thereby depressing the manipulated price.

V.

Based on the foregoing, the Commission finds that Preisig willfully violated Sections 5(a) and 17(a) of the Securities Act of 1933, Section 10(b) of the Exchange Act and Rule 10b-5 thereunder.

VI.

In view of the foregoing, the Commission deems it appropriate and in the public interest to accept the Offer submitted by Preisig and accordingly,

IT IS HEREBY ORDERED, effective immediately, that Richard A. Preisig, Jr. be, and hereby is, barred from association with any broker or dealer; and

IT IS HEREBY ORDERED, effective immediately, that Richard A. Preisig, Jr. be, and hereby is, barred from participating in any offering of penny stock, including: acting as a promoter, finder, consultant, agent, or other person who engages in activities with a broker, dealer or issuer for purposes of the issuance or trading in any penny stock; or inducing or attempting to induce the purchase or sale of any penny stock.

By the Commission.

Jonathan G. Katz
Secretary

Footnotes

1 The facts, findings, and conclusions herein are made pursuant to Preisig's Offer of Settlement and are not binding on any other person or entity named as a respondent or defendant in this or any other proceeding.

http://www.sec.gov/litigation/admin/34-44266.htm

Sunday, June 23, 2002

google7acfadfb3402f798

google7acfadfb3402f798

Sunday, May 27, 2001

SiliconSalon The TV Show, Silicon Valley, Circa 1997

What follows is a rough, unfinished verbatim transcript of the first 45 minute segment of SiliconSalon. Please excuse its appearance, we plan to smooth it out later. If you have any suggestions to improve its readability, or any other comments please send them to:

DigitalKomponents@gmail.com

Verbatim Transcript

SiliconSalon

22 April 1997

First Aired: May 27, 1997 Palo Alto, CA

Nyc Labrets Host

Brett Bourbon Guest (Harvard Humanities Professor)

Chris Espinosa Guest (Started Working for Steve Jobs @ Apple when he was 14 yrs old)

Marjorie Perloff Guest (MacArthur Board, Author, Stanford English Professor)

---------------

Nyc Labrets: And now we'd like to introduce our guests:

Brett Bourbon who is Mellon Fellow visiting Professor from Harvard University He's now at

Stanford,

Chris Espinosa of Apple Computer.



Chris Espinosa : Hi Nick



Nyc Labrets: And Marjorie Perloff, Professor of English Comparative Literature, is that right?



Marjorie Perloff: Right



Nyc Labrets: at Stanford University. Thank you all for coming tonight.



Chris Espinosa Thank you, Nick.



Nyc Labrets: And now that my speechifying is over, we were talking before about, like, what

we were going to talk about and I was thinking, How do we recognize something that is

earth breaking or earth shattering, mean that the question that my parents would raise is

that the books that are out today aren't going to be read fifty years from now How do we

recognize something that's got that kind of value?



MARJORIE PERLOFF: Why are they not going to be read fifty years from now?



Nyc Labrets Because, umm



MARJORIE PERLOFF I don't agree with you.



Professor Bourbon: Hopefully our books will be read fifty years from now



Nyc Labrets the discussion then centered around stuff that was really you know common

stuff

detective stories, popular culture the opinion was it didn't have a lot of lasting value I mean

how do

we know if something's got lasting value?



Chris Espinosa Well I think that it's very hard to tell that at the time and it's really hard to

separate what is you know coming up at the grass roots and has lasting value from what is

coming

up at the grass roots and is just common and ephemeral. I remember when I was working in

the garage of Apple Computer which was then just a small company, half a dozen of us in

1976, though we had you know the great grand dreams that everybody has we had no idea

that personal computing and electronics and networking was going to become such central

cultural force, we

wanted it to, but you know I'm sure Ham radio operators wanted that to be there were a lot

of people

calling us the next craze like citizen's band radio which was contemporaneous around 1976.

CB

radio was really shaping American culture around 1976 but it just vanished so it is really

hard to tell

that at the time.



Professor Bourbon: : I think that's what is dynamic about this area, is that everyone is

pursuing

this next vision, even, in the Academy, not as well, but we are trying.



MARJORIE PERLOFF: You have very different, you wanted to talk about paradigm shifts, one

shift that's

happened is let's say in the reception of books when you said who is going to know about

them and

the whole modes of reviewing, I've written on that recently. That it used to be that you had

to wait for

something to be reviewed in the Times Book Review, and if it wasn't in then you were

disappointed.



And then you wait for the scholarly reviews which took two years to come out.



Now, there are various Web Sites, there are various sites, there's for instance the Electronic

Book Review, which I don't know if you've seen, which is done at the University of Illinois,

not in this

area I'm afraid, by a man Nick named Joe Tabby. And it means that when you do review a

book, your review comes out immediately and this person may answer, and then you

respond

again and that's a very different dym mic and that all kinds of people see it that you don't

expect will see it and all kinds of people read these things, so it's just one group anymore. I

think

that's a really big change in the way things are received.



Professor Bourbon: the critical question for literature too is the audience where is the

audience

coming what how is it constructed Art itself today is one of it's primary jobs you can say, is

constructing its own audience. That's it , one of its fundamental projects. And that is both

positive

thing in the way it creates a dynamic requirement for art but at the same time it's

fragmenting art and makes it difficult to have these kinds of icons of culture that have any

effect. It's

probably reflected in the survey that we saw today in Stanford right that few people don't

know that

Gutenburg invented printed





Nyc Labrets which is real embarrassing



MARJORIE PERLOFF we have to explain what that is. We had a survey at Stanford the

Stanford review which is

our conservative newspaper in all fairness the main newspaper is the Stanford Daily, and

then there

is something that comes out only I think only every few two weeks or so, called the SR

which is

billed as the conservative newspaper, but they are very funny, and they really expose some

of the

things that are going on and they did a survey of the most basic information like who is the

PM of

England right now and 70% I think didn't know. What day was Pearl harbor that's the one

that really

amazed me as somebody who loved through it, What day, what 's the date of Pearl Harbor

well it was 72%

did not know.



Chris Espinosa: Oh my



MARJORIE PERLOFF which seems rather amazing and then who wrote wealth of Nick

Nations, Adam smith

Copernicus, that one they did not you know the knowledge base, which is people like E. D.

Hirsch

pointed out is really pretty appalling but it's partly that you just can't count on people

knowing the

same things any more.



Professor Bourbon: OK that's the problem that's also true of the sciences, the last year, I

saw

this back in Cambridge that people knew like 5 % of the people understood what DNA

Adams was

and what 50% knew the earth went around the sun instead of the other way around. 50%

In the

United States...



Nyc Labrets: So how do we even address that and where do we start?



Professor Bourbon: : You move to another country...



Nyc Labrets Yeauh..



Chris Espinosa: I'm not sure that what has been going on with tech & education in the last

you

know, 10 or 15 years is really working because what what we seem to be doing is especially[

from

the technology side, what we see the problem is as Oh it's a simple fact delivery problem,

and we

are creating much much more effective ways to deliver facts to people especially kids in

schools

and I' m just watching the amount of knowledge one has to absorb just to stay current in

ones job in

the computer industry and it's an incredible amount of just keeping up with facts that one

has to do

and I'm wondering you know what is happening to my you know my knowledge of the

things I

learned in school and even my memory of you know birthdates and anniversaries of

members of my

family is I keep cramming these facts into my head I can only remember a limited amount of

stuff

and you know part of me wants to say that the logarithmic acceleration of knowledge that's

necessary just to remain in school must be taking a toll on some of these what we think are

the

basic building blocks of culture, understanding where western learning came from

understanding

what our world is like today you know kids today know how to get to every level in the

newest

SuperNintendo game and maybe it's that knowledge displacing what we consider to be more

valuable.



Professor Bourbon: Well I think that one of the prime sites for novelistic experience for

today's

kids is computer games that they experience those those that the game itself interactively,

they're

often structured like that too anyway as a story and as the fictional world they are closest

too but even their fictional interactions they're not passive or contemplative in the way they

were before and I think the contemplative aspect is a good thing it's bad to lose but they are

also

able to you know alter their worlds



MARJORIE PERLOFF: But what does that ability do for them, do you think, in the long run?

the ability to play

these games and alter their world?



Professor Bourbon: They get jobs at Apple



Chris Espinosa yeah but does it does it set it a model does modeling their interaction in that

world set a model for them to have a to interact in the real world and I don't think so. but I

also don't

think that our upbringing or the upbringing the generations before us were any different I

remember

the kind of children's literature that was current when I was growing up and my parents

were

growing up it was you know buccaneers and swordfighters and it was just as fantasy based

as

today.



Professor Bourbon: : So far a question for America, continually, how much education do you

give your kids, there's an anti-educationalist strand in American culture that's very strong

and yet to be a citizen is also to be educated within everything within your country and

there's a

responsibility to be educated in that way too.



MARJORIE PERLOFF: I also think that the frightening is that, and this is kind of frightening

that things happen

imperceptibly, for instance if you watch the morning news shows the Today show, ABC the

main

channels which for years if I'm having breakfast or something I might turn on in the last and

this has

only happened I'd say in the last year there's no more news there's No news. The only news

that

might be on even on the hour where first you know there's supposed to be 3 min. of news

then

comes the weather and then come little special features but in those first 3 min. of news

where they

would say: "In Israel yesterday PM Netanyahu said.." Now all you get is that some boy fell

into a

well maybe or something like that locally and other little tidbits like that and then you realize

wait

the news isn't still coming it's over and then you think Why? and that's because the audience

has

changed so rapidly because first of all people that get a lot new s that really want it can get

on the

computer now and they call up exactly what they want and whether they want the financial

news or which news they want to, they have that choice. But it means that everybody

else there's just a great hole and you can see that now that our TV has changed and that

has

happened very suddenly and very quickly without anybody I think talking about it very

much. I

haven't read anything about that but it has totally changed.



Chris Espinosa: this is one of the things that will happen in the great paradigm shifts as

some

media which has been broadcast orientated starts finding ways to get and I think some

people are

using the term Nick NarrowCasted or personalized, as individuals are able to find

their markets for information more effectively and the information is more tightly tailored to

them

what that's doing is that's removing a lot of broad general content out of the mass media

and the

quality of the mass media declines when its most educated, and most astute and most

information

needy customers go somewhere else.



Professor Bourbon: Yes, that's very true.



Nyc Labrets: I mean I'm having a problem communicating with my peers, on stuff I take for

granted. I was talking about a song today with a friend of mine and I made a reference to

another

cultural icon and he couldn't connect the two. And had he been five years older that

wouldn't have

happened. It throws me.



MARJORIE PERLOFF: But there are other skills that obviously people have now that we

didn't have, I mean that

they know how to fill out forms, of the most complicated types of forms, (background

laughter), I'm

not joking about this, I really, I had to judge a contest recently which was, it was very

interesting, it

shows how ones own consciousness changes, I got the very same day two requests: One

was to

judge the Christiann Gauss Award which is the Award the Phi Beta Kappa gives to the best

scholarly book. but it means that you have got to read about 70 of these books and that

you've got

to write a report on each one I really didn't want to have to do that. At my stage I've gotten

very bored

with reading these school, you know, you have to go through, if I wouldn't have to write

reports on

them, but you read them But the other one was to judge the technical, the ISEA, let's see, I

SEe

A<>

having a

huge festival, and so I said , like a fool,, oh I'll be happy to judge this, I though it would be

much

more fun than the Christian Gauss Award at least and what I didn't know is you'd have to do

it

on-line, you had to it all on the screen, in other words the proposals only came in, it never

left the

screen and I found that very hard to write my comments, and look at these things, that

good I'm not,

I don't have that kind of training to do the whole thing that way and that's the only way you

could

see what the things were, that are going to be in this festival. But on other hand I was very

impressed, they come from all over the world, they come from Argentina they come from

you and

meit and some of them are musical's some of them are literary, some of them deal with the

visual

arts, very clever, all new kinds of artistic creations. And that's very impressive. I mean those

are

impressive. But I found it hard to do but I'm still glad that I did that not the other. Which

shows that

you do get tired of a certain kind reading, at least I felt that I did and I did not have to read

those

books.



Chris Espinosa: There is a certain ironic tradeoff that's coming along. I was in school in the

very,

very early days of computers being in universities and I was one of the first students to be

able to

compose my undergraduate papers on a word processor and I had several English

Professors ask

me where I had purchased my essays from and threaten to fail me because they were

turned in with

left right flush margins



MARJORIE PERLOFF: Oh yes.



Chris Espinosa: and no typographical errors and no signs of erasure or backspacing or

whiteout. All of these things that were...WhiteOut! Carbon Paper! These things have almost

evaporated in the last 20 years. But I was one of the few who had access to a computer and

now

students coming out of the University more or less know typesetting I don't know that it is

improving their ability to write but they know how to typeset.



MARJORIE PERLOFF: Well they do some beautiful things. I'm teaching a course right now

It's sort of New Arts

and we were doing John Cage last week and Cage's lectures which are all arranged you

know, the

typography is very innovative and there is this student in fact who is an undergraduate, who

Brett

may have talked to, whose name is Ryan Whitehead. Who did the most marvelous thing that

I never

could have figured how to typeset with different fonts and different faces all on the word

cryptography. And he just analyzed that one word and did sort of puns on it and various

things things. But it was marvelously done. I mean, I couldn't have done that. And he said

"Oh that's

easy to do." and he just said "the margins" you know, whichever way I can't do it, but so it

is there

are things that are very impressive that they do just like that but I think one problem is that

and

maybe it isn't such a problem but the point is talking about whiteout makes me think of this

that in

the days of Xerox when well before Xerox I mean I remember the days before Xerox when

you

actually went to the library and you took notes (laughter)



Nyc Labrets Ouch!



MARJORIE PERLOFF: Now when you did that it was very valuable reading the book and so

you had those notes

and you took them on index cards and it made you really learn what you were reading.

When Xerox

came along and then you could just have these Xerox's and it wasn't so thrilling anymore.

Now they

don't read anything at all that isn't absolutely required that's not part of the course. In other

words,

you make it readily available, it's in the library, it's in a reserve book in Myer Library they can

take it

out just like that and they don't go at all. Because somehow the challenge isn't there.

Whereas if it

was hard to get the book and you had to make notes and you were the only one who'd

found the

book.



Professor Bourbon: : that's the too effect of television. We see it teaching as well the

students

demand entertainment and education isn't always entertainment and especially the quick

stimulus

and so more and more performance is encouraged I think amongst us Professors to the

detriment

of education for the students.



Nyc Labrets one of the most telling things, my family lives in Europe, a lot of them and I was

about 17 and it was summer and the kids were in school there which was a real surprise

because

we get two three months in New York and I said "let me see your book" and this 17 year old

kid

who looked like he would have walked outré of my Shop Class, he was doing analytical

geometry



MARJORIE PERLOFF Oh yeah.



Nyc Labrets and it was just I was absolutely blown because..

Professor Bourbon: : But their colleges are no good so they all come here to

college..(laughter)



Nyc Labrets So that's the tradeoff?



MARJORIE PERLOFF Well it's not only that it's always also a question whether that really

does you that much

good later on. So I have sort of mixed minds. I get very shocked that people don't know

some of

these things like the ones we were talking about or in the ED Hirsch Cultural Literacy book

that you

admire and I go along with it up to point but then there is another part of me that feels: Are

people

though finally are often more inventive...then you know, other words those who have

learned things by the time they are certain age and then what? Then what do you do with

it?



Nyc Labrets That was..



Chris Espinosa Are you...



Nyc Labrets No go ahead



Chris Espinosa Are you saying research skills decline or vanish or are they...



MARJORIE PERLOFF Yes



Chris Espinosa ...just be moving into something else? Because my life has changed

tremendously in the last two years with the advent of the Internet I don't have to remember

things

any more. All I need to know is where to look. And... that is... I used to you know... I got my

role

in the corporation of being the vast storehouse of trivial knowledge and now I don't have to

be a vast

storehouse of trivial knowledge anymore because I can look things up very very quickly...



MARJORIE PERLOFF but how do know those things are accurate? One of the big problems..



Chris Espinosa that's a good question



Nyc Labrets hmm yeah



MARJORIE PERLOFF I have heard lots of interesting discussions about these things on the

Net. Now I have found

things myself that I know are innaccurate Adamsccurate. In other words, your taking it on

faith that just

because it's on there see and this is a question that I have for you....the input after all, there

isn't

anything on the Web or on another computer, in general, that hasn't been put in by

somebody,

groups of somebody, whatever. So you only have, it can only be as good as the input and

the input

most of the time is not very good so what is so special about it in that sense?



Chris Espinosa there used be something in the economics of producing information that

committing it to paper or to video or to another medium of broad distribution was so

expensive that

you had to hire layers and layers and layers of fact checkers and editors and people to

ensure the

quality of the information and you could generally draw a co-relation between the quality of

the

information and the cost or the perceived cost of it.

If it was typeset it was generally more reliable than if it were typewritten which was

generally

more reliable than if it were handwritten. And one of the things that the electronic

revolution has

done is that it's basically lowered the cost of production of information to a uniformly low

level, so

that anybody can be a publisher and that that... but people still have this in their mind that

production values equal quality and accuracy and I've seen some stuff that where the

production

values are superb and the content is absurd and that's really scary...



MARJORIE PERLOFF It is



Nyc Labrets: Uh yeah absolutely yea it's a major issue and it frightens because how do we

know?



MARJORIE PERLOFF: and nobody checks it you see there are all kinds of ezines and they

were talking about

what the editorial policy is Now the standard thing is if let's say you write a 5 page article

and you

send it to Business Journal it's going to be checked it's going to be copy edited and so on

but if it is electronic usually they just take it exactly the way it is and put it on there and you

look

at it and it's got all kinds of notorious errors



Nyc Labrets Glaring



MARJORIE PERLOFF Glaring errors, and you can also though feel that it's not permanent

and so you sort of get

away with doing that and nobody seems to really care on the other hand you don't get that

much

credit for doing it either you see there are somethings...



Professor Bourbon: so we can lie right here right





Nyc Labrets we can lie right here we're on TV



Professor Bourbon: who knows



MARJORIE PERLOFF we're on TV... well even TV doesn't work quite that way. But it does

make people say all

kinds of things and not think they'll ever be checked for



Chris Espinosa Was there another, I keep wondering whether there was another time in

History when there was a technology explosion around communication.. . like the penny

presses in

Great Britain where you know pulp magazines were something and novels were something

you

picked up for a couple of pence on the way home from work and there were racks and racks

of was

there a similar time of a tremendous increase in the quantity and a tremendous decrease in

the

quality of information.



Nyc Labrets: The story you told about not having to remember all this stuff because of the

Internet, umm there's an old story about the guy that invented the alphabet and he took it

to a king

and the king said this is no good and he was why and he said look now that we have this

and it's

obviously not going to go away people are not going to have to rely on their memories

anymore and I

would presume that that's the first instance of it and we've probably losing ground ever

since...



MARJORIE PERLOFF I don't know that there is a parallel to that



Professor Bourbon: Well certainly there were explosions 18th century, as you say the

newspapers and often it's tied to the audience being created at the same time, there are

intimate

relationships, the novel itself is such a beast. It took a while for that to mature intellectually

until it

became what it is today



Chris Espinosa I think we are some what spoiled by what a wild frontier modern information

access is by having you know such strict control and actually really respectably high levels of

quality in our broadcast information in our print information newspapers from the 50's

through the

70's here in America were they were tremendously higher quality. How long did you live in

great

Britain? Because I've looked at the..



Professor Bourbon: Great Britain?



Chris Espinosa Yes.



Professor Bourbon: I just visited.



CE Oh you just visited, sorry



Professor Bourbon: It was Cambridge MA I was referring to



CE OK, Wrong Cambridge



MARJORIE PERLOFF But I actually lived in Britain for years



CE I've noticed that when I read overseas newspapers on the one hand their coverage of

world

affairs and their coverage of the United States is much much different, on the other hand

their

political coverage and their general coverage of society is even more I don't want to say

trashy...



MARJORIE PERLOFF It is



CE OK I will say trashy...



MARJORIE PERLOFF That's a recent development I mean they used to be terribly snobbish

about American

Newspapers and gossip and so forth and be quite superior but again in the last 20 years or

so they

have now.. The Manchester Guardian even will now have exposes and so forth on the front

page

yeah they're even more trashy The point there is when they do copy our things then they

get even

trashier in that kind of way and that will happen with some kind of computer talk too... How

do you

all feel about the you know, have you tried to buy any books on the net,



NA Not as of yet



MARJORIE PERLOFF NO.. You know you can go through Vagabond or there are these huge

companies, But

something I find very disturbing is while you're doing that and I've only done it a few times I

wanted

to order something from Germany, and I did manage to find a German bookstore, and these

ads

keep flashing on for Vagabond, or whatever other books, it's very distracting, and I think

there are

going to be a lot more ads aren't there?



CE Oh yes unfortunately



MARJORIE PERLOFF going on all the time while you're...well you see and that of course is

another issue



BB You got to pay for it somehow



MARJORIE PERLOFF I know, that's right



CE And I think that's one of the things that disappoints me because when you look at some

of

the ideas that formed this technology and some of the thinkers like Ted Nelson and what

they were

planning and what they wanted to do or planning on doing is that this was supposed to be

an

information economy where the principal good was information and you could create a

market for

your information and the better information would have higher value and generate more

return to its

creators and that was the way it was supposed to work. and Instead it turns out, that, and I

don't

know whether if it's a function of markets or a function of people or a function of just the

way it grew

it up but that people don't really have a high value for information.



BB Well the value is not the information, it's in the use of the information, right, so if there is

no

use for it or if one can't find it, then it's noise.



CE So, that....



MARJORIE PERLOFF: I think it's even more than that, it's inverse. If you know you can

get...Suppose you really

can't get information in a time where it was much harder to get or let's say if you knew

there was

one book that had an essay in it you wanted You could only get it from inter-library loan it

would

come from the library of Congress to say Berkeley or something like that then you were so

excited

that then when that essay came you memorized it practically, Now that you always know "oh

well

that information is available" nobody wants it.



BB But it does suggest that if you make information ubiquitous or easy to come by and what

really matters is what you do with it and therefore how you think and therefore what at least

certainly we try to do in school I think is teach our students how to think, not what to think

but how

to do it, but at the same time you have this fragmentation, that you were talking about

before, and

all that you need to know, there is an inability to synthesize that because there is an inability

to

think you can't be passive about most of this information you've got to attack and organize it

and

that takes a lot of responsibility, responsibility not intellectually, buy you have to in some

sense,

be ambitious in trying to put all these things together the more information that's there the

more

your ambition to integrate that has to be.



NA I'm reminded of the Jobs article in Wired where he says look I've put more computers in

more classrooms than anyone else, single handedly, practically and I don't really think that

was

the answer and it seems to me that starting earlier and getting with the basics and the

ABC's ....

I feel real blessed I went to public schools in New York City and it was all rote drills and

memorization and I talk to kids today and they are doing something very different umm I

ran into a

high school student not too long ago and they were studying Russia and they were using

some

second third rate novel instead of of a Russian history they were reading something bought

off the

rack at the airport and this was a sign



MARJORIE PERLOFF Of where the teachers are



NA a sign.. I was just totally amazed Bright kid you know, it just struck that at this age

schools might be putting higher content into their heads



BB Well schools have always been fragmented in their goals, since they have the goal of

making good citizens, making people, preparing people to get jobs and then something

called upon

to make them feel better about themselves. And I think the last one is what's become the

dominant goal of all public schools.



CE Also you've got to recognize that the kind of jobs that we are preparing people for have

changed radically in the past 50 years and that the amount of just pure manufacturing jobs

where for

example doing something by rote repetitively every day is your major job function you know

assembly jobs mechanical jobs agricultural jobs have almost vanished and we're left with the

service economy and we're left information economy and what I find odd about the

information

economy is that because, for the reasons you talked about , information is such a low value

commodity and it's hard to differentiate, that people aren't willing to pay for it the major

things that

the Internet is doing is marketing hard goods and advertising.



MARJORIE PERLOFF Yes



CE And it's terribly self-referential. I saw a comment where you know two of the major

advertisers on two of the larger sites, the Wired site and the Excite site, their largest

advertisers

were \ each other

NA Oh really



MARJORIE PERLOFF Isn't that amazing, but see that leads to another interesting question

getting back to the

Academy too, a University like Stanford, is that I think with all the talk about the "Canon

Wars" and Radicalism and even in this Stanford Review they seem to feel that the blame has

to do something with being too radical. It's exactly the other way, it's really very

conservative in a bad way It's exactly the other way, it's really

very conservative, in a bad way. I think, that namely, that they don't understand that all

these things are changing. So, they are then forever discussing..





NA So, it's closemindedness?





MP: Well, they are forever discussing should we substitute this novel for that novel, we

have to have more books by women, we have to study more books by minorities, so in

the exact same slot, you take out Joyce, and you put in Virgina Wolfe, then you take out

Virgina Wolfe and put in Zornia Horlsten, so then you have a black woman. But you

really are still doing exactly the same thing, basically, and except probably not doing it as

well or doing it as interestingly. So it absolutely doesn't take into account that maybe

some of the fields do have to change. We still have exactly the same fields that we had

pretty much 50 years ago. We have Social Sciences, and they all have the same names,

pretty much... I mean Sociology has changed somewhat but Economics is basically the

same kind of department.

Psychology is and so on... Then you have the Humanities which are all still in, you know,

in that sense the same, even if the foreign languages are smaller, not called foreign

languages, Modern languages lets say are smaller, much smaller departments, fewer

people are studying them, and then Biological and Physical Sciences and everything is

always still divided that way. Then you have the Business School, but that goes way

back by now too and you have Computer Studies so that's somewhat new but can be

accommodated so that there's really no basic strange in structure, or very little. Wouldn't

you agree with that? That...





BB: I think that's true...





MP: That the way Universities do things, and the sad part is, so there is very little of the

content you're talking about, but the structure has remained frozen, so they're always sort

of figuring out what to do with this frozen structure, and partly that's because 0� the

whole tenure system and that people don't want change. If you ask most academics the

one thing they fear more than anything else is change. Despite all that talk about radicals

on campus, that's a lot of talk, mostly, It isn't happening, really.







NA: So you think the University is going.. Well, I'm hearing you say the University isn't

going to change all that much. Do you see any forces that might tip their hand?





MP I'm going to let Brett answer that one.





BB Yeah, I think there is an increasing demand for the humanities to justify themselves

in relationship to the other departments that are dominating the society: engineering, the

sciences, business, etcetera... and in order to justify themselves they are going to have to

change so the pmcess will have to take place. Ii's a question of when and how and how

painful it will be.





MP It will be painful.





NA It sounds it,From what I'm hearing, sounds hike it will be real painful..





BB Because in the meantime there is a replacement of content with happens to be

fashionable. When you lose your discipline, when you lose your, what you were happy to

be doing, then you keep jumping on the next bandwagon... and that's undermined a lot of

whats happened the humanities and made it irrelevant in relationship to the greater

society.





MP: And see the justification that Brett is talking about works this way that people have

pointed this out that even a generation ago there was a value of being cultured, so that

let's say that if you were a political candidate, if you were George Bush, if you were

whoever, it was sort of valuable to be cultured enough to know who Mozart is, and to be

able to recite a few lines of poetry from something, say know a little Shakespeare, a little

Yeats, Blake, whatever it would be, and that was considered a good thing ipso facto. So

that you could talk people into doing the Humanities to some extent. But that isn't true

anymore. Now it has been shown that you can through life very successfuly, certainly lots

of people do, and make lots of money who don't know any of those things Donald Trump

or whatever. For that matter Bill Clinton is an interesting example. Because although he

lookd so well educated Georgetown University, A Rhodes Scholar, and the Yale Law

School this man you can tell from little comments he makes, and the same is true of

Hillary Clinton who went to Wellesley, they don't know one thing about music, art or

literature that's clear from little things they say, they just don't have a clue. I mean it isn't

that their taste is not quite my taste you know whatever, but they just don't know, I mean

they really don't know anything about it.





NA And I had a personal experience with that. I dated a Wellesly girl whQ went to USC

Film School and we were watching some film and I said "Wow that looks like it's from

'Citizen Kane..." and she went to USC Film School, I had a real hard time with this, she

asked me "what was Citizen Kane?" (groans)





MP Oh no, I find that hard to believe....





NA True story...





MP Yeah, Yeah...





NA Lovely girl...





MP But you see there is no premium put on it and so then you do have to justify the

humanities because then how do you.... it used to be well that's good for you because you

need to be cultured and you're going to be a business man or a doctor or whatever a

physician but it's good to have a little culture and the smattering of History. Now that's

what people like Roger Kimball still believe, you know people who write in the New

Criterion or for that matter Bennett, William Bennett, whose book you have here on the

shelf but the fact is it's harder and harder to convince people of that, because if you break

down the class system and it's not a matter of getting perhaps into the right club, or being

part of the right social circle, you know, all it is today is money. I mean if you have

enough money you can buy your way into any of those circles. There's no particular

premium put on it then why should anybody learn, how do you justify why people need

to learn these things?





CE Because business is certainly not demanding the Humanities.







MP Certainly not





CE as a job requirement for being in any role in business. Either, you have your choice,

you either study a specialty which you have to be a constant study at because the

specialties keep changing they keep getting more complex, the engineering specialties,

the manufacturing specialties, or you're expected to get a Master of Business

Administration and be not very focused on anything, because all of your efforts should go

into competing very heavily to come out the top of your class. And I'm very disappointed

that the interlock of who businesses hire and what colleges produce are producing very

very narrow individuals who seem to be bred for maximum competitiveness and not bred

for any kind of breadth.





MP Well now





BB That will come back to haunt them, I think because not all thinking is problem

solving I mean it's a very important skill, but there are kinds of thinking, kinds of

analytical thinking that the humanities is good at teaching, not just the analysis of texts

but the analysis of oneas own language ones own concepts conceptual kind of thinking





CE and also the basics of human relationships which MBA school tends not to be so good

at either. I pursued a humanities degree at Berkeley and I was plucked out of that and

went straight into middle management at Fortune 500 multi-billion dollar corporation and

while I had been studying a little computer science what helped me most in my job

managing a group a technology group in a corporation was the humanities education on

what people were like and how they behaved in certain situations and how to watch a

story develop and how to understand the little dramas that got played out among people

rather than knowing the technical content of the books that they happened to be writing.

So i know the value of the humanities education in business. 1 just don't know that the

hiring managers and the the resumex system that looks for the keywords on your resume

really understand that anymore and so I think what the Humanities are left for as an

audience is if business isn't taking them and citizenship doesn't have any requirements

any longer the only thing you can do if you have a Humanities degree from the

University is feed the machine and go into the humanities Dept of the University and I

think by feeding on itself a little much and not having any other outlet it's gotten a little

stuck.

BB That's true





MP That's a very good point. Because let's say if you're a physicist then you can either

become an academic but you can do something else But many of these people then feel

that you know they've got to do it come hell or high water and you read these terrible

article about how they are living in a log cabin somewhere and they don't have enough to

eat waiting for some job to come along you know.





CE No, no, in Silicon Valley the classic couple is the husband is a programmer and he

has the Double E\CS and the wife has the humanities degree, and she's a technical writer.

And that's the classical Silicon Valley couple.





MP Wait what's an ECS, excuse me?





CE Double E CS, Electrical Engineering/Computer Science





MP that's the classic profile?





CE It's the classic profile.





BB Do you think that the humanities have a place in solving the content problems of the

industry





CE Oh absol;utely





BB It strikes me as the obvious place and I would encourage and there's probably a lot of

resistance to it, but that we can one of the ways we can redefme the humanities is to think

that ther is a place there is a direction from whree they are what they are studying in

school to those kinds of jobs where at this point there's not







CE I think theres almost a social mandate because uncorrected by people who understand

how cul;tures and societiues are formed the business peopl;e and technologists are going

to take these vast new empires and vast new technologies they're developing and they're

simply going to replay old patterns Like I was talking before about how this incredible

revolutionary new communications medium called the WWW is rapidly turning into an

advertising, promotion, and hard goods manufacturing medium that's because people who

are approaching this as the solution to business problem don't understand that people

sharing ideas is not a business problem or they do understand that people sharing ideas is

not a business problem and so we're going to not, if we can't make money on people

interchanging ideas or forming communities, then we are going to make money by selling

books which we know how to do, or advertising which we know how to do.

recreating the Greek Agora in both the cultural and political senses as well as the

marketplace senses is really one of the vast potentials of the Net, but unfortunately like in

most of the interesting communication medium before it, pornography dominated, OK

just like video casettes and cable television, you know pornography dominated, then it

got the multi-level marketers and get rich quick opportunists, we were talking earlier

about junk faxes and then it will settle down into just being another television which

would terribly sad considering the possibilities of the medium.





MP But is has on the other hand one thing, the book is now in some ways much more

valued again, see and that's the good side of it in some sense. Artists books you know

there is an enormous influence now in the so called artist book Theer's a journal of Artist

books there are artist books just burgeoning and articles written about them and what are

they really? But because they are objects they are not just made to be read through but

they are objects to be contemplated they use visualo and verbal things they use different

quality paper and they are the handmade things in the age of computers so that people

quite thrilled to go to exhibitions to see them and to buy them they have a good market,

so I don't believe that books you know to come back to your earlier question, Nick, about

on, you know, who reads the books, or whatever it is, I don't actually, you know, when

television first came in, everybody said nobody will go the movies anymore, when

movies first came in, nobody's going to read anymore. That doesn't really seem to happen

and then we say yes but how many people read valuable books but on the other hand

when you think how people there are there's still there's been studies done of this theres

still more people than there ever where before, who were all the mulions who read these

things before, you see so, one thing sort of produces another. But what I do worry about

and you were talking about this before is the enormous glut there's just too much to keep

up with. I find now that I always feel completely snowed and everybody I know feels that

way. Everybody feels,

talk of the "Golden Age," but everbody feels completely stressed and never has a minute

and that didn't used to be true.





NA And it wasn't what we were....





MP And it's very hard to know why that's true. There's just too much that comes across

your desk and then the email and then the phone and then the fax machine goes off and

then you could look up this and as a result you're never sort of sitting quietly

contemplating, you know, anything.





NA This isn't what we were promised. I remember 20-30 years ago we were promised a

lot of labor saving and it's not happpening...





MP Oh it is it is labor saving, but it creates some other labor, it always creates something

else.





BB Oh yeah, got have a growing economy, or it all falls apart.





NA I was really moved recently, somebody who knows what I'm doing said to read this

Mark Helprin article called "The Acceleration of Tranquility" and he compares and

contrasts the life of a diplomat at the turn of the century to somebody that's living twenty

odd years from now and the guy at the turn of the century if he wanted to write a letter he

had to go through a whole process and procedure and it would take two or three weeks to

get a response, twenty yhears in the future he's got agents baffling like setting up a

labyrinth before any message can get to him it's gotten to that point and I think the trick

for us is to figure


-----------------------

this is as far as I got transcribing the damn thing, there's about another 15 minutes, as well

as 8 other hour long episodes that never got transcribed. Labrets

Days Left Until Bush Leaves Office, Maybe, Countown Clock