(M&S Chair and Saviour from oblivion, Stuart Rose, knighted; why?)

Given that America was only deflated in its momentum to attack Iran when it turned out that the claims made by the White House did not match the findings of the CIA with regards to nuclear weaponry it is safe to say that the new neo-conservative reasoning and justification for waging unprovoked wars of aggression is not that Communism must be defeated, or that civil and political liberties have to be established, but instead that a country which is not in Europe and is not, of course, Israel or America can and should be invaded if they have a will for nuclear weaponry.

This was something of a development of their previous argument, that any country with the dreaded WMDS {besides, of course, Europe, America or “Plucky little Israel”} needed to be invaded.

But I am not interested in going through a history of the “Development” of neo-conservative thought, but instead to make a small suggestion: bomb Pakistan.

Yes, fairly simple when you consider it, isn’t it?

The country is at severe, constant and severe risk of fundamentalist overthrow by a bunch of deranged Islamists who could well be perfectly happy to fire nuclear weaponry at Israel, if they can reach it, or if not the more obvious, immediate and historically appropriate target of India.

Yes, the same India which is estimated to have enough atomic stockpiles to initiate a Global Winter should both it and Pakistan launch their warheads in quick succession, thus literally causing the End Of All Life On Earth As We Know It.

The most viable opponent to the present autocrat was shot in the neck and then blown up yesterday. Either these forces or those belonging to the countries’ own leader could have done this and either way it seems like the region is in for some more havoc and carnage over the next few days.

And…They. Have. Nukes.

So…Brutal, totalitarian leader with a pack of deranged religious types as the most viable alternative. Quite possibly Bin Laden himself is somewhere in the country.

So why the entire absence of suggestions from the neo-cons that we implement some pre-emptive military strikes upon their nuclear weapons facilities? Why are we not mangling the infrastructure surrounding these areas to ensure that they never fall into Islamist hands?

Why were all the guns readying themselves to aim at Iran when a nation which actually has the weapons that America was so afraid of and is rapidly disintegrating politically with no end in sight except perhaps a new, brutally enforced theocratic hegemony is bordering with another nation capable of obliterating the Global Ecology and, quite literally, wiping out every living being upon the face of the planet, or at very least the entirety of the Indian subcontinent?

Surely even brown people must count for about as much as Israel when there are over a billion of them?

Bhutto was killed yesterday.  The media outlets have been full of all kinds of analysis and comment.  Why?  There’s nothing else to write about.

Government’s not doing anything (which is, in broad terms, a good thing).  It’s not really the time of year for a sex scandal.  There have been no natural disasters today.  It’s all a little slow, which is to be expected at this time of year.  The BBC are even making news of something that the BBC created, and even then only because they handed Today over to guest editors because the knew nobody would be listening.  Desperate.

Knowing nothing about Pakistan, I guess I shall remain silent until something more interesting comes to light.

This article appeared as a Times leader yesterday.

The headline is a reference to the Global Village first used by Wyndham Lewis in the 1940s but now most commonly used in reference to the internet, thanks to the manner in which it has drawn the world together. Unfortunately for conservatives it seems that one of the things this new collective is most keen on, along with pornography, is making their property available to one another rather than hoarding it for themselves as conventional capitalism requires.

So, although the byline suggests that the government should stay out of matters {heaven forbid the state get involved!} the overall tone of the article is what you would expect from what Rupert Murdoch has increasingly groomed as a rival to the Daily Mail: something MUST be done.

Of course their argument suffers heavily from their very conservatism. It is a sad irony that those with in most staunchly opposition to progressive change are those who understand it least. They are ignorant of their targets and thus both the reasoning behind their attacks and the logic supporting their solutions is inherently and overwhelmingly flawed. This is as true here as anywhere else.

The problems start early on:

the main US film studios lost an estimated $2.3 billion (£1.15 billion) to internet piracy in 2005, and the British music industry says it has lost £1.1 billion since 2005. As a great deal of online downloading is illegal, it is understandable that industries want to press for the enforcement of laws broken and to stem the loss of profit.

As would be expected by an institution of the establishment The Times does little to challenge these claims. It is perfectly possible that we are witnessing a correlation rather than causation in terms of lost profits. It is also questionable exactly how much the quantity of “Profit” is of any concern when what is being considered is not any tangible goods but rather entertainment.

Live music, for instance, has flourished over the past few years and although far harder for “The British music industry” {a term which in this instance means, so far as I can tell, the major record labels} to squeeze cash out of make a tidy profit for the bands involved as well as providing an excellent experience for all those present.

It also seems remarkable that, when witnessing an immense slump in their profit and relevance, these industries suddenly abandon the principle of consumer satisfaction and thus rather than asking “How can we improve, how can we make our products more desirable?” enquire: “How can we crush these new conditions?”

The position of these reactionaries would be far more easily defend if, the last time new technology had become available to them they had not used it to ruthlessly exploit the customer. Ask yourself: which costs more to create; a CD or a cassette tape? The latter, of course, yet the amount charged for the former exceeded the cost of tapes by a vast degree.

The labels wagered that due to the enhanced quality they could increase sales while also charging an extortionate quantity of cash for a product that was of greater clarity but also far cheaper. For at least a decade they deceived those who purchased their music and exploited their ignorance to rake in billions of pounds.

In my view it only appropriate that their failure to adjust to the next generation of technological advances is likely to cause their downfall. If this occurs it will not be an outrage, or a tragedy but simply an instance of poetic justice.

The British Phonographic Institute (BPI), which represents the UK’s recording industry, has called for some years for individual users to be prevented from downloading content illegally.

One cannot fail but notice that The Times has failed to mention their strategy of prosecuting individuals who have downloaded files, including children. If I were more cynical I would here suggest that this admission shows that they agree with my view of the conduct as bizarre and reprehensible but are so desperate to defend the Order Of Things that they will present a pack of loathsome, litigious leeches upon actual talent in a forgiving light.

A good thing that I am not so jaded.

Last year it shifted its attention [from suing young teenagers who downloaded nursery rhymes] to the internet service providers (ISPs), asking two companies to intervene and terminate the contracts of internet users known to infringe the law. But, along with groups such as the Music Business Forum calling for more monitoring, the BPI has met with intransigent outrage from the ISPs and the online community.

Intransigent…What delightful wording. It means stubborn refusal to relent or offer any form of compromise. Presumably a good deal more intransigent than those who would sue under-18s who were under the impression that they were acting within the confines of the law and did no harm to anybody for thousands of pounds

ISPs argue that it is as impossible for them to monitor customers’ internet use as it is for the Post Office to monitor the contents of envelopes, and many cite confusion about how the internet works as the cause of the misguidedness of the proposed regulation.

However, their argument is undermined by the ISPs profiting from the contracts used by illegal downloaders, and the allusions to downloading in their marketing. ISPs already control some content. British ISPs have taken measures to block access to child pornography, after BT collaborated with the Home Office on a project called Cleanfeed.

And, of course, the desire to protect profit should receive exactly as high a priority as protecting children. And there is just as much child porn as there is illegal file sharing occurring upon the internet, I’m sure, rather than only a minute amount of the former and untold tetrabytes of the latter.

Because otherwise that comparison would collapse more heavily than Enron.

And it does not seem impossible for creative and internet industries to work together; it is happening in the US and in France. The Motion Picture Association of America announced earlier this month that, after negotiations, all the leading ISPs would be carrying out “much more aggressive monitoring” of file-sharing activity.

Not that anything short of the disintegration of all peer-to-peer software will ever be enough for these rapacious, regressive dogs. One can only sit slack-jawed in wonder at the gaping, vacuous absence of any mention of the poor woman recently bankrupted by the “Music Industry” suing her for far more than she ever had over a few music files. The Times is clearly performing a white-wash and one has to wonder why.

In France, President Sarkozy last month endorsed an agreement between creative representatives and a number of ISPs to combat organisations providing free online content, and individuals downloading it. Punishment will, initially, take the form of a terminated ISP contract rather than prosecution.

And, of course, initially is all that could possibly matter.

The Government, then, was right to conclude, after a select committee report, that it believes “strongly that the industry should do more to discourage piracy.” However, the task of holding to account the millions of British downloaders needs to remain proportionate to the civil offence committed. Freedom of access is one of the internet’s key characteristics, and it needs to be cherished. Regulation could smother legitimate pursuits as well as illegal downloading.

Finally, a stroke of sense, but then…

The Government is right to urge ISPs to work with creative industries to create a body to investigate claims of infringement of copyright. The emphasis of such a body would most sensibly be on tracking down providers of illegal content rather than consumers. ISPs should crack down on lawbreaking to keep the internet as profitable and unregulated as possible.

This was the part of the piece that perhaps annoyed, irked and irritated me most.

It bears a strange resemblance to those politicians who want to sound tough yet kind by saying they will focus upon drug dealers rather than drug users and end up seeming only soft to those who are hard-liners and ignorant to those who know anything about the subject.

With drugs the distinction between user and dealer is not entirely clear cut: often junkies will deal, almost all dealers use. Beyond the direct transaction there is frequently a second tier, those who will {for instance} store substances in their houses to ensure that the dealer walks away free if there is a bust, in exchange for a portion of what they look after. Others serve as look-outs for police while dealing is underway or otherwise engage in aiding and abetting the dealing solely because of their own habit.

The interaction is usually far more complex than that commonly presented, it is not entirely a matter of a ruthless exploiter and dedicated users. Anyone who claims that they will pursue only the dealers and spare the users anything save rehabilitation has clearly got scanty knowledge of the topic and can not be trusted to oversee policy.

But the ignorance on display in The Times yesterday was much, much worse than this.

The clue to how the majority of file sharing on the internet works is in the very title: peer-to-peer. It is effectively a group of members to an online club which share content between themselves. As a consequence on certain program communities, such as SoulSeek, it is actually unusual to find a user that has not put at least some content on offer for sharing. Indeed if you attempt to access other user’s sharing folders without one of your own the likelihood is that you will find yourself blocked.

Therefore there is no small group of dedicated anarchists trying to topple the system through putting some Mariah Carey or the latest winner of X-Factor or American Idol onto Kazaa , there is certainly nobody stupid enough to imagine that they can somehow make a profit out of offering copywritten files and there is, above all, no centralised “Provider” at all.

The Times seems to have taken their vague memories of the VHS “Pirates” highly active in the 1990s, that grainy documentary footage of blurred faces and frantically working industrial machinery, and attempted to super-impose this onto an operation which bears not even a vague resemblance to it.

Peer-to-peer services work on an entirely localised basis. They are small-scale sharing occurring en masse and using no technology more complex than personal computers and a few hosting servers. The files remain on the user’s computers and are simply made accessible to everyone who wants them. The providers are not distinguishable from the consumers, there is no way of separating the two groups as they are all, as the name suggests, each others peers.

The providers are the consumers.

It could even be argued that this is the epitome of the ideals behind the French Revolution: Liberte, egalite, fraternite are all present amongst the users of such groups.

That this challenges the wealthy capitalists of the record industries is to be expected, although it must be emphasised that the same is not true for the bands themselves. From The Libertines to Fallout Boy peer-to-peer services have been crucial to the early attention and dedicated fan-bases. If the record labels truly had a modicum of concern for the state of music this would be enough, but their focus is truly upon profit above and over all else.

As such it is understandable that they would attempt to pressurise ISPs but they have left such efforts far too late and are deluding themselves if they imagine otherwise: if they immobilise every account engaging in the download of copywritten materials internet service providers will have to remove a majority of their customers. This is perhaps the worst business strategy imaginable and would result in severe damage, if not outright share collapse and bankruptcy, being inflicted upon any company that tried it.

Instead of trying to follow the undignified approach of attempting to obliterate peer-to-peers in court and stamp on bit torrents like ants the record industry could be attempting to find ways of making money out of this new innovation. iTunes has done well, primarily through giving a simply minuscule amount of money away in royalties to the actual creators of the music but there we are, meaning that a software company best known for playing second fiddle to a much larger one has managed to get the march on a group of companies who make all their profit from music.

Rather pathetic, really. I am no Social Darwinist but if you said that this industry deserved to die I would find it hard to disagree.

Glancing at The Fifth Way, it seems that the circumstances surrounding Ali’s protest have changed.  The police have given permission to protest in Parliament Square, with their lateness being more the fault of the holidays and the state of the post than anything else.  The arrangements are now thus:

“1000hrs - 1200hrs, East side of Parliament Sq and Millbank.”

I imagine Ali will add anything more that needs to be known, if it does.

Yesterday, on the semi-recommendation of the esteemed R.E Vamp, I picked up Era Vulgaris, Queens of the Stone Age’s latest studio album. I’m not sure what to think of it. Maybe I haven’t left it long enough to form opinions – Vamp tells me it’s a grower. But for the moment, I’m decidedly ambivalent about it all.On the one hand, there are some indisputably striking moments in the album. The manic, vaguely demented, sound of Sick, Sick, Sick is reminiscent of the sound of the superb Songs for the Deaf. A strong, pounding beat carries the track along powerfully, holding together the wailing, quasi-discordant guitar as it rises and falls with Homme’s distressed refrain. The result is a bizarre, highly enjoyable, melange of hammering hard-rock and frenetic trippiness for which QOTSA are rightly known. At the least, I can’t help but feeling that Sick, Sick, Sick would make a good background for some of the more…jabbering passages in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas…Similarly, the other stand-out track at the moment for me, Make it Wit Chu, might also suit one of Thompson’s more drug addled narratives, albeit in a different way. By far more relaxed than the pounding Sick, Sick, Sick and 3’s and 7’s, and yet keeping a brisk pace, this track displays the lilting qualities of Homme’s voice to the full. Rolling between the skipping thumps of the guitar, the easier, almost floating vocals conjure images of aimless wandering in a psychedelic landscape. Although, this may merely be the influence of the distinctly psychedelic album cover on my perceptions of the album itself.Of course, this relaxation can go too far – and does. At times, Era Vulgaris can feel all too flat. Where it does, it’s a deep anti-climax after the constantly throbbing energy of Songs for the Deaf and Rated R. Take the opening track, Turnin’ on the Screw. Without the thundering energy and pounding rhythm of QOTSA’s more successful tracks, it lacks direction. Instead, it feels lost, aimless, and almost confused. Contrast this with, say, You think I ain’t worth a dollar, but I feel like a millionaire as an opener, and it becomes immediately apparent that it’s just not the band at their best.It’s not that there isn’t enough energy in the album. It’s just that a lot of it gets repetitive after a while – it seems like the same rhythm, the same beat, the same song as ten minutes ago. If you’re not listening particularly hard, Into the Hollow at one end of the album doesn’t sound massively different to Run, Pig, Run, at the other. It’s all very accomplished, technically, as you’d expect – just not always that different. Add to this the directionless, almost anomalous tracks like Turnin’ on the Screw and The Fun Machine took a Shit and Died, and we find an album that at times is definitely disappointing.

But, all the same, it’s really not a bad album. As I’ve already said, there are some outstanding tracks, and as individual pieces most of the music is good regardless – it’s just some bits of it fits in better with the album than others. This said, I may be warming to the album. Even as I listen to it again now, I think I’m beginning to pick up the intricacies of each track and the album as a whole – which now doubt will help immensely. So maybe R.E Vamp was right. A grower.

(Tories call for yet more measures against anyone who’s not them)

A Russian energy company has been banned from broadcasting an advert claiming that Father Frost (Santa’s Russian alias) doesn’t exist.

In other news, Gordon has been accused of a “stalinist re-writing of history” by using the publicly-funded Downing Street website to tell the world how great the Brownite Labour party has been since July, all but ignoring the vast array of reasons contributing to an 11-point poll defecit.

(Gordon Brown proud of meeting artificial targets on Crime and, in this case, Punishment)

(Labours claims education is just fine, thank you very much)

As some of you may be aware, recently the BBC has been running (yet another) tawdry and dull drama on Robin Hood. This one is even worse than the norm for such shows. Hood’s men look like a carbon copy of the Arctic Monkeys. Gisborne is an egotistical leather-fetishist. Maid Marion is a feminist half a millennia before Wollstonecraft. And, of course, it’s all a pan-European plot to take over Good(e) Old(e) England.

As usual, Hood is portrayed as a heroic proto-socialist, deeply concerned with the suffering of the oppressed peasantry. He steals from the rich, gives to the poor and clearly hates the feudal system. He and his men will crush those aristocratic spongers and restore those starving serfs to their natural freedom.

Of course, it’s all a bit of fun. But, at the back of my mind, the niggling pedant won’t shut up. What are they making Hood out to be this time? An egalitarian? Oh no, not again. Why?

You see, the problem is that I just can’t see the myth of Robin Hood as anything but deeply conservative. Yes, he is somewhat unusual for a medieval nobleman. Yes, he respects the peasantry. Yes, he steals from the rich and gives to the poor. But when he steals, he does so not as a social revolutionary, but as a conservative monarchist seeking to restore an idealised version of the distinctly un-egalitarian feudalism.

At first, this probably sounds an odd statement. After all, superficially, Hood is deeply egalitarian, committed to an unofficial form of progressive taxation (Keynesian banditry?) long before the advent of redistributive taxation. But let’s have a look at some common details of the myth, and see if that vision stands up to scrutiny.

First, let’s examine the typical relationship between Robin Hood and the Merry Men. Robin Hood is a nobleman – albeit a disinherited one. He is, we presume, of Norman descent, used to telling peasants what to do, and closed to new ideas on his social status. He is, after all, almost obsessed with taking, “his,” land at Loxley back in many versions of the story. This is symptomatic of the medieval nobility’s complex of blood, honour and belonging which ignores the fact that the peasants, who work and live on the land, really have more right to it than them. He is not a leveller.

The Merry Men, meanwhile, are peasants. They are from the oppressed classes. They have no reason to love Robin from the start. Indeed, they really couldn’t be blamed if they turned around and told the upstart nobleman Hood to go – or if they just killed him and took what money he had left.

But they don’t. Instead, they accept his supreme leadership, rarely questioning it. What does this say? That peasants should take aristocratic orders – even when both are outside the law. More than that though, it says something else. Before Hood came along, the Merry Men were nothing. They were a gang of small-time thieves achieving nothing but the occasional mugging. Then Hood comes along, and they simply succeed. What does that say? That peasants are incapable of success without noble leadership.

Very egalitarian.

Now, let’s have a look at the wider relationship between Hood and the peasantry. What’s Hood doing with them? He’s protecting them from aggression, abuse and assault. He’s giving the needy food and money when starving. He is a nobleman, acting in a vaguely philanthropic fashion, while receiving the allegiance of his men – the essence of ideological paternalism.

What he is not doing is encouraging social revolution. Is he encouraging the peasants to stop paying taxes? Is he encouraging them to think, act or live for themselves? Is he calling for an end to the principle of oppression? No. He is seeking to restore the relationship between the nobility and the peasantry to a stable level in line with the theory of feudalism.

And what about his attitude to the King? In the versions where Prince John is one of the villains, Hood also fights for the usurped King Richard. He defends not only the practice of monarchy, but the principle – he wants a pious, godly monarch who will correct the imbalance of stability and authority created by John and his cronies. Robin Hood fights for the King.

So, in most stories, Robin Hood is not a leveller, not an egalitarian and not a republican.

What is he then? That’s quite simple. He’s a feudalist. In most cases, he’s not aiming for a social revolution, but a restoration – to a (non-existent) golden age of paternalism where the feudal system worked for all.

What many people seem to forget is that feudalism wasn’t (in theory) a system designed to squeeze every last drop of blood from the peasantry. It instead represented a system whereby, in return for their fealty and labour, the nobility would protect the peasantry, from attack by the sword, from starvation by charity, and from damnation by piety. They were not meant to levy crippling taxes, or brutalise the peasants, or crush them so badly. If the aristocracy did, they had broken the, “sacred,” relationship.

With this in mind, Hood’s purpose is more clear. In attacking the Sheriff, he’s attacking a man who’s broken the bond of trust between Lord and Bondsman. In defending King Richard, he’s defending the true, good King on the throne by divine right. In feeding the peasants, he’s doing his duty as a paternalist nobleman and protecting them in hard times. He is, in essence, acting like the perfect feudal nobleman.

Of course, his view of feudalism is hopelessly naïve and, ultimately, plain wrong. If nothing else, the enduring popularity of Robin Hood type ballads throughout the Middle-Ages maybe indicates that the relationship was more of less constantly broken.

There are some different versions of Robin Hood, of course. Early ballads in particular often portray Hood not as a nobleman, but a yeoman, fighting a sheriff who was just doing his job. This could justly be termed as vaguely class based, perhaps – the yeoman-rebel fighting the authorities because they were the authorities.

But, in the long term, versions of this sort appear to be in the minority. Certainly, the majority of surviving Robin-Hood ballads, dating mostly from the 16^th and 17^th Centuries, are concerned with the more familiar paternalist-hero. Interestingly, this period is the one where the relationship between the monarch and people advocated in feudalism was visibly dissolving. The advent of Protestantism meant that the Divine Right of the King and nobility came under question. Bad harvests and a Little Ice Age meant that people were often hungry anyway. And a Civil War began in part because the monarch had moved in a popular view from protector to oppressor, and was acting like a tyrant.

So there we have it. Robin Hood: feudalist, monarchist and conservative.