A couple of movie reviews
I just put up a new episode of The Movie Show with some reviews of films I’ve seen recently:
The Movie Show #44 – INTO THE WILD and BLADE RUNNER THE FINAL CUT
G’Day World Book Club Recommends: Fidel Castro “My Life”
Yesterday I was presented with an early Xmas gift from Nick Hodge – Fidel Castro’s “My Life”, a recently published volume of interviews conducted by Ignacio Ramonet, the long-time editor of the French magazine Le Monde Diplomatique, professor of communication at the University Denis Diderot in Paris and founder of Media Watch Global.
This has jumped to the very top of my reading list.
Ramonet spent one hundred hours interviewing Castro between 2003 and 2005. Castro then reviewed the entire manuscript in 2006. This, then, is the closest we will ever get to having Fidel Castro’s autobiography.
Ramonet says he wrote it because young people around the world know little of the truth about Castro. After 48 years of American negative propaganda against him and the Cuban Revolution, the perception of Castro is mostly negative. He is perceived as a brutal dictator, a relic from the Cold War. Ramonet, however, paints a very different picture of the man. He describes him as “shy, a polite, affable man who pays attention to each person he talks to and speaks without affectation, yet with the manners and gestures of a somewhat old-fashioned courtesy that has earned him the title of ‘the last Spanish gentleman’.” He is also “indefatigable” – in his eighties, he still sleeps on average 4 hours a night, working through until five or six am every day, with his entourage of young assistants asleep on their feet. He lives frugally, with no luxury spent on himself – no palaces for Fidel. He is a man with a never-ending series of Big Ideas.
Ramonet writes of Castro:
“Moved by humanitarian compassion and internationalist solidarity, he has a dream, which he has spoken about a thousand times, of bringing health and knowledge, medicines and education, to every corner of the planet.
As for Cuba itself, Ramonet writes:
“Although the face of Fidel is often in the press, on television and in the street, there is no official portrait, nor is there a statue or coin or avenue or building or monument dedicated to Fidel Castro or any other living leader of the Revolution.
Despite the unceasing harassment from abroad, this little country, clinging to its sovereignty, has achieved undeniably admirable results in the area of human development: the abolition of racism, the emancipation of women, the eradication of illiteracy, a drastic reduction in infant mortality rates, a higher level of general knowledge…. In questions of education, health, medical research and sports, Cuba has achieved results that nany developed nations would envy.
Despite the persistent attacks by the United States and the 600 assassination attempts against Fidel Castro, Cuba has never responded with violence. For forty-eight years, not a single act of violence encouraged or sponsored by Cuba has occurred in the United States.”
Cuba gets (and deserves) criticism from Amnesty International for some of its policies which deny it’s citizens civil freedoms, such as the freedom of association, freedom of opinion, freedom of movement, and the use of the death penalty. However there are no reported cases of torture in Cuba or ‘disappearances’, the murder of journalists or political assassinations or protest marchers beaten by police. There has NEVER been a popular uprising against the regime – in nearly fifty years. To understand why Cuba has some of those civil freedom restrictions, you have to understand the forces trying to destroy Cuba.
The Unites States government has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in this decade alone trying to oust Castro, through NGO’s such as the “National Endowment for Democracy” (NED) and the “United States Agency for International Development” (USAID), which alone has delivered over $65 million to anti-Castro groups since 1996. According to Ramonet, hundreds of journalists around the world are paid to spread negative propaganda about Castro. Funding is provided by the USA to terrorist organisations hostile to the Cuban government such as Alpha 66 and to the now-perhaps-disbanded Omega 7.
Cuba has been under a devastating and evil economic embargo from the USA since 1960, severely crippling its economy, and yet Castro continues to defy their attempts to destroy the Revolution. He has survived relentless attacks on his person and his country by the most powerful economic and military superpower on the planet for 48 years while continuing to improve the living conditions of the 11 million citizens of Cuba.
The key to understanding Cuba and Castro is that you have to understand what life was like back before the Revolution when Cuba was governed by a series of corrupt and brutal regimes directly supported by the US government and US corporations. The quality of life for the citizens of Cuba was terrible. Castro changed all of that. He ousted Bastista’s corrupt regime and the US interests that backed it. He has significantly improved the living conditions of the Cuban people, all while fighting off the US government’s continued attempts on his life.
Please – read this book.
TPN’s Digital Photography Show is #32 baby!
Scott and Michael have another reason to be proud. The Digital Photography Show just hit the number #32 spot in the US iTunes directory! Well done guys!
G’Day World #302 – Dr John Demartini on overcoming your fears
Well this is the first real show of Season 4 of the G’Day World odyssey with the new focus on answering the question “how can I make the world a better place?”
I’m very lucky to have a big hitter like Dr John Demartini back on the show to kick off the new season. Before any of us can make the world a better place we need to get out of our own way, sort out our shit, cut the victim mentality and stop buying into the manufactured ambivalence.
Dr Demartini is back in Australia running a seminar called “For Love or Money – Financial Fantasy and Relationship Reality” and I took the opportunity to ask him a few questions of my own as well as a few questions submitted to me over Twitter.
I like Demartini’s style. As I said the last time he was on the show (G’Day World 276), listening to him is like listening to a much more refined, wealthier, better looking version of myself. He articulates what I think is a terrific attitude towards life.
As I mention at the end of the show, you can get your FREE DVD of the evening event ‘For Love or Money’ with Dr John Demartini by clicking on the image below.
Tokyo Police Club
“Nature Of The Experiment” (mp3)
from “A Lesson In Crime”
(Paper Bag Records)
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Transparency and Integrity
Russell Buckley from MobHappy, who I respect a lot and who has always provided great, brutal feedback when required, emailed me this morning slapping me around the head regarding a couple of issues I want to air here because I think they deserve a broader forum for discussion, as they touch upon issues I haven’t totally got my head around yet.
The first is regarding a somewhat defamatory entry made in my Wikipedia profile recently by someone who chose to remain anonymous – although, by looking at the IP address, I know who it is. The entry reads:
In 2007 Cameron sold out and excepted cash for comments from Telstra which included running shows about Telstra without owning up to the fact he is accepting money from them. He finally let it slip on the 11th Episode of On The Pod with Duncan Riley.
Now this isn’t the first time people (mostly this same person) has chosen to write shit about me in my Wikipedia entry. I’m not sure what the point of it is. Apparently they either don’t understand that Wikipedia is *supposed* to contain accurate, factual information – or they just want to be a dickhead, annoy me and waste my time. Needless to say, the person who wrote this didn’t ask me anything about what I’m doing for Telstra. He just wrote it up there based on a comment I made on Duncan’s show.
For the record – Telstra engaged my services recently to produce a series of podcast pilots for them which will be run off of their website, not TPN, starting in the new year. I haven’t mentioned it in detail because they have asked me not to – they want to “launch it” in the usual Telstra way with a full PR process. Fair enough. Since they have engaged my services, I think you’ll find I have kept my blogging and podcasting about Telstra agnostic as always – I wrote something as recently as this week saying their NextG wireless card didn’t seem to perform as well as Three’s NetConnect card on my testing. If this is “cash for comments”, then they are getting the raw end of the deal. The ironic thing is that they actually engaged my services, I believe, because they knew I would be an agnostic voice coming in and doing these shows, not somebody who is on the Telstra payroll. I make enough money from TPN that I don’t *need* to take corporate work. If anything, it cuts into the time I have to do TPN work. I take it, though, when interesting projects come my way and when I think the client genuinely shares the same vision I have for what podcasting should be about. In this case, the Telstra team I am working with share my vision. So I’m excited about it.
Anyway, here are the two questions I have about defamatory comments in Wikipedia:
1) What do you think the acceptable procedure is when people write shit about you? Should you a) amend it yourself (making sure, of course, that you log in and therefore put your changes on the record, not like this person or Adam Curry would do) or b) alert the Wikipedia editors about the issue or c) blog about it and hope somebody fixes it for you?
2) At what stage do you think people will realize they can be sued for writing defamatory comments in Wikipedia? I know back in February 2007 a pro golfer Fuzzy Zoeller sued a the owner of an IP address after allegedly defamatory comments were left on his Wikipedia entry. Personally I’m not a big fan of legal alternatives until you’ve tried all other possible avenues, and when I read this thing about me I just though “dickhead” and meant to blog about it but didn’t get around to it until Russell slapped me over it.
The other issue Russell asked me about is my sponsorship recently from Global1Training and the interview I did with Dr John Demartini. I won’t go into details about Russell’s concerns (he can do that here in the comments section if he thinks it’s appropriate) but I did want to mention that I’m doing a follow-up interview with Dr Demartini this Tuesday and would welcome your input into my questions for him. For the record – when I did my first interview with him, I had never heard of Global1Training and they approached me a few weeks later about sponsorship ideas. So if you have any concerns about my interview questions with John the first time around, know that there wasn’t even the suggestion of a commercial relationship until weeks later. And if you listen to that first episode I actually talked with Dr Demartini about getting him back on the show during his next trip to Australia, which happens to be this week. Just in case you were wondering….
The bottom line here is this: I think I’ve been doing this show long enough for regular listeners to know my attitudes towards transparency and integrity when it comes to advertising and commercial relationships. I genuinely value people like Russell calling me out when they are unsure of what’s going on – it makes me realize I need to be constantly vigilant about revealing my commercial interests as early as possible. There is a balance though between revealing them and keeping my mouth shut when I am working on projects for clients who want to reveal them in their own time and way. That’s just business. If I had been writing or podcasting really positive stories about Telstra lately I would feel obliged to reveal that money had changed hands but as I haven’t been doing that, I can sleep at night.
Any questions?