Its a crazy world we’re living in every day
Poverty, violence taking lives away
Earthquakes, hurricanes almost every day
And politicians try dividing us, no no way
~ Michael Franti & Spearhead
Concert Coming June 2020
Music is found in every known culture, past and present. We should consider the idea that we cannot have a healthy society without a healthy music generation system. And that our current lack of peace, prosperity, and real innovation is rooted in the corporate capture of the music industry.
Hey world, what you say
Should I stick around for another day or two?
Don’t give up on me, I won’t give up on you
Just believe in me like I believe in you
~ Michael Franti & Spearhead
We’ve sold our souls for what we don’t own anymore
I’m calling all creators in the movement
It’s time to offer a solution to the dilution of what we love
And the greats would be so disappointed
‘Cause we’ve sold our souls for what we don’t own anymore
~ Esthero
In 2017, the music industry generated $43 billion in revenue in the United States. The sad fact is that the artists’ share is very small, just 12 percent.
Data ownership using Blockchain technology will fundamentally change the music industry and give artists a larger share of the revenue.
What if access to services like Netflix, Uber, and Spotify came baked into the network itself, like email or a Web page, protocol-to-protocol rather than company-to-company? And what if these relationships were all managed autonomously by high-order math running on distributed computing engines, beyond the control of any one individual or organization?
This is the potential of blockchain technology.
Smart contract technology will make royalty payments and rights management more equitable. Technology will likely replace intermediaries, automating payment processes at a lower cost. The blockchain could also underpin a more secure platform for creatives to share their content in a way that discourages piracy. Some innovators envision entirely new ways ways to stream music using blockchain platforms.
We are dirt!
The first human ever to walk the earth was named Adam (אדם). The Torah explains the name. The Hebrew word for earth is adamah (אדמה). God formed man from the dust of the earth, and on the simplest level, that connection with adamah, earth, is the basis for man’s name. There is additional relationship between the words adam and adamah and the word dam (דם), meaning blood.
Then the LORD God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.
~ Genesis 2:7
We depend on dirt to purify and heal the systems that sustain us.
A third of our top soil was lost in last one hundred years.
25 percent of greenhouse gas emissions are coming from a war against the soil.
Flood, drought, climate change, and even war are all directly related to the way we are treating dirt.
[T]he issues that confront most Americans directly are income, food (thereby, agriculture), health and climate change. (And, of course, war, but let’s leave that aside for now.)
These are all related: You can’t address climate change without fixing agriculture, you can’t fix health without improving diet, you can’t improve diet without addressing income, and so on. The production, marketing and consumption of food is key to nearly everything. (It’s one of the keys to war, too, because large-scale agriculture is dependent on control of global land, oil, minerals and water.)
We don’t grow plants, we grow soil, and soil grows plants.
Report produced by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), the report was approved at the 6th session of the IPBES Plenary in Medellín, Colombia. IPBES has 129 State Members:
Worsening land degradation caused by human activities is undermining the well-being of two fifths of humanity, driving species extinctions and intensifying climate change. It is also a major contributor to mass human migration and increased conflict, according to the world’s first comprehensive evidence-based assessment of land degradation and restoration.
The dangers of land degradation, which cost the equivalent of about 10% of the world’s annual gross product in 2010 through the loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services, are detailed for policymakers, together with a catalogue of corrective options, in the three-year assessment report by more than 100 leading experts from 45 countries, launched today.
Providing the best-available evidence for policymakers to make better-informed decisions, the report draws on more than 3,000 scientific, Government, indigenous and local knowledge sources. Extensively peer-reviewed, it was improved by more than 7,300 comments, received from over 200 external reviewers.
Dear Mr. Man
It’s So Hot in Herre!
July 2019
Hottest month in recorded history!
Beginning on July 17, 2019, nearly half of the US population experienced temperatures of at least 95 degrees over at least seven days.
It’s gettin hot in herre (so hot)
More than 70 million people were under heat watches, warnings or advisories in different parts of the country.
Who said that water
Is a precious commodity
Then dropped a big old black oil slick
In the deep blue sea?
~ Prince
Concert will be featured in documentary
Your Data is more valuable than oil!
Are you being robbed?
You personal data is an asset. Like a bond, like a stock, like your home, it’s an asset, and it belongs to you.
~ Stuart Lacey
[Google and Facebook have] quantified you not as a person, but as a unit metric of how much you’re worth.
~ Stuart Lacey
The [crypto/blockchain] dream is really compelling…. We can take finance into our own hands…. [Yet,] the current technology cannot deliver that dream to us.
~ Emin Gün Sirer
What’s Athereum?
Athereum is 99% Ethereum and 1% AVA. It’s the same Ethereum you fell in love with. Same keys. Same EVM. Same tooling.
The only new thing is the backend consensus engine. Instead of longest chain proof-of-work, Athereum uses a staking-based linear chain version of the Avalanche consensus protocol.
Music is bigger than religion, it’s bigger than politics, it’s bigger than pretty much everything…. Make sure you’re saying something, when you saying something.Erykah Badu
Currently in the music business there is a lot of dumbing down, but there is no need to panic. We just need to teach our children well.Dave Matthews
Students today are completely full of shit…. We live in a country where that seems to be in this massive state of delusion. Where the idea of what you are is more important than you actually being that. And it actually works as long as everybody is winking at the same time.
~ Branford Marsalis
The key to developing this super-app is data ownership.
Own Your Data!
I will be giving a free talk
A talk on Digital Personal Data given by
Terrance Jackson
Monday, November 18th at 7 pm
Larchmont Public Library
121 Larchmont Avenue, Larchmont, NY
Your personal data is big business. Google, Facebook, and Amazon have become extremely wealthy from your personal data by selling predictions of your behavior and in many cases by actually changing your behavior. Our ignorance is key to this whole methodology, threatening both democracy and personal autonomy. Learn how Blockchain technology will help restore data control to citizens by empowering us to determine who has access to our information online.
A Digital Identity Wallet
We are developing a “digital identity wallet” that will give people more control over their personal information. It will be portable and the customer will truly owned the account.
Our digital identity wallet we use an identity standard that will empower our customers, giving them control over their own digital identities for the first time. An identity standard outlines the technical specifications for how information could be shared and accessed depending on the level of trust or demands of a specific use case.
We we are starting with a religion literacy app that will include music streaming
Americans are both deeply religious and profoundly ignorant about religion.
~Stephen Prothero
Religious Literacy
Our survival depends on our ability to form trusting relationships
An AR Game inspired by Pokémon Go, Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol, Sadhguru, Stephen Prothero, and CryptoKitties.
We have barely scratched the surface of our mental and spiritual capabilities.
Don Katz, CEO of Audible, was inspired by Ralph Ellison
I think there’s music in language, in general, this I learned from Ralph [Ellison] to the point that I hear a written word.
~ Don Katz
The storyteller is the most powerful person in the world
All of our perceptions are a kind of storytelling by the brain. So by shaping this process, storytelling itself has the power to change our perceptions.
The art of storytelling here lies in finding the fringes. Finding the edges of what people can imagine. You go to far, and your audience’s prior beliefs can’t handle the data you giving it. Don’t go far enough, and the experience is trivial. Perhaps great storytellers inherently know that a successful narrative doesn’t work unless you engage the person, compelling them to be part of the process of making and remaking their perceptual world.
Hurricane Harvey: Boat rescue traffic on the flooded Jimmy Johnson Road in Port Arthur, Texas, on August 30.
What does the Sahara Desert in Africa have to do with hurricanes in the Atlantic, Gulf of Mexico, and Eastern Pacific Ocean?
All North Atlantic and Eastern North Pacific hurricanes
(at least Category 1 on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale). Note how many originate at the edge of Africa’s West Coast, where the desert meets the green forests to the south. (NOAA)
Let’s make the Sahara green again, build charter cities, create habitats of the future, and reverse climate change.
Just transitioning 10 percent of agricultural production to best practice regenerative systems will sequester enough CO2 to reverse climate change and restore the global climate.
Greening the Sahara would potentially reduce the number and severity of hurricanes hitting the eastern United States.
Greening the Sahara would also allow the building of charter cities in former desert areas.
These charter cities will use blockchain technology.
“Society will move from a scarcity to an abundance mindset”
“The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”
John 10:10
John 10:10
Craig Detweiler writes in iGods:
We need a theology of abundance to deal with the outcomes of our technology, the massive fruitfulness that the Creator God baked into us. We need a theology of abundance equal to the grace and generosity found in the blood of Jesus poured out for many. We need a theology of abundance commensurate with the superabundant presence of the Holy Spirit that can flood our senses, short-circuit our rationale. Unfortunately, our economics is built on a model of scarcity, and our theology feels equally impoverished.
Music can make a disable man walk, can make a dormant brain come back to life.
~ Jacobo Mintzer, MD, MBA
Apollo has been variously recognized as a god of music, truth and prophecy, healing, the sun and light, plague, and poetry. Apollo was one of the few gods that the Romans kept the same name.
In the liner notes of A Love Supreme, John Coltrane states that in 1957 he experienced “by the grace of God, a spiritual awakening which was to lead me to a richer, fuller, more productive life. At that time, in gratitude, I humbly asked to be given the means and privilege to make others happy through music.”
Miles Davis and John Coltrane onstage in 1960, in Chicago.Photograph by Ted Williams / Iconic Images / Getty
John Coltrane studied the Qur’an, the Bible, Kabbalah, and astrology with equal sincerity.
By studying China, we can get inspiration and insight for how we can evolve our own business models.
~ Connie Chan
a16z general partner
In 2003, before Facebook, Terrance Jackson had the insight that combining the power of social media and broadcast television would be an extremely important development in the digital economy. With that insight in mind, he created Live From VA.
We interviewed such guests as: Academy Award winner Mo’Nique, Russell Simmons & Rev Run, Kanye West, Pharrell Willams & Chad Hugo (the Neptunes), and Katt Williams.
Why does the United States treat its music performers the same as China, North Korea, and Iran?
Radio stations in the United States do not compensate performers when their songs are played on the radio. Very few countries do not compensate performers for radio airplay. In addition to the U.S., there is North Korea, Iran, and China.
To maintain the status quo, Kathy Castor (R-FL) reintroduced the “Local Radio Freedom Act” in January 2019. This resolution currently has 183 cosponsors (133 Republican and 50 Democratic). The language of the resolution proposes that:
…Congress should not impose any new performance fee, tax, royalty, or other charge relating to the public performance of sound recordings on a local radio station for broadcasting sound recordings over the air, or on any business for such public performance of sound recordings.
Congress is Corrupt!
Why does the United States treat its music performers the same as China, North Korea, and Iran? The simple answer is that Congress is corrupt. In his farewell speech to the Senate, John Kerry said:
There’s another challenge that we must address and it is the corrupting force of the vast sums of money necessary to run for office. The unending chase for money I believe threatens to steal our democracy itself.
Lawrence Lessig:
[T]his dependence upon the funders produces a subtle, understated, camouflaged bending to keep the funders happy. Candidates for Congress and members of Congress spend between 30 and 70 percent of their time raising money to get back to Congress or to get their party back into power, and the question we need to ask is, what does it do to them, these humans, as they spend their time behind the telephone, calling people they’ve never met, but calling the tiniest slice of the one percent? As anyone would, as they do this, they develop a sixth sense, a constant awareness about how what they do might affect their ability to raise money. They become, in the words of “The X-Files,” shape-shifters, as they constantly adjust their views in light of what they know will help them to raise money, not on issues one to 10, but on issues 11 to 1,000.
What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream
“Journalism is printing…” is not an actual Orwell quote but it does capture the essence of his suppressed introduction to “Animal Farm.”
Noam Chomsky in “What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream” wrote:
If you’ve read George Orwell’s Animal Farm which he wrote in the mid-1940s, it was a satire on the Soviet Union, a totalitarian state. It was a big hit. Everybody loved it. Turns out he wrote an introduction to Animal Farm which was suppressed. It only appeared 30 years later. Someone had found it in his papers. The introduction to Animal Farm was about “Literary Censorship in England” and what it says is that obviously this book is ridiculing the Soviet Union and its totalitarian structure. But he said England is not all that different. We don’t have the KGB on our neck, but the end result comes out pretty much the same. People who have independent ideas or who think the wrong kind of thoughts are cut out.He talks a little, only two sentences, about the institutional structure. He asks, why does this happen? Well, one, because the press is owned by wealthy people who only want certain things to reach the public. The other thing he says is that when you go through the elite education system, when you go through the proper schools in Oxford, you learn that there are certain things it’s not proper to say and there are certain thoughts that are not proper to have. That is the socialization role of elite institutions and if you don’t adapt to that, you’re usually out. Those two sentences more or less tell the story.
Your Job is to Make Art
(Left to Right) Junior Murvin, Bob Marley, Jacob Miller, and Chris Blackwell
Corporate culture is not conducive to developing musical talent. Chris Blackwell, founder of Island Record, quoted in The Song Machine by John Seabrook:
I don’t think the music business lends itself very well to being a Wall Street business. You’re always working with individuals, with creative people, and the people your are trying to reach, by and large, don’t view music as a commodity but as a relationship with a band. It takes time to expand that relationship, but most people who work for the corporations have three-year contracts, some five, and most of them are expected to produce. What an artist really needs is a champion, not a numbers guy who in another year is going to leave.
In the U.S., music revenue and consumer outlays were steadily increasing until 2000.
The sky was all purple
There were people runnin’ everywhere
Tryin’ to run from their destruction
You know I didn’t even care
They say two thousand zero, zero
Party over
Oops, out of time
So tonight I’m gonna party like it’s 1999
In 2017, according to a August 2018 report by Citi, in the U.S., the music industry generated $43 billion in revenue. The artists’ share of this $43 billion is small, just 12 percent.
Facebook, Google, and Amazon have bred a virulent mutation of capitalism that must cast human autonomy as its enemy.
What is Surveillance Capitalism?
“Surveillance capitalism,” Shoshana Zuboff’s term for businesses that create a new kind of marketplace out of our private human experiences. They hoover up all the behavioral data they can glean from our every move (literally, in terms of tracking our phones’ locations) and transform it with machine intelligence into predictions, as they learn to anticipate and even steer our future behavior. These predictions are traded in novel futures markets aimed at a new class of business customers.
Zuckerberg’s sudden turn toward accountability is impossible to take seriously.
Mark Zuckerberg ushered in the new year pledging to address the many woes that now plague his company by “making sure people have control of their information,” and “ensuring our services improve people’s well-being.”
“Hate speech and misinformation,” are by-products of the features of social networks, not bugs.
As much as we may want to believe him, Zuckerberg’s sudden turn toward accountability is impossible to take seriously. The problems Zuckerberg cited, including “election interference” and “hate speech and misinformation,” are by-products of the features of social networks, not bugs….
The film… is a… piercing examination of what the filmmakers say are the false promises of the environmental movement and why we’re still “addicted” to fossil fuels. Director Jeff Gibbs takes on electric cars, solar panels, windmills, biomass, biofuel, leading environmentalist groups like the Sierra Club, and even figures from Al Gore and Van Jones, who served as Barack Obama’s special adviser for green jobs, to 350.org leader Bill McKibben, a leading environmentalist and advocate for grassroots climate change movements.
Gibbs, who produced Moore’s “Bowling for Columbine” and “Fahrenheit 9/11,” didn’t set out to take on the environmental movement. He said he wanted to know why things weren’t getting better. But when he started pulling on the thread, he and Moore said they were shocked to find how inextricably entangled alternative energy is with coal and natural gas, since they say everything from wind turbines to electric car charging stations are tethered to the grid, and even how two of the Koch brothers — Charles and David — are tied to solar panel production through their glass production business.
Prince was a great musician
“Prince came in, and he said to the labels, ‘Do not try to just put me with the urban group; I want the world. I want to be with the pop staff. I’m going to make rock and roll, as well as soul, as well as funk… I don’t want to just go to Soul Train, I don’t want to just open up for Rick James, I want to be on Dick Clark.’”
~ Touré
But more importantly, Prince was a great activist
“[Prince] helped so many people. Most people don’t know that. He wanted to keep his charitable activities a secret. He wanted to keep his passion for underprivileged people between him and his god.”
“We spent hours talking about [Prince’s] concerns about technology and getting those skills to inner city youth.”
Often in the United States, Black activists don’t fare too well
For example Black Panther leader Fred Hampton was murdered by the Chicago police and the FBI.
It’s not a crime to murder Black organizers in an operation run by the national political police…. Just compare the coverage and the memory of just these two events, Watergate and the Hampton assassination, you learn a lot about the prevailing immortal and intellectual culture.
~ Noam Chomsky
It’s not a crime to murder Black organizers in an operation run by the national political police.
~ Noam Chomsky
~ Noam Chomsky
The American system, right now, is not working very well. There is something really wrong and it is getting worse.
Top Lobbying Industries
| Industry | Total |
|---|---|
| Pharmaceuticals/Health Products | $280,305,523 |
| Insurance | $156,867,044 |
| Electronics Mfg & Equip | $144,870,718 |
| Business Associations | $141,539,249 |
| Oil & Gas | $124,492,199 |
| Electric Utilities | $120,725,148 |
| Real Estate | $117,334,792 |
| Hospitals/Nursing Homes | $99,686,787 |
| Securities & Investment | $98,576,572 |
| Misc Manufacturing & Distributing | $95,449,395 |
| Telecom Services | $92,671,826 |
| Air Transport | $91,346,438 |
| Health Professionals | $89,724,045 |
| Health Services/HMOs | $79,352,992 |
| Education | $77,443,167 |
| Internet | $76,672,866 |
| Civil Servants/Public Officials | $74,504,292 |
| Automotive | $67,774,786 |
| Commercial Banks | $64,022,918 |
| Defense Aerospace | $64,014,043 |
Industry Profile: Summary, 2018
Total for Oil & Gas: $125,347,199
Total Number of Clients Reported: 197
Total Number of Lobbyists Reported: 727
Total Number of Revolvers: 508 (69.9%)
A new study, the G7 Fossil Fuel Subsidy Scorecard, measured the US against other G7 countries on each country’s progress in eliminating fossil fuel subsidies. The US ranked the worst out of the G7 countries, spending over $26 billion a year propping up fossil fuels. (The G7 countries are Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, UK and the US.)
The International Monetary Fund recently updated its comprehensive report on global fossil-fuel subsidies. It arrives at a staggering conclusion: In 2017, the world subsidized fossil fuels by $5.2 trillion, equal to roughly 6.5 percent of global GDP. That’s up half a trillion dollars from 2015, when global subsidies stood at $4.7 trillion, according to the IMF. If governments had only accounted for these subsidies and priced fossil fuels at their “fully efficient levels” in 2015, then worldwide carbon emissions would have been 28 percent lower, and deaths due to toxic air pollution 46 percent lower….
[T]he $5.2 trillion figure includes much more than a cash transfer from government to businesses. By the commonsense definition of the term, governments actually subsidized fossil fuels by $296 billion in 2017, according to the report….
[The costs post-tax subsidies] are very large: The burning of fossil fuels releases deadly air pollution, hastens the destruction of the climate, and (sometimes) increases traffic fatalities. And since all of those things kill people, they also depress a country’s tax base. Account for both the harms and the smaller tax base, says the IMF, and you produce an overwhelming number. In 2017, post-tax subsidies came to $4.9 trillion, or 94 percent of the total.
June 2019 Hottest Ever
Boosted by a historic heat wave in Europe and unusually warm conditions across the Arctic and Eurasia, the average temperature of the planet soared to its highest level ever recorded in June.
According to data released Monday by NASA, the global average temperature was 1.7 degrees Fahrenheit (0.93 Celsius) above the June norm (based on a 1951-to-1980 baseline), easily breaking the previous June record of 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit (0.82 Celsius), set in 2016, above the average.
NASA is the second institution to confirm that it was Earth’s hottest June, as the Copernicus Climate Change Service had also determined that June 2019 was the warmest such month on record for Europe and globally.
10 Radio Groups Garner Half the Revenues
The top 10 radio groups account for nearly 19% of the total number of U.S. commercial radio stations, but garner nearly half (47.4%) of all radio station advertising revenues. That’s one top finding from BIA/Kelsey’s recent State of The Radio Industry report. The key reason, of course, is simple. The top 10 owners control the “vast majority of stations in the largest markets and these markets generate a significant proportion of the entire industry revenues,” the report says. What’s more, these groups control some of the most popular stations in the largest markets.
While nearly half of radio dollars flow to 10 groups, gross revenue is concentrated in the top five, which account for over one of every three industry dollars (38.7%), per BIA/Kelsey. Topping the industry is iHeartMedia, which BIA/Kelsey estimates generated $2.59 billion in 2015 revenues from its 862 radio stations, good for 18.5% of total radio industry revenues. CBS Radio was second with $1.25 billion in 2015 revenues from its 117 radio stations, accounting for 8.9% of radio revenues. Third-place Cumulus Media pulled in $748.6 million via 449 radio stations for 5.3% of the 2015 radio pie. Entercom (125 stations) was fourth with $505.6 million or 3.6%, and Univision was fifth as its 67 radio stations corralled $330.8 million, or 2.4%.
After that it was Cox Media Group ($286.9 million, 2.0%, 56 stations); Townsquare Media ($267.6 million, 1.9%, 309 stations); Alpha Media ($248.4 million, 1.8%, 245 stations); Radio One ($232.1 million, 1.7%, 54 stations) and Hubbard Radio ($223.9 million, 1.6%, 46 stations).
This massive media consolidation was made possible by The Telecommunications Act of 1996 that was signed into law by President Bill Clinton. This Act allowed media cross-ownership and also allowed broadcast companies to own an unlimited number of radio stations.
In 1953, the FCC established the 7-7-7 rule, one entity could not own more than seven AM, seven FM, and seven TV stations nationwide. In 1985, the 7-7-7 rule became the 12-12-12 rule. In 1992, the 18-18-12 rule was established and in 1994, limits were raised to 20-20-12.
The Telecommunications Act of 1996 dropped these limits and at one point Clear Channel (now iHeartMedia) owned over 1,200 radio stations nationwide.
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