phillyharper.com

YouTube have just added a feature which I predict will become a game changer in the months to come. Users can now easily edit their own videos right inside the browser and reupload them to YouTube when they’re done. Currently, it’s just a nice feature that allows you to make better use of your own videos.



What if I upload a video and apply a creative commons license that allows people to make attributed remixes of my work using the YouTube editor? YouTube would have millions of these kinds of videos online and all of a sudden YouTube becomes it’s very own footage archive with thousands of amateur film makers stringing the footage together in new and compelling ways.

Expect an explosion in documentary, satire, comedy, art, music, news, science to come from YouTube the moment this feature is announced.  People will  be able to make feature length documentaries without ever having to download a single piece of video to their hard drive, and all YouTube need to do to make it happen is flick a switch to allow users to edit other peoples videos.

It’s technology like this that will eventually make the BBC completely irrelevant unless they do something drastic to catch up.

Dan Auerbach is one of the greatest guitar players of our generation.

George Osborne has handed over control of financial regulation to the bank of England because the tripartite system put in place by labour ‘failed spectacularly’.

If my history serves me right it was The Bank of England who helped William Pitt the Younger kick start income tax to fund wars we didn’t need and it’s The Bank of England who profit from the interest (albeit quite a small one at the moment) on the country’s debt. It’s the Bank of England that own the IOU’s for all the quantitive easing cash that was created from thin air.

To hand control of our financial regulation to The Bank of England is to get rid of regulation all together. How many people are capable of self regulating? The same is true of business.

The move is akin to watching a playground full of children running riot at the hands of underfunded and understaffed dinner ladies and declaring, “you know what, this isn’t working, let’s leave this kid who’s building the water bombs in charge…”

Mervin king builds and supplies water bombs. He cannot be trusted to regulate them.

I don’t need to tell you about Israel’s utterly disgusting murder of innocent and unarmed civilians in international water, I would hope that you’ve heard the news already. Following a chat with my mother, I decided to do something about it by writing to my MP, David Mowat.  I used the invaluable service of WriteToThem to send my letter, and I’d urge you to do the same; I’m happy for you to use my letter as a template. 

Dear David Mowat,

I am writing to express my disgust over the murder of peace and charity activists in international waters this week. It follows a huge number of human rights abuses at the hands of the Israeli regime over the last decade, which in order to not write an entire novel, I won’t go into.

It appears that support for the Israeli regime remains strong amongst both Labour and Conservative politicians, with the lobbying group “Conservative Friends of Israel” boasting that “two thirds of Conservative MPs were members of Conservative Friends of Israel in 2006″.

I do not know if you are a member of the above organisation, which on the surface appears to be an group with nothing but sincere support for a regime which keeps an entire population under siege, abuses human rights, violates international law on a daily basis, and now – it would appear – murders charity workers.

Now that it’s clear that the IDF have murdered unarmed civilians in international waters for attempting to bring aid to a starving and desperate population, will you declare your position on being a member of Conservative Friends of Israel, and if you are a member, will you revoke your membership?

Second to this, I hope that you will stand up in parliament and represent Warrington’s disgust at this horrendous crime. We cannot let Israel continue to get away with murder, and if politicians such as yourself stand up for basic human rights, we may have some hope of stopping them doing this again.

Yours sincerely,

Phil Harper