The following may appear to have nothing to do with P2P. But it does. There is a growing sense of entitlement, self-protection, and amnesia in this country ... and in the entertainment industry. A resistance to change. These are the early warning signs of economic maturity, if not decay itself. Life is Darwinian, whether it's economics, business, biology, or sport. Once the fire is gone, the game, or at least the race to the top, is over.

England was once THE superpower. They became satisfied and were overtaken. Today the United States is following the same path. The US faces an imminent threat. It's not terrorism, which will always be with us. It's China. And the question is not if China will overtake the US as the dominant economic force, but when.

The entertainment industry (music and movies) matured long ago. It's already been eclipsed by video gaming. Its attack against P2P is merely a holding action. It's the postponement of inevitable industry transformation from a digital onslaught whose technologies will increasingly outpace the industry's ability to control or manage it. Hollywood's grip will erode further in a world where America's economic and polticial might continue to slip

Now on to our article.

Warning in the rearview mirror of history: Objects are closer away than they appear.

Much religion is evil, substituting ancient text for rational thought, calcifying rather than opening the brain. Beware uber-patriots, especially those driven by religion. They protect themselves at the expense of the rest of society. They destroy civilization, the social enlightenment that's been attained only after the cost of millions of lives and thousands of years. In a few brief years the United States seems to have already forgotten the lessons of Vietnam, the Geneva Convention, part of the Bill of Rights, and many more that escape my fading memory and we don't even know about yet. What's next? Nazi Germany is never far away.

NEW YORK TIMES
Public Lives: Warning From a Student of democracy's Collapse
January 6, 2005
By CHRIS HEDGES

FRITZ STERN, a refugee from Hitler's Germany and a leading
scholar of European history, startled several of his
listeners when he warned in a speech about the danger posed
in this country by the rise of the Christian right. Read more at the New York Times or here.

Marc Freedman
RazorPop, developer of TrustyFiles, the leading multiple network P2P file sharing software
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