Author
Paul Griffin
update on the pirate and micro-power radio scene with some music
and politics thrown in.
Dear Readers,
Welcome to our 69th newsletter! What a long strange trip it’s been! The biggest news this time has to be the “termination” of over 20 pirate stations which happened at the end of October all over Great Britain. Reports are still filtering in. Go to the news link on google.com and type in “pirate radio” for the latest updates.Here in Berkeley, we’re throwing a benefit party on December 10 with some great blues rockers from “back in the day”...Nick Gravenites, Barry Melton, Roy Blumenfeld, Banana, and Peter Albin will share the stage at Rountrees Rhythm & Blues Hall of Fame Museum. The address is 2618 San Pablo Avenue in Berkeley and the show begins at 9:30 PM. Admission is $10 and all proceeds go to Berkeley Liberation Radio which desperately needs the funds. Later in this newsletter, we’ll talk about the efforts to help the people in Louisiana and a new approach to avoid getting prosecuted for operating an unlicensed radio station (read on!) -Paul Griffin (for the AMPB)
LET’S TALK ABOUT GEAR
(an infrequent feature of the AMPB Report)
Terk VR-1
First of all, I’d like to thank The Dude from the Wolf Radio Network for telling me about this device. It is intended for the consumer video market and helps keep the volume under control during movies or broadcast tv. The unintended use-it makes a darn good limiter for micro-pwer radio stations. It’s very small (3x3x1 inches) and very simple (no knobs to twiddle at all). The front panel has a bypass switch and the back panel has two rca jacks for audio in and two rca jacks for audio out, plus a “barrel” type jack for the ac adapter. It can run off nine volts dc so it will work in cladestine radio broadcasts and other “off the grid” situations where 120 volts ac is not available. Commercial radio stations spend thousands on their audio processors but if you want something simple and inexpensive ($45) to keep the dj’s from overmodulating, then check out the VR-1!
Alesis CD TWIN
If you’ve ever had to make 20 copies of an 80 minute cd with a 4x speed cd burner, you know it can be a time consuming process. This machine will make one-to-one copies at 24x speed plus it will hook up to your windows computer and serve as a data backup device. It will also serve as a stand-alone cd player. The problem with leaving cd’s in a radio studio is they get damaged and stolen. With this thing, no worries! Simply burn a copy and keep your original in a safe place. Making copies is so simple, too! Just turn it on, insert your original in the left side and your blank in the right and hit “start”. I would like it better if it came with macintosh drivers but that’s ok. At this price ($200) it replaces units that costed three times as much! The cool space-age design is just a bonus.
STATION ALERT
A pirate radio station known for its explicit music is back on the air just two months after the government closed it down and seized $2,000 worth of equipment. On September 1st, station operator Jason Green vowed that he'd return to the airwaves, and now he's made good on that promise. The station broadcasting on 103.3 FM does not have a license, but it could be here to stay no matter how many times it is raided because authorities are finding it difficult to prosecute Green. "We have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the individual has committed the criminal act," Long said. That means agents must find Green and the transmitter together. They believe Green operates from a remote computer via the internet to his transmitter, so the two never cross paths. Meanwhile, the station is making money. Green didn't return phone calls, but the station advertised a teen party coming up Thanksgiving weekend at Raymond's Rollerland. The general manager of the rink says Green rents out the space about twice a month. He sells $12 tickets for a concert at the door and then splits the profits with the rink. FDLE plans to work with the FCC to shut Green down again. The FCC has tried to get Green off the air in the past. They've fined him as much as $10,000, but they say he has not paid the fine yet.
From: Joe Bryak, joebryak@gmail.com
I am asking everybody to please forward this plea to all your lists. Malik Rahim, former Black Panther and then housing organizer in San Francisco, has been back in New Orleans a good decade now. He has done a helluva job in organizing folks in Algiers for this self-help project. I am listening to a meeting in New Orleans right now on streaming audio at www.commongroundrelief.org
that Malik and others are at in New Orleans. It is a true grass roots effort. Folks are speaking at this moment about how to get a dumpster, then trucks and volunteers, to clean up rotting garbage, etc. from the Bywater and Ninth Ward, which are due east of the French Quarter. Algiers is directly across the river from the French Quarter (and still in New Orleans proper). This is not "politics"; it is basic survival. I'm still listening, as I write. This is the real deal, grass roots for real. They have people. They have know-how. What they need from us is financial assistance. These are working class people who were struggling *before* this happened. The hand of the government is by and large *against* them. We have pitched in for projects all across the world, from South Africa to Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chiapas, Haiti. I wish I could say we've solved problems there, and performed miracles, but we know things are still critical in all those places, and more. But now it's time to help folks right here, "where we live." Donations of checks or Money Orders can be sent directly to:
Common Ground Collective
331 Atlantic Ave
New Orleans, La. 70114
From: Iolmisha@cs.com
My name is mesha Monge-Irizarry, Director of Idriss Stelley Foundation, Campaign to End the Death Penalty member, SF Youth Commission Funding Advisory Board and member of the Violence Prevention Network at SF Health DEPT.
My only child Idriss Stelley was murdered by SFPD 4 1/2 years ago, 48 bullets, 9 "peace officers" while experiencing a mental breakdown at the SF Sony Metreon. What does it have to do with Stanley Tookie Wiliams? Why am I involved in the fight to save Tookie's life? Because Death row is nothing but the end of the road, in a system that dooms Young People of Color to fail and be discarded!This is my message to you all: It is time we urgently JOIN FORCES in the Struggle to Save Stanley Tookie Williams Life !
We sometimes shy from each other's movements, having so much on our respective plates, while we are really dealing with the very same intimate, deadly web concocted by our US Government:
Stan Tookie Williams grew up in Louisiana before ending up Poor and Opressed on L.A streets, founding the gang of the CRIPS as a survival outlet against Poverty, Racism and Genocide. The US System successfully canned Tookie, wrongfully convicted by an all non-Black jury, on Death row for 26 years and scheduled for execution by lethal injection in California, San Quentin in 30 days from now ! Are we going to let this happen? Through his internationally acclaimed anti-gang children books and his best seller "Blue Rage, Black Redemption" Tookie, from behind bars has saved hundreds of thousands of young lives! Jamie Fox, Danny Glover and Snoop-Dog have joined the struggle to save Tookie's life. Won't you join us as well? The world, especially the Youth cannot afford the abomination of Tookie's State Murder ! Killing Tookie equivals to crushing the hope of millions of Young lives across our planet, Killing Tookie virtually means killing Youth across the world !
For more information, remember to log onto
mesha Monge-Irizarry
Idriss Stelley Foundation ( I S F )
iolmisha@cs.com
4921 3rd St SF CA 94124
(415) 595-8251 / 24HR Bilingual Crisis Line
MIT to launch $100 laptop
The MIT Media Laboratory expects to launch a prototype of its $100 laptop in November, according to Nicholas Negroponte, the lab's chairman and co-founder. The facility has been working with industry partners to develop a notebook computer for use by children in primary and secondary education around the world, particularly in developing countries. The laptops should start appearing in volume in late 2006. "In emerging nations, the issue isn't connectivity," Negroponte said at the Emerging Technologies
Conference on MIT's Cambridge, Mass., campus today. "That's not solved, but lots of people are working on it in Wi-Fi, 3G, 4G, etc. For education, the roadblock is laptops." Negroponte and his
colleagues believe that equipping children around the world with their own laptops will greatly improve the level of education and help stimulate kids to learn outside of school as well as in the classroom. The lab expects to unveil a prototype of the $100 laptop at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) on Nov. 17, according to Negroponte. The WSIS WAS held in Tunis, Tunisia, Nov. 16-18. Negroponte showed slides of the prototype at the MIT event. The 500-MHz laptop will run a "skinny version" of the Linux operating system. It will have a two-mode screen, so it can be viewed in color or, after pushing a button or activating software, in black and white. The latter display can be viewed in bright sunlight at four times normal resolution, according to Negroponte. He estimates that the display will cost around $35. The laptop can be powered either with an AC adapter or via a wind-up crank, which is stored in the housing of the laptop, where the hinge is located. The laptops will have a 10 to 1 crank rate, so that a child will crank the handle for one minute to get 10 minutes of power and use. When closed, the hinge forms a handle, and the AC cord can function as a carrying strap, according to Negroponte. The laptops will be ruggedized and probably made of rubber, he said. They will have four USB (Universal Serial Bus) ports, be Wi-Fi- and cell phone-enabled and come with 1GB of memory.
Each laptop will act as a node in a mesh peer-to-peer ad hoc network, Negroponte said, meaning that if one laptop is directly accessing the Internet, other machines can share that single online connection when they power on. The lab will initially target the laptops for use in Brazil, China, Egypt, South Africa and Thailand, according to Negroponte, as well as in Massachusetts, which has just committed to equipping every schoolchild with a laptop. Negroponte hopes to start mass production of some 5 million to 15 million laptops for those markets toward the end of 2006. By December 2007, he estimated production of the laptops at between 100 million and 150 million, three times the number of annual shipments of commercial laptops. Negroponte launched a nonprofit spin-off from the lab to spearhead the development of the notebook at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January. The nonprofit is called One Laptop Per Child, or OLPC. The lab and OLPC are working with a number of key partners, including Advanced Micro Devices Inc., Google Inc., News Corp. and Red Hat Inc., on developing the laptop, he said. "I've told the governments that our price will float and go down over time," Negroponte said; "$100 is still too expensive." Each government will need to pay for 1 million laptops in advance to ensure that the lab and its partners can achieve the necessary scale to persuade companies to mass produce the machines, he added. He didn't provide any further details on how exactly the vast number of machines will be produced and shipped to their final destinations.
The laptop can be used in a variety of ways as a computer, an electronic book, a television and a writing or drawing tablet, according to Negroponte. One issue the lab is particularly sensitive to is the gray market for computers, Negroponte said. "It's a big deal for us whether laptops vanish in customs or are stolen," he said. "We want to have a machine that's so distinctive it'd be like stealing a post office truck." The lab is even thinking of having each child's name engraved on each laptop as an additional theft deterrent, he said. Another obstacle is the online access schoolchildren in repressive regimes will gain. "I do tell governments we're selling you a Trojan horse," Negroponte said, adding it's really up to the children as to what they access from the Internet. The huge issue he sees with the technology is how education curricula around the globe will change in response to the introduction of the laptops and Web access.
"It's something that will take decades to sort out properly," he said. As for children accessing pornography, the lab is working on how best to block harmful online content, he said. However, Negroponte asks people not to blame the medium. "Pornography uses the printed page, but [Johannes] Gutenberg [the inventor of the printing press] isn't getting much flak," he quipped. The MIT Media Lab has been involved in a number of initiatives to provide schoolchildren with laptops in the past in Senegal and in Costa Rica -- and Negroponte has his own projects in Cambodia. But this is the first global push for the lab with a mobile computer developed from scratch.
AMPB RECORD CHART FOR THE WEEK ENDING 11/19/05
# TITLE - ARTIST - LABEL
1 SIEG HOWDY! - JELLO BIAFRA WITH THE MELVINS - ALT. TENTACLES
2 NEW WHIRL ODOR - PUBLIC ENEMY - SLAMJAMZ REC.
3 AT THE CENTER - MEAT BEAT MANIFESTO - THIRSTY EAR
4 DEMON DAYS - GORILLAZ - EMI
5 THE ROUGH GUIDE TO...BALKAN GYPSIES - WORLD MUSIC NET
6 CELTIC CROSSROADS - VARIOUS ARTISTS - PUTUMAYO
7 FOR A DECADE OF SIN - VARIOUS ARTISTS - BLOODSHOT
8 RADIO PHNOM PENH - ALAN BISHOP - SUBLIME FREQ.
9 PROTEST: SONGS OF STRUGGLE AND RESISTANCE - ELLIPSIS ARTS
10 SONGS OF THE VOLCANO - BOB BROZMAN, ETC. - WORLD MUSIC NET.
11 RAW RAW DUB - BUSH CHEMISTS - ROIR
12 ARAWAKS & MAROONS - SANTERO - SIETE POTENCIAS TRADING CO.
13 THE GIRL WHO COULDN'T FLY - KATE RUSBY - COMPASS
14 RIDDIM DRIVEN: SLENG TENG RESURRECTION - VP
15 COMMUNITY SERVICE II - THE CRYSTAL METHOD - ULTRA
16 HAVE YOU HEARD - TOSHI REAGON - RIGHTEOUS BABE
17 THE ROUGH GUIDE TO - TITO PUENTE - WORLD MUSIC NET
18 PRAIRIE WIND - NEIL YOUNG - REPRISE
19 PATTERNS OF WAR - DR. ISRAEL - ROIR
20 DAILY BREAD - COREY HARRIS - ROUNDER
21 LATIN LOUNGE - VARIOUS ARTISTS - PUTUMAYO
22 FREEDOM AND WEEP - WACO BROTHERS - BLOODSHOT
23 WEST NILE FUNK - EX-CENTRIC SOUND SYSTEM - INDIELAND
24 SILVER & GOLD 1973-1979 - PRINCE FAR I - BLOOD AND FIRE
25 CEASEFIRE - EMMANUEL JAL&ABDEL GADIR SALIM - WORLD MUSIC NET
26 BRIDGETOWN - JOHNNY B. CONNOLLY - GREEN LINNET
27 COMIN' IN TOUGH - FREDDIE McGREGOR - VP
28 THE COLLECTION - ALANIS MORISSETTE - MAVERICK
29 ROYAL ALBERT HALL - CREAM - REPRISE
30 DESERT SWEETS - VINKELOE, WEAVER, SMITH - BALANCE POINT
31 CASUALTIES OF RETAIL - ENTER THE HAGGIS - FIREBRAND ENT.
32 BABY - THE DETROIT COBRAS - BLOODSHOT
33 ASIAN LOUNGE - VARIOUS ARTISTS - PUTUMAYO
34 GLOBAL FUSION - EMAM & FRIENDS - ETERNAL MUSIC
35 THE ESSENTIAL - RAVI SHANKAR - COLUMBIA
36 NEXT TO YOU - EDWIN YEARWOOD - VP
37 KICKING TELEVISION - WILCO - NONESUCH
38 SON: SOUL OF A NATION - SIERRA MAESTRA - WORLD MUSIC NET
39 SACRED GROUND - VARIOUS ARTISTS - SILVER WAVE
40 THE BEST OF - DIRE STRAITS - WARNER BROS.
CAPTAIN FRED’S WORLD CRUISE #62
MUNDO COCEK - BOBAN MARKOVIC ORKESTAR
SPEAKER ROCKER - BUSH CHEMISTS
SPEAK UP - MARCEL KHALIFE
WANT ADS TWO - MEAT BEAT MANIFESTO
STAY WITH ME - DR. ISRAEL
I'M GEORGE W - GEORGE MANN
EL TIGRE - SANTERO
WHAT A FOOL BELIEVES - PUBLIC ENEMY
KALI-FORNIA UBER ALLES - JELLO BIAFRA / MELVINS
ASABI - EMMANUEL JAL & ABDEL GADIR SALIM
ROADHOUSE BLUES - CRYSTAL METHOD
SENTIMIENTOS - ANDRES LINETZKY & ERNESTO ROMEO
WATIKAI IAU NUK PAU ATALAIGU - EAGLE VOICE BAND
CAN YOU FEEL IT - FREDDIE MCGREGOR
TP'S SHING-A-LING - TITO PUENTE
EL SON ES PARA SIEMPRE - SIERRA MAESTRA
KOULANDIAN - KELETIGUI DIABATE
YOU BELONG TO ME - KATE RUSBY
FIRE COMING OUT OF THE MONKEY & DEMON DAYS- GORILLAZ
SIGN-OFF/THE VENERABLE ANTHEM - ALAN BISHOP
Association of Micro-Power Broadcasters
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2018 Shattuck Ave.
Berkeley, CA 94704
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E-mail
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PMB 22, 2018 Shattuck Ave. Berkeley, CA 94704