Exercising caution

Healthy readers: Have you ever secretly wondered if people with ME/CFS or fibromyalgia are contributing to their own problems? Do you think they would get better if they just exercised more?

Readers with ME/CFS or fibro: Have you become enormously frustrated by all the well-meaning friends and family members who say you should just exercise?

Caregivers: Are you ever accused of enabling when you don't try to force your kid/spouse/parent into more activity than your kid/spouse/parent can handle?

All y'all need to read this:

Debunking Myths: 'More Exercise' for Fibromyalgia & Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

The article explains, in very plan language, how exercise can be harmful to people with ME/CFS and fibromyalgia. It's a good, informative read, and because it's associated with About.com, people might actually take it seriously.

Bookmark the page. Send the link to your friends the next time they say you should be exercising. Maybe they'll finally get it. Or, if not, at least you didn't waste your breath on useless debates with those who are absolutely convinced that they know better than you.

My rambling thoughts on the piracy thing, part 2

Imagine the following hypothetical scenario.

A frail woman in her 90s slowly makes her way down a crowded city street. Suddenly a fifteen-year-old boy comes up from behind her, grabs her purse, and runs.

Take a mental snapshot of the scene. Got it? Great. Let's continue.

The kid rounds a corner, purse tucked under his arm. He's spotted by three police officers. Noticing the purse, which likely does not belong to him, they pursue. Eventually they corner him, grab him, and determine that he is unarmed.

Then they beat him within an inch of his life.

When you took your mental snapshot, you probably didn't like this kid at all. He was just some punk with no regard for the law or his victim. But what if the first time you heard about this, the papers were reporting how he lingered in a coma for two days, and how he may never walk again?

Because the punishment he received was so excessive, you might feel a little sorry for him. He was just a kid! He made one mistake, and now he'll be paying for it for the rest of his life!

Do you see where I'm going with this?

I got some intelligent, beautifully articulated comments on last week's piracy poll. The contributors didn't agree with each other about everything, but on one point there was consensus: fining somebody $25 thousand for illegally downloading 30 songs is ludicrous.

The RIAA may yet win its case—it's won similar settlements in the past—but it has lost the battle for hearts and minds. Now the people inclined toward piracy have the perfect rationalization. They're not depriving artists of income, they're sticking it to the man! And the people who believe piracy is wrong still view RIAA targets as victims. The thinking shifts from "We shouldn't take music without paying the artist" to "Good grief, it's not that bad."

If the RIAA truly wants us to understand that piracy is harmful, they need to make the punishments fit the crimes. Otherwise nobody is going to take them seriously.

My rambling thoughts on the piracy thing, part 1

I first heard about Napster through a friend in 1999. He went on and on about how great it was, and how I absolutely had to try it.

I never bothered. Two words: dial-up.

But I understood why it was cool. You could find all kinds of songs that didn't exist in stores. You could turn other people on to your favorite bands, and they could turn you on to theirs. A total love-in. Dig it.

So when Napster's legal troubles began around a year later, they took me by surprise. The idea that their site enabled people to do anything illegal hadn't crossed my mind. The users were just music lovers, sharing music that they owned.

I never thought of it as stealing.

* * *

I'm a pretty honest, law-abiding person. I've never shoplifted. I don't cheat on my taxes. I tip my servers. If a friend told me that she shoplifted, or cheated on her taxes, or stiffed her servers, I would express my disapproval.

And despite all that—despite being a musician who has music for sale—I still can't get all that worked up about people who download music without paying for it.

For one thing, it's not exactly stealing. If you come to a Cinder Bridge gig and lift one of our CDs, then we don't have a copy of that CD anymore and no one else can buy it from us. That's theft. But if you get a bootleg copy off the Internet, we haven't actually lost anything.

Well, we may have lost the income we would have received had you paid for the album. But that assumes you would have paid for the album if you couldn't get it for free. Maybe you would have decided not to.

That doesn't make it right, necessarily. And it certainly doesn't justify a two thousand-song music library consisting entirely of pirated downloads. It just makes it ... different from theft.

This is a complex issue. I don't pretend to have all the answers. On the other hand, I've formed some pretty strong opinions about the RIAA, which believes it does have all the answers.

More on that in our next installment.

The anti-promoter

A few days ago, a reader made this remark in the comments thread for my informal piracy poll.

I listened to your stuff on MySpace and loved it--and I expected to not like it at all for some reason ...

Zow.

Naturally, I'm thrilled whenever I hear that somebody loves our music. It means we're doing something right.

But, "I expected to not like it at all ..." What to make of that?

I'm lousy at promoting Cinder Bridge. I know it. I can even list some reasons why: I don't spend enough time getting our name out there. I haven't discovered where potential fans hang out. I don't know how to get people to buy without being spammy and annoying, so I don't try very hard.

That said, I thought my only sins were not connecting with enough people, and not sufficiently engaging their curiosity. It never occurred to me that I could be making people think they'd hate us.

So now I have to figure out if I am, in fact, giving people a bad impression of Cinder Bridge, or if the commenter had preconceived notions that had nothing to do with me. Any insights would be appreciated.

P.S.We don't suck.

P.P.S. Please buy our album.

You had your time, you had the power

At a small gathering this weekend, I met a musician named Mikey King. He used to be in a local band called Street Pajama.

I'd never heard of Street Pajama. They disbanded before I moved to Tucson in 1991. But they were big around these parts. Really big.

Back in 1982, they came out with a song called "Screwed Again." I haven't heard it yet; Mikey describes it as "a cross between Rachmaninoff, Beef Stroganov, and New Wave." (Isn't that intriguing? I have to learn to describe our music like that so people listen to it or die of curiosity.) Anyway, it made the Billboard charts, not nationally, but for Tucson. A local station had a top-40-type show, and one week, "Screwed Again" reached the number one spot.

"Beat It," by Michael Jackson, was number two.

The song's ride to the top was short-lived. Once "Beat It" hit number one, "Screwed Again" dropped off the chart, never to be heard from again. Still, I find the story mind-boggling.

Forget the part about edging out Michael Jackson. Can you imagine a local song even appearing on a commercial radio station today? I almost said "local radio station" but stopped myself, because that's the point, isn't it? There are no real local commercial radio stations anymore. They're all run by a tiny handful of large corporations that have no connection to whatever cities they broadcast from.

All in all, the current era has been pretty good to Cinder Bridge. With the vastness of the Internet at our disposal, we and other indie bands can find audiences all over the globe. My band is probably better off than it would have been if we had to depend on radio (and labels, and traditional distribution).

But radio ...

That would have been cool.

Piracy poll

Jammie Thomas-Rassett is back in the news.

Who is Jammie Thomas-Rassett, you ask? She's a woman whom the RIAA has accused of illegally downloading 30 songs. Various verdicts have demanded that she pay $222 thousand, $1.92 million, and most recently, $54 thousand. The RIAA offered to settle for $25 thou. Thomas-Rassett's response: nuh uh.

"It is a shame that Ms. Thomas-Rasset continues to deny any responsibility for her actions rather than accept a reasonable settlement offer and put this case behind her," [RIAA spokeswoman Cara] Duckworth said. "Given this, we will begin preparing for a new trial."

Full story on PC World.

What think you:

1. Is it ALWAYS wrong to download music without paying for it?
   
   
2. At what point should the RIAA go after offenders? (After one illegal download? After the person downloads a certain number of songs? After the person distributes it? After the person resells it?)
   
   
3. What's a reasonable punishment for someone who downloads 30 songs, then makes them available for other people to download?

I have my own thoughts on the matter, but they're kind of long and vague and rambling. I'll share them when I have more time and wakefulness at my disposal.

Reeves out

William C. Reeves, head of the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Research Program at the CDC, is moving on. Effective February 14, he'll become senior advisor for a another department within the agency. Dr. Elizabeth Unger will temporarily replace him.

Those of you who have ME/CFS have probably heard about this already, and almost certainly know why it's cause for celebration. For everybody else, here's the deal.

Reeves has led the CDC's CFS program for around a decade. During that time, he has done nothing to bring us closer to a cure, or even marginally effective treatment. Instead ...

• He has diluted the definition of ME/CFS to include people who instead suffer from clinical depression.
  
  
• Armed with the new, diluted definition, he has promoted the belief that childhood trauma and sexual abuse are linked to ME/CFS. The 2009 paper supporting this assertion fails to cite an earlier study, which found that people with ME/CFS are less likely to report such abuse.
  
  
• He has championed cognitive behavioral therapy and graded exercise therapy, which may have small benefits for people with clinical depression, but do nothing for people with ME/CFS. In fact, graded exercise therapy can actually harm people with the disease.

In October of last year, the Whittemore Peterson Institute for Neuro Immune Disease announced that it had found a strong link between ME/CFS and a retrovirus called XMRV. The discovery shone a bright light on Reeves' biases. Immediately following the announcement, he told the New York Times that "We and others are looking at our own specimens and trying to confirm it. If we validate it, great. My expectation is that we will not."

Will Reeves' move represent a significant change in the way the CDC deals with the disease? Will they take the program in a different direction? No idea.

It's possible that the CDC saw which way the wind was blowing in the wake of the XMRV discovery and decided to make Reeves the fall guy. Maybe they intend to go back to business as usual after he leaves, hoping that his removal alone will appease angry sufferers and advocates.

If that's the case, they're very wrong. It won't appease us. But it is still cause for celebration.

I like the way the wind is blowing.