WHAT THE FUCK HAVE YOU DONE?

FIN : C.R. StecykTrailer

2012-02-02T01:37:00.002-05:00

I've got no idea what this is about, but if i was anywhere near Southern California I'd be at this premiere.

The First Installment of An Evolutionary Series of Digital Shorts by Iconic Writer, Producer, & Artist C.R. STECYK III

Wednesday February 8th 6pm-9pm Hurley Space Gallery

11 year Old Tells "TED" Audience 'What's Wrong With Our Food System'

2012-02-01T01:05:00.001-05:00

Birke Baehr -"What's Wrong With Our Food System? And How Can We Make A Difference?"

RELATED:

Hungary Destroys All Monsanto GMO Maize Fields

NASA Releases "Most Amazing High-Definition" Photo of Earth, from Space

2012-01-31T01:34:00.002-05:00

Earlier this week NASA released a so-called 'Blue Marble' image of Earth captured by the VIIRS instrument on NASA's most recently launched Earth-observing satellite, the Suomi NPP. The composite image above "uses a number of swaths of the Earth's surface taken on January 4, 2012." Larger sizes here (hello, new computer desktop image!)

Thanks to Xeni at BoingBoing

A Bit More From the Sundance Film Festival

2012-01-30T01:03:00.004-05:00

Here's a short clip of the panel I moderated, as well as a great clip of Peralta and some of the Bones Brigade talking about thier film.

Rodney and Lance are fucking HEROES!

Have Yourself a "Soul Train" Sunday

2012-01-29T05:38:00.002-05:00

From DangerousMinds:

And why the hell not? Here are some classic clips from Soul Train that are guaranteed to make you feel good, and maybe even get up and shake your ass!

You know, with all the Seventies-related posts here on DM, it’s good to remember that the decade was not all about white boys with guitars (though some of the clips below are from the early 80s too). These dancers are hot as hell - without resorting to showing acres of flesh - and isn’t it nice to see people actually interacting with each other when they dance.

Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes “Bad Luck”

Kool & The Gang “Jungle Boogie”
(this clip is one of the coolest things I have ever seen)

Rufus & Chaka Khan “Once You Get Started”
(featuring lots of bumping)

Marvin Gaye “Got To Give It Up (Parts 1 & 2)
(in part 2 Marvin joins the audience for some groovin’)

Trussell “Love Injection”
(moving into the 80s with a boogie classic)

Yellow Magic Orchestra “Firecracker”
(two different cultures in perfect tandem)

Media Controlled Conspiracy Theory Rock - SNL Banned episode

2012-01-28T01:11:00.000-05:00

A Banned Segment from Saturday Night Live

The 1998 Robert Smigel animated short film "Conspiracy Theory Rock", part of a March 1998 "TV Funhouse" segment, has been removed from all subsequent airings of the Saturday Night Live episode where it originally appeared. Michaels' claimed the edit was done because it "wasn't funny". The film is a scathing critique of corporate media ownership, including NBC's ownership by General Electric/Westinghouse.

from NaturalNews.TV

Identifying Different Psychopaths

2012-01-27T02:21:00.001-05:00

Gnarly.

Thanks, DangerousMinds

Martin Luther King Debates Mitt Romney

2012-01-26T01:22:00.000-05:00

"Is Our World Becoming Less Violent?"

2012-01-25T01:44:00.000-05:00

Shocker: Is Our World Becoming Less Violent?
By Joshua Holland, AlterNet

Humanity's lust for violence has undergone a long, precipitous decline at every level of social interaction, from domestic abuse to violent crime to interstate wars. That's the sweeping and somewhat counterintuitive thesis of psychologist Steven Pinker's new book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. The pacification of humanity, says Pinker, is “a fractal phenomenon, visible at the scale of millennia, centuries, decades, and years.”

Pinker writes that the “very idea invites skepticism, incredulity and sometimes anger.” He sets out to overcome that barrier by surveying a broad swath of data, from examinations of ancient bones unearthed in peat bogs and on long-forgotten battlefields, to homicide statistics based on European coroners' inquests and local records dating back 800 years, to databases of modern interstate conflicts and civil wars.

Does Pinker's research validate his thesis? And if so, what forces might explain such a profound shift in human society?

Are We Really Less Violent Today?

Pinker makes his case by combing dozens of disparate datasets to pull out what he proposes is a standard measure of our tendency toward violence: the likelihood of dying at the hand of another human being in a given year. In the long sweep of human history, he makes a compelling case, noting that almost 20 percent of bones uncovered at archaeological excavations of prehistoric societies show evidence of violent trauma – a death rate unparalleled in even the bloodiest episodes in recent history.

With the emergence of the city-state – first in pre-Columbian Mexico in the 15th century -- the rate of violent death declines precipitously, to 5 percent. Wandering closer to modernity, Pinker cites estimates of war deaths (excluding violent crime) in the two most violent regions and centuries of the era of the nation-state: 17th century Europe, “with its bloody wars of religion,” and the 20th century, with its two world wars. Historian Quincy Wright estimated the 17th century death-rate by war at 2 percent, and estimates of that measure in the 20th century run as “low” as 1 percent.

He cites criminologist Manuel Eisner's study of homicides in Europe dating back to 1200 CE, which illsutrated an equally dramatic decline in one-on-one violence, at least on the continent. Eisner estimates that during the Middle Ages, about 100 in 100,000 people were murdered, a figure that has fallen to around 1 in 100,000 today.

That's but a small a fraction of the research Pinker cites, devoting six chapters brimming with graphics and charts to make his case. Yet, as with any thesis spanning the entire history of human existence planet-wide, Pinker ultimately runs into an empirical wall; there isn't sufficient data to justify the claim that violence has fallen precipitously in every culture and at every level of human interaction throughout history. A comprehensive database of violent deaths worldwide for the 20th century, much less for the 11th, simply does not exist.

Elizabeth Kolbert, reviewing the book for the New Yorker ($$), unfairly charges that “Pinker’s attention is almost entirely confined to Western Europe.” He examines what research is available from a host of societies at different points in history, but he does devote an inordinate amount of space to the decline in violence in the “West,” and in the era of the nation-state, and one might imagine that to be a result of where the best data are to be found.

One also has to question the rigor behind Pinker's contention on the interpersonal level. He can demonstrate that corporal punishment has declined in schools around the world, and show that violent crime has seen a dramatic, decades-long fall in the West, but what about the kind of violence that isn't tracked by governments with any consistency? Has there really been a consistent and global decline in drunken men punching one another in the face? Have we really become more tame at every level of intercourse, and is it really a “fractal” phenomenon that holds true “at the scale of millennia, centuries, decades, and years”?

Pinker himself acknowledges that the decline of violence does not track in a straight line, that it is a historical current with “eddies” of increased violence at various times and in various regions. He notes, for example, that the homicide rate in the United States didn't decline at all in the 20th century; rather it oscillated, rising during the first three decades, falling precipitously by mid-century and then spiking to a high in the 1980s before coming back down to what it was in 1900. (According to the Associated Press, in 2010, homicide fell off of the list of the top 15 causes of death in the United States for the first time since 1965, bumped by an unenviable death by choking on one's food or vomitus.)

But while Pinker doesn't present a slam-dunk, irrefutable case, one might conclude that he's a victim of his own ambition. The sheer weight of his data suggests that his thesis is correct when it comes to the big picture. The historical transition from bands of hunter-gatherers to agricultural societies that formed the basis of city-states to the emergence of early feudal states and finally the birth of the modern nation-state does correlate rather neatly with a precipitous decline in intra- and inter-communal violence.

Bringing Forth the 'Better Angels of Our Nature'

This leads to a question of why, as Pinker puts it, it has become a cliché that “the twentieth century was the bloodiest in history”? He attributes this widespread belief to “historical amnesia,” a cognitive tendency to “overweight the conflicts that are most recent, most studied or most sermonized.” He demonstrated this by asking 100 people (presumably Americans) to write down as many wars as they could recall in five minutes, an exercise that produced results that were heavily “weighted toward the world wars, wars fought by the United States and wars close to the present.”

We also tend to believe the 20th century to be the most violent because of advances in the technology of destruction. It is only in recent history that we have had the capacity to incinerate 80,000 people in an instant in Hiroshima, and many millions with modern nuclear ICBMs. The overall number of war-deaths in the last century did represent a historic high. But here, again, we have to return to Pinker's unifying metric of violence: violent death proportional to the entire population. There were many more humans walking the planet in the 20th century than there were in the eighth century.

When Pinker adjusts for population size, it becomes clear that the two world wars that marked the crescendo of interstate violence in absolute numbers were anything but exceptional in relative terms. About 15 million people perished during World War I, and 55 million more died in World War II. But the Mongol invasions of the 13th century resulted in an estimated 40 million war deaths, a figure that would represent 278 million people relative to the human population in the middle of the 20th century. In China, the Lushan Rebellion killed 36 million people in the eighth century, a death toll that would total 429 million -- or six times the combined carnage of the two world wars -- relative to the human population during World War II.

Pinker is on his most solid ground arguing that we hold an idealized view of an earlier, more tranquil era in human history. He explicates, often in gruesome detail, the bloody history of human society prior to the age of enlightenment (to which we'll return presently). That long epoch played out against “a backdrop of violence that was endured, and often embraced, in ways that startle the sensibilities of a 21st century Westerner.”

Indeed, we recoil at the idea of civilian casualties -- “collateral damage” -- incurred during conflicts today, but in Biblical times, genocidal wars that wiped entire populations off the earth were a relatively common “extension of policy by other means,” as the military theorist Karl von Clausewitz put it.

Tales of torture by authoritarian regimes shock the conscience today, but the most gruesome forms of torture weren't only routine in the Middle Ages, they were often a source of entertainment – people laughed at the degradation and abuse of their fellow humans. That rulers weren't free to slaughter their own citizens is only a relatively recent concept; that communal lynching is abhorrent an even more recent advent. And today, humans' revulsion to physical violence extends not only to other humans, but to animals as well. Pinker takes readers on a horrifying tour of the unvarnished history of violence, pausing to point out sites like human sacrifice, inquisitions and witch-hunts along the way.

In prehistoric societies, hunter-gatherers lived lives of almost constant tribal warfare. Bands raided their neighbors for three primary reasons, Pinker argues, and these grounds persist in some form in modern conflicts: attacks inspired by competition for scarce resources; preemptive strikes, out of fear that a group would be raided if it didn't move first; and raids to avenge past attacks in the hope of deterring future aggression.

It is when he explicates this long and profound decline in organized violence over a larger scale of human history – spanning millennia rather than decades – that Pinker is most convincing. Which leads to the question of what we might credit for the decline – what it is precisely that brought forth the “better angels of our nature.” Pinker offers several possible explanations for what he calls a long “civilizing process.”

First and foremost is the emergence of the nation-state. Pinker argues that the constant raiding that marked hunter-gatherer societies validated the enlightenment philosopher Thomas Hobbes' view of humanity in a state of nature – a world in which life was typically “nasty, brutish and short.” In Hobbes' formulation, the state serves as an all-powerful “leviathan” that holds a monopoly on the legal use of violence, and, in turn, defuses the primary motives for inter-communal violence: it deters aggressive attacks for resources, which in turn lessens the need for preemptive attacks as well as the urge to avenge every slight as a form of deterrence.

Pinker cites a study of 27 non-state societies and compared their average death rate due to wars with that of one of the most violent states in history, the Aztec Empire of Central Mexico, and found that those living in the average non-state society were twice as likely to perish in battle. Although the data is somewhat limited, he demonstrates that the same holds true in terms of homicides.

But the emergence of states isn't enough to explain the decline. In their earliest iteration, states were feudal fiefdoms and fractured monarchies under despotic rule. Leaders thought of their subjects as little more than cannon-fodder, materiel to be exchanged for glory, God or territory. “The first leviathans,” writes Pinker, “solved one problem but created another. [People] were less likely to become the victims of homicide or casualties of war, but they were now under the thumbs of tyrants, clerics and kleptocrats.” Solving this problem, he argues, would “have to wait another few millennia, and in much of the world it remains unsolved to this day.”

Pinker puts a great deal of weight on the Enlightenment period in his civilizing process. Exhausted by almost three centuries of gruesome religious wars, Western thinkers underwent an “intellectual and moral change: a shift from valuing souls to valuing lives.” Pinker notes that while territory and “dynastic power” were at stake, “religious differences kept tempers at a fever pitch” in Europe between the early 16th century and the mid-17th century. It was an era in which the whole schema of human society underwent dramatic changes in a relatively short period. “The calming of religious fervor meant that wars were no longer inflamed with eschatological meaning, so leaders could cut deals rather than fight to the last man,” writes Pinker. “Popular writers were deconstructing honor, equating war with murder, ridiculing Europe's history of violence, and taking the viewpoints of soldiers and conquered peoples.”

It was during the Enlightenment that, “in the span of just over a century, cruel practices that had been a part of civilization for millennia were suddenly abolished.”
The Killing of witches, the torture of prisoners, the persecution of heretics, the execution of non-conformers, and the enslavement of foreigners – all carried out with stomach-turning cruelty – quickly passed from the unexceptional to the unthinkable.
This was one of two “human rights revolutions” -- the other being the post-World War II advances in international law that followed the Nuremberg Tribunals and culminated in the signing of the United Nations' treaty. That process has continued into this century with a shift from an unwavering emphasis on state sovereignty – with the “right” of governments to manage their own domestic affairs as they see fit -- to what has come to be known as the international community's “responsibility to protect” the lives of innocents.

Another factor contributing to the decline of violence, Pinker argues, is that technology, and the emergence of the modern nation-state, enabled a dramatic increase in “non-zero-sum” transactions between different communities and states. Commercial trade, specifically, has been seen as a disincentive to violence since Immanuel Kant wrote Perpetual Peace: a Philosophical Sketch in the late 18th century.

Pinker also cites a theory proposed by philosopher Peter Singer in his book The Expanding Circle. Singer suggests that human beings have an inherent capacity for empathy; that the ability to identify and cooperate with others conferred an evolutionary advantage on early homo sapiens. But that empathy was, throughout much of our history, limited to a small circle of people: the extended family, the clan. Those residing outside of the circle have often been seen as less than human, and treated accordingly. But with the decline in violence, that circle of humans whose lives we deem worthy of our respect (Pinker says it should be called the “circle of sympathy”) has expanded, from the village to the tribe to the nation-state. And it has continued to expand to people of different ethnicities and religions and sexual orientations, to those who were once dispatched with impunity. (Singer deploys this theory in service of an argument for according the same rights to other sentient species.)

Why that circle has expanded is unclear. Pinker writes that he uses the “expanding circle” as “a name for the historical process in which increased opportunities for perspective-taking led to sympathy for more diverse groups of people.” He cites the advent of the printing press and popularization of the novel, a medium that allowed people to imagine themselves inside the heads of other people for the first time. He posits that advances in personal hygiene made others less repulsive, and therefore harder to see as subhuman. And as economic development and scientific advances extended human life, it simply became dearer, and more valuable. When life really was “nasty, brutish and short,” it was far easier to take a life without remorse.

More recently, Pinker talks about the role played by women entering the public sphere. For him, the “feminization” of society isn't a cultural problem, but a profound public good. “Historically,” he writes, “women have taken the leadership in pacifist and humanitarian movements out of proportion to their influence in other political institutions...and recent decades, in which women and their interests have had an unprecedented influence in all walks of life, are also the decades in which wars between developed states became increasingly unthinkable.”

Having marshaled his evidence, Pinker turns in his final chapter to the question of whether the decline in violence is a phenomenon that is likely to persist. Pinker considers himself a cautious optimist, but is not a historical determinist. “Optimism,” he writes, requires a touch of arrogance, as it extrapolates the past to an uncertain future.”

Having identified “the broad forces that have pushed violence downward,” he can only say that humanity's increasing distaste for blood is “a product of social, cultural and material conditions. If the conditions persist, violence will remain low or decline even further; if they don't, it won't.”

Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet. He is the author of The 15 Biggest Lies About the Economy: And Everything else the Right Doesn't Want You to Know About Taxes, Jobs and Corporate America. Drop him an email or follow him on Twitter.

"Artificial Coloring"

2012-01-24T00:38:00.001-05:00

Thanks, Doug!

"Why vegans were right all along" - The Guardian (UK) explains

2012-01-23T00:24:00.000-05:00

from The Guardian, on Chistmas Eve 2002

Famine can only be avoided if the rich give up meat, fish and dairy

by George Monbiot

The Christians stole the winter solstice from the pagans, and capitalism stole it from the Christians. But one feature of the celebrations has remained unchanged: the consumption of vast quantities of meat. The practice used to make sense. Livestock slaughtered in the autumn, before the grass ran out, would be about to decay, and fat-starved people would have to survive a further three months. Today we face the opposite problem: we spend the next three months trying to work it off.
Our seasonal excesses would be perfectly sustainable, if we weren't doing the same thing every other week of the year. But, because of the rich world's disproportionate purchasing power, many of us can feast every day. And this would also be fine, if we did not live in a finite world.

By comparison to most of the animals we eat, turkeys are relatively efficient converters: they produce about three times as much meat per pound of grain as feedlot cattle. But there are still plenty of reasons to feel uncomfortable about eating them. Most are reared in darkness, so tightly packed that they can scarcely move. Their beaks are removed with a hot knife to prevent them from hurting each other. As Christmas approaches, they become so heavy that their hips buckle. When you see the inside of a turkey broilerhouse, you begin to entertain grave doubts about European civilisation.

This is one of the reasons why many people have returned to eating red meat at Christmas. Beef cattle appear to be happier animals. But the improvement in animal welfare is offset by the loss in human welfare. The world produces enough food for its people and its livestock, though (largely because they are so poor) some 800 million are malnourished. But as the population rises, structural global famine will be avoided only if the rich start to eat less meat. The number of farm animals on earth has risen fivefold since 1950: humans are now outnumbered three to one. Livestock already consume half the world's grain, and their numbers are still growing almost exponentially.

This is why biotechnology - whose promoters claim that it will feed the world - has been deployed to produce not food but feed: it allows farmers to switch from grains which keep people alive to the production of more lucrative crops for livestock. Within as little as 10 years, the world will be faced with a choice: arable farming either continues to feed the world's animals or it continues to feed the world's people. It cannot do both.

The impending crisis will be accelerated by the depletion of both phosphate fertiliser and the water used to grow crops. Every kilogram of beef we consume, according to research by the agronomists David Pimental and Robert Goodland, requires around 100,000 litres of water. Aquifers are beginning the run dry all over the world, largely because of abstraction by farmers.

Many of those who have begun to understand the finity of global grain production have responded by becoming vegetarians. But vegetarians who continue to consume milk and eggs scarcely reduce their impact on the ecosystem. The conversion efficiency of dairy and egg production is generally better than meat rearing, but even if everyone who now eats beef were to eat cheese instead, this would merely delay the global famine. As both dairy cattle and poultry are often fed with fishmeal (which means that no one can claim to eat cheese but not fish), it might, in one respect, even accelerate it. The shift would be accompanied too by a massive deterioration in animal welfare: with the possible exception of intensively reared broilers and pigs, battery chickens and dairy cows are the farm animals which appear to suffer most.

We could eat pheasants, many of which are dumped in landfill after they've been shot, and whose price, at this time of the year, falls to around £2 a bird, but most people would feel uncomfortable about subsidising the bloodlust of brandy-soaked hoorays. Eating pheasants, which are also fed on grain, is sustainable only up to the point at which demand meets supply. We can eat fish, but only if we are prepared to contribute to the collapse of marine ecosystems and - as the European fleet plunders the seas off West Africa - the starvation of some of the hungriest people on earth. It's impossible to avoid the conclusion that the only sustainable and socially just option is for the inhabitants of the rich world to become, like most of the earth's people, broadly vegan, eating meat only on special occasions like Christmas.

As a meat-eater, I've long found it convenient to categorise veganism as a response to animal suffering or a health fad. But, faced with these figures, it now seems plain that it's the only ethical response to what is arguably the world's most urgent social justice issue. We stuff ourselves, and the poor get stuffed.

www.monbiot.com

Sunday Sermon

2012-01-22T01:18:00.001-05:00

Newt Gingrich is Awesome

2012-01-21T02:19:00.000-05:00

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

What a piece of shit.

Saturday at Sundance - Not to Miss!

2012-01-20T00:25:00.007-05:00

This Saturday at 9:30am I will be moderating a panel at the "Cinema Cafe" in Park City Utah with old friends Stacy Peralta and Ice-T.

As part of the Sundance Film festival. Stacy will be premiering his new BONES BRIGADE: A Biography and Ice-T will be making his directorial debut with Something From Nothing: The Art of Rap - I'll be at both of these premiere screenings later the same day. Should be cool.

check the current very rough trailer clips:
(neither of which do the films any justice at all, but at least you get a taste)

SOUL TRAIN - the Doc

2012-01-19T01:50:00.001-05:00

Original discription from VH1 site:

Few television series were as innovative and influential as Soul Train. Set first in Chicago, and later in Los Angeles, the Soul Train dance party reached national significance and became the longest running syndicated show in television history. In commemoration of its 40th anniversary, Soul Train: The Hippest Trip In America is a 90 minute documentary celebrating the show's many contributions to pop culture, music, dance and fashion. From 1970-2006 the series offered a window into the history of Black music, and its charismatic host, Don Cornelius was The Man responsible for a new era in Black expression. A trained journalist, Don created a media empire that provided an outlet for record labels and advertisers to reach a new generation of music fans. As the epitome of cool, many of his expressions entered the popular American lexicon: "A groove that will make you move real smooth," "Wishing you Peace, Love and Soul!" The documentary will feature performances and great moments from the show, as well as behind-the-scene stories and memories from the cast and crew. In addition, popular musicians, comics and actors of yesterday and today will comment on growing up with the show and will share their stories of how Soul Train affected their own lives.

Thanks, Aaron!

PROTEST OF SOPA & PIPA - NO SCHEDULED BLOG POST TODAY IN SUPPORT OF THE ACTION

2012-01-18T00:41:00.006-05:00

Call your elected officials.
Tell them you are their constituent, and you oppose SOPA and PIPA.

Why?
SOPA and PIPA cripple the free and open internet. They put the onus on website owners to police user-contributed material and call for the blocking of entire sites, even if the links are not to infringing material. Small sites will not have the sufficient resources to mount a legal challenge. Without opposition, large media companies may seek to cut off funding sources for small competing foreign sites, even if big media are wrong. Foreign sites will be blacklisted, which means they won't show up in major search engines.

In a post SOPA/PIPA world, Wikipedia --and many other useful informational sites-- cannot survive in a world where politicians regulate the Internet based on the influence of big money in Washington. It represents a framework for future restrictions and suppression. Congress says it's trying to protect the rights of copyright owners, but the "cure" that SOPA and PIPA represent is much more destructive than the disease they are trying to fix.

If you'd like to learn even more about SOPA/PIPA, click here.

and click here for even more info!

Occupy Comix: Inaugural Issue! Vol. 1, Is. 1

2012-01-17T01:02:00.002-05:00

Occupy Comix was born in the stage of Occupy Wall Street. Occupy Comix is being launched to bring you the anecdotes, glimpses, pictures and critical stories and dreams of struggle occurring all around us. This issue is the first of what will hopefully be a free bi-monthly illustrated publication chronicling the lives and issues of the 99%. We believe that artists and writers can help transform our world, to build a new Mythos of Hope. Let us know what you think.

CLICK HERE TO PREVIEW AND DOWNLOAD DIGITAL VERSION FREE

Greenpeace - Inspiring Action

2012-01-16T00:55:00.000-05:00

2012-01-15T01:52:00.001-05:00

sorry i have no idea who took this...

#J15 Worldwide Candlelight Vigil for Unity

2012-01-14T01:07:00.001-05:00

Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Birthday

January 15th, 2012 @ 7:00pm in Each Time Zone Globally

Via J15global.com: On his birthday and in the spirit of Dr. King's vision for racial and economic equality, peace, and non-violence, we are holding candlelight vigils to unite our world in a global movement for systemic change.

Wherever we may be, whether in our homes, in city squares, online, Occupies, or at work, we lift a beautiful message high above the political dialogue. We light the dream of a more equitable world in our hearts. We can overcome!

Dr. King said "A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and say: 'This is not just.' "

Vigils are being organized around the world -- from California to Cairo, New York to New Orleans, Germany to Nova Scotia. Pete Seeger, K'naan, Ramy Essam, Sol Guy, Joan Baez, Steve Earle and many more have committed their support.

We gather to empower a great and global dream, a dream we have all dreamt of for thousands of years. We will sing, because freedom songs are the soul of the movement.. Together, we will make the dream a reality.

Help turn this moment into a world-wide wave of light:

Like our Facebook page and share with your friends.
Follow @J15global on Twitter.
Call a friend and make a plan to light a candle together.
Organize a vigil on your block or in your town.
Return to Facebook to post your ideas and see what others are planning.

Zuccotti (Liberty) Park is re-opened...

2012-01-13T00:19:00.001-05:00

Take a listen, watch an hear the first moments after the barricades were removed due to a lawsuit brought by the New York division of the ACLU.

Tim Pool speaks with our friend Justin Wedes who brings you all up to date on what's going down at #OWS

Hot Wheels, Mother Fucker!

2012-01-12T00:54:00.002-05:00

This really is best viewed full screen...

4 Creepy Ways Big Pharma Peddles its Drugs

2012-01-11T01:46:00.006-05:00

from AlterNet

By Martha Rosenberg

It's no secret that advertising works. Big Pharma wouldn't spend over $4 billion a year on direct-to-consumer advertising if it didn't mean massive profits.

What is more unknown is why drug ads that sow hypochondria, raise health fears and "sell" diseases are often the most common--and effective--even when the drugs themselves are of questionable safety.

The nation's fourth most frequent drug ads in 2009 for were Cymbalta, making Eli Lilly $3.1 billion in one year, despite the antidepressant's links to liver problems and suicide. Pfizer spent $157 million advertising Lyrica for fibromyalgia in 2009, despite the seizure pill's links to life-threatening allergic reactions. The same year, it spent $107 million advertising the antidepressant Pristiq, even though it also had links to liver problems.

So, how does Pharma dupe us into using unsafe drugs? Today's drug ads, targeted directly to consumers since 1999, seem like they sell diseases and often cast women, children, the elderly and mentally ill in a bad light. But a quick look at ads before direct-to-consumer advertising (DTC) in medical journals shows that drug ads have always done so. It's just that patients didn't used to see them.

Here are some of Pharma's most offensive ad campaigns, then and now.

1. You're Sicker Than You Think

When psychiatric drugs first became popular for use in the general population, in the late 1960s, everyday personality problems became imbued with psychiatric labels. "Lady, your anxiety is showing (over a coexisting depression)," says a 1970 ad, showing an older, wrinkly woman in a bouffant wig with gigantic sunglasses and garish jewelry. "On the visible level, this middle-aged patient dresses to look too young, exhibits a tense, continuous smile and may have bitten nails or overplucked eyebrows," says the ad copy. "What doesn't show as clearly is the coexisting depression."

The ad, both sexist and ageist, suggests the woman needs the antidepressant and tranquillizer Triavil.

Another ad from 1968 shows a bored, upper-middle-class couple whose hauteur is also said to really be depression. "Do you have patients who try to hide frustration behind conformity?" says the ad for the antidepressant Aventyl HCl.

You'd think such demeaning ads would vanish with DTC advertising because people would be offended. But You're Sicker-Than-You-Think ads are alive and well since DTC advertising and even flowering.

A three-page consumer ad in the late 2000s similarly conveys that everyday psychological traits could actually be dire mental problems that require medication. If you are "talking too fast," "spending out of control," "sleeping less," "flying off the handle" and "buying things you don't need," you could be suffering from bipolar disorder said the ads, which appeared in magazines like People. And here you thought it was the coffee. Accompanying photos of a woman screaming into a phone and contorting her face are so extreme they could come out of the movie Halloween Part II, if the woman were holding a knife.

Psychiatric drugs are not just advertised for everyday personality problems. Pharma is pushing them for everyday pain conditions. Eli Lilly's original depression campaign for the antidepressant Cymbalta, "Depression Hurts," seems to anticipate its subsequent approval for pain conditions including back problems. Now ads tout Cymbalta as a "non-narcotic, once daily analgesic FDA approved for three indications across four different chronic pain conditions," as if it does not have severe controversial psychiatric risks including the suicide of volunteers who tested it.

And seizure and epilepsy drugs, known for major allergic and psychiatric reactions, are also becoming pain franchises. "What's causing your chronic widespread muscle pain?" asks an ad for the seizure and epilepsy drug Lyrica. "The answer may be overactive nerves," says the ad, even though "widespread muscle pain" and "over-active nerves," are not mentioned in the approved labeling for Lyrica, says pharmaceutical reporter John Mack. The military spent $35 million on seizure and epilepsy drugs in 2009 alone, including for migraines, headaches and pain.

And speaking of overkill, ads for genetically engineered injected drugs like Humira, approved to treat serious diseases like Crohn's disease, psoriatic arthritis and chronic plaque psoriasis look like they are designed to sell beer or beauty treatments, not immune suppressing drugs that invite cancers and lethal infections.

DTC ads don't just escalate everyday problems into psychiatric problems, they also escalate real psychiatric problems into irresponsible, sensationalistic stereotypes. Ads for the best-selling antipsychotic Risperdal, widely used in children, and in soldiers with PTSD, suggest that people with mental illness have hallucinatory fears about "boiling rain" and "dog women." The "dog woman" ad, showing a half-dog, half-woman crouched on her elbows, her eyes blackened, furthers the sensationalizing of mental illness with the tagline, "Because relapses are a living nightmare."

2. Your Kid Is Sick

DTC ads don't just convince people they're in need of new drugs, but also that their kids may be, too. And it's been going on for decades.

Long before Pharma convinced parents, teachers and clinicians that millions of US kids had attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), kids were said to suffer from "minimal brain dysfunction" (MBD) and "hyperkinesis," two conditions that were essentially the same as ADHD. In fact, so many kids had MBD by 1976 that an ad for the drug Cylert hailed the "Importance of single daily dose to the child, the parents and the teacher," because kids wouldn't have to be singled out anymore at pill time at school. (ADHD has been so huckstered, a YMCA ad spoofs it with the headline, "Before video games, before Facebook, before Ritalin, there was basketball.")

Yet neither Cylert--whose approval the FDA withdrew in 2005 because of liver failure and deaths--or the current ADHD drugs are safe. In 2009, researchers reported that kids are more likely to die sudden deaths while taking them and the American Heart Association recommends electrocardiograms (ECGs) before kids take them. And yet, combined sales of ADHD drugs continue to grow from $4.05 billion to $7.42 billion in 2010.

Thirty years ago, it certainly looked like kids were being overmedicated. They were given the antipsychotic Thorazine for their "hyperactivity," "hostility," sleep problems and even for vomiting. Picky eaters and kids who wet the bed were given tranquillizers. Kids with tics, stuttering and school phobia were given the tranquillizer Miltown.

But today, ads promoting drugs for kids continue, and now they are aimed at parents. Sometimes, it's hard to tell the difference between ads for drugs or ads for sugary cereals! Pharma tells moms to give their kids the bubble gum-flavored ADHD med, LiquADD and the grape-flavored ADHD med, Methylin. The latter campaign, to parents, is "Give 'em the GRAPE!"

DTC advertising has also convinced parents their kids suffer from GERD (gastroesophageal reflux disease) otherwise known as acid reflux disease, which was barely a disease in adults much less kids, before consumer advertising. "GERD Can Be a Big Problem for Little Kids," say award-winning ads for Prevacid, which won a "RX Club" Silver award in 2004. In Europe, kids are treated for another "adult disease" and given chewable Liptitor to lower their cholesterol.

Some of Pharma's most aggressive advertising has been designed to convince parents their children's minor sniffles or wheezing are imminent asthma and require immediate and expensive drugs. To make the asthma drug Singulair (which also comes in a yummy chewable), the seventh most popular drug in 2010, Merck inked partnerships with the American Academy of Pediatrics and Scholastic, both of which parents consider neutral organizations and not Pharma mouthpieces. Merck also partnered with Olympic gold-medalist swimmer Peter Vanderkaay and NBA kid clubs to sell the asthma drug.

"A kid who's got what your kid's got is out doing what your kid's not," says one Singulair ad campaign. "Find out how you can help your child breathe a little easier."

If Singulair were not harmful, the huckstering would simply be a case of wasting money and overmedicating kids. But Singulair has been linked to both pediatric suicide and to emotional, behavioral and ADHD-like symptoms in kids, the latter likely inspiring parents to give their kids "the grape."

Of course, another kid-targeted campaign is for the vaccine against the sexually transmitted Papillomavirus or HPV, immortalized by Gov. Rick Perry and Rep. Michele Bachmann in hot exchanges this fall. Many object to the sexualizing of 9-year-olds, to government lining Pharma's pockets by promoting the vaccine (including overseas) and to the risks of the vaccines themselves. But the ads for Gardasil and Cervarix are also offensive.

Last spring, poster-sized ads for Gardasil on Chicago's commuter trains pretended to sell real estate in sought-after neighborhoods. A closer look revealed descriptions of women in those neighborhoods who thought they didn't need the HPV vaccine but did, positioning HPV not only as a general risk to the population, like flu, rather than an STD but as "hip."

HPV vaccine ads got even cooler when GSK rolled out Cervarix extravaganza TV ads and its "armed against cervical cancer" campaign with an Angelina Jolie-like model displaying a skinny arm with a Cervarix tattoo.

3. Be Like Me, and Can Your Beer Do This?

Prescription drugs may affect health, but they are still consumer products sold with the same marketing principles as toothpaste or beer. In fact, the wacky, "Can Your Beer Do This?" Miller Lite campaign of the 1990s, came back to life to sell the antidepressant Wellbutrin XR. In a glossy, color magazine ad, a young man rows his girlfriend on a scenic lake and lists the benefits of his Wellbutrin XR. "Can your medicine do all that?" he asks.

What does it say about the success of DTC advertising that people are assumed to have an antidepressant?

Experiential ads also sell prescription drugs like vintage ads for the "Kodak Moment," "Maalox Moment" and the old cigarette ads for the "L&M Moment" did. "Lunesta Sleep. Have You Tried it?" asks a 2007 ad in Parade magazine, elevating the experience to something akin to "designer sleep."

And just as celebrities move other consumer products, they have been deployed to sell prescription drugs. TV personality Joan Lunden and former baseball star Mike Piazza stumped for the allergy pill Claritin, ice skater Dorothy Hamill and track star Bruce Jenner for the pain pill Vioxx, and Sen. Bob Dole for Viagra. NASCAR figure Bobby Labonte also endorsed the antidepressant Wellbutrin XL in 2004. Yes, his medicine could "do all that."

But there has been a problem with celebrity drug endorsements, unlike product endorsements in which a celebrity like Tiger Woods or Martha Stewart could taint a product, a prescription drug can taint a celebrity! Did Dorothy Hamill know that Vioxx doubled the risk of heart attacks in users when she stumped for it? Did the model Lauren Hutton know that hormone replacement therapy causes a 26 percent higher incidence of breast cancer, a 29 percent increase in heart attacks, a 41 percent increase in strokes, and a doubling of the rate of blood clots when she shilled for it? Does actress Sally Field know that bone drugs like Boniva are linked to esophageal cancer, jaw bone death and the very fractures they are supposed to prevent as she pushes them?

Of course, good product marketing includes public relations. When Pharma sells a disease with no mention of the drug it is really selling, it's called "unbranded" advertising. Since DTC advertising, Pharma has invaded public service announcements (PSAs) that TV and radio stations confer for free, pretending their take-a-drug messages serve the public good, like messages to change smoke detector batteries or put kids in car seats.

One such "educational" "awareness" campaign called "Depression Is Real" saturated the radio air waves in 2011, funded by the National Alliance on Mental Illness, which was investigated by Congress for its Pharma funding from Wyeth, part of Pfizer, and other groups. The high-budget ads, running for free, compare depression to diabetes because it doesn't go away and to cancer because it can be fatal.

4. One Kind of Ad You Won't See Anymore

Animal research at drug companies and the National Institutes of Health is a great scientific iceberg of which people only see a tip. In drug development, millions of animals die to prove a drug's "safety." At academic and medical centers, animal study grants from NIH provide millions to researchers and labs.

As sentiment grows against animal experiments and the government's gigantic National Primate Research Centers (new rules will limit the use of chimpanzees), the research is downplayed and even hidden. But there was a time when Pharma actually flaunted animal research.

"More than a decade of animal research on various animal species has suggested that Librium (chlordiazepozxide HCI) exerts its principal effects on certain key areas of the limbic system," says an ad from the 1970s, showing three monkeys crouching and dangling in cages as assorted experiments are conducted.

An ad for the diet pill Pre-Sate is even worse. It says, "one of the most sophisticated comparative animal studies ever conducted demonstrates direct action on the satiety centers," and shows five photos of cats in experiments. One shows a life-size white cat looking at the camera with a chain around its neck and invasive instrumentation embedded in its skull.

Today's consumers, it seems, wouldn't tolerate ads like these. (Or the experiments behind them.) Why do they tolerate derisive ads about "dog women" and ploys to market pharmaceuticals to kids as if it were candy?

Martha Rosenberg frequently writes about the impact of the pharmaceutical, food and gun industries on public health. Her work has appeared in the Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune and other outlets. Martha Rosenberg's first book, Born With a Junk Food Deficiency: How Flaks, Quacks, and Hacks Pimp the Public Health, will be published by Prometheus Books in April.

© 2012 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/153677/

Hip-Hop Diplomacy? How the State Department Uses Rap to Spread Propaganda Abroad

2012-01-10T01:10:00.001-05:00

By Julianne Escobedo Shepherd, AlterNet

Since 2005, the US State Department has been using hip-hop as a bridge for foreign cultural diplomacy. Operating under the auspices of then-public diplomacy undersecretary Karen Hughes, the “Rhythm Road” program began sending “hip-hop envoys” to, mostly, the Middle East, hoping to promote transnational understanding through music and dance.

Al-Jazeera ran an excellent piece on the program this week, which begins with this quote from Hillary Clinton in 2010: “Hip-hop is America,” she told CBS—certainly a true statement, but not one anyone would have expected to hear before the Obama adminstration, even from culturally savvy Bill Clinton, whose most famous exchange with hip-hop was when he accused Sistah Souljah of reverse racism.

And while President Obama has done a good job of finally welcoming into the White House the most important musical movement of the last 35 years (both culturally and commercially), his olive branch to the culture has been met with controversy. Most recently, right wingers expressed outrage over his invitation to rather innocuous rapper Common on poetry night, with Sean Hannity wrongly painting him as a controversial "cop-killer"—an absurd assertion to anyone who listens to his music.

The aforementioned Al-Jazeera piece, which chronicles hip-hop's relatively new embrace within the state department, also discuss the music's role in the Arab Spring, which was declared "le printemps des rappeurs" by the French and thought to be a spark in both Syria and Tunisia. Of course, hip-hop's role cannot be quantified in those instances, and in Morocco and Algeria—where hip-hop enjoys a vast audience—there has been no revolution. Al-Jazeera blames the enthusiasm of Western media to lionize hip-hop's role in actual revolutions on their idea that "a taste for hip hop among young Muslims is a sign of moderation, modernity, even 'an embrace of the US.'"

Yet regardless of its impact on the revolutions—something that's impossible to gauge—rap has spread everywhere. The State Department is using hip-hop as a diplomatic concern in an effort to piggyback and control it, yet hip-hop has already been its own diplomat. Notoriously begun in the South Bronx of New York in the mid 1970s, flourishing despite urban blight and extreme disenfranchisement by the government, as it grew as a phenomenon its spirit resonated across the world. Nearly every country across the globe has its own interpretation of hip-hop—Russia, Denmark, and Turkey, as well as Tunisia and Morocco and Algeria—and not just because it conveyed cool cache. The rebellious notion of it, and the fact that it's a really effective way to express political malcontent, translates across cultures and languages (Public Enemy's rise to global popularity in the late 1980s certainly had a hand in it.)

And, quantifiable or no, the Arab Spring was not the first time protests have been inextricable from hip-hop. For instance, in 2006, after the banlieues of Paris erupted in response to rampant anti-immigration and racist sentiment in France, President Sarkozy blamed what he called "ruffians" but some of whom were, in fact, rappers who spoke against him. (Take Alibi Montana and Menace Crew's "Monsieur Sarkozy," and feel free to read my 2006 article on the topic in SPIN magazine.)

The State Department's actions mirror its efforts during the Cold War, when they dispatched prominent jazz musicians to counter Soviet propaganda about life in America. The Al-Jazeera piece brings up that this program sends Muslim hip-hop artists, in particular, to Muslim-majority countries to discuss their experience in the United States. It also points out the irony in the concept of using hip-hop in foreign diplomacy, when rap has been blamed for America’s worst aspects for so long. But clearly, rank hypocrisy is embedded in the program: the true rap voices of American youth have long been maligned by the government—and if the government expended more effort helping the blighted and impoverished black communities most of it comes from, it wouldn't be so reviled there. Further, there's the institutional existence of "hip-hop cops"—state-organized task forces within police departments created especially to target rap's high-profile stars—which have plagued the genre since the mid-1980s.

But first, some history. During the Cold War, the jazz musicians who went out in the name of American diplomacy were world-famous, like Dizzie Gillespie. This initiative doesn't parallel that--the groups it sends are generally unknown among hip-hop fans, despite many American rappers being both political and popular. For instance, Legacy, one of the groups in the program, is a four-person, live instrumental hip-hop crew, and while their pedigrees certainly guarantee an underground audience (they are all trained professionals, and have played mostly with jazz ensembles), that probably wouldn’t have much cache among most US hip-hop consumers.

The program's site explains that the groups are chosen for their "artistic integrity, music ability and educational skills." They're also painting a portrait of acceptance and cultural understanding in America that is counteracted daily by reports of physical violence against Muslims.

Plus, as Al-Jazeera points out, most hip-hop artists American Muslim youth respect are, too, making anti-capitalist, anti-regime statements, including Lupe Fiasco, Mos Def, Talib Kweli (the latter three have given support to Occupy), as well as Philadelphia legend Freeway.

Enlisting these or any number of Muslim rappers—who enmesh their religion with their lyrics—would make more sense from the cultural standpoint of a hip-hop fan, though clearly not an ambassadorship one.

And as for the "society-ruining" rap music that people like Hannity and Bill O'Reilly constantly harp on—nothing would curtail hard rap quicker than if the government ended the drug war, whose racist policies have ruined the lives of so many young black men that discontent is inherent. (And you have to wonder what the State Department would make of Shyne, the immensely popular Diddy associate who, after spending nine years in prison for a 2001 shooting, emerged an Orthodox Jew and began showing support for Zionist spy Jonathan Pollard.)

But nuance is not the most questionable part of this program. It’s the absurd idea that it exists, when other branches of the government—the FBI in collusion with the NYPD in particular—have been so adamant about profiling (and taking down) well-recognized stars of the genre. The “hip-hop cops” are also known as the “rap task force,” and their existence solely for the surveillance of rappers’ movements has deepened the mistrust of police within hip-hop (and young blacks and Latinos by extension).

Certainly some well-known rappers have been involved in illegal activities and have even made millions off of bragging about them (50 Cent, who began his career as a crack dealer and was shot nine times before his career skyrocketed, is probably the best known example). Nevertheless, the purpose of monitoring rappers has echoes of COINTELPRO. For years, the existence of the hip-hop cops was rumored in New York (though the LAPD involvement with the murder of the Notorious BIG suggests it spread elsewhere). Bronx rapper Fat Joe told MTV in 2005:

"It's definitely a task force," Fat Joe said. "You go to hip-hop spots now and they ain't just your normal walking-the-beat cops. There's cops out there in undercover cars like they know something we don't know. Like bin Laden's in the club, B."

Some may have thought it a paranoid conceit, but in the mid 2000s, around the time the monitoring seemed to pique, the NYPD was capturing a disproportionate amount of rappers doing minor offenses. The insane amount of times rapper Busta Rhymes has been pulled over for minor traffic infractions alone suggests the force assigned him his own personal detail. Running red lights, talking on the phone, speeding, you name it—more than just garden variety racial profiling, hip-hop was getting busted and the NYPD seemed out for vengeance. In 2007, Lil Wayne was arrested in New York after performing at a show with a hulking police presence. (I was there, covering the show for VIBE magazine, and the amount of cops made it look something like an Occupy protest.) The popular rapper was charged with possession of a gun the police found on his tour bus, and though he denied it was his, the prosecution used a disputed, highly controversial DNA test to link him to it. He spent a year at Riker's Island as a result.

If it felt like the cops were fiending to arrest a high-profile rapper at that show (it did), they might have been. In 2006, Derrick Parker, a former police officer tasked with creating a "Rap Intel" squad, published the book "Notorious C.O.P.," detailing his experience on the NYPD for 20 years—and proving the existence of the Hip-Hop Task Force.

Ironic, no? It would behoove all to look behind the State Department's motives and wonder whether it’s trying to paint a pretty picture abroad, while punishing citizens at home—even now, with a more hip-hop friendly presidency (for the time being).

Julianne Escobedo Shepherd is an associate editor at AlterNet and a Brooklyn-based freelance writer and editor. Formerly the executive editor of The FADER, her work has appeared in VIBE, SPIN, New York Times and various other magazines and websites.

© 2012 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/153662/

America Is Getting More Power from Renewables than From Nuclear - And It's About Fucking Time

2012-01-09T01:49:00.005-05:00

from GOOD.is

Despite the economic slowdown and the absence of any groundbreaking climate policy, renewable energy had a good year in the United States in 2011. According to the latest report from the Energy Information Administration, the government’s keeper of all energy-related facts, renewables grew at a record pace and squeaked out of last place in the country’s energy generation standings. In the first nine months of the year, renewables accounted for 11.95 percent of domestic energy production, pulling ahead of nuclear power, which contributed only 10.62 percent.

When you look at the electricity sector alone, renewables shine even brighter. Nuclear’s share of electricity generation dropped by 2.8 percent compared to the first nine months of 2010, while coal’s share dropped by 4.2 percent. In the same period, renewables’ share of electricity generation grew almost 25 percent.

Renewables’ big bump comes is attributable in part to its relatively small share of electricity generation overall. But the continuing success of renewable energy also points to its dynamism compared to energy sources like nuclear plants—which take years to build, require heavy investments at the beginning of their lifetime, and often face strong community opposition. While the price per unit of renewable energy has been dropping steadily, the price per unit nuclear energy has been sneaking upward.

Some supporters of renewables do see a role for nuclear energy in a low-carbon future. It is, after all, clean energy, and it poses little risk to human life and health compared to coal power. The nuclear industry is looking for different ways to build plants—new designs use nuclear waste for fuel, for instance, and plans for "mini-reactors" could make nuclear power a less-intimidating investment.

Nuclear power, though, is stuck between its past and its future; renewable energy is thriving now, and its share of power generation should continue to grow over the coming decades. For the foreseeable future, that trend might require support from the government: If Congress decides to keep rolling back subsidies, the solar and wind industry worry that growth could stall out. But private financiers are starting to realize that solar installations are strong investments that deliver steady, predictable profits, and the solar industry is starting to envision a time when its momentum won’t depend on the whims of Washington.

Right now, an agency like the EIA groups all renewables together under the same heading, and last-generation technologies like hydro power and biomass are helping to boost upstarts like wind and solar into the big leagues. But these newer energy sources are growing steadily. The larger the contribution they’re making to the country’s power, the more seriously policymakers and investors will have to take them.

Public domain WPA posters from the Library of Congress

2012-01-08T01:18:00.003-05:00

The Library of Congress just posted a Flickr set of WPA posters.

WPA Posters

Go here: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/wp... for high resolution images for a lot of WPA posters

thanks, http://boingboing.net

Obliteration Room: a stark white room with thousands of kid-placed colored dots

2012-01-07T02:12:00.004-05:00

from BoingBoing:

(Image: GoMA Blog)

Yayoi Kusama's installation The Obliteration Room at the Brisbane Gallery of Modern Art started as a stark white room, and then thousands of passing children were given brightly colored dots with which to decorate it. The result is exuberant and marvellous.

(Image: Stuart Addelsee)

This is What Happens When You Give Thousands of Stickers to Thousands of Kids

2011: A Year in Revolt !

2012-01-06T00:42:00.006-05:00

from OccupyWallStreet.org January 1st, 2012

2011 will be remembered as a year of revolution, the beginning of the end for an unsustainable global system based on poverty, oppression, and violence. In dozens of countries across the Arab world, people rose up against broken economies and oppressive regimes, toppling dictators and inspiring the world to action. Popular rejection of austerity measures and attacks on worker's rights brought millions to the streets in Greece, Iceland, Spain, Portugal, Italy, the UK, Chile, Wisconsin and elsewhere.

By midsummer, murmurs of "occupying Wall Street” were stirring online, and on July 14th, we registered the domain occupywallst.org and began organizing. The first New York City General Assembly was held August 2nd and the Occupation of Liberty Square began on September 17th.

Fueled by anger at the growing disparities between rich and poor, frustrated by government policies that benefit a tiny elite at the expense of the majority, and tired of the establishment’s failure to address fundamental economic inequalities, OWS offered a new solution. We built a People’s Kitchen to feed thousands, opened a People’s Library, created safer spaces, and provided free shelter, bedding, medical care, and other necessities to anyone who needed them. While cynics demanded we elect leaders and make demands on politicians, we were busy creating alternatives to those very institutions. A revolution has been set in motion, and we cannot be stopped.

As the mainstream media ignored us, we learned from other leaderless resistance movements in places like Tunisia, Egypt, and Iran to use social media and live video streaming to spread our message. We are part of a global movement that has radically democratized how information is created and shared, rendering centralized, corporate-funded mainstream media increasingly irrelevant. The rapid exchange of information allowed us to make collective decisions quickly, discuss information and ideas across the globe, mobilize effective direct actions, and document police brutality. Now more than ever, when we chant “The Whole World Is Watching!” it is not an idle threat.

Today, tens of thousands of everyday people are putting ideals like solidarity, mutual aid, anti-oppression, autonomy, and direct democracy into practice. Individuals are joining together in city-wide General Assemblies and autonomous affinity groups. Through consensual, non-hierarchical and participatory self-governance, we are literally laying the framework for a new world by building it here and now -- and it works.

The rest is history. In honor of a new year, here is a run-down of what we accomplished since then. It would be impossible to list every action or mention every place an Occupation has occurred. But let us start a new year by celebrating a few highlights of our victories -- along with a sneak preview of what's to come!

SEPT 17: We Occupied Wall Street.

Over two thousand people descended on Manhattan’s financial district with one goal: to Occupy. We brought tents and gave our new home (Zuccotti Park) a new name: Liberty Square.

SEPT 24: We exposed the violent underpinnings of economic inequality for all to see.

Foreshadowing events to come, over 80 people were violently arrested returning from a peaceful march on Union Square. Video of unprovoked police pepper-spraying protesters went viral, unmasking the brutality necessary for the perpetuation of social and economic inequality. Thousands marched on the NYPD headquarters to express outrage, and the world began to take notice.

SEPT 28-ONGOING: More workers and oppressed communities began to join in solidarity.

Early in the Occupation, OWS had shown support for many causes, including postal workers struggling for better conditions. On Sept. 28th, the Transport Workers Union Local-100 voted to support OWS and encouraged their members to show up. Since then, we’ve received tremendous support from local unions like the American Federation of Teachers and pilots, as well as rank-and-file workers like port truck drivers on the West Coast. On Dec. 1st, we responded to a call from the NYC Central Labor Council to march for jobs and a fair economy, and on Dec. 2nd, OWS marched with farmers to call for food justice. Economists, writers, and musicians have all supported us. We've also been joined by students, immigrants, African-American church leaders, transgender liberation activists, Native individuals and First Nations like the Indigenous People's Council, incarcerated prison hunger strikers, veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and countless other oppressed communities struggling to improve their living conditions under an unfair economic and political structure.

SEPT 29-ONGOING: The Occupation grew and spread across the globe.

Protesters in San Francisco began to occupy their own financial district. New memes (“We are the 99%!”) spread rapidly. “Occupy” itself was taken, adapted, and reinvented across the world. Occupy Wall Street became Occupy All Streets. Occupy groups and actions formed on every continent, in over one thousand cities in over 70 countries, and in all 50 U.S. States plus the District of Columbia. To date, at least 5,748 people have been arrested for Occupying. Camps and protests have appeared and survived in the biggest cities and the most rural towns. Although it would be nearly impossible to compile an exhaustive list of every place where Occupations and solidarity actions have taken place, it’s safe to say we are everywhere.

OCT 1: We took the Brooklyn Bridge and inspired the world to Occupy.

Over 5,000 people marched to the Brooklyn Bridge. Police enclosed protesters in netting and arrested around 800. Days later, 15,000 demonstrators marched from Foley Square to Liberty Square. After nightfall, NYPD again responded violently by pepper-spraying bystanders and using kettling nets. The next day, thousands marched in Portland, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Tampa, Houston, Austin, Salt Lake City, and elsewhere and began to Occupy Together.

OCT 10-25: We showed determination during the first wave of eviction attempts.

140 were arrested at Occupy Boston. On Oct. 25th, hundreds of police moved to evict Occupy Oakland using an arsenal of teargas, beanbag rounds, and rubber bullets, arresting 85. A Marine and Iraq War veteran was left in critical condition after being shot directly in the head with a teargas canister. The growing movement responded quickly. In New York, OWS marched near Union Square. Nearly 100 people were arrested in Portland, Austin, and Denver, where police fired pepper spray pellets to disperse Occupiers. Nevertheless, new Occupations continued to pop up.

OCT 15: We contributed to a global movement for economic justice.

Thousands in NYC marched to Times Square in a Global Day of Action. Protesters from small towns like Ashland, KY and Ketchum, ID joined with other U.S. cities like Des Moines and Dallas. Globally, protesters stormed financial districts in Amsterdam, Athens, Auckland, Mumbai, Tokyo, Seoul, Ottawa, Sydney, London, and Johannesburg. One million people marched in Barcelona and Madrid alone. Hundreds of thousands marched in Rome and Valencia, and tens of thousands marched in Berlin, Zagreb, Brussels, Lisbon and Porto. In Latin America, the largest Occupations took place in Buenos Aires, Porto Alegre, Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, Santiago, Bogota, San Jose, Quito, Mexico City, Lima, and Montevideo.

OCT 16-ONGOING: We altered mainstream political discourse.

Recognizing how well our message resonated, the political establishment tried to co-opt our movement and use our slogans for political gain. On Oct. 16th, President Obama claimed to “work for the 99%.” During the last week of October, mainstream media mentioned “income inequality” more than five times more often than during the week before the Occupation began. On Nov. 10th, a media analysis company announced "occupy" had become the "most commonly used English word on the internet and in print." Time Magazine named “the protester” its Person of the Year. In 2011, we made General Assembly a household term.

NOV 2: We organized the first General Strike in the United States since 1946.

Occupy Oakland spearheaded a General Strike and shut down the Port of Oakland. Over 100,000 people marched in solidarity. The next day, riot police attacked with flash bang grenades and tear gas. Over 100 were arrested, and another Iraq veteran was seriously wounded.

NOV 5: We hit the bankers where it counts: their wallets.

OWS supported Bank Transfer Day by protesting outside major banks and financial institutions. Over 600,000 people switched from banks to nonprofit community credit unions.

NOV 9-22: We walked hundreds of miles to share the message of justice.

On Nov. 9th, a group of Occupiers left Liberty Square for Washington, D.C. to protest President Obama’s tax cuts for the 1%. Weeks later, the “Walkupiers” arrived in D.C. to a warm welcome and massive media presence.

NOV 15: We survived the violent eviction of Liberty Square.

Mayor Bloomberg’s private army attacked our home. Around 1AM, police moved in a horrific display of force, using LRAD sound cannons and bloodying protesters with batons in the middle of the night. Journalists were barred. Over 5,000 donated books from The People’s Library were wantonly destroyed, along with many Occupiers’s personal possessions. A New York City councilmember was among those arrested. Occupiers in D.C. held a sit-in at the offices of Brookfield Properties, “owners” of Liberty Square. Soon after, Occupiers in Seattle were attacked with pepper-spray and there were hundreds of Occupy-related arrests in Portland, Berkeley, San Francisco, St. Louis, and Los Angeles. We remained nonviolent through it all.

NOV 17: We persevered, fought back harder, and triumphantly returned to the Bridge stronger than ever.

Two days after the Liberty eviction, we held perhaps the largest OWS action to date. In the morning, Occupiers blockaded every entrance to the New York Stock Exchange. A retired Philadelphia Police Captain stood in solidarity and was arrested by NYPD along with hundreds. Over 30,000 people, including organized students and labor unions, marched around Liberty, Union, and Foley Squares before walking across the Brooklyn Bridge. Occupations in Portland, Milwaukee, Seattle, Los Angeles, Detroit, Miami, Chicago, Philadelphia, St. Louis, D.C., Hartford, Houston, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Great Falls, Minneapolis, Kalamazoo, Augusta, Saginaw, Cleveland, Richmond, Iowa City, and more marched on key bridges in solidarity with the Liberty Square Occupiers. In New York, students at the New School established a 24/7 occupation. Solidarity actions also took place across the world in Canada, Japan, the U.K., Spain, Germany, Greece, and more.

NOV 18-ONGOING: In the face of police brutality and disproportional force, we adapted.

Riot police nonchalantly pepper-sprayed a line of UC-Davis students holding a peaceful sit-down. The image went viral, viscerally capturing the state's attitude toward nonviolent resistance. The pattern of police violence and midnight raids continued in dozens of cities: Seattle, Portland, Oakland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Denver, Minneapolis, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Newark, Boston, Atlanta, Montreal, Amsterdam, and beyond. But we learned to evolve as the circumstances change, proving that “Occupy Will Never Die, Evict Us -- We Multiply!” Evicted Occupations continued to hold General Assemblies and maintain busy calendars with daily meetings, events, workshops, teach-ins, marches, direct actions, and demonstrations at their local city hall, bank branch, corporate office, and courts. Some moved indoors, some took over bank-owned homes, some slept in churches, some held 24/7 vigils at their Occupation with no tents to avoid city ordinances, and dozens still maintain physical occupations with tents -- but all of us kept organizing. Our new slogan became: You cannot evict an idea whose time has come.

Occupiers in DC liberated the empty, city-owned Franklin School. In blatant disregard for social services and popular will, the former homeless shelter was slated to become a condo or hotels for the 1% lobbyists on K Street. Before massive police repression, Occupiers had already planned public forums to decide how to put the building to use. There are more empty houses than homeless people in the United States. After the greedy speculation of Wall Street bankers created a housing crisis for their own huge profits, we helped revive many hardest-hit communities by turning vacant buildings into livable, productive,and life-saving resources for those most in need. In London, Seattle, Oakland, Chapel Hill, Portland, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Atlanta, Boston and many other places, we continued to occupy bank-owned buildings and turned them into social centers.

NOV 24: We demonstrated new ways of supporting ourselves and each other.

On "Thanksgiving" in the U.S., instead of supporting colonialist holidays, we gave thanks for our spirit of compassion by continuing to provide for our collective needs. In NYC, Occupiers gathered in Liberty Square to share dinner. The People's Kitchen made food to feed thousands, while Occupy the Hood distributed meals throughout Brooklyn, Harlem, and the Bronx, as well as the New School Occupation and Occupiers staying in Far Rockaway. From Oakland to Boston, Occupations sat down for meals and took part in actions in solidarity with First Nations and Native Americans. In Philly and other places, we began to turn vacant lots into small farms for public use to feed their communities. Occupy Boston, Occupy DC, and many other cities hosted "Really Really Free Markets" to share goods with whomever needs them, proving that another world -- and an economy where we take care of one another’s needs instead of corporate profits -- is possible.

NOV 25: We perfected the People’s Mic.

What began as a creative way to avoid NYPD amplification restrictions became an excellent tool for organizing. From making announcements to redirecting marches, 2011 was the year of the mic check. The People’s Mic has been used countless times to confront 1%ers and corrupt politicians. It was used in New Hampshire to interrupt President Obama, in Iowa to call out Newt Gingrich, and in L.A. to voice popular dissent at City Council meetings. But on Black Friday, the People’s Mic was perfected. Occupiers used it to occupy Wal-Marts and other large retailers in dozens of cities like El Paso, Kansas City, San Diego, Atlanta, Oakland, San Francisco, Portland, Chicago and more.

NOV 28: We fought for accessible education.

In response to police violence, a massive General Assembly of University of California-Davis students called for a system-wide strike and announced their intention to shut down campuses where the U.C. Regents were scheduled to vote in favor of extreme service cuts and raised tuitions. Students at the City University of New York -- who had been attacked by police a week prior while protesting tuition hikes -- took over Baruch College and barricaded the building to prevent the Board of Trustees from voting to raise tuition. Outside, hundreds of Occupy CUNY students and their supporters chanted, "Education is a right!" while the New School students continued to Occupy their campus.

DEC 1: We took direct action to support the occupiers of Tahir Square.

In Egypt, the military regime that took power after protesters toppled the Mubarak regime continued to attack and murder protesters fighting for democracy and freedom. Many of those in the streets were the same people who had inspired and supported the original Occupation of Wall Street. In solidarity, Occupiers from Baltimore, Philadelphia, and across the Mid-Atlantic joined with Egyptians here in the U.S. to protest outside a company in rural Pennsylvania that manufactures tear gas canisters that have been sold to Arab governments and used against protesters in places like Tahir Square, Cairo. OWS has also protested in front of Egyptian consulates in New York and elsewhere.

DEC 6: We took direct action against foreclosures by putting mutual aid into practice.

During and after our Day of Action, we occupied homes and prevented foreclosures and evictions. In L.A., Atlanta, Bremerton, Reno, New Orleans and beyond, Occupiers disrupted foreclosure auctions. Occupiers foreclosed on bank offices in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose, Buffalo and elsewhere. In cities like New York, Atlanta, Detroit, Chicago, Fort Lauderdale, Rochester, Cleveland, Oakland, and Philadelphia, we helped homeless, poor, working- and-middle class, low-income families and families of color, people who had been foreclosed on, and veterans move into empty, bank-owned homes.

DEC 7: We exposed the corruption of money in politics.

Thousands of Occupiers shut down K Street in Washington, DC -- home of the Wall Street lobbyists who control the politicians. Hundreds were arrested for laying down in the intersection of 14th St NW & K St. From there, we marched through freezing winds to the White House chanting "Occupy Wall Street, Occupy K Street, Occupy EVERYWHERE and NEVER give it back!" and "Rain, sleet, ice, or snow -- Occupy will never go!" Later, more people were arrested on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court while decrying the government’s collusion with the 1% through acts like the ruling on corporate personhood in Citizen’s United.

DEC 12: We shut down the ports.

In response to the government's coordinated effort to suppress our movement, we organized a multi-city effort of our own. Nonviolent blockades and other actions occurred at ports in Long Beach, San Diego, Oakland, Portland, Seattle, Vancouver, Anchorage, and more. Occupy Houston shut down their port on the Gulf of Mexico, while land-locked Occupy Denver rallied outside a massive Wal-Mart distribution center. Occupy Bellingham nonviolently shut down rail ways used to transport goods from the ports. In New York, OWS picketed the headquarters of Goldman Sachs and flash mobbed the World Financial Center. Solidarity actions also took place in Anchorage, Tacoma, Chicago, Tokyo, and elsewhere.

DEC 17: We celebrated our 3-month anniversary.

Since the eviction of Liberty Square, many homeless Occupiers had been sleeping on the street or in local churches. On Dec. 17th, OWS attempted to re-occupy a new home in Duarte Square, an empty lot in Manhattan owned by one of these churches -- Trinity Church on Wall Street. Thousands showed up in solidarity, and we received tremendous support from religious leaders.

DEC 18: We marched in solidarity with immigrants and economic refugees.

On the International Day of Migrants, OWS and members of the immigrant community marched to Foley Square to demand an end to wage theft, detentions, and deportation, and to support the rights of economic refugees and immigrants. Occupiers rallied outside an ICE Detention Center in Birmingham, Alabama. Actions in solidarity with migrant justice also took place in cities and Occupations across the world.

DEC 31: We celebrated the New Year.

After demonstrations to abolish the prison-industrial complex took place in dozens of cities across the U.S. and more throughout the Europe and South America, we took back the place where it all started -- Liberty Square -- to bring in the New Year. Occupiers danced on top of the barricades the police had tried to use to keep us out of OUR park, and at least 68 were arrested. Occupiers in dozens of other cities also held events to celebrate the beginning of 2012.

2012: We are getting ready.

The spontaneous, leaderless qualities of our movement give us strength. The future is unwritten, and the possibilities boundless. In 2012, Occupiers everywhere will continue to show the strength of the people united. We will keep fighting back against attacks from the 1% and governments. Here is a mere "teaser trailer" for some of the actions that are in the works:

We continue to Occupy the Iowa Caucuses by occupying campaign offices of Presidential candidates to remind the world that the "liberal/conservative, Democrat/Republican dichotomy is a distraction from the real social conflict undergriding American society: the 99 percent versus the 1 percent."
Today, OWS in New York will protest the "indefinite detention" authorized by the National Defense Authorization Act
Also today, Occupy Atlanta will disrupt another foreclosure auction, and then rally against the death penality in honor of Troy Davis, namesake of their main encampment.
On Jan. 17th, we will Occupy Congress.
On Jan. 20th, Occupy San Francisco will retake the financial district.
On April 7th, Occupy Chicago will launch a "spring offensive" along with Occupations across the globe.
On May 1st, the world will be watching...

And in 2012 YOU can become a part of the solution or remain part of the problem...

Actualizing an Idea (An interview with Henry Rollins)

2012-01-05T01:00:00.002-05:00

from Paradigm Magazine

Growing up in Northeast Ohio as an awkward teenager, I found myself at odds with my high school contemporaries. Filled with angst and nowwhere to belong, many teenagers try to escape their lives through legal and illegal activities. My escape was skateboarding and punk rock. I was first introduced to Henry Rollins by a close friend, who handed me a stack of CD’s, everything from Minor Threat to Black Flag to Tiger Army and Refused … After listening to those albums, culturally, politically, aesthetically, morally, things changed for me. It was my aha moment; in that instant I felt that I belonged. Ten years later, as I added a bit more “mileage” and life experience, the words of my childhood heroes became clear. Since my youth, I have actively followed Henry’s work across many art forms; music, film, spoken word, and literature. Henry is a true legend, an individual who exemplifies my belief in living a full life without limits or boundaries, it is a great honor and pleasure to have had the opportunity to interview him. Paradigm Magazine would like to thank Glen E. Friedman for the use of his photograph and Shepard Fairey for the use of his art. Their generosity of spirit continues to inspire.

Introduction & Interview by Theo Constantinou

Thoreau was quoted saying, “I have never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will.” Henry, I have heard you speak many times on solidarity and loneliness can you delve deeper into your own personal reasons for being a ‘solitary man’.

A lot of my work requires that I be alone. I don’t do much collaborative work and usually only find myself involved in it for employment purposes. I was raised as an only child. I worked after school most of the time. I knew a few people in my neighborhood, like Ian MacKaye, who has been my best friend since I was twelve or thirteen. I like people but they are painful and not easy for me to understand. I like them in person but I like them better on records, on film or in photos. I travel all over the world on my own for months at a time and don’t really get lonely. I don’t “miss” anyone. I have never thought of getting married and don’t want a girlfriend. I just want to work and go as far and as wide as I can. Companionship doesn’t matter to me. I am thankful for the few people I know but they are enough, actually, probably more than I can handle.

Henry, you have been making music, performing spoken word, doing radio shows, hosting television programs, basically constantly working since your teenage years. I read this quote by Joseph Conrad that says, “I don’t like work… but I like what is in work – the chance to find yourself. Your own reality – for yourself, not for others – which no other man can ever know.” Can you talk more about how you’ve found yourself by working for the past 25 years?

Work is how I identify myself. It’s how and where I find myself. It’s how I get through time. I don’t enjoy life. I do life. I am an Americanist. Every moment I am alive is because I have not been murdered by the America. Work and an appreciation of art, be it music or painting, or whatever other form you want to mention—are what makes life possible for me. Otherwise, it’s a flat line. The tasks I set out for myself are what I do to beat the perfect pointlessness of life. I build my own wheel and run on it.

When Ernest Hemingway won the Nobel Peace Prize he sent a speech to be read in his absence … Here is an excerpt, “Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer’s loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.” … Do you find this to be true as a performer and do you find yourself facing eternity each day, alone?

Well, he did read it. I have a recording of him reading it. He had very unique phrasing.
Listen to the Banquet Speech by Ernest Hemingway (excerpt)
I usually find myself facing the lack of it. I live in a very immediate environment. I have a daily schedule that is very coordinated, very stacked. I don’t think much past a few hours until things have settled down and then when I can, I think about what’s coming up, a tour or a trip I am about to leave on. Past that, I don’t think about ten years later. Well, sometimes I do, when I am trying to do some time management. I reckon I have a few years left to be able to get something of worth from the books I want to read. That window closes a little every day. I am trying to get a lot done.

I had a conversation a few weeks ago with Todd Carmichael, co-founder and owner of La Colombe, we were talking about one single question about life & knowing oneself. Who are you? So I ask, who is Henry Rollins?

I am my itinerary. I am the next thing I plan for myself; the next trip, book project, tour—the next opportunity to actualize an idea. That’s all I am.

There was this interview you did with this kid from Michigan and he was completely unprepared … He asked you if you ever got the feeling that LA was dead and you said that it’s not as dead as some peoples’ minds. In today’s world with real-time updates from Facebook, Twitter & the Blogosphere, it feels like people have lost their desire for mind expansion and thought provoking material. Even the questions people ask in interviews are completely useless and mind-numbing. And I’ll quote you from that interview but why in today’s society or just in general do people become completely ‘complacent’. Can you speak a bit more on your early days in Black Flag and what it truly meant to be DIY punk band, and the idea that if you weren’t on the road performing, you weren’t eating?

Black Flag’s world was very small. Small rooms, small vans, small backstage areas, close proximity to each other, small plans, etc. Food, shows, women, sleep, money to get to the next place and to keep the band happening, that’s about all there was in our world. It kept me very in-the-moment as they say. If you see a dog looking for scraps, the dog is very awake, processing each inhalation, every movement had intent behind it, that was what being in that band was all about. We were very hungry, angry and hopeless. In short, unstoppable. Normal people seemed somewhat not all the way plugged in, or perhaps insulated from life.

Do you really believe that if you ever let anyone close to you that there truly wouldn’t be anything there?

With me, there’s just ideas, schedules, strategy, tactic and objective. That’s really not what your girlfriend wants to hear about. Another thing not to do is almost forget she’s there, it’s unbecoming. It is, at this point, impossible for me to be with a woman and connect on any level beyond platonic, intellectual or physical. Past that, I am a room sparsely outfitted with broken items.

In the ‘Man Test’ video you did, you spoke about the one time in your life when you were in love and how it was one of the most two most powerful experiences of your life. What was the second experience? And did that love last and if not, can you speak on the pain of loss and dealing with that pain? When things ended with my last girlfriend, I asked my father for some advice and he told me to read this poem, Walls by Constantine Cavafy. It was funny that the poem was named ‘Walls” because for the first time in ages I had let my walls down and it made me realize how I had built a different kind of blind love wall around the world I was living in … Do you feel like you have built walls around your own-self knowingly or do you feel walls are created from life’s experience and the power they offer oneself in psychological protection?

I have loved a few women in my life. It never lasted. Either I couldn’t hold on or they saw that I was distant and I wasn’t going to get closer than I was at that moment, which probably wasn’t close, and they would split. A woman I was going out with about ten years ago got killed when I was on tour. That slowed me down and pushed me further away from all that.

Capt. Willard’s quote from Apocalypse Now captures how I feel about all that very well:

“I’d wake up and there’d be nothing. I hardly said a word to my wife, until I said “yes” to a divorce. When I was here, I wanted to be there; when I was there, all I could think of was getting back into the jungle. I’m here a week now… waiting for a mission… getting softer. Every minute I stay in this room, I get weaker, and every minute Charlie squats in the bush, he gets stronger. Each time I looked around the walls moved in a little tighter.“

The other powerful experience would be when my friend Joe Cole was killed next to me. The guy shot at me twice and missed. I don’t know why I am still here. One bullet went into the door jamb next to my left side, heart level. A few inches over and things would have perhaps concluded much differently than they did. The next morning, I cleaned up the parts of my friend off the lawn that the city didn’t take. I don’t know if you come back all the way from something like that. It changes you.

I just did an interview with a good friend of mine mine, Mikael Kennedy … He said, “Death is always on my mind, I recently learned of the Trappists Monks of Algeria, who have a vow of silence other than when they pass each other during the day, they are only allowed to say “Remember death”. To be aware of the end makes every moment up to it so much more important. All things comes to an end, it is what gives them their value.” Are you always remembering death and do you believe that the temporary nature of every moment truly gives those moments their value?

I don’t think of death in an obsessive way, I don’t think I do. I am more interested in what I am doing and what I want to do. I don’t see the value of partitioning your hard drive to accommodate a constant awareness of death. It’s the one, single thing that is going to happen to you, so while I wouldn’t suggest running in front of speeding trains, I would not lose too much sleep on the one thing that is unavoidable. I think about time spent well more than anything.

Henry you once said, “I am an optimist because I want to change things for the better and I know that blood has to be spilled and disharmony and cruelty are necessary to do that.” … When I read this it immediately triggered thoughts on today Occupy movement. Do you think today’s youth are being effective for bringing change for the better with their peaceful protests or do you really think disharmony needs to be created for them.

It’s not necessarily mean that I am looking to spill someone’s blood. Who is injuring whom at Occupy sites? It’s the police who are suppressing people’s First Amendment rights by beating on them, spraying them. That’s what cops do. Unfortunately for these cops, all they do is create more Occupy people. Like when Marines shoot Taliban and Al Qaeda, they just make more. Same with Israelis shooting Palestinians. You better kill them all because you are making more, all over the world. The chickens of unregulated capitalism have come home to roost and there will be some changes. Some people are not going to like what they get. What the Occupy people need to do now is get onto the next phase. All they are doing now is getting their heads caved in to maintain a tent. Now they have to get some legislation moving. They need an MLK type, an objective and a strategy to get it across. I suggest that they get the money out of elections. A billion dollars to be president is pathetic. They now know they have people’s ear, these people want something else than what they’re getting. They have to reach for it. The camping thing was a good start but it can’t end there. They have forced the cops to act like cowards. The Occupy people have won. Now that they have the infantry, they need to march them somewhere.

My photo of Henry from The Idealist up top, and collaboration with Shepard Fairey above. Photo of Henry in India 2011 by Kris Denton

Shit [some] Vegans Say

2012-01-04T01:36:00.004-05:00

Who says Vegans don't have a sense of humor?

"World Peace" and pro basketball?

2012-01-03T02:08:00.001-05:00

For Metta World Peace, a New Name and Outlook

From the New York Times By HOWARD BECK — World Peace is possible. Just check the box score.

World Peace is there, between Blake and Murphy. On many nights, World Peace can be heard echoing across South Figueroa Street in downtown Los Angeles.

In this holiday season, World Peace is in the air. But only when he jumps.

The locals are still getting used to the phenomenon.

In September, Ron Artest — the Lakers’ burly, quirky, unfailingly unpredictable forward — legally changed his name to Metta World Peace. The first name is a Buddhist term meaning “loving kindness.” The last name is self-explanatory. The intent is noble — the jokes and puns irresistible.

“Give World Peace a chance,” read a Los Angeles Times headline Sept. 24, a week after the name change was stamped as official.

The name also leads to unfortunate assertions, such as a recent story claiming that “World Peace certainly wasn’t winning over many fans” in the preseason. They seem to have come around, gleefully chanting, “We want World Peace!” during a game at Staples Center earlier this week.

This is, more or less, what Artest intended when he made the change: to make the public, unwittingly or consciously, seriously or in jest, consider the concept.

“If you look at a young kid and you tell them, would they love world peace? They would definitely tell you yeah,” he said Thursday after the Lakers’ shootaround. “But as we get older, we change and we adjust to our environment. And we don’t think about little things anymore. But kids love, they love other kids. They love world peace.”

Kids may also love World Peace, although so far he has not seen many wearing the new jersey yet.

Because, he noted, “I’ve had a lot of jerseys” and “people are getting tired of buying my jersey.”

(For the record, World Peace will cost you $49.99 at the N.B.A.’s online store.)

In a statement released in September, Artest explained, “Changing my name was meant to inspire and bring youth together all around the world.”

It probably sounded curious, coming from a tough, notoriously hard-nosed enforcer. But the World Peace of today is not the Ron Artest who ignited the infamous brawl between the Detroit Pistons and the Indiana Pacers in 2004. He worries Laker fans with his shot selection, but rarely with his behavior.

Last spring, Artest was ejected (and later suspended) for striking Dallas’s J. J. Barea in the face with a forearm. But he has generally steered clear of fights, flagrant fouls, technical fouls and controversy for the last several years. On more than one occasion, he has even played, ahem, peacemaker when teammates have tangled with opponents.

Mike Brown has tracked the evolution from a good vantage point, first as a Pacers assistant coach when Artest was still Artest and playing for Indiana, and now as the Lakers’ new coach.

“We’re all more mature than what we were back then,” Brown said. “We’re a lot more stable with what our roles are, with what our expectations are. He’s no different than I am.”

That last statement might be a bit of a stretch. But Brown clearly has a special fondness for World Peace, and a respect for the name change, even as others snicker. “I think I try to call him Metta more than anybody else,” Brown said. “I’m like ‘Metta, Metta Metta.’ And then I hear Steve Blake, ‘Hey Ron.’ I hear Kobe: ‘Hey Ron. Hey Ron, hey Ron.’ And it throws me off. So I’m trying. But nobody is helping me.”

World Peace is helping Brown, however. With Lamar Odom gone, World Peace is now anchoring the second unit, averaging 12.3 points.

Back in Queens, friends and family still call him Ron or Ron-Ron. Meanwhile, the name perseveres in two Artest generations — in World Peace’s father and son. “I don’t really have a preference,” World Peace said. “I told the guys don’t feel bad if you call me Ron.”

Even World Peace is adjusting to World Peace, admitting it sounded weird the first time he was introduced.

“Our preseason game they said, ‘World Peace is coming in the game’ and the fans went crazy,” he said.

The Lakers have accommodated their fair share of quirky personalities over the years, from Dennis Rodman to Vladimir Radmanovic to Phil Jackson. But World Peace is presenting a different sort of challenge. Team officials first had to establish whether “World” was his middle name or part of his last name.

So World Peace it is — on the back of his jersey, on his locker stall and every time he is introduced by Lawrence Tanter, the Lakers’ longtime public-address announcer. Tanter said he had practice, having been around when Philadelphia’s Lloyd B. Free legally changed his name to World B. Free, in 1981.

The Lakers’ record-keeping has also been altered.

“The name Ron Artest does not exist in our media guides,” John Black, the Lakers’ spokesman, said.

Artest was still Artest when he helped the Lakers win the 2010 championship. He later auctioned off his championship ring for $500,000 to help raise awareness for mental health, a cause he has championed since the 2010 finals, when he thanked his psychiatrist on national television.

“I think I accomplished a lot already,” World Peace said. “First I accomplished a lot with the mental health, changed lives. And people I don’t even know, I’ve probably changed a lot of lives, too.”

IF 2011 WAS JUST THE BAND TUNING-UP, THEN 2012 IS GOING TO BE QUITE A YEAR

2012-01-02T02:18:00.004-05:00

from our friend Richard Metzger at DangerousMinds

Reading through some of the year-end “summing up” articles appearing around the blogsphere post-Christmas/pre-New Years, there seems to a general consensus—right, left and all parts between—that if 2011 was an “interesting” year, then 2012, with a US presidential election as its centerpiece, should be a real firecracker. This year we had an Arab Spring, full-scale burn-shit-to-the-ground riots in England, a crisis in the Euro-zone, the re-awakening of the labor movement in Wisconsin and Ohio, Occupy Wall Street…yes, it was a, um, novel year, indeed.

We keep hearing that 2012 will = “the next 1968”—but if that’s true, did 2011 = the Summer of Love???

What’s love got to do with it?

Or is there something else entirely going on? (And no, I am not referring to the fucking Mayan Calendar running out, okay? There’ll be none of that around here…)

I think people are simply starting to wake up to which side of the fork they’re on.

And nothing less… That’s a very big deal for mankind, most who would rather not think about such matters.

Even for dummies who only get their “facts” from Fox News or talk radio, enough… ah… “reality” is still slipping through the cracks that it’s becoming harder and harder to remain ignorant of how the financial elites have left the world in economic ruin.

It’s not like you can blame this shit on the unions, illegal aliens or the budget deficit anymore, no matter what Fox News or Rush Limbaugh tells you. That entire worldview is leaking water.

Looking back on 2011, personally, the thing that I found the most astonishing—at least in terms of the media, which is all there really is anymore, right? I mean that in a Lacanian sense and in every other sense, too—is how so many mainstream commentators have taken it upon themselves to crank the rhetoric of “class war” up to 11.

It used to be that—how shall I put this—drumming up support for “the revolution” was not done in polite company. What is today casually said on television (and applauded) could have gotten you blacklisted—or worse—in the 1950s.

Nope, it used to be that unless you went out and looked for, you know, “left wing rhetoric,” it just didn’t come find you. Or you didn’t discover it by accident. And certainly not by accident in your own home. It was something you basically got from sources like ‘zines and punk rock records.

This was true up until fairly recently. This year, however, things changed in a big way and you could see and hear reasonable-seeming people making reasonable-sounding arguments for beheading stock brokers in the opinion pages of the major daily newspapers on cable TV.

Personally, I think it’s about time that, say, Jello Biafra’s politics became mainstream. As far as I am concerned, it’s taken long enough already… but make no mistake about it, it is happening.

There is a particularly good example of what I am talking about written by novelist and financial reporter, Michael Thomas and published at Newsweek/The Daily Beast. Thomas is no wide-eyed leftie or aging punk rocker, he’s a 75-year-old man who has lived his life at an especially high vantage point, one that makes him able to understand how the world really works: He was a partner in Lehman Brothers, where he worked for 30 years. He writes for the New York Times, WSJ, and the New Yorker. He’s got some hard-fought wisdom to share with us and it doesn’t sound all that different from what we’re hearing on the street level, too.

Is it significant when a former partner in Lehman Bros. publicly predicts, and indeed seems to support, a retroactive confiscation of Wall Street’s ill-gotten gains? I sure think it is, because it’s starting to look like common sense when there are these bastards living in gated mansions in Connecticut and upstate New York while entire families are living in their cars. What did Huey Long say in his famous “Every Man a King” speech? Oh yeah:
How may of you remember the first thing that the Declaration of Independence said? It said, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that there are certain inalienable rights of the people, and among them are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”; and it said, further, “We hold the view that all men are created equal.”

Now, what did they mean by that? Did they mean, my friends, to say that all me were created equal and that that meant that any one man was born to inherit $10,000,000,000 and that another child was to be born to inherit nothing?

Did that mean, my friends, that someone would come into this world without having had an opportunity, of course, to have hit one lick of work, should be born with more than it and all of its children and children’s children could ever dispose of, but that another one would have to be born into a life of starvation?

That was not the meaning of the Declaration of Independence when it said that all men are created equal of “That we hold that all men are created equal.”

Now was it the meaning of the Declaration of Independence when it said that they held that there were certain rights that were inalienable—the right of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Is that right of life, my friends, when the young children of this country are being reared into a sphere which is more owned by 12 men than it is by 120,000,000 people?
It’s taken a while, but nearly 80 years after Long said those words, the consensus position is anger. The default conventicle, only now beginning to be discussed in public, is becoming retribution. (And please don’t mistake my position here as advocating anything—even if I would advocate or otherwise support something like this because I most certainly would/do—I’m merely trying to make the case that this is something likely to become one of THE defining topics of 2012).

Michael Thomas writes:
This time, I fear, the public anger will not be deflected. Confessions, not false, will be exacted. Occupy Wall Street has set the snowball rolling; you may not think much of OWS—I have my own reservations, although none are philosophical or moral—but it has made America aware of a sinister, usurious process by which wealth has systematically been funneled into fewer and fewer hands. A process in which Washington played a useful supporting role, but no more than that.

Over the next year, I expect the “what” will give way to the “how” in the broad electorate’s comprehension of the financial situation. The 99 percent must learn to differentiate the bloodsuckers and rent-extractors from those in the 1 percent who make the world a better, more just place to live. Once people realize how Wall Street made its pile, understand how financiers get rich, what it is that they actually do, the time will become ripe for someone to gather the spreading ripples of anger and perplexity into a focused tsunami of retribution. To make the bastards pay, properly, for the grief and woe they have caused. Perhaps not to the extent proposed by H. L. Mencken, who wrote that when a bank fails, the first order of business should be to hang its board of directors, but in a manner in which the pain is proportionate to the collateral damage. Possibly an excess-profits tax retroactive to 2007, or some form of “Tobin tax” on transactions, or a wealth tax. The era of money for nothing will be over.

But it won’t just end with taxes. When the great day comes, Wall Street will pray for another Pecora, because compared with the rough beast now beginning to strain at the leash, Pecora will look like Phil Gramm. Humiliation and ridicule, even financial penalties, will be the least of the Street’s tribulations. There will be prosecutions and show trials. There will be violence, mark my words. Houses burnt, property defaced. I just hope that this time the mob targets the right people in Wall Street and in Washington. (How does a right-thinking Christian go about asking Santa for Mitch McConnell’s head under the Christmas tree?) There will be kleptocrats who threaten to take themselves elsewhere if their demands on jurisdictions and tax breaks aren’t met, and I say let ’em go!

At the end of the day, the convulsion to come won’t really be about Wall Street’s derivatives malefactions, or its subprime fun and games, or rogue trading, or the folly of banks. It will be about this society’s final opportunity to rip away the paralyzing shackles of corruption or else dwell forever in a neofeudal social order. You might say that 1384 has replaced 1984 as our worst-case scenario. I have lived what now, at 75, is starting to feel like a long life. If anyone asks me what has been the great American story of my lifetime, I have a ready answer. It is the corruption, money-based, that has settled like some all-enveloping excremental mist on the landscape of our hopes, that has permeated every nook of any institution or being that has real influence on the way we live now. Sixty years ago, if you had asked me, on the basis of all that I had been taught, whether I thought this condition of general rot was possible in this country, I would have told you that you were nuts. And I would have been very wrong. What has happened in this country has made a lie of my boyhood.
The Big Lie: Wall Street has destroyed the wonder that was America (Newsweek)

And then, after you have, watch this video of Ian Bone’s infamous “hypothermia speech” from 1985’s Class War conference. Notice how they’re sorta saying the same thing? And how long will it be before Ian Bone has his own TV show, anyway? I’d watch, wouldn’t you?

MY NEW BurningFlags.com WEBSITE IS UP!

2012-01-01T00:01:00.005-05:00

www.BurningFlags.com

The building of this site was based on some very fundamental principles.

Quality images, design, and function, as well as being as complete an archive as possible.

One big decision we made about halfway through the long process was we chose to stay away from Flash® and still make it dynamic for the age.

Big high quality images on the introduction to the Photographs section were always on the menu, even if it takes extra time for loading. We felt the quality was worth it, it's a photographers site after all, and we were tired of seeing photo sites where they usually only use small images. No longer! These images will go as big as your screen and still look great. As far as we're concerned "Good things come to those who wait" - if people can't wait a few extra seconds for a page to load up, fuck'em.

For the daily rants and interests you can always check out the blog. Other interesting stuff including an insane press archive, photos to share on your non-commercial sites and social media pages, recent photos, rare never before seen photos, a high quality video page, and more depth then you're likely to ever need on the subject will all be here for your perusal. Dig It.

2011-12-31T01:37:00.000-05:00

Official Occupy Wall Street Thank You Video

2011-12-30T01:22:00.005-05:00

I'm looking forward to 2012 and beyond...

The Einstein Theory of Relativity 1923

2011-12-29T01:54:00.002-05:00

“The Einstein Theory of Relativity” is a silent animated film made in 1923 that tried to explain Einstein’s work to the general public.

It was produced by Fleischer Studios, best known for their delightful Betty Boop cartoons.

Thanks, BoingBoing

Another country says fuck McDonald's

2011-12-28T00:39:00.003-05:00

from Hispanically Speaking News

Bolivia will become the first McDonald’s-free Latin American nation, after struggling for more than a decade to keep their numbers out of ‘the red.’

After 14 years in the nation and despite many campaigns and promos McDonald’s was forced to close its 8 Bolivian restaurants in the major cities of La Paz, Cochabamba and Santa Cruz de la Sierra.

McDonald’s served its last hamburgers in Bolivia Saturday at midnight, after announcing a global restructuring plan in which it would close its doors in seven countries with poor profit margins.

The failure of McDonald’s in Bolivia had such a deep impact in the company’s Creative and Marketing staff, that they produced a documentary titled “Why did McDonald’s Bolivia go Bankrupt,” trying to explain why did Bolivians never crossed-over from empanadas to Big Macs.

The documentary includes interviews with cooks, sociologists, nutritionists and educators who all seem to agree, Bolivians are not against hamburgers per sé, just against ‘fast food,’ a concept widely unaccepted in the Bolivian community.

Fast-food represents the complete opposite of what Bolivians consider a meal should be. To be a good meal, food has to have be prepared with love, dedication, certain hygiene standards and proper cook time.

and from Pravda.ru

McDonald's leaves Bolivia healthier forever!

After 14 years of presence in the country, and despite all the existing campaigns and having a network, the chain was forced to close the eight restaurants that remained open in the three main cities: La Paz, Cochabamba and Santa Cruz de la Sierra.

It is a question of the first Latin-American country that will remain without any McDonald's, and the first country in the world where the company has to close because it persists in having their numbers in the red for over a decade.

The impact for the creative and marketing managers has been so strong that a documentary was filmed under the title "Why McDonald's went broke in Bolivia," where they try to somehow explain the reasons that led Bolivians to still prefer pies to hamburgers.

Cultural rejection

The documentary includes interviews with cooks, sociologists, nutritionists, educators, historians and more, where there is a general agreement: the rejection is neither to the hamburgers nor to their taste. The rejection is in the minds and mentality of Bolivians. Everything indicates that "fast food" is literally the opposite of a Bolivian's conception of how to prepare a meal.

In Bolivia, the food to be good requires, in addition to taste, care, and hygiene, a lot of preparation time. This is how a consumer values the quality of what goes into the stomach, also by the amount of time it took to make the meal. Fast food is not for these people, the Americans concluded.

thanks, Fernando Elvira

So What’cha Want? Revisited

2011-12-27T00:59:00.001-05:00

This works real well for serious Beastie Boys fans.

National Geographic Photo Contest 2011

2011-12-26T00:52:00.001-05:00

National Geographic is currently holding its annual photo contest, with the deadline for submissions coming up on November 30. For the past nine weeks, the society has been gathering and presenting galleries of submissions, encouraging readers to vote for them as well. National Geographic was kind enough to let me choose among its entries from 2011 for display here on In Focus. Gathered below are 45 images from the three categories of People, Places, and Nature, with captions written by the individual photographers. [check out all the images and captions HERE.]

some more favorites below:

Happy Holidays!

2011-12-25T00:46:00.002-05:00

BONUS: Pee-Wee's Christmas Special Full Episode Pee-Wee's Playhouse

New York City in the 1940s Classic Photographs

2011-12-24T01:03:00.003-05:00

Check out a few cool examples below, and the whole article HERE

Beautiful clip for today

2011-12-23T01:11:00.003-05:00

Thanks, Peggy Oki

Street Art Utopia's photo gallery 2011

2011-12-22T00:24:00.007-05:00

Street Art Utopia posted a gallery of "106 of the most beloved Street Art Photos – Year 2011." click on the link to see all of them, and see a few of my favorites below.

thanks, BoingBoing

COOL.

2011-12-21T01:15:00.001-05:00

SIMPLY ICONIC - not the totally un great photograph taken by Robert Mapplethorpe - But of my old friend Nick Marden's Jacket that's the subject - for us punks in the east village 78-82 there was nothing cooler than Nick's hand painted jacket.

The Story of DEF JAM records - An Oral History, from the BBC

2011-12-20T00:20:00.001-05:00

I posted this a few years back, and it's been taken down from YouTube and other sites, but just stumbled upon it on "Myspace" and never realized there was an imbedding code. It's really pretty damn good and certainly excellent sound quality if nothing else. Dig It.

An oral history of the origins of Def Jam Records, as told by Rick Rubin, Russell Simmons, L.L. Cool J, Bill Stephney, Chuck D., Glen E. Friedman, Hank Shocklee, Tim Westwood, DMC, Joe Perry, Beastie Boys and others. originally broadcast on BBC radio 2 - Narrated/Hosted by Paul Sexton for 10 Ounce production October 2006

FILM THE POLICE! (to the tune of NWA's "Fuck Tha Police")

2011-12-19T01:28:00.000-05:00

and the classic NWA original (with lyrics):

Great Animated Hard Core Punk Mash Up!

2011-12-18T01:23:00.000-05:00

PUBLIC ENEMY "Prophets of Rage" from the BBC

2011-12-17T00:30:00.000-05:00

Occupy 2.0 #D17

2011-12-16T00:37:00.002-05:00

Join artists, musicians, and local community members for an all-day performance event in support of Occupy Wall Street and the occupation of space and reclaiming of the commons.

Freedom of expression and the right to assemble are sacred human freedoms. Through bold, courageous actions, Occupy Wall Street has renewed a sense of hope, revived a belief in community and awakened a revolutionary spirit too long silenced. To Occupy is to embody the spirit of liberation that we wish to manifest in our society.

On Saturday, December 17th – the 3 month anniversary of the birth of this movement, we will gather to celebrate Occupy Wall Street and to occupy space together.
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 17th at 12PM
DUARTE SQ. PARK, 6th AVE & CANAL,
PROTECT & CELEBRATE THE OCCUPY MOVEMENT
FOR SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC JUSTICE
OCCUPY

from http://occupywallst.org/

"Pay To Cum" X-mas with the Peanuts crew

2011-12-15T01:51:00.002-05:00

"Pay to cum" for those that do not know was the first song the BAD BRAINS put out on record. An all time hardcore punk milestone and now classic.

The Health of Children and Consumers is Threatened by Conservative Push for Corporate Speech Rights

2011-12-14T01:09:00.001-05:00

from AlterNet:

By Steven RosenfeldSome pro-business federal judges have shockingly approved a constitutional right for big companies to avoid revealing product dangers on labels.

In recent years, corporate lawyers representing industries whose products touch millions of American lives have stopped numerous government efforts to better inform the public about possible health risks with an eyebrow-raising legal strategy. They have asserted a constitutional right not to speak, or say more than they want on labels and advertising, and pro-business federal judges have agreed, rejecting the public’s right to know.

In cases involving manmade hormones fed to dairy cows, heart and lung disease caused by tobacco, the nutritional value of foods contributing to childhood and teenage obesity, and even radiation emitted by cell phones, the industries keep returning to court until a business-friendly judge or majority on an appeals court rules that the First Amendment includes the corporate right not to ‘speak’ if it could harm profits.

“They invoke the Amendment’s protection to accomplish exactly what the Amendment opposes,” wrote U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Pierre Leval, in a lengthy dissent in an early case in which his peers sided with industry and cited the First Amendment to overturn a state law labeling hormone-containing milk products. “The majority’s invocation of the First Amendment to invalidate a state law requiring disclosure of information consumers reasonably desire stands the Amendment on its ear.”

The labeling cases are not the only way corporations have been seeking to enlarge First Amendment speech rights outside the political arena.

This past June the Supreme Court ruled that drug makers’ constitutional speech rights included ‘selling' patient records, overturning a Vermont law that sought to keep the files private. Justice Stephen Breyer’s dissent said the Court was setting a dangerous precedent by allowing the First Amendment to be used to avoid reasonable government regulation.

“At best the Court opens a Pandora’s Box of First Amendment challenges to many ordinary regulatory practices that may only incidentally affect a commercial message,” he warned. “At worst, it reawakens Lochner’s pre-New Deal threat of substituting judicial for democratic decision making where ordinary economic regulation is at issue.”

Breyer’s reference to the Lochner Era was shorthand for what many right-wingers would like to see the judiciary do today—roll back government regulation. Lochner refers to the early 20th century when the Supreme Court reversed many workplace rights. It ended when the Court relented to allow the new deal to allow the New Deal's progressive reforms to take place.

Indeed, today’s corporate champions, such as Washington Post columnist George Will, are pining for an activist judiciary that prioritizes corporate rights above those of citizens. They see nothing wrong with extending the Constitution’s political freedoms given to individuals to modern profit-making corporations. As Will wrote this September in a piece attacking liberals, “So much for the idea that one of the Constitution’s primary purposes is the protection of individual rights against majority tyranny.”

Don’t Call It A Food Fight

The mainstream media calls it a Washington food fight. But that belittles the stakes.

One-third of American children and teens age 17 and younger are overweight or obese. The Federal Trade Commission, created a century ago is to protect consumers, has been studying the issue for years. It has found little consistency in the marketing and labeling of foods that are a mainstay of children and young adult diets. So the FTC, working with other federal agencies that studied the science behind what has been called an epidemic – The Department of Agriculture, Food and Drug Administration, and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – last April announced voluntary product marketing guidelines for foods targeting youths, including limits on ingredients such as sugar, fat and salt. The FTC will soon issue a final report to Congress, including the voluntary guidelines.

This federal effort has prompted a lobbying stampede that continues to this day.

In July, some of the America’s largest food corporations, including Burger King and McDonald’s, announced their own marketing standards to defang, if not to derail, the FTC guidelines. Preemption is an old tactic in Washington. Their perspective reached prominent newspapers, such as at USAToday, which editorialized that the “industry standards aren’t bad.” In response, Josh Golin of Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, wrote, “The brouhaha over the government proposal is the latest proof that asking corporations to work against their economic interests is futile.”

But then corporate lawyers added another twist.

The Washington Legal Foundation, a non-profit law firm that seeks to affirm and expand corporate rights, filed comments with the FTC claiming that the guidelines, even though voluntary, would be “a clear violation of First Amendment Rights.” Their accompanying press release said:

“Under Supreme Court case law, First Amendment protections kick in whenever government regulation “burdens” speech, not simply when the government adopts an outright prohibition on speech. WLF argued that the “burden” imposed by the Guidance’s “voluntary” advertising restrictions would be considerable, because many companies will be frightened by the unknown consequences of not complying.”

In other words, even a nudge to reveal more nutritional information was unacceptable.

“Are you really surprised?” replied Betsy Lordan, FTC spokeswoman, when asked to comment on the Foundation’s claim. “There is nothing new with companies trying to come up with reasons for not being regulated.”

But, strictly speaking, the federal agencies are not trying to regulate the food industry.

The FTC is issuing a year-end report to Congress, including voluntary ingredients and marketing guidelines. Congress will then decide what action, if any, to take. The FTC regularly issues guidelines for all kinds of industries, such as what is permissible with celebrity endorsements. Its goal is to deter commercial misrepresentation and fraud.

Nonetheless, the Washington Legal Foundation said this FTC-led food marketing effort exceeded its instructions from Congress because “instead of making recommendations to Congress, the Guidance makes recommendations directly to the food industry.” That criticism is to be expected from an anti-regulation think tank. But its lawyers also said that how a corporation labels its food products is constitutionally protected speech—as long as what is printed on the labels is true.

This is legally correct but a sly argument because companies do not have a legal duty to say everything they know about their products on their packaging and advertising. They can—and do—omit key details that could erode profits. And, as Judge Leval said in his dissent in the milk labeling case, government has the power to require companies to tell the public more about products if a public interest is served, such as protecting health.

“Freedom of speech is not an absolute right, particularly in the commercial context,” Leval wrote. It is “subject to regulation if the government has a substantial interest in regulating the speech, the regulation directly advances that interest, and is no more intrusive than necessary to accomplish its goal.”

The Washington Legal Foundation told the FTC that food corporations would be harmed if they could not freely label or advertise, or if they felt government pressure to include more nutritional information, such as how fatty, sugary or salty their products covered with cartoon wrappers truly were. Their FTC brief omits any mention of the millions of overweight American kids and teenagers, or the government’s legitimate interest in improving public health trends.

“Government action can constitute a ‘burden’ on speech even when it takes the form of ‘voluntary’ government speech standards,” WLF said. “The government seeks to change the dietary habits of children. There is no reason to believe that the only means of doing so is to suppress truthful speech.”

Tobacco and The Right Not To Speak

WLF’s arguments about corporate speech rights are not unique or limited to food labels.

Under its project entitled, “Criminalization of Free Enterprise – Business Civil Liberties Program,” it has filed briefs with the FDA opposing future nutritional labeling of food served in restaurants, required under the new federal health care reform law. It also filed briefs in federal appeals court arguing that shopkeepers in New York City should not be forced “to display signs conveying the city’s anti-smoking message, with which they disagree.” Their brief said signs, such as “Smoking Causes Lung Cancer,” accompanied by “one of three graphic, color images depicting the potential effects of tobacco use: a brain damaged by a stroke, decaying teeth and gums, or a diseased lung,” and a New York City seal, are “controversial, non-factual disclosures.”

This characterization—controversial and non-factual—is how the large tobacco firms described the accusations made by its critics in 1967, nearly four decades before the U.S. Department of Justice convicted them of racketeering by concealing science and other evidence that cigarettes severely harmed human health.

“The First Amendment protects not only the right to speak but also the right not to speak,” WLF’s website said, summarizing the New York City case. “Forcing someone to convey and associate with speech with which he disagrees violates the free speech protections of the U.S. Constitution… Many tobacco retailers object to the signs.”

Substitute ‘tobacco merchants’ for ‘milk producers’ in the following comment by Judge Leval in the 1996 Vermont milk labeling case, and consider how corporate lawyers have been pushing to not just protect profits, but also to expand constitutional protections.

“Notwithstanding their self-righteous references to free expression, the true objective of the milk producers is concealment. They do not wish consumers to know that their milk products were produced by use of rBST because there are consumers who, for various reasons, prefer to avoid rBST… The question is simply whether the First Amendment prohibits government from requiring disclosure of truthful relevant information to consumers.”

The Appeals Court majority, ruling against Vermont, disagreed, saying the labeling law was based on “consumer curiosity alone,” not science, because no federal agency had found rBST was unsafe. It said, “Strong consumer interest and the public’s ‘right to know’ … are insufficient to justify compromising protected constitutional speech.”

In other words, the public’s right-to-know is subordinate to private industry’s right to conceal information from consumers.

The federal court system is byzantine. Each federal circuit is a legal kingdom unto itself. Judges in one circuit can ignore what judges in other circuits do, until conflicting rulings work their way up to the Supreme Court – where they are settled until Congress passes new laws. (Or until those laws are challenged in lawsuits, restarting this cycle).

In 2009, Congress passed the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, which, among other things, authorized the FDA to regulate warning labels on cigarette boxes. It was the biggest change in cigarette labels in 25 years. The agency published its rules describing the new warnings in June 2011. New text messages and photographic images would “bring Americans face to face with tobacco-related disease on every cigarette package and advertisement,” the FDA website said. Four of the five largest American tobacco companies sued the FDA in August in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C.

In early November, U.S. District Judge Richard Leon ruled that the FDA’s regulations forcing the industry to put the same kind of graphic images as in the New York case on the outside of cigarette boxes would likely violate their constitutional speech rights. He ordered the mandatory labeling process stopped until the court fight was over, which could take years. But suspending the introduction of the FDA’s new labels was not Leon’s only gift to cigarette makers.

Leon also agreed with tobacco lawyers, finding the photographic images—not the printed warnings—would “confiscate the front and back portions of cigarette packaging” and went beyond “purely factual and uncontroversial information,” the legal standard that he cited for government-compelled speech such as warning labels. “The Court concludes that plaintiffs have demonstrated a substantial likelihood that they will prevail… and that they will suffer irreparable harm.”

Who is Harmed?

Courts often look for middle ground balancing interests—often frustrating advocates on either side of a fight. The question of who is being harmed—and harmed more, the public or private commercial interests—shows how citizens have lost ground to corporations as fervent federal judges have expanded and elevated corporate speech.

Judge Leon’s order suspended a political process that included state attorneys general from both political parties, Congress, the Justice Department under a Democratic and Republican president, and other federal court rulings from judges appointed by three presidents. None of that mattered to Leon. “I would remind the Government that even decisions from other district courts in our Circuit have no binding effect on this Court,” the activist judge wrote.

In Judge Leon’s discussion of the “harm that is more than simply irretrievable,” he said that the tobacco companies will have to spend “tens of millions of dollars” redesigning cigarette packaging to comply with the FDA rules. He said the FDA-required images would use too much space on cigarette boxes, which also was unconstitutional.

“The loss of First Amendment freedoms, for even minimal periods of time, unquestionably constitutes irreparable injury,” he wrote, quoting the 1971 Supreme Court ruling that protected the New York Times and Washington Post from retaliation from the federal government after they published the Pentagon Papers, which detailed the military’s failures in the Vietnam War.

Think about that comparison: the tobacco companies’ rights to avoid putting photographs on cigarette box warning labels—after losing a major racketeering case and being ordered to change their labels by Congress—are comparable in Leon’s courtroom to the media’s right to print information about an unpopular war that killed 45,000 Americans by 1971.

An Uphill Fight

Another recent federal ruling where public-interest concerns have been thwarted concerns the first-in-the nation’s cell phone radiation labeling law.

In late October, U.S. District Judge William Alsup suspended a San Francisco ordinance requiring cell phone makers to include health warnings about radiation from the devices. These were to include an in-store poster and sticker, and fact-sheet given to buyers. The national trade association for the wireless industry sued to block the law, arguing that it violated their First Amendment rights to not speak about their products.

Like Judge Leval’s dissent in the Vermont milk labeling case, Judge Alsup found “that a government may impose, out of caution, at least some disclosure requirements based on nothing more than the possibility that an agent may (or may not) turn out to be harmful.” That statement appeared to be a public interest victory; but was not the end of the Court’s remarks. Judge Alsup found the fact-sheet was “misleading and must be corrected.”

He said the city’s fact-sheet could easily prompt buyers to “misunderstand this as more dangerous than it really is.” Like Judge Leon in the FDA tobacco case, he also rejected images that the city wanted to use in its poster. Further, Alsup ruled the poster was “not reasonably necessary and would unduly intrude on the retailers’ wall space.” The judge also said that the “sticker requirement is also unconstitutional” because “stickers will unduly intrude upon the retailers’ own message.”

Judge Alsup ordered the city to rewrite its fact sheet, which is to be submitted to his court for approval. Those revisions will undoubtedly be weaker than health officials wanted. But buried in the Court’s interim ruling was wording that was less militant than other activist judges who have recently ruled in corporate First Amendment rights.

“There really will be little irreparable injury in complying with the fact-sheet so long as the corrections are included to mitigate the nonfactual, misleading and alarmist tenor of the fact-sheet,” Alsup wrote. “The San Francisco program is not aimed at slowing sales. It is aimed at precautions for consumer use and presupposes that all sales will flow unabated. Industry profits will not sag.”

Taken alone, that wording was dangling a carrot before the city in a ruling where Alsup gave the wireless industry almost everything it wanted. But the CTIA-The Wireless Association, the national trade group that sued the city, responded by saying it still was not enough. “CTIA respectfully disagrees with the Court's determination,” its press release said, and “is considering its options regarding further proceedings.”

In other words, in yet another corporate speech versus the public interest fight, corporate lawyers—with virtually bottomless corporate checkbooks behind them—are betting they will find an even more business-friendly courtroom, completely censoring the public’s right to know any health information about radiation when buying a cell phone.

Steven Rosenfeld covers democracy issues for AlterNet for is author of "Count My Vote: A Citizen's Guide to Voting" (AlterNet Books, 2008).

NYPD shred kids' paper hearts commemorating Occupy arrestees before their very eyes

2011-12-13T00:24:00.002-05:00

Parents for Occupy Wall St. March against police brutality. Children created 5,000 paper hearts one for every peaceful protester arrested on behalf of the Occupy Wall Street movement in the three month period leading up to the march. The children delivered them to New York City Hall for Mayor Bloomberg only for the NYPD to aggressively tear them down and apart in front of the children. Children cried and the NYPD did yet another action against peaceful protesters. We as a country should not stand for this, get involved, speak up, do something for our children's futures.

from Cory Doctrow at BoingBoing

It's predictable but weird how many of the YouTube commenter's criticize the parents for involving their kids with a protest. I grew up on protest marches and demonstrations with my parents, and I take my daughter to them, because I think that parenting is (partly) about imparting values to your children. Growing up amid a critical discourse about issues of social justice and freedom helped make me who I was, and my parents were always available to debate these subjects with me, encouraging me to listen to arguments on either side without hiding which side they were on.

I whole heartily agree with Cory on this. In fact I took my son down to the first "Parents for Occupy Wall St." event down in the early days of this revolution at Zuccotti park, it was a beautiful thing. Shame on the pigs who took down the hearts off the City Hall fence.

My son and I - 21 October 2011

CNN report from back on October 21st:

The Punk Patriot

2011-12-12T02:10:00.001-05:00

from Richard Metzger at DangerousMinds:

I was looking for an image of an old labor movement poster that had the fat cat asking the mouse “You going let that union guy steal your cookie?” which I’ve always thought was the ultimate stick in the eye to working class people who watch Fox News and believe billionaire “job creators” deserve tax cuts, whilst union members and their families—you, know, their actual neighbors and relatives!—should have to make greater sacrifices. Instead of a vintage image, I came across the above illustration, Molly Crabapple and John Leavitt’s “We’re All in This Together,” their contribution to the terrific looking Occupy Comics project (which Alan Moore has just signed on to as well).

Isn’t that just a thing of beauty? It deserves to be a poster/lithograph too. I bet a lot of people would buy them. I certainly would. It’s something that needs to get around. and be seen.

I love the inclusion of the quote from quintessential 19th century “robber baron” Jay Gould, who (in)famously said:
“I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.”
That quote (and Google) in turn led me to stumble across The Punk Patriot, who has been making politically-themed YouTube videos for some time now—that are often quite good—with the aim to promote “life, liberty and the pursuit of a less fucked-up government.” Worthy goals, indeed!

In the clip below, The Punk Patriot takes on the Reichwing echo-chamber. This is a great video to send to that Archie Bunker-ish great uncle of yours who annoyed the shit out of you on Thanksgiving with his Fox News/Dittohead nonsense…

Follow The Punk Patriot on Twitter.

Visit The Punk Patriot’s blog.

The Diagnosis of Xeni Jardin

2011-12-11T00:34:00.005-05:00

Xeni has become a friend in recent years and someone who's work I always appreciate, and use on this blog here often. Friday on the infamous blog Boing Boing, that she helped to start many years ago before most of us had ever even heard of the internet, she told her current story of her own diagnosis. Read the story below and a comment from another mutual friend, and another bad ass blogger, Richard Metzger (DangerousMinds) after.

I have breast cancer. A week ago, I had breast cancer, and the week before that, and the week before that. Maybe five, eight, even ten years ago, the first bad cell split inside me, secretly. But I didn't know. This is how I arrived at knowing.

Two friends of mine were recently diagnosed. When news of the first came, I felt sadness. When news of the second came a few weeks ago, I felt a different kind of shock. I'd never had a mammogram. Even though I was ten years younger than the time they say you need to start, it felt like time to start, and when her news came I thought: I need to do this right now. For my friends, for me. Solidarity. Something small I can do, some little action against the big unknowable that swoops down without warning and strikes the ones we love.

Around the same time, I'd became aware of a funny stiffness in a spot on my own body. But anomalies in women's bodies come and go all the time, and it was a fluid whatever-thing, something that would pass, definitely not a lump, nothing that my waking, speaking mind would grasp as danger. This anomaly must be misplaced anxiety, my logic-brain tried to explain to my lizard-brain; maybe it's me wanting to make my friend's bad news all about me.

I called my insurance company for a clinic referral, then dialed a few places on a list the guy in their Indian call center emailed. Over the phone, the clinics all sounded like places you'd take a pork chop to be examined, not a human breast, not a person, and not me. I googled around and found a place with a lot of stars on Yelp and other online ratings services from women who'd gone and felt they'd been treated well. Pink Lotus Breast Center. The women who answered the phone there sounded cool. I made an appointment.

I live online as much as I live offline. Often, I move around in the world staring into a device as I walk, sharing bits of one realm with the other. The morning I went in for my first mammogram, I felt nervous. I would tweet this new thing, like I do with lots of new things, and make the unknown and new feel less so. Maybe by doing so, I thought while I was driving, other women like me who'd never done this would also feel like it was less weird, less scary, more normal and worth doing without hesitation. I'd crack some 140-character jokes. I'd make fun of myself and others. I would Instagram my mammogram.

The women at the front desk were kind and welcoming. Both were from Virginia, like me. One of them is from the back-country part where there's still no internet. Her dad and uncle work the fields. We talked about growing corn and hogs, how they still make cane molasses with a horse-drawn grinder, and about poor white Appalachian babies nursed on Mountain Dew.

The mammogram technologist saw on my chart that I'd lost a loved one to ALS. She had too. I hugged her, and she hugged back. She folded my body into the machine, pressed some buttons, folded me another way, and the machine clicked and whirred and clicked and whirred. Then it was over. She told me to wait.

I tweeted the waiting. Inviting the internet in is something I do every day anyway, but this time it was like a shield. Nothing bad can happen in a new place if you're cracking jokes and 50,000 people are watching. You're safe out here, in here, out here.

The waiting-moment stretched out, and out, and out, and finally she returned.

Where was that thing you felt that isn't anything, she asked?

Here, I showed her.

Put your arms in the air, she said. She felt, and squinted, and her brow furrowed, and she stepped aside again. Then she returned. Come back in a few hours when the doctor is free, she said, and we'll look a little more closely with ultrasound, just to be thorough. She smiled. Maybe just go have some lunch, she said, and we'll wrap this up when you return.

The hours stretched out and out and out. I felt nervous, but it was still all normal. I was too nervous to eat, but not too nervous yet to tweet. A finger pulling down the iPhone touchscreen still yielded replies from familiar names, and this was all going to end well. I drove back to the clinic.

Dr. Kristi Funk is her name. How can anything go bad when the doctor's name is Funk, and there are so many funny things to tweet? She told me to lie down, put some goop on my chest, and waved a wand through the goop. The waves appeared on a screen. It looked like NASA video, something the Mars rovers might transmit home to a JPL engineer searching for distant water.

She showed me a crater in the waves, a deep one, with rough edges and a rocky ridge along the northern rim. Calcification. Badly-defined boundaries. Not the lake we'd hoped to find.

"The first thing you're going to learn about working with me is that I'm a straight shooter," Dr. Funk said. Her voice was steady and reassuring.

"That's how you know you can trust me. I'm going to tell you everything, and I'm going to tell it to you like it is."

I forget the rest of what she said, but it added up to this: the crater was cancer.

As the words sank in, the Mars rover crawled over another steep ridge, out of the crater and into a valley, and found one of my lymph nodes, larger and darker than the others. A rocky prominence. A sentinel node. No water there, just fast-dividing cells that kill.

I believe that we are looking at breast cancer, and that it has spread to one of your lymph nodes, she said. We're going to do a biopsy right away to confirm and learn more.

Another woman came in, and held my hand. Dr. Funk shot the biopsy gun in the air first so I wouldn't be afraid of the sound. That's when the shaking started and my heart started pounding.

I cried, but someone else was doing the crying, someone else was doing the shaking, someone else was lying there, and now the gun was diving in to someone else's flesh to bring back rock samples from outer space for the lab to analyze.

The shaking didn't stop. I tried to dial the people I loved on my iPhone with one hand while the assistant held down my other arm, pushing cotton into the place where the probe dove in for samples, where blood was now coming forth.

My fingers were cold and shaking, and I couldn't hit the numbers on the screen. When I finally got through, someone else's voice was coming out of my mouth, and it was taking forever for the stuttery radio transmissions to beam through space, from the cold planet I was lost on, way out here, far from home.

Treatable, curable, survival odds, margins, chemotherapy, surgery, radiation. Someone else's problems, someone else's words. The biopsy came back the next day. Those words became my own.

I do not know all of what's ahead. I know a little. I know that there is a new kind of life on the other side of this thing. A changed mind and body. A new appreciation of time, and breath, and health, and life, and loved ones.

The gravity in this place is different. I've spoken to others who've traveled out here, too, and returned home safely. When you become one of them, you learn quickly that you share a language others can't understand.

The trick, these fellow travelers tell me, is to accept the not knowing and find your equilibrium in that new gravity. Calm the mind. Find your balance out on the cold planet, whether or not you know the next step, or the date of the next appointment, or what good or bad news the Technetium-99 isotopes floating around in your blood during the last scan reveal.

You must be at peace with not knowing, they tell me. That is how you get through outer space, and find your way back home.

The thing about this thing, or, at least, this first week of this thing, is how it takes you out there to the cold planet again and again and again, when you aren't expecting it. Long, undulating waves of fear pull you out to where you are alone and unreachable, even by words sent from the strongest satellite.

The thing that brings you back is love.

Note from Richard Metzger's DangerousMinds blog:

As many of DM’s readers probably know, Xeni Jardin is one of my and Tara’s closest friends and favorite people in the world. As a mutual friend once said of her, “Xeni is like a being from an advanced planet or the future who has come to Earth to help us all evolve faster.” If there’s anyone who can beat this, it is, for sure, our Xenorita, and she is in really good hands, which is a real comfort to all of us who care about her. Send some good vibes—and love—her way in the Boing Boing comments, won’t you?

LA PUNKS: A TV NEWS INVESTIGATION FROM 1983

2011-12-10T01:24:00.001-05:00

thanks, DangerousMinds

Ice Cube on L.A. and The Eames

2011-12-09T01:49:00.001-05:00

Thanks, Martin Sprouse via Cynthia Connolly

Kodak's long fade to black

2011-12-08T01:18:00.004-05:00

I sincerely doubt that the end of Kodak is eminent, as horrible as it was to me that my favorite film was never to be processed again as of almost one year ago, the fact is I still use other Kodak films and Kodak paper to make my professional museum quality prints on. They have not been a stellar corporation in many ways, besides the usual mistakes that anyone on top can make, greed, abuse of the environment to never be excused... But, they did something for our culture that very few corporations do. They developed products that help to inspire and excite culture, helped people to express themselves in ways that were not really possible until they came along. So let's see what happens... I had a strange scary feeling this fall when i attended the usually depressing (for old schoolers such as myself) "Photo Expo" here in New York City, when, for probably the first time ever, in the history of the event, Kodak was not present giving away sample rolls of our old favorite, and new films they wanted us to check out. I always would chat up the most senior representatives to see how things were going, what was in store. This year with no representation whatsoever I had a feeling, an ugly uncomfortable feeling....

from the Los Angeles Times:

Kodak’s chairman has been denying that the company is contemplating a bankruptcy filing with such vehemence that many believe Chapter 11 must lurk just around the corner. Above, the company's headquarters in Rochester, N.Y., is shown in a 2004 photo. (Gary Wiepert, Reuters)

By Michael Hiltzik

Like the passing of distinguished individuals, the passing of great corporations should prompt us to ponder the transience of earthly glory.

So let's pay our respects to Eastman Kodak, which at this writing appears to be a shutter-click from extinction.

Once ranked among the bluest of blue chips, Kodak shares sell today at close to $1. Kodak's chairman has been denying that the company is contemplating a bankruptcy filing with such vehemence that many believe Chapter 11 must lurk just around the corner.

The Rochester, N.Y., company said it had $862 million in cash on hand as of Sept. 30, but at the rate it's losing money from operations (more than $70 million a month), that hoard would barely last a year. As for future revenue, it's banking heavily on winning patent lawsuits against Apple and the maker of BlackBerry phones.

Kodak Brownie and Instamatic cameras were once staples of family vacations and holidays — remember the "open me first" Christmas ad campaigns? But it may not be long before a generation of Americans grows up without ever having laid hands on a Kodak product. That's a huge comedown for a brand that was once as globally familiar as Coca-Cola.

It's hard to think of a company whose onetime dominance of a market has been so thoroughly obliterated by new technology. Family snapshots? They're almost exclusively digital now, and only a tiny fraction ever get printed on paper.

Eastman Kodak engineers invented the digital camera in 1975; but now that you can point and click with a cheap cellphone, even the stand-alone digital camera is becoming an endangered species on the consumer electronics veld. The last spool of yellow-boxed Kodachrome rolled out the door of a Mexican factory in 2009. Paul Simon composed his hymn to Kodachrome in 1973, but his camera of choice, according to the lyrics, was a Nikon.

It's not uncommon for great companies to be humbled by what the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter called the forces of "creative destruction." Technology, especially digital technology, has been the most potent whirlwind sweeping away old markets and old strategies for many decades. Changing economics and global competition have reduced behemoths of the past, such as General Motors, into mice of the present.

Kodak's decline is of a different order from GM's. The latter still manufactures a product with a huge market demand; it just got sloppy and inefficient at turning out its cars and trucks. That's why the federal government, not to mention GM's unions and other stakeholders, thought a dramatic restructuring might put it back on its feet. (That it was a central player in an industry employing hundreds of thousands of Americans was part of the calculus too.)

Kodak, however, markets a process technology; and as the chemistry of film has yielded to digital electronics, consumer demand for Kodak's traditional products has evaporated. A similar transition afflicts newspapers, book publishers, movie studios, broadcasters and record labels today, but the issues for those industries are different yet.

Their business models are under pressure because they're dependent on outdated distribution technologies; but their core products (information, entertainment) are still very much in demand.

So Kodak has faced a tougher challenge than automakers or content producers. Still, it has met the challenge ham-handedly. This is characteristic of companies that have enjoyed what one might think of as success on a tragic scale.

Almost from Kodak's founding by George Eastman in 1880, the money had rolled in, thanks to Eastman's razor-blade strategy of selling cameras cheaply and reaping lavish margins from consumables — film, chemicals and paper.

As late as 1976, Kodak commanded 90% of film sales and 85% of camera sales in the U.S., according to a 2005 case study for Harvard Business School. Such seemingly unassailable competitive positions tend to foster unimaginative executive cultures, and Kodak's was no exception.

Even after Fuji Photo crept into the U.S. market with lower-priced film and supplies, Kodak refused to believe Americans would ever desert its sacred brand. Complacently, the company spurned the chance to become the official film of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics; the bid went instead to Fuji, which exploited its sponsorship to win a permanent foothold in the marketplace.

Then came digital. Far from scorning the new technology, Kodak ramped up research and development to nearly 10% of sales in the mid-1980s and integrated digital features into its product lines, including video systems, scanners and photo enhancement software.

But its executives couldn't foresee a future in which film had no role in image capture at all, nor come to grips with the lower profit margins or faster competitive pace of high-tech industries. At one meeting with Microsoft's Bill Gates to discuss integrating Kodak's photo CDs with Windows, Kodak Chairman Kay Whitmore fell asleep.

Whitmore was succeeded by George M.C. Fisher, who as the former CEO of Motorola had a better grasp of high tech. Fisher reached out to Microsoft and other new consumer merchandisers. For example, Apple's pioneering QuickTake consumer digital cameras, introduced in 1994, were mostly Kodak products with Apple nameplates. But Fisher never conceived of an entirely filmless world, either.

Under Fisher's successor, Daniel Carp, Kodak moved headlong into digital photography, but at a cost. In 2001 it held the No. 2 spot in U.S. digital camera sales (behind Sony), but its executives acknowledged it was losing $60 on every camera sold. By last year it ranked fourth. And it can hardly escape the company's notice that an ever-smaller percentage of digital pictures are being taken on digital cameras, as opposed to cellphones and tablets.

As time passes, Kodak looks more and more like a truck spinning its wheels in mud. The company hasn't had a profitable year since 2007. Its current chairman, Antonio Perez (a former executive at Hewlett-Packard, another company riding on bald tires), said last month on announcing Kodak's dismal third-quarter results that he's delighted in the profit prospects for its inkjet printers. But does anybody else out there think that desktop printing is a growth market?

Kodak's biggest revenue score of 2010 was $838 million it collected from patent licensing, evidently including a settlement it reached with LG after suing the South Korean company for patent infringement. Through the first three quarters of this year, the same category produced zero. But Perez is still hoping for a big score from another patent sale.

It may be premature to write Kodak off. After all, the company does have more than a century's experience in consumer marketing and a technology portfolio potentially worth billions. But companies that can remake themselves to survive changes on the scale of what Kodak confronts are rare indeed.

IBM has done so, and General Electric, but not many others.

Kodak was once such a pervasive part of our lives that the "Kodak moment," defined as a personal event that demanded to be recorded for posterity, entered our lexicon.

Now when even the most private Kodak moment seems to unfold before the digital gaze of a hundred iPhones, it looks as though Kodak's moment has passed. The circle of life in business is a natural phenomenon, the lesson of which shouldn't be overlooked by companies that seem to have cemented themselves into permanent spots at the top of the world today — including Apple, Google and Facebook. The lesson is: Nothing lasts forever.

more:

Did Digital photography kill Kodak?

Pepper-spray inventor: "It's fashionable to use chemical agents on people who have an opinion"

2011-12-07T00:34:00.000-05:00

Amy Goodman interviews Kamran Loghman, inventor of modern pepper spray and developer of police procedures for its use. Loghman regrets his work today, and says it's "fashionable" to use chemical agents on "people who have an opinion":
It is becoming more and more fashionable right now, this day and age, to use chemical on people who have an opinion. And that to me is a complete lack of leadership both in the police department and other people who cannot really deal with the root of the problem and they want to spray people to quiet them down. And it’s really not supposed to be that. It’s not a thing that solves any problem nor is it something that quiets people down.”
Pepper Spray Developer: It Has Become Fashionable to Use Chemicals on People with Opinions (via Naked Capitalism)

NPR discusses FUGAZI's new live series website with Ian "Steady Diet Of Everything: The Fugazi Live Vault"

2011-12-06T00:55:00.000-05:00

Obviously, I could write my own story about these tapes finally being released this way, but I think the NPR perspective is pretty interesting (almost as much as Fugazi gracing the cover of the New York Times on line last week) and a nice interview with Ian as well.

When the iconic American punk band Fugazi started playing back in 1987, it started taping, too.

"Our friend Joey Picuri, who was a local sound man — or a fellow who helped do sound for bands — he recorded the shows," Fugazi frontman Ian MacKaye tells NPR's Guy Raz. "He just gave us tapes of our first show, and he gave us a tape of our second show."

From the beginning, the band appreciated his efforts: "It was just nice to be able to hear the songs realized, in that sense," MacKaye says. "In many ways, you can write a song and you practice it, but it doesn't really become a song until it goes into someone else's ears — in this situation, the audience's. So hearing it in that setting, it's like, 'OK, this is a song now.'"

For a lot of bands, that would have been it; record the first show, show it to your friends afterward, then forget about it and continue living the dream. But Fugazi isn't most bands.

"Joey started to travel with us as a sound man," MacKaye says. "He just started to record the shows out of habit. We didn't really plan on recording all the shows, but after we had 50 or 75 or 100, it seemed like, 'Well, we might as well keep doing it.' And we ended up with 850."

Not 850 tracks, or even 850 hours — 850 shows. Fugazi, one of the most important bands in the history of punk, recorded every single show it ever played. But what does a band — even one with as fanatical a fan base as Fugazi's — do with all that tape?

"At some point, we were around the 300 mark, and the band discussed the tapes," MacKaye says. "And we were thinking, like, 'We don't need these tapes.' We didn't even listen to these tapes. The first shows, sure, we listened to those things. But when you're on a tour and you play, say, 60 shows in 63 days, pretty much the last thing you want to hear is a recording of those shows. It's unbearable! We just kept stashing them in the closet."

It must be a pretty big closet, because the band has ended up with more than 1,300 hours of tape. "We were trying to figure out how to get all this music out there," MacKaye says. Now that technology has caught up with Fugazi, the band has done just that: Fifteen years of shows will be made available to buy off the Internet, warts and all.

"These tapes are not all good," MacKaye says. "I certainly cringe at some of the stuff I hear, especially sometimes when I'm talking to the crowd. I think sometimes my humor is extremely dry, and a lot of times I would say things that I thought were very funny but ... I have a reputation of — people think of me as a very fundamentalist, humorless fellow."

'At Least A Dollar'

Fugazi is employing a pay-what-you-want strategy for this enormous library, so listeners can decide how much these hyper-authentic recordings are worth to them.

"They have to pay us at least a dollar — there's no free on this one," MacKaye says. But with their purchase, listeners get a true oral history of the band, riddled with moments that would have otherwise been lost.

"There's a really great show from Munich, in I think the early '90s, '93," MacKaye says. "At that time, it was pretty typical for the audience to say things like, 'Get on with it!' and 'Play the music! Just play!' I remember we had come back on stage for an encore, and somebody was lost or confused, or I don't know; something had happened and somebody needed help. So we were trying to say, 'Hey, there's a woman back here, she's lost and she's looking for her friends.' And some guy was just yelling, 'Get on with it! Just play!' And at that moment, I understood the dynamic, what was going on in this relationship, where he was a consumer and wanted to consume. He wanted sound. So at that moment, we just all turned on our guitars and started feedback, and it was a wall of feedback. And it was like, 'Okay, here's sound. You just want sound.' There was no actual engagement with the music; it was just sound they wanted.

"So it's maybe five minutes of just feedback. It was a totally surreal moment, and when I hear that, I can smell that moment. It's so visceral to me, but it's one of my favorites, because we go right into a song from that. I'm not sure that's even up yet, but it'll show up."

Included is the band's last show to date, on Nov. 4, 2002, and its traditional set-closer, "Glue Man." These recordings bring MacKaye back; in reliving the moments he recorded, he remembers the moments that weren't.

"The truth is, what I really miss is the six-hour drive in the van with them, because we always just hung out. We did a lot of time together, and those moments, those are very difficult to come by at this moment. Whether or not we play again, I don't know. That's just the way that goes. In some ways, this has been such an incredible project, mostly because I've just been sitting on these tapes for so long, and I think, 'Finally, here, everybody else have at it.' "

All the World (and the Media) is Your Stage: Occupy Wall Street, Act II

2011-12-05T00:19:00.003-05:00

from my friend Richard Metzger at DangerousMinds:

The clueless conservatives chatterboxes on Fox News and AM talk radio cheering on the evictions of the rapidly dwindling in number Occupy sites around the country have another thing coming if they think that the fun is over. It’s not the end of anything, no matter what smug frat-boys like Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh or Eric Bolling claim to “think.”

The Occupy movement isn’t waning, it’s mutating into something different now. Something we can’t predict yet. The rightwing echo chamber acts as if standing around in freezing cold public spaces with the intention to annoy the “job creators” was the movement’s sole aim. I think these Marie Antoinette Republicans are… wrong.

Here’s what respected historian Todd Gitlin told Associated Press:
The Occupy movement is beginning to follow a familiar pattern, said Todd Gitlin, a sociologist at Columbia University and an authority on social movements. He noted that the 1960s anti-war movement grew gradually for years until bursting onto the world stage during the election year of 1968.

He predicted big rallies around the 2012 Republican National Convention in Tampa, Fla., and the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C.

Until then, “I think there will be some kinds of occupations, but I don’t think they’ll be as big and as central,” Gitlin said.
When the dust settles and the history is written, Zuccotti Park will be seen as a “strange attractor” rallying place, a “temporary autonomous zone” and a very potent symbol of what could be, but that’s all it will be in the final narrative: The First Act.

And what a beginning it was. People in Wisconsin, in Ohio, in Michigan, in Los Angeles, in Oakland, previously apathetic Americans are starting to wake up to the stark and shitty realities of life in our times in an unprecedented manner and actually fight back. I’m someone who thought “the revolution” would have taken place by the end of the 1980s. I’ve been predicting something like this for 30 years. Even a stopped clock has the right time twice a day, I suppose, but it was getting ridiculous.

As everyone who was there knows, something really special happened in lower Manhattan. Now, no matter where you live, it’s time to use the winter months to organize for next year’s election. There is a chance to gain a lot of ground in 2012. The Reichwing is in a state of preposterously comic disarray with no savior in sight. It might even be possible to push Obama and the Democrats truly leftwards for a change (stranger things have happened, see also FDR; see also what REALLY happened during Great Depression). No one knows what is going to happen next, but I do suspect for there to be a lot of it about, to paraphrase Spike Milligan.

To get too bogged down in trying to hold on to some real estate would have merely become a distraction and as time went on, the “visuals,” as so many in the media like to say, would have taken on a different semiotic and not done the movement any favors in what is, essentially still a war of images. All things considered—and this is just one asshole’s opinion, mine—I think it’s probably the right time for the various Occupy encampments to disperse. It was starting to feel like the first act needed to come to a climax. And what a G-spot barnstormer that curtain-closer was.

Even as I was privileged to have witnessed Occupy Wall Street on three occasions in all of its life-affirming, carnivalesque glory, for anyone looking at the situation as a supportive outsider, the writing was on the wall in October about how long Zuccotti Park could reasonably be expected to be held by the wide cross-section of people who kick-started the movement. As more and more people were going to get peeled off because of the diabolically cold New York winter, it’s a blunt fact that after a certain point, only the chronically homeless would have still been camping out in that freezing cold concrete park. And Fox News would have been all over Zuccotti Park, the open-air homeless shelter.

Lest you think I am disparaging the homeless contingent at Occupy Wall Street, I’m not. In very little of the reporting I’ve seen or read on the OWS encampment, is there any mention of the extremely pivotal roles that were played by the hardcore homeless people and the gutterpunk types in what went down at Zuccotti Park. THEY are the ones who made it possible for the park to be held long enough for the others to join them. Nope, I’m not dissing the homeless participants in OWS, in the least, I think they were amongst the very first frontline heroes of the movement, but it’s just time to move past romancing this idea of the ragtag encampments. go back inside and get better organized. Some people, sympathetic to the movement’s goals are never in a million years going to do something “rash.” It’s time to reach out to them now, so the government knows what size crowd it’s dealing with! (That “silent majority” thing works both ways, as the establishment is finally starting to find out. Americans don’t like “Socialism” but they seem to LOVE socialist ideas, especially in times when their families are starving and they can’t afford to heat their homes. Just saying).

During the past few days, I’ve noticed quite a few more than just vaguely supportive “What’s next for the Occupy movement?” articles popping up in the mainstream media, including the front page of the New York Times, and from the Associated Press and Reuters. There’s also been some worried “What are we going to do about the OWS movement?” type things appearing in the conservative blogsphere.

A pretty good indicator of opinion on the right can be seen in Republican strategist Frank Luntz’s comments to the Republican Governors Association this week in Florida. Say what you will about Luntz—I hate his guts and think he’s made this country a much shittier, meaner, stupider place than had he never been born—the man, like Karl Rove, is an evil genius. But can even the sinister Mister Luntz do anything to stop the tidal wave of history? (To paraphrase the Carol Beer character in Little Britain, “Dialectic says ‘NO’”).

“I’m so scared of this anti-Wall Street effort. I’m frightened to death,” Luntz told the GOP governors. “They’re having an impact on what the American people think of capitalism.”

In a series of talking points (you can read them all in Chris Moody’s article “How Republicans are being taught to talk about Occupy Wall Street” on Yahoo News) Lutz gave the GOP leadership advice like: Don’t say capitalism.
“I’m trying to get that word removed and we’re replacing it with either ‘economic freedom’ or ‘free market,’ ” Luntz told them. “The public . . . still prefers capitalism to socialism, but they think capitalism is immoral. And if we’re seen as defenders of quote, Wall Street, end quote, we’ve got a problem.”
You could read into that statement a lot of different ways. I’ll leave you to your own interpretation.

Another thing I see happening, and I applaud the editors who are sharp enough to get why this would be a good idea, is that people who have actually physically been at the various Occupy encampments and were writing from an “on the ground perspective” there, are starting to get hired by some of the major newspapers to cover current events, and the arts, from the point of view of the Occupy movement.

One of these individuals is Arun Gupta, the founding editor of The Indypendent, who wrote “This is a movement for anyone who lacks a job, housing or healthcare, or thinks they have no future” in a fascinating essay, “The Revolution Begins at Home An Open Letter to Join the Wall Street Occupation” that I read on Naomi Klein’s website. I’ve taken notice of his byline ever since.

He’s now covering the Occupy movement for Salon, but in the pages of The Guardian, Gupta wrote what I thought was a gobsmacking vision of what America has become in the intro to his sensational interview with novelist Arundhati Roy

“This is uniquely American,” I remark to Roy about interviewing her while both in cars but thousands of miles apart. Having driven some 7,000 miles and visited 23 cities (and counting) in reporting on the Occupy movement, it’s become apparent that the US is essentially an oil-based economy in which we shuttle goods we no longer make around a continental land mass, creating poverty-level dead-end jobs in the service sector.

If that last bit didn’t drain the blood out of your face, then read it again.

From the interview with the author of the Booker Prize-winning novel, The God of Small Things:
Arun Gupta: Why did you want to visit Occupy Wall Street and what are your impressions of it?

Arundhati Roy: How could I not want to visit? Given what I’ve been doing for so many years, it seems to me, intellectually and theoretically, quite predictable this was going to happen here at some point. But still I cannot deny myself the surprise and delight that it has happened. And I wanted to, obviously, see for myself the extent and size and texture and nature of it. So the first time I went there, because all those tents were up, it seemed more like a squat than a protest to me, but it began to reveal itself in a while. Some people were holding the ground and it was the hub for other people to organise, to think through things. As I said when I spoke at the People’s University, it seems to me to be introducing a new political language into the United States, a language that would be considered blasphemous only a while ago.

Arun Gupta: Do you think that the Occupy movement should be defined by occupying one particular space or by occupying spaces?

Arundhati Roy: I don’t think the whole protest is only about occupying physical territory, but about reigniting a new political imagination. I don’t think the state will allow people to occupy a particular space unless it feels that allowing that will end up in a kind of complacency, and the effectiveness and urgency of the protest will be lost. The fact that in New York and other places where people are being beaten and evicted suggests nervousness and confusion in the ruling establishment. I think the movement will, or at least should, become a protean movement of ideas, as well as action, where the element of surprise remains with the protesters. We need to preserve the element of an intellectual ambush and a physical manifestation that takes the government and the police by surprise. It has to keep re-imagining itself, because holding territory may not be something the movement will be allowed to do in a state as powerful and violent as the United States.

Arun Gupta: At the same, occupying public spaces did capture the public imagination. Why do you think that is?

Arundhati Roy: I think you had a whole subcutaneous discontent that these movements suddenly began to epitomise. The Occupy movement found places where people who were feeling that anger could come and share it – and that is, as we all know, extremely important in any political movement. The Occupy sites became a way you could gauge the levels of anger and discontent.

Arun Gupta: You mentioned that they are under attack. Dozens of occupations have been shut down, evicted, at least temporarily, in the last week. What do you see as the next phase for this movement?

Arundhati Roy: I don’t know whether I’m qualified to answer that, because I’m not somebody who spends a lot of time here in the United States, but I suspect that it will keep reassembling in different ways and the anger created by the repression will, in fact, expand the movement. But eventually, the greater danger to the movement is that it may dovetail into the presidential election campaign that’s coming up. I’ve seen that happen before in the antiwar movement here, and I see it happening all the time in India. Eventually, all the energy goes into trying to campaign for the “better guy”, in this case Barack Obama, who’s actually expanding wars all over the world. Election campaigns seem to siphon away political anger and even basic political intelligence into this great vaudeville, after which we all end up in exactly the same place.

—snip—

Arun Gupta: You’ve written about the need for a different imagination than that of capitalism. Can you talk about that?

Arundhati Roy: We often confuse or loosely use the ideas of crony capitalism or neoliberalism to actually avoid using the word “capitalism”, but once you’ve actually seen, let’s say, what’s happening in India and the United States – that this model of US economics packaged in a carton that says “democracy” is being forced on countries all over the world, militarily if necessary, has in the United States itself resulted in 400 of the richest people owning wealth equivalent [to that] of half of the population. Thousands are losing their jobs and homes, while corporations are being bailed out with billions of dollars.

In India, 100 of the richest people own assets worth 25% of the gross domestic product. There’s something terribly wrong. No individual and no corporation should be allowed to amass that kind of unlimited wealth, including bestselling writers like myself, who are showered with royalties. Money need not be our only reward. Corporations that are turning over these huge profits can own everything: the media, the universities, the mines, the weapons industry, insurance hospitals, drug companies, non-governmental organisations. They can buy judges, journalists, politicians, publishing houses, television stations, bookshops and even activists. This kind of monopoly, this cross-ownership of businesses, has to stop.

The whole privatisation of health and education, of natural resources and essential infrastructure – all of this is so twisted and so antithetical to anything that would place the interests of human beings or the environment at the center of what ought to be a government concern – should stop. The amassing of unfettered wealth of individuals and corporations should stop. The inheritance of rich people’s wealth by their children should stop. The expropriators should have their wealth expropriated and redistributed.

Standing ovation!

The interview concludes when Gupta asks Roy if the term “occupation” can be reclaimed: She tells him “We ought to say, “Occupy Wall Street, not Iraq,” “Occupy Wall Street, not Afghanistan,” “Occupy Wall Street, not Palestine.” The two need to be put together. Otherwise people might not read the signs.”

Arundhati Roy: ‘The people who created the crisis will not be the ones that come up with a solution’ (The Guardian)

Look for more of Arun Gupta’s work on Salon. Follow him on Twitter.

Another strong—and often very amusing—new voice emerging from the media on the Left is Tina Dupuy, the managing editor of the mighty Crooks and Liars blog. She’s a powerful and persuasive writer and a sometime stand-up comic. Dupuy gave a fascinating firsthand description of what she saw the other night when Occupy Los Angeles—the largest of all the encampments—was evicted, when she was on Sam Seder’s Majority Report yesterday. I’m glad this woman is out there on the frontlines. Tina Dupuy could be another Rachel Maddow. It can’t be long until Current TV or MSNBC snaps her up (Or The Daily Show for that matter. They could use a real Lefty…)

And then there is this survey, which suggests to me that some of the marks are wising up. At The New York Times blog, The Caucus, Kate Zirnike writes in “Support for Tea Party Drops Even in Strongholds, Survey Finds”
In Congressional districts represented by Tea Party lawmakers, the number of people saying they disagree with the Tea Party has risen sharply over the year since the movement powered a Republican sweep in midterm elections, so that almost as many people disagree with the Tea Party as agree with it, according to the poll by the Pew Research Center.

Support for the Republican Party has fallen more sharply in those places than it has in the country as a whole. In the 60 districts represented in Congress by a member of the House Tea Party Caucus, Republicans are viewed about as negatively as Democrats.

The survey suggests that the Tea Party may be dragging down the Republican Party heading into a presidential election year, even as it ushered in a new Republican majority in the House of Representatives just a year ago.

Other polls have shown a decline in support for the Tea Party and its positions, particularly because its hard line during the debate over the debt ceiling and deficit reduction made the Tea Party less an abstraction. In earlier polls, most Americans did not know enough about the Tea Party to offer an opinion.

But the Pew survey shows that Tea Party support has declined even in places where it had been particularly robust.

“We know that the image of the G.O.P. has slipped, but to see it slip so dramatically in Tea Party districts is pretty surprising,” said Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew center. “You think of those as bedrock Republican districts. They are the base.”
Tea-hee! Superb!

More from Reuters:
In an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll taken earlier this month, 76 percent agreed that the “current economic structure of the country is out of balance and favors a very small proportion of the rich over the rest of the country.” In another recent poll, by The Washington Post/ABC News, respondents were asked: “Do you think the federal government should or should not pursue policies that try to reduce the gap between wealthy and less well-off Americans?” A majority – 60 percent – said the government should pursue such policies.

Meanwhile, public concern about the Tea Party’s linchpin issues – taxes and the deficit – has receded. Asked in late October to name the most important issue facing the country, just 5 percent of respondents to a New York Times/CBS News poll named the budget deficit. A majority said jobs and the economy. This same poll included another result that should give Democrats hope: A strong 69 percent of respondents agreed that the policies of Republicans in Congress “favor the rich” while just 12 percent thought the same thing about Obama’s policies.
Actually that poll should do more than just provide the Democrats with some “hope”—it should give them SOME FUCKING IDEAS. Here’s one for free: TAX THE RICH.

And lastly, here’s the New Statesman blog had a look at the numbers from big strike in the UK:
The unions claim that around 2 million people were on strike yesterday, but ministers dispute this, putting the number closer to 1.2 million.
Well they would say that, wouldn’t they? Either way that’s well over a million people striking. And David Cameron calls that “a damp squib”? What number would it take to really rattle the boy Prime Minister? Let’s hope we get to find out soon!

Why The Study of Evolution Matters

2011-12-04T00:28:00.002-05:00

from BoingBoing:

"Teaching science without evolution is like teaching sentence structure without the alphabet." That's a quote from Carin Bondar, one of the awesome scientists interviewed in this video about why evolution needs to be taught in public schools.

You'll note that all the scientists in the video happen to be female. That's because it's kind of a response, meant as a counterpoint to that incredibly obnoxious video of Miss America contestants' responses to the same question. Women who know science know evolution matters.

Thanks to scientists Matt Shipman, David Wescott, Jamie Vernon, Kevin Zelnio and Andrea Kuszewski for producing this awesome film.

Dead Kennedys Lost Tapes

2011-12-03T00:36:00.004-05:00

IN GOD WE TRUST, INC: AMAZING FOOTAGE OF DEAD KENNEDYS IN THE STUDIO, 1981

from DangerousMinds

When the Dead Kennedys went into the studio in 1981 to record In God We Trust, Inc., their “tribute” EP to the faster, thrashier “hardcore” musical style associated with the Washington, DC punk scene (think Minor Threat) the first sessions were laid down on defective tape stock, so they had to go back to the studio to record it again a few months later.

In 2003, videotapes of the band working out the arrangements and recording the songs during that initial session (taped for a documentary on punk rock) were released as The Lost Tapes on DVD. A raw mix was fed directly into the line inputs of the camera, so the audio was immediate and powerful. Using techniques that did not exist in 1981, five of the eight songs recorded during the first In God We Trust, Inc. session were eventually restored.

For In God We Trust, Inc., the group updated their anti-Jerry Brown screed, “California Über Alles” as a cocktail jazz redux inserting-newly inaugurated President Ronald Reagan’s name in for the young governor who had succeeded him. (Brown was re-elected California’s governor in 2010). Jello Biafra and the rest of the band, of course, don’t see eye to eye today, but the band captured during that ill-fated studio session was absolutely raw and on fire. Drummer D.H. Peligro had just joined the band at this time and he brought a lot to the band’s sound.

I bought In God We Trust, Inc. on a music cassette. The b-side was blank and the label bore the words “Home taping is killing record industry profits! We left this side blank so you can help.” LISTEN TO THIS LOUD!

Go HERE for the Youtube consecutive play page of the entire DVD

Alan Moore talks V for Vendetta Guy Fawkes masks

2011-12-02T01:26:00.001-05:00

The Guardian catches up with Alan Moore, writer of V for Vendetta and noted grumpy, uncompromising debullshitificator, and asks how he feels about the Guy Fawkes mask from his comic becoming a symbol of Anonymous and Occupy protests.
"I suppose when I was writing V for Vendetta I would in my secret heart of hearts have thought: wouldn't it be great if these ideas actually made an impact? So when you start to see that idle fantasy intrude on the regular world… It's peculiar. It feels like a character I created 30 years ago has somehow escaped the realm of fiction..."

Moore first noticed the masks being worn by members of the Anonymous group, "bothering Scientologists halfway down Tottenham Court Road" in 2008. It was a demonstration by the online collective against alleged attempts to censor a YouTube video. "I could see the sense of wearing a mask when you were going up against a notoriously litigious outfit like the Church of Scientology."

But with the mask's growing popularity, Moore has come to see its appeal as about something more than identity-shielding. "It turns protests into performances. The mask is very operatic; it creates a sense of romance and drama. I mean, protesting, protest marches, they can be very demanding, very gruelling. They can be quite dismal. They're things that have to be done, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they're tremendously enjoyable – whereas actually, they should be..."

"I find it comical, watching Time Warner try to walk this precarious tightrope." Through contacts in the comics industry, he explains, he has heard that boosted sales of the masks have become a troubling issue for the company. "It's a bit embarrassing to be a corporation that seems to be profiting from an anti-corporate protest. It's not really anything that they want to be associated with. And yet they really don't like turning down money – it goes against all of their instincts." Moore chuckles. "I find it more funny than irksome."

Alan Moore – meet the man behind the protest mask

Thanks, BoingBoing

Over 50 years ago, he began a revolution that's still playing out today.

2011-12-01T01:05:00.002-05:00

from Discovery Magazine:

Discover Interview The Radical Linguist Noam Chomsky

For centuries experts held that every language is unique. Then one day in 1956, a young linguistics professor gave a legendary presentation at the Symposium on Information Theory at MIT. He argued that every intelligible sentence conforms not only to the rules of its particular language but to a universal grammar that encompasses all languages. And rather than absorbing language from the environment and learning to communicate by imitation, children are born with the innate capacity to master language, a power imbued in our species by evolution itself. Almost overnight, linguists’ thinking began to shift.

Avram Noam Chomsky was born in Philadelphia on December 7, 1928, to William Chomsky, a Hebrew scholar, and Elsie Simonofsky Chomsky, also a scholar and an author of children’s books. While still a youngster, Noam read his father’s manuscript on medieval Hebrew grammar, setting the stage for his work to come. By 1955 he was teaching linguistics at MIT, where he formulated his groundbreaking theories. Today Chomsky continues to challenge the way we perceive ourselves. Language is “the core of our being,” he says. “We are always immersed in it. It takes a strong act of will to try not to talk to yourself when you’re walking down the street, because it’s just always going on.”

Chomsky also bucked against scientific tradition by becoming active in politics. He was an outspoken critic of American involvement in Vietnam and helped organize the famous 1967 protest march on the Pentagon. When the leaders of the march were arrested, he found himself sharing a cell with Norman Mailer, who described him in his book Armies of the Night as “a slim, sharp-featured man with an ascetic expression, and an air of gentle but absolute moral integrity.”

Chomsky discussed his ideas with Connecticut journalist Marion Long after numerous canceled interviews. “It was a very difficult situation,” Long says. “Chomsky’s wife was gravely ill, and he was her caretaker. She died about 10 days before I spoke with him. It was Chomsky’s first day back doing interviews, but he wanted to go through with it.” Later, he gave even more time to DISCOVER reporter Valerie Ross, answering her questions from his storied MIT office right up to the moment he dashed off to catch a plane.

You describe human language as a unique trait. What sets us apart? 
Humans are different from other creatures, and every human is basically identical in this respect. If a child from an Amazonian hunter-gatherer tribe comes to Boston, is raised in Boston, that child will be indistinguishable in language capacities from my children growing up here, and vice versa. This unique human possession, which we hold in common, is at the core of a large part of our culture and our imaginative intellectual life. That’s how we form plans, do creative art, and develop complex societies.

When and how did the power of language arise? 
If you look at the archaeological record, a creative explosion shows up in a narrow window, somewhere between 150,000 and roughly 75,000 years ago. All of a sudden, there’s an explosion  of complex artifacts, symbolic representation, measurement of celestial events, complex social structures–a burst of creative activity that almost every expert on prehistory assumes must have been connected with the sudden emergence of language. And it doesn’t seem to be connected with physical changes; the articulatory and acoustic [speech and hearing] systems of contemporary humans are not very different from those of 600,000 years ago. There was a rapid cognitive change. Nobody knows why.

What first sparked your interest in human language?  
I read modern Hebrew literature and other texts with my father from a very young age. It must have been around 1940 when he got his Ph.D. from Dropsie College, a Hebrew college in Philadelphia. He was a Semitist, working on medieval Hebrew grammar. I don’t know if I officially proofread my father’s book, but I read it. I did get some conception of grammar in general from that. But back then, studying grammar meant organizing the sounds, looking at the tense, making a catalog of those things, and seeing how they fit together.

Linguists have distinguished between historical grammars and  descriptive grammars. What is the difference between the two?
Historical grammar is a study of how, say, modern English developed from Middle English, and how that developed from Early and Old English, and how that developed from Germanic, and that developed from what’s called Proto-Indo-European, a source system that nobody speaks so you have to try to reconstruct it. It is an effort to reconstruct how languages developed through time, analogous to the study of evolution. Descriptive grammar is an attempt to give an account of what the current system is for either a society or an individual, whatever you happen to be studying. It is kind of like the difference between evolution and psychology.

And linguists of your father’s era, what did they do?  
They were taught field methods. So, suppose you wanted to write a grammar of Cherokee. You would go into the field, and you would elicit information from native speakers, called informants.

What sort of questions would the linguists ask?  
Suppose you’re an anthropological linguist from China and you want to study my language. The first thing you would try to do is see what kind of sounds I use, and then you’d ask how those sounds go together. So why can I say “blick” but not “bnick,” for example, and what’s the organization of the sounds? How can they be combined? If you look at the way word structure is organized, is there a past tense on a verb? If there is, does it follow the verb or does it precede the verb, or is it some other kind of thing? And you’d go on asking more and more questions like that.

But you weren’t content with that approach. Why not? 
I was at Penn, and my undergraduate thesis topic was the modern grammar of spoken Hebrew, which I knew fairly well. I started doing it the way we were taught. I got a Hebrew-speaking informant, started asking questions and getting the data. At some point, though, it just occurred to me: This is ridiculous! I’m asking these questions, but I already know the answers.

Soon you started developing a different approach to linguistics. How did those ideas emerge? 
Back in the early 1950s, when I was a graduate student at Harvard, the general assumption was that language, like all other human activities, is just a collection of learned behaviors developed through the same methods used to train animals—by reinforcement. That was virtually dogma at the time. But there were two or three of us who didn’t believe it, and we started to think about other ways of looking at things.

In particular, we looked at a very elementary fact: Each language provides a means to construct and interpret infinitely many structured expressions, each of which has a semantic interpretation and an expression in sound. So there’s got to be what’s called a generative procedure, an ability to generate infinite sentences or expressions and then to connect them to thought systems and to sensory motor systems. One has to begin by focusing on this central property, the unbounded generation of structured expressions and their interpretations. Those ideas crystallized and became part of the so-called biolinguistic framework, which looks at language as an element of human biology, rather like, say, the visual system.

You theorized that all humans have “universal grammar.” What is that?  
It refers to the genetic component of the human language faculty. Take your last sentence, for example. It’s not a random sequence of noises. It has a very definite structure, and it has a very specific semantic interpretation; it means something, not something else, and it sounds a particular way, not some other way. Well, how do you do that? There are two possibilities. One, it’s a miracle. Or two, you have some internal system of rules that determines the structures and the interpretations. I don’t think it’s a miracle.

What were the early reactions to your linguistic ideas? 
At first, people mostly dismissed or ignored them. It was the period of behavioral science, the study of action and behavior, including behavior control and modification. Behaviorism held that you could basically turn a person into anything, depending on how you organized the environment and the training procedures. The idea that a genetic component entered crucially into this was considered exotic, to put it mildly.

Later, my heretical idea was given the name “the innateness hypothesis,” and there was a great deal of literature condemning it. You can still read right now, in major journals, that language is just the result of culture and environment and training. It’s a commonsense notion, in a way. We all learn language, so how hard could it be? We see that environmental effects do exist. People growing up in England speak English, not Swahili. And the actual principles—they’re not accessible to consciousness. We can’t look inside ourselves and see the hidden principles that organize our language behavior any more than we can see the principles that allow us to move our bodies. It happens internally.

How do linguists go about searching for these hidden principles? 
You can find information about a language by collecting a corpus of data—for instance, the Chinese linguist studying my language could ask me various questions about it and collect the answers. That would be one corpus. Another corpus would just be a tape recording of everything I say for three days. And you can investigate a language by studying what goes on in the brain as people learn or use language. Linguists today should concentrate on discovering the rules and principles that you, for example, are using right now when you interpret and comprehend the sentences I’m producing and when you produce your own.

Isn’t this just like the old system of grammar that you rejected?  
No. In the traditional study of grammar, you’re concentrating on the organization of sounds and word formation and maybe a few observations about syntax. In the generative linguistics of the last 50 years, you’re asking, for each language, what is the system of rules and principles that determines an infinite array of structured expressions? Then you assign specific interpretations to them.

Has brain imaging changed the way we understand language? 
There was an interesting study of brain activity in language recently conducted by a group in Milan. They gave subjects two types of written materials based on nonsense language. One was a symbolic language modeled on the rules of Italian, though the subjects didn’t know that. The other was devised to violate the rules of universal grammar. To take a particular case, say you wanted to negate a sentence: “John was here, John wasn’t here.” There are particular things that you are allowed to do in languages. You can put the word “not” in certain positions, but you can’t put it in other positions. So one invented language put the negation element in a permissible place, while the other put it in an impermissible place. The Milan group seems to have found that permissible nonsense sentences produced activity in the language areas of the brain, but the impermissible ones—the ones that violated principles of universal grammar—did not. That means the people were just treating the impermissible sentences as a puzzle, not as language. It’s a preliminary result, but it strongly suggests that the linguistic principles discovered by investigating languages have neurocorrelates, as one would expect and hope.

  Recent genetic studies also offer some clues about language, right? 
In recent years a gene has been discovered called FOXP2. This gene is particularly interesting because mutations on it correspond with some deficiencies in language use. It relates to what’s called orofacial activation, the way you control your mouth and your face and your tongue when you speak. So FOXP2 plausibly has something to do with the use of language. It’s found in many other organisms, not just humans, and functions in many different ways in different species; these genes don’t do one single thing. But that’s an interesting preliminary step toward finding a genetic basis for some aspects of language.

You say that innate language is uniquely human, yet FOXP2 shows a  continuity among species. Is that a contradiction?
It’s almost meaningless that there’s a continuity. Nobody doubts that the human language faculty is based on genes, neurons, and so on. The mechanisms that are involved in the use, understanding, acquisition, and production of language at some level show up throughout the animal world, and in fact throughout the organic world; you find some of them in bacteria. But that tells you almost nothing about evolution or common origins. The species that are maybe most similar to humans with regard to anything remotely like language production are birds, but that’s not due to common origin. It’s what’s called convergence, a development of somewhat analogous systems independently. FOXP2 is quite interesting, but it’s dealing with fairly peripheral parts of language like [physical] language production. Whatever’s discovered about it is unlikely to have much of an effect on linguistic theory.

Over the past 20 years you’ve been working on a “minimalist”  understanding of language. What does that entail?  
Suppose language were like a snowflake; it takes the form it does because of natural law, with the condition that it satisfy these external constraints. That approach to the investigation of language came to be called the minimalist program. It has achieved, I think, some fairly significant results in showing that language is indeed a perfect solution for semantic expression—the meaning—but badly designed for articulate expression, the particular sound you make when you say “baseball” and not “tree.”

  What are the outstanding big questions in linguistics?  
There are a great many blanks. Some are “what” questions, like: What is language? What are the rules and principles that enter into what you and I are now doing? Others are “how” questions: How did you and I acquire this capacity? What was it in our genetic  endowment and experience and in the laws of nature? And then there are the “why” questions, which are much harder: Why are the principles of language this way and not some other way? To what extent is it true that the basic language design yields an optimal solution to the external conditions that language must satisfy? That’s a huge problem. To what extent can we relate what we understand about the nature of language to activity taking place in the brain? And can there be, ultimately, some serious inquiry into the genetic basis for language? In all of these areas there’s been quite a lot of progress, but huge gaps remain.

Every parent has marveled at the way children develop language. It seems incredible that we still know so little about the process.
We now know that an infant, at birth, has some information about its mother’s language; it can distinguish its mother’s language from some other language when both are spoken by a bilingual woman. There are all kinds of things going on in the environment, what William James called a “blooming, buzzing confusion.” Somehow the infant reflexively selects out of that complex environment the data that are language-related. No other organism can do that; a chimpanzee can’t do that. And then very quickly and reflexively the infant proceeds to gain an internal system, which ultimately yields the capacities that we are now using. What’s going on in the [infant’s] brain? What elements of the human genome are contributing to this process? How did these things evolve?

What about meaning at a higher level? The classic stories that people retell from generation to generation have a number of recurring themes. Could this repetition indicate something about innate human language?  
In one of the standard fairy tales, the handsome prince is turned into a frog by the wicked witch, and finally the beautiful princess comes around and kisses the frog, and he’s the prince again. Well, every child knows that the frog is actually the prince, but how do they know it? He’s a frog by every physical characteristic. What makes him the prince? It turns out there is a principle: We identify persons and animals and other living creatures by a property that’s called psychic continuity. We interpret them as having some kind of a mind or a soul or something internal that persists independent of their physical properties. Scientists don’t believe that, but every child does, and every human knows how to interpret the world that way.

You make it sound like the science of linguistics is just getting started. 
There are many simple descriptive facts about language that just aren’t understood: how sentences get their meaning, how they get their sound, how other people comprehend them. Why don’t languages use linear order in computation? For example, take a simple sentence like “Can eagles that fly swim?” You understand it; everyone understands it. A child understands that it’s asking whether eagles can swim. It’s not asking whether they can fly. You can say, “Are eagles that fly swimming?” You can’t say, “Are eagles that flying swim?” Meaning, is it the case that eagles that are flying swim? These are rules that everyone knows, knows reflexively. But why? It’s still quite a mystery, and the origins of those principles are basically unknown.

Occupy Everywhere: Michael Moore, Naomi Klein on Next Steps for the Movement Against Corporate Power

2011-11-30T01:22:00.000-05:00

Great Talk organized by The Nation magazine from Democracy Now

How does the Occupy Wall Street movement move from "the outrage phase" to the "hope phase," and imagine a new economic model? In a Democracy Now! special broadcast, we bring you excerpts from a recent event that examined this question and much more. "Occupy Everywhere: On the New Politics and Possibilities of the Movement Against Corporate Power," a panel discussion hosted by The Nation magazine and The New School in New York City, features Oscar-winning filmmaker and author Michael Moore; Naomi Klein, best-selling author of the "Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism"; Rinku Sen of the Applied Research Center and publisher of ColorLines; Occupy Wall Street organizer Patrick Bruner; and veteran journalist William Greider, author of "Come Home, America: The Rise and Fall (and Redeeming Promise) of Our Country."

Occupy Wall St - The Revolution Is Love

2011-11-29T01:26:00.000-05:00

"Love is the felt experience of connection to another being. An economist says 'more for you is less for me.' But the lover knows that more of you is more for me too. If you love somebody their happiness is your happiness. Their pain is your pain. Your sense of self expands to include other beings. This shift of consciousness is universal in everybody, 99% and 1%." ~ Charles Eisenstein

This short film was Directed by Ian MacKenzie

Watch video with Spanish/French subtitles
http://www.universalsubtitles.org/en/videos/06HYpGK1jhTJ/info/

CHARLES EISENSTEIN is a teacher, speaker, and writer focusing on themes of civilization, consciousness, money, and human cultural evolution.

Transcript:

"This movement isn't about the 99% defeating or toppling the 1%. You know the next chapter of that story, which is that the 99% create a new 1%. That's not what it's about.

What we want to create is the more beautiful world our hearts tell us is possible. A sacred world. A world that works for everybody. A world that is healing. A world of peace.

You can't just say "We demand a world of peace. Demands have to be specific. Anything that people can articulate can only be articulated within the language of the current political discourse. And that entire political discourse is already too small. And that's why making explicit demands reduces the movement, and takes the heart out of it. So it's a real paradox, and I think the movement understands that.

The system isn't working for the 1% either. You know if you were a CEO, you would be making the same choices they do. The institutions have their own logic. Life is pretty bleak at the top too - and all the baubles of the rich are this phoney compensation for the loss of what's really important. The loss of community, the loss of connection, the loss of intimacy. The loss of meaning.

Everybody wants to live a life of meaning. And today, we live in a money economy where we don't really depend on the gifts of anybody. But we buy everything. Therefore we don't really need anybody, because whoever grew my food, or made my clothes, or built by house, well if they die, or if I alienate them, or if they don't like me, that's okay because I can just pay someone else to do it.

And it's really hard to create community if the underlying knowledge is "we don't need each other." So people kind of get together and act nice, or maybe they consume together. But joint consumption doesn't create intimacy. Only joint creativity and gifts create intimacy and connection.

You have such gifts, that are important. Just as every species has an important gift to give to an ecosystem, and the extinction of any species hurts everybody. The same is true of each person, that you have a necessary and important gift to give.

And that for a long time our minds have told us that maybe we're crazy, that maybe we're imagining things, that's its crazy to live according to what you want to give. But I think now, as more and more people wake up to the truth, that we're here to give, and wake up to that desire, and wake up to the fact that other way isn't working anyway - the more reinforcement we have from people around us that this isn't crazy. This is makes sense. This is how to live.

And as we get that reinforcement, then our minds and our logic no longer have to fight against the logic of the heart which wants us to be of service. This shift of consciousness that inspires such things is universal, 99% and the 1% and it's awakening in different people in different ways.

I think love is the felt experience of connection to another being. An economist says 'more for you is less for me.' But the lover knows that more of you is more for me too. If you love somebody their happiness is your happiness. Their pain is your pain. Your sense of self expands to include other beings.

That's love, love is the expansion of the self to include the other. And that's a different kind of revolution. There's no one to fight. There's no evil to fight. There's no other in this revolution.

Everybody has a unique calling and it's really time to listen to that. That's what the future is going to be. It's time to get ready for it, and contribute to it, and help make it happen.

Uploaded by fiercelightfilms
A taste of the upcoming feature documentary, Occupy Love. This is a community funded film. Please support our crowd funding campaign at http://www.indiegogo.com/Occupy-Love?a=315019&i=addr

The Revolution Is Being Televised, cont.Consistently the Best Occupy Coverage is from this Kid.

2011-11-28T01:07:00.004-05:00

Occupy Wall Street General Assembly
WeAreTheOther99 on USTREAM

I was telling people for a while via twitter and my blog that this kid was the one to watch, for quality and coverage.
My friend Xeni as well as many of you picked up on him soon thereafter.

The following interview from Xeni Jardin at BoingBoing:

The Dronecam Revolution Will Be Webcast:
Interview with Tim Pool of "The Other 99"

In recent weeks, one source of live news coverage for the Occupy Wall Street movement stood out above all others. Not a cable news network, not a newspaper, but a 25-year-old guy named Tim Pool. He packs a smartphone with unlimited data, a copy of Ustream's mobile video streaming app, and a battery pack to keep it all going — which he has for 21 hours straight, on big news days. Soon, Tim and team plan to have have their own hacker-made flying camera-drones, to provide aerial footage TV news chopppers can't. The guerrilla web stream "The Other 99" has reached more than 2 million unique viewers over the last two months, and become a source of eyes on the ground unmatched by big media. The project runs solely on donations. Is The Other 99's webcast the start of a new news normal, and could Pool be one of many DIY backpack broadcasters to come? I tracked him down in New York between streams to find out what he thinks, and how and why he does what he does. — XJ

Xeni Jardin: Break down your current gear setup for us, would you?

Tim Pool: The backpack I use is just a regular backpack. My gear is a Samsung GALAXY S II (on Sprint, because they offer unlimited data) and an Energizer XPAL 18000, and I literally slide the external battery into my back pocket and I plug my phone into it. That’s pretty much it.

Xeni Jardin: And that equipment was purchased for you with donations?

Tim Pool: The Energizer battery, yes. The cellphone is just my cellphone.

Tim Pool's gear kit for the "The Other 99" web stream. Yup. That's all.

Xeni Jardin: Where are you from?

Tim Pool: Chicago. I came up to New York on the fourth day of the Occupation, up from Newport News, VA. I had been staying there with my brother, working with friends to create a community skate park and producing videos to show how to do some of my favorite skateboard tricks.

Xeni Jardin: And what inspired you to come up to OWS?

Tim Pool: I knew about Occupy Wall Street a little bit before it happened. The financial sector problems happening in this country, government corruption and collusion with big corporations, all of that concerned me. So this spoke to me. When I first heard about it, I was skeptical that people wouldn’t actually stand their ground. I'd become jaded over the years as an activist and nonprofit volunteer, and didn't have much hope.

But then, I saw this video of police brutality at Occupy Wall Street. The officers were arresting a man, and they grabbed him by his ankles and started dragging him by his hands. When they let go, you could see that his hands were bleeding. That really riled me up.

So I thought, these people have been sleeping in the park, they are serious, and I have to be down there and support them.

Xeni Jardin: So you took the Chinatown bus from Virginia up to New York, and then what?

Tim Pool: When I first arrived I thought: I know can add something to this, but it was extremely difficult to adapt. It's a problem a lot of people have with Occupy Wall Street, if you don’t understand it, it appears to not be focused. But really, the Occupy Movement is just trying to create a new system because the old one is broken.

It was difficult to integrate myself into all of this, and I didn’t fully understand what they were fighting for, because there were so many different things to fight for.

After a while I realized, maybe the best thing to do is document this as truthfully as possible so we could have just transparency. I felt like an independent media outlet that was external -- not exactly a part of the movement, but not part of a corporate machine bound by the typical rules of the TV business, either. That way I wouldn’t have an internal or external bias, I could sort of float in between and tell the story from my point of view.

Xeni Jardin: You mentioned you had done nonprofit work before. Tell me a little bit more about that? Were you a political activist? What was it that you were doing before, and were you doing video?

Tim Pool: Not video. The extent of my video just involves skateboarding tricks and pointing a camera at my friends. But I did fundraising, street canvassing for Greenpeace, and Environment America. And then I have also been on a few actions with the World Can't Wait, and just anti-war protests and things like that.

Xeni Jardin: What was it like when you arrived in New York?

Tim Pool: I got there really late at night, on September 21st. I got off the bus in Chinatown. I had never been to New York before, had no idea where I was, and I just walked up to the first person I saw and said, "I am looking for Liberty and Broadway." They pointed me in the right direction, and I started walking.

It was really incredible when I first arrived, because there was really nothing there. The food section, the kitchen? Just a few bowls covered with plastic wrap. There was some torn carpet that people were sleeping on. And when I arrived I just laid down on a torn piece of carpet, covered myself with some plastic to protect against the rain, and it was just incredible. I was like, hey, this place is occupied, and I am in it.

Xeni Jardin: And then what was the morning like? Did you bring your gear with you, were you thinking already about video?

Tim Pool: No, I just had a backpack full of clothes, and I was floating around trying to figure out where I would fit in. I met Henry James Ferry later that day, and he was uploading a video. Henry had started a media fund to raise money, and he was actually buying a lot of supplies for the people on the park. And then a day or two later he said, I think I want to fund some independent journalists, people are donating this money to me, and we need to be able to tell the story, because the news isn’t going to do it.

The action really started on day eight. I had a cellphone and I was using Twitter, and that was when we saw the pepper-spraying of the protestors by Officer Bologna. Henry was the one who actually uploaded that footage and got that out there.

When that video took off, within three days it had over a million hits. Henry got me a computer and said, let's do this, let’s use this computer, and let’s do a blog, we will set up a WordPress or something. How can we do this? He was also doing a bit of political theater—"The Conversation with the 1%," where he set up a little coffee table and two chairs and he would invite people from the 1% of society to come down and just have an open debate.

I told him, I am pretty good with computers, I could probably set up a live channel for you, what do you think? And he was like, yeah, yeah, let’s do it.

So I looked at the two main programs that people seemed to be using; Livestream and Ustream. I chose Ustream, because they had the mobile app, so I could shoot and broadcast just with my cellphone.

We had originally planned to webcast scheduled events, where people would tune
in and watch the political theater, but all of a sudden, this police action started to explode.

I just instinctively turned my phone on and went live, and we had seven or ten viewers who tuned in, just by hearing about it on Twitter.

We did the Times Square March, and we had about 200 viewers simultaneously. Then, 700. And I had a big old smile on my face like, "Wow, this is working, we are doing something good." We actually had over 5,000 people look at our channel to see what was going on and 700 stuck with us for the most part.

There were some other live broadcasts after that. I ended up doing the Oakland Solidarity March, that day. I was with Henry, but we got separated. Until that point Henry had been the one communicating as a correspondent, and I was just the cameraman. But when the action really heated up that night, about 2,000 people were marching down the street, they took over Broadway, they had taken the orange "kettling" net away from the police, and I was on my own. So I took over the narration. And we hit over 2,000 simultaneous viewers that night, and had about 25,000 unique hits.

Then, the real action happened that Tuesday during the NYPD eviction of OWS at Zuccotti Park. I couldn't get into the park. I had been at the Spokes Council Meeting, which was off-site. I just turned the phone on and said, I have got to do this. It was just instinct. I really didn’t have a plan, but I had my phone plugged into my external battery.

And I guess because the police had taken everyone by surprise, the other live stream teams didn't have a chance to charge their batteries. I was the only one streaming. If you wanted to know what was happening that night, you pretty much had to go through my stream. Global Revolution put my broadcast on their channel, because I was the only source, and I quickly went from 50 people to 5,000, then 6,000, and then we actually hit 12,000 simultaneous viewers that day.

We never knew what was going to happen next that day. There was something new happening every minute. I kept broadcasting throughout the entire day with the support of a friend who let me use his MacBook to get a charge into my cellphone, because I was down to about 3% at one point. Then, a few people pitched in and bought me the XPAL 18K batteries to keep me going.

I finished that day after 21 hours of handling a live broadcast with narration, but I didn't really realize what I had done. I was just sort of, hey, whatever, I am doing a live broadcast. But by end of the day I was on the front page of time.com, and I'd been put out by Al Jazeera.

Honestly, there were so many different outlets that had taken my stream as a primary source. It was just -- yeah, I didn’t realize the impact of what had happened.

The really big event was that Thursday for the #N17 action. We peaked out with 31,000 simultaneous viewers and a total of 737,000 unique viewers for the broadcast, within the span of about 12 hours.

Xeni Jardin: Why are you doing this?

Tim Pool: I felt compelled to do it. It just sort of happened. When I first started doing it, it was kind of just, hey, these cops are out of line, it’s safer to turn on the live broadcast, because the footage will go straight to the Internet and they can’t destroy it.

But as time went on I started to feel an obligation to people who had become loyal to our channel. Those viewers were loyal to me and I am in turn loyal to them.

I am an activist for transparency. I am a huge fan of the ideals behind WikiLeaks. I think information wants to be free, it deserves to be free, and the only way we are going to have a functioning government for the people is if people can see and understand why decisions are made. I hope I am contributing to that.

Xeni Jardin: Have you been offered a job by a TV network or anything like that?

Tim Pool: Not a network, but very prominent talent agents have -- yeah, they want to, and there is no way I am going to do that. I can’t trust the television networks and the editing, and I really don’t think there’s a way to --

Xeni Jardin: Tim, listen to me, those are good instincts. What you're doing is great. Please don’t fuck it up.

Tim Pool: No seriously, I would rather ask 1 million people for $1 than one person for $1 million. And I won’t turn our stream on just for the sake of having a stream on. A lot of people ask, "Why aren’t you broadcasting today?," and I try to remind everyone the mainstream news outlets have to produce a show. So you see news every day, but it’s a television show, and when it gets slow they are like, "Hey you guys, look at this cat." I am not going to do that.

Xeni Jardin: There you go! You have got your head on straight. What are you, 25?

Tim Pool: Yeah.

Xeni Jardin: That’s good! Don’t ever lose that spirit. So what’s next for you guys? You have a little office, there are people volunteering to help you out to keep things going. Where is the funding coming from?

Tim Pool: Small donors. We are all volunteers. The only pay we get is minor expenses. It’s like, hey, your cellphone is getting paid, maybe your rent will get covered. That's it. We are pretty broke, but we have enough to keep the story going, keep the narrative going.

Xeni Jardin: How can people support?

Tim Pool: Well, if you go to our Ustream channel, The Other99.TV, that’s simple, underneath the Video window there is a link to our donation page. And the new project that I am taking donations for, a side project is, Occumentary.org. There is a We Pay page listed on there and that’s for a live broadcast of an occupation road trip. The plan is to drive to as many occupations as possible and make sure that every second of it is live, like ‘The Truman Show’.

The idea seemed obvious. A lot of documentaries are biased, they leave out of information. Well, we are not going to leave out any of the information, because you are going to see every second of it. You will get to see everything real and raw and get a real experience of traveling to these places and meeting these people.

Xeni Jardin: What was the most intense moment for you behind the camera over these past few weeks?

Tim Pool: During the Oakland Solidarity March where about 2,000 of the occupiers took to the streets, there was a point where the police had made an attempt to kettle them with the orange netting again. But this time, the protestors weren’t having it, and they grabbed the orange net and pulled it away from the police. They lifted it over their heads and started marching and chanting, "Whose net? Our net!"

I was completely overwhelmed, and I just blurted out over the screen, "Tonight belongs to Occupy Wall Street!" And it was just -- it was amazing! The occupiers took the orange net and they started ripping out small sections to make armbands and headbands and they wore them as like a badge of honor for being a part of it.

Xeni Jardin: What was the most grueling stretch you've done?

Tim Pool: The most physically intense was the Occupy Oakland March, because I think we actually ended up marching about five miles. I was so dehydrated, I couldn’t run, I could barely walk by the time we were returning. I was struggling to move my legs, I thought I was actually going to pass out.

Xeni Jardin: What’s the longest you have stayed awake and stayed online streaming?

Tim Pool: 21 hours. Last Tuesday when NYPD did the Zuccotti eviction. I was up that Monday and it was the end of the day. I had been up since about 9 in the morning and the eviction started at around 1pm. I started streaming, and I didn’t actually go to sleep until around 1 in the morning Wednesday. So yeah, I was up for over two days and I had a 21-hour broadcast.

Xeni Jardin: Have you ever had problems with the police?

Tim Pool: Yes. I have been shoved, I have been thrown, I have been pushed into the middle of traffic. The thing is that the NYPD really don’t care who you are. They see me, a guy carrying a cellphone that says "Ustream" on the front and has a sticker, and they just assume I am one of the protestors. They're like, "Oh, another one of these guys."

We actually have press passes for TheOther99, and the police are like, "Oh, I am sorry, if you don’t have an NYPD credential, you can’t come back here." And then to the press who actually do have the NYPD passes they say, "Oh, if you come back here, we will take your credential away." For those reporters it's a decision of, "If I lose my credential, I get fired," so they are really scared and they act accordingly.

Last Thursday the police said at one point, anyone with an NYPD press badge that goes from the sidewalk on to the street loses their credentials. The supervising officer said to what appeared to be his unit, any member of the press that steps in the street loses their credentials, take it from them. And when the press heard him say that, you could see them all just run back to the sidewalk. I stood right next to him, I was like, "I don’t have a press pass you can take."

Xeni Jardin: Have you tried to get a NYPD press pass?

Tim Pool: We all thought about getting them, but with the way the police treat the people with NYPD press credentials -- it’s a waste of time. There are stipulations, like, you need to have produced six pieces of breaking news over the past few months to qualify. And Occupy Wall Street doesn’t count as breaking news, they say; it’s just an ongoing event. It’s really funny, because there are people from TIME Magazine, who have never needed to cross police lines, who now want to document Occupy Wall Street and can’t. They have been with TIME or some other big publication for ten years, and they can’t get a press pass.

The police know who I am. On our stream just the other day a police officer identified me by name. I met him and I said, what’s your name, and I shook his hand. I said, nice to meet you. "We keep up," he said.

I have been told that the police watch my stream, because it’s a good source of information. I don’t doubt it. I mean, I think they would be fools not to.

Xeni Jardin: So you have had some interactions with them that have been pretty cordial. Have you had negative interactions with police?

Tim Pool: I was pushed by an officer into traffic. But that sounds worse than it was. It wasn’t like cars were speeding past me, but he essentially pushed me off the sidewalk into the street, and that kind of pissed me off.

I was told the other day that I couldn't stand in the sidewalk and I showed him my press pass, and he said, I don’t care, you can either get behind the barricade or you can go to the pen. And I said I would start walking.

I am fortunate enough to have not encountered that situation. I think they try to avoid the live broadcast cameras, because they know these are -- you don’t want to hit the guy with the live broadcast, because people are going to flood the department with the phone calls, because they are all watching it live.

During the #N17 action an officer actually lifted up a barrier and used it as a sort of a shield to shove us. I was lifted up the ground, I got smashed in between people; it was pretty intense.

I have never been scared. It’s exciting, and I can feel the adrenaline, but I am really not worried about getting hurt. But after I was pushed out of that barricade situation, I saw the officer slam a photographer to the ground and, man, it’s really intense. They don’t care if you are press. If you are hanging on the side, they just start shoving and throwing people.

Xeni Jardin: Have you ever been arrested?

Tim Pool: I have been arrested for skateboarding.

Xeni Jardin: How about for what you are doing now with OWS?

Tim Pool: No.

Xeni Jardin: What are your thoughts about the possibility that you could be?

Tim Pool: It would be very interesting to have the live broadcast and with me getting arrested to see how that would play out for the NYPD. At the same time, I don’t want to be arrested, because it’s important that I document what’s happening, but the possibility is there. I am not really worried about sitting in a cell for a day or two and then getting out; getting a disorderly conduct charge that will eventually just disappear, and essentially meaningless.

Xeni Jardin: Where do you want to go from here? The documentary, the Occumentary as you call it— that would take you away from the action in New York City. Are you worried about missing something?

Tim Pool: Well, generally what I had been doing before these two marathon events, I just generally do updates. I will stick with the march, maybe get an hour or two of footage if there is an action, I will film the March, and then go offline. Everyone sort of assumes that I am this marathon broadcaster who goes on 24 hours a day, everyday. And it has really never been what I did, I just saw -- I saw the necessity for these two days to do it and I did.

But there is action happening in other places that is equally important, and my plan right now is to either go to Los Angeles or Oakland. It’s probably going to be Los Angeles, because on December 12 they have a plan for a West Coast Port Shutdown. I want to break out of the shell and see the other occupations.

Xeni Jardin: What's this I hear about you guys building a drone to compete with the TV news choppers?

Tim Pool: Well, everyone's seen that Polish video, the "Robokopter," right? We got lot of emails from people saying, "Why don’t you guys use an aerial drone to get overhead shots?," and it was really interesting to see all these coming at the same time. Someone actually donated, just a few days ago, $500 towards the purchase of the AR.Drone toy from Walmart. But it can’t stream and it can’t broadcast the video to a computer in which I could do a desktop capture.

So I spoke with Geoff Shively, and he said, we have got plans for a hack that’s going to make this essentially the most badass drone— "The SkyWitness," is what he calls it. But it’s going to be able to travel between wave points, so that I can send it to Henry based on whatever signals he is using, get an aerial overhead to fly over Zuccotti park. I think Geoff may build it with Noisebridge and with help from other hackerspaces. It looks like we are going to have a drone soon with an aerial camera to add to the mix.

Xeni Jardin: Some people will complain that you are acting as a journalist covering a movement that you feel a part of, or you feel aligned with. There is this long-held idea that journalists must be objective.

Tim Pool: I am an activist. I do feel support for the movement. However, there is something more important, and that’s the truth. I think Occupy Wall Street is great, because it's the people trying to work out their problems and make a space where they can communicate with each other.

It's sort of an end to the division, where we have the left and the right, the bottom and the top. They are trying to do away with that and understand one another. That’s awesome, that’s great! But if I see something happening in the movement and it’s wrong, I am going to film that too, and that’s just the way it is. I'm not going to spare people bad news about Occupy.

The truth is, it's just people. Good people, bad people, regular people, strange people; it's just a big group of people.

Xeni Jardin: What does your family think about what you are doing?

Tim Pool: My mom is super proud, and my dad is too. My brother is excited, and wants to join me. I guess I didn’t know what I was doing when I started doing it.

It's really strange for me, because I still don’t think about it, it’s just kind of normal. I turn my camera on and I just talk and everyone tells me it’s an amazing narration, and I kind of don’t think so. I am kind of just confused by it.

Florida Atheists' Xmas ad campaign

2011-11-27T01:49:00.000-05:00

from BoingBoing

After years of hearing the Christian right complain about the nonexistent "War on Christmas," the Florida chapter of American Atheists have decided to finally essay a skirmish. They'll be placing bus-ads in Florida this season advertising the fact that millions of Floridians are atheists and inviting atheists to attend their Ft Lauderdale convention Dec 18-19. I'm assuming that religious fundamentalists will oblige them by going crazy and make a huge stink, which'll ensure that the news of the convention is spread far and wide.

"Every year groups like The Catholic League and American Family Association told Americans about a war on Christmas that simply did not exist," American Atheists Communications Director Blair Scott says in the announcement. "Last year we thought we would give them what they seemed to want and fired the first shot in the war on Christmas. To both groups we say, 'Happy Holidays!'"

Atheist Group's New Florida Billboards About to Piss Off a Whole Bunch of Jesus Fans

Shepard Fairey Occupy UPDATE !

2011-11-26T00:07:00.002-05:00

After Conversations with Occupy Wall Street Organizers, Shepard Fairey Releases Revised “Occupy Hope” Design

By Shepard Fairey
I am not directly associated with either the Obama re-election campaign or the organizers of Occupy Wall St. After I put my Occupy HOPE image and brief statement online [last] Friday, I received responses from people and some very important issues were raised. It is hard to put across complex ideas with an image, and even harder to have a reasonable discussion in this polarizing, sound-bite oriented, media landscape, so I was grateful for some thoughtful feedback. My most eye-opening discussion was with an organizer of Occupy Wall St. who remains anonymous to preserve the lack of hierarchy within the movement. Below is a bit of our dialogue, which shows the many nuances to be navigated…

This image represents my support for the Occupy movement, a grassroots movement spawned to stand up against corruption, imbalance of power, and failure of our democracy to represent and help average Americans. On the other hand, as flawed as the system is, I see Obama as a potential ally of the Occupy movement if the energy of the movement is perceived as constructive, not destructive. I still see Obama as the closest thing to “a man on the inside” that we have presently. Obviously, just voting is not enough. We need to use all of our tools to help us achieve our goals and ideals. However, I think idealism and realism need to exist hand in hand. Change is not about one election, one rally, one leader, it is about a constant dedication to progress and a constant push in the right direction. Let’s be the people doing the right thing as outsiders and simultaneously push the insiders to do the right thing for the people. I’m still trying to work out copyright issues I may face with this image, but feel free to share it and stay tuned… -Shepard Fairey

Response from an Occupy Wall Street organizer:

Shepard,

The design is brilliant and powerful on many levels. I’m sure many people will love it. I don’t know if you know the history and evolution of the OWS 99% movement, but a core subgroup within Anonymous played a significant role, so to see that you used the V mask is very fitting. That being said, if it is not too late, we would like to make suggestions that we believe will make the design much more broadly accepted within the movement. You’re the artistic genius, so take what we say for whatever it’s worth to you.

Unfortunately, as it stands now, I myself and several other organizers cannot in any way be connected to this design. The 99% movement is wholly non-partisan and we have been repeatedly attacked as being a front for Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign. Our movement is about uniting people, from all different walks of life and all different political viewpoints, against the global financial elite who have bought control of our government through campaign finance, lobbying and the revolving door.

As Obama has raised more money from Wall Street than any other candidate in history, it would make us naive hypocrites to support him under present circumstances. I have written many investigative reports on our economic crisis, I know the situation very well from a policy perspective. All hope was lost with Obama as soon as he picked Tim Geithner as his Treasury Secretary. He also made Larry Summers his lead economic advisor and Bill Daley his Chief of Staff. He even supported the reconfirmation of the Bush-chosen Fed chairman Ben Bernanke. You cannot have a worse group of people when it comes to the economic destruction of the US. Geithner, Summers and Bernanke have made a career out of exploiting the 99%.

Some of us are of the opinion that Romney would be worse than Obama on some issues and many OWS supporters may end up voting for Obama over Romney. However, this movement is about empowering people to take actions themselves to fight for the structural change we urgently need. To reduce us to an Obama re-election campaign will not help anyone. Our political system is corrupt and broken. As naive as it may sound, we have to stop looking to leaders and we must be the change.

When you say that you “see Obama as a potential ally of the Occupy movement if the energy of the movement is perceived as constructive, not destructive.” That is a highly offensive and disrespectful comment. Everything we do is designed to be constructive. In the face of repeated police brutality, we have remained non-violent. We use the money that has been donated to us to feed people at our camps that don’t get food otherwise. We have medical professionals and psychologists who help people who can’t afford care. We had drug addicts directed to our camps by the police in attempts to make us look bad, and we have professional councilors treating them if they need or want help. We have put our bodies on the line in a peaceful non-violent manner so we can give voice to the voiceless. Our camps have become a place where people can air their grievances and engage in dialogue to find constructive ways out of the dire situation they are in. Of course the Fox News type outlets are going to work to create a false impression, but why would you feed into their propaganda framing?

As for the design, the fact that you put the 99% inside the Obama O is crossing a sacred line. While it definitely looks cool, whether intended or not, this sends a clear message that Obama is co-opting OWS. Just the fact that you are the person creating the design and using your iconic red, white and blue gives the Obama connection more than enough room to make your pro-Obama statement. Without the 99% being in his O, it would be a fair balance of interests, in my opinion. With the 99% being in his O, this sends a clear message that Obama is attempting to co-opt OWS and creates serious problems for the movement.

Also, given the fact that Obama’s HOPE is written out just as it was last time, it is again excessive and in my opinion weak to pleadingly address the president as hoping he is on our side. If you want to win over the movement in a genuine way, I would suggest saying something like “We Are Hope” and then underneath the word “Hope” you can really get some street cred by writing, “Expect Us.”

Obviously, this is your design and powerful statement, and you are brilliant in conveying your message. I’m sure you will find a large audience that will love it. Given my admiration and respect for you as an artist, I am conflicted in the fact that I cannot support or endorse this as it currently is. Depending on the intensity of the backlash that the movement endures in response to it, I sincerely hope that we can find ways to work together moving forward. I will do my best not to publicly comment on it and will work to advise other organizers to not speak out against it. Sorry for having to write these things, my every move has been under intense scrutiny. At the end of the day, I have great respect for you and your art.

Shepard’s response:

I get everything you are saying. I don’t agree with all of it, but I appreciate it. I get that the Occupy movement is non-partisan. I see a conflict for you and the movement there. However, my poster is not in any way a re-elect Obama poster. I have zero contact with the Obama campaign. I am disappointed with many aspects of Obama’s presidency and I am far from an unconditional Obama supporter. The round logo I made is not Obama’s O logo. His O uses curved stripes and a white sun. The stripes in my 99% logo are straight. I saw my 99% logo as subverting his logo more than amplifying it. I wanted a patriotic frame for the 99% logo to assert that the Occupy movement IS patriotic. The use of the word HOPE is more saying that Occupy is the greatest Hope we now have, but it would be great if Occupy pushed Obama in the right direction. You may find any appeal to Obama to support Occupy as unrealistic, but I have always believed in working EVERY angle. I’ve called it the “inside/outside strategy” for many years. Outsider activism is where I come from, but outsider elitism is incredibly unhealthy because it excludes moderates.

I have no interest in pandering to Obama. I see my image as a reminder to him that he has alienated his populist progressive supporters. If the threat of not being re-elected pushes Obama to do more to reform Wall St. etc… then I’m all for that! I’m also terrified of a Republican taking office. I voted for Nader in 2000 and if people like me won Bush that election I’ll regret that forever. I did not make the Occupy HOPE image to become THE image for Occupy. I believe very strongly in the Occupy movement, but I’m looking more at the politics of the entire nation than the politics within Occupy. I’m sure I may not be extreme enough for some people. When I said “if the movement is perceived as constructive, not destructive” I mean exactly that… PERCEIVED. I am trying to be realistic, not offensive. I have written that the movement is intelligent, civilized, peaceful, and tolerant in stark contrast to the Tea Party, but I have also been to Occupy LA and NY and seen and heard some views that I think undermine the movement’s potential to resonate. Some of the loudest people are putting across anti-capitalist, anti-government messages. I have plenty of issues with capitalist greed and our government’s policies, but constructive phrasing about reform is essential. I’m not feeding into Fox’s framing, I’ve witnessed this myself. I’m all for freedom of speech, but I desperately want the movement to succeed!

Most of the rhetoric is not too radical for me, but I’m well aware that much of the country is scared and cautious. I know that you and the organizers are very intelligent, dedicated, and engaged. I meant no disrespect to 98% of the 99%. I’m incredibly frustrated too, but evolution, much less “revolution”, scares most people. I want progress to be made! I made a series of images calling out villains and issues (I actually made these several months before Occupy started): http://obeygiant.com/support-the-occupy-movement-free-downloads I donate money and art to rootstrikers.org. I want campaign finance reform ASAP. We may disagree on some things. I want to support Occupy as much as I can without undermining its potential to move things in the right direction. I have tons of issues with the two-party system, but I don’t see it being dismantled any time soon. I want reform to happen and I’m trying to look at realistic routes to ideal outcomes. I’m very open to hearing suggestions from you, and I’d also be into sharing this dialogue publicly if you are open to that. I think it could be valuable to people to hear a thoughtful discussion of these issues. Let me know.

-Shepard

LEGO Hard Core Show for Black Friday!

2011-11-25T01:04:00.000-05:00

Remember this Thanks Giving Day:You Cannot Evict An Idea.

2011-11-24T00:59:00.001-05:00

and a note from Michael Moore:

Where Does Occupy Wall Street Go From Here? ...a proposal from Michael Moore

Tuesday, November 22nd, 2011

Friends,

This past weekend I participated in a four-hour meeting of Occupy Wall Street activists whose job it is to come up with the vision and goals of the movement. It was attended by 40+ people and the discussion was both inspiring and invigorating. Here is what we ended up proposing as the movement's "vision statement" to the General Assembly of Occupy Wall Street:

We Envision: [1] a truly free, democratic, and just society; [2] where we, the people, come together and solve our problems by consensus; [3] where people are encouraged to take personal and collective responsibility and participate in decision making; [4] where we learn to live in harmony and embrace principles of toleration and respect for diversity and the differing views of others; [5] where we secure the civil and human rights of all from violation by tyrannical forces and unjust governments; [6] where political and economic institutions work to benefit all, not just the privileged few; [7] where we provide full and free education to everyone, not merely to get jobs but to grow and flourish as human beings; [8] where we value human needs over monetary gain, to ensure decent standards of living without which effective democracy is impossible; [9] where we work together to protect the global environment to ensure that future generations will have safe and clean air, water and food supplies, and will be able to enjoy the beauty and bounty of nature that past generations have enjoyed.

The next step will be to develop a specific list of goals and demands. As one of the millions of people who are participating in the Occupy Wall Street movement, I would like to respectfully offer my suggestions of what we can all get behind now to wrestle the control of our country out of the hands of the 1% and place it squarely with the 99% majority.

Here is what I will propose to the General Assembly of Occupy Wall Street:

10 Things We Want
A Proposal for Occupy Wall Street
Submitted by Michael Moore

1. Eradicate the Bush tax cuts for the rich and institute new taxes on the wealthiest Americans and on corporations, including a tax on all trading on Wall Street (where they currently pay 0%).

2. Assess a penalty tax on any corporation that moves American jobs to other countries when that company is already making profits in America. Our jobs are the most important national treasure and they cannot be removed from the country simply because someone wants to make more money.

3. Require that all Americans pay the same Social Security tax on all of their earnings (normally, the middle class pays about 6% of their income to Social Security; someone making $1 million a year pays about 0.6% (or 90% less than the average person). This law would simply make the rich pay what everyone else pays.

4. Reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act, placing serious regulations on how business is conducted by Wall Street and the banks.

5. Investigate the Crash of 2008, and bring to justice those who committed any crimes.

6. Reorder our nation's spending priorities (including the ending of all foreign wars and their cost of over $2 billion a week). This will re-open libraries, reinstate band and art and civics classes in our schools, fix our roads and bridges and infrastructure, wire the entire country for 21st century internet, and support scientific research that improves our lives.

7. Join the rest of the free world and create a single-payer, free and universal health care system that covers all Americans all of the time.

8. Immediately reduce carbon emissions that are destroying the planet and discover ways to live without the oil that will be depleted and gone by the end of this century.

9. Require corporations with more than 10,000 employees to restructure their board of directors so that 50% of its members are elected by the company’s workers. We can never have a real democracy as long as most people have no say in what happens at the place they spend most of their time: their job. (For any U.S. businesspeople freaking out at this idea because you think workers can't run a successful company: Germany has a law like this and it has helped to make Germany the world’s leading manufacturing exporter.)

10. We, the people, must pass three constitutional amendments that will go a long way toward fixing the core problems we now have. These include:
a) A constitutional amendment that fixes our broken electoral system by 1) completely removing campaign contributions from the political process; 2) requiring all elections to be publicly financed; 3) moving election day to the weekend to increase voter turnout; 4) making all Americans registered voters at the moment of their birth; 5) banning computerized voting and requiring that all elections take place on paper ballots.

b) A constitutional amendment declaring that corporations are not people and do not have the constitutional rights of citizens. This amendment should also state that the interests of the general public and society must always come before the interests of corporations.

c) A constitutional amendment that will act as a "second bill of rights" as proposed by President Frankin D. Roosevelt: that every American has a human right to employment, to health care, to a free and full education, to breathe clean air, drink clean water and eat safe food, and to be cared for with dignity and respect in their old age.

Let me know what you think. Occupy Wall Street enjoys the support of millions. It is a movement that cannot be stopped. Become part of it by sharing your thoughts with me or online (at OccupyWallSt.org). Get involved in (or start!) your own local Occupy movement. Make some noise. You don't have to pitch a tent in lower Manhattan to be an Occupier. You are one just by saying you are. This movement has no singular leader or spokesperson; every participant is a leader in their neighborhood, their school, their place of work. Each of you is a spokesperson to those whom you encounter. There are no dues to pay, no permission to seek in order to create an action.

We are but ten weeks old, yet we have already changed the national conversation. This is our moment, the one we've been hoping for, waiting for. If it's going to happen it has to happen now. Don't sit this one out. This is the real deal. This is it.

Have a happy Thanksgiving!

Yours,
Michael Moore
MMFlint@MichaelMoore.com
@MMFlint
MichaelMoore.com