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WHAT A STUPID PIECE OF SHIT SHE IS.
Thank You Jon Stewart for being the most fair and balanced out there.

God Hates Tucson: LIFE photographs inside Westboro Baptist Church

Ben Cosgrove of LIFE Magazine tells Boing Boing last week,

This morning LIFE published a gallery of exclusive, never-seen photographs by Anthony Karen (the same photographer who did our KKK gallery last year) taken at the Westboro Baptist compound in Topeka, Kansas, in June 2008, and other places where the church likes to hang out and picket grieving families, etc.
The gallery is a disturbing, thought-provoking, intimate look inside what might well be the most despised community in America right now, along with Anthony's insights into what makes these people tick.

Here is the full photo gallery at LIFE.com.
The church has been in the news this week for their characteristically offensive plans to protest at the funerals of shooting victims in Tucson. The government of Arizona took quick action to block this, by passing an expedited law that made protesting within 300 feet of a funeral or burial service illegal. NY Mag, CNN, ABC affiliate in AZ, Christian Science Monitor.

This person has some interesting theories on the church's founder.

Thanks to Xeni, from BoingBoing

Cruisin Casket for Only the Most Serious O.G.

For if you want to leave this world in style.

Cruisin Caskets is the first and only of it's kind. We are a casket fabricating company that creates custom car designs for the car lover that wants to leave this world in style. We are currently taking orders for a 1950's style Merc coffin.

The specially designed, car-shaped coffin opens as conventional coffins do, with a hinged top portion, and features the same type of upholstered interior as standard coffins. Cruisin Caskets have a fiberglass body and may come in a variety of paint colors and designs.

thanks, Presurfer

"I STILL HAVE A DREAM"

How 'bout that?

Here's a t-shirt i designed several years ago...

Super Cars of the Future: Inspiring Future thinking in Car Design

Love/Hate relationship with automobiles continues:

from Design Juices

I think we have all ambitions to own a super car in the future, maybe your even lucky enough to be close to reaching that ambition. Whether your after and old school american muscle car, or a new-wave carbon fibre body super car; we are all interested in the new technologies of making the car as sexy in its aesthetics and also as fast as possible.

Here I look to highlight and showcase several amazing concept (and possible production) super cars who are all using new technologies and new ways of designing the super car of the future.

SC Ultimate Aero 2
This is the super car which is on its way to becoming the fastest mass-production car; the SC Ultimate Aero 2. It can achieve a maximum speed of 440km/h, its modern design is the work of Jason Castriota and takes advantage of Carbon Fibre. The SC Ultimate Aero 2 is available at a snap at €696,000. Found on Fubiz



Halo Intersceptor
You maybe thinking what if i could combine my personal super car and boat; well now you can with the Halo Inspector. This hybrid vehicle concept aims to become the icon on every extreme sports addict, its aesthetics certain attract your eyes attention. Found on Tuvie.



Hussar Dakar
This vehicle is a concept that design Klaud wasiak has taken inspiration from winged polish calvary soldiers names hussars; the Hussar Dakar. The car is designed as a rally car and uses the wings to create kinetic energy during the vehicles movement. Found on Design Boom.

Citroen Survolt & Agni Z2<
These two machine have been designed to compliment one another; Citroen Survolt and Agni Z2. The two of them are both powered with a electric drivetrain and make them a team of almost silent racers, it also features an emission-free and eco-friendly engine which ensure smooth driving up to 200km/h. Found on Tuvie.



Mob Sports Car (Made from Wood)
The Mob is an extreme racing sports car which has been designed by Jorge Marti vidal, the whole car is envisioned to be created with a strip; two films that create the vehicles structure. The idea would be to use liquid wood, organic material sthat come from waste wood and can be moulded into different shapes. From Tuvie.



AMV-R
This design is the work of Alexei Mikhailov, it is almost a mis-mash of different styles; it encorporate both Italian and German design. It works with the pure italian fluid (almost) organic design and the German sports lines, which emphasise the overall quality of the cars design. Found on Tuvie.



Tesla EYE Concept
Considering there’s almost no chance we’ll ever see the EYE concept cruising the streets, we’ll just have to enjoy the car for what it is: a good-looking show car with a Tesla badge. Sure, we can imagine putting an electric powertrain in there and showing up at the soccer game in one of these, but for now we’ll just have to ask ourselves if the IED students managed to create a new status symbol with the EYE, something they said they were shooting for. From Autoblog.



Lamborghini Concept EV
Flavio Adriani, the designer, created the Lamborghini Concept EV as a tribute to the man who changed everything about sportcars, Ferrucio Lamborghini. The design, the lines, the impact of the car derive from a beautiful, almost perfect combination of the Diablo and Gallardo. Found on Tuvie.



Saab Spyker 9+ Tribue
The Saab Spyker 9+ Tribute is a concept car imagined by Swedish designer Eduard Gray, graduate of the Coventry University (UK), with a Bachelor Degree 2:1 in Industrial Product Design.The exterior design is pure Saab, featuring simple lines, turbine-style wheels, trademark headlights and the Saab grille, but also a big windshield that extends over the entire roof top. Via Concept Supercars.



Audi A0 QS
The Audi A0 QS, Q stands for four-wheel drive and S for sports, has been specially designed for athletes and rich people to enhance their active lifestyles. This small and dynamic sports car is equipped with electric motor and a hydrogen engine that make the car entirely hybrid. Found on Tuvie.



Bentley Aero Ace Speed VI Concept
The Bentley Aero Ace project Speed VI concept car is an independent design proposal from Royal College of art student Gabriel Tam. The designer has given the Speed VI concept a futuristic treatment, but at the same time, the concept looks back at the original Bentley Speed 6 for inspiration, and seeks to celebrate the sporting heritage of Bentley. Found via Greenpacks.

Lamborghi Countach EV Concept
The design of the Lamborghini Countach EV, a 3D concept electric car, has been inspired by the fascinating Countach by Marcello Gandini which is an unforgettable piece for every Lamborghini fans. This redesigned car features more clean curves without changing the standard appearance such as doors, wings, front lights, etc. Found on Tuvie.



Mobius Car
The vehicle you’re about to glance upon is the Mobius, this one designed by Tommaso Gecchelin who aims to merge aesthetic suggestions of both math and geometry into one harmonious shape. Via Yanko Design.



Opel Flextreme GT/E Concept
Opel is all set to unveil its new concept car at the 80th edition of the Geneva Motor Show, the Opel Flextreme GT/E. The idea of this concept is to show how extended-range electric vehicle (E-REV) systems can be integrated into larger cars, a mid-size five-door hatchback in this case. Via Concept Supercars.



TVR Throne Concept Car
Hussien Al Jammazi has envisioned an excellent and unique car concept name TVR Throne that has all the aesthetical aspect to make a person get amazed. The designer has given his maximum effort to make unique components for the car. From Tuvie.



Ghepardo De Tomaso
Designer Frederik Tjellsesen has done one heck of a job creating a concept to catch their eye. Tjellsesen’s created a four-door sports car by the name of “Ghepardo,” accenting the fabulously modern gray with a smooth, sensual purple. From Yanko Design.

this storyy "The EN-V – Is this the Car of the Future?" should make up for the above

30,000 Used Chopsticks Transformed Into a Fallen Tree in Shanghai

from Inhabitat

Single use-chopsticks are a notable waste issue in China - roughly 100 trees a day must be felled to create the little, wooden eating utensils. In response to the atrocities being subjected to these innocent trees, the China Environmental Protection Foundation has assembled the ghostly remains of meals past into a full-sized chopstick tree. An impressive sculpture standing beautiful and tall, this was actually far from the message they hoped to convey. So what did they do to get their point across? They broke it and handed out reusable chopstick sets and statistics near the slain tree.

The tree was built from 30,000 used wooden chopsticks, stretched five meters high. It stood along a local street in Shanghai accompanied by a laundry list of chopstick consumption statistics. And despite the likelihood they were dipped numerous times in soy sauce, the sticks were odor-free having been thoroughly cleansed before assembly.

The hope of this project was to raise awareness and encourage the use of reusable chopsticks. China’s activists estimate that the country’s current forest stock will only support chopstick production for the next 20 years.

via Treehugger

With various "bring your own chopsticks" movements making little headway against the 45 billion pairs of disposable wooden utensils used each year in China alone, a clever Chinese environmental group has brought a dramatic visible representation of the environmental impact to the streets of downtown Shanghai.

Though they can be made out of porcelain, plastic, lacquered bamboo, stainless steel, and even ivory or jade, chopsticks of the disposable wooden variety have long been the most-used utensil in China's restaurants and other eateries. Some 25 million trees are required to feed the country's annual chopstick, er, yen, according to the China Environmental Protection Foundation, which notes that at this rate, "forest will disappear from China in 20 years."

Only Two Decades' Worth Of Trees Left
To raise awareness about the problem, the foundation went around Shanghai and gathered 30,000 pairs of used disposable chopsticks from the city's restaurants. After washing and preparing them, they used the little wooden sticks to build a five-meter-high tree in a busy district of the city -- and then chopped it down. Volunteers were stationed by the fallen "tree" to hand out reusable chopsticks to curious passers-by, while a sign laid out the consumption statistics and warned: "Our trees are enough to feed us for only another 20 years."

We'll agree with tipster copyranter that it was an impressive and "pretty damn industrious" idea -- and hopefully one that makes a real impact.

I eat with chopsticks almost all the time, almost never disposeble ones, and if the are disposable, they are bamboo. There's something about stabbing food and the need for cutting at the table is usually unnecessary, with my diet. It's much calmer to just pick it up and place it in your mouth rather than cutting, stabbing and shoving it in.

Energy And Dynamic Braking

OK, even though this video comes from GE one of the great evil corporations of our time it is very interesting.

Energy: you can't destroy it, but you can certainly waste it. That's what most motorized vehicles do, including trains. Usually, the energy generated when you stop a moving vehicle is dissipated as heat, and is lost to the atmosphere.

With GE's ecomagination you can capture and store that energy, then reuse it. Watch the video to see a simple illustration of the physics behind dynamic braking. Keep in mind an object's force is measured in newtons, using the equation force = Mass x Acceleration.

via The Presurfer blog

NASA Stops Planned Animal Experimentation, Space Is Cool Again

from Ecorazzi:

NASA announced that it’s going to put a hold (hooray!) on the $1.75 million taxpayer-funded study that would expose 18 squirrel monkeys to doses of harmful radiation at New York’s Brookhaven National Laboratory. The plan was that after the radiation was administered, the primates would then reside at McLean Hospital in Belmont where they would be monitored for the the rest of their lives by Harvard Med School researchers. The amount of radiation would be equivalent to three years of space travel, and would help to determine safe levels for astronauts on lengthy missions.

Many celebs, including Sir Paul McCartney, have been outspoken in their campaigns against these experiments, and activist groups like PETA have applauded the decision to re-evaluate this line of research.

A statement put out by Brookhaven Labs, said that they were about to “undertake a comprehensive review of the agency’s current research and technology development plans to see how they align with the President’s plan for human spaceflight.”

While Michael Braukus, a NASA spokesman, stated, “A decision will be made when the review is completed, depending on whether it’s still deemed to be a value added experiment.”

Personally we don’t see the value in dousing live monkeys with huge levels of radiation, which seems to be animal cruelty to the extreme. For now we’re happy that this is on hold, and we hope it lasts indefinitely!

The CIA funded the famous animated film of Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm’ you saw in school

one of my top ten favorite books of all time...

story from DangrousMinds

Until videotapes replaced 16mm film projectors in the classroom in the mid-1980s, there was a very good chance that if you were British or American, that at least once, if not twice or more, you were going to see the animated 1955 version of George Orwell’s Animal Farm during your education. I can vividly recall being absolutely incredulous during a post-film discussion in high school, that the teacher we had seemed to have no idea, as in none at all, that Animal Farm was quite specifically a satire of the Russian revolution and the rise of Joseph Stalin. After I raised my hand to object and explained, no doubt with the cocky annoyance of a teenaged autodidact, that “Old Major” was a Karl Marx/Lenin figure, that “Napoleon” was Stalin, “Snowball” was Trotsky and so forth, she blithely dismissed what I said (she clearly had no idea of what I was talking about and so therefore had nothing to add) and remarked that “it could be one theory.”

No my dear, that would be the only fuckin’ theory. If you think American public schools are bad now, I put it to you that they’ve always been pretty shitty…

Animal Farm was directed by the husband and wife animation team of John Halas and Joy Batchelor. It is considered one of the greatest British films, something akin to a “serious” work from Disney. The film does not follow the events of the book very closely, especially the “hopeful” ending that Halas felt necessary to tack on. Orwell’s book ends with the animals numbly resigned to their exploitation by the porcine politburo in cahoots with the humans. This was considered too bleak and Halas wanted an upbeat ending. “You cannot send home millions in the audience being puzzled,” he said about the film in 1980.

But there is an interesting back story of how Animal Farm came to be made that most people are probably unaware of: The most famous British animated film ever made was in fact financed by the American CIA in an effort to encourage a negative view of the Soviet Union.

In 1951, using American taxpayer dollars, the CIA’s Office of Policy Coordination carried out obtaining the rights to the book from Sonia Orwell, the author’s widow, in an operation run by future Watergate criminal E. Howard Hunt. Two members of the Psychological Warfare Workshop staff who were working in undercover in Hollywood made the arrangements. To thank Mrs. Orwell, the CIA arranged for her to meet actor Clark Gable.

Hunt chose as the film’s producer, Louis De Rochemont, the creator of the famed “March of Time” newsreel journalism films and De Rochemont had final say over all creative matters (Hunt worked for De Rochemont when he was younger). Over 80 animators worked on the film, including three Disney animators who were not credited, probably because they didn’t want to piss off Uncle Walt. Two of them went on to work on Yellow Submarine and Watership Down.

Vivien Halas, the daughter of the film’s directors, believes that her parents were innocent of knowing that the CIA was involved with the project:

“I don’t believe that my parents were aware of any CIA involvement at the time. Frances reminded me that, in the early 1950s, the CIA was not regarded with the same scorn as today. My father dismissed the idea, but my mother felt annoyed.” John Halas and Joy Batchelor would go on to do the Jackson 5ive and The Osmonds cartoons. Louis De Rochemont became paranoid about the CIA bugging him late in his life.

The film was completed in 1954 and distributed worldwide the following year, the first British animated feature ever to be so widely seen. Prints were made for schools and libraries the world over by the United States Information Agency (USIA). If you are over the age of 35 and saw the film in school, there is a very high likelihood that US taxpayer’s dollars paid for the print you saw. The animated Animal Farm, due to the whole “pigs are unclean” thing, was also thought to be effective anti-Soviet propaganda in the Middle East.

On the flip-side, the Soviet spin on Orwell’s 1984 is that the book’s nightmarish depiction of constant state surveillance was about everyday life in America.


 

Orwell Subverted: The CIA and the Filming of Animal Farm

The cartoon that came in from the cold (The Guardian)

How Big Brothers used Orwell to fight the cold war (The Guardian)

The Little Red Book That Swept France

from The Independent (UK):

The latest call to (non-violent) arms has turned a 93-year-old war hero into a publishing phenomenon.

Take a book of just 13 pages, written by a relatively obscure 93-year-old man, which contains no sex, no
jokes, no fine writing and no startlingly original message. A publishing disaster? No, a publishing
phenomenon.

Indignez vous! (Cry out!), a slim pamphlet by a wartime French resistance hero, Stéphane Hessel, is
smashing all publishing records in France. The book urges the French, and everyone else, to recapture the
wartime spirit of resistance to the Nazis by rejecting the "insolent, selfish" power of money and markets and
by defending the social "values of modern democracy".

The book, which costs €3, has sold 600,000 copies in three months and another 200,000 have just been
printed. Its original print run was 8,000. In the run-up to Christmas, Mr Hessel's call for a "peaceful
insurrection" not only topped the French bestsellers list, it sold eight times more copies than the second
most popular book, a Goncourt prize-winning novel by Michel Houellebecq.

The extraordinary success of the book can be interpreted in several ways. Its low price and slender size –
29 pages including blurbs and notes but just 13 pages of text – has made it a popular stocking-filler among
left-wing members of the French chattering classes. Bookshops report many instances of people buying a dozen copies for family and friends.

But Mr Hessel and his small left-wing publisher (which is used to print runs in the hundreds) say that he has evidently struck a national, and international nerve, at a time of market tyranny, bankers' bonuses and budget threats to the survival of the post-war welfare state. They also suggest that the success of the book could be an important straw in the wind as France enters a political cycle leading to the presidential elections of May 2012.

In a New Year message Mr Hessel, who survived Nazi concentration camps to become a French diplomat, said he was "profoundly touched" by the success of his book. Just as he "cried out" against Nazism in the 1940s, he said, young people today should "cry out against the complicity between politicians and economic and financial powers" and "defend our democratic rights acquired over two centuries".

In a party-political aside which might or might not undermine his new status as political prophet, Mr Hessel went on to imply that "resistance" should begin with a rejection of President Nicolas Sarkozy and a vote for the Parti Socialiste.

The book has not pleased everyone. It also contains a lengthy denunciation of Israeli government policies, especially in the Gaza Strip. Although the final chapter calls vaguely for a "non-violent" solution to the world's problems, the book also suggests that "non-violence" is not "sufficient" in the Middle East. Mr Hessel, whose father was a German jew who emigrated to France, has been accused by French jewish organisations of "anti-semitism".

Mr Hessel was born in Berlin in 1917. He emigrated to France with his family when he was seven. He joined General Charles de Gaulle in London in 1941 and was sent back to France to help organise the resistance. He was captured, tortured and sent to concentration camps in Germany. After the war, he helped to draft the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.

Jean-Pierre Barou, the joint head of the small Montpellier-based publishing house Indigène, which commissioned the book, said Mr Hessel had revealed a "deep sense of indignation in France".

As a political tract, the book contains no especially original analysis of the world's problems.

"They dare to tell us that the State can no longer afford policies to support its citizens," Mr Hessel says. "But how can money be lacking ... when the production of wealth has enormously increased since the Liberation (of France), at a time when Europe was ruined? The only explanation is that the power of money ... has never been so great or so insolent or so selfish and that its servants are placed in the highest reaches of the State."

The originality of the book is the suggestion that an organised "Resistance" is now called for, just like in 1940. "We, veterans of the resistance ... call on young people to revive and pass on the heritage and ideals of the Resistance," the book says.
How people should resist the power of money and the markets – by peaceful means, the book insists – is not made entirely clear.

A message of resistance

* "I would like everyone – everyone of us – to find his or her own reason to cry out. That is a precious gift. When something makes you want to cry out, as I cried out against Nazism, you become a militant, tough and committed. You become part of the great stream of history ... and this stream leads us towards more justice and more freedom but not the uncontrolled freedom of the fox in the hen-house."

* "It's true that reasons to cry out can seem less obvious today. The world appears too complex. But in this world, there are things we should not tolerate... I say to the young, look around you a little and you will find them. The worst of all attitudes is indifference..."

* "The productivist obsession of the West has plunged the world into a crisis which can only be resolved by a radical shift away from the 'ever more', in the world of finance but also in science and technology. It is high time that ethics, justice and a sustainable balance prevailed..."

read the original article comments here.

The Incredible Story of Vivian Maier

from PetaPixel

In 2007, 26-year-old real estate agent John Maloof purchased a box filled with 30,000 negatives from an estate sale for $400. After being stunned by the quality of the street photographs, Maloof began digging and discovered that they were created by a nanny and street photographer named Vivian Maier. He then decided to purchase the other boxes of negatives, bringing his collection of Maier photos up to about 100,000 images. Now some are saying he might have discovered one of the greatest (and previously unknown) street photographers of the 20th century. You can view some of Maier’s photographs here.

Next time you’re at an estate sale, you might want to take a closer look at any boxes of negatives you come across.

Thanks, Doug!

Old Telephone Books

Imagine a time when even phone books had interesting design to them, when it wasn't just about selling, but there was an aesthetic involved, that a designer or even a corporation actually tried contributing to culture with more than an Helvetica font (Not to take away from the incredible great cleanliness of helvetica and those designs built around it, but... ) These were cool even then.







I got this via Tara McGinley at DangerousMinds She says "It’s not like I’m some phone book enthusiast or anything, but these vintage designs over at Old Telephone Books are pretty great. The site touts being, “Possibly the world’s largest online collection of phone books.” I believe them. "

Payback Is A Motherfucker

from our friend Xeni at BoingBoing


Bullfighter Pepe Manrique is tackled by a bull during a bullfighting festival at Canaveralejo bullring in Cali, Colombia, on December 30, 2010. REUTERS/Jaime Saldarriaga.

Dumber & Dumber: Were Dragons and Unicorns on Noah's Ark?

from Richard Metzger at DangerousMinds



As if there is any doubt posed by the question “Are we slouching towards Idiocracy?” what else can a sane person conclude when confronted with headlines like “Conservatives Split Over Oppposition to Anti-Obesity Campaign” (WHO would be PRO-obesity aside from a politically astute moron like Sarah Palin? Surely the morbidly obese must make up a large percentage of her supporters) and “Kentucky Creationist Museum to Feature Dragons, Unicorns.”

Aside from a similar accident of birth on the North American land mass, I don’t perceive myself as having ANYTHING in common with someone who believes that dinosaurs and unicorns were on Noah’s fucking Ark (or Sarah Palin supporters for that matter)! Do you? Where is the commonality when IQs have become this stratified? And where is this mess headed when the stupidest people in the country are the only ones reliably voting? It’s really getting frustrating to read the news these days. I feel like there is a new low reached almost daily. The dumbness used to be a little more spread out.

Truly, it’s undeniable at this juncture that “the dumbs” are really starting to take over and if these shit-for-brains types are allowed to continue dominating the conversation, then all bets are off for the future of the American republic. I can’t help but to feel we’re about to reach a tipping point towards some serious bad craziness. If you can convince a man that dinosaurs and unicorns were on Noah’s Ark, you can convince this man of ANY darned thing (like millionaires and billionaires pay too much in taxes or that Sarah Palin is qualified to be president).

Reblogging this from Barefoot and Progressive:

I asked Answers in Genesis if there will be dinosaurs on their Ark. They said yes.

I’ve since asked if there will be fire-breathing dragons on their Ark.

My visit to the Creation Museum last week told me that the answer is a strong “probably so.” Digging through the AiG archives this morning, I now see that Ken Ham says the answer is an emphatic “yes”:

Being land animals, dinosaurs (or dragons of the land) were created on Day Six (Genesis 1:24–31), went aboard Noah’s Ark (Genesis 6:20), and then came off the Ark into the post-Flood world (Genesis 8:16–19). It makes sense that many cultures would have seen these creatures from time to time before they died out.

There will be dragons on their Ark. [What about Godzilla or Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster? Will non-American “dragons of the land” be considered for inclusion?—RM]

But here’s one more question for you: Will there be unicorns on the Ark?

According to Ken Ham and AiG, the answer is yes.

“Some people claim the Bible is a book of fairy tales because it mentions unicorns. However, the biblical unicorn was a real animal, not an imaginary creature.”

“Modern readers have trouble with the Bible’s unicorns because we forget that a single-horned feature is not uncommon on God’s menu for animal design. (Consider the rhinoceros and narwhal.) The Bible describes unicorns skipping like calves (Psalm 29:6), traveling like bullocks, and bleeding when they die (Isaiah 34:7). The presence of a very strong horn on this powerful, independent-minded creature is intended to make readers think of strength.”

“The absence of a unicorn in the modern world should not cause us to doubt its past existence. (Think of the dodo bird. It does not exist today, but we do not doubt that it existed in the past.). Eighteenth century reports from southern Africa described rock drawings and eyewitness accounts of fierce, single-horned, equine-like animals. One such report describes “a single horn, directly in front, about as long as one’s arm, and at the base about as thick . . . . [It] had a sharp point; it was not attached to the bone of the forehead, but fixed only in the skin.”

“To think of the biblical unicorn as a fantasy animal is to demean God’s Word, which is true in every detail.”

There will be unicorns on the Ark. So this is what we’re left with:

Thanks to [Governor] Steve Beshear, Kentucky is no longer just known as the state whose governor endorsed and gave $40 million in tax breaks to people who want to tell children that science and history explain that a 600 year old man herded dinosaurs onto a big boat 4,000 years ago.

No, Kentucky will now be known as the state whose governor endorsed and gave $40 million in tax breaks to people who want to tell children that science and history explain that a 600-year-old man herded dinosaurs, fire-breathing dragons and unicorns onto a big boat 4,000 years ago.

But Steve Beshear wasn’t elected to debate religion, he was elected to create jobs…

Ouch! I just want to pull the covers over my head when I read something like this, don’t you? Obviously, requesting a unicorn chaser would not really be appropriate here…

 

 

If Modern Humans Are So Smart, Why Are Our Brains Shrinking? (Discovery)

At least I let a week go by into the new year before i posted some of this depressing reality.
Here's another from Richard to get you even more upset.

‘AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM’: AMERICANS ARE THE EXCEPTION, JUST NOT NECESSARILY IN A GOOD WAY

A Few Great Woody Allen Interviews, Now and Then.

DETROITROCKSAMPLER: Arch-Drude Julian Cope drops some knowledge on you

from Richard Metzger at DangerousMinds

Arch-Drude Julian Cope, dropped an appropriately pagan seasonal gift for the world’s music fans when he posted his insanely great DETROITROCKSAMPLER online last month. If you haven’t listened to any of Cope’s various erudite ROCKSAMPLERs, you’re really missing out, because they’re ALL great. What’s not to love about a mixed tape put together by one of the world’s greatest music heads? There is EVERYTHING to love with this new one, I can assure you.

DETROITROCKSAMPLER consists of thirty-eight of the finest slabs of guitar-drenched music to come out of Detroit Rock City from the mid-60s to the late 70s, with all the bands you’d expect to see represented and plenty that you’ll probably be hearing for the first time. The tracklisting features the original 45 version of the MC5’s “Looking at You,” some Alice Cooper, The Amboy Dukes, The Bob Seger System (pictured above), a demo from Mynah Birds (Motown’s integrated rock act with Rick James and Neil Young! (James was incarcerated for deserting the army, breaking the band up), the under-rated Grand Funk Railroad, SRC, Frigid Pink, Iggy and the Stooges, Funkadelic’s “Cosmic Slop,” a Brother Wayne Kramer solo single from 1975, Stooge Ron Asheton’s decidedly un-PC band The New Order, Destroy All Monsters, and a rarity from the sessions for the first Stooges album called “Asthma Attack.” The “liner notes” are, as you might expect, classic Cope. He’s the best and most passionate rock writer since Lester Bangs (there is no close second in the rock prose department, none).

There was a time when gourmet fare like this was available only on expensive import CDs. No more. Now everyone with an Internet can be musically enlightened. What are you waiting for, brothers and sisters? Smoke a joint, crank up the speakers and kick out the jams, motherfuckers.

I love Julian Cope. Long may the Arch-Drude thrive.

Below, The MC5 performing an absolutely furious live version of “Looking at You” in 1970:

Partnership for a Drug Free America - Rarely Seen Straight Edge Campaign

Polar Bears 3, BBC 0

Polar bears destroy BBC documentary cameras.

BBC documentary cameras are no match, it turns out, for the destructive curiosity of your average polar bear. Producers of the BBC show "Polar Bear: Spy on the Ice" thought they could outwit their documentary subjects on the Arctic islands of Svalbard by concealing weather-resistant high-tech cameras inside casings that mimicked the look of ice floes and other snow formations. The idea, apparently, was to capture the unguarded rounds of polar bear life in the species' natural habitat, in the general style of the successful Animal Planet franchise "Meerkat Manor."

But the inquisitive bears weren't taken in by the ruse. The cameras were designed to survive in temperatures as low as -40 degree Celsius, but once they came in the sights--and more important, the grip--of wandering polar bears, they were soon clawed, gnawed and crushed into state of total dysfunction. The heroic cameras in some instances caught the moment of their own demise.

via Yahoo News

Deconstructing "Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band'

It’s probably the most famous pop album in the world, and here is its title track, “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” broken down into its constituent parts.



and a BONUS, Documentary "Making Of..."













Best to you in the New Year, Brothers and Sisters!

thanks, DangerousMinds

Vision: How a Better Future Is Being Made Right Now

By Rebecca Solnit, Tomdispatch.com

After the Macondo well exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, it was easy enough (on your choice of screen) to see a flaming oil platform, the very sea itself set afire with huge plumes of black smoke rising, and the dark smear of what would become five million barrels of oil beginning to soak birds and beaches. Infinitely harder to see and less dramatic was the vast counterforce soon at work: the mobilizing of tens of thousands of volunteers, including passionate locals from fishermen in the Louisiana Oystermen’s Association to an outraged tattoo-artist-turned-organizer, from visiting scientists, activist groups, and Catholic Charities reaching out to Vietnamese fishing families to the journalist and oil-policy expert Antonia Juhasz, and Rosina Philippe of the Atakapa-Ishak tribe in Grand Bayou. And don’t forget the ceaseless toil of the Sierra Club’s local environmental justice organizer, the Gulf Coast Restoration Network, the New Orleans-born poet-turned-investigator Abe Louise Young, and so many more than I can list here.

I think of one ornithologist I met in Grand Bayou who had been dispatched to the Gulf by an organization, but had decided to stay on even if his funding ran out. This mild-mannered man with a giant pair of binoculars seemed to have some form of pneumonia, possibly induced by oil-fume inhalation, but that didn’t stop him. He was among the thousands whose purpose in the Gulf had nothing to do with profit, unless you’re talking about profiting the planet.

The force he represented mattered there, as it does everywhere -- a force that has become ever more visible to me as I live and journey among those who dedicate themselves to their ideals and act on their solidarities. Only now, though, am I really beginning to understand the full scope of its power.

Long ago, Adam Smith wrote about the “invisible hand” of the free market, a phrase which always brings to my mind horror movies and Gothic novels in which detached and phantasmagorical limbs go about their work crawling and clawing away. The idea was that the economy would somehow self-regulate and so didn’t need to be interfered with further -- or so still go the justifications for capitalism, even though it took an enormous armature of government interventions to create the current mix of wealth and poverty in our world. Your tax dollars pay for wars that make the world safe for giant oil corporations, and those corporations hand over huge sums of money to their favorite politicians (and they have so many favorites!) to regulate the political system to continue to protect, reward, and enrich themselves. But you know that story well.

As 2010 ends, what really interests me aren’t the corrosions and failures of this system, but the way another system, another invisible hand, is always at work in what you could think of as the great, ongoing, Manichean arm-wrestling match that keeps our planet spinning. The invisible claw of the market may fail to comprehend how powerful the other hand -- the one that gives rather than takes -- is, but neither does that open hand know itself or its own power. It should. We all should.

The Iceberg Economy

Who wouldn’t agree that our society is capitalistic, based on competition and selfishness? As it happens, however, huge areas of our lives are also based on gift economies, barter, mutual aid, and giving without hope of return (principles that have little or nothing to do with competition, selfishness, or scarcity economics). Think of the relations between friends, between family members, the activities of volunteers or those who have chosen their vocation on principle rather than for profit.

Think of the acts of those -- from daycare worker to nursing home aide or the editor of TomDispatch.com -- who do more, and do it more passionately, than they are paid to do; think of the armies of the unpaid who are at “work” counterbalancing and cleaning up after the invisible hand and making every effort to loosen its grip on our collective throat. Such acts represent the relations of the great majority of us some of the time and a minority of us all the time. They are, as the two feminist economists who published together as J. K. Gibson-Graham noted, the nine-tenths of the economic iceberg that is below the waterline.

Capitalism is only kept going by this army of anti-capitalists, who constantly exert their powers to clean up after it, and at least partially compensate for its destructiveness. Behind the system we all know, in other words, is a shadow system of kindness, the other invisible hand. Much of its work now lies in simply undoing the depredations of the official system. Its achievements are often hard to see or grasp. How can you add up the foreclosures and evictions that don’t happen, the forests that aren’t leveled, the species that don’t go extinct, the discriminations that don’t occur?

The official economic arrangements and the laws that enforce them ensure that hungry and homeless people will be plentiful amid plenty. The shadow system provides soup kitchens, food pantries, and giveaways, takes in the unemployed, evicted, and foreclosed upon, defends the indigent, tutors the poorly schooled, comforts the neglected, provides loans, gifts, donations, and a thousand other forms of practical solidarity, as well as emotional support. In the meantime, others seek to reform or transform the system from the inside and out, and in this way, inch by inch, inroads have been made on many fronts over the past half century.

The terrible things done, often in our name and thanks in part to the complicity of our silence or ignorance, matter. They are what wells up daily in the news and attracts our attention. In estimating the true make-up of the world, however, gauging the depth and breadth of this other force is no less important. What actually sustains life is far closer to home and more essential, even if deeper in the shadows, than market forces and much more interesting than selfishness.

Most of the real work on this planet is not done for profit: it’s done at home, for each other, for affection, out of idealism, and it starts with the heroic effort to sustain each helpless human being for all those years before fending for yourself becomes feasible. Years ago, when my friends started having babies I finally began to grasp just what kind of labor goes into sustaining one baby from birth just to toddlerhood.

If you do the math, with nearly seven billion of us on Earth right now, that means seven billion years of near-constant tending only to get children upright and walking, a labor of love that adds up to more than the age of this planet. That’s not a small force, even if it is only a force of maintenance. Still, the same fierce affection and determination pushes back everywhere at the forces of destruction.

Though I’m not sure I could bring myself to watch yet again that Christmas (and banking) classic It’s a Wonderful Life, its premise -- that the effects of what we do might best be gauged by considering what the world would be like without us -- is still useful. For the American environment, this last year was, at best, a mixed one. Nonetheless, polar bears got some protection and the building of at least one nuclear power plant was prevented; the work of groups like the Sierra Club continued to keep new coal-fired power plants at bay; and Californians defeated a sinister oil-company-sponsored initiative, to name just a few of the more positive developments. Erase all the groups at work on the environment, hardly noticed by the rest of us, and it would have been a massacre.

The Alternatives to “There Is No Alternative”

We not only have a largely capitalist economy but an ideological system that justifies this as inevitable. “There is no alternative,” as former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher used to like to say. Many still argue that this is simply the best human nature, nasty to the core, can possibly hope to manage.

Fortunately, it’s not true. Not only is there an alternative, but it’s here and always has been. Recently, I had dinner with Renato Redentor Constantino, a climate and social justice activist from the Philippines, and he mentioned that he never cared for the slogan, “Another world is possible.” That other world is not just possible, he pointed out, it’s always been here.

We tend to think revolution has to mean a big in-the-streets, winner-take-all battle that culminates with regime change, but in the past half century it has far more often involved a trillion tiny acts of resistance that sometimes cumulatively change a society so much that the laws have no choice but to follow after. Certainly, American society has changed profoundly over the past half century for those among us who are not male, or straight, or white, or Christian, becoming far less discriminatory and exclusionary.

Radicals often speak as though we live in a bleak landscape in which the good has yet to be born, the revolution yet to begin. As Constantino points out, both of them are here, right now, and they always have been. They are represented in countless acts of solidarity and resistance, and sometimes they even triumph. When they don’t -- and that’s often enough -- they still do a great deal to counterbalance the official organization of our country and economy. That organization ensures oil spills, while the revolutionaries, if you want to call them that, head for the birds and the beaches, and maybe, while they’re at it, change the official order a little, too.

Of course, nothing’s quite as simple as that. After all, there are saints in government and monsters in the progressive movement; there’s petroleum in my gas tank and money in my name in banks. To suggest that the world is so easily divided into one hand and the other, selfish and altruistic, is impossibly reductive, but talking in binaries has an advantage: it lets you focus on what is seldom acknowledged.

To say there is no alternative dismisses both the desire for and the possibility of alternative arrangements of power. For example, how do you square a Republican Party hell-bent on preserving tax cuts for the wealthiest 2% of Americans with a new poll by two university economists suggesting that nearly all of us want something quite different? The pollsters showed a cross-section of Americans pie charts depicting three degrees of wealth distribution in three societies, and asked them what their ideal distribution of wealth might be. The unidentified charts ranged from our colossal disparity to absolute equality, with Swedish moderation in-between.

Most chose Sweden as the closest to their ideal. According to the pollsters, the choice suggested that "Americans prefer some inequality to perfect equality, but not to the degree currently present in the United States.”

It might help to remember how close we had come to Sweden by the late 1970s, when income disparity was at its low ebb and the Reagan revolution was yet to launch. Of course, these days we in the U.S. aren’t offered Swedish wealth distribution, since the system set up to represent us actually spends much of its time representing self-interest and moneyed interests instead. The Republicans are now being offered even larger bribes than the Democrats to vote in the interests of the ultra-affluent, whether corporate or individual. Both parties, however, helped produce the Supreme Court that, in January, gave corporations and the wealthy unprecedented power in our political system, power that it will take all our energy to counteract and maybe, someday, force into retreat.

By the way, in searching for that Thatcher no-alternative quote, I found myself on a page at Wikipedia that included the following fundraising plea from a Russian woman scientist: “Almost every day I come home from work and spend several hours improving Wikipedia! Why would I donate so much of my free time? Because I believe that by giving my time and effort -- along with thousands of other people of different nationalities, religion, ages -- we will one day have shared and free knowledge for all people.”

Imperfect as it may be, ad-free, nonprofit Wikipedia’s sheer scope -- 3.5 million entries in English alone, to say nothing of smaller Norwegian, Vietnamese, Persian, and Waray-Waray versions with more than 100,000 articles each -- is an astonishing testimony to a human urge to work without recompense when the cause matters.

Butterfly Spotting

The novelist and avid lepidopterist Vladimir Nabokov once asked someone coming down a trail in the Rockies whether he’d seen any butterflies. The answer was negative; there were no butterflies. Nabokov, of course, went up that same trail and saw butterflies galore.

You see what you’re looking for. Most of us are constantly urged to see the world as, at best, a competitive place and, at worst, a constant war of each against each, and you can see just that without even bothering to look too hard. But that’s not all you can see.

Writing my recent book about disasters, A Paradise Built in Hell, led me to look at the extraordinary way people behave when faced with catastrophes and crises. From news coverage to Hollywood movies, the media suggest that, in these moments of turbulence when institutions often cease to function, we revert to our original nature in a Hobbesian wilderness where people fend for themselves.

Here’s the surprise though: in such situations, most of us fend for each other most of the time -- and beautifully at that. Perhaps this, rather than (human) nature red in tooth and claw, is our original nature. At least, the evidence is clear that people not only behave well, but take deep pleasure in doing so, a pleasure so intense it suggests that an unspoken, unmet appetite for meaningful work and vibrant solidarities lives powerfully within us. Those appetites can be found reflected almost nowhere in the mainstream media, and we are normally told that the world in which such appetites might be satisfied is “utopian,” impossible to reach because of our savage competitiveness, and so should be left to the most hopeless of dreamers.

Even reports meant to be sympathetic to the possibility that another better world could exist in us right now accept our Social-Darwinian essence as a given. Consider a November New York Times piece on empathy and bullying in which David Bornstein wrote,

“We know that humans are hardwired to be aggressive and selfish. But a growing body of research is demonstrating that there is also a biological basis for human compassion. Brain scans reveal that when we contemplate violence done to others we activate the same regions in our brains that fire up when mothers gaze at their children, suggesting that caring for strangers may be instinctual. When we help others, areas of the brain associated with pleasure also light up. Research by Felix Warneken and Michael Tomasello indicates that toddlers as young as 18 months behave altruistically.”

Are we really hardwired to be aggressive and selfish, as Bornstein says at the outset? Are you? No evidence for such a statement need be given, even in an essay that provides plenty of evidence to the contrary, as it’s supposed to be a fact universally acknowledged, rather than an opinion.

The Compassion Boom

If I were to use the normal language of the marketplace right now, I’d say that compassion and altruism are hot. It might, however, be more useful to say that the question of the nature of human nature is being reconsidered at the moment by scientists, economists, and social theorists in all sorts of curious combinations and coalitions. Take, for example, the University of California’s Greater Good Science Center, which describes itself as studying “the psychology, sociology, and neuroscience of well-being, and teaches skills that foster a thriving, resilient, and compassionate society.” Founding director Dacher Keltner writes, “Recent studies of compassion argue persuasively for a different take on human nature, one that rejects the preeminence of self-interest.”

A few dozen miles away is Stanford’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education, which likewise draws on researchers in disciplines ranging from neuroscience to Buddhist ethics. Bornstein’s essay mentions another organization, Roots of Empathy in Toronto, that reduces violence and increases empathy among children. Experiments, programs, and activities like this proliferate.

Independent scholars and writers are looking at the same underlying question, and stories in the news this year -- such as those on school bullying -- address questions of how our society gets organized, and for whose benefit. The suicides of several queer young people generated a groundswell of anti-bullying organizing and soul-searching, notably the largely online “It Gets Better” attempt to reach out to queer youth.

In a very different arena, neoliberalism -- the economic system that lets the invisible hand throttle what it might -- has finally come into question in the mainstream (whereas if you questioned it in 1999, you were a troglodyte and a flat-Earther). Hillary Clinton lied her way through the 2008 primary, claiming she never supported NAFTA, and her husband, who brought it to us, publicly apologized for the way his policies eliminated Haiti’s rice tariffs. “It was a mistake," Bill Clinton told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on March 10th. "I had to live everyday with the consequences of the loss of capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people because of what I did."

Think of those doing the research on altruism and compassion as a radical scholarly movement, one that could undermine the philosophical and political assumptions behind our current economic system, which is also our political system. These individuals and organizations are putting together the proof that not only is another world possible, but it’s been here all along, as visible, should we care to look, as Nabokov’s butterflies.

Do not underestimate the power of this force. The world could be much better if more of us were more active on behalf of what we believe in and love; it would be much worse if countless activists weren’t already at work from Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma and the climate activists in Tuvalu to the homeless activists around the corner from me. When I studied disasters past, what amazed me was not just that people behaved so beautifully, but that, in doing so, they found such joy. It seems that something in their natures, starved in ordinary times, was fed by the opportunity, under the worst of conditions, to be generous, brave, idealistic, and connected; and when this appetite was fulfilled, the joy shone out, even amid the ruins.

Don’t think of this as simply a description of my hopes for 2011, but of what was going on right under our noses in 2010; it’s a force we would do well to name, recognize, celebrate, and enlarge upon now. It is who we are, if only we knew it.

Rebecca Solnit is the author of 13 books, including last year's A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster, and this year's Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas.
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