School Life Monday:The Clever Tricks of Advertising

Adverts know us well and therefore tease us with promises of love, friendship, calm and success – but then go on merely to sell us things we don’t particularly need: like bars of chocolate or sports cars.

LL Cool J's Bigger And Deffer album was 30 years old this week.

LL COOL J in his Grandma's basement where he was still living circa 1987 when we made this photograph. I was reminded yesterday that it was 30 years this past week that the B.A.D. album was released. This is an alternate and very similar photograph that was on the back cover. This photo appears Bigger and Deffer in the MY RULES book with an incredible essay from LL about his humble beginnings and inspiration, guaranteed to blow you away #MyRules the book! #NewEditionPosters #satinJacket #HipHop #GoldenEra #LL #LadiesLoveCoolJames #Kangol #Adidas #DefJam #RockTheBells #ICantLiveWithoutMyRadio #ImDangerous #Rush #1986 #GargleWithPeanutButter #ExtraStrengthPosse #earlyDays #OldSchool #inspiration #BAD #MommaSaidKnockYouOut #BiggerAndDeffer #BBoy #style #punchingBag

A post shared by glen E. friedman Ⓥ (@glenefriedman) on Jun 3, 2017 at 6:19am PDT

THE EAST VILLAGE LOSES ANOTHER PLACE FOR THE YOUNG, HUNGRY, AND WEIRD

Angelica's Kitchen was the original Vegan Organic restaurant , after 40 years it was forced to close. One of my Go-To spots. I met many good friends there.

Here's a short story that was written by one of it's former employees Jay Sacher in the NEW YORKER

Angelica Kitchen was, for many generations of the young, hungry, and weird, a gateway to New York City. The pioneering East Village vegan eatery is slated to close on April 7th, after forty years of operation—its owner, Leslie McEachern, said that rising rents and a changing neighborhood led to its demise. If you were a young punk, art student, political activist, ex-Hare Krishna, confused hippie, graffiti artist, ballet dancer, magician, actor, or none or all of the above, you could move to the city and get a job at A.K. An apartment, a love life, heartbreak, hangovers, and all the rest of it would follow. I walked through A.K.’s glass doors for the first time in the mid-nineties, but I know there were countless waves of hungry young kids before me and after me—you could swap my stories and memories for dozens of others.

My first day on the job, as a delivery guy in the juice-bar/takeout section of the restaurant, I already knew a good half-dozen people on the staff, old friends from the music scene: Scoots; Glenn; Sean; my childhood friend Luke; and Glenn’s brother Brian, my roommate at the time down on Rivington Street, in a dank apartment with slanted floors and faulty heating that three of us shared for nine hundred bucks a month. That number of friends grew quickly—front of house, back of house, and customers, sometimes enemies, sometimes friends, sometimes local legends, now all of them rose-tinted with nostalgia.

I remember delivering food to Joey Ramone. He’d order under his real name, Hyman. I’d hop on the iron horse, the rickety A.K. delivery bike, and head up to the mid-century white-brick apartment building on Third Avenue where he lived. Often, his mom was there—they’d come into the restaurant together as well. She had a large head of hair like her son and was continually nagging him, with Joey’s stone face hiding years of exasperation.

I can’t remember what Joey ate, but it was probably the Dragon Bowl, Angelica’s signature dish. Those of us who worked there, those of us who ate there, we knew what kale was before kale was kale. The Dragon Bowl is a macrobiotic classic that sounds horrible in theory but has always seemed like comfort food to me. I crave it on cold winter days: an oversized bowl of brown rice, tofu, sea vegetables, beans, and a rotating selection of seasonal vegetables. (I always preferred the winter vegetables, rich kabocha squash and hearty winter greens, my serving always lathered with an extra-large helping of brown-rice gravy.) As a penniless payout-to-payout twentysomething service-industry worker, that free Dragon Bowl at the end of your shift was like the Berlin Airlift; it kept us going, fuelled our young lives.

Some celebrity visitors, like Joey, were great fun. Or Willem Dafoe, who’d come in with his yoga mat and his curly-haired teen-age son, who looked like the kid from “The Blue Lagoon,” both of them setting the waitresses’ hearts aflutter. I once got into an inadvertent bike race with Mike D from the Beastie Boys, another genial regular. I was biking down Twelfth Street, heading to work, and there was Mike D, rolling down the street on his banana-seat bike, king of the road. The unspoken rule of our celebrity guests was to treat them like everyone else: don’t pester them, don’t acknowledge their fame. So, there was Mike D, trying to stay incognito, clearly both of us headed to the same spot. To give him room, I pedalled faster, but he had been thinking the same thing, so suddenly we were neck-and-neck, and then we both slowed down to let the other pass, and then both stopped at the light on Second Ave and Twelfth Street, each pretending not to notice the other.

Anthony Kiedis’s “people” called up one busy Friday night when I was managing the floor. “Anthony Kiedis, from the Red Hot Chili Peppers?” his handler told me. “He’s on his way uptown from the SoHo Grand? It would be great if you could have a table ready for him and his party.”

I was almost gleeful in my answer.

“O.K., great. When Anthony gets here, he can come put his name on the list. It’s about a half-hour wait for a table right now.” Talk about speaking truth to power!

The only time I fudged that rule was for Madonna. She showed up one busy night when the wait for a table was roughly an hour. The vestibule and tiny waiting area were crammed with people since it was freezing outside. All eyes, deer-in-headlights-style, were on Madonna and her crew. I quickly put her at Table 23, in the way back, far from prying eyes. I was surprised that none of our regulars, who kept a keen, lawyerly watch for equitable treatment, called me out for that. I think everybody was as uncomfortable with the situation as I was.

And Kerry Washington, pre-“Scandal,” worked with us for a time, as a hostess. I got a death threat one night that she was working, one of two I received in my five years at the restaurant. At 10:30 p.m., Kerry locked the front door, as we always did. There’s only so much tofu you can sling in a day. At 10:31, a regular shows up, famished and with a low-blood-sugar temper tantrum, ready to go. Kerry smiled and said, “Sorry, we’re closed.” I was already downstairs counting the money. By the time I was alerted to the situation, the kitchen was already well toward shutting down. I stepped outside and was berated by the man, frothing out the mouth.

“If I ever see you on the street, you’re dead. I’m gonna fuck you up,” he told me.

“Well, aren’t I on the street right now?” I asked.

But, really, it’s the non-famous folks I remember most: Spencer, always walking into work with a purple plastic Kim’s Video bag in one hand, stuffed full of records—a man of obscure and eclectic musical tastes who was prone to saying things like, “The only good Beatles song is ‘Norwegian Wood.’ ” There was Dexter, a tall Trinidadian with a beaming smile, who unofficially ran the kitchen. Somehow, in between working at the restaurant seemingly 24/7, caring for his young daughter, and waking up at 5 a.m. to do yoga, he had the time to be on a first-name basis with every attractive woman who came in the door. Genuine supermodels would peek their heads into the juice bar, all with the same question: “Is Dexter working?” Last I heard, Dexter was Erykah Badu’s personal chef.

Carolina, the Brazilian pastry chef. When you came in for a day shift, she’d be leaving, her day having started well before dawn. “Ciao, babies,” she’d say to us boys with a flourish, dressed up for her day on the town. Sayeed, a teen-ager from Bangladesh, bussing tables after school, was acclimating to American culture by becoming a full smooth homeboy, checking out the girls walking by the wide plate-glass windows that looked out onto Twelfth Street, with a smile and a “da-a-a-a-amn.” Sayeed, unlike other bussers (and I had been a frazzled one myself), never seemed to rush, even when the restaurant was at its busiest, but his tables were always clean, stacks of dirty glasses in his hands piled up like a juggler.

Justin, a genial Vermonter whom I’d known briefly in school in Boston, and who went on to work in that super-slick and now long, long gone record shop on Ninth Street, and who, one night after work, schooled me on how to order an alcoholic drink. Being a long-standing straight-edge kid, I’d recently started drinking and had found the whole process intimidating. “This is an easy one,” he told me. “Vodka, Chambord, and soda.”

Sal, the patriarch of the kitchen, wearing cowboy boots and a jean jacket after work, a guitarist in a mariachi band, and who, when he was telling us about the day’s specials, always ended with the same dad joke: “And the special ingredient, love.” Pablo, the mercurial comedic madman prep cook. I picture him always in the Angelica Kitchen basement, looking at you like somebody just told a hilarious joke at your expense, making seitan in a white kitchen bucket, stirring it like he’s churning butter with a wide cricket bat of a spoon. Seitan, a meaty wheat-gluten substance, is the sausage of the vegetarian world, and it’s really not something you want to see made and then happily sit down to eat. “Just save yourself a step and throw it in the toilet,” we’d joke.

And Leslie, the owner, who came by her Basquiat “Downtown 81” vibe honestly and well-earned. When you worked there, young and full of authoritarian distrust, you never knew what to think of her. Suspicion of the boss runs deep, especially in restaurant work. But now I look back on her as a kind of glorious hero. Forty years and never wavering in her commitment to sustainable food and farmers, opening in 1976 in a tiny storefront on St. Marks, moving to the larger Twelfth Street location in the eighties, through the crack epidemics and the squatter’s riots and 9/11 and the recession. All of it long before Whole Foods and “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” long before such ideas of eating were fashionable or profitable, building decades-long relationships with farmers and with patrons, consistently turning out quality food that was, in the scheme of things, cheap, wholesome, and plentiful.

Two decades later, my time there reverberates outward and onward in a web of connections, work, motivation, and memory. The news of its closing hits hard for what remains of the old East Village. If C.B.G.B.’s was the sour rock-and-roll heart of the neighborhood, Angelica Kitchen was its weird and wonderful and slightly embarrassing hippie soul. After April 7th, I don’t think I will want to walk down East Twelfth Street and see paper over those plate-glass windows, awaiting a bank or a CVS, or, like St. Mark’s Bookshop down the street, probably an empty storefront for months on end. The East Village has been a walking graveyard for years now, sputtering along as a cover-band version of itself. For me, the loss of Angelica marks its true and complete ending. I know, of course, that such things are relative, and other New Yorks will exist for other younger waves of the young, hungry, and weird, but it does nothing to soften my lament for the passing of this one.

Some Pacific Islanders Have DNA Not Linked To Any Known Human Ancestor

from ATI:

Researchers have now uncovered the DNA of a previously unknown group of hominids.



Most everyone knows that the islands of the South Pacific are some of the most remote and unique places on Earth, but a new study reveals just how unique they really are.

According to a report from the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, researchers have found traces of a previously unknown extinct hominid species in the DNA of the Melanesians, a group living in an area northeast of Australia that encompasses Papua New Guinea and the surrounding islands.

A computer analysis suggests that the unidentified ancestral hominid species found in Melanesian DNA is unlikely to be either Neanderthal or Denisovan, the two known predecessors of humankind to this point.

Archaeologists have found many Neanderthal fossils in Europe and Asia, and although the only Denisovan DNA comes from a finger bone and a couple of teeth discovered in a Siberian cave, both species are well represented in the fossil record.

But now genetic modeling of the Melanesians has revealed a third, different human ancestor that may be an extinct, distinct cousin of the Neanderthals.

“We’re missing a population, or we’re misunderstanding something about the relationships,” researcher Ryan Bohlender told Science News. “Human history is a lot more complicated than we thought it was.”

Hiding in plain sight: how the 'alt-right' is weaponizing irony to spread fascism

from The Guardian:

Experts say the ‘alt-right’ have stormed mainstream consciousness by using ‘humor’ and ambiguity as tactics to wrong-foot their opponents

Earlier this month, hundreds of “alt-right” protesters occupied the rotunda at Boston Common in the name of free speech. The protest included far-right grouplets old and new – from the Oath Keepers to the Proud Boys. But there were no swastikas or shaved heads in sight.

Instead, the protest imagery was dominated by ostensibly comedic images, mostly cribbed from forums and social media. It looked a little like an animated version of a favorite “alt-right” message board, 4chan.

At least one attendee was dressed as the cartoon frog Pepe (a character co-opted by the movement against the wishes of its creator). Others carried the flag of “Kekistan”, the imaginary country created 4chan members. Kyle Chapman, the man who became the “based stick man” meme after attacking anti-fascists armed with a gas mask and a Captain America shield, also addressed the crowd. The same crowd later confronted a counter anti-fascist protest in the street.



Until recently, it would have been hard to imagine the combination of street violence meeting internet memes. But experts say that the “alt-right” have stormed mainstream consciousness by weaponizing irony, and by using humour and ambiguity as tactics to wrong-foot their opponents.

Last week, the Data & Society Institute released a report on the online disinformation and manipulation that is increasingly shaping US politics. The report focused on the way in which far-right actors “spread white supremacist thought, Islamophobia, and misogyny through irony and knowledge of internet culture”.

One the report’s authors, Dr Alice Marwick, says that fascist tropes first merged with irony in the murkier corners of the internet before being adopted by the “alt-right” as a tool. For the new far-right movement, “irony has a strategic function. It allows people to disclaim a real commitment to far-right ideas while still espousing them.”

Marwick says that from the early 2000s, on message boards like 4chan, calculatedly offensive language and imagery have been used to “provoke strong reactions in outsiders”. Calling all users “fags”, or creating memes using gross racial stereotypes, “serves a gate-keeping function, in that it keeps people out of these spaces, many of which are very easy to access”.

Violating the standards of political correctness and the rules of polite interactions “also functions as an act of rebellion” in spaces drenched in adolescent masculinity.

This was played up by Milo Yiannopoulos in an infamous Breitbart explainer last year, in which he insisted that the “alt-right” movement’s circulation of antisemitic imagery was really nothing more than transgressive fun.

“Are they actually bigots?” Yiannopoulos asked rhetorically. “No more than death metal devotees in the 1980s were actually satanists. For them, it’s simply a means to fluster their grandparents.”

What Yiannopoulos left out, according to Marwick, is that these spaces increasingly became attractive to sincere white supremacists. They offered them venues for recruitment, and new methods for popularising their ideas.

In other words, troll culture became a way for fascism to hide in plain sight.

Marwick points to another guide to the “alt-right”, published last on Andrew Anglin’s prominent Nazi site, the Daily Stormer, which credited “troll culture” with bringing about “non-ironic Nazism masquerading as ironic Nazism”:

Irony allows people to strategically distance themselves from the very real commitment to white supremacist values that many of these forums have.

It also allows individuals to push boundaries in public, and to back away when they meet resistance. When Richard Spencer led a fascist salute to Donald Trump at his National Policy Insitute conference in the wake of Trump’s win, he said it was done in “a spirit of irony and exuberance”.

A compounding difficulty for opponents of the “alt-right” is that online, it’s always been difficult to tell the difference between sincerity and satire.

Ryan Milner teaches Communication at the College of Charleston, and is the co-author of a new book called The Ambivalent Internet. The book ponders the implications of Poe’s law, an internet adage that points to the difficulties of online communication and of distinguishing extremist views from parodies.

“Unless you have an obvious marker of another person’s intent, you can’t really gauge their intent. They could be messing around. They could be deadly serious. They could be a mix of both,” Milner says.

But ironic, playful content can have effects in real life. Milner offers the example of Edgar Welch, who turned up at Comet Ping Pong Pizza in Washington DC with a gun after imbibing too deeply of the so-called Pizzagate conspiracy theory. The theory was ginned up by forum trolls and amplified by fringe rightwing media. It asserted, on the basis of some of John Podesta’s leaked emails, that the restaurant was the hub of an elite pedophile ring.

Last December, Welch drove to Washington from North Carolina with three firearms. When he arrived, he texted a friend: “Raiding a pedo ring, possible sacrificing the lives of a few for the lives of many.” He fired shots inside the restaurant, but fortunately was arrested without harming anyone.

“A lot of the people propagating the Pizzagate conspiracy were doing it winkingly. But in the moment that somebody walked into that shop with a gun, then that playful buzzing participation around that conspiracy turned into real consequences,” Milner says.

More generally, every “ironic” repetition of far-right ideals contributes to a climate in which racism, misogyny, or Islamophobia is normalised.

“Every time you see a viral video of somebody shouting down a person of Muslim descent in a supermarket line, what you’re seeing are the effects of an environment where it’s increasingly normal, increasingly accepted and expected to speak in this register, whether or not that started out as a joke,” Milner says.

Author Alexander Reid Ross agrees that irony has been deployed by the far right in chipping away at whatever prohibitions have existed around publicly adopting far-right politics. His book, Against the Fascist Creep, published late last year, explores the long history of fascists attempting to mainstream their ideas, or even sell them to the left.

“Fascism is more or less a social taboo. It’s unacceptable in modern society,” Ross says. “Humour or irony is one of the ways that they can put forward their affective positions without having to fall back on any affirmative ideological positions.”

He adds: “They’re putting forward the anger, the sense of betrayal, the need for revenge, the resentment, the violence. They’re putting forward the male fantasies, the desire for a national community and a sense of unity and a rejection of Muslims. They’re doing all of that, but they’re not stating it.”

The best response is to stubbornly take the “alt-right” at their word. Angela Nagle’s book about the “alt-right”, Kill All Normies, will be released next month. She says that for the “alt-right”, online irony “is a mechanism for undermining the confidence of their critics”.

“The thing that people have to realize is that it isn’t that complicated. We know what they believe in, and if you say that you’re ‘alt-right’, presumably you believe in those things too.”

Rather than getting lost in the weeds of a fast-moving internet culture, we should be bearing down hard on those core beliefs.

“Journalists should be saying, ‘I don’t want to talk about Pepe memes and hand signs. Tell me what are the limits of what you’re prepared to do’. We should force them to talk about what they really stand for,” Nagle says.

In future, the best step may be to meet irony with sincerity.

Peggy Oki on my InsatGram

PEGGY OKI @peggy_oki skating the Kenter Canyon School Yard, the year is 1976. Peggy was known as the only girl on the original Zephyr team, and in fact was just as progressive as the "Z-Boys" when compared to other female skaters. Always cool and nice. These days Peggy is an environmental inspiration councilor or warrior if you must, looking out for the planet as well as the sea and it's inhabitants in particular. Kenter was my local spot, my favorite place to skate, first year of 35mm photography, mostly with a borrowed camera. I was there almost all the time once we discovered the urethane wheel and even more so once precision bearings came into play. It's where i met most of the Zephyr team and many others for the first time. My home base without a doubt. With Paul Revere Junior High banks a close second. #skateboarding #inspiration #integrity #Zephyr #zboys #zgirl #Kenter #GirlsWhoSkate #WomenWhoSkate #surfSkate #Style #BankSkating #WLA #schoolYard #1976 #70s #handOnTheWall #touching #feeling #OldSchool #OG #BadAss #MYRULES

A post shared by glen E. friedman Ⓥ (@glenefriedman) on May 30, 2017 at 4:45pm PDT

Vintage Hip-Hop Fantastic Freaks, Cold Crush Brothers, DJ Grand Wizard Theodore (Live at Club Dixie in South Bronx)

Clip from 1983 film "Wild Style".....
The Source has called WILD STYLE "the best hip-hop movie of all time," and it's widely recognized as such worldwide. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted the film as one of the "10 Best Rock 'n' Roll Movies of All Time." Rolling Stone rates it #7 on its list of "The Top 25 Music DVDs of All Time," noting, "you'll find exhilarating and rare footage of Fab Five Freddy, Grandmaster Flash and all the spray-painters, rappers and breakers who helped turn hip-hop from a South Bronx musical style into a cultural phenomenon." This seminal visual record of the origins of hip-hop culture now celebrates its quarter-century mark with the special WILD STYLE 25th ANNIVERSARY EDITION from Rhino.

The WILD STYLE 25th ANNIVERSARY EDITION DVD presents a digital transfer from the original 16mm film, a 5.1 audio mix and new commentary from director Charlie Ahearn and hip-hop icon and former graffiti artist Fab 5 Freddy. In addition to the groundbreaking feature film, captured on location in the South Bronx in 1982 - including great subway and train yard shots - the WILD STYLE DVD is now expanded with new interviews with Ahearn, Fab 5 Freddy, Busy Bee and Lady Pink. Also featured are a previously unissued mini-documentary with footage from the 20th Anniversary WILD STYLE concert, a "Bongo Barbershop" DJ battle in the Bronx, previously unreleased photos and other bonus extras.

Narratively, WILD STYLE follows the exploits of maverick tagger Zoro (real life graffiti artist Lee Quinones), whose work attracts the attention of an East Village art fancier (Patti Astor) who commissions him to paint the stage for a giant Rapper's Convention. A documentation of the earliest days of hip-hop in the boroughs of New York, everything in WILD STYLE is authentic - the story, style, characters, and most of the actors, are drawn from the community. It features a pantheon of old-school pioneers, including Grandmaster Flash, Fab Five Freddy, Busy Bee, The Cold Crush Brothers and more.

In its chronicling the influential South Bronx youth culture of the day - before it became globally known - WILD STYLE shows many important hip-hop personalities in their milieu before they went on to reap national acclaim. Chief among these is Fab 5 Freddy, who hosted Yo! MTV Raps from its inception. Director Ahearn credits Freddy for the film's vision of hip-hop as a unified culture. WILD STYLE may not have been the first movie featuring rappers, but it was the first to link graffiti, break dancing, DJing, freestyle MCing and the emergence of the hip-hop nation. It culminates in one of the greatest hip-hop parties in history.

Get The DVD: HERE at Amazon

School of Life Monday: PLATO ON: The Allegory of the Cave

Plato made up an enduring story about why philosophy matters based on an allegory about a cave…

Sunday Sermon: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful: Noam Chomsky & Glenn Greenwald

The basis for power elite membership is institutional power, namely an influential position within a prominent private or public organization. About the book: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/125...

One study of power elites in the USA under George W. Bush identified 7,314 institutional positions of power encompassing 5,778 individuals. A later study of US society found that the demographics of this elite group broke down as follows:

Age Corporate leaders average about 60 years of age. The heads of foundations, law, education, and civic organizations average around 62 years of age. Government-sector members about 56.
Gender Women are barely represented among corporate leadership in the institutional elite and women only contribute roughly 20 percent in the political realm. They do appear more among top positions when it comes to cultural affairs, education, and foundations.
Ethnicity White Anglo-Saxons dominate in the power elite, with Protestants representing about 80 percent of the top business leaders and about 73 percent of members of Congress.
Education Nearly all the leaders are college-educated with almost half having advanced degrees. About 54 percent of the big-business leaders and 42 percent of the government elite are graduates of just 12 heavily endowed, prestigious universities.
Social Clubs Most holders of top position in the power elite possess exclusive membership in one or more social clubs. About a third belong to a small number of especially prestigious clubs in major cities like New York, Chicago, Boston, and D.C.[16]

In the 1970s an organized set of policies promoted reduced taxes, especially for the wealthy, and a steady corrosion of the welfare safety net.[17] Starting with legislation in the 1980s, the wealthy banking community successfully lobbied for reduced regulation.[18] The wide range of financial and social capital accessible to the power elite gives their members heavy influence in economic and political decision making, allowing them to move toward attaining desired outcomes. Sociologist Christopher Doob gives a hypothetical alternative stating that these elite individuals would consider themselves the overseers of the national economy, appreciating that it is not only a moral but a practical necessity to focus beyond their group interests. Doing so would hopefully alleviate various destructive conditions affecting large numbers of less affluent citizens.

Mills determined that there is an "inner core" of the power elite involving individuals that are able to move from one seat of institutional power to another. They therefore have a wide range of knowledge and interests in many influential organizations, and are, as Mills describes, "professional go-betweens of economic, political, and military affairs."[19] Relentless expansion of capitalism and the globalizing of economic and military power binds leaders of the power elite into complex relationships with nation states that generate global-scale class divisions. Sociologist, Manuel Castells, writes in The Rise of the Network Society that contemporary globalization does not mean that "everything in the global economy is global."[20] So, a global economy becomes characterized by fundamental social inequalities with respect to "the level of integration, competitive potential and share of the benefits from economic growth."[21] Castells cites a kind of "double movement" where on one hand, "valuable segments of territories and people" become "linked in the global networks of value making and wealth appropriation," while, on the other, "everything and everyone" that is not valued by established networks gets "switched off... and ultimately discarded."[21] The wide-ranging effects of global capitalism ultimately affect everyone on the planet as economies around the world come to depend on the functioning of global financial markets, technologies, trade and labor.

some Old School O.G. Hip-Hop for your Saturday

Tom Groholski on my Instagram

TOM GROHOLSKI - Cheap Skates - Line Lexington, Pa. guessing late 80's here. Also met Jim Murphy for the first time this day. I met Tom down at Cherry Hill at first then hung out with him and his friends and family often, including great sessions at their own Backyard ramp in New Brunswick, NJ. We took many road trips with his incredible dad at the wheel and later on our own when we made this photo which may have been around the time we did his first interview for THRASHER magazine. Another photograph from this day may have been used as a Vision Ad and may also be the day we made the photo that's in FUCK YOU HEROES and MY RULES? Feel free to add on or correct my caption. All you gotta know is that Tom was one of the earliest New Jersey skaters to get a national reputation for his abilities and being an all around good guy. #SkateBoarding #JerseyDevil #Groholski #TomG #Vision #inspiration #INTEGRITY #NewJersey #CheapSkates #RampSkating #Eastcoast

A post shared by glen E. friedman Ⓥ (@glenefriedman) on May 25, 2017 at 2:04pm PDT

Corporate Attack on Education, Chomsky

Sir Roger Moore, 1927-2017

Roger Moore, famous for his portrayals of master spy James Bond and master criminal Simon Templar, is dead at 89, reports the BBC.

Last Week's REAL NEWS

School of Life Monday: Karl Marx - Political Theory

Karl Marx remains deeply important today not as the man who told us what to replace capitalism with, but as someone who brilliantly pointed out certain of its problems.



BONUS:

undeniable ... next weeks TIME magazine cover

How the Professor Who Predicted Trump's Win is Making the Case for Impeachment

from Time Magazine:

When Allan Lichtman correctly predicted the widely unexpected outcome of the 2016 presidential election, he received a personal note of congratulations from Donald Trump. Months later, the President will soon receive a copy of a new book outlining Lichtman's next big prediction: impeachment.

Throughout his career, Trump has avoided accountability," Lichtman told TIME on Friday. "As president, though, you cannot walk away from accountability. You can’t declare bankruptcy, you can’t just abandon a deal. And the ultimate accountability is impeachment."

Lichtman, an American University history professor who has used a set of keysto correctly predict every presidential election since 1982, gained attention last year when he predicted that Trump would win the election and then be impeached.

His new book, The Case for Impeachment, outlines eight possible reasons to impeach Trump, including his business-related conflicts of interest, his team's connections to Russia and his involvement in previous legal disputes, such as lawsuits against Trump University. In his "most edgy" argument, Lichtman says Trump could be impeached for a "crime against humanity" based on his refusal to take action on climate change.

The book, which will be released Tuesday, draws comparisons between Trump and the two U.S. presidents who have been impeached — Andrew Johnson in 1868 and Bill Clinton in 1998 — as well as Richard Nixon, who avoided inevitable impeachment when he resigned. Johnson and Clinton were both impeached by the House of Representatives but acquitted in the Senate.

"What might distinguish a Trump impeachment from that of Clinton and Johnson is that the transgressions could be more Nixonian — that is, more serious, more threatening to our constitutional order, our liberties, our freedoms and our national security," Lichtman said.

But impeachment is a difficult process, and the act of actually removing a president from office is even harder. That's especially true when the president's own party has control of Congress — as Republicans do now. But Lichtman believes enough Republicans would support impeachment if any concrete evidence surfaced to show Trump's campaign colluded with Russia to interfere in the election.

“I think the Russian connection would be the most likely source of impeachment," Lichtman said. "There sure is a lot of smoke. And my own suspicion is there’s some kind of fire that’s producing this smoke. Whether it’s serious enough to warrant impeachment, we don’t know yet."

"If the investigations do turn up some serious wrongdoing, I think even Republicans in Congress are not going to overlook it," Lichtman added, while acknowledging "it's a steep hill to climb."

If a vote were to take place in the House today, all 193 Democrats and 23 Republicans would need to vote for impeachment in order for it to pass. In the Senate, 19 Republicans would have to side with all 46 Democrats and two independents in order to remove Trump from office

While making the case for impeachment, Lichtman's book also gives Trump a "blueprint for surviving as president" that includes fully divesting from his business interests, supporting measures to prevent climate change, hiring a fact-checker and firing chief strategist Steve Bannon.

"I hope he reads this book, and I hope he does change," Lichtman said. " I am rooting for Trump to some extent because I am a believer in American democracy, and I would much rather see our democracy cherished and protected than see President Trump being removed."

"Pushing The Limit" with Jay AdamsFirst time I had a photo of mine made into a T-shirt The year 1977

JAY ADAMS 1977 - this is a classic T-Shirt made in the surf style of the era. "PUSHING THE LIMIT" - it was the first time a photo of mine had been used on a shirt, i got $50 and a dozen shirts for my friends and I. Still got this one and an orange long sleeve one in my archive. Jay is hitting the last wall at Resida "SkaterCross", it was one of the earliest skateparks built in the LA area, out in the Valley , just down the block from an Arby's, and it was actually like an old A&W Drive-In restaurant, they kept the cover which kept a portion of the park in shade... it was a pretty bazaar park, but they all were back then really. i made some cool photos there, and it was where i met Warren Bolster in person for the first time, at their grand opening. He gave me 3 rolls of film! (Kodachrome 64) first time i ever got free film, and i was beyond stoked, made a full pager of Wally Inouye that day, my third photo ever published. #skateboarding #15yearsOld #oldschool #surfstyle #Tshirt #JayBoy #Zflex #inspiration #integrity #original #silkscreen #70s #StoriesForDays #Bert #skatepark #skaterCross

A post shared by glen E. friedman Ⓥ (@glenefriedman) on May 17, 2017 at 6:25pm PDT

"I'm Just a Lie," Jimmy Kimmel's modern day Schoolhouse Rock lesson

We live in a world of alternative “facts” where the President makes statements almost every day that aren’t always based in fact. We are raised to believe the President tells the truth, but since that isn’t necessarily the case anymore, and to bring children up to date on the new American way, we took a cue from Schoolhouse Rock to explain how it all works now.

Bonus:




original Bonus:



thanks Boing Boing

1981 Nightline interview with Steve Jobs

Ted Koppel, Bettina Gregory, and Ken Kashiwahara present news stories from 1981 on the relevancy of computers in every day life and how they will affect our future. Included are interviews with Apple Computer Chairman Steve Jobs and writer David Burnham.