Thursday, August 31, 2017

Sound Breaking from PBS Episode 2


Great Series: Soundbreaking Stories from the Cutting Edge of Recorded Music

Wednesday, August 30, 2017

Sound Breaking from PBS Part 1


Great Series...

Here is Episode one, as long as it lasts on youtube:



I will post a new episode each day.

Tuesday, August 29, 2017

Run-DMC and Beastie Boys
on my Instagram


TOGETHER FOREVER RUN-DMC & BEASTIE BOYS We made this photograph on the stoop next to the RUSH Productions / DEF JAM Recordings building where the EXRTRA STRENGTH POSSE resided, where it all began, 298 Elizabeth St. NYC circa 1987 DEF JAM was on top of the music world, on top of culture, on top of the scene in NYC at this time, it was incredible. A lot of people learned a lot of things during this era, including myself, that propelled lives into other stratospheres Run-DMC and Beastie Boys touring together and feeding off of each others energy and creativity was a landmark moment in the culture as well. I made a ton of great photos of both of these great groups... was thinking in the next year or so may put together a book of all my best photographs of both groups in one volume, similar to my book "Keep Your Eyes Open" my photographs of FUGAZI from start to the last show on US soil. There are already a ton of photos of both these groups in MY RULES, in fact maybe too many... so yeah, this might happen, and maybe this is an image in contention for the cover... we shall see 👀. #RUSH #DEFJAM #HIPHOP #NYC #80s #NewBook #inspiration #rundmc #djhurricane #beastieboys #beasties #adrock #mikeD #MCA #RIPMCA #SKATEBOARD @revwon @unclerush @beastieboys__ @djhurricane1 @ChrisRock @RizzoliBooks @lyorcohen @danteross @mrchuckd_pe #whoshouse #runshouse

A post shared by glen E. friedman Ⓥ (@glenefriedman) on

Monday, August 28, 2017

School of Life Monday:
Machiavelli’s Advice For Nice Guys


Nice guys too often finish last; they need to read the advice of one of the wisest and most realistic thinkers in the history of philosophy: Niccolo Machiavelli.

Sunday, August 27, 2017

Thursday, August 24, 2017

The Perfect game That Wasn't
PITTSBURGH PIRATES walk off WIN in the 10th




One of my favorite players in professional sports today, Josh Harrison becomes the 1st player in history to end a no-hitter with a walk off Home Run in extra innings.





Josh Harrison connects for a walk-off home run to left field, breaking up Rich Hill's no-hitter in the bottom of the 10th inning
For eight innings, Dodgers left-hander Rich Hill was perfect. For nine innings, he was unhittable. But the Pirates' first hit was the only one they'd need.
Josh Harrison ripped a walk-off homer to left field in the 10th inning, breaking up Hill's no-hit bid and giving the Pirates to a wild 1-0 win over the Dodgers on Wednesday night at PNC Park.

a few other incredible moments in this incredible game:

click here: Mercer's Incredible catch

click here: Josh Harrison does it on the field too!

can't front on this either:

Monday, August 21, 2017

School of Life Monday:
The Ultimate Test of Your Social Skills

You’ll know you’ve truly become socially adept when you finally manage to make small talk with that most challenging and unforgiving of characters: a small child you hardly know.

Sunday, August 20, 2017

WHAT THE HEALTH - trailer


I highly recommend you watch this film on Netflix

ASAP ;-)



bonus:

Saturday, August 19, 2017

Tuesday, August 15, 2017

Jello Biafra on How to Stand Up to Trump, Why Punk Still Matters

from January 3rd 2017...

It's kinda hard for me to believe, but I am quoting Rolling Stone interviewing Jello Biafra:

"What we're looking at here is Jim Crow 2.0," ex–Dead Kennedys frontman says of coming presidency



After Donald Trump won the presidential election, Jello Biafra, former Dead Kennedys frontman, fell face first onto his bed, pounding his fists and shouting, "How can people be so fucking stupid?!?" For Biafra, who has spent nearly 30 years as a leftist pundit, doing as many spoken-word appearances as punk-rock shows, Trump's ascendancy confirms his darkest conspiracy theories about fundamentalist right-wingers taking over the world.

"I don't think the upper 1 or 0.1 percent were ever tearing their hair out about Trump," the 58-year-old "California Uber Alles" and "Nazi Punks Fuck Off" singer-songwriter says, by phone from his family home in Boulder, Colorado, where he's helping his mother contact AAA to replace a dead car battery. "They were ecstatic that somebody that right-wing, and that bigoted, came with a built-in fan base – a cult following, even – that you could never build from scratch with a Jeb Bush or a Ted Cruz or a Marco Rubio. Behind the scenes, they love this stuff. They think they can get away with so much more."

After bringing up Trump, Rolling Stone let Biafra do most of the talking for nearly an hour.

A lot of people out there are asking, "What do we do now? How do we join the resistance?" What do you suggest?
I said from the Gulf War onward: "Don't hate the media, become the media." And then I began to see it painted on punk rockers' jackets and things, But we have to be smart about it. This does not mean blogging to an echo chamber of people who agree with you. It means going to people face-to-face. And they may put you down the way Trump put you down at first. And it may turn your stomach hearing their side of the argument but someone has to plant those seeds. They may wake up three months, even three years, later: "Hey, wait a minute, that's true, all these people feeding me all this bullshit are wrong. ... It's not immigrants and brown people taking all these job away; it's the same corporations that the Trump regime is [affiliated with], sending those same jobs out of the country, to Mexico, China, Vietnam, whatever."

And I hope some of those people are asking the right questions about some of these cabinet members too. As laughable as Rick Perry has been as governor of Texas and other [presidential] campaigns, he's also very dangerous. At first they were saying Secretary of Agriculture for him, but then suddenly Secretary of Energy. That dude is in charge of our nukes now and he's also part of a fundamentalist Christian doomsday cult. ... It was basically yet another cult like the one Sarah and Todd Palin prescribed, whose whole mindset was "Jesus is coming soon, and in order to expedite we should be wasting every last natural resource and clear-cutting every tree we can right now because Jesus is coming back again. It's OK to run up further budget deficits, because Jesus loves America, he's going to put the money back."

Oh, boy ...
The last person we want with their finger on the nuclear button is somebody connected to this extreme Christianist doomsday cult.

People are freaked out that Trump has made the head of Exxon the Secretary of State, and the guy is so tight and in bed with Putin – well, there's another part of Rex Tillerson I hope people are going to highlight, too. He's the one who finally admitted climate change existed as head of Exxon, but then he said mankind will adapt and so it's no big deal. ... I'm not sure Trump himself is one of these fundamentalist Christians. He just worships himself. He admitted he doesn't read books and he mainly just reads articles about himself. ... I'm just hoping against hope he freaks out so bad about having to sell his business empire and having his own name owned by somebody else all over the world that he refuses to take the oath of office at all. But then we [have] Paul Ryan and Co. voting in president Mike Pence, the most rabidly anti-gay and anti-choice politician of any high public office.

Sure, Hillary is no prize, and she marches to Wall Street's drum and always has, but, dammit, she wouldn't be pulling all this doomsday supremacist Christian bigoted racist destroy-the-earth-before-Jesus-comes crap that the Trump people are pulling. I would say that well over 75 percent of the people that voted for Trump did not vote for what's about to happen. ... What we're looking at here is Jim Crow 2.0, and they're going to be even more hardcore about that in the 2018 election, to keep anybody with a conscience from being able to vote. Look at who the new Attorney General is going to be, the same guy who in the Eighties said he thought the people in the Ku Klux Klan were all right "until I saw some of them smoked pot."

In an era like this, my thoughts go back to the Dead Kennedys and Eighties hardcore. Is it realistic that something like that could or should happen again?
Well, I don't think all the people who are scared to death of the Trump/Pence/Exxon agenda should depend on one kind of underground music to lead the way. I mean, when you're talking about punk, I don't think it was ever a "movement" – movements have their eyes on a political prize. It's just an inspirational rebel culture that can help energize other movements, as can hip-hop, metal, folk and even country. ... It lets other people scared to death of a bunch of racist neo-Nazis running the show know they're not alone. And that's important. Bullying against bigger, mainstream artists is going to be fierce. Steve Bannon will have his fingers on all sorts of buttons to make sure that happens. But artists should keep in mind that it's not their fans on the other end who are vilifying them. ... On the other hand, let's not buy into this urban legend it was a good thing Reagan was president because so much great punk rock and angry hip-hop came out of that. Wrong!

Yes, I agree with your point on that.
People need to pay a little more attention to their history, and read the dates. Everybody from Sex Pistols to Clash to Dead Kennedys to Bad Brains were all fully formed in music and vision before Reagan or Thatcher ever seized power. The common denominator of most of us is we were anti-corporation and anti-corporate culture, especially the way it was polluting and dumbing down our music.

You ran for mayor of San Francisco in 1979. Are you planning to become more involved in the Trump Era? Would you run for office again or has that ship sailed?
I don't plan too much in advance because I never know what weird and wild and interesting adventures may fall into my lap. I didn't really plan to run for mayor of San Francisco. Dead Kennedys' original drummer dared me when I was folded in the back of his Volkswagen on the way to a Pere Ubu show. So then I told people at the show I was running for mayor [and] wrote my platform on a napkin with a felt-tip pen four feet away from where Ubu were playing. People were so into the idea I couldn't back out of it.



I was watching the first "What Would Jello Do?" on YouTube after the election, where you're screaming, "How can people be so fucking stupid?" and pounding your head against the wall.
[Laughs] That's my general description for the Tea Party: "Someone's got to stand up for the stupid, goddammit!" Of course, the people up top aren't stupid at all. That was the ultimate fake grassroots Astroturf uprising controlled by oil barons like the Koch brothers and others.

Did you script that or was it spontaneous?
I planned to do something like that and decided to shoot that one in my bedroom instead of at my desk because I was worried about how much shit would fall off my desk and fall off the wall. But I wanted something that would get people's attention [laughs].

After the events of last year, I've found myself repeatedly listening to "Nazi Punks Fuck Off." Are you finding people are going to Dead Kennedys and other likeminded, anti-fascist music to figure out how to deal with the return of white supremacy?
The one silver lining I'd rather not have from all the hell that's gone down is that our Nazi Trumps Fuck Off shirts have been flying out the door at [Biafra's longtime record label] Alternative Tentacles and done more to keep us in business than the music we try to get people hip to.

I read that your father died since we last talked.
Yeah there's a "What Would Jello Do?" about that. I shot it on the bridge [in Boulder] after the floods and he died after the floods. ... I go into a lot about why closure is a bogus pop culture concept and this is not going to go away. In a different way, even my sister dying with her husband in the fall of 1996 in Rocky Mountain National Park, every once in a while it just rockets through me all over again. I break down, I cry, I fuckin' lose it. And then I get up and keep moving. And that's what I said at the memorials of the Oakland [Ghost Ship warehouse club] fire victims in the park by the lake in Oakland. I wasn't even supposed to speak, and didn't come there prepared to, but people were poking: "You've got to get near the mic; you've got to say something." I didn't want to step on the people talking about their friends they lost in the fire, but because people were so devastated, I thought maybe I needed to make that analogy, to help people process this whole thing.


Monday, August 14, 2017

School of Life Monday:
Resilience

The route to greater resilience is to explore how well we would cope if so much of what we think we need were to be taken away from us. We would, almost certainly, manage far better than we think in our timid moments.

Saturday, August 12, 2017

This U.S. Sports Envoy Is Bridging Communities With Skateboarding

from NBC NEWS ASIA:


Neftalie Williams was 16 when he met two pro skateboarders outside of a summer camp he wasn't able to attend. It was after hours, and the pair skated with him. They taught Williams that the sport wasn't out of reach to anyone.

“Even though I didn't have the chance to attend the camp, they still made sure to provide me the opportunity to skate with them," Williams told NBC News. "Their gesture taught me that skateboarding was an activity 'by the people and for the people.' It has been my goal to return the favor to the next generation of skaters ever since then.”

Now 37 years old, Williams is a skateboarding envoy with the U.S. State Department and is spreading his love for the sport, recently completing a cultural diplomacy mission in Cambodia, where he highlighted skateboarding's benefits to young people.

“It’s a bridge between people all over the world,” Williams said. “For me, I’ve always been focused on what it was that made skateboarding special.”

“It’s been built into the ethos and the DNA of skateboarding culture to explore new spaces, to build community, and to always have fun in a non-competitive way while you’re skateboarding,” he added.

William’s program in Cambodia was a first in the country for the State Department, according to Williams, who had previously hosted a program in the Netherlands working with Syrian refugees who had just been granted asylum.

During the multi-day series, he discussed skateboarding culture and how it can be a positive pathway for academics and physical activity. Clinics and demonstrations were also held for the kids, some of whom had never been on a skateboard before, according to Williams.

“Once you give a kid a skateboard and they start pushing, then they just realize how much faster they are than the world, and it gives them some freedom and a way to sort of express themselves through skateboarding,” he said.

Williams, who also lectures at the University of Southern California and is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Waikato in New Zealand, noted that skateboarding culture allows kids to meld academia with athletics.



“There’s a space for them if they’re into business or media and content creation or design.”
Williams said skateboarding culture is growing in popularity in Cambodia partly because of the Cambodian youth's interest in American sports and culture.

Kids in Asia have growing opportunity to reach higher levels of the sport, he noted, with the inaugural Asian Skateboarding Championships being held last November. At the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo, skateboarding will be an official sport, he added.

“Skateboarding is that one sport that has all of those aspects at one time, and you don’t need to have a coach. You don’t have to have a league. That’s really important in countries where there may be kids who are disadvantaged or slightly disenfranchised,” said Williams, who has also worked in South Africa, Brazil, and Cuba.

At Skateistan, a nonprofit organization that works with kids in Cambodia, the youth and staff were inspired by Williams, Kov Chan Sangva, a program officer at the organization, told NBC News.

“He made a presentation about the skate scene in America and it was a wonderful story,” Kov said. “We also spoke out about the skate scene in Cambodia and hopefully in the future, the world will know more about Cambodia skaters and our story.”

Skateistan offers free programs at a safe place for kids who may not otherwise be able to afford the materials necessary to skateboard. The sport is becoming more popular among the youth, Kov said.

“Skateboarding is an amazing sport,” she said. “It feels fantastic and it really helps people a lot — to build trust, to build confidence and make a lot of friends. It can help us to get out of bad situations, and builds trust between people, communities and the world.”

Friday, August 11, 2017

TODAY 44 years ago "HIP HOP was INVENTED"




and even @GoogleDoodles has gotten in to celebrate with a cool DJ game experience narrated by our good old friend Fab 5 Freddy.

check it out https://goo.gl/ecQDWu

#BirthOfHipHop #GoogleDoodle #Sponsored

Thursday, August 10, 2017

Watch Janis Joplin and Tom Jones
shake it to 'Raise Your Hand' in 1969




This footage is from an episode of Jones' show This is Tom Jones which aired on December 4, 1969, just 10 short months before her death.

Thanks, Boing Boing

Wednesday, August 9, 2017

DEVO’S JERRY CASALE INTERVIEWS
DEVO’S GERALD V. CASALE

from Dangerous Minds:



This is the best self-interview since David Byrne’s promotional interview for Stop Making Sense.

In this nineteen minute video, “Jerry” Casale plays the cynical straight interviewer of himself, “Gerald” Casale, bass player, vocalist, and spokesman for DEVO.

Gerald reveals to Jerry the secret behind the DEVO “energy domes” (erroneously referred to as “flower pots” by many spuds back in the day), the inspiration behind which was an art deco lighting fixture that hung from the ceiling in his grade school.

Gerald talks at length about the origins of DEVO at Kent State University, from the original concept creation with his friend Bob Lewis, to his meeting of Mark Mothersbaugh after seeing Mothersbaugh’s stickered artwork hanging in the halls of the school.

Gerald explains that the Kent State Massacre was the impetus for the creation of DEVO, conceptually and musically, as an experimental force and bulwark against the prevailing culture:
“After those killings at Kent State and the clampdown from the Nixon administration, you either had to go underground and stick to activism and possibly go to jail or be killed, or find a more creative and subversive way of reacting to the situation you found yourself in in the horrible culture.”
Gerald waxes nostalgic for the “democratic” early days of DEVO’s music when all of the members contributed to the minimalist “form follows function” vision of the band, but explains that the songwriting process went south when the technology they were using became “autocratic,” dictating the direction of the group. According to Casale, “Mark wanted it that way and I didn’t.”

DEVO’s biggest hit, “Whip It,” is also discussed, with Gerald revealing to Jerry that the basis for the song was Mark Mothersbaugh’s deconstruction of Roy Orbison’s “Oh, Pretty Woman,” adding a two beat space to the song’s main riff, with Casale’s lyrics being inspired by Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow.

At the conclusion of this insightful interview, Jerry asks Gerald if DEVO would have been willing to play Trump’s inauguration, to which Gerald replies, “absolutely… it would be the proof of De-evolution.”

Tuesday, August 8, 2017

The Cronies Behind the Energy Industry's Deliberate Misinformation Campaigns


Authors Dick Russell and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. expose the energy moguls covering up catastrophic climate change for their own gain. By Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Dick Russell
The following is an excerpt from the new book The Horsemen of the Apocalypse: The Men Who Are Destroying the Planet—and How They Explain Themselves to Their Own Children by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Dick Russell (Hot Books, May 2017), available for purchase from Amazon, IndieBound, and Hot Books:

Early in October 2015, Rex Wayne Tillerson—62-year-old father of four, recent national president of the Boy Scouts of America—took the stage at the 36th annual Oil and Money Conference in London. As the then-CEO of ExxonMobil, Tillerson had just been named Petroleum Executive of the Year. His topic was “Unleashing Innovation to Meet Our Energy and Environmental Needs.”

Tillerson’s half-hour-long speech did not ignore the subject of a rapidly changing global climate. He spoke of the challenge of “reducing the greenhouse gas emissions associated with energy use.” He said “the risks of climate change are serious and warrant thoughtful action,” including his corporation’s research into alternative technologies and support of a “revenue-neutral” carbon tax. However, Tillerson added, “The world will need to pursue all energy sources, wherever they are economically competitive . . . importantly, we will need coal, oil, and natural gas.”

The highest paid executive of the richest fossil fuel corporation on the planet went on to point out: “From the very beginning of concern on this issue, ExxonMobil scientists and engineers have been involved in discussions and analysis of climate change. These efforts started internally as early as the 1970s.”

What Tillerson failed to mention was this: only the month before, an investigation of internal Exxon documents had revealed that those very scientists had repeatedly warned, almost forty years ago, of a potentially “catastrophic” warming of the planet that “endangered humanity.” But instead of responding to this red alert from their own experts by starting to shift the energy giant toward renewable resources, Exxon’s top executives, including Tillerson, had shut down the company’s own research—and embarked instead on a massive disinformation campaign aimed at debunking climate change as a myth.

The corporation was a ringleader in setting up the Global Climate Coalition, a massive disinformation machine bringing together the world’s leading fossil fuel companies in an all-out effort to prevent governments from curbing their emissions. Tillerson’s company, the second largest emitter of CO2 in the world (after Chevron), dispersed millions to muddy any scientific understanding and delay any real action.

Tillerson, his predecessor Lee Raymond, and their cronies knew the truth about the fate of the planet. And yet they lied, and they paid others to lie. They lied as global temperatures began rising at record rates. They lied as droughts and wildfires swept across the American West, and as California started running out of water. They lied as tornadoes and hurricanes and snowfall levels intensified in unprecedented ways. They lied as thousands died in European heat waves, and thousands more perished in Asian floods. They lied as Greenland’s ice turned liquid, and sea levels began to rise two-and-a-half times faster than anyone thought possible, and the oceans became increasingly acidic and filled with disease-causing bacteria. They lied and sacrificed future generations for their short-term profits.

During his visit to America in December 2015, Pope Francis issued a warning about climate change, “a problem which can no longer be left to a future generation. . . . I can say to you ‘now or never.’ Every year the problems are getting worse. We are at the limits. If I may use a strong word I would say that we are at the limits of suicide.”

Six months earlier, in the pope’s encyclical on the situation, he had asked: “What kind of world do we want to leave to those who come after us, to children who are now growing up?” And he had raised another question: “What would induce anyone, at this stage, to hold on to power only to be remembered for their inability to take action when it was urgent and necessary to do so?”

The president of the World Bank, Jim Kim, has spoken out along similar lines: “My son will live through a 2, 3 or maybe even 4 degree Celsius warming. We cannot keep apologizing to our children for our lack of action. We must change course now.”

At the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, while some three billion people watched, the opening ceremony featured a video of ever-escalating global carbon pollution and simultaneously drastic rise in sea levels.

These are the facts behind the pleas of the Pope, the World Bank leader, and the Olympic Games leadership:

• Sixteen of the seventeen warmest years ever recorded have occurred since 2001. For the third consecutive year, it was announced in January, the earth set a heat record. Across vast stretches of the Arctic Ocean, temperatures in the fall of 2016 reached an astonishing 20 to 30 degrees above normal.

• As billions of tons of ice melt or slide into the sea, satellite data shows that oceans around the world are rising by five millimeters a year, a rate not seen since the close of the last Ice Age.

• “Much of the carbon we are putting in the air from fossil fuels will stay there for thousands of years—and some of it will be there for more than 100,000 years.”—Oregon State University paleoclimatologist Peter Clark, lead author of a new study in Nature Climate Change, February 2016.

• “Given currently available records, the present anthropogenic carbon release rate is unprecedented during the past 66 million years.” —Nature Geoscience, March 2016.

Several years earlier, in September 2013, UNICEF published the results of a five-year study about how a changing global climate affects today’s children. “Climate change has too often been discussed and debated in abstract terms, negating the human costs and placing little attention on its intergenerational impact,” the report said. However, “more severe and more frequent natural disasters, food crises and changing rainfall patterns are all threatening children’s lives and their basic rights to education, health, clean water, and the right food.”

These drastic changes in our planet’s ecosystem will have the most severe consequences, of course, on future generations. Climate change is all too often discussed in “abstract terms,” the 2013 UNICEF report noted. But the environmental upheaval associated with climate change is already having a massive impact on “children’s lives and their basic rights to education, health, and [proper] food.” UNICEF has estimated that, by 2030, 25 million more children will suffer malnourishment, with another 100 million facing food insecurity due to scarcity, and between 150 and 200 million more being displaced from their homes. “We are hurtling towards a future where the gains being made for the world’s children are threatened, and their health, wellbeing, livelihoods and survival are compromised . . . despite being the least responsible for the causes,” said David Bull, executive director of UNICEF in the United Kingdom.

The UNICEF report noted that “children and young people in developed countries are acutely aware of climate change, and are passionate and vocal about the need for action by governments to tackle the problem.” Polling in the UK indicated that nearly three-quarters of those between ages 11 and 16 in Britain worried about the planet’s environmental future. More than seven in ten wanted their government to do more, and nearly two-thirds voiced particular concern about their counterparts in developing nations. In the US, similar polling found almost three-quarters of young voters saying they were less likely to vote for a candidate who opposed President Obama’s climate change plan. “We need to listen to what children are saying,” the study concluded.

The goal of the entrenched interests, however, is to drown out those voices—all the way to the classroom. In Wyoming, when the Park County School District was to vote on whether to purchase new textbooks and reading materials in 2015, one board member responded, “I will not authorize any of the $300,000 allocated for this purchase to include supplemental booklets about ‘global whining’. . . . Our Wyoming schools are largely funded by coal, oil, natural gas, mining, ranching, etc. This junk science is against community and state standards.”

Jeff Turrentine, who wrote about this for OnEarth Magazine’s web site, added, “For thousands of years, going back to Aristotle, humanity’s greatest minds have sought to safeguard the precepts of the scientific method by keeping them away from the corrupting influence of political culture. Defending the integrity of science from powerful people is what got Galileo imprisoned. And yet, 400 years later, here we are: watching a public official tasked with guiding the educational trajectories of his community’s children rail against the accepted science on climate change—because its conclusions threaten to undermine the local political culture. . . . Anyone who would deliberately misinform children about the gravity of the problem that awaits them when they grow up doesn’t deserve to be in charge of their education.”

The campaign to “misinform children” is particularly aggressive in the American West, stronghold of the oil and coal industries, including in Utah, where a coalition of parents decrying “Education Without Representation” has intimidated the state’s Office of Education into watering down education on climate change. Even in “left-coast” California, where the Democratic Party has a lock on state government, a 2015 analysis of science textbooks used in the sixth-grade classrooms revealed that the language and writing techniques “more closely match the public discourse of doubt about climate change rather than the scientific discourse.” The study, which was conducted by Southern Methodist University, speculated that conservative media like Fox News had contributed to “a shift in public discourse, which eventually influences textbook language by creating competing interests within the textbook market.” A follow-up survey published in the journal Science in 2016 found that, while three-quarters of science teachers nationwide devote time to climate change instruction, 30 percent tell students that it’s “likely due to natural causes” and another 31 percent claim that the matter is unsettled. That’s opposed to the 97 percent of active climate scientists who contend that human activity is a primary cause. Bills have now been introduced in state legislatures of four states that promote climate change denial as part of academic freedom.

Even in 2016, as the world weathered another year of record-setting temperature rise, America’s presidential campaign was dominated by Republican candidate Donald Trump, who dismissed the global crisis as a “hoax”—allegedly manufactured by the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing “non-competitive” and by Democrats to justify higher taxes. Meanwhile, Trump’s Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, while acknowledging climate change as an urgent problem, amassed a huge campaign war chest from donors and lobbyists connected to the oil, gas and coal industry, while her allies headed off an attempt by Senator Bernie Sanders to hammer an anti-fracking plank into the 2016 party platform.

Despite all the calamitous news from the environmental front lines, the energy industry still wields extensive influence over the climate change debate, from the classroom to the presidential campaign trail.
Excerpted from the new book The Horsemen of the Apocalypse: The Men Who Are Destroying the Planet—and How They Explain Themselves to Their Own Children by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Dick Russell (Hot Books, May 2017), available for purchase from Amazon, IndieBound, and Hot Books.




Monday, August 7, 2017

School of Life Monday:
How to Find Meaningful Work


Contrary to some expectations, it isn’t only money we want from work. We also need our work to feel ‘meaningful’. But what exactly is meaningful work, and where can we find more of it?

Thursday, August 3, 2017

Wednesday, August 2, 2017

MCA DAY this Saturday in Brooklyn


Check out more info on their Face Book page: https://www.facebook.com/MCADAYNYC/



Poster above by Shepard Fairey based on my 1985 photo of Beastie Boys in Malibu. while touring with Madonna as her opening act on the "Like A Virgin" tour.

Tuesday, August 1, 2017

from the who woulda thunk it dept.:
L.A. Punk Legends X To Be Celebrated At Dodger Stadium Next Month




from the LAist:
In 1980, X took Los Angeles by storm with the release of their debut album, Los Angeles, and its frenetic, eponymous single, "Los Angeles." Then-married couple John Doe and Exene Cervenka "sang about L.A. as a surreal nightmare full of psycho speed freaks and burned-out Hollywood directors," as Rolling Stone put it. The band had formed in 1977, but it was with the release of Los Angeles that they helped define California punk.

On August 16, Doe and Cervenka will once again storm the city—or at least Elysian Park. The pair will be celebrated at a Dodger game against the Chicago White Sox, with Doe singing the National Anthem and Cervenka throwing out the ceremonial first pitch, according to the L.A. Times. Guitarist Billy Zoom and drummer D.J. Bonebrake will also be interviewed during the pre-game show.

"Somebody in the Dodgers' back office deserves a raise. Go to any ballpark in the country and you won't see nearly the diversity in the stands that we have here at Dodger Stadium," longtime Dodgers fan and Silver Lake resident Ben Cooley told LAist. "But honoring X is kind of the coolest, smallest hat tip to a corner of L.A.'s cultural history that makes me love this team back. Go Dodgers!"
thanks Joie!