60 satellite images of Earth(perhaps Santa's perspective tonight)

Webdesigner depot has 60 incredible satellite photos of Earth.

Looking at nature from different perspectives can create stunning compositions for your photographs. This couldn't be more true than when we look at our planet from outer space and appreciate the reality of its beauty from such an incredible and rarely seen perspective.

Dasht-e Kevir – The Dasht-e Kevir, or valley of desert, is the largest desert in Iran. It is a primarily uninhabited wasteland, composed of mud and salt marshes covered with crusts of salt that protect the meager moisture from completely evaporating.

Garden City, Kansas – Center pivot irrigation systems create red circles of healthy vegetation in this image of croplands near Garden City, Kansas.

Campeche – Named after the ancient Mayan Province of Kimpech, the state of Campeche comprises much of the western half of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. Rivers in southern Campeche drain into the immense Terminos Lagoon, the entrance to which is protected by a long barrier island, Isla Del Carmen.

Coahuila, Mexico - This desolate landscape is part of the Sierra Madre Oriental mountain range, on the border between the Coahuila and Nuevo Leon provinces of Mexico.

Bogda Mountains - The Turpan Depression, nestled at the foot of China’s Bogda Mountains, is a strange mix of salt lakes and sand dunes, and is one of the few places in the world that lies below sea level.


The images in this compilation are from the Landsat 7 satellite and were created to introduce the general public to the Landsat Program. Various combinations of the eight Landsat 7 spectral bands were selected to create the vivid RGB composites.

Go here and check them out, and click on them to see really large with more info and great resolution.

(from Boing Boing Via The Presurfer)

Dismembered Gingerbread

Perfect for the Bad-Ass, or Punk Rock, baker in your life.


Dismembered Gingerbread at Chow.com's winter 2009 Gift Guide. Only $12, sorry i didn't find this sooner for y'all.

(from The Presurfer)

THE DAMNEDknow how incredible the 1st LP is

Another early British punk band you might not all know, but should, and even if you do, you may not have listened as recently as i have. Here are some favorite cuts from the debut album DAMNED DAMNED DAMNED:

NOAM CHOMSKY: “The Unipolar Moment and the Culture of Imperialism”

from Democracy Now

Noam Chomsky delivers the 5th Annual Edward Said Memorial Lecture: The Unipolar Moment and the Culture of Imperialism at Columbia University School for International Affairs.

Apple Working on 3D 'Hyper-Reality' Displays

from MacRumors.com via Mac News Daily
Apple's patent applications always provide an interesting peek into what Apple researchers have been working on. In one of the more interesting patent applications we've discovered, Apple appears to be researching 3D displays in which the user will be able to look around an object.

In order to view a 3D object from various angles on your screen at present, you are required to use the mouse or keyboard to manipulate the object. This might simply involve clicking and dragging to pan or rotate an object. While functional, Apple considers this to be unintuitive and potentially frustrating to new users.

Apple proposes that a display could change the perspective of the 3D objects based on the users' relative position. Said display would detect the user's position through any suitable approach (such as video, infrared, electromagnetic fields etc...). Video, of course, is the most likely possibility with a camera mounted at the top of the display itself, thus allowing the computer to determine the user's location and position. The user could then move their head left and right to look around a 3D object as shown in the example image above. Apple also suggests that it could also be applied to 2D objects like windows to provide some added depth to traditionally flat objects:


In fact, Apple suggests that software could be so advanced as to incorporate elements of the user's environments into the scene on the display.

For example, the electronic device may define visual properties of different surfaces of the displayed object (e.g., reflection and refraction characteristics), and apply the visual properties to the portions of the detected image mapped on each surface. Using this approach, surfaces with low reflectivity (e.g., plastic surfaces) may not reflect the environment, but may reflect light, while surfaces with high reflectivity (e.g., polished metal or chrome) may reflect both the environment (e.g., the user's face as detected by the camera) and light. To further enhance the user's experience, the detected environment may be reflected differently along curved surfaces of a displayed object (e.g., as if the user were actually moving around the displayed object and seeing his reflection based on his position and the portion of the object reflecting the image).

Apple has been researching these sorts of novel display types for years. Back in 1995, they had even had a similar system built in the lab and referred to these displays as "Hyper Reality" displays. Apple, of course, is not the only company working on such technology. This YouTube video shows this system in action (thanks djellison) on a make-shift Wii system, demoed by Johnny Lee:

Auschwitz death camp sign stolen

The infamous Arbeit Macht Frei sign at the entrance to the Auschwitz Nazi death camp in Poland has been stolen.


Above is a photo of the gate i took when i visited a bit more than a year ago while i was in Krakow for my FYA Exhibition as part of Photomonth. Auschwitz is in Poland, about an hour or so from where i was staying. It was the second time i had visited a concentration camp. The first just outside of Berlin called Sachsenhausen. It was as heavy as it gets, the location, the buildings still standing, the ruins, and the documentation, as well as original artifacts on display were not only mind boggling, but really earth shattering revelations, it's not like you didn't know, but seeing these things first hand is REALLY a life changing experience.

from the BBC:

The wrought iron sign, whose words mean "Work Sets You Free", was unscrewed and pulled down from its position above the gate in the early hours of Friday. Polish authorities denounced the theft, while Israel's Holocaust museum branded it an "act of war". More than a million people - 90% of them Jews - were murdered by the Nazis at Auschwitz during World War II. Investigators say at least two people would have been needed to steal the five-metre-long (16ft), 40kg (90lb) sign. The theft occurred between 0330 and 0500 local time on Friday, police spokeswoman Katarzyna Padlo told AP news agency.

Jarek Mensfelt, from the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum, told the BBC: "It is more than just stealing something. It is a desecration."Somebody who did this must have been a person who had a knowledge of our security system because all the area is closed at night and patrolled and there is a system of cameras," he added. "This was not an incident - this was a deliberate and organised action." Avner Shalev, director of Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial, said the theft "constitutes a true declaration of war". He added: "We don't know the identity of the perpetrators but I assume they are neo-Nazis." Polish ex-President Lech Walesa described the theft as "unthinkable", while Poland's chief rabbi said he could not imagine who would do such a thing. "If they are pranksters, they'd have to be sick," said Michael Schudrich. Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Silvan Shalom labelled the theft "abominable". "This act demonstrates once again hatred and violence against Jews," he is quoted as saying by AFP news agency.

The BBC's Adam Easton in Warsaw says police are interviewing security guards and viewing closed circuit television footage.
It is not clear why it was stolen but museum officials say the widely recognised sign would be difficult to sell.
It is the first time the sign, made by Polish prisoners, has been stolen since it was erected in 1940.

Reward offer

Occasionally removed by officials for conservation work, it has been replaced by a replica. A 5,000-zloty ($1,700; £1,050) reward has been offered for information leading to the capture of the thieves, reports AP.

The cynical slogan "Arbeit Macht Frei" was also used at the entrances to other Nazi camps, including Dachau and Sachsenhausen, although the one at Auschwitz is perhaps the best known. Hundreds of thousands of prisoners passed under the sign into the camp during the Holocaust, but the majority were murdered or worked to death.

The theft comes just days after the German government pledged 60m euros ($86m) to an endowment fund to help preserve the camp.Auschwitz, which receives more than a million visitors a year, has been run as a state museum since 1947.

some more interesting articles from the BBC about Auschwitz below:

Auschwitz's sign of death and defiance (history)
Cash crisis threat to Auschwitz (Narrated slide show+more)

THE DESSERT PSYCHOPUNK DRUMMER TRANSFORMS INTO WORLD-CLASS CHEF WITH ALARMING SWIFTNESS

from Vice magazine:

I’ve worked in just enough restaurants to recognize an abnormally large pastry station when I see one. It was January, and I was standing in the kitchen below Del Posto, one of New York’s—and thus the world’s—most prestigious restaurants. The spotless counter before me was at least a dozen feet long, and the region it bordered—stainless-steel shelves, ovens, a bulky Fusion freezer on wheels that no one seemed very happy with—was now ruled by my old friend Brooks Headley, the head pastry chef here for the past year. Although I’d been sure to rib him about his rubber clogs and double-ply running socks on the way in, this was pretty much just a defense mechanism against the disconnect of seeing someone I’ve known for a long time in a position of exalted authority.

It was hard to shake the feeling that I was constantly getting in the way, despite the spooky indifference of passing staff. Employees flowed around me without eye contact, silent except for occasional murmurs of “behind” to indicate that they needed to get to a cabinet I happened to be blocking with my body. It felt like I was interfering with the duties of a beehive. When I expressed this concern to Brooks, he seemed amused.

“No, man, everyone here is terrified of a guy writing stuff down.”

He was right. My small notebook guarded me from scrutiny. That’s why no one gave me so much as a glance. When I had to cross the kitchen back to the restroom, I made sure to conspicuously carry the notebook in front of me. Later, when that still didn’t seem sufficient protection from sudden ejection, I held the notebook and pen in both hands like props, and used my Looking for Frank face (vigilant, stern, scanning the periphery) to assert my right to stay.


Brooks led me on the rounds of his prep. Navigating the hubbub of the kitchen felt like being inside an episode of The West Wing. In a dry storage room, we paused before thousands of dollars’ worth of glittering olive oil. The entire kitchen had the eerie cleanliness of a private hospital, its floors without stains. I’ve worked in as many restaurants as Brooks, but always on the ass end of the labor equation: dishwashing, busing, mopping. Before this day, I’d never been in the back of any restaurant that didn’t smell of garbage and wet rubber mats and ammonia. When I inquired about industrial can openers, I was told there were none—they get too dirty. The spotless trash vestibule smelled like a waiting room and was air-conditioned in January. If Brooks had told me to pull up a chair here for the rest of the day, I would’ve been quite comfortable.


In a smaller prep area adjacent to a walk-in freezer, I audited a session of juicing for something called the Collezione, the Collections Menu, a $175, three-hour-plus dining experience that ended with a stack of goodies in an “I [heart] NY” bag (“after three hours, all those foods, of course you’re gonna fucking love New York”). According to the terminology of elite dining, the translucent emerald-green essence of celery and apple is a “soup,” not “juice.” The conversation swung around to the stereotypes of restaurant workers. “You could say the most horrible, racist joke you wouldn’t even tell a junkie,” Brooks explained of his lofty cooking environment. “But you wouldn’t even joke about spitting in someone’s food.” After the juicing/souping, he produced a frosty metal canister of blood-orange sorbet he’d whipped up earlier. When he extracted the spoon, a thick curl of fluorescent magenta gloop dangled before us. “That’s the hang.” Brooks said with some satisfaction. This was a function of dextrose, I later learned, leading to a taste that was less sweet than granulated—a phenomenon confined to the universe of Italian gelato. Ice cream has no hang. He grinned. “The hang is totally the shit.”

The entire story continues here.

No it's not a prank, i in fact did shoot this story for Vice magazine a few months ago. I saw it for the 1st time in print today, but i think it may have been in the issue before the one that just came out. The last time I actually shot something for a magazine specifically? I honestly can not remember. But this came about just the right way and everyone was cool. So here's the lead photo and beginning of the story. Btw. Brooks was very cool, and the place he works at was amazing (and they had a totally vegan menu 7 course meal for me - and i'm told any customer who requests it - but fat chance anyone I know will every go to this fancy place), I only hope to get invited back again some day.

How a Few Private Health Insurers Are on the Way to Controlling Health Care. or "Shit On Me for Even Trying"

from Robert Reich's Blog

The public option is dead, killed by a handful of senators from small states who are mostly bought off by Big Insurance and Big Pharma or intimidated by these industries' deep pockets and power to run political ads against them. Some might say it's no great loss at this point because the Senate bill Harry Reid came up with contained a public option available only to 4 million people, which would have been far too small to exert any competitive pressure on private insurers anyway.

To provide political cover to senators who want to tell their constituents that the intent behind a robust public option lives on, the emerging Senate bill makes Medicare available to younger folk (age 55), and lets people who aren't covered by their employers buy in to a system that's similar to the plan that federal employees now have, where the federal government's Office of Personnel Management selects from among private insurers.

But we still end up with a system that's based on private insurers that have no incentive whatsoever to control their costs or the costs of pharmaceutical companies and medical providers. If you think the federal employee benefit plan is an answer to this, think again. Its premiums increased nearly 9 percent this year. And if you think an expanded Medicare is the answer, you're smoking medical marijuana. The Senate bill allows an independent commission to hold back Medicare costs only if Medicare spending is rising faster than total health spending. So if health spending is soaring because private insurers have no incentive to control it, we're all out of luck. Medicare explodes as well.

A system based on private insurers won't control costs because private insurers barely compete against each other. According to data from the American Medical Association, only a handful of insurers dominate most states. In 9 states, 2 insurance companies control 85 percent or more of the market. In Arkansas, home to Senator Blanche Lincoln, who doesn't dare cross Big Insurance, the Blue Cross plan controls almost 70 percent of the market; most of the rest is United Healthcare. These data, by the way, are from 2005 and 2006. Since then, private insurers have been consolidating like mad across the country. At this rate by 2014, when the new health bill kicks in and 30 million more Americans buy health insurance, Big Insurance will be really Big.

In light of all this, you'd think the insurance industry would be subject to the antitrust laws, so the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission could prevent it from combining into one or two national behemoths that suck every health dollar out of our pockets (as well as the pockets of companies paying part of the cost of their employees' health insurance). But no. Remarkably, the Senate bill still keeps Big Insurance safe from competition by preserving its privileged exemption from the antitrust laws.

From the start, opponents of the public option have wanted to portray it as big government preying upon the market, and private insurers as the embodiment of the market. But it's just the reverse. Private insurers are exempt from competition. As a result, they are becoming ever more powerful. And it's not just their economic power that's worrying. It's also their political power, as we've learned over the last ten months. Economic and political power is a potent combination. Without some mechanism forcing private insurers to compete, we're going to end up with a national health care system that's controlled by a handful of very large corporations accountable neither to American voters nor to the market.

And here's a further update on the total demise of the caring for american's health at The Nation "A Sucker-Punched Harry Reid Throws in the Towel on Real Reform"

Like I said, "Shit On Me for Even Trying" - Kill this bill and START FROM SCRATCH until we get what we want and need, compromising on health is no fair, it's compromising on what should be a human right and is seen as such in the rest of the industrialized world. Go crawl into a hole if you don't agree or don't want to help.

Fuck Santa!

i've seen Sketchy Santas mentioned all over the place, after taking a look decided why not get in the holiday spirit.



go to Sketchy Santas to see more.

The Biology of Music: Why we like what we like.

From BoingBoing:

As a rule, humans are very picky about their music. I don't mean stylistic choices. Whether you like country, western, or both is up to you. I'm talking about something more basic than that.

A tone is a sound, like a note before it gets a specific name, and a scale is a collection of tones grouped in ascending or descending order. We are able to hear a huge number of tones and, theoretically, there's billions of ways to group them, but humans tend to focus on a very small number of scales, usually made up of either five or seven tones. The same scales are used over and over, throughout most of Western music and much of human music as a whole, said Dale Purves, Ph.D., professor of neurobiology at Duke University and director of the Duke-NUS Neuroscience Program in Singapore. In fact, even styles of music that sound completely different--say classical Chinese music vs. Western folk music--use the same scale, he said. They just use it differently.

So why are we so drawn to certain tones and certain groups of tones? Purves' team thinks they have an answer--an explanation that links what humans like with who they are, biologically.

The key, Purves said, lies in our evolutionary history.

"Any perceptual quality you have is there for some biological reason. They evolved because they provide useful information to us," he said. "So if you take a microphone out in nature and ask what the tonal sounds are in our environmental niche that we would have evolved to appreciate, the tonal sounds you record are nearly all animal vocalizations. And the ones that count the most are the vocalizations of other humans."

The sounds humans make matter most, he said, because that's where we get information about our competitors and our potential mates--the things we need to know to be successful creatures. We developed an ear for the tones common in human vocalizations, the same way a sommelier might develop a taste for fine wines. Those are the tones we find most appealing and thus, the ones we made into our musical art.

The basics of this idea are nothing new. It is, after all, pretty obvious that there's a connection between human voices and human music. But, when people have looked for links between musical scales and the natural changes in the pitch and rhythm of speech, they haven't been able to turn up any solid evidence of a causal relationship. Purves, along with Kamraan Gill, Ph.D., approached this in a different way, looking instead at similarities between scales and the spectrum of--or frequencies in--speech. Here, they hit paydirt. In fact, Purves and Gill found that you can correctly predict which scales are the most popular by how similar they are to the spectrum of human vocalizations. A great example of how this plays out: Rock 'n Roll.

"Rock is especially popular because it emphasizes the musical intervals whose frequency relationships are those we hear in the human speech ," Purves said. "That's one of the reasons people like it so much."

Read Dr. Purves and Dr. Gill's paper at the journal PLoS ONE.

A Eulogy For The Boombox

In Honor of this story, here's one of my all time favorite portraits I ever shot of LL, and in fact it was the firts time i shot him as well. It was in Madison Square Park in 1985, when Russell's offices were just up the block at 1133 Broadway I believe, and I was in town to shoot Run-DMC. The photo down below is another i took a few years later that I don't think has ever been published, but if there was ever a shot appropriate for this piece, "there it is."

From NPR

Before there were iPods, or even CDs, and around the time cassettes let break dancers move the party to a cardboard dance floor on the sidewalk, there were boomboxes. It's been 20 years since the devices disappeared from the streets. It's high time to press rewind on this aspect of America's musical history.

Back in the day, you could take your music with you and play it loud, even if people didn't want to hear it. 150 decibels of power-packed bass blasted out on street corners from New York City to Topeka. Starting in the mid-'70s, boomboxes were available everywhere, and they weren't too expensive. Young inner-city kids lugged them around, and kids in the suburbs kept them in their cars.

They weren't just portable tape players with the speakers built in. You could record off the radio, and most had double cassette decks, so if you were walking down the street and you heard something you liked, you could go up to the kid and ask to dub a copy.

They were called boomboxes, or ghetto blasters. But to most of the young kids in New York City, they were just a box.

And the manufacturers noticed, says Fred Brathwaite, better known as Fab 5 Freddy.

"People that were big fans of music at the time were into higher-fidelity, better-quality sound — bass, midrange and treble," Freddy says. "So [the manufacturers] listened to what the consumer, what the young hip kid on the streets of New York, wanted. We wanted bass."



The Rise Of The Big Box

The boxes had to be big, to make that bass boom. The speakers in early boxes had extra-large magnets to push all that air around, and they were housed in heavy metal casing to deal with the vibrations from all the bass. Fab 5 Freddy says they got pretty big.

"I remember some boxes so big, they required 20 D-size batteries to an already heavy box," he says. "So these boxes were so heavy that some cats that would carry their boxes all the time, they would develop massive forearms and biceps."

The boxes were part of a style that included white Adidas and big gold chains. Freddy was a filmmaker and artist at the time, and he says he took his box everywhere.

"I traveled with my massive boombox," Freddy says. "That thing moved with me, you know. I remember, like, being on the plane — it couldn't go in the overhead bin, but that was my baby. It traveled first class right along with me."

But the trappings of this new culture were secondary to the music. This was the dawn of hip-hop, and it might not have happened without the boombox.

"A big part of this hip-hop culture in the beginning was putting things in your face, whether you liked it or not," Freddy says. "That was the graffiti, that's like a break dance battle right at your feet, you know what I'm saying? Or this music blasting loud, whether you wanted to hear it or not."

Moving Indoors

As the '80s wore on, cities started enforcing noise ordinances. The Walkman became popular, and it was lighter and cheaper. Gradually, people stopped listening to music together. The rap world eventually left the corner and moved online. People still pass songs around, but now it's on file-sharing sites and blogs. Headphones are universally accepted, and eye contact is frowned upon.

These days, you don't see or hear many boomboxes, except at Lyle Owerko's house. He collects them. He keeps most of them in storage, taped up in bubble wrap to, as he says, preserve the domestic bliss. His favorite is the GF9696.

"It's absolutely my most mint box," Owerko says. "It's incredibly shiny; it's 40 watts. The speaker grilles detach, which makes it look really mean."

Owerko's collection of 40 boxes includes Lasonics and Sanyos, JVCs and Crowns. He photographs them and blows the prints up to make the boxes look even bigger than they are in real life.

Though Owerko grew up far from the city, in western Ontario, even there all the cool kids carried boxes. The only difference was that they were blasting Led Zeppelin and Ozzy Osbourne.

The Impression Of What's Real

Boxes didn't stay cool forever: They started to be made from plastic and decorated in neon colors and flashing lights. They were sold to people who didn't care about sound but just wanted to look like they were down. Owerko says the transition wasn't surprising.

"Towards the end of any culture, you have the second or third generation that steps into the culture, which is so far from the origination," he says. "It's the impression of what's real, but it's not the full definition of what's real. It's just cheesy."

Today, he uses his collection as props on photo shoots, and he says the sight of them sends everyone from models to art directors down memory lane. Vintage boomboxes sell for upwards of $1,000 now, so those who had one back then can kick themselves for not holding on to it.

Fab 5 Freddy misses his box, too, but at least he can go visit it — it's on display at the Smithsonian's Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.

The nostalgia for boomboxes isn't just about a trend in stereo equipment. When the music was loud and unavoidable, we had to listen to each other. Maybe we miss boomboxes because when we're wearing headphones, we can't talk to anyone else. Which makes it hard to help each other out, and makes it hard to party.

This piece was reported by Frannie Kelley, Roy Hurst and Caitlin Kenney.

Thanks, Dangerous Minds

The New World: A Misunderstood Masterpiece

I just saw this story on Dangerous Minds and gotta say i kind of agree. Differences for me were, I also liked the Thin Red Line and I had no idea what this movie was about before I went into the theater to see it (in fact I think this made it even more satisfying and exciting), I just knew it was made for a big screen by Terrence Malick, and I was blown away. I bought the DVD as soon as it came out, I can't believe they now have a an "extended cut." Go watch it on the biggest screen with the best sound you can. I'll hope someone gets me the "extended cut" for x-mas.

John Patterson at the Guardian’s critical appreciation of The New World, one of my favorite movies from my favorite director, ever. Patterson calls it the best movie of the decade. I think he’s probably right. It’s the kind of movie that will help you breathe for weeks. John says:

This decade hasn’t been up to much, movie-wise, but I am more than ever convinced that when every other scrap of celluloid from 2000-2009 has crumbled to dust, one film will remain, like some Ozymandias-like remnant of transient vanished glory in the desert. And that film is The New World, Terrence Malick’s American foundation myth, which arrived just as the decade reached its dismal halfway point, in January 2006.

It’s been said that The New World doesn’t have fans: it has disciples and partisans and fanatics. I’m one of them, and my fanaticism burns undimmed 30 or more viewings later. The New World is a bottomless movie, almost unspeakably beautiful and formally harmonious. The movie came and went within a month, and its critical reception was characterised for the most part by bafflement, condescension, lazy ridicule and outright hostility. And, less often, by faintly hysterical accolades written too soon and in terms too overheated to convey understanding. I know, I wrote one of them.

I was lucky. I saw the movie at 10 in the morning, on 20 minutes’ notice. I knew only that it was about Pocahontas and Captain John Smith, and was directed by the man who made Badlands, Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line. I saw it on a screen the size of a warehouse wall, boasting a state-of-the-art sound system that picked out every insect whirr and birdcall, every droplet of falling water, every muted sigh. Having been underwhelmed by The Thin Red Line (upon which critics had – to me inexplicably – drunkenly expended their full arsenal of accolades, having waited 20 agonising years to do so), I found myself soon borne aloft on a symphonic magic carpet ride of the senses and emotions, anchored by a perfomance so instinctive and note-perfect by a teenage non-pro called Q’orianka Kilcher that I almost hope she never acts again. Afterwards I had to be alone for an hour to savour and prolong the almost physical intensity of the feelings that deluged me. It was the only time in my life when I have literally wept tears of exultation.

read the whole piece here:
(The Guardian: The New World, a misunderstood masterpiece?)

(The New World: The Extended Cut)

Iranian banknotes uprising

I've seen different stories on this posted in several places in the last few days. Here's the best source piece from Payvand blog

Payvand.com was established in San Francisco Bay Area in late 1995 and is dedicated to Iranian-American issues. Payvand in Persian means joining together, and has recently been used to mean “web link” * as well.
Our mission is to create a site that brings Iranians around the globe and those interested in Iran together around related issues. We hope we open a window into Iran through which we can promote understanding, dialogue and peace.

Anti-government activists are not allowed to express themselves in Iranian media, so theses activists have taken their expressions to another high circulation mass-medium, banknotes. The Central Bank of Iran has tried to take these banknotes out of circulation, but there are just too many of them, and gave up. For the activists’ people it’s a way of saying “We are here, and the green movement is going on”.

Following are examples of such banknotes, mostly written in green ink:

1- V (for victory) stamp

2- Top: Plan to write 1 Billion slogans on bank notes.
Bottom: Bank notes without slogan is like saying no to spring (of green movement)

3- A re-write of a saying on the left side (Iranian people will find “knowledge’ no matter where – Prophet Muhammad) – Iranian people will find “justice” no matter where.

4- They stole oil money and give it to Chavez

5- Khamenei the non-believer is servant of Putin

6- Based on a kid’s poem – How is Iran doing? It’s full of sorrow, its oil is gone, took its gas to India, got China’s garbage, everything is imported, exports are forgotten, close down all local productions.

7- Cheater Khamenei and power-hungry Ahmadinejad

8- People’s enemy

9- Long live freedom

10- Don’t believe what a government says if that government is the only entity that has the right of expression. (by Ali Shariati, called ideologue of 1979 Iranian Revolution)

11- Top: Neda’s photo followed by death to dictator slogan.
Bottom: Logo of state media Voice and Vision of Islamic Republic with added swastika followed by “humiliated by our Voice and Vision”

12- Top: Death to Khamenei is crossed out/colored
Bottom: Shame can not be erased by crossing out/coloring

13- Blast from the past- A banknote from Shah’s administration is stamped by Islamic Republic to cover shah’s face.

it's that time of year... (when I think of the Beastie Boys)

Yeah, I walked by the ice skating rink in central park the other day, and it was packed, it had to be, it's that time of year... reminded me of a classic Beastie Boys b-side I always enjoyed called "Honkey Rink". check it (below these rare circa 1991 photos of mine):

"Time to Declare War on Democratic Blackmailers"

An interesting editorial from actress and activist Margot Kidder, from the front page of CounterPunch a few days ago:

Ax Max

By MARGOT KIDDER

The Democratic Party needs an intervention and then it needs to be sent to rehab. The lunacy behind the thinking of many traditional Democrats that any Democrat in Congress is better than no Democrat at all needs to be exposed and treated for the infectious disease that it is. But there is no 12 step program for corrupt politicians, and turning the problem over to God is just not going to cut it this time, no matter what Sarah Palin thinks .

The absence of democracy in a congress whose votes are bought, sold, and traded like pork bellies by big corporations in exchange for highly profitable votes and amendments on bills is a bi-partisan infection. And the pus is everywhere.

Give me a nut job for an enemy anytime. You can take aim at the obviousness of the problem and roll a strike 99 times out of a hundred. But if your enemy is disguised as a boring but harmless friend, and wears the same logo on his sweatshirt as you do, then landing a punch is like trying to slug mist. There’s no connection, no delicious smacking sound, there’s no obvious win. The fact that 20 to 25 percent of Americans support policies and politicians that are bat shit crazy is not as much a concern as the fact that 50 to 60 percent of Americans support politicians whose policies are for sale to the highest bidder, and exist independent of any underlying morality or consistent philosophy of government. Arlen Specter calls himself a Democrat for God’s sake. And so does Ben Nelson. And Blanche Lincoln. These are not Democrats; they’re Republicans in Donkey suits. And somewhat tasteful donkey suits at that. None of them would have strings of tea bags dangling from THEIR cowboy hats, you can bet the ranch on that. They are much more dangerous than Rush Limbaugh could ever hope to be.

And oh how they bray, and the bray is as bad as the bite. With each snort and hee-haw the party trembles defensively and gives them whatever they want. To hell with traditional Democratic principles, its all about keeping the guy from leaving you, so what if he’s hit you so many times that your face is no longer recognizable? Keep that man. Get more numbers on your side of the aisle than they have on theirs and pay no attention to the actual quality of the people who make up those numbers. If they say they are Democrats, if they will wear our label, they must be on our side. Democrats can’t hurt us. Can they?

Look at Max Baucus, the most anti-charismatic Montanan in the state. How is it possible to recognize such a surfeit of blandness as dangerous? Talking with Max is like talking with drywall: he nods at whatever you say and he’ll smile vacantly at you for hours on end, but you’re never quite sure if he’s home or if he’s just had one motorcycle accident too many. I say this because I believe that those of us he purports to represent have a right to know who the person behind the mask really is.

The hideous truth is that this empty suit-person almost single handedly took the reform out of health care reform, has introduced and somehow passed more legislation to abet the cornucopia of crime that is our banking system than anyone else in congress, and has stalled the funding of any, if not all, modern programs that would give financial lifeboats of one kind or another to families in need. He did it by pretending he was a Democrat and by hanging in there long enough to get appointed, almost by default, as chair of the banking committee. And he gets elected in a state with the fourth lowest per capita income in the country by consistently “bringing home the pork.”

Billings needs a baseball field? That’s no problem for Max. Stick it on the nearest bill, regardless of relevance. Missoula wants a biking path? Easy as spitting. But you poor souls who are being screwed by the credit card company that got you so deeply in debt and then raised your interest rates so high that you had to sell your house to make the payments? Tough titty.

Max voted against a ceiling on credit card interest rates. You’re going bankrupt and about to lose your house because you got laid off and missed two payments, you deadbeat you? Max voted against allowing bankruptcy judges the leeway to lower interest rates or principle on mortgages in a way that would allow families to stay in their homes.

Can’t afford health insurance at today’s exorbitant rates? Max devised a plan whereby if you DON’T buy from one of the existing health insurance companies who trade your health for their profits you will get smacked with a whopping fine by the IRS, and they get to charge you whatever the hell they please. Hey, it’s your own fault; you should better manage your money.

Have to choose in the winter months between your medication and your heat? Max made sure that no pharmaceutical company will ever be asked to put ceilings on their profit margins, so if you can’t afford that one hundred and forty seven dollars for the only antibiotic that will work on your systemic sepsis, well, die baby die, you should have learned the rules of unregulated capitalism.

Everyone who is anyone donates huge sums of money to Max. It’s like landing on the social pages of Women’s Wear Daily. But Max is from Montana so its doubly chic, macho wilderness chic, with just a hint of cowboy. Here in Montana the corruption is as fresh as this morning's manure. No company with their shareholders interests at heart would dare forget mailing in their “Max Baucus for Senate” checks come election time. You’re guaranteed a lot of bang for your buck, and if your check is big enough and Max has to choose between the interests of his scruffy and often poor Montana constituents and the freshly facialed, Armani-clad CEO’s of Aetna or Goldman Sachs or Anaconda Mining, trust me, he’s going to go with the high-end set – they pay a lot of money every summer to learn to light campfires at Camp Baucus at the Big Sky Ski Resort and Max has become addicted to their donations.

The mainstream media calls Max Baucus and other Democratic blackmailers “centrists”. As compared to what, Chiang Kai-Shek? “Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,” said Yeats, but that was in 1919 and he was referencing the Russian revolution. America’s centre has been tap dancing to the right since Ronald Reagan was loosed upon the world and it hasn’t taken a backwards step yet, so our centre is way out in right field and has no intention of coming back of its own accord. It’s up to us, unfortunately.

In the big D.C. high school known as congress, “practical” politics is all the rage with the in crowd these days. It’s Rahm Emmanuel speak for accepting the system as it is and playing the game better than anyone else. Get all the dough you need from huge corporations - and what’s a concession or two or twenty compared to several million dollars of fuck-you money in the campaign chest that will ensure you can four wall the country with television ads in 2012 and thus get Obama a second term? It is essentially a philosophy of “anti-change”, no matter what system of logic you apply to it. Rahm must have been out of the room when the campaign was going on last year. But wherever he was, he is demanding an ossification of our dreams. You want “Hope” back? Hope, schmope. The world doesn’t work like that.

And protesting will just get you are accused of idealism, that nagging little worm that lives in the hearts of nerds everywhere. And idealism is just not cool. It’s not practical. You must abandon childish notions of hope for a better world and look the corruption square in the eye and accept it. Work with it. Look at Max. He’s arguably the most powerful guy in the Senate.
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So get with the program and shut up. Call this mess of health insurance backed suggestions “reform” and let’s move on. No one will really notice that it’s a ferocious defense of the status quo, so who are you to make a fuss? Be a good little Democrat. Say we passed an historical health reform bill. Lie, OK? Lie for the greater good of the party.

Sadly, the hard truth is that it’s hard not to feel like a little baggie of leftover peas in the face of the seeming omnipotence of these corporations, these dictates from above. Inertia and depression are logical responses to such an enormous monolith of corruption. And fighting for anything remotely resembling a just society, or expressing severe disillusionment with the fact that your own senator has been bought by JP Morgan Chase and Blue Cross/Blue Shield is just not done and is frowned upon.

But we can’t give in to the easy seduction of lying in bed with the covers over our heads hoping this whole thing will somehow pass of its own accord. Its not going to go willingly, and until we get really, really feisty and turn back to all that anger that Obama managed to tamp down with all his lovely speeches and turn it again into a force to be reckoned with, there is no hope for any kind of future worth having. The Democrats aren’t going to save us – we have to save them.

We can target every one of these fake Democrats and expose the hypocrisy that is running like a deep aquifer of sludge under their public personas. And we can, if we’re smart, soften them up for the blows of the more polished and hopefully “progressive” politicians who will remove them from office.

Will the forces who replace them be infinitely better than them? Who knows? They might be worse. But until we flex our muscles and show we mean business, it will be business as usual, and business as usual benefits no one. Until we get all our little homemade slingshots out and relentlessly whack at this destructive Goliath of our own making, nothing is going to ameliorate the ruthless destruction of what is still naively called a government of the people, for the people and by the people.

Margot Kidder is an actress and activist living in Livingston, Montana.

The Story of Cap & Trade (Annie Leonard presents)

Annie Leonard is all about understanding the system and creating solutions. Her previous educational film "The Story of Stuff" released a few years ago was one of my most popular forwards ever. So here is the latest from the woman who explains "Why you can't solve a problem with the thinking that created it."

The Story of Cap & Trade is a fast-paced, fact-filled look at the leading climate solution being discussed at Copenhagen and on Capitol Hill. Host Annie Leonard introduces the energy traders and Wall Street financiers at the heart of this scheme and reveals the "devils in the details" in current cap and trade proposals: free permits to big polluters, fake offsets and distraction from what’s really required to tackle the climate crisis. If you’ve heard about cap and trade, but aren’t sure how it works (or who benefits), this is the film is for you.

Go see the original "Story of Stuff" and the main web site this comes from with a lot more information.

the Buzzcocks a group you should know well, in case you don't.

One of my all time favorite bands.
Here's a few cuts (mostly from the 1st incredible album "Another Music In A Different kitchen")

PLAY LOUD and have a better day!

Welcome To The Island