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Chain and The Gang - Minimum Rock N Roll

record review from
Washington City Paper By Leor Galil:

Ian Svenonius has spent decades in bands that present themselves as anything but ordinary—the Nation of Ulysses, the agitprop post-hardcore group he fronted till its demise in 1992, even seceded from the union. Svenonius is an immeasurably sharp and sophisticated pop auteur who could make challenging, provocative work in a variety of mediums. He’s dabbled elsewhere: He’s hosted his own talk show (Soft Focus) and he’s written a couple of books (most recently 2012’s Supernatural Strategies for Making a Rock ’n’ Roll Group), but rock music is still the vehicle Svenonius uses to propel his heady sociopolitical manifestos.

He’s also got a knack for condensing a lot of ideas into lean, catchy rock, which is central to Chain and the Gang’s fourth album, Minimum Rock N Roll, released on Svenonius’s new label, Radical Elite (and distributed by Dischord Direct). It’s rock music stripped to its barest essentials—sometimes the spaces between notes can leave an impression as powerful as the group’s blunt guitar stabs—and played in a fashion reminiscent of the unvarnished, animalistic garage of decades long-since passed. Minimum Rock N Roll is revival rock, but that has less to do with the fact that the album sounds like it popped out of a time capsule from the ’60s and more to do with the way Svenonius, vocalist Katie Alice Greer (of Priests), and the rest of the band deliver the stark tunes with a fervor that borders on religious.

The music gets pretty intense, but its simplicity and near-minimalism tend to foreground any elements that change from song to song, elevating Svenonius’s words, and, more importantly, their content. The music’s the grand pulpit Svenonius uses for his declamations, and on Minimum Rock N Roll, he’s speaking (or singing, or sing-speaking) from one with a strong amplification system. His polemics are multipronged and layered—“Devitalize” is as much a takedown of gentrification as it is of society as a whole, no stretch for a guy who once released an album about destroying America and who calls his current band’s sound “crime rock.”

Indeed, there’s a sense of lawlessness that pervades Minimum Rock N Roll, which spills over from Svenonius’s lyrics into the band’s music and back again. The album’s a pointed attack on indie rock’s middling status quo, and it feels a little dangerous in a way that’s also entirely charming and approachable. Chain and the Gang even make outlaw life sound stylishly romantic on “I’m a Choice (Not a Child),” an old-school ballad that hints at some hidden nuance that’ll take months to unpack. It’s clever, a bit deceptively so, but that’s what you can expect from Svenonius and company—something that sounds innate and familiar, yet twisted in unexpected ways.

Artist Gets Tortured Like an Animal to Raise Awareness for Animal Cosmetics Testing

A young woman was restrained, force-fed and injected with cosmetics in a high street shop window as part of a hard-hitting protest against animal testing. Jacqueline Traide was tortured in front of hundreds of horrified shoppers in a bid to raise awareness and end the practise.

The 24-year-old endured 10 hours of experiments, which included having her hair shaved and irritants squirted in her eyes, as part of a worldwide campaign by Lush Cosmetics and The Humane Society. The disturbing stunt took place in Lush’s Regent Street store, one of the UK’s busiest shopping streets.

via Artfido - thanks, Philippe Petit

some crazy shit for the 4th

IGGY POP FOUND TORTURED WITH THE DALAI LAMA AND KARL LAGERFELD!

from Dangerous Minds:

“The future of rock is Justin Bieber”—Iggy Pop

Torture a man and he’ll tell you what you want to hear. It ‘s the message that launches Amnesty International’s new campaign, in its Francophone version, to raise public awareness on the issue of torture. In addition to Iggy Pop, they also “tortured” the Dalai Lama (“A man who does not have a Rolex at 50 years of age is a failure”) and German fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld (“The height of elegance is the Hawaiian shirt with flip-flops.”).

Truly incroyable.

IF THE MOON WERE ONLY ONE PIXEL

check out this incredible visual by going to the website:
IF THE MOON WERE ONLY ONE PIXEL

click above link!


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8 Reasons Young Americans Don't Fight Back: How the US Crushed Youth Resistance

via Films For Action By Bruce E. Levine / originally appeared at alternet.org:

The ruling elite has created social institutions that have subdued young Americans and broken their spirit of resistance.

Traditionally, young people have energized democratic movements. So it is a major coup for the ruling elite to have created societal institutions that have subdued young Americans and broken their spirit of resistance to domination.

Young Americans—even more so than older Americans—appear to have acquiesced to the idea that the corporatocracy can completely screw them and that they are helpless to do anything about it. A 2010 Gallup poll asked Americans “Do you think the Social Security system will be able to pay you a benefit when you retire?” Among 18- to 34-years-olds, 76 percent of them said no. Yet despite their lack of confidence in the availability of Social Security for them, few have demanded it be shored up by more fairly payroll-taxing the wealthy; most appear resigned to having more money deducted from their paychecks for Social Security, even though they don’t believe it will be around to benefit them.

How exactly has American society subdued young Americans?

1. Student-Loan Debt. Large debt—and the fear it creates—is a pacifying force. There was no tuition at the City University of New York when I attended one of its colleges in the 1970s, a time when tuition at many U.S. public universities was so affordable that it was easy to get a B.A. and even a graduate degree without accruing any student-loan debt. While those days are gone in the United States, public universities continue to be free in the Arab world and are either free or with very low fees in many countries throughout the world. The millions of young Iranians who risked getting shot to protest their disputed 2009 presidential election, the millions of young Egyptians who risked their lives earlier this year to eliminate Mubarak, and the millions of young Americans who demonstrated against the Vietnam War all had in common the absence of pacifying huge student-loan debt.

Today in the United States, two-thirds of graduating seniors at four-year colleges have student-loan debt, including over 62 percent of public university graduates. While average undergraduate debt is close to $25,000, I increasingly talk to college graduates with closer to $100,000 in student-loan debt. During the time in one’s life when it should be easiest to resist authority because one does not yet have family responsibilities, many young people worry about the cost of bucking authority, losing their job, and being unable to pay an ever-increasing debt. In a vicious cycle, student debt has a subduing effect on activism, and political passivity makes it more likely that students will accept such debt as a natural part of life.

2. Psychopathologizing and Medicating Noncompliance. In 1955, Erich Fromm, the then widely respected anti-authoritarian leftist psychoanalyst, wrote, “Today the function of psychiatry, psychology and psychoanalysis threatens to become the tool in the manipulation of man.” Fromm died in 1980, the same year that an increasingly authoritarian America elected Ronald Reagan president, and an increasingly authoritarian American Psychiatric Association added to their diagnostic bible (then the DSM-III) disruptive mental disorders for children and teenagers such as the increasingly popular “oppositional defiant disorder” (ODD). The official symptoms of ODD include “often actively defies or refuses to comply with adult requests or rules,” “often argues with adults,” and “often deliberately does things to annoy other people.”

Many of America’s greatest activists including Saul Alinsky (1909–1972), the legendary organizer and author of Reveille for Radicals and Rules for Radicals, would today certainly be diagnosed with ODD and other disruptive disorders. Recalling his childhood, Alinsky said, “I never thought of walking on the grass until I saw a sign saying ‘Keep off the grass.’ Then I would stomp all over it.” Heavily tranquilizing antipsychotic drugs (e.g. Zyprexa and Risperdal) are now the highest grossing class of medication in the United States ($16 billion in 2010); a major reason for this, according to theJournal of the American Medical Association in 2010, is that many children receiving antipsychotic drugs have nonpsychotic diagnoses such as ODD or some other disruptive disorder (this especially true of Medicaid-covered pediatric patients).

3. Schools That Educate for Compliance and Not for Democracy. Upon accepting the New York City Teacher of the Year Award on January 31, 1990, John Taylor Gatto upset many in attendance by stating: “The truth is that schools don’t really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators, but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions.” A generation ago, the problem of compulsory schooling as a vehicle for an authoritarian society was widely discussed, but as this problem has gotten worse, it is seldom discussed.

The nature of most classrooms, regardless of the subject matter, socializes students to be passive and directed by others, to follow orders, to take seriously the rewards and punishments of authorities, to pretend to care about things they don’t care about, and that they are impotent to affect their situation. A teacher can lecture about democracy, but schools are essentially undemocratic places, and so democracy is not what is instilled in students. Jonathan Kozol in The Night Is Dark and I Am Far from Home focused on how school breaks us from courageous actions. Kozol explains how our schools teach us a kind of “inert concern” in which “caring”—in and of itself and without risking the consequences of actual action—is considered “ethical.” School teaches us that we are “moral and mature” if we politely assert our concerns, but the essence of school—its demand for compliance—teaches us not to act in a friction-causing manner.

4. “No Child Left Behind” and “Race to the Top.” The corporatocracy has figured out a way to make our already authoritarian schools even more authoritarian. Democrat-Republican bipartisanship has resulted in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, NAFTA, the PATRIOT Act, the War on Drugs, the Wall Street bailout, and educational policies such as “No Child Left Behind” and “Race to the Top.” These policies are essentially standardized-testing tyranny that creates fear, which is antithetical to education for a democratic society. Fear forces students and teachers to constantly focus on the demands of test creators; it crushes curiosity, critical thinking, questioning authority, and challenging and resisting illegitimate authority. In a more democratic and less authoritarian society, one would evaluate the effectiveness of a teacher not by corporatocracy-sanctioned standardized tests but by asking students, parents, and a community if a teacher is inspiring students to be more curious, to read more, to learn independently, to enjoy thinking critically, to question authorities, and to challenge illegitimate authorities.

5. Shaming Young People Who Take Education—But Not Their Schooling—Seriously. In a 2006 survey in the United States, it was found that 40 percent of children between first and third grade read every day, but by fourth grade, that rate declined to 29 percent. Despite the anti-educational impact of standard schools, children and their parents are increasingly propagandized to believe that disliking school means disliking learning. That was not always the case in the United States. Mark Twain famously said, “I never let my schooling get in the way of my education.” Toward the end of Twain’s life in 1900, only 6 percent of Americans graduated high school. Today, approximately 85 percent of Americans graduate high school, but this is good enough for Barack Obama who told us in 2009, “And dropping out of high school is no longer an option. It’s not just quitting on yourself, it’s quitting on your country.”

The more schooling Americans get, however, the more politically ignorant they are of America’s ongoing class war, and the more incapable they are of challenging the ruling class. In the 1880s and 1890s, American farmers with little or no schooling created a Populist movement that organized America’s largest-scale working people’s cooperative, formed a People’s Party that received 8 percent of the vote in 1892 presidential election, designed a “subtreasury” plan (that had it been implemented would have allowed easier credit for farmers and broke the power of large banks) and sent 40,000 lecturers across America to articulate it, and evidenced all kinds of sophisticated political ideas, strategies and tactics absent today from America’s well-schooled population. Today, Americans who lack college degrees are increasingly shamed as “losers”; however, Gore Vidal and George Carlin, two of America’s most astute and articulate critics of the corporatocracy, never went to college, and Carlin dropped out of school in the ninth grade.

6. The Normalization of Surveillance. The fear of being surveilled makes a population easier to control. While the National Security Agency (NSA) has received publicity for monitoring American citizen’s email and phone conversations, and while employer surveillance has become increasingly common in the United States, young Americans have become increasingly acquiescent to corporatocracy surveillance because, beginning at a young age, surveillance is routine in their lives. Parents routinely check Web sites for their kid’s latest test grades and completed assignments, and just like employers, are monitoring their children’s computers and Facebook pages. Some parents use the GPS in their children’s cell phones to track their whereabouts, and other parents have video cameras in their homes. Increasingly, I talk with young people who lack the confidence that they can even pull off a party when their parents are out of town, and so how much confidence are they going to have about pulling off a democratic movement below the radar of authorities?

7. Television. In 2009, the Nielsen Company reported that TV viewing in the United States is at an all-time high if one includes the following “three screens”: a television set, a laptop/personal computer, and a cell phone. American children average eight hours a day on TV, video games, movies, the Internet, cell phones, iPods, and other technologies (not including school-related use). Many progressives are concerned about the concentrated control of content by the corporate media, but the mere act of watching TV—regardless of the programming—is the primary pacifying agent (private-enterprise prisons have recognized that providing inmates with cable television can be a more economical method to keep them quiet and subdued than it would be to hire more guards).

Television is a dream come true for an authoritarian society: those with the most money own most of what people see; fear-based television programming makes people more afraid and distrustful of one another, which is good for the ruling elite who depend on a “divide and conquer” strategy; TV isolates people so they are not joining together to create resistance to authorities; and regardless of the programming, TV viewers’ brainwaves slow down, transforming them closer to a hypnotic state that makes it difficult to think critically. While playing a video games is not as zombifying as passively viewing TV, such games have become for many boys and young men their only experience of potency, and this “virtual potency” is certainly no threat to the ruling elite.

8. Fundamentalist Religion and Fundamentalist Consumerism. American culture offers young Americans the “choices” of fundamentalist religion and fundamentalist consumerism. All varieties of fundamentalism narrow one’s focus and inhibit critical thinking. While some progressives are fond of calling fundamentalist religion the “opiate of the masses,” they too often neglect the pacifying nature of America’s other major fundamentalism. Fundamentalist consumerism pacifies young Americans in a variety of ways. Fundamentalist consumerism destroys self-reliance, creating people who feel completely dependent on others and who are thus more likely to turn over decision-making power to authorities, the precise mind-set that the ruling elite loves to see. A fundamentalist consumer culture legitimizes advertising, propaganda, and all kinds of manipulations, including lies; and when a society gives legitimacy to lies and manipulativeness, it destroys the capacity of people to trust one another and form democratic movements. Fundamentalist consumerism also promotes self-absorption, which makes it difficult for the solidarity necessary for democratic movements.

These are not the only aspects of our culture that are subduing young Americans and crushing their resistance to domination. The food-industrial complex has helped create an epidemic of childhood obesity, depression, and passivity. The prison-industrial complex keeps young anti-authoritarians “in line” (now by the fear that they may come before judges such as the two Pennsylvania ones who took $2.6 million from private-industry prisons to ensure that juveniles were incarcerated). As Ralph Waldo Emerson observed: “All our things are right and wrong together. The wave of evil washes all our institutions alike.”



Bruce E. Levine is a clinical psychologist and author of Get Up, Stand Up: Uniting Populists, Energizing the Defeated, and Battling the Corporate Elite (Chelsea Green, 2011). His Web site is www.brucelevine.net

Contra A Copa: The Other Side of Brazil's World Cup

Although it might have seemed like a good idea to host the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil — one of the most soccer-obsessed countries in the world — massive social unrest has taken the country by storm in the lead-up to the tournament.

The Brazilian government is spending an estimated $14 billion on this year's tournament, making it the most expensive World Cup to date. This has provoked outrage among Brazilians, many of whom view the government as corrupt, and are now seeing vast amounts of money being spent on soccer stadiums and police, while the country's endemic poverty and social issues are ignored.

This growing unrest led to violent anti-government protests breaking out in June of 2013, which have continued with increasing momentum in the lead-up to the World Cup. The Brazilian government has responded to these demonstrations by deploying massive numbers of police and military throughout the country in an attempt to suppress the masses. Despite this crackdown, major demonstrations continue to take place in cities across the country as international teams begin to arrive for the games.

VICE News traveled to Brazil to see how the country is preparing for one of the world's biggest international events, while simultaneously struggling to control a mounting civil uprising. In the first episode of this four-part series, we meet some of the activists involved in the protests, and attend a marijuana-legalization demonstration in Rio de Janeiro.

Check out the VICE News beta for more: http://vicenews.com

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Related:
São Paulo Monorail Collapses Days Before World Cup Begins: http://bit.ly/1oRxhZ5

Vegan Supermarket Chain to Come to US in 2016

via Ecorazzi

Jan Bredack wasn’t always a passionate vegan. In 2011, the former meat-lover started the world’s first vegan supermarket chain called “Veganz“. Founded in Berlin, Germany, the business venture has proven successful with plans to open dozens of branches across Europe.

In 2009, Bredack turned to veganism after suffering burn-out from a less than balanced life. After changing his lifestyle and ethical code, he wrote the book “Vegan für alle: Warum wir richtig leben sollten” (Veganism for everyone: Why we should live right) to share his transformation with the masses, but that wasn’t where he stopped.

After several trips abroad, the veggie entrepreneur, exposed to vegan products in other countries, decided to open his first store. Bredack says, “The decision to open a vegan supermarket came from a potpourri of ideas after coming across various vegan products in the US and Russia.” He noted that it was difficult to “shop normally” when one adopts a vegan lifestyle, and he wanted to make the switch to veganism more accessible to everyone.

Get excited, Americans! Bredack plans on taking his vegan chain to the United States soon. In 2016, Veganz will open a vegan shopping center in Portland, Oregon, the U.S. vegan homeland.

It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad world! The origin of counterculture icon Alfred E. Neuman

from Dangerous Minds:

While going through a box of old papers, an article I cut out of the New York Times when I was 14 (January 10, 1975) fell out. Just as important to me now as it was then, it is about a subject dear to my heart, Mad Magazine mascot Alfred E. Neuman (not Newman). This face of total idiocy spent at least 50 years as an icon for cool rebellious youth (only in recent years does the 62-year-old publication seem to have become homogenized, sadly), a signpost to the training ground for smartypants the world over from the ‘50s to the ‘80s, and recognizable to just about anyone on earth, whether they liked it or not. A generation of heavy counterculture leaders can be identified as having read Mad Magazine, as it was like an underground press for pre-teens waiting to be old enough for initiation into the real underground. Anyone from Abbie Hoffman to R. Crumb to Jimi Hendrix was trained in “fuck you, haha” by the true geniuses at Mad. Alfred E. Neuman was entered into the presidential race for many decades until “that was a bigger joke than ours,” said Al Feldstein, longtime Mad editor (R.I.P.) who gave Alfred his name.

But where did Alfred come from? Any Mad fans or weirdo collector types will tell you he was around long before Mad existed. Here’s a nice piece of history, this Times article I found, about the history of our beloved grinning idiot, written by Mad co-founder (with William M. Gaines) Harvey Kurtzman.

  MOUNT VERNON, N.Y.-There’s a question that nags wherever I go. Again and again I am asked, Where did Alfred Neuman come from? For those of you who didn’t hear a bell ring at the mention of Alfred N., he is the face you see on the covers of Mad Magazine. And for those of you who ring, let me put the eternal question to rest, once and for all.

The face first came to my attention when i was doing the comic book Mad for publisher William Gaines in the middle fifties—I think it was 1954. We were working with Ballantine paperback books on the first of a series of Mad reprint collections.

Since I was Mad’s chief cook and bottle washer at the time, there wasn’t a moment of my waking life that wasn’t devoted to the search for more and more Mad material.

In this condition, and while passing the time of day in the office of an editor, Bernard Shir-Cliff, I noticed on the Ballantine Book bulletin board, a postcard with this face. The card had some ad message-I don’t recall what.

And the face itself was printed alongside in a space, maybe an inch by an inch and a half. The face was not unfamiliar. I associated it with the funny-picture postcards in Times Square penny arcades and tourist traps, this one with the caption “What, Me Worry?” under the bumpkin portrait-part leering wiseacre, part happy-go-lucky kid.

But what interested me about this Ballantine version was that of all the reproductions I remembered, this one looked like the authentic, original-source portrait—the real goods.

While everything I’d seen before was cartoon, this seemed to be a photograph of the actual face! So I pocketed the card and rushed back to the workshop where I inserted the “What Me Worry?” face on and in subsequent issues of Mad magazine.

I was very fond of plastering Mad with inanities-Items like Potrzebie, Melvin Cowznofski, Alfred E. Neuman. The readers apparently liked them. Potrzebie was a word clipped at random from a Polish-language newspaper. Melvin was borrowed from the old Ernie Kovacs Show, as Alfred E. was borrowed from Hollywood by way of the old, old Henry Morgan show.

Alfred Newman (the late) was in reality a movie-music man whose credits were legion on the silver screen.

Morgan would use the name for various innocuous characters that passed through his show, and I did it in Mad, after Morgan’s fashion. And even though the face was, and ever would be, to me, a What, Me Worry? kid, our fan mail insisted on calling him Melvin Cowznofski and Alfred E. Neuman.

As a matter of fact, in the ensuing fan enthusiasm over the face, we ourselves became curious as to his genealogy, and in our letters page we asked the readers for whatever source information they might have.

The answers were astonishing. The face dated back to the 19th century. It was supposed to have been used for selling patent medicine, shoes and soft drinks. the kid was depicted as a salesman, a cowboy, a doughboy, and was rendered in dozens of slight to grossly altered variations.

But the answer I have always liked to believe was that the face came from an old high school biology text—an example of a person who lacked iodine.

Whatever the truth might be, Mad adopted the face as its mascot, and we used it like a trademark on all of our covers.

With the success of Mad, disputations arose. Readers laid copyright claims to the face, and eventually the issue went to court—not to just any court, but the Supreme Court of the Land. In this lofty council, Mad won, once and for all, the right to use the face. The What, Me Worry? kid was permanently baptized Alfred E. Neuman by Albert Feldstein, the editor who came after me.

So that’s the story, once and for all. Don’t ask me anymore.

There you have it, from the horse’s mouth, the closest yet description of the origins of our boy Alfred.

By the 1960s Alfred E. Neuman and Mad Magazine were so massive worldwide that this record would be made by crazy teens in Sweden in 1965. The band is called The Madmen, the song, “Alfred E. Goes Surfin’”.



So identifiable was Alfred E. Neuman’s face that by the late 50’s on his huge TV special Another Evening With Fred Astaire, Mr. Astaire could, without uttering one word, do an entire act revolving around him having been expertly made up exactly as Alfred E. Neuman. Notice the surely, mostly adult reaction. (Starts at 1:55)



And, last but not least, this incredible song (performed by The Dellwoods), originally released on a cardboard record in a Mad special issue, then included on the LP Fink Along With Mad (the follow up to Mad Twists Rock ‘N’ Roll) and officially released on a 45 with a great picture sleeve in Germany (as “Alf Newman”!). Lux Interior of The Cramps and many others cite this as the greatest rock n roll record ever made, I have used it as my closing song in every DJ gig I have done for decades. Here he is “vocalising” for your dis/pleasure, Alfred E. Neuman himself, with his greatest hit…“It’s A Gas!”

Pentagon Preparing for Mass Civil Unrest

from: The Guardian / By Nafeez Ahmed
via AlterNet:

"Social science is being militarized to develop 'operational tools' to target peaceful protest movements."

A US Department of Defense (DoD) research [3] programme is funding universities to model the dynamics, risks and tipping points for large-scale civil unrest across the world, under the supervision of various US military [4] agencies. The multi-million dollar programme [5] is designed to develop immediate and long-term "warfighter-relevant insights" for senior officials and decision makers in "the defense policy community," and to inform policy implemented by "combatant commands."

Launched in 2008 [6] – the year of the global banking crisis – the DoD 'Minerva Research Initiative' [7] partners with universities "to improve DoD's basic understanding of the social, cultural, behavioral, and political forces that shape regions of the world of strategic importance to the US."

Among the projects awarded for the period 2014-2017 is a Cornell University-led study managed by the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research which aims to develop an empirical model "of the dynamics of social movement mobilisation and contagions." The project will determine the "critical mass (tipping point)" of social contagions by studying their "digital traces" in the cases of "the 2011 Egyptian revolution, the 2011 Russian Duma elections, the 2012 Nigerian fuel subsidy crisis and the 2013 Gazi park protests in Turkey."

Twitter posts and conversations will be examined "to identify individuals mobilised in a social contagion and when they become mobilised."

Another project awarded this year to the University of Washington "seeks to uncover the conditions under which political movements aimed at large-scale political and economic change originate," along with their "characteristics and consequences." The project, managed by the US Army Research Office, focuses on "large-scale movements involving more than 1,000 participants in enduring activity," and will cover 58 countries in total.

Last year, the DoD's Minerva Initiative funded a project to determine 'Who Does Not Become a Terrorist, and Why?' [8] which, however, conflates peaceful activists with "supporters of political violence" who are different from terrorists only in that they do not embark on "armed militancy" themselves. The project explicitly sets out to study non-violent activists:

"In every context we find many individuals who share the demographic, family, cultural, and/or socioeconomic background of those who decided to engage in terrorism, and yet refrained themselves from taking up armed militancy, even though they were sympathetic to the end goals of armed groups. The field of terrorism studies has not, until recently, attempted to look at this control group. This project is not about terrorists, but about supporters of political violence."

The project's 14 case studies each "involve extensive interviews with ten or more activists and militants in parties and NGOs who, though sympathetic to radical causes, have chosen a path of non-violence."

I contacted the project's principal investigator, Prof Maria Rasmussen of the US Naval Postgraduate School, asking why non-violent activists working for NGOs should be equated to supporters of political violence – and which "parties and NGOs" were being investigated – but received no response.

Similarly, Minerva programme staff refused to answer a series of similar questions I put to them, including asking how "radical causes" promoted by peaceful NGOs constituted a potential national security threat of interest to the DoD.

Among my questions, I asked:

"Does the US Department of Defense see protest [9] movements and social activism [10] in different parts of the world as a threat to US national security? If so, why? Does the US Department of Defense consider political movements aiming for large scale political and economic change as a national security matter? If so, why? Activism, protest, 'political movements' and of course NGOs are a vital element of a healthy civil society and democracy - why is it that the DoD is funding research to investigate such issues?"

Minerva's programme director Dr Erin Fitzgerald said "I appreciate your concerns and am glad that you reached out to give us the opportunity to clarify" before promising a more detailed response. Instead, I received the following bland statement from the DoD's press office:

"The Department of Defense takes seriously its role in the security of the United States [11], its citizens, and US allies and partners. While every security challenge does not cause conflict, and every conflict does not involve the US military, Minerva helps fund basic social science research that helps increase the Department of Defense's understanding of what causes instability and insecurity around the world. By better understanding these conflicts and their causes beforehand, the Department of Defense can better prepare for the dynamic future security environment."

In 2013, Minerva funded a University of Maryland project in collaboration with the US Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory to gauge the risk of civil unrest due to climate change [12]. Thethree-year $1.9 million project [13] is developing models to anticipate what could happen to societies under a range of potential climate change scenarios.

From the outset, the Minerva programme was slated to provide over $75 million over five years for social and behavioural science research. This year alone it has been allocated a total budget of $17.8 million by US Congress.

An internal Minerva staff email communication referenced in a 2012 Masters dissertation [14] reveals that the programme is geared toward producing quick results that are directly applicable to field operations. The dissertation was part of a Minerva-funded project on "counter-radical Muslim discourse" [15] at Arizona State University.

The internal email from Prof Steve Corman, a principal investigator for the project, describes a meeting hosted by the DoD's Human Social Cultural and Behavioural Modeling (HSCB) programme in which senior Pentagon officials said their priority was "to develop capabilities that are deliverable quickly" in the form of "models and tools that can be integrated with operations."

Although Office of Naval Research supervisor Dr Harold Hawkins had assured the university researchers at the outset that the project was merely "a basic research effort, so we shouldn't be concerned about doing applied stuff", the meeting in fact showed that DoD is looking to "feed results" into "applications," Corman said in the email. He advised his researchers to "think about shaping results, reports, etc., so they [DoD] can clearly see their application for tools that can be taken to the field."

Many independent scholars are critical of what they see as the US government's efforts to militarise social science in the service of war. In May 2008, the American Anthropological Association (AAA) wrote to the US government [16] noting that the Pentagon lacks "the kind of infrastructure for evaluating anthropological [and other social science] research" in a way that involves "rigorous, balanced and objective peer review", calling for such research to be managed instead by civilian agencies like the National Science Foundation (NSF).

The following month, the DoD signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the NSF to cooperate on the management of Minerva. In response, the AAA cautioned [17] that although research proposals would now be evaluated by NSF's merit-review panels. "Pentagon officials will have decision-making power in deciding who sits on the panels":

"… there remain concerns within the discipline that research will only be funded when it supports the Pentagon's agenda. Other critics of the programme, including the Network of Concerned Anthropologists, have raised concerns that the programme would discourage research in other important areas and undermine the role of the university as a place for independent discussion and critique of the military."

According to Prof David Price, a cultural anthropologist at St Martin's University in Washington DC and author of Weaponizing Anthropology [18]: Social Science in Service of the Militarized State, "when you looked at the individual bits of many of these projects they sort of looked like normal social science, textual analysis, historical research, and so on, but when you added these bits up they all shared themes of legibility with all the distortions of over-simplification. Minerva is farming out the piece-work of empire in ways that can allow individuals to disassociate their individual contributions from the larger project."

Prof Price has previously exposed [19] how the Pentagon's Human Terrain Systems (HTS) programme - designed to embed social scientists in military field operations - routinely conducted training scenarios set in regions "within the United States."

Citing a summary critique of the programme sent to HTS directors by a former employee, Price reported that the HTS training scenarios "adapted COIN [counterinsurgency] for Afghanistan/Iraq" to domestic situations "in the USA where the local population was seen from the military perspective as threatening the established balance of power and influence, and challenging law and order."

One war-game, said Price, involved environmental activists protesting pollution from a coal-fired plant near Missouri, some of whom were members of the well-known environmental NGO Sierra Club. Participants were tasked to "identify those who were 'problem-solvers' and those who were 'problem-causers,' and the rest of the population whom would be the target of the information operations to move their Center of Gravity toward that set of viewpoints and values which was the 'desired end-state' of the military's strategy."

Such war-games are consistent with a raft of Pentagon planning documents which suggest that National Security Agency (NSA [20]) mass surveillance [21] is partially motivated to prepare for the destabilising impact of coming environmental, energy and economic shocks [22].

James Petras, Bartle Professor of Sociology at Binghamton University in New York, concurs with Price's concerns. Minerva-funded social scientists tied to Pentagon counterinsurgency operations are involved in the "study of emotions in stoking or quelling ideologically driven movements," he said, including how "to counteract grassroots movements."

Minerva is a prime example of the deeply narrow-minded and self-defeating nature of military ideology. Worse still, the unwillingness of DoD officials to answer the most basic questions is symptomatic of a simple fact – in their unswerving mission to defend an increasingly unpopular global system serving the interests of a tiny minority [23], security agencies have no qualms about painting the rest of us as potential terrorists.

[3] http://www.theguardian.com/education/research
[4] http://www.theguardian.com/world/us-military
[5] http://minerva.dtic.mil/cois.html
[6] http://www.wired.com/2008/12/earlier-this-1/
[7] http://minerva.dtic.mil/funded.html
[8] http://minerva.dtic.mil/doc/abstracts/Rasmussen_WhoNotTerrorist_FY13.pdf
[9] http://www.theguardian.com/world/protest
[10] http://www.theguardian.com/environment/activism
[11] http://www.theguardian.com/world/usa
[12] http://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-change
[13] http://www.livescience.com/38167-national-security-impact-of-warming-climate.html
[14] http://repository.asu.edu/attachments/93938/content/tmp/package-DBgi6R/Nair_asu_0010N_11963.pdf
[15] http://cidse.engineering.asu.edu/minerva-initiative-project-recognized-by-dod/
[16] http://www.aaanet.org/issues/policy-advocacy/upload/Minerva-Letter.pdf
[17] http://www.aaanet.org/_cs_upload/issues/press/22649_1.pdf
[18] http://www.theguardian.com/science/anthropology
[19] http://zeroanthropology.net/2010/02/16/david-price-human-terrain-systems-dissenter-resigns-tells-inside-story-of-trainings-heart-of-darkness/
[20] http://www.theguardian.com/world/nsa
[21] http://www.theguardian.com/world/surveillance
[22] http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2013/jun/14/climate-change-energy-shocks-nsa-prism
[23] http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/may/28/inclusive-capitalism-trojan-horse-global-revolt-henry-jackson-society-pr-growth

University of Oxford college votes for vegan meals to help fight climate change

from Blue&Green Tomorrow:

Wadham College at the University of Oxford has passed a motion to ban meat products and only serve vegan food for five nights a week on campus.

Founded in 1610, Wadham consists of 150 graduates and 450 undergraduates. It was one of the first colleges to admit women and is known for its progressive attitude.

Oxford is made up of more than 30 different colleges, with the Wadham students’ union (SU) meeting every fortnight.

At a recent meeting, James Kenna, a fourth-year engineer, proposed the motion of serving vegetarian food for four nights. Ben Szreter, a second-year history student, then said to really make a change, it should be amended to five days of vegan food, which was passed.

The motion said, “Reducing the consumption of meat is one of many steps needed to reduce the effects of climate change.”

It was agreed in a meeting in March 2014 that Wadham would have meat-free Mondays, with the motion noting, “Excessive meat consumption is harmful to the environment and it could also lead to an increased risk of certain illnesses like bowel cancer.”

However, some are worried this will intimidate prospective students.

“Five days of vegan food may sound intimidating to students across the country, and many Wadham students I’ve spoken to have said that they would have applied to another college if this policy was in place when they were applying”, Szreter told the weekly newspaper the Oxford Student.

The SU food representative will be carrying out the motion and it will be bought to the next food committee meeting.

The University of Oxford is believed to have the largest investments in fossil fuel companies of any UK university and earlier this month it pledged to look into selling the investments with the results due to be released in July.

In Energy Policy, a peer-reviewed journal, a study in 2012 found the production of fresh meat makes a significant contribution to harmful greenhouse gases. The UN has also been quoted as saying the meat industry is a large contributor to environmental problems.

SHOGO KUBO R.I.P.

-from his SkateBoarder magazine interview-

I heard the news pretty early on and did not believe it. "Red Dog" told me he got a text from his son, I wouldn't accept that as proof, I asked him to please speak to someone, not via text, but voice or face to face. This is not something we need to rush to tell the world about, we need to know what has actually happened to the fallen brother... As the day went on indeed the words and call were true. Shogo it appears was stand up paddle boarding in Hawaii, where he's lived for many years now, and had a heart attack (UPDATE: brain aneurism), he was 55 years old.



I knew Shogo from my days at the Kenter banks before I even had a camera, up through the heyday of DogTown, his time as the best contest pool rider to come from the original ZEPHYR team crew, to when he moved out to Cherry Hill skatepark in New Jersey, around the same time I was forced to move back to New Jersey to finish High School.


-Cherry Hill Skatepark 1979-

Shogo Kubo, for those who do not know, was one of the most stylish and flowing pool and half pipe riders you'd ever see. To me Skaters like Ray "Bones", Steve Caballero, and Christian Hosoi, to name a few, were cut from his cloth. Shogo was an original, an innovator, and a competitor like none of the other "Z-Boys", and he was radical too. We created a lot of cool images together during that hey day. All the images you see above and below come from a few of our outings... he will be missed by many.


-the original Dog Bowl - Santa Monica, 1977-



-Trespassing in West Los Angeles, 1978-



dig it.

GEF


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By composing pieces from photos find online, Jim Kazanjian creates “hyper-collages”

from Domus:

By composing pieces from photos find online, Jim Kazanjian creates “hyper-collages” inspired by classic horror literature, disputing the idea that photography has a sort of built-in objectivity.

My images are digitally manipulated composites built from photographs I find online.

The technique I use could be considered "hyper-collage". I cobble together pieces from photos I find interesting and feed them into Photoshop. Through a palimpsest-like layering process of adding and subtracting, I gradually blend the various parts together. I am basically manipulating and assembling a disparate array of multiple photographic elements (sometimes more than 50) to produce a single homogenized image. I do not use a camera at any stage in the process.

My method of construction has an improvisational and random quality to it, since it is largely driven by the source material I have available. I wade through my archive constantly and search for interesting combinations and relationships. Each new piece I bring to the composition informs the image's potential direction. It is an iterative and organic process where the end result is many times removed from its origin. I think of the work as a type of mutation which can haphazardly spawn in numerous and unpredictable directions.

I’ve chosen photography as a medium because of the cultural misunderstanding that it has a sort of built-in objectivity. This allows me to set up a visual tension within the work, to make it resonate and lure the viewer further inside. My current series is inspired by the classic horror literature of H.P. Lovecraft, Algernon Blackwood and similar authors. I am intrigued with the narrative archetypes these writers utilize to transform the commonplace into something sinister and foreboding. In my work, I prefer to use these devices as a means to generate entry points for the viewer. I'm interested in occupying a space where the mundane intersects the strange, and the familiar becomes alien. In a sense, I am attempting to render the sublime.

(Must click on images to see larger with incredible details and go to original article for more)

Ultra high speed rare flat land skateboarding tricks

Space Colonies: A look via the 1970's

from BoingBoing:

In the 1970s, NASA's Ames Research Center gathered artists and tasked them with designing space colonies able to accommodate 10,000 people. Some forty years later, the dream of suburbs in space remains just that—but their influence on science fiction and the public imagination only grows.

Dropping Science Saturday: The History and Future of Everything -- Time

What about NAS? jus saying . . .

inspiring at the moment...

a few dope tracks... an artist i never got to shoot, unfortunately . . .










-----bonus----



shout out to Faith and the inside playa!

Dave Chappelle's Show -The 50 Million Dollar Question (a very interesting indy home made doc)

Anarchism In America

from our friend Richard Metzger over at Dangerous Minds:

As the title promises, Steven Fischler and Joel Sucher’s Anarchism in America is a documentary survey of anarchism in the United States. The film presents an overview of the movement’s history, such as the Spanish Civil War, the 1917 Revolution, Emma Goldman, and the deaths of Sacco and Vanzetti, and takes these as the points of departure for what were then (1983) contemporary observations from the outside looking in on Ronald Reagan’s America. Whether viewed as a time capsule or as an able introduction to the various forms of anarchism, the film makes for fascinating viewing and has held up well after 31 years.

What’s perfectly obvious is how much of a libertarian or individualistic route the American strain of anarchism takes—let’s call it “free market anarchism”—in stark contrast to European-style communal living experiments (such as squatters’ groups or farm co-ops). They’re just not quite the same school of thought, although if you were to draw a Venn diagram of what they do have in common, it would be significant but also… probably equally incompatible for the things which they lack in simpatico. Does anyone in Anarchism in America have any hopes for a revolution? Seemingly not in their lifetimes. (Many of them were right, of course. I’ve read that the filmmakers are planning a sequel, so I’d suspect that post-Occupy, post-Piketty, there would be more positive prognostications to be found along those lines today.)



Emma Goldman will not attend your revolution if she can’t dance….

The film also offers anarchist or anarchist-leaning thinkers uninterrupted camera time to make their points. Like Murray Bookchin, who says this:

I had entered the communist children’s movement, an organization called the Young Pioneers of America, in 1930 in New York City; I was only nine years of age. And I’d gone through the entire ’30s as a—Stalinist—initially, and then increasingly as someone who was more and more sympathetic to Trotskyism. And by 1939, after having seen Hitler rise to power, the Austrian workers’ revolt of 1934 (an almost completely forgotten episode in labor history), the Spanish revolution, by which I mean the so-called Spanish civil war—I finally became utterly disillusioned with Stalinism, and drifted increasingly toward Trotskyism. And by 1945, I, finally, also became disillusioned with Trotskyism; and I would say, now, increasingly with Marxism and Leninism.

And I began to try to explore what were movements and ideologies, if you like, that really were liberatory, that really freed people of this hierarchical mentality, of this authoritarian outlook, of this complete assimilation by the work ethic. And I now began to turn, very consciously, toward anarchist views, because anarchism posed a question, not simply of a struggle between classes based upon economic exploitation—anarchism really was posing a much broader historical question that even goes beyond our industrial civilization—not just classes, but hierarchy—hierarchy as it exists in the family, hierarchy as it exists in the school, hierarchy as it exists in sexual relationships, hierarchy as it exists between ethnic groups. Not only class divisions, based upon economic exploitation. And it was concerned not only with economic exploitation, it was concerned with domination, domination which may not even have any economic meaning at all: the domination of women by men in which women are not economically exploited; the domination of ordinary people by bureaucrats, in which you may even have welfare, so-called socialist type of state; domination as it exists today in China, even when you’re supposed to have a classless society; domination even as it exists in Russia, where you are supposed to have a classless society, you see.

So these are the things I noted in anarchism, and increasingly I came to the conclusion that if we were to avoid—or if we are to avoid—the mistakes in over one hundred years of proletarian socialism, if we are to really achieve a liberatory movement, not simply in terms of economic questions but in terms of every aspect of life, we would have to turn to anarchism because it alone posed the problem, not merely of class domination but hierarchical domination, and it alone posed the question, not simply of economic exploitation, but exploitation in every sphere of life. And it was that growing awareness, that we had to go beyond classism into hierarchy, and beyond exploitation into domination, that led me into anarchism, and to a commitment to an anarchist outlook.

Worth noting that Bookchin left anarchism behind, too, due to what he saw as the antisocial element to American style anarchist thought.

There’s one particularly amazing piece of footage (among several included in the film) that I wanted to call to your attention. It’s the demonstration of how a policeman’s truncheon fares against various food items such as an egg, squash, and an eggplant before moving on to a Yippie’s head. That clip comes from an “answer” film made by the Yippies in the aftermath of the Chicago riots that was played on television there due to the “equal-time” rule specifies that U.S. radio and television broadcast stations must provide an equivalent opportunity to any opposing political parties who request it. When Mayor Richard Daley got to tell the city’s side of the story in something called “What Trees Did They Plant?” the Yippies got to tell their side in an extremely whacked-out short film scripted by Paul Krassner. That starts at 30:50 but if you want to see the entire thing, click over to archive.org, they’ve got it. (The guy with the truncheon is Chicago-based lefty humorist and radio broadcaster Marshall Efron, who played one of the prisoners in George Lucas’ THX 1138. He was also the voice of “Smelly Smurf” and works as a voice actor in animated films to this day.)

Toward the end of Anarchism in America, Jello Biafra and Dead Kennedys are seen onstage performing “We’ve Got a Bigger Problem Now,” while in the interview segment a level-headed young Biafra suggests that anarchy, or some sort of revolution in the USA, is probably a long, long way off. If they do make the sequel, he’s one of the first people they ought to interview for it. I’d be curious if he still feels that way. I would suspect that he’s much more optimistic these days.

Once upon a time in New York

A comparison of old and new, New York.

Rakim An in-depth recent interview

Skateboarding - Visualtraveling - East Meets West Berlin and 'Kim Il-Sung's Birthday Party'

these two are shorter than those posted the last month of Sundays.

Michael Mackrodt pushing from East to West Berlin.

Traveling to the Hermit Kingdom is already bizarre enough, but when we heard that North Korea would be celebrating the 100 year anniversary of the Great Leader & eternal president, Kim Il-sung, there was no way to let such an epic birthday party slip through our hands.

Laurence Keefe, Kirill Korobkov and I flew over to Pyongyang for two days to witness the madness. While skateboarding within the DPRK was our main intention, it was overshadowed by the celebrations & the 'no sliding' anywhere rule.

The three minute clip portrays a small insight into North Korea from the 15th of April 2012.

Filmed & Edited by Patrik Wallner

Dropping Science Saturday - Are You Alone? The motherfucking big picture!

Really Great Don't-text-and-drive PSA

from Boing Boing:

Volkswagen and ad agency Ogilvy Beijing created this powerful and sneaky PSA for moviegoers in China, to warn of the dangers of being distracted by your smartphone while driving. We don't know that the footage is genuine, but even it not--it's a powerful concept.

More at Ads of the World.

Incredible interview with Sly Stone

from Dangerous Minds:

SLY STONE, TOTALLY WASTED (AND TOTALLY AMAZING)
ON THE DICK CAVETT SHOW

Even a lucid Sly Stone is a marked contrast with the as-patrician-as-a-midwesterner-gets raconteur/columnist Dick Cavett. So when Sly and the Family Stone appeared on a 1971 episode of Cavett’s talk show, and Sly did his post-performance interview blitzed out of his fucking skull, high comedy ensued (no pun). After a killer performance of “I Want to Take You Higher” (too easy, not gonna take it), Stone sat down with an unflappable Cavett for some of the most hilariously groggy repartee in television history.



At one point, Cavett asked a left-field seeming question—though in Stone’s state, any question probably could have seemed a non-sequitur—about music theory. Stone was in fact steeped in theory, and nipped the question in the bud (had to) by channeling his old music teacher David Froelich in an utterly jaw-dropping outburst. Sly’s benumbed appearance can be found on the Dick Cavett Show: Rock Icons DVD, but you can watch Cavett and Stone hold their own against one another right here, in magnificent fuzzyvision. The first video is the musical performance, the second is the interview.

 

Aug(De)Mented Reality [animation]