CANCELLED! I'll be at the Jaberwocky festival in London! This Friday and Saturday, previewing my "MY RULES" exhibitionCANCELLED!

If you happen to be in the UK around London, going to the "Jaberwocky" All Tomorrow's Parties festival - Be sure to stop by the preview exhibition I will have up for MY RULES. The entire exhibition will be exhibited at a yet to be announced surprise venue in London during October. We will officially announce that in the next few weeks!



UPDATE!!! I was notified only a little sooner than the public that the Jabberwocky festival was totally cancelled. A real shame! I was expecting to be on the plane this morning on my way to London, hence made this post beforehand - - sorry for the confusion - the official ATP - Jabberwocky website can further explain the circumstances, but it had something to do with the venue really making last minute demands on the promoter that were unfair. Good news is this was only meant to be a "Preview" of the full exhibition I have coming to London in the fall, so indeed I hope I get to see anyone who planned to see me at Jabberwocky will be at the London show - Those details will be coming in the next few weeks. Thank you.

The Perils Faced by an Atheist Family in their God-Obsessed Community

"My children are surrounded by other kids' prayers and patriotism, but I'm determined to teach them to ignore it."

By Julie Drizin

from Salon.com via AlterNet

“Goddammit!” “God bless you!” “For God’s sake!” “God forbid!”

My children have heard me take “the Lord’s name in vain.” These expressions slip out as easily as expletives and are part of my vernacular, even though I don’t believe in God.

God is not exactly welcome in our home.

I’m not a hater (at least not anymore). I’m an atheist. My daughters know I’m the tooth fairy; they have no use for Santa Claus; and would consider the Bible a collection of boring, inaccessible stories (at worst) or fables on par with Greek and Roman mythology (at best).

I’m raising good kids. They are good without God. They will not go to hell … because there is no hell. Neither will they go to heaven … because there is no heaven. I have taught my girls that “heaven” and “hell” are what we humans create for ourselves and each other right here on earth.

Atheist. Say it over and over again and it sounds like a meaningless label. I prefer to call myself a humanist, which expresses what I embrace rather than what I reject. Humanism is my religion. I have faith in the higher power of people – our capacity, indeed our yearning, to do good. If you think sustaining faith in an invisible God or his sacrificial dead son is challenging, try being a spiritual humanist. People fuck up all the time: We disappoint, we hurt each other, we fail miserably. To err is human. But to forgive at least feels divine.

So I forgive all of the evangelicals who’ve come knocking on my door to share the “Good News” with my family and save our souls.

I forgive my former next-door neighbors – a Baptist minister and her husband ­– for having a “Veggie Tales” video marathon while baby-sitting for my non-Christian kids. I forgive my mom’s Orthodox Jewish friend for “gifting us” with a mezzuzah when my first daughter, Sophie, was born. A mezzuzah is a little box that houses a teeny-tiny scroll with a Hebrew prayer on it that many Jews hang on the doorposts of their homes as a sign of their faith. I would hang one if it could ward off Jesus’ traveling salesmen, but it doesn’t. And I forgive Kayla’s dad for suggesting that I solve a childcare crisis by sending my 11-year-old daughter Jessie to Bible camp with his children. Thanks, but I would rather her binge-watch reruns of “I Love Lucy.” Finally, I have to forgive myself for many years of ruthlessly judging those who believe in God as gullible, fearful children holding on to the security blanket of an imaginary friend.

Parenting has transformed my perspective on religion. I don’t want my children to face prejudice for their beliefs and I don’t want them to feel prejudice toward anyone else. On some fundamental level, I think world peace begins with me teaching my children respect for freedom and diversity. So how did a nice Jewish bat mitzvah girl become an outspoken believer that Dieu n’exist pas? Feminism made me do it. Sure, let’s blame feminism. Everybody does.

A women’s studies class at Penn introduced me to the religious origins of gender oppression. I concluded that God didn’t create man, rather mencreated God in their own image. Patriarchy strikes again! So, God was yet another male authority figure to reject.

I dabbled with the Goddess ­– Mother Earth – and found the concept of a female divinity empowering. But she didn’t stick.

Still, I had a spiritual awakening. It didn’t happen inside any houses of worship or appear to me in the shadowy curves of a bagel. It happened, actually, during political demonstrations, when I felt a soulful connection to a larger group as we joined together to promote a common vision of justice. And I experienced an epiphany again during pregnancy and after giving birth, when I felt my own power of creation plus a deep connection to all women, across cultures and throughout time, who have grown a human life inside them, pushed a baby out of their bodies, fed that child from their breasts, and felt love of divine proportions.

Many people find God in these moments of mystery and clarity. I found my way to the Washington Ethical Society (WES). [3]What looks like a church, acts like a church but isn’t a church? A congregation of spiritual humanists.

Both of my daughters had baby naming ceremonies at WES. These rituals don’t feature holy water or the drawing of blood. Instead, parents stand before the congregation, promise to love and accept their child’s uniqueness; and the congregation pledges to support our family, to know and care for our children, too.

My daughters have also attended Sunday School at WES and (like most parents there) my partner and I have taught our kids and others in class. The kids engage in social justice work, like campaigning against slave/child labor in the cocoa industry and serving meals at a shelter for homeless women. Instead of Valentine’s Day, we have Pay Attention to Love Day. We hold a humanist seder at Passover and celebrate Spring Festival in place of Easter. “Stone Soup” is our Thanksgiving and Winter Festival is our end of year holiday.

But God wormed his way into my children’s lives anyway. (He works in mysterious ways.) Where? At public school, of course, where my kids have been required to recite the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag every day, a ritual I find nauseating both for its nationalism and its invocation of God.

I decided that perhaps my children should have more religious literacy than I do. I purchased a series of books called “This Is My Faith,” which are first-person journals of children explaining the symbols, rituals, tenets of Judaism, Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism and Sikhism and how their family practices their religion. One summer, I tried to get Jessie interested in creating her own “This Is My Faith” book about humanism/ethical culture, but like many projects launched with great enthusiasm, we never finished.

My older daughter hasn’t really asked about God. But I’ve asked her plenty. Most recently:

“Sophie, do you believe in God?”

“I don’t know!”

“You don’t know if there’s a God or you don’t know if you believe in God?”

“I don’t know! Now, leave me alone!” (She is 15, after all, and has better things to do, usually involving earbuds and a palm-size screen.)

Jessie, at 11, is surprisingly clearer on her beliefs. While rehearsing at home for a school chorus concert, she admitted to me that instead of singing “God shed his grace on thee” during “America, the Beautiful,” she silently mouths the words, just as she’s been doing for years, ­she confessed, during the pledge of Allegiance.

This summer, Jessie went to a week of overnight camp, where they sang songs before meals and bedtime. At the end of the week, Leslie, the camp director, asked the girls for feedback on what they liked most and what they would change. My daughter pulled Leslie aside and explained that she is an atheist and wished that they didn’t sing songs that mentioned God. Leslie thanked her and said that she usually tells kids they can substitute “Earth” for “God” but just forgot this year.

This past year, Sophie participated in the Coming of Age program at WES, a year-long rite of passage that educates parents about adolescent development. It includes spiritual experiences, like camping alone on a mountain. The program concluded with a moving graduation ceremony in which the teens gave speeches about how they had grown over the year and we parents tearfully sang songs to our children.

It’s been a challenging year. Sophie and Jessie are the only two of their vast brood of cousins who aren’t having bar or bat mitzvahs. We’ve been to so many of them, I wondered if Sophie felt like she was missing something, a special event that focused just on her transition from childhood to young womanhood. So, I offered to throw her an alternative quinceañera. “We’re not Latino, Mom,” she reminded me.

No, we’re not. We’re Jewish(ish). We’re liberals. We’re a two-mom family. We’re vegetarians. We’re not “nones,” that growing population of Americans who are disconnected from religious affiliation. We aren’t going it alone. But still, somehow, the thing that seems to push our family over the edge of mainstream America is our atheism.

[3] http://www.ethicalsociety.org
[4] mailto:corrections@alternet.org?Subject=Typo on The Perils Faced by My Atheist Family in Our God-Obsessed Community
[5] http://www.alternet.org/tags/religion-0
[6] http://www.alternet.org/tags/atheism
[7] http://www.alternet.org/tags/children-0
[8] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B

Incredible astrophotography time-lapse of stars and meteors

via our friend Xeni at Boing Boing

Photographer and time-lapse video genius Gavin Heffernan has done it again with this amazing video of the night sky over Sequoia and King's Canyon national parks in California, near the Sierra Nevada mountain range. Makes me want to drive out there right now. Below, a "behind the scenes" video. More photos here.

a kind of "making of" here:

Sunday special: Dove, the Band of Love: DEVO’s Christian alter-ego

from Dangerous Minds:

The dawn of the ‘80s was an amazing time for DEVO. After a late-1979 Saturday Night Live appearance made them notorious among the normals, the resolutely weird and misanthropic Akron, OH band managed an actual pop radio hit with “Whip It,” from the Freedom of Choice LP. That song probably remains their best known work among civilians who consider the band a one hit wonder.

Those civilians do kind of have a point. Though they’re inarguably among the most influential bands of the ‘70s and ‘80s, and their still-growing cult is as ardent as any band’s, DEVO would never experience that kind of mass-marketplace success again, and they remain a connoisseur’s buy. But while they had the world’s ears and eyeballs, they did their best to spread to the masses the prophetic, only half-satirical “Theory of Devolution” that gave them their name. One of the funniest moves they pulled to that end was to serve as their own opening band in the guise of “Dove, the Band of Love.” To satirize the devolution-proving emergence of that puritanical, self righteous, money-hungry, and censorious strain of Christian Evangelicalism that was beginning its pernicious spread through American political and cultural life—and which remains disturbingly powerful still—Dove (an anagram for DEVO, if you didn’t catch that) performed tepid, bowdlerized, Jesused-up versions of DEVO songs, wearing cheap leisure suits and accountants’ visors.

Dove’s Evangelical satire was so spot-on that they earned a cameo in the seriously underrated 1980 Dabney Coleman spoof film Pray TV. It’s not unlike “Weird” Al Yankovic’s UHF, but it beat “Weird” Al to the punch by nine years, and it’s centered around televangelism.

 

 

 

Previously on Dangerous Minds

Attention all spuds: DEVO in concert 1980

My Life After Manson

from NYTimes.com

My Life After Manson
Forty-five years ago, Patricia Krenwinkel killed for Charles Manson. Now she provides an emotional account of her life from prison.

KARL MARXIO BROTHERS: AN 8-BIT ‘MARXISM FOR DUMMIES’ FOR THE DIGITAL GENERATION

from Dangerous Minds

Dialectical materialism as explained by 8-bit philosophy, a kind of “Super Marxio” or “Marxism for Dummies” for the digital generation. Why bother with boring old Das Kapital when you can bluff your way through the exam with this four-minute video?

More low resolution gems of useful information on Plato, Nietzsche, Kant, Sartre, Zeno, Descartes and Kierkegaard can be found here, or better still, read the books.

FUCK YOU ALL Exhibition winds up after over 15 years with opening tomorrow in The Canary Islands off Spain

This may in fact be the last ever presentation of the "FUCK YOU ALL" exhibition:

(unfortunately, I will not be in attendance)



As we gear up for the revitalized version via the release of MY RULES the book and the exhibition to follow.

just a reminder

Rakim has an incredible essay in my new book, I'm honored by his contribution.
go here now to pre-order the book at a great discount.

How Well Does A Drug Work? Look Beyond The Fine Print

Two doctors are pushing for the FDA to add information to drug packaging that explains how the medication compares to placebo.

Listen to the story here on NPR

Anybody who has ever seen a drug advertisement or talked over the pros and cons of a medicine with a doctor can be forgiven for being confused.



Sorting out the risks and benefits of taking a medicine can be complicated even for professionals.

This spring, the Institute of Medicine convened a workshop with the Food and Drug Administration. The topic: How best to communicate to doctors and patients the uncertainty in the assessment of benefits and risks of pharmaceuticals.

The FDA not only approves drugs, it also approves the prescribing instructions that come along with them. For some drugs, the wad of paper filled with fine print about the risks and benefits of using the drug is accompanied by a medication guide that is supposed to summarize the main points.

During one question-and-answer session, Dr. Robert Temple of the FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, acknowledged that those guides are full of information. "But it's remarkably nonquantitative for the most part," he said. "And I think we should try to think about whether there are quantitative ways of presenting that stuff."

He then referred to Drs. Steven Woloshin and Lisa Schwartz, two of his fellow panelists, who have said it's possible to pull that off.

The husband-and-wife team from Dartmouth are on a decade-long mission. They have been pushing the FDA to get useful and readable quantitative data about drugs to doctors and their patients.

Schwartz and Woloshin have designed a format they call a drug facts box. It shows the gist of what they say is buried in all the fine print: How does the drug compare to a placebo?

That's in contrast to what usually happens, Schwartz says. "The prescribing info is written by industry, and then negotiated with FDA, and then FDA ultimately approves it. And we have documented examples where important info — like how well the drug works — is not in the label."

This drives Schwartz and Woloshin crazy.

Better Than A Sugar Pill

So, here's their experiment: They showed people ads for two competing heartburn drugs, one plainly more effective than the other.

They also showed people two of their drug facts boxes, one for each of those two heartburn drugs, showing how each drug fared against a placebo (a sugar pill) in testing.

"When the people are presented with the standard information they see — like a drug ad — about 30 percent of people chose the better drug," Woloshin says. "But when we showed them information in the drug facts box form, 68 percent of people were able to choose the objectively better drug. So that's a really dramatic improvement. It just shows you that if you show people information in a way that's understandable, they can use it, and it can improve their decision."

Using FDA data, Woloshin and Schwartz developed a drug facts box for the sleep aid Lunesta.

Two columns compare people with insomnia who took Lunesta and people with insomnia who, unknowingly, took a sugar pill.

The results? Those who used Lunesta took 30 minutes to fall asleep. Those who got a sugar pill took 45 minutes — a difference of 15 minutes. Those who took Lunesta stayed asleep 37 minutes longer than those who took a sugar pill.

Woloshin and Schwartz say some people might consider those benefits worth taking the drug, and some might not.

"That's the whole point of the drugs facts box," Woloshin says, "to let people look at the evidence and come to their own judgments. But you can't make those judgments without the facts.

He and Schwartz believe passionately in the numeracy of patients. They say we can handle numbers, like percents. It's just that too often we're given incomplete or misleading information.

How Good A Deal Is That Sale?

For example, a claim that some drug reduces the likelihood of a particular disease by 50 percent can be misleading.

Woloshin explains why. "If you heard about a sale, and it said 50 percent off, would you travel a great distance to go to the sale? Well, you might if it was on things that are really expensive, like a flat-screen TV or something," he says. "But what if the thing that was on sale was gum, and you save only a couple of cents? So when you hear 50 percent reduction, you have to ask 50 percent of what?"

The doctors' dream is to get those drug facts boxes into health systems and electronic medical records, so that doctors and patients can study the information and decide what's best before the drug is prescribed.

"What we hope is that the box will encourage people to take drugs that are effective and that work, and discourage people from taking drugs that don't work or are just harmful," Woloshin says. "And also that just having this information in front of people will stimulate better drug research, because drug companies realize people are paying attention and looking at these numbers — and then we'd have a better quality of drug trials."

Woloshin and Schwartz say medical information should be as quantitative as other information. And we digest quantitative data all the time.

"If you were reporting on an election, you wouldn't say Obama won by a little," he says. "You'd give the numbers. If you were reporting sports scores, you wouldn't say the Celtics, won, hopefully won, by a bit. You'd give the score."

Why should health care be different?

He and Schwartz are convinced that we can understand risk described by numbers, provided the numbers are clearly and honestly presented.

They have been lobbying the FDA to develop drug facts boxes, but say that seems unlikely. So they started their own company to do it — Informulary. It's funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which also supports NPR.

Via Maggie at Boing Boing

Descendents of Milo: Make your own Milo with the Milogenerator app!

via Dangerous Minds

Milo Goes to College by the Descendents is surely one of the most accessible and enduring albums to come out of the SoCal punk scene in the early 1980s. I was talking about this album just the other day—my idea was that a punk guy going to college was unusual enough to get your attention in 1982, but the contradiction wouldn’t hold today.



The cover was a big part of the album’s magical appeal, coming complete with a cartoon mascot that could be endlessly messed with. In effect, “Milo” was the Descendents’ “Boognish” many years before Ween invented him, or perhaps their “Eddie” of Iron Maiden fame. Recognizing that “Milo” had for all intents and purposes become their logo, The Descendents used him again for the cover of their 1996 album Everything Sucks, in which Milo is reading a newspaper with the album title written on it.

We’ve all seen variations of the album cover—Milo as Dwight Schrute from The Office and Milo as Heisenberg from Breaking Bad are two that immediately come to mind. But now you can do it yourself, courtesy of the Milogenerator app on the iTunes store. Created by Marco Mantegazza, it lets you adjust Milo’s hair, eyes, face, and body to come up with dozens of generations.



Here are a few examples of the app’s handiwork:





Here’s a pretty muddy clip of Descendents playing four songs in the early 1980s, including the last two tracks off Milo Goes to College.

 

via Noisey

Starting Young . . .

Anarchist icon Emma Goldman’s warning about capitalism from jail, 1893

from Dangerous Minds:

Red Emma’s mugshot

When state senator Wendy Davis held her 11-hour filibuster in Texas last year to block Senate Bill 5 and its restrictions on abortion, it was hard not to think how much better (and entertaining) anarchist firebrand “Red Emma” Goldman would have been if she’d have been the one speaking for so many hours. Davis incited a loud but well-behaved demonstration outside the capitol building in Austin. If Emma had been the orator, there would have been an actual riot. And fires.

Journalist Nelly Bly did a series of profiles of well-known anarchists for The New York World in 1893. She visited 25-year-old Emma in the notorious Tombs jail in New York City shortly after her arrest for inciting a riot at the Carpenters Hall in Philadelphia. Emma was demurely waiting for her friends to bail her out prior to the trial, where she was found guilty and sentenced to a year at Blackwell’s Island Penitentiary. After the obligatory description of Emma’s appearance and clothes (“a little bit of a girl” with “pretty and girlish” hair and dressed in “modest blue serge Eton suit, with a blue muslin shirtwaist and scarf” ), Bly elicited a prescient quote about, among other topics (like free love and marriage), capitalists:

Everything wrong, crime and sickness and all that, is the result of the system under which we live, she continued earnestly. ‘Were there no money, and as a result, no capitalists, people would not be over-worked, starved and ill-housed, all of which makes them old before their time, diseases them and makes them criminals. To save a dollar the capitalists build their railroads poorly, and along comes a train, and loads of people are killed. What are their lives to him if by their sacrifice he has saved money? But those deaths mean misery, want and crime in many, many families. According to Anarchistic principles, we build the best of railroads, so there shall be no accidents… Instead of running a few cars at a frightful speed, in order to save a larger expense, we should run many cars at slow speed, and so have no accidents.’

‘If you do away with money and employers, who will work upon your railroads?’ I asked.

‘Those that care for that kind of work. Then every one shall do that which he likes best, not merely a thing he is compelled to do to earn his daily bread.’

‘What will you do with the lazy ones, who would not work?’

‘No one is lazy. They grow hopeless from the misery of their present existence, and give up. Under our order of things, every man would do the work he liked, and would have as much as his neighbor, so could not be unhappy and discouraged.’

(I was going to include Emma’s famous blintz recipe, which she included in a letter to her long-time friend and lover Alexander Berkman, but to obtain a copy you have to donate $10 to the Emma Goldman Papers at the University of California at Berkeley. Other writings of hers can be found for free at the online Anarchist Library.)

Newsreel footage of Emma at a press conference upon her return to the U.S. in 1934:

ULTRAMAGNETIC friday! Live in the UK from 1990

9 powerful lessons Punk Rock teaches you

a pretty worthy re-post from Buzzfeed

“To me, punk rock is the freedom to create, freedom to be successful, freedom to not be successful, freedom to be who you are. It’s freedom.”
– Patti Smith

1. If you’re scared of failing you’ll never try.

One of the ethos punk teaches you is to just go for it, consequences be damned. Yes, that can be foolhardy, but success should be the byproduct of passion, not the goal.

2. Question everything, especially authority.

For many, punk rock is their intro into politics and corruption, mostly through reading Dead Kennedys lyrics and then having their minds blown by bands like Discharge and Crass. More importantly, punk shows us that not just politicians are to be questioned, but everyone in authority, including your parents.

3. You don’t have to be perfect.

The beauty of punk rock is that it is pure, raw emotion, an exposed nerve that doesn’t need to be slick and polished to get its point across. I mean, Sid Vicious was probably the world’s worst bassist but did that stop the Sex Pistols from making history? Hell. No. All punk asks is that you give it your all, and if you make a mistake then even better.

4. You’re an individual, so express it however you like.

It’s your hair, it’s your body. Do what you will with it. Just no Crocs, please.

5. Sometimes you’re better off doing it yourself.

The DIY philosophy implemented by punk rock was birthed from necessity, with bands and fans having to do everything on their own — including fanzines, record sleeves, etc. — knowing that no one was going to give them a hand. With that ideology, you can take on the world in all its aspects, since at the end of the day, the only person you can truly depend on is yourself.

6. The pit can be cathartic.

Especially as a youth, when your hormones are out of control and it seems like the world is against you, there is nothing better than getting out your frustration by violently hurtling yourself and other youths doing the exact same thing. In the end you feel like you just ran a marathon, which, depending on how many times you ran around the circle, you probably did.

7. Don’t judge a book by its cover.

Some of the nicest, gentlest, sweetest people you will ever meet will be wearing a studded leather jacket with liberty spikes atop their heads. Just because someone isn’t a cookie-cutter citizen doesn’t make them a threat, it just makes them different.

8. There is more out there than just punk rock.

Punk is the perfect gateway to other genres of music, since its family tree is thick with branches — some that lead to metal, some that lead to ska and reggae, some to hip-hop, etc. Diving into punk really means diving into music in general.

9. You are not alone.

The greatest gift punk rock offers is the fact that there are other people like you out there. There is nothing worse than feeling isolated, feeling like no one understands, and then — BAM! — here’s this music and this community that instantly gets you. It’s the reason you fell in love with it, and the reason that no matter what, you’ll always be punk at heart.

Saint Roberto Clemente?

via The Huffington Post
Religion News Service | By Heather Adams

(RNS) Richard Rossi is on a crusade of sorts, traveling to cities across the country to collect stories about the fabled healing powers of baseball great Roberto Clemente.

His goal? Nothing short of making Clemente an officially recognized Catholic saint.

“He had a calling to be a great baseball player,” Rossi said, “but he had a calling beyond baseball.”

Clemente played right field for the Pittsburgh Pirates from 1955-1972. He reached 3,000 hits and won the National League MVP trophy in 1966.

On Dec. 31, 1972, Clemente boarded a flight in San Juan, Puerto Rico, to ferry relief supplies to earthquake victims in Nicaragua. Soon after takeoff, the plane crashed, killing Clemente and four others.

Rossi was only 9 years old when Clemente died but remembers going to Pirates games for $1 with his father. Since then, Rossi said he’s read almost everything written on Clemente and talked with many more people who knew him.

After talking to several people, including a nun, Rossi said, he learned the religious side to Clemente had been left out of most biographies. So, Rossi, a 51-year-old Catholic and independent filmmaker in Hollywood, made it one of the bigger parts in his movie, “Baseball’s Last Hero: 21 Clemente Stories.”

Now, Rossi and a group of volunteers are listening to people’s stories about Clemente, and they’re using the scientific tools of X-rays and medical records to verify tales of Clemente’s miraculous healing touch.

Under normal circumstances, miracles are considered much later in the process, after the church has officially opened a sainthood cause. Catholic teaching says miracles attributed to a saint — two are needed for canonization, after his or her death — are evidence that the person has God’s ear in heaven.

“One reason the Catholic Church has lasted a couple of thousand years, it has this kind of process, they’re very slow and so we want to make sure we present something that, you know, has a lot of credible evidence,” Rossi said.

Rossi already has several supporters on his side, including Duane Rieder, executive director of the Clemente Museum in Pittsburgh.

Rieder said he has spent time talking to family, friends and nuns who knew Clemente; they say he predicted his own death through dreams of him dying in the ocean and his body not being found.

But Rieder said he feels that the most important part is not the way Clemente died, but the way he lived his life for others.

“He’s the only true baseball hero. He’s the only person, player that ever gave up his life helping other people. Everybody else, you know, Babe Ruth wasn’t a hero. He was a hell of a baseball player,” Rieder said. “Roberto Clemente was the only true baseball hero.”

Rossi is also looking for support from bishops, including Archbishop Roberto Gonzalez Nieves of San Juan — and even Pope Francis.



“The purpose of my writing is to humbly ask your blessing my efforts to defend the beginning of the canonization of Puerto Rican athlete humanitarian Roberto Clemente,” the letter says.

As the archbishop of San Juan, Nieves would have to sign off on Clemente’s sainthood cause and move the process along to the Vatican. The Archdiocese of San Juan did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Rossi also hopes to meet with Pope Francis and show him his movie. “I think he is the perfect pope for this — No. 1, being Latin American. But No. 2, he thinks outside the box.”

Carmen Nanko-Fernandez, a Latina theologian at Chicago Theological Union, is writing a book about Clemente, “El Santo! Baseball and the Canonization of Roberto Clemente.” She said anything is possible with Pope Francis, but due to a canonization process that can stretch on for centuries, she isn’t so sure Clemente will make the cut.

“All evidence seems to point to that Clemente was a good guy who tried to lived his life well. So in that sense, you know, does he have a chance at being considered a saintly person? Sure,” she said. “Will that make him into the canonization process that makes him an officially recognized saint in the Catholic Church? I’m not so sure.”

But Nanko-Fernandez said Hispanic Catholics can continue to venerate and honor him, making him an unofficial saint.

“It’s not necessary for one to become an official saint to be considered a saint,” Nanko-Fernandez said.

For Rossi, Clemente is needed as a saint for “ordinary” people to look up to. Clemente lived his life for others and died in service to the poor, Rossi said, and what could be more saintly than that?

“When we look at the process of canonization, unfortunately, it’s very weighted towards celibate people that choose the vocations of being a priest or nun,” Rossi said. “I mean, there’s a very small percentage that walk it out in the real world as a family-first man, as a husband, as a father, in a secular culture, as a baseball star.”

Punk Rock and the Situationist International

from Dangerous Minds:

“The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an ‘immense collection of commodities.’”—Karl Marx

“In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.”—Guy DeBord

“The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.”—Guy DeBord

“We are not working for the spectacle of the end of the world, but for the end of the world of the spectacle.”—Raoul Vaneigem

“Quotations are useful in periods of ignorance or obscurantist beliefs.”—Guy DeBord

“We’re not here to answer cuntish questions.”—Guy DeBord

On the Passage of a few People through a Rather Brief Moment in Time: The Situationist International 1956-1972 is an interesting short film by Branka Bogdanov primarily documenting the work of ultra-leftist French philosopher Guy DeBord, author of the influential post-Marxist study of late 20th capitalism Society Of The Spectacle. The film explores the Situationist International’s role in inciting the Paris riots of May 1968 and the influence of the SI’s nihilistic aesthetics on the punk rock era.

Interviewees include Greil Marcus, author of Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century, the late Malcolm McLaren and Sex Pistols graphic designer Jamie Reid.

 

Weird private photographs of Hitler practicing dramatic gestures for his speeches

from Dangerous Minds:

Hitler is the human symbol of evil, but his rise to power in Germany in the 1930s obviously can’t be explained by reference to that alone. There must have been some deep, underlying appeal to the man himself. In 1940, in a review of Mein Kampf, George Orwell (!!!), who was not yet the famous author he would become, wrote:

But Hitler could not have succeeded against his many rivals if it had not been for the attraction of his own personality, which one can feel even in the clumsy writing of Mein Kampf, and which is no doubt overhwhelming when one hears his speeches. I should like to put it on record that I have never been able to dislike Hitler. Ever since he came to power—till then, like nearly everyone, I had been deceived into thinking that he did not matter—I have reflected that I would certainly kill him if I could get within reach of him, but that I could feel no personal animosity. The fact is that there is something deeply appealing about him. One feels it again when one sees his photographs—and I recommend especially the photograph at the beginning of Hurst and Blackett’s edition, which shows Hitler in his early Brownshirt days. It is a pathetic, dog-like face, the face of a man suffering under intolerable wrongs. In a rather more manly way it reproduces the expression of innumerable pictures of Christ crucified, and there is little doubt that that is how Hitler sees himself. The initial, personal cause of his grievance against the universe can only be guessed at; but at any rate the grievance is there. He is the martyr, the victim, Prometheus chained to the rock, the self-sacrificing hero who fights single-handed against impossible odds.

As Orwell points out, Hitler’s appeal was largely symbolic, and, just as with every American president from FDR to Nixon to Reagan to Obama, he understood that public presentation has to be carefully staged and place a premium on non-verbal, one might even say precognitive aspects to politics and ceremony. In the preface to Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote, “I know that men are won over less by the written than by the spoken word, that every great movement on this earth owes its growth to orators and not to great writers.”

Hitler understood the power of oratory, and his success in that arena was not accidental; it was the product of a great deal of practice and careful adjustment. Heinrich Hoffmann was Hitler’s personal photographer, who took an astonishing two million pictures of the Führer. Here we see a series of photographs by Hoffmann of Hitler practicing his exaggerated hand gestures to be used in future speeches. Hitler actually characterized different effects for the various poses, such as “gebieterisch” (domineering) or “kämpferisch” (pugnacious).

>After he saw the negatives, Hitler ordered that the photos be destroyed, but Hoffmann hid them away. After the seizure of his archives, they were released to the public.

















via Downtown Camera

Why You Are Still Alive - The Immune System Explained

TODAY IS ANIMAL FREE DAY!

A compilation of various artists from around the world endorsing AFD (Animal Freedom Day) by lending their talents to bring the much needed awareness for this worthy cause. Watch the full webcast on July 26th, 2014 at 12:00 pm EST right here on this channel: youtube.com/animalfreedomdayintl
Performances include: Rapper's Delight (The Sugarhill Gang), Jarvis Church (of The Philosopher Kings), Fred Penner, PRTY H3RO, D.O. Maestro, Stone River, Gentlemen Husbands, Keep The Faith (Bon Jovi Tribute), Who Made Who (AC/DC Tribute), Absolute Journey (Journey Tribute), The Reklaws, Bring Me The Author, The Killin' Time Band, Boris Brot, Craig Cardiff, Mystic Drumz, Aukland, Tupper Ware Remix Party, Mandippal, NUA, Scarlett Jane and more!
We encourage everyone to go animal-free for at least one day on AFD, July 26 2014.
Show your support by posting a picture, tweeting a text or uploading a video saying which animal you would be and why.
Hashtag #WhatAnimalAreYou to get involved!
By particpating in #WhatAnimalAreYou and by signing the following AFD petition: (http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeac...), we can make AFD a global recognized event by the United Nations and by all citizens of the world.
Celebrate AFD for the earth, environment, people and for the animals.
Find out how and why going animal free on AFD can help the world. ** For more info visit www.facebook.com/animalfreedomday OR www.twitter.com/animalfreeday **

Forest Man

Since the 1970's Majuli islander Jadav Payeng has been planting trees in order to save his island. To date he has single handedly planted a forest larger than Central Park NYC. His forest has transformed what was once a barren wasteland, into a lush oasis.

Humble yet passionate and philosophical about his work. Payeng takes us on a journey into his incredible forest.

Check out our bonus scenes if you want to see more of this incredible story.

Download the original soundtrack by Mike Ritchie:
http://mikeritchie.bandcamp.com/releases

Thanks, Doug!

BONUS CLIPS:

Extra Scene: Why is Majuli Eroding Away?




Extra Scene: Night in Jorhat

Meet David Carter, Pro Football Player, Competitive Powerlifter, and Vegan

from One Green Planet

David Carter sure doesn’t look like the weak stereotype that many perceive those on a vegan diet to be. This 300-pound athlete is the defensive lineman for the Oakland Raiders in the NFL, and he does not eat any animal products. He is 26-years-old, has a height of 6-6 and can bench 470 and squat 660 pounds.



Carter grew up eating meat and believed it was necessary to eat it in order to be big and strong. “Every coach, trainer, nutritionist, and doctor all pointed me in the direction of animal products,” he wrote on his blog. “From protein shakes to weight gainers there was no other alternative, so I did as I was told and followed the standard athlete’s diet regimen. Whey protein, raw eggs, gallons of milk, and casein were in just about every supplement I took.”

So why did he make a healthier change? ”One night my wife and I were watching Forks Over Knives and I realized that all the effort I was putting in to get big and strong for football was actually killing me,” he wrote. So, he started eating vegan!

Carter is awesome for showing the world that you can thrive and be strong enough to play football with the biggest of meat eaters. He played college football at U.C.L.A. and was drafted in 2011, making this season his fourth year in the NFL. Now, he is in the process of launching his personal website, The 300 Pound Vegan, where you can read posts about his vegan diet and catch up on news relating to the athlete. The site plans to allows readers to make a difference by submitting donations.



“I have always seen the benefits of being vegan, but I never thought I could have a plant-based diet and keep weight on for football,” Carter wrote on his blog. ”After being vegan for only two months I can honestly say that being vegan is not the only most efficient way to be full body strong, it’s also the most humane; everyone wins.”

Images’ source: The 300 Pound Vegan

Wha Me Eat - Macka B

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thanks, Banksy

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