Amen To That: Why Evangelicals Hate Jesus

From Richard Metzger at DangerousMinds

This article was co-authored by Phil Zuckerman, a professor of sociology at Pitzer College in Claremont, CA and Dan Cady, an assistant professor of history at California State University, Fresno. He publishes on the history of the American West, music, and religion. Since Huffington Post didn’t pay them for this, I hope they won’t mind if I post it here in full, it’s quite a good read and so eloquently put.

What is addressed here should be examined in every church in America:

The results from a recent poll published by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life reveal what social scientists have known for a long time: White Evangelical Christians are the group least likely to support politicians or policies that reflect the actual teachings of Jesus. It is perhaps one of the strangest, most dumb-founding ironies in contemporary American culture. Evangelical Christians, who most fiercely proclaim to have a personal relationship with Christ, who most confidently declare their belief that the Bible is the inerrant word of God, who go to church on a regular basis, pray daily, listen to Christian music, and place God and His Only Begotten Son at the center of their lives, are simultaneously the very people most likely to reject his teachings and despise his radical message.

Jesus unambiguously preached mercy and forgiveness. These are supposed to be cardinal virtues of the Christian faith. And yet Evangelicals are the most supportive of the death penalty, draconian sentencing, punitive punishment over rehabilitation, and the governmental use of torture. Jesus exhorted humans to be loving, peaceful, and non-violent. And yet Evangelicals are the group of Americans most supportive of easy-access weaponry, little-to-no regulation of handgun and semi-automatic gun ownership, not to mention the violent military invasion of various countries around the world. Jesus was very clear that the pursuit of wealth was inimical to the Kingdom of God, that the rich are to be condemned, and that to be a follower of Him means to give one’s money to the poor. And yet Evangelicals are the most supportive of corporate greed and capitalistic excess, and they are the most opposed to institutional help for the nation’s poor—especially poor children. They hate anything that smacks of “socialism,” even though that is essentially what their Savior preached. They despise food stamp programs, subsidies for schools, hospitals, job training—anything that might dare to help out those in need. Even though helping out those in need was exactly what Jesus urged humans to do. In short, Evangelicals are that segment of America which is the most pro-militaristic, pro-gun, and pro-corporate, while simultaneously claiming to be most ardent lovers of the Prince of Peace.

What’s the deal?

Before attempting an answer, allow a quick clarification. Evangelicals don’t exactly hate Jesus—as we’ve provocatively asserted in the title of this piece. They do love him dearly. But not because of what he tried to teach humanity. Rather, Evangelicals love Jesus for what he does for them. Through his magical grace, and by shedding his precious blood, Jesus saves Evangelicals from everlasting torture in hell, and guarantees them a premium, luxury villa in heaven. For this, and this only, they love him. They can’t stop thanking him. And yet, as for Jesus himself—his core values of peace, his core teachings of social justice, his core commandments of goodwill—most Evangelicals seem to have nothing but disdain.

And this is nothing new. At the end of World War I, the more rabid, and often less educated Evangelicals decried the influence of the Social Gospel amongst liberal churches. According to these self-proclaimed torch-bearers of a religion born in the Middle East, progressive church-goers had been infected by foreign ideas such as German Rationalism, Soviet-style Communism, and, of course, atheistic Darwinism. In the 1950s, the anti-Social Gospel message piggybacked the rhetoric of anti-communism, which slashed and burned its way through the Old South and onward through the Sunbelt, turning liberal churches into vacant lots along the way. It was here that the spirit and the body collided, leaving us with a prototypical Christian nationalist, hell-bent on prosperity. Charity was thus rebranded as collectivism and self-denial gave way to the gospel of accumulation. Church-to-church, sermon-to-sermon, evangelical preachers grew less comfortable with the fish and loaves Jesus who lived on earth, and more committed to the angry Jesus of the future. By the 1990s, this divine Terminator gained “most-favored Jesus status” among America’s mega churches; and with that, even the mention of the former “social justice” Messiah drove the socially conscious from their larger, meaner flock.

In addition to such historical developments, there may very well simply be an underlying, all-too-human social-psychological process at root, one that probably plays itself out among all religious individuals: they see in their religion what they want to see, and deny or despise the rest. That is, religion is one big Rorschach test. People look at the content of their religious tradition—its teachings, its creeds, its prophet’s proclamations—and they basically pick and choose what suits their own secular outlook. They see in their faith what they want to see as they live their daily lives, and simultaneously ignore the rest. And as is the case for most White Evangelical Christians, what they are ignoring is actually the very heart and soul of Jesus’s message—a message that emphasizes sharing, not greed. Peace-making, not war-mongering. Love, not violence.

Of course, conservative Americans have every right to support corporate greed, militarism, gun possession, and the death penalty, and to oppose welfare, food stamps, health care for those in need, etc.—it is just strange and contradictory when they claim these positions as somehow “Christian.” They aren’t.

"Beautiful piece of collaboration between nature and industrial agriculture"

from BoingBoing:

“My Conversation With the Secret Service” by IAN SVENONIUS

Here's an old story that just came up on my internet radar that my good friend Ian Svenonius (Nation Of Ulysses, The Make-Up, Chain and The Gang) wrote back in 2005 for the now semi-defunct ARTHUR Magazine.

A Conversation With the Secret Service

Was I being investigated as a threat to the president—or as a potential hire for a sinister job?

By Ian Svenonius

I have a suspicion that the current president might be assassinated. How do I know? I was interviewed for it.

About a year and a half ago, I took a call from people who identified themselves as the Secret Service. They expressed an urgent desire to see me, which in their highly considered psycho-babble, was made to sound like a choiceless inevitability.

On the demand for an explanation, the agent, a woman, told me that they had intercepted an email which seemed to implicate me in a plot to harm the POTUS: that is, the President Of The United States.

I immediately surmised that her concern was related to a mass mailing I’d written in beat-prose to attract attendees to a night of record playing at a local club, called “Spilt Milk.” Thinking that my audience would enjoy the same amusements as myself, I had perhaps contained some reference to a dispatched leader of the free world.

The Secret Service’s responsibility was to check out every instance of a threat, no matter how far-fetched.

“We need you to come down to the office. It’s extremely important,” the woman insisted.

To get the initial sale, through, they used a female agent, knowing via a psychological assessment based on telephone and computer surveillance, that this would seem less threatening to me. Like a talented telemarketer, she was gentle but firmly coercive. In fact, the two professions are related, as the FBI and CIA’s inquisition techniques are lifted straight from Nelson Rockefeller’s bible for salesmen, How to Win Friends and Influence People, and feature the exact same mind control tricks. Of course, telemarketers don’t have the weight of state security at their disposal.

“I can’t come down, I’m really busy,” I told her, though my inbred instinct was to obey.

“We’ll come to your house, then,” she insisted, another offer I evaded.

After much back and forth, I agreed to meet “them,” the Secret Service agents, at a French bistro not far from my house. It seemed less likely that they’d kill or abduct me in a public setting.
Before I left my home, I alerted a few people as to the nature of my rendezvous and they agreed to witness the interrogation from afar, unannounced.

When I arrived, the officers were sitting in the outside cafe section under a sun umbrella which said “CHIMAY.” One was the woman I had spoken with on the telephone and she was accompanied by a man in a lowslung baseball cap with some rugged facial growth.

They looked drab and angry, respectively.

As the woman agent clasped the evidence and sat businesslike, her partner assumed the “bad cop” persona, searching me like a berserker and then scowling fiercely through the duration of the meeting. The implication was clear; if he were let off his chain, he would make quick work of me for god and country.

The purpose of this choreographed psycho-ballet is of course to draw the detainee into the maternal arms of the good cop so as to escape the paternal bad cop figure’s wrath. This psy-op cliche was immediately transparent, but it still worked; psychological reflex is at least as dependable as the blood-and-guts kind.

Meanwhile, my own spy witnesses had taken their anonymous positions, taking snapshots innocuously in case I were later dangled from a helicopter by these freak thugs.

When the waiter came by, I ordered a latte.

The mama character drew the offending email from a folder dramatically, like it was a bad report card. She read it aloud, slowly and haltingly as if translating from hieroglyphs.

“Dear Spilt Milk…”

The email flyer was written like a Dear Abby column, with the advice giver having the name of the nightclub. I explained this to the concerned agents who didn’t seem satisfied.

The mama kept reading:

“My partner and I recently had sex change operations to better understand the respective gender’s perspective. It was a very enlightening experience. To better understand the plight of the aged, I’ve been attending sessions at a tanning salon and to better empathize with endangered wildlife, I’ve been listening to a Richard and Mimi Farina LP.”

The agents pretended to be utterly literal and scanned me for signs of bursting hormones and imported genitalia.

I explained that I actually hadn’t had a sex change but that this was meant as a fantastical scenario in the life of a mythical do-gooder.

Again, the berserker daddy looked like he was herniating.

The reading continued.

“Now I’d like to experience psychological derangement; to stand in the virtual shoes of a person who is a would be gunmen, bent on murdering the president. Any suggestions? Signed, Empathy Tourist”

They looked at me, bewildered and shocked, in a sublime pantomime of a 17th-century Puritan couple. As if the culture weren’t littered with so much obscenity and simulated bloodshed; as if these presidential fondlers weren’t de facto collaboraters with some of the greatest mass murderers in history.

Still, the act was perfect; their collective civic virginity had been punctured by these rapacious words.They were awestruck by my audacity.

She continued, though the strain was evident:

“Dear Empathy Tourist,
My dear do gooder, you need look no further than Spilt Milk: each and every dancing lothario there is an aspiring revolutionary whose singular desire is to slaughter the president!”

The address followed but she didn’t read it.

Who was the Empathy Tourist?
Who is Spilt Milk?
Was this nightclub a gathering of would be assassins?
Would I like to kill the president?

A thousand “are you a lone nut” questions followed from a prepared questionaire, which followed the cultural conceit that there is no ideology, only insane people, that to desire the assassination of the president (a person so fine and benign) one would have to simply be a crazoid mentalist.
Responding to their assumed persona of lobotomized dunderhead, I played the part of apolitic entrepeneur, a man whose sole desire was to see asses in seats.

Before this absurd charade was concluded, I declared officially that I didn’t mean to incite club goers to kill the POTUS.

Of course, like the various running dog lackeys who were tapping my phone and reading my mail, they already knew this. The interview was bogus but it wasn’t merely bean counting. In fact, it was maybe something far more sinister.

The whole experience was demeaning like a job interview for some corporation like Urban Outfitters.

And perhaps it was a job interview; there is a good chance that I was being screened as a possible patsy in the RITUAL BLOOD SACRIFICE OF THE FIRSTBORN GEORGE W. BUSH BY HIS FATHER, GEORGE H. W. BUSH, the arch-satanist who has controlled the country for thirty years. Just as Kennedy was ritualistically murdered in Dallas by his inner circle in a magick invocation of a new age, maybe W. will be killed as an offering to moloch or whatever hungry diety demands satisfaction.

Think about it. He has been bred for this role.

The pathos of George W. is evident when one sees him speak. After the initial disgust one feels at his stupidity, arrogance and mass murdering, one is seized with pity at his plight. It’s a simple matter to see that he is merely a husk of a man, a mind controlled puppet; the sad, lame, brain-gone pawn of the various blood sucking high priests of the inner order.

His sobriety and “born again” conversion were really just a cover for an MK-ULTRA mind control program to which W, as a wayward lout, prone to suggestion, was the perfect “candidate”.
Just as Hinckley was H. W. ’s robot slave, a “friend” of the Bush family, designed to kill Reagan and therefore annoint the elder for the top spot, George W. is another mental muppet, a bizarre construct who must be cast into the flames to realize the elder’s pledge to his illuminated brethren to usher in the final stage of Novus Ordo Seclorum, “the New World Order.” While mass murder of Iraqis, Afghanis and Colombians is an appreciable offering, the firstborn is traditionally the “whopper” of sacrifice.

I was certainly just one of several patsies interviewed for the hapless job of taking the fall. After my encounter, the agents hurried down to the club in question and harassed management there in an attempt to gauge public perception of me. They have very specific requirements, after all.

Not anyone will do.

Like Oswald, James Earl Ray, Sirhan and Hinkley, this new “Lone Nut” will be found with journals of scribbled free verse as evidence of his lunacy…

If you enjoyed this story or even if you didn't (which I doubt) you should go and get Ian's incredible book "The Psychic Soviet"
I loved it!

California Libraries Targeted For Takeover By Private Equity Firms

from BoingBoing

Public libraries in Camarillo, Santa Clarita and Ventura have all been targeted for a takeover by Library Systems and Services (LSSI), a private company headquartered in Maryland and majority-owned by the private equity firm Islington Capital Partners. Privatizing public libraries means libraries will be de-professionalized and residents will pay more and receive less, while LSSI makes a profit for its investors and shareholders. Instead of listening to residents, the City Council created a 'Citizen's Advisory Committee' to review Santa Clarita's library system and its needs and make recommendations for moving forward with LSSI. The committee had no decision-making power, and was widely criticized as a thinly veiled attempt to silence critics.

Instead the SEIU is taking matters into their own hands with the "Privatization Beast" site, fighting to help keep public library services public. People from all over are signing the petition to help save the Santa Clarita public library system. Comedian Sarah Haskins even teamed up with the SEIU to make a claymation video showing the Privatization Beast in action. There's hope that with enough support, the libraries can be saved.

Privatization Beast | Hide your libraries! A privatization beast is on the lose!

Auschwitz Shifts From Memorializing to Teaching

from The New York TImes
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

OSWIECIM, Poland — For nearly 60 years, Auschwitz has told its own story, shaped in the aftermath of the Second World War. It now unfolds, unadorned and mostly unexplained, in displays of hair, shoes and other remains of the dead. Past the notorious, mocking gateway, into the brick ranks of the former barracks of the Polish army camp that the Nazis seized and converted into prisons and death chambers, visitors bear witness via this exhibition.

Now those in charge of passing along the legacy of this camp insist that Auschwitz needs an update. Its story needs to be retold, in a different way for a different age.

Partly the change has to do with the simple passage of time, refurbishing an aging display. Partly it’s about the pressures of tourism, and partly about the changing of generations. What is the most visited site and the biggest cemetery in Poland for Jews and non-Jews alike, needs to explain itself better, officials here contend.

A proposed new exhibition at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum here, occupying some of the same barracks or blocks, will retain the piled hair and other remains, which by now have become icons, as inextricable from Auschwitz as the crematoria and railway tracks. But the display will start with an explanatory section on how the camp worked, as a German Nazi bureaucratic institution, a topic now largely absent from the present exhibition, which was devised by survivors during the 1950s.

Back then they wished to erase the memory of their tormentors, as the Nazis had tried to erase them, so they said as little as possible in their exhibition about the Germans who had conceived and run the camp. They focused on mass victimhood but didn’t highlight individual stories or testimonials of the sort that have become commonplace at memorial museums as devices to translate incomprehensible numbers of dead into real people, giving visitors personal stories and characters they can relate to. Those piles, including prostheses and suitcases, also stressed the sheer scale of killing at a time when the world still didn’t comprehend, and much of it refused to admit to, what really happened here.

As Marek Zajac, a 31-year-old Polish magazine editor who serves as secretary for the International Auschwitz Council, pointed out: “People who visited after the war already knew what war was, firsthand. They had lived through it. So the story of a single death did not necessarily move them, because they had seen so much death, in their families and in the streets, whereas the scale of death at Auschwitz was shocking.”

The new exhibition would go on to describe the process of extermination, leading visitors step by step through what victims experienced, and end with a section on camp life, meaning the “daily dehumanization and attempts to keep one’s humanity,” said Piotr Cywinski, the bearish, red-bearded 39-year-old Polish director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum.

“If we succeed we will show for the first time the whole array of human choices that people faced at Auschwitz,” he explained. “Our role is to show the human acts and decisions that took place in extreme situations here — the diversity of thinking and reasoning behind those decisions and their consequences. So, we may pose the question, should a mother give a child to the grandmother and go to selection alone, or take the child with her? This was a real choice, without a good solution, but at Auschwitz you had to make the choice.”

A barrack once used for sterilization experiments, one of the few left nearly undisturbed since the war, may be reopened, and a new visitor center, replacing the cramped one in use today, constructed to handle crowds. There will be few bells and whistles, Mr. Cywinski insisted, few if any videos or touch-screens in the main galleries, which would be impractical for masses of people. Nothing must overshadow the evidence of the site itself, he stressed.

“The more we use special effects,” he said, “the more we draw attention away from the authenticity of this place, which is unlike any other.”

All or nearly all visitors will be shepherded by guides to field questions and keep crowds moving.

That changes to Auschwitz must entail first of all calculating how to move increasingly large masses of people more efficiently, effectively and swiftly through the site is an uncomfortable turn of history lost on no one here. An explosion of mass tourism, dark tourism and education programs in Europe and elsewhere that send students abroad, has tripled the number of visitors to Auschwitz over the last decade. Some 450,000 people a year visited Auschwitz in 2000. Last year, that number was 1.38 million.

The increase — most obvious during warm months in the long, crawling lines and oceans of visitors pouring into and out of the narrow barracks onto fleets of buses to Auschwitz II, or Birkenau, the vast extermination camp the Nazis built a few miles away — has strained an antique exhibition conceived when not many people came. Today, travel agencies in Krakow hawk daylong tours combining Auschwitz with the picturesque Wieliczka salt mine, with its rock salt chapel, sculptures and chandeliers.

“We must take into consideration that more and more people just drop by,” Mr. Zajac said. “We may not endorse this tourism, but we don’t charge admission. This is a cemetery. You don’t charge admission to a cemetery.”

The gradual passing of survivors has also meant that Auschwitz faces a historical turning point.

“Teenagers now have grandparents born after the war,” Mr. Cywinski noted. “This is a very big deal. Your grandparents are your era but your great-grandparents are history.

“The exhibition at Auschwitz no longer fulfills its role, as it used to,” he continued. “More or less eight to 10 million people go to such exhibitions around the world today, they cry, they ask why people didn’t react more at the time, why there were so few righteous, then they go home, see genocide on television and don’t move a finger. They don’t ask why they are not righteous themselves.

“To me the whole educational system regarding the Holocaust, which really got under way during the 1990s, served its purpose in terms of supplying facts and information. But there is another level of education, a level of awareness about the meaning of those facts. It’s not enough to cry. Empathy is noble, but it’s not enough.”

This is the theme to which officials here return often. Auschwitz, they say, must find ways to engage young people (some 850,000 students came last year), so they leave feeling what the director called “responsibility to the present.”

Exactly how that might be accomplished, if it can be, he admitted remains to be fleshed out in the questions and historical information presented by the exhibition and the tour guides. The very notion that people increasingly see Auschwitz as ancient history, that the site, with its haunted ruins, might no longer speak for itself but needs to be made relevant to a new century — all this reflects a wider change in education and scholarship about the Holocaust, and also the special burden felt by officials at Auschwitz. “Auschwitz is a pillar of postwar Europe,” Mr. Cywinski said, “and the key to understanding today.”

Each generation has gotten the stories it wants from the site. Under Communism, Auschwitz served as a national memorial to Polish political prisoners, who were the camp’s first victims. Birkenau, where hundreds of thousands of Jews from Poland, France, Germany, Hungary, the former Soviet Union and elsewhere were murdered, lapsed into neglect, because it didn’t fit the narrative.

After the Berlin Wall fell, painful struggles between Roman Catholics and Jews erupted over what was in effect symbolic “ownership” of Auschwitz, as a place of martyrdom and mourning, which led, among other things, to the creation of the international council, a board of advisors under the authority of Poland’s prime minister, which includes survivors, museum directors, clergy, scholars and representatives of Jewish, Roma and other groups.

The international council could convene as early as June to review the proposed changes to the exhibition; an international competition would follow for a designer, and perhaps by 2015, Mr. Cywinski said, a new exhibition might open. The $20 million cost, including necessary preservation work on the buildings, would be paid by the Polish government.

Mr. Cywinski is also looking to raise some $160 million more for an endowment to preserve the whole of Auschwitz and Birkenau, which requires millions of dollars a year in conservation. Germany has committed $81.5 million, Austria $8 million, and the United States pledged $15 million, so far.

“This may sound boring,” Mr. Zajac said, “but I believe tending to this place is a debt to the victims. I sometimes meet students whom I met here years ago, now grown, who say they were changed by their visit, who became responsible people, dedicated to charity, leading ethical lives.”

He said many of them feel compelled to return: “They feel ashamed to admit this because it sounds weird, but they miss the place. They need to go back.”

“I share this feeling,” he continued. “When I am at Auschwitz I start looking at the world and at my own life. I remind myself of what’s important, which is so easy to forget. In the kingdom of death you can find the meaning of life. At the biggest cemetery in the world I know what I live for.”

When I had my exhibition in Krakow, Poland a few years ago I had the experience of visiting Auschwitz for a day (it was a drive less than 2 hours away), it wasn't my first visit to a concentration camp (first was in Germany just a short drive outside of Berlin, called Sachsenhausen- THAT was a supreme mind fuck - and if you believe in any kind of religion, god or diety, try visiting one of these places!) But, really there's nothing to prepare you for a place of such mass extermination in such an organized way. Education is the key to end this fucking insanity of insane men.

(Top and below are two of the images I shot while there in the spring of 2008).

Previously Unpublished - Steve Olson

Here's a classic shot of one of my best old friends, 1978 SkateBoarder Magazine's SkateBoarder of the year (only the second time it was ever awarded) Steve Olson, (father of the presently famous skater Alexander Olson - who you might have seen as my very last shot on Kodachrome film.)


This photo was taken around 1983, another shot from the same day, on a different wall in the same pool appeared in an article on the session at "Dorris' pool. I also got the cover (see below) and an infamous 2 page spread.


(as usual click on the images to see them bigger)

Bonus shots of classic Olson (that i did not take) in 1978 and 1977

Well, When You Put It That Way: The Republican Strategy

Former Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich’s latest book, Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future can, more or less, be summed up in a single sentence: Until we deal with the preposterous wealth disparity in this country, America’s fucked and it’s going to stay that way. (I couldn’t agree more, btw and loved the book). The following excerpt from his February 17th blog post, “The Republican Strategy,” lays the issue pretty nakedly on the table, I think you’ll agree:

Republicans would rather go after teachers and other public employees than have us look at the pay of Wall Street traders, private-equity managers, and heads of hedge funds – many of whom wouldn’t have their jobs today were it not for the giant taxpayer-supported bailout, and most of whose lending and investing practices were the proximate cause of the Great Depression to begin with.

Last year, America’s top thirteen hedge-fund managers earned an average of $1 billion each. One of them took home $5 billion. Much of their income is taxed as capital gains – at 15 percent – due to a tax loophole that Republican members of Congress have steadfastly guarded.

If the earnings of those thirteen hedge-fund managers were taxed as ordinary income, the revenues generated would pay the salaries and benefits of 300,000 teachers. Who is more valuable to our society – thirteen hedge-fund managers or 300,000 teachers? Let’s make the question even simpler. Who is more valuable: One hedge fund manager or one teacher?

Suck on that logic, Teabaggers and rightwing dickheads… take a good long toke!

from good ole boy Richard Metzger at DangerousMinds

Baldwin, Brando, Belafonte, Poitier, Mankiewicz, and Heston Talk Civil Rights, 1963

On August 28 1963, the same day Martin Luther King delivered his landmark “I have a dream” speech, at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, writer James Baldwin, director Joseph Mankiewicz, and actors Harry Belafonte, Marlon Brando, Charlton Heston, and Sidney Poitier, sat down in a CBS studio to discuss Civil Rights in America. It was an historic moment, one that would be difficult to imagine happening today, amongst Hollywood’s glitterai - especially when Mankiewicz let’s the cat out of the bag:

“Freedom, true freedom is not given by governments; it is taken by the people.”

Thanks, DangerousMinds

James Bond for International Woman's Day

Daniel Craig as the international symbol of machismo, James Bond, goes through a dramatic transformation to help send a message about the inequalities that exist between men and women.

Directed by Sam Taylor-Wood and scripted by Jane Goldman, the video Equals was created for the Equals partnership, a coalition of charities brought together by Annie Lennox to celebrate the centenary of International Women’s Day on March 8th.

“Together we’re stepping up the call for an equal world. And we want you to join us.”

The voice-over is Dame Judi Dench reprising her role as “M.”

from DangerousMinds

'America Is NOT Broke': Michael Moore Speaks in Madison, WI -- March 5, 2011

TED2011 prize winner

TED2011 posted a video of TED Prize winner JR, an anonymous artist who drapes large scale photographic portraits across buildings in poor urban areas.

JR creates pervasive art that spreads uninvited on buildings of Parisian slums, on walls in the Middle East, on broken bridges in Africa or in favelas in Brazil. People in the exhibit communities, those who often live with the bare minimum, discover something absolutely unnecessary but utterly wonderful. And they don't just see it, they make it. Elderly women become models for a day; kids turn into artists for a week. In this art scene, there is no stage to separate the actors from the spectators.

After these local exhibitions, two important things happen: The images are transported to London, New York, Berlin or Amsterdam where new people interpret them in the light of their own personal experience. And ongoing art and craft workshops in the originating community continue the work of celebrating everyone who lives there.

As he is anonymous and doesn't explain his huge full-frame portraits of people making faces, JR leaves the space empty for an encounter between the subject/protagonist and the passerby/ interpreter.

via BoingBoing

Best Rare Bird Photos of 2011: National Geographic

A picture of an endangered Asian crested ibis soaring over China is a first-prize winner in the first annual World's Rarest Birds international photo competition, organizers announced in January.

Red-Crowned Crane

Kakapo

Great Indian Bustard

Marvellous Spatuletail

Read all the details and view the entire gallery HERE.

thanks to Xeni at BoingBoing

"The Story Of" Citizens United Vs. FEC

Why Democracy Only Works When People Are In Charge.



go directly to the "Story Of Stuff" website to get more information and see more great educational clips.

happy birthday to me

Squatters on the Skyline (in Venezuela)

from NewYorkTimes.com

Facing a mounting housing shortage, squatters have transformed an abandoned skyscraper in downtown Caracas into a makeshift home for more than 2,500 people.

thanks, Luke

Anti-government protests around the world (big photo gallery)

A girl attends Friday prayers in front of an army tank in Tahrir Square. Egyptians held a nationwide "Victory March" on Friday to celebrate the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak's 30-year rule one week ago, to protect the revolution and to remind new military rulers of the power of the street. Hundreds of thousands joined the rallies, which are also a memorial to the 365 people who died in the 18-day uprising, with many Egyptians expressing their intention to guard their newly-won prospect of democracy. (REUTERS/Suhaib Salem)


A boy watches as pro-democracy supporters gather in Tahrir Square in Cairo February 18, 2011. Egyptians held a nationwide "Victory March" on Friday to celebrate the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak's 30-year rule one week ago, to protect the revolution and to remind new military rulers of the power of the street. Hundreds of thousands joined the rallies, which are also a memorial to the 365 people who died in the 18-day uprising, with many Egyptians expressing their intention to guard their newly-won prospect of democracy. (REUTERS/Mohamed Abd El-Ghany)


A demonstrator shows his T-shirt that features the star and crescent symbol and reads "Yes We Can" during a protest against the regime of Libya's leader Muammar Gaddafi outside the Libyan Embassy in Berlin, February 21, 2011. (REUTERS/Thomas Peter)

More photos follow, from Algeria, Yemen, Bahrain, Iraq, and other nations throughout Africa and the Middle East where the "revolution virus" is spreading.


A demonstrator spits at a picture of Libya's Muammar Gaddafi during protests outside the Libyan Embassy in London February 20, 2011. Libyans protesting against Muammar Gaddafi's rule appeared to control the streets of Benghazi on Sunday despite the security forces killing dozens in the bloodiest of multiple revolts now rocking the Arab world. (REUTERS/Luke MacGregor)

from Xeni at BoingBoing see more HERE.

Why Wisconsin Matters: Naomi Klein

Chris Hayes and Naomi Klein on MSNBC. This is totally worth watching. In the second half, she says some important things.

I was raised in a union family in West Virgina. My father worked at the telephone company (one of the Bells) and was a member of the CWA (Communication Workers of America). There is no doubt in my mind, NONE, that my family benefited massively—our lives were made a lot better—because of my father’s union and collective bargaining. I was actually able to have a special allergy medicine that was no longer manufactured made up for me a batch at a time and our insurance paid for it. I had to have special lenses made for my glasses. My sister was able to have braces, etc. How many American jobs have benefits like that anymore? Today, you’d practically have to pull a fucking John Q if your kid got really sick, even if you have health insurance!

When my father retired (he was bought out at age 62) he was extremely bitter about the wages the telephone company was paying the younger hires. He saw the writing on the wall and it wasn’t pretty. Outside of the medical profession I doubt that there are any decent paying jobs with benefits in my hometown anymore.

Scott Walker and the Wisconsin Republicans are the lowest of the low. Traitors to the American middle class. The Wisconsin GOP are ready to knife these people to prove a point! Scum. I spit on them. If it’s not already obvious(!) we here at Dangerous Minds stand firmly with the pro-labor demonstrators in Madison. They’re heroes, these people. Good citizens. May they prevail. For their sakes and for all of our sakes.

from Richard Metzger at DangerousMinds

Noam Chomsky on Wisconsin's Labor Protests

America’s most important intellectual, Noam Chomsky on Democracy Now on the rebirth of America’s labor movement and how absurd it is to blame teachers and working people for the state of the economy, AS IF Wall Street’s actions had nothing to do with it! (No it was the middle-school teachers in Wisconsin, definitely, who drained your 401k account...)

From DemocracyNow (via Richard Metzger at DangerousMinds).

Jay Boy at 50 - Same As He Ever Was

I hadn't seen Jay Adams for over 25 years face to face, but i finally did Thursday. Unfortunately he had a slight injury and didn't want to skate the pool, so i just shot a few portraits for old times sake.

I'm part of a group show opening tonight in Echo Park (Los Angeles)

TOO FAST TO LIVE, TOO YOUNG TO DIE

FEATURING WORK BY EDWARD COLVER, SHEPARD FAIREY, GLEN E. FRIEDMAN, JENNY LENS, DAVE MARKEY, RAYMOND PETTIBON, JORDAN SCHWARTZ, WINSTON SMITH

Original flyers, posters, set lists and more from Bryan Ray Turcotte (Fucked Up + Photocopied)

Opening Reception:
Friday, February 25, 2011 / 7-11PM
Musical Performances at 9PM

Exhibition Dates:
February 25th - March 26, 2011

TOO FAST TO LIVE, TOO YOUNG TO DIE is a selection of photography, art and ephemera from the California Punk and Hardcore scene with an emphasis on the explosive period of the late 70's and early 80's. This exhibition features creative pioneers who were present for the detonation of the Southern California scene and whose imagery helped capture and craft it's angles, attitudes, music, fashion and sub-culture. Additionally, reflections of other punk scenes throughout California and contemporary collaborations will be presented that were inspired by one of the most potent and relevant periods of individual expression in California history.

I've got around 5 or 6 photos in the show, and an original copy of MY RULES will be on display (A few mint copies with the original envelopes i used to mail them out in will also be offered for sale to serious colectors).

I'll be there.