A retired teacher's courageous crusade: Tackling neo-Nazi hate

By Andy Eckardt, NBC News
BERLIN – Irmela Mensah-Schramm has embarked on her very personal "combat mission" almost daily for 26 years. Her weapons? A scraper, nail-polish remover, a camera and lots of courage.

Come rain, heatwaves or stormy weather, the 66-year-old sets out to battle what she calls "extremely disturbing" neo-Nazi and racist graffiti, stickers and posters that blight the streets of Germany's capital.

The retired special-needs teacher has now removed more than 90,000 stickers and scribblings.

"Even when I injured my leg several years ago and was walking on crutches, it did not stop me from removing the muck off traffic light poles, bus stops or building walls," Mensah-Schramm says.

Mensah-Schramm travels by commuter train to areas she believes are right-wing strongholds, places where xenophobic propaganda and spray-painted Nazi symbols mix with gang-related graffiti and the more colorful works of spray-paint artists.

'Appalled'
Her "vocation" started with a single neo-Nazi sticker on a street light outside of her apartment in the upmarket Berlin-Wannsee area.

"One morning, I saw a banned Nazi symbol well visible on a lamp post and was appalled that people in my neighborhood ignored it day in and day out, without removing this trash," Mensah-Schramm recalls.

"Only a short while later, I witnessed an incident in which my Indian brother-in-law became the victim of racist bashing. This shocked me so much that I decided to act."

She documents much of the offensive material in photographs and has compiled a scrapbook, which she always carries with her. Mensah-Schramm calls her project "Hate Destroys."

"For many years, I have been displaying my pictures in exhibits across the country," Mensah-Schramm says. "I talk about my experiences in schools and I regularly host workshops with children and students, generating awareness for the bad impact of these ugly racist messages."

Swastikas
Even ill health hasn't stopped her determined drive to wipe out extremist propaganda. After undergoing a cancer operation at a Berlin hospital in 1995, Mensah-Schramm found two swastikas painted in a stairwell. She rushed back to the nurses, asked for acetone and scrubbed away as much as she could before becoming too weak to finish the job. It was the first day Mensah-Schramm was able to get out of bed.

"In some journeys, I need to take tougher measures with black spray-paint or anti-graffiti solvent to remove writings off walls, and sometimes I even ask people on the street to help me out, if I cannot reach the graffiti," Mensah-Schramm says as she walks past run-down apartment buildings in an economically depressed neighborhood in the Berlin suburb of Koenigs Wusterhausen, which was once part of communist East Germany.

"Look, that is my work," she proudly points out, as she walks past a black square, which was once a swastika that she recently painted over.

Her message is clear: Don't look away.

"You cannot achieve something by doing nothing," explains Mensah-Schramm, whose husband was born in Ghana.

"This type of xenophobic propaganda on the streets can help to spread dangerous ideologies, which can be part of a radicalization process that ultimately can lead to extreme violence," she says, referring to recent revelations about a neo-Nazi terror cell that shocked Germany and led to a nationwide debate about the danger of right-wing extremism in the country.

Murder spree
Two men, Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Boehnhardt, and their 36-year old female accomplice, Beate Zschaepe, formed the so-called National Socialist Union (NSU). The group is believed to be responsible for the murders of at least nine small businessmen of Turkish and Greek origin between 2000 and 2006, as well as the slaying of a police officer in 2007.

Much to the embarrassment of German authorities, the country's law enforcement agencies only connected the crimes and their xenophobic motives in late 2011 after two of the three cell members committed suicide, following a bank robbery that put police on their trail.

German investigators originally suspected that the victims were most likely killed by fellow immigrants and might have been involved in gang-related crimes.

While critics say that German authorities had turned "blind on the right eye", by focusing instead on tackling Islamist terrorism, lawmakers set up an anti-terror center for right-wing extremism in December. Last month, Germany's parliament also appointed a commission of inquiry into the series of killings.

The German government has also established a database aimed at better coordination in the fight against violent neo-Nazis, partly because the NSU terror cell apparently remained in the shadows for so long due to poor lines of communication between different national security agencies and state authorities.

"Attacks on local politicians and violent acts against foreigners show that the goal is to spread fear and terror," Heinz Fromm, the head of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, told a recent symposium in Berlin.

'Brutality'
Germany's domestic intelligence agency estimates that there are about 9,500 potentially violent neo-Nazis among the 26,000 right-wing extremists in the country.

"For years, we have been seeing that brutality within right-wing extremism has been on the rise," says Dr. Alexander Eisvogel, vice-president of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency.

* * Homes raided after neo-Nazi torchlight parade

However, Mensah-Schramm insists that she remains unafraid.

"I have been threatened many times by neo-Nazis, who have seen me remove their works,” she says. “And once, I came across big letters written on a wall that read: 'Schramm, we will get you'.

"Another time, I found my photo illegally posted on a well-known neo-Nazi website, where the subtitle indicated that nobody would care if I was dead," Mensah-Schramm describes.

She filed an official complaint over the violation of her personal rights. "Unfortunately, that got me nowhere because the server for the page was based in the United States," Mensah-Schramm says.

In fact, German authorities are facing a growing challenge when it comes to online enforcement.

Extremist groups are turning to web servers in the United States to host their content and spread their messages beyond the jurisdiction of local authorities. While displaying of Nazi symbols and the incitement of racial hatred are outlawed in Germany, neo-Nazi websites take advantage of free speech laws in the United States.

As the retiree counts sticker number 70,076, removed at a bus stop outside a local high school, she turns and says, "There are these small, but very rewarding moments."

"A former neo-Nazi, who had massively threatened me in the past and later exited the scene, stopped me on the street one day," Mensah-Schramm says with a choked voice. "He took off his sunglasses, looked me straight in the eyes and said that he wanted to thank me for never giving up my fight.

"I was so overwhelmed by the gesture that I started to cry," Mensah-Schramm says, before walking off to complete her mission of the day.

Phenomenal Planet Photography

Planet (Stereographic Projections) Photography is simply crazy and fun! The technique is not only all about skilful digital manipulations, there are a few really good programs that can help you out there, but the raw photography side is very technical. The use of wide angle lenses help to overcome the need for multiple photographs to get the entire scene, but then there is the mapping of your photographs to ensure that you capture all of the surroundings and not to later find a gap in your equirectangular panorama. However, you can avoid the stitching altogether by making do with a single photo and stretch it around in a circle!











Please have a deeper look into this mind twisting technique by clicking HERE

From http://www.inspiration.scottphotographics.com/

Related: How to make a Globe/Planet photo manipulation in GIMP

FIN : C.R. StecykTrailer

I've got no idea what this is about, but if i was anywhere near Southern California I'd be at this premiere.

The First Installment of An Evolutionary Series of Digital Shorts by Iconic Writer, Producer, & Artist C.R. STECYK III

Wednesday February 8th 6pm-9pm Hurley Space Gallery

11 year Old Tells "TED" Audience 'What's Wrong With Our Food System'

Birke Baehr -"What's Wrong With Our Food System? And How Can We Make A Difference?"


RELATED:

Hungary Destroys All Monsanto GMO Maize Fields

NASA Releases "Most Amazing High-Definition" Photo of Earth, from Space

Earlier this week NASA released a so-called 'Blue Marble' image of Earth captured by the VIIRS instrument on NASA's most recently launched Earth-observing satellite, the Suomi NPP. The composite image above "uses a number of swaths of the Earth's surface taken on January 4, 2012." Larger sizes here (hello, new computer desktop image!)

Thanks to Xeni at BoingBoing

A Bit More From the Sundance Film Festival

Here's a short clip of the panel I moderated, as well as a great clip of Peralta and some of the Bones Brigade talking about thier film.





Rodney and Lance are fucking HEROES!

Have Yourself a "Soul Train" Sunday

From DangerousMinds:



 
And why the hell not? Here are some classic clips from Soul Train that are guaranteed to make you feel good, and maybe even get up and shake your ass!

You know, with all the Seventies-related posts here on DM, it’s good to remember that the decade was not all about white boys with guitars (though some of the clips below are from the early 80s too). These dancers are hot as hell - without resorting to showing acres of flesh - and isn’t it nice to see people actually interacting with each other when they dance.

Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes “Bad Luck”


Kool & The Gang “Jungle Boogie”
(this clip is one of the coolest things I have ever seen)


Rufus & Chaka Khan “Once You Get Started”
(featuring lots of bumping)


Marvin Gaye “Got To Give It Up (Parts 1 & 2)
(in part 2 Marvin joins the audience for some groovin’)


Trussell “Love Injection”
(moving into the 80s with a boogie classic)


Yellow Magic Orchestra “Firecracker”
(two different cultures in perfect tandem)

Media Controlled Conspiracy Theory Rock - SNL Banned episode

A Banned Segment from Saturday Night Live

The 1998 Robert Smigel animated short film "Conspiracy Theory Rock", part of a March 1998 "TV Funhouse" segment, has been removed from all subsequent airings of the Saturday Night Live episode where it originally appeared. Michaels' claimed the edit was done because it "wasn't funny". The film is a scathing critique of corporate media ownership, including NBC's ownership by General Electric/Westinghouse.

from NaturalNews.TV

Identifying Different Psychopaths

Gnarly.

Thanks, DangerousMinds

Martin Luther King Debates Mitt Romney

"Is Our World Becoming Less Violent?"

Shocker: Is Our World Becoming Less Violent?
By Joshua Holland, AlterNet

Humanity's lust for violence has undergone a long, precipitous decline at every level of social interaction, from domestic abuse to violent crime to interstate wars. That's the sweeping and somewhat counterintuitive thesis of psychologist Steven Pinker's new book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. The pacification of humanity, says Pinker, is “a fractal phenomenon, visible at the scale of millennia, centuries, decades, and years.”

Pinker writes that the “very idea invites skepticism, incredulity and sometimes anger.” He sets out to overcome that barrier by surveying a broad swath of data, from examinations of ancient bones unearthed in peat bogs and on long-forgotten battlefields, to homicide statistics based on European coroners' inquests and local records dating back 800 years, to databases of modern interstate conflicts and civil wars.

Does Pinker's research validate his thesis? And if so, what forces might explain such a profound shift in human society?

Are We Really Less Violent Today?

Pinker makes his case by combing dozens of disparate datasets to pull out what he proposes is a standard measure of our tendency toward violence: the likelihood of dying at the hand of another human being in a given year. In the long sweep of human history, he makes a compelling case, noting that almost 20 percent of bones uncovered at archaeological excavations of prehistoric societies show evidence of violent trauma – a death rate unparalleled in even the bloodiest episodes in recent history.

With the emergence of the city-state – first in pre-Columbian Mexico in the 15th century -- the rate of violent death declines precipitously, to 5 percent. Wandering closer to modernity, Pinker cites estimates of war deaths (excluding violent crime) in the two most violent regions and centuries of the era of the nation-state: 17th century Europe, “with its bloody wars of religion,” and the 20th century, with its two world wars. Historian Quincy Wright estimated the 17th century death-rate by war at 2 percent, and estimates of that measure in the 20th century run as “low” as 1 percent.

He cites criminologist Manuel Eisner's study of homicides in Europe dating back to 1200 CE, which illsutrated an equally dramatic decline in one-on-one violence, at least on the continent. Eisner estimates that during the Middle Ages, about 100 in 100,000 people were murdered, a figure that has fallen to around 1 in 100,000 today.

That's but a small a fraction of the research Pinker cites, devoting six chapters brimming with graphics and charts to make his case. Yet, as with any thesis spanning the entire history of human existence planet-wide, Pinker ultimately runs into an empirical wall; there isn't sufficient data to justify the claim that violence has fallen precipitously in every culture and at every level of human interaction throughout history. A comprehensive database of violent deaths worldwide for the 20th century, much less for the 11th, simply does not exist.

Elizabeth Kolbert, reviewing the book for the New Yorker ($$), unfairly charges that “Pinker’s attention is almost entirely confined to Western Europe.” He examines what research is available from a host of societies at different points in history, but he does devote an inordinate amount of space to the decline in violence in the “West,” and in the era of the nation-state, and one might imagine that to be a result of where the best data are to be found.

One also has to question the rigor behind Pinker's contention on the interpersonal level. He can demonstrate that corporal punishment has declined in schools around the world, and show that violent crime has seen a dramatic, decades-long fall in the West, but what about the kind of violence that isn't tracked by governments with any consistency? Has there really been a consistent and global decline in drunken men punching one another in the face? Have we really become more tame at every level of intercourse, and is it really a “fractal” phenomenon that holds true “at the scale of millennia, centuries, decades, and years”?

Pinker himself acknowledges that the decline of violence does not track in a straight line, that it is a historical current with “eddies” of increased violence at various times and in various regions. He notes, for example, that the homicide rate in the United States didn't decline at all in the 20th century; rather it oscillated, rising during the first three decades, falling precipitously by mid-century and then spiking to a high in the 1980s before coming back down to what it was in 1900. (According to the Associated Press, in 2010, homicide fell off of the list of the top 15 causes of death in the United States for the first time since 1965, bumped by an unenviable death by choking on one's food or vomitus.)

But while Pinker doesn't present a slam-dunk, irrefutable case, one might conclude that he's a victim of his own ambition. The sheer weight of his data suggests that his thesis is correct when it comes to the big picture. The historical transition from bands of hunter-gatherers to agricultural societies that formed the basis of city-states to the emergence of early feudal states and finally the birth of the modern nation-state does correlate rather neatly with a precipitous decline in intra- and inter-communal violence.

Bringing Forth the 'Better Angels of Our Nature'

This leads to a question of why, as Pinker puts it, it has become a cliché that “the twentieth century was the bloodiest in history”? He attributes this widespread belief to “historical amnesia,” a cognitive tendency to “overweight the conflicts that are most recent, most studied or most sermonized.” He demonstrated this by asking 100 people (presumably Americans) to write down as many wars as they could recall in five minutes, an exercise that produced results that were heavily “weighted toward the world wars, wars fought by the United States and wars close to the present.”

We also tend to believe the 20th century to be the most violent because of advances in the technology of destruction. It is only in recent history that we have had the capacity to incinerate 80,000 people in an instant in Hiroshima, and many millions with modern nuclear ICBMs. The overall number of war-deaths in the last century did represent a historic high. But here, again, we have to return to Pinker's unifying metric of violence: violent death proportional to the entire population. There were many more humans walking the planet in the 20th century than there were in the eighth century.

When Pinker adjusts for population size, it becomes clear that the two world wars that marked the crescendo of interstate violence in absolute numbers were anything but exceptional in relative terms. About 15 million people perished during World War I, and 55 million more died in World War II. But the Mongol invasions of the 13th century resulted in an estimated 40 million war deaths, a figure that would represent 278 million people relative to the human population in the middle of the 20th century. In China, the Lushan Rebellion killed 36 million people in the eighth century, a death toll that would total 429 million -- or six times the combined carnage of the two world wars -- relative to the human population during World War II.

Pinker is on his most solid ground arguing that we hold an idealized view of an earlier, more tranquil era in human history. He explicates, often in gruesome detail, the bloody history of human society prior to the age of enlightenment (to which we'll return presently). That long epoch played out against “a backdrop of violence that was endured, and often embraced, in ways that startle the sensibilities of a 21st century Westerner.”

Indeed, we recoil at the idea of civilian casualties -- “collateral damage” -- incurred during conflicts today, but in Biblical times, genocidal wars that wiped entire populations off the earth were a relatively common “extension of policy by other means,” as the military theorist Karl von Clausewitz put it.

Tales of torture by authoritarian regimes shock the conscience today, but the most gruesome forms of torture weren't only routine in the Middle Ages, they were often a source of entertainment – people laughed at the degradation and abuse of their fellow humans. That rulers weren't free to slaughter their own citizens is only a relatively recent concept; that communal lynching is abhorrent an even more recent advent. And today, humans' revulsion to physical violence extends not only to other humans, but to animals as well. Pinker takes readers on a horrifying tour of the unvarnished history of violence, pausing to point out sites like human sacrifice, inquisitions and witch-hunts along the way.

In prehistoric societies, hunter-gatherers lived lives of almost constant tribal warfare. Bands raided their neighbors for three primary reasons, Pinker argues, and these grounds persist in some form in modern conflicts: attacks inspired by competition for scarce resources; preemptive strikes, out of fear that a group would be raided if it didn't move first; and raids to avenge past attacks in the hope of deterring future aggression.

It is when he explicates this long and profound decline in organized violence over a larger scale of human history – spanning millennia rather than decades – that Pinker is most convincing. Which leads to the question of what we might credit for the decline – what it is precisely that brought forth the “better angels of our nature.” Pinker offers several possible explanations for what he calls a long “civilizing process.”

First and foremost is the emergence of the nation-state. Pinker argues that the constant raiding that marked hunter-gatherer societies validated the enlightenment philosopher Thomas Hobbes' view of humanity in a state of nature – a world in which life was typically “nasty, brutish and short.” In Hobbes' formulation, the state serves as an all-powerful “leviathan” that holds a monopoly on the legal use of violence, and, in turn, defuses the primary motives for inter-communal violence: it deters aggressive attacks for resources, which in turn lessens the need for preemptive attacks as well as the urge to avenge every slight as a form of deterrence.

Pinker cites a study of 27 non-state societies and compared their average death rate due to wars with that of one of the most violent states in history, the Aztec Empire of Central Mexico, and found that those living in the average non-state society were twice as likely to perish in battle. Although the data is somewhat limited, he demonstrates that the same holds true in terms of homicides.

But the emergence of states isn't enough to explain the decline. In their earliest iteration, states were feudal fiefdoms and fractured monarchies under despotic rule. Leaders thought of their subjects as little more than cannon-fodder, materiel to be exchanged for glory, God or territory. “The first leviathans,” writes Pinker, “solved one problem but created another. [People] were less likely to become the victims of homicide or casualties of war, but they were now under the thumbs of tyrants, clerics and kleptocrats.” Solving this problem, he argues, would “have to wait another few millennia, and in much of the world it remains unsolved to this day.”

Pinker puts a great deal of weight on the Enlightenment period in his civilizing process. Exhausted by almost three centuries of gruesome religious wars, Western thinkers underwent an “intellectual and moral change: a shift from valuing souls to valuing lives.” Pinker notes that while territory and “dynastic power” were at stake, “religious differences kept tempers at a fever pitch” in Europe between the early 16th century and the mid-17th century. It was an era in which the whole schema of human society underwent dramatic changes in a relatively short period. “The calming of religious fervor meant that wars were no longer inflamed with eschatological meaning, so leaders could cut deals rather than fight to the last man,” writes Pinker. “Popular writers were deconstructing honor, equating war with murder, ridiculing Europe's history of violence, and taking the viewpoints of soldiers and conquered peoples.”

It was during the Enlightenment that, “in the span of just over a century, cruel practices that had been a part of civilization for millennia were suddenly abolished.”

The Killing of witches, the torture of prisoners, the persecution of heretics, the execution of non-conformers, and the enslavement of foreigners – all carried out with stomach-turning cruelty – quickly passed from the unexceptional to the unthinkable.

This was one of two “human rights revolutions” -- the other being the post-World War II advances in international law that followed the Nuremberg Tribunals and culminated in the signing of the United Nations' treaty. That process has continued into this century with a shift from an unwavering emphasis on state sovereignty – with the “right” of governments to manage their own domestic affairs as they see fit -- to what has come to be known as the international community's “responsibility to protect” the lives of innocents.

Another factor contributing to the decline of violence, Pinker argues, is that technology, and the emergence of the modern nation-state, enabled a dramatic increase in “non-zero-sum” transactions between different communities and states. Commercial trade, specifically, has been seen as a disincentive to violence since Immanuel Kant wrote Perpetual Peace: a Philosophical Sketch in the late 18th century.

Pinker also cites a theory proposed by philosopher Peter Singer in his book The Expanding Circle. Singer suggests that human beings have an inherent capacity for empathy; that the ability to identify and cooperate with others conferred an evolutionary advantage on early homo sapiens. But that empathy was, throughout much of our history, limited to a small circle of people: the extended family, the clan. Those residing outside of the circle have often been seen as less than human, and treated accordingly. But with the decline in violence, that circle of humans whose lives we deem worthy of our respect (Pinker says it should be called the “circle of sympathy”) has expanded, from the village to the tribe to the nation-state. And it has continued to expand to people of different ethnicities and religions and sexual orientations, to those who were once dispatched with impunity. (Singer deploys this theory in service of an argument for according the same rights to other sentient species.)

Why that circle has expanded is unclear. Pinker writes that he uses the “expanding circle” as “a name for the historical process in which increased opportunities for perspective-taking led to sympathy for more diverse groups of people.” He cites the advent of the printing press and popularization of the novel, a medium that allowed people to imagine themselves inside the heads of other people for the first time. He posits that advances in personal hygiene made others less repulsive, and therefore harder to see as subhuman. And as economic development and scientific advances extended human life, it simply became dearer, and more valuable. When life really was “nasty, brutish and short,” it was far easier to take a life without remorse.

More recently, Pinker talks about the role played by women entering the public sphere. For him, the “feminization” of society isn't a cultural problem, but a profound public good. “Historically,” he writes, “women have taken the leadership in pacifist and humanitarian movements out of proportion to their influence in other political institutions...and recent decades, in which women and their interests have had an unprecedented influence in all walks of life, are also the decades in which wars between developed states became increasingly unthinkable.”

Having marshaled his evidence, Pinker turns in his final chapter to the question of whether the decline in violence is a phenomenon that is likely to persist. Pinker considers himself a cautious optimist, but is not a historical determinist. “Optimism,” he writes, requires a touch of arrogance, as it extrapolates the past to an uncertain future.”

Having identified “the broad forces that have pushed violence downward,” he can only say that humanity's increasing distaste for blood is “a product of social, cultural and material conditions. If the conditions persist, violence will remain low or decline even further; if they don't, it won't.”

Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet. He is the author of The 15 Biggest Lies About the Economy: And Everything else the Right Doesn't Want You to Know About Taxes, Jobs and Corporate America. Drop him an email or follow him on Twitter.

"Artificial Coloring"

Thanks, Doug!

"Why vegans were right all along" - The Guardian (UK) explains

from The Guardian, on Chistmas Eve 2002

Famine can only be avoided if the rich give up meat, fish and dairy

by George Monbiot

The Christians stole the winter solstice from the pagans, and capitalism stole it from the Christians. But one feature of the celebrations has remained unchanged: the consumption of vast quantities of meat. The practice used to make sense. Livestock slaughtered in the autumn, before the grass ran out, would be about to decay, and fat-starved people would have to survive a further three months. Today we face the opposite problem: we spend the next three months trying to work it off.
Our seasonal excesses would be perfectly sustainable, if we weren't doing the same thing every other week of the year. But, because of the rich world's disproportionate purchasing power, many of us can feast every day. And this would also be fine, if we did not live in a finite world.

By comparison to most of the animals we eat, turkeys are relatively efficient converters: they produce about three times as much meat per pound of grain as feedlot cattle. But there are still plenty of reasons to feel uncomfortable about eating them. Most are reared in darkness, so tightly packed that they can scarcely move. Their beaks are removed with a hot knife to prevent them from hurting each other. As Christmas approaches, they become so heavy that their hips buckle. When you see the inside of a turkey broilerhouse, you begin to entertain grave doubts about European civilisation.

This is one of the reasons why many people have returned to eating red meat at Christmas. Beef cattle appear to be happier animals. But the improvement in animal welfare is offset by the loss in human welfare. The world produces enough food for its people and its livestock, though (largely because they are so poor) some 800 million are malnourished. But as the population rises, structural global famine will be avoided only if the rich start to eat less meat. The number of farm animals on earth has risen fivefold since 1950: humans are now outnumbered three to one. Livestock already consume half the world's grain, and their numbers are still growing almost exponentially.

This is why biotechnology - whose promoters claim that it will feed the world - has been deployed to produce not food but feed: it allows farmers to switch from grains which keep people alive to the production of more lucrative crops for livestock. Within as little as 10 years, the world will be faced with a choice: arable farming either continues to feed the world's animals or it continues to feed the world's people. It cannot do both.

The impending crisis will be accelerated by the depletion of both phosphate fertiliser and the water used to grow crops. Every kilogram of beef we consume, according to research by the agronomists David Pimental and Robert Goodland, requires around 100,000 litres of water. Aquifers are beginning the run dry all over the world, largely because of abstraction by farmers.

Many of those who have begun to understand the finity of global grain production have responded by becoming vegetarians. But vegetarians who continue to consume milk and eggs scarcely reduce their impact on the ecosystem. The conversion efficiency of dairy and egg production is generally better than meat rearing, but even if everyone who now eats beef were to eat cheese instead, this would merely delay the global famine. As both dairy cattle and poultry are often fed with fishmeal (which means that no one can claim to eat cheese but not fish), it might, in one respect, even accelerate it. The shift would be accompanied too by a massive deterioration in animal welfare: with the possible exception of intensively reared broilers and pigs, battery chickens and dairy cows are the farm animals which appear to suffer most.

We could eat pheasants, many of which are dumped in landfill after they've been shot, and whose price, at this time of the year, falls to around £2 a bird, but most people would feel uncomfortable about subsidising the bloodlust of brandy-soaked hoorays. Eating pheasants, which are also fed on grain, is sustainable only up to the point at which demand meets supply. We can eat fish, but only if we are prepared to contribute to the collapse of marine ecosystems and - as the European fleet plunders the seas off West Africa - the starvation of some of the hungriest people on earth. It's impossible to avoid the conclusion that the only sustainable and socially just option is for the inhabitants of the rich world to become, like most of the earth's people, broadly vegan, eating meat only on special occasions like Christmas.

As a meat-eater, I've long found it convenient to categorise veganism as a response to animal suffering or a health fad. But, faced with these figures, it now seems plain that it's the only ethical response to what is arguably the world's most urgent social justice issue. We stuff ourselves, and the poor get stuffed.

www.monbiot.com

Sunday Sermon

Newt Gingrich is Awesome

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

What a piece of shit.

Saturday at Sundance - Not to Miss!

This Saturday at 9:30am I will be moderating a panel at the "Cinema Cafe" in Park City Utah with old friends Stacy Peralta and Ice-T.

As part of the Sundance Film festival. Stacy will be premiering his new BONES BRIGADE: A Biography and Ice-T will be making his directorial debut with Something From Nothing: The Art of Rap - I'll be at both of these premiere screenings later the same day. Should be cool.

check the current very rough trailer clips:
(neither of which do the films any justice at all, but at least you get a taste)

SOUL TRAIN - the Doc

Original discription from VH1 site:

Few television series were as innovative and influential as Soul Train. Set first in Chicago, and later in Los Angeles, the Soul Train dance party reached national significance and became the longest running syndicated show in television history. In commemoration of its 40th anniversary, Soul Train: The Hippest Trip In America is a 90 minute documentary celebrating the show's many contributions to pop culture, music, dance and fashion. From 1970-2006 the series offered a window into the history of Black music, and its charismatic host, Don Cornelius was The Man responsible for a new era in Black expression. A trained journalist, Don created a media empire that provided an outlet for record labels and advertisers to reach a new generation of music fans. As the epitome of cool, many of his expressions entered the popular American lexicon: "A groove that will make you move real smooth," "Wishing you Peace, Love and Soul!" The documentary will feature performances and great moments from the show, as well as behind-the-scene stories and memories from the cast and crew. In addition, popular musicians, comics and actors of yesterday and today will comment on growing up with the show and will share their stories of how Soul Train affected their own lives.

Thanks, Aaron!

PROTEST OF SOPA & PIPA - NO SCHEDULED BLOG POST TODAY IN SUPPORT OF THE ACTION

Call your elected officials.
Tell them you are their constituent, and you oppose SOPA and PIPA.

Why?
SOPA and PIPA cripple the free and open internet. They put the onus on website owners to police user-contributed material and call for the blocking of entire sites, even if the links are not to infringing material. Small sites will not have the sufficient resources to mount a legal challenge. Without opposition, large media companies may seek to cut off funding sources for small competing foreign sites, even if big media are wrong. Foreign sites will be blacklisted, which means they won't show up in major search engines.

In a post SOPA/PIPA world, Wikipedia --and many other useful informational sites-- cannot survive in a world where politicians regulate the Internet based on the influence of big money in Washington. It represents a framework for future restrictions and suppression. Congress says it's trying to protect the rights of copyright owners, but the "cure" that SOPA and PIPA represent is much more destructive than the disease they are trying to fix.

If you'd like to learn even more about SOPA/PIPA, click here.

and click here for even more info!

Occupy Comix: Inaugural Issue! Vol. 1, Is. 1

Occupy Comix was born in the stage of Occupy Wall Street. Occupy Comix is being launched to bring you the anecdotes, glimpses, pictures and critical stories and dreams of struggle occurring all around us. This issue is the first of what will hopefully be a free bi-monthly illustrated publication chronicling the lives and issues of the 99%. We believe that artists and writers can help transform our world, to build a new Mythos of Hope. Let us know what you think.

CLICK HERE TO PREVIEW AND DOWNLOAD DIGITAL VERSION FREE

Greenpeace - Inspiring Action