Tell-A-Vision = Why Not Try Love Again?
In memory of Frisket, who ascended Sunday afternoon, September 9, 2012, and will be missed!
Autumn Fenders - Ralph Davis
Speedway Meadows 1969, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, CA, Photography by Ralph DavisMike Wilhelm - Charlatans, Flamin' Groovies, Loose Gravel, and more
Mike Wilhelm & Hired Guns - Louie Louie live at the WingSingle cam vid by Ed Chatham, www.bebopvideos.com. Original song by Richard Berry & the Pharaohs, 1958. A fresh take by Mike Wilhelm, guitar & vocal; Gary Bouley, guitar; Paul McCandless, saxes; Jamie Webber, bass, Colin "The Kid" Holmes, drums. Live at the Blue Wing Saloon, Upper Lake, CA on Sept. 17, 2012.
Alerts + Notes from ~@~ Listed Below:
33rd Annual Clear Lake Splash-In: 28-30 Sep 2012
Click for large poster - Events - Aircraft & Amphicars - Page LocationAmestizo - BLOG + NEW: http://amestizo.bigcartel.com/
Jay Thomas on Letterman.2009.12.23 - The 'Lone Ranger' StoryRadio Control Models - Aviation
Flying BikeRainbow Puddle - Stellar Light Shows
Burning Man From AboveAlerts + Notes from ~@~ Listed Below:
Native American Day
Today: 201209.28
Tune in, psych out: the new black psychedelia
A movement of house, hip-hop and R&B musicians are embracing the mind-blowing experimentalism of psychedelia to create challenging new sounds
Eddy Lawrence, The Guardian, Thursday 27 September 2012 21.00 BST, Article Source
The OddienceIf you believe everything you read (elsewhere, that is), you'd think modern pop is simply a cot blanket intended to pacify the masses. Fortunately, there are still true believers in music's potential for enlightenment. One such acolyte is Eddington Howard of Oddience, an LA-based, acid-laced outfit currently gathering giddy plaudits with their floaty, sunshine-powered, semi-improvised take on hip-hop.
Oddience - Lit Lava Lamp"Music taught me to be a free-thinker," says Howard. "It's taught me how to groove, to go with the flow. Overall, music has taught me to be."
Oddience are part of a group of musicians who are deploying psychedelic philosophies in new territories. Sonically, these artists have little in common – after all, unlike, say, dubstep's infrasonic bass, psychedelia doesn't have a signature sound that can be easily appropriated with a Logic preset. What they share is a desire to expand their consciousnesses. This usually means gleefully dumping the conventions of their nominal host genre. Electric Youth, for example, had a narrow escape from chillwave, but their recent track The Best Thing sounds like a lost pop anthem. Kilo Kish, meanwhile, mix psychedelic singer-songwriter stylings with hip-hop urgency and, as on new single Navy, kitchen-sink observations about the celestial nature of humanity.
Electric Youth - The Best ThingAt its best, this correspondence school of music weaves the boundaries of house, hip-hop, R&B and miscellaneous electronica into a Venn diagram of genres resembling a Technicolor Spirograph spiderweb. It's at the heart of the avant-garde soul of Shabazz Palaces collaborators TheeSatisfaction, whose deceptively catchy awE naturalE album conceals a multitude of shape-shifts. It's the keystone of Flying Lotus's relatively restrained new album, Until the Quiet Comes, notable for reining his sprawling abstract funk into tunes you can almost whistle.
And it's central to the aesthetic of Seth Troxler, feted techno DJ, producer and linchpin of the Visionquest label collective, whose music is yet to find a sound it hasn't assimilated. Troxler's love of psychedelia is lavishly expressed on his Resident Advisor podcast, which skipped barefoot from Pink Floyd to hyphy rappers Dem Hoodstarz, while still making perfect thematic sense (his more recent Essential Mix for Radio 1, with Jamie Jones, is also a treat). Troxler's curiosity encompasses all aspects of the psychedelic experience, with a particular focus on the power of pattern recognition on consciousness. To explore this, his productions, and DJ sets, contain specific, evolving rhythmic patterns intended to induce a trance-like experience in the listener.
Kilo Kish - NavyVisionquest was famously born out of a communal acid trip shared by the label's founders, and the group now plan to make manifest their vision through a series of events held in "explorative" environments, augmented with music to try to open the attendees' pineal eyes.
Troxler says they hope to encourage a wave of similar "large, spiritual events, rather than just having raves and festivals, which are kind of bullshit at the moment. People aren't pushing the boundaries. And if people don't push those boundaries, people forget that there are boundaries to be pushed. Where will that leave us in 50 or 100 years? Is it something that will be lost?"
The interaction between the listener, the music and the environment is a source of inspiration for other artists, too. FlyLo heralded his album's launch with a fittingly eye-bending video for Putty Boy Strut by psychedelic animator Cyriak, whose own work is inspired by the mathematics of nature.
"The music seemed to tell its story quite clearly," says Cyriak. "It's a journey from naive simplicity to complex discord and back again, with a transformation at the end. The basic sounds and repetitive nature of the main theme suggested something mechanical and yet childlike, so from there I had the subject, style and storyline I needed: a cartoon robot world whose perfect balance is upset, resulting in destruction that in turn creates something new."
Similarly, LA's Oddience wowed the music nerdsphere with their recent mini-movie Lit Lava Lamp, which cuts their trippy, cloud-headed tracks, Homeboy Palm Tree, The Dew and Goldblum into a "tramedy" about four isolated individuals sharing the same moment that may or may not be the end of the world. "Where we live is a crazy place," says Howard. "You can create your own reality, because it's a paradise, so it can be whatever you want it to be. You can be this unhappy person in this beautiful, sick, shiny city, but at the same time that's an idea you've missed in your own mind.Once you really open yourself up and look around, this place is nuts – it's got perfect weather, it's got every fuckin' geographical environment, there's always something to do. I think that mix comes across in the music."
Although psychedelia is more commonly associated with skinny white boys with Boris Johnson hair and a borrowed sitar, many of its greatest achievements come from the worlds of soul, funk and jazz, whether it's the endtimes social surrealism of Funkadelic's Maggot Brain, the evolutionary introspection of Stevie Wonder's Innervisions or the embryonic-electronic generalised freakout of Miles Davis's On the Corner. Howard refuses to self-identify as a psych artist yet he cites this seam as a key influence. "A lot of the ideas that came out of psychedelia were about peace and love, the connection between human beings, and sharing human experience," he says. "I feel like a lot of our lyrics, as well as the melodies, definitely go along with the psychedelic idea. I really believe in higher learning, speaking your mind, connecting with other people. Psychedelia will teach you a lot in terms of living."
Peace, love and empathy aside, psychedelia was once viewed as a potential instrument of revolution during the civil rights era in the US: in 1971 vice-president Spiro Agnew personally intervened to block the release of Eugene McDaniels's Headless Heroes of the Apocalypse, believing it would inspire mass riots. It's not that surprising he wasn't a fan – aside from that album's incendiary lyrics, psychedelia encourages its fans to question their beliefs. Troxler enthuses that this particular element changed his life for ever.
Flying Lotus - Until The Quiet Comes"You can see the correlation between the music that people listen to and also the ideas that they represent in their everyday lives," he says. "That's something that I think is profound about psychedelia. If you listen to experimental music, your perception of life is also more open. It's about finding that self within, and then when you do, you're much more able to create yourself in the outer world.'
Quite aside from the acid and general bohemianism inherent in the scene, psychedelia encourages listeners to view existence more objectively, taking other personal perspectives into account. Troxler likens this process to hallucinogen - and ritual music-assisted initiation rites prevalent in many civilisations from the Americas and Africa, in which the passage to adulthood is marked by a great epiphany. "With the music, or anything else, it's about giving the opportunity to realise that we are conscious beings," he says. "In many ways I think that is the point of our existence."
For his part, Troxler sees employing music's transformative power almost as a social responsibility, suggesting that the commercial neutering of music is mirrored by a societal drift away from mass political engagement.
"It's a weird situation – you want to challenge but you want to entertain. But not to challenge is a lost opportunity for influencing people. Once you go within, then you can stand up and say something. But if you don't, you live in this brainwashed lollipop world where it's easier to just be in a coma and take things as they are. People who are into more challenging psychedelic music challenge life itself, and that's where we make progress. Rather than in America, being like a sheep, where you're told, 'this is not just what it is, but also what it can be'. When you've had the psychedelic experience," concludes Troxler, "the curtain in some way is dropped."
Seth Troxler plays the Warehouse Project, Manchester, on Saturday 29 September.
One Can Lead A Horse To Water, But...
Until there is a solution for this, where one solution has been provided, Nobody will bring Peace to Our Times, feed the hungry, care for the sick, and bake apple pie better than Mom. (otoh) If None of the Above was on voter ballots, it would be a huge step towards recovering U.S. political control, and Nobody gets it. 201209 Archive
Has Google Become A Harbinger of Terrorism?
When the cybermen serve as censors
We can't rely on YouTube and co to stand up for free speech
John Naughton, The Observer, Sunday 23 September 2012, Article Source
Hidden agenda: Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, thought to be the maker of Innocence of Muslims,
is escorted from his home last week by LA police officers. Photograph: Bret Hartman, ReutersThe first thought to strike anyone stumbling upon the now-infamous Innocence of Muslims video on YouTube without knowing anything about it would probably be that it makes Monty Python's The Life of Brian look like the work of Merchant Ivory. It's daft, amateurish beyond belief and, well, totally weird. So the notion that such a fatuous production might provoke carnage in distant parts of the world seems preposterous.
And yet it did. In the process, the video created numerous headaches for a US administration struggling to deal with the most turbulent part of the world. But it also raised some tricky questions about the role that commercial companies play in regulating free speech in a networked world – questions that will remain long after Innocence of Muslims has been forgotten.
European commentators have smugly observed that the kerfuffle shows how little the Arab world understands the idea of free speech. Actually, what it shows is the gulf that separates the US from the rest of the world, including Europe. If the video had surfaced on a hosting site based in the UK, for example, it would have been taken down for incitement to religious hatred.
But the first amendment to the US constitution provides a different kind of legal environment. The Obama administration was therefore not in a position to ban the video so it took the route of trying to persuade Google, YouTube's owner, that it violated YouTube's rules. Google declined the request 10 days ago, saying that the video did not violate its terms of service regarding hate speech. The video would remain online because it was against the Islam religion but not Muslim people.
So far, so good. But then Google appeared to undermine its own argument by announcing that it had blocked access to the video in some countries. Access was denied in India and Indonesia because it violated local laws in those jurisdictions, but it was also blocked in Egypt and Libya‚ not because it violated their laws but because of "the delicacy of the situation".
At this point, even those who are not constitutional lawyers begin to smell a rat. Here we have a commercial company effectively making editorial judgments. If Google were a publisher, like, say, the New York Times, then the question of whether it should or should not publish the video could be trashed out via an established channel – the courts. But Google is not a publisher: it's something else entirely – an intermediary – a type of entity that's increasingly common nowadays and includes Facebook, Twitter and, oddly enough, Amazon.
So we're now in new and uncharted territory, nicely described by one legal scholar, Eoin O'Dell, on his blog: "First, in the online world, where most of us access the internet through a range of intermediaries, government censorship does not necessarily need to target the disfavoured speech; it need only target the intermediaries. Very few US companies would feel able to decline a request like that from the White House, and Google are to be commended for standing firm in those circumstances. Second, these intermediaries now have a great deal of practical power over online expression‚ not only can they be co-opted by government as agents of state censorship but they also have the capacity to act as censors in their own rights, as Google did in their unilateral action to block access in the Middle East."
Oddly enough, this issue surfaced first in relation to Amazon, which most people think of only as a retailer, but which also provides cloud-computing services that make it an intermediary. During the "Cablegate" controversy, when WikiLeaks came under sustained cyber-attack, the site was moved to Amazon's EC2 cloud service on the grounds that the company's infrastructure could withstand any level of attack. But the relief offered was temporary because Amazon summarily ejected WikiLeaks from its servers following outraged statements by some US politicians, notably Senator Joe Lieberman and vice-president Biden. Amazon claimed that it had ejected WikiLeaks simply because it was violating its service's terms and conditions.
Oh yeah? The Obama administration knew that a direct order to Amazon would not have survived a First Amendment challenge. But they guessed that the same effect could be achieved through a public statement by an official, executed by "voluntary" action of a private company.
What this means, as the legal scholar Yochai Benkler has pointed out, is that the safeguards to free speech ensured by the first amendment to the US constitution might not count for much in a public sphere built entirely of privately owned infrastructure.
Facebook – or YouTube, for that matter – may look like public spaces but when it comes to the crunch they offer no more freedom of speech than the average shopping mall.
Bitter - Nobody Cares What You're Doing Now
200906.27 - 11:00 UTC
Some lessons are hard lessons to learn, but if one considers how steel achieves strength, one will discover the human species has it easy! ~@~
Anonymous
The first person to 'clue me' about anonymity was Emmett Grogan and here is a snip from The Free-Fall Chronicles by Peter Coyote, who was a visitor at our H/A residence:
"Emmett's personal relationship to these formulations of "anonymous" and "free" was always ambiguous and complex. His notion of anonymity was to give his name away and have others use it as their own nom de plume. So many people claimed it for so many purposes that eventually some reporters would assert that there was no Emmett Grogan and that the name was a fiction created by the Diggers to confound the straight world. While Emmett’s largesse was one way of demonstrating lack of attachment to his name, it also made the name ubiquitous, and incidentally made Emmett himself famous among cognoscenti.
Life with Grogan was a daily exercise in such contradictions, a daily refinement of one's understanding of "truth." You could never be sure precisely where and how the hair had been split. If, for instance, he came into a room late for a meeting, he might apologize by telling a story about being attacked by street toughs, waiting to take revenge on him for some earlier intervention in their affairs. The subtext of such a story was always that everyone knew who he was and had some strong opinion about him. Usually we listened to these stories, without believing or disbelieving them, enjoying the drama of life with Emmett as payment enough. However, if someone was pushed to incredulity by a particularly outrageous claim and were to challenge him, Emmett might remove his dark glasses with the air of a smug magician and demonstrate his blackened eye and wounds. The wounds were definitely real, but was the story? If it was true, was it completely or partially true? One never knew and never found out.
"Never let them catch you in a lie," he said to me once at the beginning of a three month "run" one summer at New York's infamous Chelsea Hotel. This remark alerted me to Emmett's awareness of his own self-dramatizing, and the extent to which he used his sense of "theater" as an asset in his work. And what was that work?
The work was to "act-out" the life of your own hero; to live your life as you wanted to and refuse to be defeated by the myriad excuses that most people offered for their not being able to do that. Since this life was engendered in the imagination, imagination was one of the primary tools available for actualizing it."
Playing For Keeps written by Peter Coyote
And from Ringolevio by Emmett Grogan [page 443]:
And so, Emmett remained an anonym to most people and allowed those close to him to drive him nearly out of his mind with their maddening insults to his sense of brotherhood. Some members of the Free City Collective resented his rigid insistence that everything be carried out anonymously, while anyone who wanted to could and was taking credit for "free" things they'd never done and words they'd never spoken or written or thought.
The Summer of Love was mainly the result of such a lie. The Haight Independent Proprietors' Human Be-In lie and its result bore witness to what would be in store for a nation that allowed its children to be lied to by comical, fake-radical politicos whose masquerade they nurtured by giving them profitable access to the mass media. The adventure of poverty by young white people in love ghettos throughout the country, like the Haight-Ashbury and the Lower East Side, was pleasant fakery for most of them. But in the same way that real poverty has always given birth to real revolution, this feigned poverty of the adventurous would breed a false-bottomed, jerry-built revolution in which the adventurers would continue their make-believe and be followed by the rock-concert lumpen, tired of their own voyeurism.
Read Ringolevio By Emmett Grogan online at:
http://www.diggers.org/ringolevio.htm
The other two people to clue me to anonymity were Keith Lampe and Richard Stallman.
Dumbassocracy
Dumbassocracy is "Profit Not People" politics based on divide and conquer.
A few days ago I was about to 'tear a new one' in my generation for getting 'stoned out' on corporate drugs and not protecting future X, Y, & Z generations, but felt it would fall on deaf eyes.
[To Be Continued and here is a hint where this is headed]:
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley:
"I'd like to show you some very interesting conditioning for Alpha Plus Intellectuals. We have a big batch of them on Rack 5. First Gallery level."
The Foundation Series by Isaac Asimov:
"The premise of the series is that mathematician Hari Seldon has spent his life developing a branch of mathematics known as psychohistory.
It uses the law of mass action to predict the future on a large scale, such as of planets or empires.
Using these techniques, Seldon foresees the fall of the Galactic Empire, which encompasses the entire Milky Way. He also predicts that there will be a thirty-thousand-year dark age before the next great empire rises.
To prevent this, he decides to create a small secluded haven of technology in a corner of the galaxy (on the planet Terminus) called the Foundation, whose job it will be to preserve knowledge after the collapse, thus reducing the time required for the next Empire to rebuild. If done properly, it will take only a thousand years before the next empire rises."
AC/DC - It's A Long Way to the Top
Paul Krassner - The Realist/Writer/Comic/Investigative Satirist
Are Rape Jokes Funny?
By Paul Krassner
Abortion was still illegal in 1970. At the time, as both an underground abortion referral service and a stand-up satirist, I faced an undefined paradox. Irreverence was my only sacred cow, yet I wouldn't allow victims to become the target of my humor. There was one particular routine I did that called for a "rape-in" of legislators' wives in order to impregnate them so that they would then convince their husbands to decriminalize abortion.
But my feminist friends objected. I resisted at first, because it was such a well-intentioned joke. And then I reconsidered. Even in a joke, why should women be assaulted because men made the laws? Legislators' wives were the victims in that joke, but the legislators themselves were the oppressors, and their hypocrisy was really my target. But for me to stop doing that bit of comedy wasn't self-censorship. Rather, it was, I rationalized, a matter of conscious evolution.
Now, in July 2012, more than four decades later, rape-joking triggered a widespread controversy when a woman who prefers to remain anonymous went to a comedy club, expecting to be entertained. She chose the Laugh Factory in Hollywood because Dane Cook was on the bill, but he was followed by Daniel Tosh, and she had never heard of him.
In an email to her Tumblr blogger friend, she accused Tosh of saying that "rape jokes are always funny, how can a rape joke not be funny, rape jokes are hilarious." She was so offended that she felt morally compelled to shout, "Actually, rape jokes are never funny!" Tosh paused and then seized the opportunity, responding, "Wouldn't it be funny if that girl got raped by like five guys? Like right now? What if a bunch of guys just raped her?"
The audience laughed raucously. After all, isn't anyone who yells at a comedian practically asking to become an immediate target? But this woman was stunned and humiliated, and she left. In the lobby, she demanded to see the manager, who apologized profusely and gave her free tickets for another night--admitting, however, that she understood if this woman never wanted to return.
In her email, she concluded that, "having to basically flee while Tosh was enthusing about how hilarious it would be if I was gang-raped in that small, claustrophobic room was pretty viscerally terrifying and threatening all the same, even if the actual scenario was unlikely to take place. The suggestion of it is violent enough and was meant to put me in my place."
She added, "Please reblog and spread the word." And indeed, it went viral.
Coincidentally, on the same night that Tosh, in his signature sarcastic approach to reality, provoked the woman, Sarah Silverman was performing at Foxwords Casino and she touched upon the same taboo subject:
"We need more rape jokes. We really do. Needless to say, rape, the most heinous crime imaginable, seems it's a comic's dream, though. It's because it seems when you do rape jokes, that the material is so dangerous and edgy, and the truth is, it's like the safest area to talk about in comedy 'cause who's gonna complain about a rape joke? Rape victims? They don't even report rape. They're just traditionally not complainers."
Ironically, in The Aristocrats, a documentary entirely about a classic joke of the same name, Silverman complained that she was once raped by show-biz legend Joe Franklin.
In the fall of 1981, I booked myself for a cross-country tour, from New York to Chicago, Minneapolis, San Francisco and Los Angeles
While I was in New York, a nun was raped. When I got to Chicago, the rapist was also there. He had given himself up to the police. On stage I explained the true reason why: "He heard that the Mafia, in a rush of Christian compassion, put a $25,000 contract out on his life." That part was true. "So now I'm asking the Mafia to use their clout to end the war in El Salvador since four nuns were raped and killed there." They must've heard my request. By the time I got to Los Angeles, the Herald-Examiner was reporting that the Mafia was "probably the largest source of arms for the rebels in El Salvador."
In the spring of 1982, there was a Radical Humor Festival at New York University. That weekend, the festival sponsored an evening of radical comedy. The next day, my performance was analyzed by an unofficial women's caucus. Robin Tyler ("I am not a lesbian comic -- I am a comic who is a lesbian") served as the spokesperson for their conclusions. What had caused a stir was my reference to the use of turkey basters by single mothers-to-be who were attempting to impregnate themselves by artificial insemination.
Tyler explained to me, "You have to understand, some women still have a hang-up about penetration."
Well, I must have been suffering from Delayed Punchline Syndrome, because it wasn't until I was on a plane, contemplating the notion that freedom of absurdity transcends gender difference, that I finally did respond, in absentia: "Yeah, but you have to understand, some men still feel threatened by turkey basters."
Although Tosh is a consistently unapologetic performer for the sardonic material he exudes on his Comedy Central series--which features a running theme of rape jokes, even including one about his sister--for this occasion he decided to go the Twitter route: "All the out of context misquotes aside, I'd like to sincerely apologize." He also tweeted, "The point I was making before I was heckled is there are awful things in the world but you can still make jokes about them."
According to Jamie Masada, owner of the Laugh Factory, Tosh asked the audience, "What you guys wanna talk about?" Someone called out "Rape," and a woman in the audience started screaming, "No, rape is painful, don't talk about it." Then, says Masada, "Daniel came in, and he said, 'Well, it sounds like she's been raped by five guys'--something like that. I didn't hear properly. It was a comment--it wasn't a joke at the expense of this girl." Masada claims that she sat through the rest of Tosh's performance, which received a standing ovation, before she complained to the manager.
Fellow comedians defended Tosh with their own tweets. Dane Cook: "If you journey through this life easily offended by other peoples words I think it's best for everyone if you just kill yourself." Doug Stanhope: "You're hilarious. If you ever apologize to a heckler again I will rape you." Louis C.K.: "your show makes me laugh every time I watch it. And you have pretty eyes"--except that he wrote it after watching Tosh on TV, but before he learned about the Laugh Factory incident. Nevertheless, he was excoriated and accused of being a "rape apologist."
But C.K. himself is no stranger to sexual-assault jokes. Onstage, he has said that he's against rape--"unless you have a reason, like you wanna fuck someone and they won't let you, in which case what other option do you have?"
Conversely, on the second episode of his series, Louie, on the FX channel, he reversed such roles. After leaving a bar with an especially aggressive woman, Laurie (played by Melissa Leo), he had inadvertently met earlier, she performs fellatio on him in her pickup truck, then insists that he in turn perform cunnilingus on her. And he refuses.
So, she attacks him physically with unabashed viciousness, mounts him, and he gives in to her demand. In other words, Laurie rapes Louie. No joke. To watch this scene was positively jaw-dropping. It served as a reminder of how often comedians--and their jaded audiences--find prison-rape jokes not only to be funny, but also, as in the case of Jerry Sandusky, an act of delayed justice resulting in laughter that morphs into applause.
Meanwhile, reacting to the Tosh tirade, Julie Burton, president of the Women's Media Center, stated:
"If free speech permits a comedian to suggest a woman in his audience should be gang-raped, then it certainly permits us to object, and to ask what message this sends to survivors or to perpetuators. Tosh's comment was just one extreme example of pop culture's dismissive treatment of sexualized violence, which desensitizes audiences to enormous human suffering. Internet outcry is encouraging, but popular media needs to push back too."
And the original blogger posted another message:
"My friend and I wanted to thank everyone for there [sic] support and for getting this story out there. We just wanted everyone to know what Daniel Tosh had done and if you didn't agree then to stop following him. My friend is surprised to have gotten any form of an apology and doesn't wish to press any further charges against [him]." What? Press charges? Rape is a crime. Rape jokes aren't. They are the risk of free speech. The blog concluded, "She does plan on returning to comedy shows in the future, but to see comedians that she's seen before or to at least look up artists before going to their shows."
Wait till she finds out Dane Cook suggested that she kill herself.
What's funny is always subjective but not incapable of alteration. Now, over forty years since I stopped presenting my concept about a rape-in of legislators' wives, I have changed my mind about that decision in the process of writing this piece. I sent the first draft around to several friends, and I was particularly touched by a response from Emma Cofod, production manager at my publisher, Counterpoint/Soft Skull Press:
"Thank you for sharing this! I truly appreciate your thoughts here. I read about this woman's complaint last week, and the whole event turned my stomach. What Tosh did was personally threatening, which is not OK. But even though I fall neatly into the feminist camp, I think your original joke is hilarious--within context, and coming from a comedian whose philosophy I identify with. Color me conflicted."
I think that kind of conflict is healthy. And then the other shoe of my epiphany dropped when I saw Louis C.K.'s appearance on The Daily Show. This is what he told Jon Stewart between interruptions:
"If this [controversy about Tosh] is like a fight between comedians and bloggers--hyperbole and garbage comes out of those two places, just uneducated, unfettered--it's also a fight between comedians and feminists, because they're natural enemies, because, stereotypically speaking, feminists can't take a joke, and on the other side, comedians can't take criticism. Comedians are big pussies. So to one side you say, 'If you don't like a joke, stay out of the comedy clubs.' To the other side you say, 'If you don't like criticism, stop Googling yourself every ten seconds, because nobody's making you read it.' It's positive. To me, all dialogue is positive. I think you should listen.
"If somebody has the opposite feeling from me, I wanna hear it so I can add to mine. I don't wanna obliterate theirs with mine, that's how I feel. Now, a lot of people don't feel that way. For me, any joke about anything bad is great, that's how I feel. Any joke about rape, a Holocaust, the Mets--aarrgghh, whatever--any joke about something bad is a positive thing. But now I've read some blogs during this whole that made me enlightened at things I didn't know. This woman said how rape is something that polices women's lives, they have a narrow corridor, they can't go out late, they can't go to certain neighborhoods, they can't dress a certain way, because they might--I never–-that's part of me now that wasn't before, and I can still enjoy the rape jokes.
"But this is also about men and women, because a lot of people are trading blogs with e--ach other, couples are fighting about Daniel Tosh and rape jokes -- that's what I've been reading in blogs -- but they're both making a classic gender mistake, because the women are saying, 'Here's how I feel about this,' but they're also saying, 'My feelings should be everyone's primary concern.' Now the men are making this mistake, they're saying, 'Your feelings don't matter, your feelings are wrong and your feelings are stupid.' If you've ever lived with a woman, you can't step in shit worse than that, than to tell a woman that her feelings don't matter. So, to the men I say, 'Listen to what the women are saying about this.' To the women I say, "Now that we heard you, shut the fuck up for a minute, and let's all get back together and kill the Jews.' That's all I have to say about it."
The audience laughed and applauded, as they did fifty years ago when Lenny Bruce ended a riff on prejudice: "Randy, it won't matter any more even if you are colored and I'm Jewish, and even if Fritz is Japanese, and Wong is Greek, because then we're all gonna stick together--and beat up the Polacks."
My notion of a rape-in of legislators' wives in order to impregnate them was no more to be taken literally than C.K.'s killing the Jews or Lenny's beating up the Polacks. Rape-in was a misunderstood metaphor; a pro-choice parable that, unfortunately, has become timely again.
Paul Krassner publishes the infamous Disneyland Memorial Orgy poster. Two of his books, both expanded and updated, have just been published: a collection, Pot Stories for the Soul; and his autobiography, Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut: Misadventures in the Counterculture. All three items are available at paulkrassner.com.
Alerts + Notes from ~@~ Listed Below:
49 quadrocopter in outdoor-formation-flight / Ars Electronica Futurelab
Politicians Support Terrorism Against U.S. Military
The Bush Administration Committed Mass War Crimes and Walk Free
Bradley Manning Blew the Whistle On Them & Went To Jail
Almost Gone by Graham Nash and James Raymond
A companion video for "Almost Gone" -- a new song by legendary singer-songwriter Graham Nash and musician James Raymond (son of David Crosby) -- is being released today in support of accused U.S. Army whistleblower Bradley Manning. The free download is available on Nash's website (www.grahamnash.com) and the Bradley Manning Support Network site www.bradleymanning.org.
The release is timed to Manning's first judicial hearing scheduled for December 16th, following more than 17-months in custody, including a year in solitary confinement that Amnesty International has characterized as "harsh and punitive."
Visually, the Almost Gone video is punctuated with bold graphics, disturbing images and harsh facts. Its release is scheduled to precede Manning's pre-trial hearing on December 16, which is the day before his 24th birthday. The Bradley Manning Support Network has named the following day, December 17, its International Day of Solidarity (http://events.bradleymanning.org/). PFC Manning, an Army intelligence analyst who had been stationed near Baghdad, was arrested in May 2010 under suspicion of leaking classified information, including a video showing the killing of civilians, to the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks.
Nash and Raymond composed the song "Almost Gone (The Ballad of Bradley Manning)" during this spring's US tour of Crosby-Nash, and the new recording serves as the music bed for the video; it features an impassioned lead vocal by Nash, a two-time Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted (Crosby, Stills & Nash, and The Hollies). "Bradley Manning is a hero to me," he sings, acknowledging Manning's role in making public videos and documents that shed light on such as issues as the true number and cause of civilian casualties in Iraq, human rights abuses by U.S.-funded contractors and foreign militaries, and the role that spying and bribes play in international diplomacy.
Where there is no Justice, there will never be Peace.
Jail the Criminal Republican Bush Administration for War Crimes!
Cancer-stricken judge admits marijuana use
by JESSICA DYE, Last updated 13:00 18/05/2012, Article Source
A cancer-stricken judge in New York has become an unlikely voice in support of legalising the use of medical marijuana with the admission that he smokes pot to ease the side-effects of his treatments.
Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Gustin Reichbach, who is being treated for pancreatic cancer, wrote in a New York Times article on Thursday that he had been using marijuana provided by friends at "great personal risk" to help him cope with the nausea, sleeplessness and loss of appetite from chemotherapy treatments.
"This is not a law-and-order issue; it is a medical and a human rights issue," wrote Reichbach, 65, who has spent 21 years on the bench in Kings County Supreme Court, and continues to hear cases even as he receives cancer treatment.
In the past, admitting to taking a few puffs of marijuana has been enough to derail some judges' careers. US appeals court Judge Douglas Ginsburg saw his nomination for the US Supreme Court go up in smoke in 1987 after admitting he had used marijuana several times in the 1960s and 1970s.
In 2011, a Georgia judge was removed from the bench for various infractions including publicly admitting to smoking pot regularly.
New York is not among the US 16 states and the District of Columbia that allow medical marijuana. Cannabis remains an illegal narcotic under federal law.
Under New York's Code for Judicial Conduct, judges are required to "respect and comply with the law." First-time possession of less than 25 grams of marijuana is punishable by a $100 maximum fine.
While Reichbach's editorial amounts to an admission he broke the law, his story is more likely to elicit admiration than condemnation, judicial ethics experts said.
"It's brave and wonderful, but it's heart-wrenching," said Ellen Yaroshefsky, a law professor at the Benjamin Cardozo School of Law. "There are key moments in history where a judge makes a bold stand. This is one of the moments, and we should be proud of it."
LEGAL CONSEQUENCES UNCLEAR
In New York, disciplinary actions involving judges are handled by the state's Commission on Judicial Conduct, which reviews allegations of criminal activity and other wrongdoing and decides on an appropriate reprimand. That could range from a confidential cautionary letter to dismissal, although more serious forms of punishment require approval from the state's chief judge.
Robert Tembeckjian, counsel for the commission, declined to say whether any inquiry could or would be opened into Reichbach's statements.
"Information relating to the conduct of judges that appears in newspapers is routinely reviewed by the commission," Tembeckjian said.
The Brooklyn District Attorney's Office did not immediately comment on whether any action was being contemplated against the judge. But first-time possession of a small amount of marijuana is classified only as a civil offense.
A spokesman for the state court system, David Bookstaver, also declined to address whether Reichbach might face consequences for the editorial, saying only that "everyone's thoughts in the court system are with Justice Reichbach as he battles a very serious disease."
One potential conflict that may arise from Reichbach's comments is his ability to hear cases involving marijuana possession, said Monroe Freedman, a law professor at Hofstra University.
"He has admitted to unlawful conduct," Freedman said. "Ordinarily, that could be a problem, but it's a very narrow, specific situation and I would hope nothing would come of it that would be adverse to the judge."
Support for medical-marijuana legislation is gaining support among New Yorkers. A poll from Siena Research Institute released on Wednesday found 57 per cent of New Yorkers supported establishing a legal framework for allowing doctors to prescribe marijuana for cancer, chronic pain and other illnesses.
On Tuesday, a New York Assembly committee approved medical-marijuana legislation, and the Democratic-controlled Assembly appears poised to pass it for the third time in five years. A spokesman for the state Senate Republican majority said that chamber was unlikely to act on the measure this year. - Reuters
Adele 'confirmed' for James Bond Skyfall theme song
Singer recording theme song to next 007 film, reports say
Sean Michaels, guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 18 September 2012 11.27 BST, Article Source
Bond girl ... Adele reportedly confirmed for Skyfall theme song. Photograph: Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images
Adele may finally have her moment as a Bond girl. The singer has reportedly been confirmed to sing the theme song for the new James Bond film Skyfall.
Total Film reports that Adele has already recorded some or all of the song, also called Skyfall, which is due to be released at the end of October. The 24-year-old, who is currently pregnant, was recently seen hanging around an MGM recording studio. The singer also revealed in April that she had plans to release a new single before the end of 2012. This would be the singer's first new material since her album 21 in January 2011.
Bond fans have been hoping for an Adele theme song since before the last 007 film, Quantum of Solace. She was rumoured at the time as a possible replacement for Amy Winehouse, but the theme song was eventually recorded by Jack White and Alicia Keys. Since then, Adele has risen from being one of Britain's hottest artists to arguably the most successful singer of the 21st century.
Earlier this year, Adele said she would be taking a break before writing her next album. (She later revealed that she was pregnant with her first child.) "If I didn't write my own songs, I'd be out next week with a new album," she told NRJ Radio. "[But] I have to take time and live a little bit."
Skyfall, directed by Sam Mendes, will open in cinemas on 26 October.
Hunt launched after Halliburton loses
radioactive rod in Texas desert
Fears rod containing americium-241/beryllium could fall into hands of terrorists after employees of US oilfield services company lost it in transit between oil wells
Rupert Neate, guardian.co.uk, Monday 17 September 2012 16.38 BST, Article Source
A radioactive rod similar to the one lost by Halliburton
Halliburton has lost a seven-inch radioactive rod somewhere in the Texas desert. The National Guard has been called in to help to find the device, which employees of the controversial US oilfield services company lost a week ago.
The rod, which contains americium-241/beryllium and is stamped with a radiation warning symbol with the words "Danger Radioactive: Do not handle. Notify civil authorities if found", was lost during a 130-mile journey between oil well sites in Pecos and Odessa last Tuesday.
The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) warned that the radioactive materials "could cause permanent injury to a person who handled them".
The agency said americium-241/beryllium, known as Am-241, is a "category 3" source of radiation and would normally have to be held for some hours before causing health problems.
But the NRC still warned that "it could possibly – although it is unlikely – be fatal to be close to this amount of unshielded radioactive material for a period of days to weeks".
A spokeswoman for the NRC said there are no records of radioactive rods lost in the last five years. "[There has] never been one lost in the public domain [in the last five years]," she said.
"Someone wanting to blow this source up would have to find it first."
The route the Halliburton truck took between Pecos and Odessa has been painstakingly searched with radioactive detection gear three times with assistance from local police and the National Guard.
"When the crew went to remove the Am-241 source they discovered the source transport container lock and plug were not in place and that the source was missing," the NRC said in its report into the incident. "The crew returned to the well site near Pecos and searched for the source, but did not find it. The radiation safety officer stated that the lock was found in the storage compartment in the back of the truck. The transport container plug was not in the container."
The three-man Halliburton crew, who had been using the rod to identify oil and gas deposits suitable for fracking, have been questioned by the FBI.
The NRC said Halliburton was carrying out a forensic search of the truck. "They are literally stripping it down, removing every piece of equipment looking for the source," the agency said.
Halliburton said it would offer a reward to anyone who finds the rod, but cautioned the public to stay at least 25ft away from the device.
"The route between the two well sites continues to be combed using specialised equipment in extensive ground searches and aerial analysis," the company said.
Halliburton, which was once run by former vice president Dick Cheney, has previously attracted controversy for its role in BP's Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster, building Guantánamo Bay and for working in Iraq, Iran and Libya.
How Halliburton STEALS From the American People
A close look at Halliburton corruption
Mitt Romney stands by gaffe
but says case not 'elegantly stated'
Romney confirms authenticity of video where he calls 47% of voters government-dependent, in most damaging mishap yet
Ewen MacAskill in Washington, guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 18 September 2012 05.09 BST, Article Source
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney speaks at a hastily-convened press conference Link to this video
Mitt Romney's campaign came close to hitting the self-destruct button when he stood by a secret video recording suggesting that 47% of Americans are government-dependent "victims" who do not pay taxes.
In a hastily-convened press conference, the Republican presidential candidate confirmed the authenticity of the video and opted against disavowing the views expressed in it. He said only that the case was not "elegantly stated" and that he had "spoken off the cuff".
He was speaking after a secret video recording was posted on a website in which he was caught denigrating people who receive benefits from the government.
The video that appeared on the Mother Jones website
He went on suggest they could expect little help from him if he became president.
"My job is not to worry about those people," he said.
He added that all these government-dependent people would support Barack Obama.
The video was recorded a few months ago at a fund-raising event behind-closed-doors.
The release of the video is the most damaging episode yet in a campaign filled with Romney mishaps. His campaign is in danger of turning into one of the most ineptly-run in recent US political history, though there are still seven weeks left to turn it round.
The Obama campaign described the video as "shocking".
In his press conference, in California, Romney basically repeated the case he made in the video that the 47% dependent on the government would vote for Obama, though couched in slightly less inflammatory language. Obama's policies are "attractive to people who do not pay taxes", Romney said.
Romney tends to avoid the press as much as possible and it is a sign of the seriousness of the situation that he had to make an impromptu statement. He attempted to pose his comments as part of a broader philosophical debate about the future of America. "Do you believe in a government-centered society that provides more and more benefits? Or do you believe instead in a free enterprise society where people are able to pursue their dreams?"
He insisted he wanted to help all Americans.
While his views about people dependent on the government will be applauded by parts of the right, he risks alienating independents who do not share his view of American society and also motivating disgruntled Democrats who may have otherwise have abstained in the 6 November election to get out and vote.
It also plays into the portrait that the Democrats have been gradually building of Romney as an extremely wealthly individual who is out of touch with working-class and middle-class Americans.
At a bare minimum, the controversy ensures it will be the dominant theme of the week, with Romney forced on the defensive again, with detailed discussion of who precisely constitutes the 47%.
It also means that the issue of how much he himself paid in taxes will resurface, with calls for him to release his tax returns beyond the two years he has volunteered.
The video, was posted on the website of the liberal Mother Jones magazine. It came only hours after the Romney campaign acknowledged it is struggling when it announced it was to change strategy. Romney is trailing Obama in the polls by about three percentage points.
In the video, Romney said: "All right, there are 47% who are with him (Obama), who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to healthcare, to food, to housing, to you-name-it."
He added: "These are people who pay no income tax."
Apart from offending a large part of the population, the comment is also inaccurate. Many of those he includes in the 47% do pay tax. Many of those also receive government money because they are elderly and have been paying into the system all their lives.
The controversy broke only hours after the Romney campaign set out to recalibrate its strategy. It said it would attempt to give a clearer, more positive picture of their candidate as it seeks to regain the initiative with just 50 days to go until the election.
The new strategy will not abandon negative campaigning, but will focus on positive ads as well as speeches to spell out the Romney would pursue in office, in particular his five-point economic plan.
Romney began his campaign early in the summer intent on making the election about Obama's economic record and making himself as small a target as possible by disclosing little about his own policies.
But since then there has barely been a clear week in which Romney has been able to get his message across, either because of a barrage of ads on his record as chief executive of Bain Capital and his unwillingness to release more than two years' worth of tax records, or because of gaffes on his own side.
CAMEROON: 3 DAYS TO FREE ROGER
via Robin Kilgore
Roger has been sentenced to three years in prison in Cameroon. His crime? Sending an SMS to another man in a country where it is illegal to be gay.
The SMS message simply read "I'm very much in love w/u" on a small sign in the picture of himself, holding the sign. His message was sent to another man. That was his only crime. My understanding is that he has spent a year imprisoned already and his case is currently under review. Friends, homosexuality occurs throughout Nature, including Humanity and is completely 'natural' and normal or it would not be so commonplace throughout nature and the World. Please take a moment to sign the petition by clicking on the link at the bottom of the page. Ask yourself, "should infatuation or affection be a CRIME" ?????
There's still a chance for him, though: Cameroon's president, Paul Biya, and the Minister of Justice could put a stop to this right now, even before Roger goes back before the judge on Monday. And, they've shown in the past that they care what the world thinks of them.
Right now while there's international media attention on Roger's case, I just signed a petition calling on President Biya and the Minister of Justice to let Roger go free and end the laws that imprisoned him.
Your voice matters, so I'm asking you to help to make a difference.
Will you join me? +++ http://www.allout.org/Roger
With Love and Light, As Ever, Robin
Keith Lampe - Co-Founder of YIPPIE and Progressive Activist Groups
September 16: Occupy Guitarmy OWS Anniversary Concert
Featuring Tom Morello, Jello Biafra, and Many More
After leaving the Spectra Pipeline Blast Zone, the Occupy Guitarmy will lead a musical march through the village to Foley Square. At Foley Square there will be a giant celebration for and by Occupy Wall Street, including an educational and community-oriented Occupy Town Square and a concert, which will feature Tom Morello, Jello Biafra, Das Racist, Rebel Diaz, Michelle Shocked, and many others.
Occupy Guitarmy will open the concert will a massive sing-along version of “Wall Street, Your Kingdom Must Come Down” leading into “Frack You.” We will end the concert with a massive singalong and guest verses of “Which Side Are You On?”
Bring your instruments, noisemakers, and voices. 12-1pm March leaves from Specra to Foley Square 1pm-6pm Occupy Town Square at Foley Square (Center Street and Worth Street) - occupywallst.org/
Bruce Springsteen & Tom Morello - The ghost of Tom Joad
Alerts + Notes from ~@~ Listed Below:
Free Event in Golden Gate Park featuring live music,
skill shares, and community building.
September 14th, 2012, 3 PM
780 Frederick Street
Sat. and Sun. Locations TBA
Check this site on Saturday
via Cat, Richard, Karl, Randy, & CurtisThe HANC Recycling Center/Community Garden and other Community Gardens will be advocated for, as well as preventing privatization of Golden Gate Park.
Bob Dylan: fans who called me Judas can rot in hell
Singer also responds angrily to accusations of plagiarism, saying 'wussies and pussies complain about that stuff'
Caspar Llewellyn Smith, guardian.co.uk, Thursday 13 September 2012 10.56 BST, Comments, Article Source
'There are different rules for me' ... Bob Dylan responds to his detractors. Photograph: Christopher Polk/Getty Images for VH1Bob Dylan has taken issue with being labelled "Judas" in the 60s, saying of his accusers: "All those evil motherfuckers can rot in hell."
The 71-year old singer's decision to abandon his acoustic roots and "go electric" prompted the insult from an audience member at his famous Free Trade Hall show in Manchester in May 1966.
Responding to criticism that he plagiarised the work of other authors on his recent albums, Dylan told Rolling Stone: "Wussies and pussies complain about that stuff. It's an old thing – it's part of the tradition. It goes way back.
"These are the same people that tried to pin the name Judas on me. Judas, the most hated name in human history! If you think you've been called a bad name, try to work your way out from under that. Yeah, and for what? For playing an electric guitar? As if that is in some kind of way equitable to betraying our Lord and delivering him up to be crucified."
To publicise the release of his new album, Tempest, Dylan discussed claims with interviewer Mikal Gilmore that lyrics from 2001's Love and Theft bear a close resemblance to phrases in a 1995 biography of a Japanese gangster and that he borrowed from the Civil War poetry of Henry Timrod.
Telling Dylan that "in folk and jazz, quotation is a rich and enriching tradition" but that some critics feel he has failed to cite his sources, the singer responded to Gilmore: "Oh, yeah, in folk and jazz, quotation is a rich and enriching tradition. That certainly is true. It's true for everybody, but me. There are different rules for me. And as far as Henry Timrod is concerned, have you even heard of him? Who's been reading him lately? And who's pushed him to the forefront? Who's been making you read him? And ask his descendants what they think of the hoopla. And if you think it's so easy to quote him and it can help your work, do it yourself and see how far you can get.
"I'm working within my art form," Dylan added. "It's that simple. I work within the rules and limitations of it. There are authoritarian figures that can explain that kind of art form better to you than I can. It's called songwriting. It has to do with melody and rhythm, and then after that, anything goes. You make everything yours. We all do it."
The identity of the figure who shouted "Judas!" at the Manchester Free Trade Hall between the songs Ballad of a Thin Man and Like a Rolling Stone has been disputed, with two fans laying claim to the distinction.
John Flores - Graphics
Art Lecture 2 "Regret" By Dunce ArtMade by a friend of my daughter ... He is a truly creative artist and is drawing and painting continuously, don't know how he has time to do anything else.
Gomma TV - Punk TV Italy
Hi Curtis,
How's it going? Do you know the story of this guy in Italy?
www.gomma.tv - solo networking, niente a che vedere col modello televisivo
My Open Source Cure
Cura open source per un tumore: appello digitale di Salvatore Iaconesi
Salvatore Iaconesi è un esperto di tecnologia, un artista, una figura polivalente con un curriculum ricco e vario. Recentemente, ha scoperto di avere un tumore al cervello. I risultati degli esami gli sono stati però consegnati in un formato chiuso, proprietario. Salvatore li ha "craccati" e resi disponibili per il download a tutti, con un'idea di condivisione e ricerca di aiuto allo stesso tempo. Salvatore chiama la sua idea "Cura Open Source", e scrive: "Ieri sono andato a ritirare la mia cartella clinica digitale: devo farla vedere a molti dottori. Purtroppo era in formato chiuso e proprietario e, quindi, non potevo aprirla né con il mio computer, né potevo mandarla in quel formato a tutti coloro che avrebbero potuto salvarmi la vita. L'ho craccata.
L'ho aperta e ho trasformato i suoi contenuti in formati aperti, in modo da poterli condividere con tutti. Solo oggi sono già riuscito a condividere i dati sul mio stato di salute (sul mio tumore al cervello) con 3 dottori. 2 mi hanno già risposto. Sono riuscito a farlo solo perchè i dati erano in formato aperto e accessibile: loro hanno potuto aprire i file dal loro computer, dal loro tablet. Mi hanno potuto rispondere anche da casa. Progressivamente, renderò disponibili tutte le risposte che riceverò, sempre in formati aperti, così che chiunque abbia il mio stesso male possa beneficiare delle soluzioni che ho trovato". L'invito si conclude con una richiesta di collaborazione per chiunque sia interessato: "Ci sono cure per il corpo, per lo spirito, per la comunicazione. Artisti, designer, hacker, scienziati, dottori, fotografi, videomaker, musicisti, scrittori. Tutti possono darmi una cura", scrive Iaconesi. "Prendete le informazioni sul mio male, se ne avete voglia, e datemi una cura: fateci un video, un'opera d'arte, una mappa, un testo, una poesia, un gioco, oppure provate a capire come risolvere il mio problema di salute" (t.t.)
Salvatore Iaconesi's Video: My Open Source Cure
I have a brain cancer.
I converted my digital medical records into open, accessible formats, turning them into a very personal form of Open Data.
This data is available at http://www.artisopensource.net/cure
Artists, scientists, doctors, designers, hackers are all invited to send me their cure.
In different cultures the word CURE means different things, referring to the body, the soul or to society.
Send me your cure at: info@artisopensource.net and it will be published on the website, so that anyone (maybe someone with my same disease) will be able to benefit from it.
Amestizo - BLOG + NEW: http://amestizo.bigcartel.com/
Skrillex & Damian "Jr. Gong" Marley - Make It Bun Dem
Rainbow Puddle - Stellar Light Shows
BURNING MAN FPV - Black Rock City Aerial Tour 2012
If your party can run the nation for eight years, and then have a national convention and not invite Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Karl Rove or Tom DeLay, you're not a political movement. You're the witness protection program. - Bill Maher
![Bill Maher on the GOP canidates and the missing [CRIMINAL] Bush Administration](images/maheronbushco.jpg "Bill Maher on the GOP canidates and the missing [CRIMINAL] Bush Administration")
Amateur Radio - A hobby I was very fond of
"Night of Nights", Video story by Seriously Now by peggy day via Richard DillmanKPH, the famous ex-RCA coast station located north of San Francisco, returned to the air for a commemorative broadcast on 13 July at 0001 GMT (12 July at 1701 PDT), 2 years and one minute after the last commercial Morse transmission in North America. Commercial operators, including former members of the KPH staff, were at the keys.
The second annual "Night of Nights", as the event has become known. Last year the transmitters and receivers were both located at the transmitting station in Bolinas, CA. Since then the receiving station at Pt. Reyes, CA has been largely restored. This year several operating positions were activated at Pt. Reyes and the transmitters in Bolinas will be keyed remotely, just as was done when the station was in daily operation.
Night of Nights Video
Readers of these pages will recall that the big annual MRHS event is called Night of Nights. On 12 July 1999 the supposed last commercial Morse message was sent from the Globe Wireless master station in Half Moon Bay, CA. Many of us were there.
For an emotional inside look at what it was like on that last day read Richard Dillman's report "The End of Morse".
The prediction of the death of Morse was premature. The idea of the MRHS was born on the day of the alleged last transmission. And by 12 July 2000 - one year and one minute after that supposed last Morse transmission - the famous call signs KPH and KFS were once again heard on the air from the first transmitters restored by MRHS volunteers. Every year since the tradition has continued and expanded.
Many have made the trip to join us for the Night of Nights events at the remote and foggy receive site on the edge of the Pacific Ocean. Others have joined us over the air, waiting before their receivers with the earphones on, often in the early hours, for the first signals to come arcing over the dome of the Earth at 0001gmt. For those True Believers who are not able to join us in person we present the video above. You'll see the activity in the Morse operating room and the opening message being sent.
The video was produced and kindly made available by Peggy Day and the local on line video news service Seriously Now. We thank them deeply for allowing us to share their work. via Maritime Radio Historical Society
Mike Wilhelm - Charlatans, Flamin' Groovies, Loose Gravel, and more
High Curtis,
Mike Wilhelm & Hired Guns play at the Blue Wing Saloon in Upper Lake on September 17 from 6 'til 9 pm at which time the sidewalks are rolled up in Upper Lake. Bring your dancing shoes.
Photo by Keizo Yamazawa taken at the Blues Hall of Fame Awards. Mike Wilhelm and Rev. RabiaPersonnel on this occasion are myself on guitar & vocals; the superb vocals and guitar of Rev. Rabia, three time Grammy winner Paul McCandless on saxes; smokin' guitarist Gary Bouley returns; longtime Hired Guns bassist Jamie Webber and our great new drummer Colin "the Kid" Holmes + others TBA. Address of the Blue Wing is 5920 Main St., Upper Lake, CA 95485, phone (707)275-2233. www.BlueWingSaloon.com for further info. Reservations recommended for parties of six or more.
Photo by Keizo Yamazawa taken at the Blues Hall of Fame Awards. Mike Wilhelm, Rev. Rabia, and Ed EarleyThis is going to be fun! Happy trails, Mike Wilhelm
Stormy Monday, Mike Wilhelm & Hired GunsMike & Hired Guns play the T-Bone Walker classic. Two cam video courtesy of Diamond Ed Chatham (Bebop42's Channel). Personnel: Mike Wilhelm, guitar & vocal; Jamie Webber, bass; "Sticks," drums; Gary Bouley, guitar; Dave Gower, tenor sax and, last but not least, Ed Earley on slide trombone.
Karl Cohen - Association International du Film d'Animation-SF Newsletter
IS AN OBSCURE ART SCHOOL TEACHING ANIMATION
IN SAN FRANCISCO TOO BIG TO FAIL?by Karl Cohen
ASIFA-SF NEWSLETTER
Association International du Film d'Animation
(International Animated Film Association)
September 2012What is Great Animation?
Noted historian and professor Karl Cohen surveys top artists and educators on what is great animation.
By Karl Cohen | Animation World Network | Monday, August 20, 2012 at 2:50 pm, Article Source
Posted In | Magazines: AnimationWorld | Site Categories: Education and Training, Films, People, Short Films
An image from Paul & Sandra Fierlinger's new film, Slocum; at sea with himself. Courtesy of Paul & Sandra Fierlinger.Since the late 1970s I've been saying animation is a great, if not the greatest art form of our time. I recently decided to ask students, animation artists, teachers and studio administrators, what is great animation? I wasn't expecting to find a single answer as a lot has to do with personal taste and how one relates to it in their life. What I hoped to learn was some of the many ways people admire it.
I began by asking my San Francisco State animation history students at the start of the spring semester what they thought was really exciting animation. When the semester was ending they were asked to write a short paper on what they thought was great animation. I was curious to see if their interests and answers had changed since the course had begun. Had the course influenced their thinking?
Comments By Students
On the first day of class I asked what films they expected to study. Most students had relatively little exposure to animation outside of first run features, anime, TV series, music videos and whatever they had discovered on the Internet. When asked what their favorite animated films were they mentioned The Simpsons, Family Guy and other TV shows, Disney features from the 1990s, and several anime titles.
Most were surprised when I told them that I would barely cover most of the works they were familiar with. In fact one year a student was so upset with that news that he dropped out as he thought the course was going to be about anime!
My course exists mainly to inspire animation students, so they see a lot of historical and contemporary shorts from the US and abroad. They are unfamiliar with most of them as they are not easy to see. Most are important works of exceptional artistic or literary merit; ones that advanced the art and technology of animation. There isn't time to show run-of-the-mill work.
For their final paper I asked them to select and write about three films that they have seen and consider great works. They did not have to be ones seen in class. I was delighted that their papers showed they had given a lot of thought to the assignment.
One student picked silent stars (Wall-E, Gromit and the male star of The Triplets of Belleville). Another wrote about acting by faceless characters (Luxo Jr., a silhouette short by Lotte Reininger and the Oompahs, a UPA short staring musical instruments). The most frequently discussed film was Madame Tutli-Putli from the National Film Board of Canada, followed by UPA's Tell Tale Heart, Henry Selick's "The Nightmare Before Christmas" and Nick Park's "Creature Comforts." One student wrote about three modern stop-motion horror films, Door by David Anderson, M. Tutli-Putli and Nightmare Before Christmas, while another found M. Tutli-Putli, Chris Landreth's "Ryan" and Jan Svankmajer's "Dimensions of Dialog" exciting explorations of the human condition.
A few students stressed the storytelling abilities in certain works including films that had no narration (the Pixar short For the Birds and Balance by Christoph and Wolfgang Lauenstein). An Asian student wrote about classic Chinese shorts. Other nice papers were on expressive acting, new directions in animation, things animation can do that can't be done in live action films and developments in stop-motion work.
Several things surprised me. The only Disney feature mentioned was Fantasia. One paper mentioned the "Sorcerer's Apprentice" segment from it and another discussed the "Night on Bald Mountain." Nobody wrote about TV animation, features from DreamWorks or shorts by the Fleishers, Disney, Otto Messmer, Winsor McCay, or Tex Avery. Several foreign features that were briefly mentioned but not shown in class were discussed. They included Persepolis, Waltz with Bashir, Mary and Max, Grave of the Fireflies, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away and Richard Williams' unfinished Thief and the Cobbler. I also noticed that many of the films chosen had received Oscar nominations. - [Continue Reading: Page 2 - Page 3 - Page 4]
Out of control copyright bots
are making a mockery of the DMCA
By Ed Oswald, ExtremeTech, on September 6, 2012 at 10:37 am, Article Source
While First Lady Michelle Obama's primetime speech Tuesday night got rave reviews, it apparently wasn't as popular with the automatic copyright bots that flag infringing content.
Shortly after the live stream ended -- which was hosted by YouTube -- the videos were then blocked. Those trying to watch replays of Mrs. Obama's speech saw the following message: "This video contains content from WMG, SME, Associated Press (AP), UMG, Dow Jones, New York Times Digital, The Harry Fox Agency (HFA), Warner Chappell, UMPG Publishing and EMI Music Publishing, one or more of whom have blocked it in your country on copyright grounds."
YouTube's move came as a surprise to both the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Obama campaign, who were unaware of the block and had a link to the live stream from their front pages with the message clearly visible. YouTube chalked the gaffe up to a "technical error," but failed to explain why Mrs. Obama's convention speech is still marked as private.
Was there really a copyright claim on the First Lady's speech, or was this yet another case of the copyright algorithms used by content providers getting a bit overzealous? This is the third time now in the past month that a major event has been disrupted due to some kind of copyright issue.
Twice in a week
Those watching the Hugo Awards via Ustream on Sunday night also found themselves cut off after copyright bots reacted to a clip of the popular science-fiction series Doctor Who. The message "Worldcon banned due to copyright infringment" appeared, and created a firestorm of negative comments against Ustream across social media.
Ustream's system requires that broadcasters inform the site of the use of copyrighted content and if they have the permission to use it. Once that information is provided, the broadcast is "whitelisted." Worldcon -- the event where the awards ceremony is held -- apparently never followed that practice.
The gaffe caused Ustream to rethink its copyright protection strategy.
"I have suspended use of this third-party system until we are able to recalibrate the settings so that we can better balance the needs of broadcasters, viewers, and copyright holders," CEO and founder Brad Hunstable writes in a blog post. "While we are committed to protecting copyright, we absolutely must ensure our amazing and democratizing platform allows legal broadcasters to Ustream their events and shows."
These events follow another takedown, which briefly booted the NASA Mars Rover Curiosity landing video offline in early August. The news organization that flagged it -- Scripps Local News -- has also "mistakenly" demanded the takedown of other NASA videos in the past, all of which should be in the public domain.
This is happening way too often
NASA says this happens all the time, which is sad. "Everything from imagery to music gets flagged," Bob Jacobs, NASA's deputy associate administrator for communications, told the Register last month. "We've been working with YouTube in a an effort to stop the automatic disabling of videos. So far, it hasn't helped much."
So what can be done? The obvious solution is to lessen dependence on automated systems. The Digital Millenium Copyright Act compels content providers to respond promptly to takedown requests. In the interest of saving time and money, companies have increased their dependence on copyright-sniffing bots.
But as we're now seeing, these automated systems are beginning to run amok. It's time to rethink copyright protections. There needs to be a system where select accounts who are known to have a legitimate purpose and/or most likely the permissions to run copyrighted content can do so without needing to worry about these bots disrupting their content.
Without a system in place to protect legitimate use of copyrighted material, both the content producer and the copyright holder will be hurt. People already see the overzealous actions of the entertainment industry when it comes to copyright as ridiculous: incidents like this are only going to make that problem worse. [Photo credit]
Clint Eastwood lambasted President Obamachair
and Chuck Norris warned of 1,000 years of socialism
David Cameron can only dream of such support
Lost in showbiz blog, Article Source
Clint Eastwood shows his rightwing support by lambasting 'that chair'. Photograph: Martin H Simon/Corbis
With just days to go before London 2012 is banished to memory and the Olympic Park can prepare for its future as the derelict backdrop to a million gritty Channel 4 dramas about gang violence, it is time to face facts. Yes, it was fun being proud to be British. Yes, by the end of the Paralympics even the most hardened of us had managed to stop instinctively flinching at the sight of a union flag. But enough's enough. It is probably time to start agreeing again that Americans are better than us.
No, really, they are. Americans are better than us because they know how to commit. Look at how their celebrities endorse rightwing politicians. Would a British celebrity ever champion a Tory by publicly muttering incoherent abuse at an empty chair for 12 solid minutes? Would a British celebrity turn up on YouTube to make a series of dark threats about the millennium of catastrophe that would engulf the planet if Ed Miliband ever made it to the other side of the House of Commons? Hardly. The best David Cameron could manage was Gary Barlow, and all he did was launch a rubbishy X Factor rip-off scheme in Nantwich and look for all the world like a man ready to accept the sweet release of death.
Americans are better than us because they count Clint Eastwood and Chuck Norris as two of their own – both grizzled, no-nonsense men's men who will do whatever it takes to ensure that Mitt Romney ousts Barack Obama in November. Even if that means using their positions of influence to spout such an aggressive torrent of cobblers that the rest of us can't help but react in the same way we would if our dad turned up to our school disco in a backwards-facing baseball cap and started yelling the word "nang" at the dinnerladies.
Let's start with Clint. There was a time when he was the coolest man alive – poised and simmering and economical and intimidating beyond words. Even though that man disappeared long ago – replaced by someone preoccupied with directing shamelessly middlebrow Oscar bait and occasionally appearing on his wife's dizzyingly vapid reality TV show – it was nevertheless still a horrible surprise to see him turn up at the Republican national convention in Florida last week and haltingly lambast an empty barstool for its continued inability to travel to universities in anything other than an inappropriately sized aeroplane, until the chair apparently told him to go and screw himself.
However, even though the outside world reacted with mortification that Clint a) was endorsing Romney in such a painfully confused way and b) apparently now has a voice like Kermit the Frog, the speech seemed to go down well with its target audience – convention attendees who keep accidentally wearing flags on their heads instead of hats. So much so, in fact, that Clint should give serious consideration to taking this double act on the road. It would be like the Sooty Show, but with a chair instead of a puppet and Dirty Harry's grandpa instead of Harry Corbett. The chair could come on inside a giant box. "Who wants to see President Obamachair?" Clint could ask, to wild applause. "President Obamachair is very shy, so you'll have to cheer louder than that," Clint could add, goading the crowd to higher and higher levels of hysteria until the chair finally bursts out of the box, squirts Clint in the face with a water pistol and then tells him to go and screw himself again. It would be brilliant. I'd certainly pay to see it.
But Clint made one fatal flaw during his speech. While endorsing Romney, he admitted that the history-making emotion of Obama's inauguration had actually made him cry. Luckily, there was no such flakiness from Norris, the grizzle-faced star of 1983's Lone Wolf McQuade. Perhaps stung by his lack of invitation to join Clint at the Republican national convention, Chuck took matters into his own hands on Monday by making a YouTube video simply entitled "Chuck Norris WARNING America '1,000 Years of Darkness' if Obama Wins".
In the video, Chuck and his wife Gena stand hand in hand inside a karate dojo and beg 30 million non-voting evangelical Christians to cast their ballots against Obama in the upcoming election, lest America fall into the evil grip of "socialism ... or something much worse".
Chuck doesn't specify what this "something much worse" is, although one would expect it is either a world where the Chuck Norris Action Jean was never invented, or a world where the US is governed by an immobile yet oddly profane barstool and its dishevelled, confused-looking translator. In fact, that's probably it. After all, this is Chuck Norris we're talking about. He didn't get to be a universal walking punchline by being inherently ridiculous in everything he says or does, did he?
This is the kind of all-out, balls-to-the-wall celebrity endorsement that America does best. Britain is simply playing catch-up. Let's hope that Cameron is watching this story unfold. Surely by now he realises that he can't possibly win the next election unless he can somehow persuade Ray Winstone to recite an apocalyptic haiku on his behalf about the dangers of renationalising the railways, to a hammock.
Only when that hapens will we begin to regain our Olympic pride.
Mike Wilhelm - Charlatans, Flamin' Groovies, Loose Gravel, and more
Stormy Monday, Mike Wilhelm & Hired GunsMike & Hired Guns play the T-Bone Walker classic. Two cam video courtesy of Diamond Ed Chatham (Bebop42's Channel). Personnel: Mike Wilhelm, guitar & vocal; Jamie Webber, bass; "Sticks," drums; Gary Bouley, guitar; Dave Gower, tenor sax and, last but not least, Ed Earley on slide trombone.
Baby Murdering Politicians Should Be Sent To Prison
We're one crucial step closer to seeing Tony Blair at The Hague
Desmond Tutu has helped us see the true nature of what the former prime minister did to Iraq and increased pressure for a prosecution
George Monbiot, guardian.co.uk, Monday 3 September 2012 17.30 BST, Article Source
For years it seems impregnable, then suddenly the citadel collapses. An ideology, a fact, a regime appears fixed, unshakeable, almost geological. Then an inch of mortar falls, and the stonework begins to slide. Something of this kind happened over the weekend.
When Desmond Tutu wrote that Tony Blair should be treading the path to The Hague, he de-normalised what Blair has done. Tutu broke the protocol of power – the implicit accord between those who flit from one grand meeting to another – and named his crime. I expect that Blair will never recover from it.
The offence is known by two names in international law: the crime of aggression and a crime against peace. It is defined by the Nuremberg principles as the "planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression". This means a war fought for a purpose other than self-defence: in other words outwith articles 33 and 51 of the UN Charter.
That the invasion of Iraq falls into this category looks indisputable. Blair's cabinet ministers knew it, and told him so. His attorney general warned that there were just three ways in which it could be legally justified: "self-defence, humanitarian intervention, or UN security council authorisation. The first and second could not be the base in this case." Blair tried and failed to obtain the third.
His foreign secretary, Jack Straw, told Blair that for the war to be legal, "i) there must be an armed attack upon a state or such an attack must be imminent; ii) the use of force must be necessary and other means to reverse/avert the attack must be unavailable; iii) the acts in self-defence must be proportionate and strictly confined to the object of stopping the attack." None of these conditions were met. The Cabinet Office told him: "A legal justification for invasion would be needed. Subject to law officers' advice, none currently exists."
Without legal justification, the attack on Iraq was an act of mass murder. It caused the deaths of between 100,000 and a million people, and ranks among the greatest crimes the world has ever seen. That Blair and his ministers still saunter among us, gathering money wherever they go, is a withering indictment of a one-sided system of international justice: a system whose hypocrisies Tutu has exposed.
Blair's diminishing band of apologists cling to two desperate justifications. The first is that the war was automatically authorised by a prior UN resolution, 1441. But when it was discussed in the security council, both the American and British ambassadors insisted that 1441 did not authorise the use of force. The UK representative stated that "there is no 'automaticity' in this resolution. If there is a further Iraqi breach of its disarmament obligations, the matter will return to the council for discussion as required in paragraph 12." Two months later, in January 2003, the attorney general reminded Blair that "resolution 1441 does not authorise the use of military force without a further determination by the security council".
Yet when Blair ran out of options, he and his lieutenants began arguing that 1441 authorised their war. They are still at it: on Sunday, Lord Falconer tried it out on Radio 4. Perhaps he had forgotten that it has been thoroughly discredited.
The second justification, attempted again by Blair this weekend, is that there was a moral case for invading Iraq. Yes, there was one. There was also a moral case for not invading Iraq, and this case was stronger.
But a moral case (and who has launched an aggressive war in modern times without claiming to possess one?) does not provide a legal basis. Nor was it the motivation for the attack. In September 2000, before they took office, a project run by future members of the Bush administration – including Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz – produced a report which said the following: "While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein." Their purpose, they revealed, was "maintaining American military pre-eminence". The motivation for deposing Saddam Hussein was no more moral than the motivation for arming and funding him, two decades before.
But while the case against Blair is strong, the means are weak. Twenty-nine people have been indicted in the international criminal court, and all of them are African. (Suspects in the Balkans have been indicted by a different tribunal). There's a reason for this. Until 2018 at the earliest, the court can prosecute crimes committed during the course of an illegal war, but not the crime of launching that war.
Should we be surprised? Though the Nuremberg tribunal described aggression as "the supreme international crime", several powerful states guiltily resisted its adoption. At length, in 2010, they agreed that the court would have jurisdiction over aggression, but not until 2018 or thereafter. Though the offence has been recognised in international law for 67 years, the international criminal court (unlike the Rwanda and Yugoslavia tribunals, which hear cases from before they were established) will be able to try only crimes of aggression committed beyond that date.
The other possibility is a prosecution in one of the states (there are at least 25) which have incorporated the crime of aggression into their own laws. Perhaps Blair's lawyers are now working through the list and cancelling a few speaking gigs.
That the prospect of prosecution currently looks remote makes it all the more important that the crime is not forgotten. To this end, in 2010 I set up a bounty fund – www.arrestblair.org – to promote peaceful citizens' arrests of the former prime minister. People contribute to the fund, a quarter of which is paid out to anyone who makes an attempt which meets the rules. With our fourth payment last week, we've now disbursed more than £10,000. Our aim is the same as Tutu's: to de-normalise an act of mass murder, to keep it in the public mind and to maintain the pressure for a prosecution.
That looked, until this weekend, like an almost impossible prospect. But when the masonry begins to crack, impossible hopes can become first plausible, then inexorable. Blair will now find himself shut out of places where he was once welcome. One day he may find himself shut in.
Twitter: @GeorgeMonbiot
A fully referenced version of this article is available at www.monbiot.com
Beautiful World by Devo
The American Dream by George Carlin
Nobody Brought Peace To Our Times
"None of the Above" Should Be On Voter Ballots
Oh, I hope that I see you again I never even caught your name As you looked through my window pane -- So I'm writing this message today I'm thinking that you'll have a way Of hearing the notes in my tune -- Where are you going? Where have you been? I can imagine other worlds you have seen -- Beautiful faces and music so serene -- So I do hope I see you again My universal citizen You went as quickly as you came -- You know the power Your love is right You have good reason To stay out of sight -- But break our illusions and help us Be the light -- Message by Michael Pinder
Freedom of expression and freedom of speech aren't really important unless they're heard...It's hard for me to stay silent when I keep hearing that peace is only attainable through war. And there's nothing more scary than watching ignorance in action. So I dedicated this Emmy to all the people who feel compelled to speak out and not afraid to speak to power and won't shut up and refuse to be silenced. - Tommy Smothers
The man whispered, "God, speak to me" and a meadowlark sang. But the man did not hear. So the man yelled "God, speak to me" and the thunder rolled across the sky. But the man did not listen. The man looked around and said, "God let me see you" and a star shined brightly. But the man did not notice. And the man shouted, "God show me a miracle" and a life was born. But the man did not know. So the man cried out in despair, "Touch me God, and let me know you are there" Whereupon God reached down and touched the man. But the man brushed the butterfly away and walked on.
Don't miss out on a blessing because it isn't packaged the way you expect.